The roots of the European Union date back to the 1920s. However leading Nazis also planned the creation of a European Union during the time of World War II.
The European Union’s website, states that the formation of the EU originated out of the period immediately after the World War II, beginning with Winston Churchill’s speech in Zurich University in 1946.
Such a description of how the EU came about fails to say anything about where the roots of the EU lie, as the origins of the EU stem back well before World War II. Prior to the end of the war, both individuals such as Jean Monnet and the Nazis advocated the cause of European integration. As such it is difficult to determine the true origins of the EU.
Whilst Christopher Booker and Richard North place the origins of the EU with Jean Monnet in their book The Great Deception: Can the European Union survive, other anti-EU writers believe the roots of today’s EU lie with the Nazis.
The Roots of the EU Date Back to the First World War
In their book The Great Deception: Can the European Union survive, Booker and North present the most popular viewpoint on the origins of the EU, with the chief architect of the EU being Jean Monnet, who became the Deputy General Secretary of the League of Nations in 1919, and continued to work behind the scenes as the main driver in the creation of the EU.
Booker and North date the earliest roots of today’s EU to French industrialist Louis Loucher’s ideas for integrating the French and German coal and steel industries, put forward at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. This was to take effect in 1925 with the ‘International Steel Arrangement’ covering the steel industries of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. During the 1920s, politicians and intellectuals produced a number of papers advocating a United States of Europe, all based on intergovernmental cooperation. Such ideas influenced and led the way for Jean Monnet to pioneer what has now become the EU.
The Nazi Plans for a European Union
Although movements pushing for European unity date back to the 1920s, many in the anti-EU movement believe that the European Union of today is a Nazi creation. David Noakes, a former candidate for the leadership of the UK Independence Party, in an interview on Edge Media Television, even stated that the idea that EU’s roots lay with Jean Monnet was disinformation put out to conceal the EU’s true, more sinister origins in the Nazis.
Others promoting the Nazi origins of the EU include Rodney Atkinson and Norris McWhirter in their book Treason at Maastricht, and intelligence writer Christopher Story in his book The European Union Collective (Edward Harle Limited, 1997).
Such authors assert that the Nazis were working to form European community from the early 1940s when they realised they would likely lose the war. According to Christopher Story, the Nazi’s set up the German Geopolitical Centre in 1942 as a think-tank to produce a long-range strategy to take over Europe in the event that they would lose the war, and their ideas were set out in the Europaische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft, or European Economic Community (EEC) published in 1942, during a conference at the University of Berlin.
The Europaische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft proposed the formation of the European Union with a single currency, and is the main document that been used to try to prove the Nazi origins of the EU. In their book Treason at Maastricht, Atkinson and McWhirter drew up a table that shows remarkable parellels between the Nazi’s plan for the EEC and the EU today.
According to David Noakes, 1943 saw the first conference of the EEC lead by Joachim von Ribbontrop, where thirteen nations, not including Britain attended. Following this the more enlightened Nazi high command held a meeting the following year with companies such as IG Farban, where they commissioned the European Union to carry forward German ambitions. Then in 1946, for political purposes, the EU was switched from a Nazi to a Communist basis.
Nazi Connections to Today’s EU
Whilst Booker and North acknowledge the works of the Nazis in forming a European Union, they deny that the EU of today has its roots in the Nazi’s plans of the 1940s. They state that the EEC which formed in the 1950s was “not so much a gemeinschaft as a gesellschaft, a society of equals, based on the same framework of rules to control their competing interests.”
Nevertheless, regardless of whether the EU is a direct creation of the Nazis, there are definitely some Nazi connections to the EU. Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission, had been a member of both the Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen (Association of National Socialist German Lawyers) and the Nazi Rechtswahrer Organisation.
Paul Henri-Spaak, one of the founders of the EEC, openly described himself as a national socialist and considered Hitler’s achievements ‘magnificant.’
Leaked documents from the 1955 Bilderberg conference in Germany reveal that delegates here were planning to create a European Union with a single currency. One of the founders of the Bilderberg group was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a former Nazi SS officer.
Sources:
- Booker C & North R, The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive, Continuum, 2003
- Atkinson R & McWhirter N, Treason at Maastricht: Destruction of the Nation State, Compuprint Publishing, 1995
