Sometimes history is unfathomable. Here are three strange historical events that are very difficult to understand:
– Strange event (A): In 1942 Hitler asked for a loan from the Greeks whom at the time he had invaded, occupied, and starved to death (with more than 200,000) deaths in Athens. He got the loan. The “lender”: a quisling Greek government.
– Strange event (B): Hitler was defeated and dead in April 1945. The US, the enemy and victor, brought to the US and protected from prosecution thousands of Nazi criminals!
– Strange event (C): The Greeks had suffered the worst kind of brutality in Europe from the Nazis For 70 years they have been asking for the money owed by the Germans since 1942. The Germans, the defeated, with the help of the US, the victors, refuse to pay back the Greeks.
The Loan
The Germans of Hitler decided that the Greeks had not only to pay for the cost of feeding and maintaining the German army that occupied and massacred them, but, also, they had to lend Hitler money for the cost of feeding and maintaining the German army that was fighting the British and their allies in Africa, during the Second World War.
Of course, there were kind-hearted German Nazis like Joseph Goebbels who in his diary mentions that “… hunger in Greece has become an endemic illness. In the streets of Athens people die in the thousands from exhaustion.”
Hitler’s Nazis entered Athens on April 27, 1941. Six months later, in October, the Nazis together with their partners, the Italians of Mussolini, held a meeting of technocrats in Athens to solve the problem of financing the evil that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was spreading in the Mediterranean and in Africa.
A few weeks later, in November, the terrible “1941 winter of Athens” began. I was 11 years old. I have lived all my life in Athens. That winter the snow in Athens was 45 centimeters [1 and 1/2 feet] deep. I have never seen that much snow in Athens, since that time. Opposite my family-home there was a vacant lot. It took more than a week for the snow to melt. The Nazis had already confiscated all the available food to feed their army, while the British, the allies of the Greeks, had imposed a food embargo to hurt the German army. So, the Greeks started dying by the thousands, mostly the middle class and especially the civil servants. It seems that the Almighty in 1941 sent hunger, snow, and the German Christian army to test the fervent “ortho-dox” [correct-faith] Christian Greeks.
[Incredible Note: At the time there were two Greeks that were “used” by the Nazis to confiscate the food from the Greeks for the benefit of the German army. One of them, named Papadopoulos, a few decades later was “used” by the US to impose the 1967-1974 military dictatorship on the Greeks. The other one, “inexplicably”, became a multi-billionaire ship-owner and banker.]
A few months later, in March 1942, the Germans and the Greek quisling government, appointed by the Germans, “agreed” that the Greeks should pay a “compulsory” loan to the Nazis. The terms of the loan were: it would be interest-free, in drachmas [the Greek currency], and no date for its repayment was fixed. A little later, the loan was changed from compulsory to a simple “contract” loan and the date of April 1943 was fixed as the starting date for repayment of the loan.
Here is the ultimate “benevolence” in human history: Hitler in the name of the German people started repaying the debt to the Greeks, whom he had already devastated! He actually paid the first two installments. But he and his epigones, to this date, did not bother to continue those benevolent acts. For this, the post-Hitler Germans had the help of their enemies; the Americans, the Britons and the French.
This is how the German were helped:
In October 1950, only five years after the Nazis had almost destroyed the world, the US, England and France started a process of rebuilding Germany. The instrument they originally used was what is known as the London Debt Agreement, which was signed in London in 1953. Through this agreement the debt of the Germans to the US and others was not only drastically reduced, but the terms of the agreement aimed at helping Germany become a gigantic economic power.
The reasons for creating this arrogant German economic “monster” cover the entire spectrum of the interests of the US economic elites. From pure geopolitical and economic reasons to racist preferences [the blond cousins helping their blond “supermen”]. After all, Hitler was admired by the US and the British elites up to a few years before the Second World War.
