DISCLAIMER: We want to make it abundantly clear at World Future Fund that we support the European Union as an organization. The European Union is NOT connected to Nazi Germany or any of Hitler's racist ideas. Most people in the European Union today are obviously opposed to such concepts. However, in order to understand the history behind the organization, it is important to study how some of the ideas conceived in Germany before 1945 may have had a role in inspiring the European Union as we know it today.
There are many concepts that were established in Germany before 1945 that people still follow in modern times. In 1883 Bismarck proposed the idea of nationalized health care, and Germany became the first nation in the world to adopt old-age social insurance back in 1889. It was also the political right in Germany that got environmentalism as a political and social movement kick started via the ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Klages. Not to mention that the anti-tobacco movement got its start in Nazi Germany.
So clearly not all ideas connected to Germany before 1945 are inherently evil or bad, even though the Nazis obviously did some very evil and deplorable things.
As far as the European Union is concerned, the historical truth is that some of the ideas in Hitler's wartime Reich served as an early prototype for the European Union.
Hitler invented the phrase "United States of Europe." Hermann Goering devised the name European Economic Community. The euro was Walther Funk's idea (Hitler's economic minister), and Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, published an early version of The Treaty of Rome.
To understand the prototype of a united european model in Germany, we must look back at a conference in 1942 in Berlin. This conference was attended by economists and politicians, including Walther Funk. The matter at hand was how to make use of Germany's subject territories, and it was proposed that there should be a "Europaische Wirtschaftgesellschaft," which translates to "European Economic Community." This idea was taken up by Albert Speer, who was Hitler's minister for armaments at the time. Speer was trying to think of a way to get the French to serve the German War effort.
Speer teamed up with Jean Bichelonne, who was a member of the Vichy government (a Pro-axis government in France during the time of German occupation, 1940-1944). In 1943, Bichelonne was invited to Berlin, as a guest of the state, and there he and Speer discussed plans for forming a common market. As Bichelonne told his interrogators after the war, Speer 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 (Telegraph, 4-4-02)."
So here we have an initial prototype for a sort of European, economic union: the idea of abolishing tariffs and creating a giant single market. As Speer stated 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 (Telegraph, 4-4-02)?" When the reality of "Europaische Wirtschaftgesellschaft" was carried out in Germany's occupied countries, it was far from Speer's Utopian ideal. 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 that taxes had to go up at home; of France's total wartime public expenditure, 49 per cent was on payments to Germany.
The EU as we know it today traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC), formed by the Inner Six countries in 1951 and 1958. Respectively. Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands were all members of the Inner Six. It is worth noting that all these countries were occupied by the Germans during World War II.
So while the European Union today is totally opposed to the ideas of racism and anti-Semitism that were prevalent in Nazi Germany, it is worth noting that the prototype of a united, economic European union was conceived of by the Nazis in Hitler's wartime Germany.
RELATED DOCUMENTS AND SPEECHES
Walther Funk: The economic reorganization of Europe (July 25, 1940) English
The Original Document in German
RELATED LINKS
The Roots of the "Brussels EU"
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