Responses: The Totalitarian Founders of the E.U. by Rodney Atkinson • March 18, 2008 • Printer-friendly
Some of the postings follow the usual pattern witnessed here in the UK. The fanatical Europhiles just hurl abuse. Some more intelligent critics get things wrong by relying on established, politically controlled, or popular sources, which are incomplete.
Regarding my alleged Germanophobia (the classic ad hominem attack): I taught at a German school for a year before graduating, and then taught at the University of Mainz for six years in the 1970s. I voluntarily organised many courses in England for German students and ran a folk club for German students in Mainz. I have had many good friends from all over Germany for decades. On the Freenations website I founded in 1994 we regularly translate and publish the work of our German journalist friends.
Those who criticize the Vatican are described as “anti-Catholic” even when they are Catholics; those who criticise Israel are “antisemitic” even when they are Jews; and likewise those who attack the imperial activities of the German state are “Germanophobe” even when they are Germans . . . etc.
As for the claim that the EU’s Charlemagne Prize was not founded by the Nazis: It was, in the early 1940s, in praise of the “Unifier of the German Tribes.” It was taken up anew in 1949 with Charlemagne portrayed as the “Unifier of Europe,” principally through the efforts of the Aachen textile merchant, Kurt Pfeiffer, who had previously been a member of the Nazi Party and of five other Nazi organisations.
The Aachen Professor of Philosophy, Peter Mennicken, had authoritative influence over the symbolism of the Charlemagne prize and the “liturgy” of its award ceremonies. Mennicken had taken over the professorship previously occupied by an expelled Jew. Mennicken had joined the SA (Storm Troopers) in 1933 and the Nazi Party in 1937. He had worked for two so-called “societies for (international) understanding” which were informal offshoots of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, used for German propaganda in the Netherlands and Belgium.
As for the claim that the Federal Union of European Nationalities (Volksgruppen) was not of Nazi antisemitic origin: It was. The FUEV describes itself in its own material as the “Successor” of the well known Minority Movements of the 1930s, control of which by the Nazi government is historic fact. At the foundation of the FUEV in the 1950s the majority of the participants spoke German—they came from the German-Danish border area. Particularly well organised was the “Association of Germans of North Schleswig,” the post-war organisation of that German speaking minority of which a quarter of the male members had been found guilty of betraying the country during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. This organisation owes its origins to Rudolf Stehr, the former leader of the Propaganda Department of the Nazi Party of North Schleswig and later chief of the Nazi “Ethnic Group office” in Copenhagen.
A second representative of the infamous Nazi “Ethnic Group” racism in North Schleswig belonged to the FUEV from the beginning: Hans Schmidt-Oxbull, who at the founding congress of the organisation made a speech laying out the principles and programme of the organisation. In the 1930s he had led the “struggle for the national socialist ideal, for Homeland and Germanness.”
In 1950s Hans Joseph Graf Matuschka of the “European Union of Germany” succeeded in linking the FUEN to the German Foreign Office and the financial support of the German Government. As Consul for the Nazi Regime in Hungary he had promoted “Ethnic Groups” and spoke continuously after the war about “Ethnic Minorities.” The legal theoretician of the FUEV was Felix Ermacora, who established publishing contacts in the field of ethnicity. His work “The Self Determination Idea” appeared in the Austrian Eckartschriften, an organ which saw itself as a “worthy memorial to the achievements of the Waffen SS” and the new foundation of the “biologically effective ancestral inheritance” of the “ethnic ancestral succession”
To emphasise the continuity of their “Minorities policy” the FUEV re-published their Nazi-era newspaper Nation and State under the title of Europa Ethnica. The publisher and author of several essays in this publication was Theodor Veiter, who in 1938 (in “National Autonomy”) had written: “The Jews’ destructive questioning of even the highest human values shows that the Jews are excluded (because of their way of thinking which arises from their race) from the sphere of ethnic life enjoyed by other nations and for that reason should be isolated from other peoples.”
Up to 1944 Nation and State promoted and justified the extermination of the Jews, the destruction of the sovereignty of the nations bordering Germany and the enslavement of their peoples.
One of the comments poured scorn on the post war influence of Walter Funk, on the grounds that he was imprisoned for war crimes until 1957. But if there is one document which precisely mirrors the 1957 structures of the new European Economic Community, it is the 1942 plan of Walter Funk (Economics Minister of the Reich responsible for the anti Jewish property laws of 1938) for a “European Economic Community.” The exact parallels are dealt with in my book Treason at Maastricht.
One commentator suggested that Churchill was a promoter of “British Socialism.” Churchill changed parties twice—from the Conservatives to the Liberals (over free trade in those days Liberal meant liberal!) and then back again to the Conservatives. He was never a “socialist,” althought he was associated with the introduction of early elements of a welfare state.
Finally one commentator claimed that my “speaking at the House of Commons” suggested I was speaking in the Chamber of the House. Of course speaking there is not possible unless the speaker is an MP. Equally, speaking in a Committee Room, as I did at the invitation of an MP, is a far more serious location—for it is in such rooms that the real business of democratic analysis and scrutiny is carried out!
For evidence of the exact replication of 1940s Fascist and Nazi ideologies and structures in modern day Europe see my books Europe’s Full Circle and Fascist Europe Rising. I would also recommend John Laughland’s book on the European Union The Tainted Source.
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