[Parenthesis: One more paradox in this matter is that Hitler was a fervent admirer of the ancient Greeks and considered himself and his compatriots as the continuation of the ancient Greeks. It seems that he had never seen the original Greek sculptured marble head of Socrates with his negroid features, flat wide nose and thick lips. But maybe he ignored these as long as Socrates kept his disdain for the “hoi polloi” [the unwashed masses] and maybe, also, that his Nazi intellectuals never told him that Crete and its Minoan civilization is a stone’s throw from Africa.
So, what about the non-blond Greeks and the loan extracted from them by Hitler in 1942? Given that Germany and Greece for these past 70 years have been under the “control” of the US Empire, it was inevitable that the Germans with the Help of the US would refuse to pay back the loan of Hitler. Actually, Karamanlis, the Greek politician chosen, in the early 1950s, by the US to be “leader” of the Greeks [“ethn-arch” in Greek} for more than half a century, had already waived the Greeks’ claim for repayment of the Hitler loan.
The Greek Left for all these years has been demanding that the Germans pay back the money they stole from the Greek people. Today, finally, the Greek parliamentarians decided to form a joint committee to demand the repayment of the Hitler loan. The amount owed, including interest, has not yet been determined, but it is estimated from 100 billion dollars to 300 billion dollars. Which means that if the German people, not Frau Merkel or Herr Scheuble, have the honesty to pay back the loan, today the misery inflicted on the Greeks by the arrogant elites of the “great” Empire and its cohorts would be diminished.
To conclude:
This is a situation in which criminals against humanity, the German elites, are pampered by the US elites, while their victims, the Greeks, are not allowed to get what is legally their right. What is more incomprehensible is the fact that the post-Hitler Germans repaid Nazi-loans, similar to the Greek Nazi-loan, to the Yugoslavs in 1956 and to the Poles in 1971.
“Real” Nazis in the US
Can there be some kind of relationship between “real” Nazis, that is Hitler-Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s, and the US?
“The Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were 22. Of these defendants … about one third were related by blood, marriage, or otherwise to Americans (or other Anglos)’’. For example, “Baldur von Schirach (1907-1974) Hitler’s Youth Leader and Governor of Vienna During World War II, was responsible for the deportation of 65,000 Jews from Vienna to Poland and to their death. Schirach was 3/4 American. His paternal grandfather … had been selected as one of the honorary pallbearers at Lincoln’s funeral …. His mother, also an American, whose ancestors included two signatories of the Declaration of Independence, was the daughter of a New York lawyer. The Nuremberg Tribunal condemned Schirach in 1946 to 20 years imprisonment for crimes against humanity, which he served out. …
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. The surrender of the Nazis was signed on May 8, 1945. Eleven days later, on May 19, a ‘military transport plane with windows blackened to hide its notorious cargo …’ brought in Washington, D.C. the first Nazis, Herbert Wagner and his two assistants’ and then kept [them] hidden from immigration authorities’. (‘Secret Agenda’, Linda Hunt, St. Martin’s Press, 1991, p.6, 7).
The true number of Nazis planted in the US is impossible to know until the CIA opens its files. There were various programs with assorted code-names (‘Overcast’, ‘Paperclip’, etc) designed to smuggle Nazi scientists (by the thousands) and (inexplicably) Nazi SS regulars (by the tens of thousands). …
Most of the older Nazis (scientists, etc) went straight to the US centers of power. … The younger SS Nazis, who were brought to the US with their families (!), given free passage, board, emergency funds (with taxpayers’ money), and assisted to find jobs (at a time when American engineers were laid off), dispersed in the lower levels of the American society.
Did these Nazis, planted in the US society, influence it? The US government’s ‘use of Nazis and collaborators in intelligence programs has left a mark on the life in the United States itself. This impact is what is known in spy jargon as ‘blowback’, meaning unexpected and negative effects at home that result from covert operations overseas.” (Christopher Simpson, “Blowback”, Weidenfeld& Nicolson, 1988, p. 5)
[Note: The above text in quotation marks is an excerpt from my ZNet Commentary “The US and the Nazis” of February 11, 2006.]
