Toby on Tuesday

 'Bucket Cars and Bulwarks' 

  (Image from www.ww2incolor.com)

 

One of my oldest, dearest friends is Rodney Atkinson.  His brother Rowan is in the business of comedy but Rodney is in the business of tragedy, in particular the tragedy of Britain’s membership of the EU.   And Rodney has just published his latest and most powerful polemic.   Called “And Into The Fire” it is available through Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1882383346) in paperback or as an ebook by GM Books.   Now he knows his EU and he knows his Germany, having been a lecturer at the University of Mainz.   In essence his thesis is that, when Germany saw defeat looming in 1944, the Nazi Party recognised that hegemony over the Continent of Europe would need to be sought instead by peaceful means through the creation of a “European Union”.   Rodney’s evidence for this narrative is incontrovertible.   

 

He cites Theodor Heuss, Federal President of Germany from 1949, a leading Nazi who had designed concentration camps and supplied slave labour to the V2 project,.   He cites Heinz Twetschler von Falkenstein, appointed by Hitler as secretary of his “Europe Committee” and then in 1949 appointed to a similar role as Director of the European Division of the West German Foreign Office leading the negotiations for the founding of the EEC in 1958.   He cites Hans Josef Globke who had drafted Hitler’s Nuremberg Race Laws and went on to be Director of the Federal Chancellery of West Germany from 1953 to 1963.   And he cites Heinrich Hunke, Hitler’s Principal Lecturer for Education of the Nazi Party from 1934 to 1945, who went on to become Ministerial Dirigent of Lower Saxony and a leading German academic.   This will give you a flavour of Rodney’s densely packed book, full of astonishing information.   Its conclusion is that Germany has once again over-reached herself.   For she is being destroyed by the failure of the Euro, the very currency designed to bring the whole Continent under her control once more through the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank.   In achieving the ambition she first set herself in 1914, she has succeeded only in bankrupting herself and the whole Continent of Europe.

 

For my part, what I believe to be indisputably true is that in 1945 America took over from Britain the leadership of the West.   With Germany apparently defeated, the threat of a belligerent Soviet Union was seen as a far greater danger to World peace.   To this end, America was prepared to turn a blind eye to the murky past of so many of Europe’s leaders.   Indeed, she wished Germany to become a bulwark against Communism and so sought a restored Germany as a shield against Russia.   And Britain’s role in American eyes was to allow ourselves to be absorbed into the European Union as a further defence against Russia.   This mindset, which is as strong in 2015 as it was in 1945, explains why so many former Nazis obtained prominence in post-war Germany and in the creation of the European Union.

 

Of course none of this is to gainsay the sheer technical genius of so much German industry.   Perhaps Germany’s greatest engineer of the 20th century was Dr. Ferdinand Porsche.   He designed the Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen, or “Strength through Joy Car”, which we know as the Volkswagen.   He went on to design the Wehrmacht’s jeep-like Kubelwagen or “Bucket Car”, the amphibious Schwimmwagen or “Swimming Car”, the Panzer tank and the flying bomb which Goebbels branded the Vergeltungswaffe-Ein or “Revenge Weapon One”, which we know as the V-1 or Doodlebug.   Despite the emissions scandal, Germany’s technical genius continues.   And as the old joke goes, “When you get behind the steering-wheel of a Porsche, you just feel that you want to invade Poland!”

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby