The book, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile1, paints a disturbing but convincing picture. It’s convincing because it explains the way the world behaves. Did the Germans win the war?
I’m not just referring to the claim that Martin Bormann lived out his days as a free man in Argentina. Or that after the war, he took the wealth looted from defeated countries with him to Argentina. And it’s not just that he took that loot out of Germany with the knowledge and approval of Germany’s industrial leaders. It’s also that Bormann was carrying out well-laid plans to help German industrialists and bankers take control of the global economy. And it can be argued that the world is living with the consequences.
Our curiosity has been put to sleep by the horror of the Holocaust
The Holocaust is the event that stands out in the last century. It’s a horror story you can never get out of your head. And because it’s so prominent in the collective imagination, it masquerades as the entire purpose of World War II. After all, what other explanation is needed? We know about Nazi racism, European anti-Semitism, and the Nazi belief that the German race had to be purified. We also know that everywhere the Germans went, they arrested and deported the Jews. What Manning’s book does is awake the natural curiosity that has been put to sleep by the real horror of the Holocaust. The underlying purpose of the war was theft in the service of supremacy.
1938: The Jews are required to register their wealth
The boldfaced robbery of German Jews is the first important fact of World War II. Anti-Semitism justified it, but the same pattern has been repeated in wars that don’t involve anti-Semitism. In 1938, a Nazi Law Forced Jews to Register Their Wealth—Making It Easier to Steal. This was shortly after Nazi Germany annexed Austria. At that time, Hitler’s government issued a decree requiring all Jews in both Germany and Austria to register any property or assets valued at more than 5,000 Reichsmarks. This amounted to around $2,000 in American currency of the period, or $34,000 today. All types of property were included: furniture, paintings, life insurance, stocks. Aryanization was the name for the state-sanctioned theft that followed, and it totaled about 7 billion Reichsmarks. This process was made more painful by the fact that Germany’s Jews had already been methodically removed from public life, civil service, and business.
The Jews were robbed even when they decided to leave. This is further evidence that theft was the underlying purpose.
For those Jews with the means to leave the country, legally emigrating meant relinquishing 50 percent of one’s monetary assets, and then exchanging the rest of the remaining Reichsmarks for the currency of whatever country would be the final destination. “By late 1938, they were allowing Jews to keep only 8 percent of what their Reichsmarks were worth in the foreign country,” Hayes says—which only made it harder to find a safe haven, since the Jewish refugees couldn’t take any of their savings with them.
Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine
1939: The Jews are robbed of intellectual property
One thing you can say about the Nazis is they were thorough. They even robbed the Jews of intellectual property.
A 1939 executive order required all Jewish men to add ‘Israel’ as a second name and women to add ‘Sara.’ This made it easier for Nazi officials to deny intellectual property registrations and renewals to Jewish applicants, cutting them off from the IP system…
In some instances, works by Jewish authors were nearly completely reproduced and distributed by others without their consent. One example of an Aryanized work is Alice Urbach’s So kocht man in Wien!, a Viennese cookbook. Urbach was forced to transfer the rights to her book, which was then republished with new authorial credit to “Rudolf Rösch.” The new work kept most of the original texts and photographs of her cooking demonstrations but removed elements celebrating Vienna’s diversity.
In the field of medicine, Dr. Josef Löbel’s Knaurs Gesundheitslexikon was a health encyclopedia that, after the Otto Liebmann publishing house was taken over by a Nazi publisher, was republished by the author Herbert Volkmann under the pseudonym “Peter Hiron.” Volkmann even added new sections on race, homosexuality, and prison psychology. He similarly usurped authorship for Dr. Walter Guttman’s Medizinische Terminologie and its ongoing publications.
Library of Congress Blogs, The Seizure of Jewish Intellectual Property Ahead of World War II
The Holocaust as a distraction from Germany’s need for Jewish wealth
The Jews of Austria, Poland and Eastern Europe were also methodically robbed. Much of the stolen wealth went to generous social programs back home in Germany. But most of it funded the Nazi war machine. If Hannah Arendt knew about this when she wrote about the Eichmann trial, ‘the banality of evil,’ was a perfect description of what happened.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t be surprised that World War II was all about annexing and looting defeated countries. That’s what war has always been about. It is highly disturbing that Germany looted its own citizens, but it was terribly logical considering the need for war funding. I’m arguing that the Holocaust has erased our common-sense understanding of war. The theft or recovery of wealth is war’s basic motivation.
The troubling nature of capitalism is not Germany’s fault
Paul Manning’s claim that the theft never stopped is the most disturbing part. His story suggests that the industrialists who funded the Nazi Party won the war. It may be more correct to say the German economy won the war. In this light, it is tempting to blame the current state of Western capitalism on the German takeover. But the troubling nature of capitalism is not Germany’s fault.
Woodrow Wilson revealed the nature of capitalism in 1920. Professor David Harvey quoted Wilson in his video on Class Nation and Nationalism. This is Harvey’s summation: ‘Relations between nations are connected together by the fact that every capitalist wants a market and wants to spread market exchange all over the world. Therefore that market process must be protected by that nation-state in relation to other nation-states in battering down the walls between them.’
Putting the Holocaust in its place opens the way to enquire about what was happening in Germany before World War I. The history books say that Germany’s punishment after the Great War that led to World War II. This punishment was an indirect consequence of liberalism.
Two faces of liberalism
Liberalism enabled the use of economic sanctions and blockade. Nations could be controlled by economic warfare because they had become tied together in the system of market exchange. However, this represents a surrender to temptation by the powerful states. It was not liberalism’s original mandate. There are two faces of liberalism.
