EU politics: keep away from the Nazi foundation myth

18/04/2014

We really, really, really can do without this garbage. I thought we had finally got past the Rodney Atkinson syndrome, with the lurid and entirely unsubstantiated claims that the Nazis created the European Union.

Yes, there were Nazi enthusiasts for creating a greater Europe, particularly Werner Daitz, Joachin von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, and Walther Funk. And in November 1940, we saw outline plans published – with attendant publicity in the British and US papers.

There was no doubt then that this was a cynical propaganda ploy by the German government to convince the United States that Nazi intentions towards the newly occupied Europe was benign, and thus keep it out of the war. There was no genuine intention on the part of the Germans to create anything other than a Berlin-centric greater-German empire.

Nor was talk of European Union unique to the Germans by any means. We published a report to the War Cabinet on 12 November 1942 by Leo Amery. This was after a committee had been set up to consider the establishment of a "federal Europe" at the end of the war, based on the original initiative by Duff Cooper. This was alongside plans for Anglo-French co-operation, set out in these Cabinet papers

This was part of an initiative to crystallise the allied "war aims", to provide an incentive for Europeans to stay in the fight – something more positive than just winning the war. Some of that thinking emerged after the war, to feed into to push for a federal Europe, so much so that the earlier wartime thinking can be seen as a competitor to German propaganda.

And for those who want to argue that Hitler invented the construct we now know as the EU, we have Monnet's colleague, Arthur Salter, and his essay of 1929, which sets out an administrative structure for a " United States of Europe", the title of the book he subsequently published in 1933 (see pg 83). This exactly matches the structure of what is now the EU fathered by Monnet.

Hitler, on the other hand, never an enthusiast for a united Europe, simply wanted Europe pacified so that he could turn his attention east to Russia. And how could he have invented the term "United States of Europe" when Salter was writing about it in 1929?

As to the wartime period, Hitler, tiring of the advocacy of the people around him, and in particular Ribbentrop, for whom he had nothing but contempt, on 4 November 1942 issued a Fuhrer decree requiring that, "the planning, preparation and execution or demonstrations of a European or international kind, such as congress, assemblies, the founding of associations, etc., must cease".

Thus, while the idea of Europe was an idea in vogue at the time, particularly embraced by the Resistance, it is wholly wrong – a complete travesty – to attribute the creation of the EU, in the form that it has emerged, to the Nazis.

The attempts to do so, in my view, have cause serious damage to the anti-EU movement, contributing to its "loony-tunes" reputation, more so when the Europeans see the construct as the antidote to Nazism and all that is associated with it.

How typically crass it is of the Express to publish details of what can only be a silly book, peddling a malign idea. This is a route we really do not want to go down again. We are struggling hard enough for credibility already, without making it even easier for our critics and detractors.

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