All the above are confirmed in the new book of Eric Lichtblau, “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men”. I think that Lichtblau’s insistence on the role of the Dulles brothers, especially that of Allen Dulles, is must reading for anybody trying to understand the Nazi phenomenon. Also, it is very important that Lichtblau reveals the precious, but ignored, work of Chuck Allen, the left-wing journalist who has been writing on this since the early 1960s.
It is pathetic to observe the arrogance of the people, also known as the world elites, who think that they own the planet and do whatever they wish because they own the gun.
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The British were pressuring Metaxas, who was the leader of Greece and the winner of the Greco-Italian war, to receive on Greek soil British troops who intended to bombard the oil fields of the Romanian city of Ploesti, which were vital to the Germans. This would amount to an unnecessary declaration of war by Greece on Germany, with the direct consequence of Germany’s invasion of Greece. Nevertheless, Metaxas accepted the English proposal, but on the condition that they would send enough troops, capable of stopping the Germans. The English did not plan to send large numbers of troops to Greece and refused. They only wanted to force the Germans to spread out and waste valuable time and resources to weaken them, even at the expense of the Greeks.
Very conveniently, after some time Metaxas died and Koryzis took his place. The British deceived the new leader with falsified documents, which said that Metaxas had accepted the presence of a small British army in Greece, but they artfully hid the condition Metaxas had set, and the naive Koryzis believed them. Shortly afterwards, Koryzis committed suicide with the wrong hand by shooting himself twice in the heart. This agreement forced the Germans to postpone their planned invasion of Russia just before the onset of winter in order to drive the British out of Greece. However, the Germans were surprised by this decision of Greece, as Metaxas was openly pro-fascist and pro-Nazi. Perhaps Metaxas was looking forward to winning Cyprus after the war, then occupied by the British. He had also invested Greece’s savings in British banks.
The few English troops, having succeeded in drawing the Germans into Greece, withdrew, leaving the Greeks to their grim fate, which the English knowingly brought about. It was British intelligence that induced Mussolini to attack Greece by lying to him that Greek officials had been paid not to react. It was the British who later pushed Greece into civil war, before the end of World War II. It was the British who prevented supplies and food from reaching Greece, an action that resulted in famine. Their purpose was to blackmail the Germans – the British did this in India as well, resulting in millions of Indian citizens starving to death. For similar reasons the Germans were forced to invade Yugoslavia. The famous forced loans were necessary for the operation of the occupied Greek state. And this is exactly where the lies of the Greek “patriots” begin, but unfortunately I am sleepy and will stop for now.
I think Staughton Lynd’s recent article, “Howard Zinn”, helps dispel some of the strangeness:
“Howard tells us in his autobiography how and why his outlook began to change during World War II.
“Howard had made friends with a gunner in another crew, who, like himself, read books and was interested in politics. One day his friend said, “You know, this is not a war against fascism. It’s an imperialist war.” Startled, Howard responded, “Then why are you here?” and his friend replied, “To talk to guys like you.” Two weeks later his friend’s plane was shot down and the whole crew killed.”
It was a war of imperialism, not against fascism. The US had accommodated fascism, an example was the transfer of technology to Hitler by International Business Machines (IBM) to help track those held in his concentration camps. Strictly business of course… and the rest is history.
Absolutely agree with this post.
Ford Motor Company was sending trucks to the Nazis until a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the mid 1930’s, Forbes magazine was singing the praises of Adolph Hitler and Mussolini for their robust economic management.
Fascism has always been an American favorite. Just look at all the third world “Hitlers” installed by the US in Latin America and elsewhere around the world after WWII.
Hitler’s problem was that he stepped on American and British toes, trying to be a bigger imperialist than either of them were. That’s why he was resisted. His internal repression would have been tolerated if he had decided to integrate Germany into the economic order of the day.