In the 19th century, the prevailing doctrine of free trade liberalism protected global trade from wartime measures. It shielded countries such as Germany from efforts to target their foreign dependence. Germany’s industries depended on foreign minerals such as manganese, which it paid for through a global financial system centered on London. Through this mechanism, Germany was able to obtain resources that it did not itself possess. But that changed during the Great War.
The other face of the liberal order: sanctions, and the Great War
So the important question becomes, how did the Great War start? First, German unification upset the balance of power in Europe in 1871. Then Germany proceeded to form an alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy. This represented a new threat to the existing order, and it was reinforced by the ambition of its leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Kaiser had plans to build a battle fleet to rival Britain’s. He eventually switched his spending from the navy to the army, but his relationship with Britain never recovered.
Naturally, Britain negotiated agreements with France and Russia. This led to fear of encirclement on the part of Germany. Tensions escalated when Germany tried to oppose a French takeover of Morocco and Britain supported France. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the final straw. Finally, the enmeshment of these countries in the liberal global economy increased the pressure on Germany by allowing the use of economic warfare.
The modern history of the economic weapon
The modern history of the economic weapon began during World War I. Britain and France tried to isolate Germany and its allies from the global economy. They sought to starve their economies of resources and their citizens of food, even though the suffering caused by this tactic was well understood. It was considered a regrettable necessity: 300,000-400,000 people in Central Europe died of starvation or illness thanks to blockade, while 500,000 perished in the Ottoman Empire. Germany, for its part, used U-boats to cripple transatlantic shipping.
Economic and financial sanctions continued as a way to reinforce the authority of the League of Nations during the interwar period. However, the economic weapon was now claimed to be a weapon of peace. Powerful nations realized they could employ sanctions without any declaration of war. They also told themselves it could be used as an alternative to war. But sanctioned states took different lessons from this treatment.
What the Nazis learned about liberalism from sanctions and blockade
The Nazi leadership saw the threat of foreign sanctions as further justifying its hegemonic ambitions—the more territory it influenced or controlled, the less vulnerable it would be to the Jews and Bolsheviks, whom it believed, or claimed to believe, were orchestrating the international campaign against Germany. The Nazi’s behavior can be largely explained by this liberal tactic of sanctions and blockade.
Just as they were a century ago, the crucial dilemmas of sanctions are the dilemmas of liberalism. Is the world better off when countries are interdependent with each other than when they hold themselves aloof? How far do you go in cutting countries out of the world economy when they turn to conquest, or look to spread illiberalism? Is the economic weapon really so much better than the military one?
International economic coercion is the dark shadow cast by the global liberal economy. Sanctions would not be nearly so effective in a world where liberalism had not won. Isolation from global trade and finance are painful precisely because they are so intertwined with the workings of national markets. In a world of complex supply chains spanning dozens of countries, and global financial systems that are woven into the warp and woof of local banking relations, it is impossible to tell where the domestic economy ends and the international economy begins.
lawfaremedia.org, The Modern History of Economic Sanctions
The Jewish case compared to the Balkans
Now let’s return to the Jewish case, as compared to the Balkans. Similar to the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany, widespread economic violence was committed during the 1990s Balkan wars. The plunder obtained in this way financed and sustained armed groups, ensuring that the conflicts could continue. However, in most of the cases presented at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, the focus is on violations of civic and political rights. Only a few cases deal with violations of economic rights.
As a consequence of this prosecutorial approach, the underlying war criminal networks that supported the war – war profiteers, organised crime gangs, illegal smugglers of gasoline, people, weapons and so on – remained invisible, even though their connections to political parties and elites that emerged during and after the conflict are well-known facts.
Elma Demir, UN Court Archives reveal the political economy of the Balkan Wars
The Jewish case as compared to Gaza
Again, there are similarities in the Jewish case compared to Gaza. Israeli soldiers have looted millions in money and gold from Gaza since the war started.
Gaza’s government media office said it had received “dozens of reports from residents of the Gaza Strip on the issue of stolen money, gold, and artefacts” over a period of 92 days, which ran from 7 October to Saturday.
The office said the items were valued at 90 million shekels ($24 million) and were “seized by the Israeli occupation army”, The New Arab’s Arabic-language sister site al-Araby al-Jadeed reported.
Israeli soldiers have boasted of the items they have looted in videos posted to social media.
The media office said the thefts occurred in various ways, with thefts at checkpoints of bags containing valuable belongings, and raids on the homes of people who were asked to evacuate.
The New Arab
It is estimated that the Israeli Army may have looted possessions worth tens of millions of dollars in addition to taking personal belongings from Palestinian citizens.
Israel is the servant of the global liberal order
The policies of Israel today are blamed on Netanyahu’s right-wing government. But this government has controlled Palestine for 20 years. The identity of Netanyahu and his cabinet is irrelevant. They could be almost anyone. Their Jewishness is a necessary convenience. But, to the extent that he is really Jewish, Netanyahu must be tortured by the knowledge that the Mossad was commanded to stop its Nazi-hunting after the arrest of Adolf Eichmann.
According to Paul Manning, the Mossad was threatened with a loss of financing if they continued to search for Nazis. This illustrates the extent to which Israel is the servant of the global liberal order.
- Paul Manning, Martin Boumann: Nazi in Exile, Lyle Stuart Inc. Secaucus, NJ, 1981 ↩︎