EVIL PEDIGREE - BERLIN 1942
INTRODUCTION by Rodney Atkinson: The most precise blueprint for the structure and indeed the protectionist and corporatist political economy of the 1957 founded "European Economic Community" which we now know as the European Union, was the publication in 1942 in Berlin of the "Europaeische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft" of which two of the most significant lectures are here translated by Edward Spalton. Those who thought that the "building of Europe" in the 1950s could in no way replicate the German dominated Europe of the 1940s may now be reconsidering their optimism. The years since the second world war have culminated in a rich German State, dominant German industry and a European Union run by Berlin while other EU countries seem politically powerless or approach bankruptcy - or both.
Nor can this dominance be regarded as accidental. It was Helmut Kohl who said "The future will belong to the Germans ... when we build the house of Europe." and it was Adenauer's Minister of Commerce, Dr Seebohm (anticipating the British Government's favourite phrase “Britain at the heart of Europe”!) who asserted that “Germany is the heart of Europe and the limbs must adjust themselves to the heart not the heart to the limbs.” (The Greeks now understand what he meant) It was a German Christian Democrat Party paper in 1995 "Reflections on European Policy" which issued the threat: “If European integration were not to progress, Germany might be called upon by its own security constraints to try to effect stabilisation of Eastern Europe in the traditional manner”
As Walter Lippman wrote in the Herald Tribune in 1947 “If thirty years hence Germany dominates Europe and thus holds the balance of power between Russia and the English speaking nations, German historians will not count this war as a true defeat.” This is the situation 60 years later and it did not come about “by accident”. And if those who genuinely sought a different Europe ignorantly reproduced so many of the characteristics of 1940s Fascism and Nazism then their naivety is as unforgiveable as those Nazis who "set the points" for post war Europe, knowing precisely where the train would arrive!
Europaeische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (EWG)
European Economic Community (EEC)
by Edward Spalton
With increasing stresses and strains in the EU, German dominance of Europe is emerging as an incontestable fact. The EU's own account of itself completely omits the attempt at creating a pan European bloc under this title, devised not by Monnet and Schuman but by the ideologues, economists and industrialists of the Third Reich and their collaborators. They too envisaged an era and area of harmony where the peoples of Europe would co-operate fruitfully under a New Order in a large area economy (Grossraumwirtschaft). The concept was launched in 1940 soon after Dunkirk and by 1942 was the subject of a high level gathering of what might have been termed "the Great and the Good" in a more normal society. In 2002 I translated the introduction and lead paper of this series of lectures. It was published as a booklet by the Democrat Press, a publisher based in the labour and trade union movement.
By one of those very long coincidences, I first heard about what is now the EU when I was in the lower sixth on a school trip to Hanover in 1958, the year after the EEC's founding Treaty of Rome. "Have you heard about our Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft?" asked my German host "It will guarantee our living standard". When we got back home our teacher explained that the word meant "Economic Community" and it had been created by a treaty between Germany, France, the Benelux countries and Italy the previous year. Not knowing anything of its structure, we thought it was a hopeful sign for future peace and prosperity in Europe. As several other boys had been told the same thing by their hosts, it was obviously something which our German friends had learned in school. Our teacher remarked on this and said it showed a difference in tradition between our countries. We would not be taught such a political opinion as fact in a British school.
The main paper which follows was delivered by Walther Funk, Reichsminister for the Economy, President of the Reichsbank and Minister for Post-War Planning. An ebullient communicator with a background in commercial journalism, he had previously been Chief Press Officer and State Secretary under Goebbels at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Funk escaped the hangman at Nuremberg although his colleague Sauckel did not. He was released from prison in 1957 on grounds of ill health and quickly found employment in the educational life of Lower Saxony. He lived in Hanover until his death in 1960. So it is very likely that our German contemporaries were so completely "on message" concerning the new EEC because Herr Funk was continuing to promote his project, albeit in a rather humbler office than the one he held in 1942!
By 1957 Professor Doctor Heinrich Hunke, who wrote the introductory paper for the 1942 lectures, was already influential in the politics of Lower Saxony. Most probably this explains why the former Reichsminister Funk obtained official employment so quickly after his release from Spandau prison.
If you disregard the references to contemporary events, the rationale for European integration and most of the policies put forward by Funk and his colleague Hunke will be familiar to anybody who has studied the activities and publications of the post war EU Commission or the arguments advanced by the European Movement. The similarities of concepts and vocabulary are too striking and numerous to be merely coincidental.
Monnet and Schuman were certainly not fascists but, to take a metaphor from cricket, those who could be described as second order batsmen and second eleven promoters of the EEC project had often been deeply involved in the first Nazi attempt. The use of the same title for the project - "European Economic Community" suggests that the founding fathers of the EU recognised that there would be a degree of brand recognition and loyalty to the vision of the Nazi project amongst the political classes, which could be carried forward to its post war revival. Some of the more prominent of these personalities are described in Rodney Atkinson's youtube video on "The Nazis and Fascists who founded the European Union and their influence today" and on the website www.freenations.freeuk.com there is substantial documentation of the true nature of the European Union and its indisputable tendency to re-create the Europe of the 1940s with contributions from all over Europe.
Long before Germany's unification in 1871, the delegates at the revolutionary parliament, meeting in Frankfurt in 1848, decided that the Balkans (then part of the old Austrian and Turkish empires) formed part of Germany's natural economic hinterland. They also decided that no significant Slavic power should be allowed to arise in the area. In 1999 the EU/NATO powers followed this policy and ensured the destruction of Yugoslavia. Today's German politicians openly talk of exercising a "benevolent hegemony" over Central and South Eastern Europe.
The EU bureaucracy has a powerful life of its own. Until recently, EU institutions and policies have often served as a cloak for long-held ambitions of the German political class. Now that the mask has fallen, we shall see whether the future of Europe will be German or European and whether the European Union itself will collapse alongside its once eponymous, unlamented, wartime forerunner.
Edward Spalton, Etwall, Derby
June 2012
Europaeische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft
EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY
by
Reichs Economy Minister
and President of the German Reichsbank Walter Funk
Professor Dr Jecht, Berlin; Professor Dr Woermann, Halle;
Dr. Reithinger, Berlin; Ministerial Director Dr Beisiegel, Berlin;
State Secretary Gustav Koenigs, Berlin;
Director Dr. Benning, Berlin; Ambassador Dr Clodius, Berlin and
Regional Economic Adviser Professor Doctor Hunke, Berlin.
With an introduction by
Regional Economic Adviser, Professor Doctor Heinrich Hunke
President of the Berlin Society of Commerce and Industry
published by The Berlin Society of Commerce and Industry
and The School of Economics of Berlin
Berlin 1942
Haude & Spenersche Publishing
& Distribution Max Paschke
READ THE FULL TRANSLATIONS BY EDWARD SPALTON OF THE SPEECHES BY WALTER FUNK AND HEINRISCH HUNKE AT:
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