Towards the end of WWI, the German population began revolting against the monarchy that had ruled their nation for centuries. Uprisings took place all over the country. Just before the war started, King Ludwig II had been deposed and likely murdered, throwing the monarchy into a crisis. Later on, once the USA entered the war, it was clear exhausted Germany was headed toward a catastrophic defeat.
After the war, the only way to deal with its immense debts was for Germany to keep printing worthless paper money and the price of a loaf of bread soon skyrocketed to a million marks. But Germany survived this hyper-inflation and instituted its first democracy, known today as the Weimar Republic. One wonders what the world would look like today had this democracy survived. Many of the best and brightest were located in Germany at the time: not just scientists, but also artists, composers, musicians, and architects. Suddenly, Germany was leading the world in the arts of literature, film, theater and music. There was great hope that the days of the feudal lords were over and perhaps real democracy would begin flourishing around the world, with the Weimar Republic as its shining star.
I’ve always wondered, how did Europe’s largest country fall so far so fast? Within a few short years, all trace of this amazing Weimar revolution was over and fascism was on the rise around the globe. Many leaders of the Weimar Republic would flee the country or wind up dead or in jail. What actually caused the end of the Weimar Republic and Germany’s brief Golden Age was the 1929 stockmarket crash.
In retrospect, one wonders today whether the international banking community had anything to do with orchestrating this crash, which soon sent Germany and many other countries careening into military dictatorships. What sort of a world would we be living in today had not millions of people died during WWII? Certainly, the progressives in Germany had no interest in fomenting another war. Today, we know the rise of Hitler was not just supported by a few major German corporations, like Thyssen, Krupt and especially I.G. Farben (Europe’s biggest corporation, known everywhere simply as “The Cartel”), but also through the support of English, Dutch and American banks. In the States, funding for Hitler came from the Union Bank of New York, which had been established in 1926. Prescott Bush (G.W.’s grandfather) was one of the bank’s directors. Another fact worthy of note was that Hitler was an army intelligence officer when he first infiltrated the far right.
War is money. Most corporations inside the military-industrial complex make more than 17 times the profit during war that they can produce during peace, so these corporations can be expected to pull any strings possible to keep a war economy moving forward. Both Communism and fascism were likely financed by the same bankers to foment a collision between the two ideologies and prevent the rise of real democracies like the Weimar Republic.
Even though Hitler claimed his goal was to rid the world of the international bankers, in fact, all he did was kill off the Jewish lower and middle classes, the gypsies, the communists, freemasons and gays, and funded his war machine by stealing all their possessions. Many bankers were virtually untouched and Max Warburg sat on the boards of I.G. Farben and the Reichsbank when the war began, although soon enough he would be busted down to zero and much of his family marched to the gas chambers.
Just before the war broke out, the Nazis created the International Bank of Settlements in Zurich as a central bank to the central banks, and it remains in operation today and its accounts can never be audited. But the real headquarters for the international banking community is London, and after Hitler captured most of Europe, many assumed he would invade England as his next move. Strangely, instead of moving against England, however, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded Russia instead, opening up another front, a move that insured the eventual defeat of Germany.
When you kill off your progressive artists and revolutionary leaders, it’s not that difficult to blame the assassinations on designated scapegoats and lead society toward a dictatorship. The alpha leaders who are capable of fomenting positive change are actually few in number and hard to replace. Real democracies are dangerous to corporations because they can spread like a virus. War is a tool used to prevent their rise.
In my opinion, the German people are not to be blamed for Hitler. Blame the bankers, the ones who put up the money to finance Hitler’s rise to power. Isn’t is strange the German corporations that funded Hitler are all alive and well today? They did break I.G. Farben into several pieces, similar to the way the Rockefeller oil monopoly was split into the Seven Sisters, but the family dynasties holding the strings of financial power have changed little since WWII.
“In my opinion, the German people are not to be blamed for Hitler.”
Not entirely, of course! But there are cultural undercurrents still afoot here, even today… among which are a simmering disgust with the “foreign” and a very strong general urge to “blame the victim”, both tendencies making Jews of that era perfect targets. I always tell my friends not to bother attempting any theories about “all that” until they’ve lived here for at least five years. I’ve lived here much longer than that! I know you’re of German descent (birth, too, I think I remember), but have you spent any serious time here as an adult? Herd-think is a dominant force and there’s a sort of psychological repression that only needs a spark or two in order to explode. Another thing I always say: Americans are crazy in a thousand different ways but Germans are crazy in just one… (and Wilhelm Reich saw it pretty clearly before he went nuts!)…
Wasn’t born in Germany, but spent six month in Bavaria when I was in the third grade. I would be interested to visit again some day. Isn’t health care and education free to all? Aren’t solar and wind energy the major sources of power? Seems like something must be going right. I’d really like to interview Bommi Baumann and collect some of his memories.
Oh, lots of things are much more right here than they are over there, without a doubt; things were especially brilliant when I first got here (creeping Disneyfication has commenced but at a much slower rate, in the capital city here, than in Manhattan)… it was a dark-ish Bohemian Utopia. The health care isn’t entirely free but it is, for the most part, stunningly high-quality and affordable. But, basically what you have here is a rich, stable society built by unhappy worker bees… a tiny minority of freaks enjoy the fruits of the labor of the super-squares, the super-“orderly”, the imagination-blocked, the uptight, etc. It’s a deep-rooted problem you see reflected in the scowls of the subway riders. And should a charismatic hysteric tap into the potential of all that psycho-sexual repression… there’s trouble.
But here’s the irony: the fatherland is actually *less* racist than the country of my birth! And I say that as a feller of color. I’ll never forget the first week I was here, it was around midnight on a Friday night and I was walking down a dark side street (which was about as dark as I am) and two well-dressed, middle-aged ladies stopped me to ask directions! I couldn’t believe it! Because I’d just flown over from America, where I was used to people hitting the electric door-locks in their cars at intersections I was trying to cross… in broad daylight… as soon as I got within ten yards of them! And I’m not a scary-looking guy… if you don’t count my American skin color.
So I am by no means bashing Joimany. The capital city is my favorite town on Earth.
PS I should qualify two of my comments: 1) the “psycho-sexual” repression is a complicated matter, because they surely aren’t Puritanical… sport-fucking is (or was until recently) a matter-of-fact reality for most everyone between 13 and 55. Women haven’t quite learned to monetize/ mystify the delta of creation the way their Yankee sisters have and beautiful women actually use the public transportation!
2) It’s not that they aren’t racist but what a feller-of-color can enjoy is the fact that Joimans have a bigger problem with all kinds of other “whites” than they do with darkies. And sport-fucking yankee-darkies was very big when I first arrived… so, you can imagine they made a favorable impression.
Here’s something I wrote about the capital city of the fatherland:
http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/8/6/in-which-we-visit-berlin-and-eat-in-the-dark.html
(not sure if links are allowed!)
Great stuff, Steve! Love this Website. I have always been impressed by your research, I learned a lot from you working at High Times magazine.
\Keep up the good work, etc.