Unemployment: EU vs. Germany

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Unemployment: EU vs. Germany

EU unemployment skyrockets while Germany’s reaches record lows. Why is this so?

By now it’s patently obvious to all. The eurozone has helped power Germany’s export economy to new heights, knocking its unemployment rate into record low territory, while driving the rest of Europe largely into recession.

How did this happen?

George Friedman of Stratfor sums it up thus (January 31; emphasis added throughout):

About 40 percent of German gross domestic product comes from exports, much of them to the European Union. For all their discussion of fiscal prudence and care, the Germans have an interest in facilitating consumption and demand for their exports across Europe. Without these exports, Germany would plunge into depression. Therefore, the Germans have used the institutions and practices of the European Union to maintain demand for their products.

Early on in the creation of the eurozone, a few voices were heard predicting this outcome. Voices belonging to such as EU whistle-blower Bernard Connolly, British political economist Rodney Atkinson and the late Christopher Story, a British intelligence and economics analyst. Their warnings of the implementation of the eurozone leading to financial catastrophe for Europe to Germany’s sole gain went unheeded.

Now the prescience of those warnings is evident in the results of today’s euro crisis.

George Friedman states: “Through the currency union, Germany has enabled other eurozone states to access credit at rates their economies didn’t merit in their own right. In this sense, Germany encouraged demand for its exports by facilitating irresponsible lending practices across Europe. The degree to which German actions encouraged such imprudent practices … is not fully realized” (ibid).

As a result, we see today that even as Germany’s unemployment rate is publicized at an official record low of 5.5 percent, the unemployment rate in the rest of the EU as a bloc was 9.9 percent in December, with 23.8 million people out of work.

So, what are opinion shapers in Germany saying about this situation? In a dramatic warping of reality, with little mind to Germany’s true history, much less to that of the creation of the eurozone, the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes: “Germany has the strongest economy by far in the EU, and its lead is growing. It is also the most populous country, which isn’t insignificant in democratic terms. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the German government is making use of this clout; that’s legitimate. … Germany bears a major burden in having to overcome a crisis that others got themselves into” (January 31).

Commentary by the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung showed a similar warped understanding of the situation in Greece in particular. It claimed that “The Germans led Greece before, and … the massacres of Distomo and Kefalonia have nothing to do with today’s euro crisis …” (January 31).

In reality, the massacres at Distomo and Kefalonia have everything to do with today’s euro crisis! Any real student of German history should know that it was those of such ilk as the elite Nazi cadre who approved the perpetration of those war crimes—including Kurt Waldheim—who went underground toward the end of World War ii to ensure the exact outcome of the creation of today’s European Union—a Europe dominated by Germany! Read the “Red House Report” and be educated on that history! (This intelligence report is reprinted in full in our free booklet Germany’s Conquest of the Balkans.)

Not only that. Perhaps Greece, for one, would not be in its present crisis had it not been for the failure of the German government to pay full reparations for the slaughterous Nazi occupation of Greece during World War ii.

Commenting on Germany’s history of failure to pay reparations for the effects of its warring actions against other nations, German Prof. Albrecht Ritschl of the London School of Economics stated in an interview with Spiegel Online: “With the exception of compensation paid out to forced laborers, Germany did not pay any reparations after 1990—and neither did it pay off the loans and occupation costs it pressed out of the countries it had occupied during World War ii. Not to the Greeks, either.”

Ritschl further commented that he believes Germany’s economic success has only been possible “through waiving extensive debt payments and stopping reparations to its World War ii victims.”

In Greece, he says, “No one … has forgotten that Germany owes its economic prosperity to the grace of other nations.”

To further explore the example of Greece in particular, during an interview with Stern magazine yet another German academic, Norman Paech, professor of international law at Hamburg University, said “that the German government was liable for compensation to the victims of the Nazi atrocities in Greece. … Paech said that Germany must ‘reconcile itself with the idea’ that a recent Greek supreme court ruling recognizing the competence of Greek courts to rule on demands for compensation over the Nazi atrocities ‘will have substantial consequences’ as some 10,000 such lawsuits were outstanding, and the total compensation involved was tens of billions of deutsche marks” (Athens News Agency, April 27, 2000).

Tens of billions! Think of what that would have done for the Greek economy. Germany obviously has a need to keep Greece in enforced penury, rather than face its obligation to pay these reparations.

There’s no doubt the hardworking nature, the thrift and the organizational ability of the German peoples has contributed greatly to their economic success today. Yet, given the true facts—from German economic experts themselves—there can also be no doubt that there is something lacking in the conscience of any German commentator who can imply that Germany’s failure to pay reparations to the nations it occupied and devastated in two world wars has nothing to do with today’s economic crisis in Europe. It has as much to do with German dominance today, and the recessionary condition of much of the European continent, as has the deliberate structuring of a European Monetary Union to favor the German economy to the detriment of the entire eurozone.

Why is Germany’s current employment rate at record high levels, while much of Europe’s population increasingly lacks gainful employment?

Look to the way that the nation’s elites have structured Europe to Germany’s sole advantage—and look to their failure to fulfill their postwar obligations of conscience. Then ask, if Germany is to lead Europe yet again—to take a phrase from Süddeutsche Zeitung, “as the Germans led Europe before”—what will really be the nature of that leadership, and what will be its outcome?

Let history teach the answer.