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-Caveat Lector-
Hitler and the Euro
Extracts:
What's Hitler got to do with the euro? Everything
By Boris Johnson
and politicians, including Walter Funk, the Nazi economics minister. The
matter in hand was how to make use of the subject territories; and it was
proposed that there should be a Europaische Wirtschaftgesellschaft. Which
means, you guessed it, a European Economic Community.
This noble-sounding idea was taken up by Albert Speer, who was then
Hitler's minister for armaments. Speer was trying to think of ways to cheer
up the French, and to spur them to serve the German war effort. The French
were fed up with the depredations of the dreaded Otto Sauckel, whose idea
of economic co-operation was to treat France as a reservoir for forced
labour. The French workers were fleeing their factories. They were being
thoroughly bolshy. So Speer teamed up with the Vichy industry minister,
Jean Bichelonne, and proposed a compromise by which German needs could be
met and French industry was not ruined.
In 1943, Bichelonne was even invited to Berlin, as a guest of the state,
and - as Sir John Keegan has recounted - he and Speer discussed plans for a
common market. As he told his interrogators after the war, Speer had
concluded that exploitation was inefficient. ''It would have been the
supposition," he said, "that the tariff was lifted from this large economic
area and through this a mutual production was really achieved. For any
deeply thinking individual, it is clear that the tariffs we have in western
Europe are unbearable. So the possibility of production on a large scale
only exists through this scheme."
There, in a nutshell, you have the dream of European economic union: get
rid of the tariffs; create a gigantic single market; realise economies of
scale. As Speer told Gitta Sereny towards the end of his life: "When
Bichelonne and I played with the idea of a European Economic Union, we
thought of it as Utopian. But it wasn't all that Utopian, was it?"
As it happens, the European Union that Hitler created was very far from
Utopian. It was a nightmare, not only morally but also economically. All
occupied countries had to pay Germany for the costs of their occupation.
These costs had to be paid in Marks, but the German clearing bank, the
Deutsche Verrechnungskasse, so grossly overvalued the Mark that the subject
countries could never bridge the deficit. That meant tax had to go up at
home; of France's total wartime public expenditure, 49 per cent was on
payments to Germany.
The war taught Jean Monnet, and Jacques Delors, his much younger heir, how
dreadfully France could suffer under untrammelled German economic
dominance. But the Speer-Bichelonne deal suggested important institutional
ways in which Germany could be tamed. That is why, after the war, Monnet
and Schuman were so determined to build novel constitutional arrangements,
and they created the European Coal and Steel Community, by which France and
Germany completely ceded sovereignty over those two vital industries to a
common European institution.
It did not matter to those visionary founders that their system was not
democratic. Their memories and their imaginations were full of the war and
the Hitlerian tyranny. One day Germany might grow great again, and there
was only one long-term solution: to create one nation out of many. The only
way to end nationalism, they decided, was to end nations and to create the
beginnings of a European state.
It was a grand vision. Fifty years on, it is hopelessly out of date. In the
1950s, the democratic objections naturally seemed trifling to Monnet,
Schuman, de Gasperi, Spaak. Better to have unaccountable European
institutions, they reasoned, than another round of vicious national sparring.
Today, to us, the prospect of German revanchism seems ludicrous and the
democratic difficulties of EU integration seem very troubling. It may be
true that these objections trouble us more, precisely because we were not
conquered by Hitler and did not see our democratic institutions discredited
or destroyed.
But to say that the euro has nothing to with the war, or Hitler, is absurd.
It has everything to do with Hitler, and we should be grateful to the
little cinema advert for pointing it out.
* Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator
<http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/core/images/trany.gif>
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
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CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
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