IRAQ AND GERMAN EUROPE - THE HISTORIC CONNECTIONS

Dateline: 20 March 2003

"British troops occupied Baghdad early yesterday morning at the end of a brilliant 100 miles march up the Tigris. With the British army of Mesopotamia capturing Baghdad it has shattered the dream which the Pan-Germans have been dreaming for more than twenty years."
The Times 12th March 1917

It would have seemed an exaggeration to say after 11th September 2001 that there was a direct link between the attacks on New York and Washington and the crisis in the European Union - or a link between Arab/Muslim expansionism and the new "German Europe". However there are, as in all wars, historic reasons for certain nations and certain religious or national groups to share an enemy. In the Iraq crisis there is in fact a historical and continuing link between Iraq and Germany, a link which always becomes acute when Germany is in imperialist mood. The present crisis has demonstrated that such links, far from being fanciful, have been strategic, ideological and industrial.

It would also have been hardly credible, as the democracies of Britain and the USA prepare to remove a fascist dictator in Iraq that the leader of a NATO "ally", Germany, should refuse to take a call from the US President, a German Minister should compare President Bush to Hitler and another minister should call him a "dictator". The French President, whose imperialist ideas for the new Europe differ little from Germany's and who personally negotiated the supply of a nuclear facility for Iraq, is contemptuous of the USA and insults 10 Eastern European states for supporting the British/US policies on Iraq.

The Franco German enmity should come as no surprise to those who really understood the nature of the struggle against German imperialism and European Fascism between 1939 and 1945. A young British officer recently wrote of escorting the Nazi General Von Viettinghoff in April 1945 just after he surrendered the German forces in the Central Mediterranean. The General said that "A Franco German Agreement had taken place just after Dunkirk in 1940 to split France into "Occupied" and "Unoccupied" zones and that Europe would become one state controlled by Germany and France. Regardless of the military outcome the French are our Friends". The Franco German "Continental System" was duly created and the collaboration of French police and civil servants with the Nazis was widespread and thorough. Francois Mitterand who helped to create the present European Superstate was the recipient of the highest award of the collaborationist Vichy regime and that other architect of the EU Jacques Delors was a young member of the French equivalent of the Hitler youth movement.

In recent days a further exact parallel to the fascist Europe of the 1940s has been exposed. Belgium, who refused to sell ammunition to the British (a NATO ally) in the first Gulf War, threatened to stop American military supplies moving through the port of Antwerp. It was in his diary of May 1940 that the senior British Foreign Office Official Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote that the Belgian Ambassador "protested against British troops going through Brussels" - to defend Belgium against the Nazi advance!

The Iraq regime under Saddam Hussein is not a religious regime but an anti-religious, secular, socialist and nationalist dictatorship - in other words fascist, very much in the same tradition of Europe in the 1940s. Iraq's historic and modern links to the German State are even more intimate than those to Chirac's France.

The recent terrorist attacks on the United States were planned in Germany and those who see Israel as their enemy would tend to seek sympathy in a nation not exactly renowned for its historic affinity to Jews. Indeed in recent years overtly anti-semitic views have been expressed by those close to Chancellor Schroeder. Those who see the USA as a threat are more likely (given the ranting anti-Americanism of German ministers) to see German Europe as a counter to or at least a competitor to that threat (they would never see Britain in that light). During the first world war Germany and the Ottoman Empire were allies and German agents were sent to "set the east ablaze" in the hope of creating such a wave of Islamic anti-British feeling that the Muslims would rise up in revolt. In the 1920s the Germans still ran the officers training corps which they had founded for the Iraqis.

The vast majority of the supply of chemical factories to Iraq in the 1980s came from Germany and the evidence from an Iraqi defector (BBC programme "Correspondent" 3rd March 2001) showed that Germany contributed 80% of the resources needed to establish the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme. It is also significant that Germany encouraged and indeed armed Bosnian and Albanian Muslims during the war which broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Indeed Bosnian and Albanian Muslims had been recruited into German Waffen SS Divisions during the Second World War.

Of interest in this connection is the significance of the fez, the hat which was part of the 1940s Handzhar (Bosnian Muslim Nazi) uniform. The fez was widely worn in the Ottoman Empire and symbolized both Muslim fanaticism and Ottoman power, under which Bosnian Muslims ruled over Orthodox Christian Serbs and Jews. These Christians and Jews were what is known under Muslim religious law as dhimmi people; their inferior status was set down in law. By setting up a Division of Muslim troops wearing the fez the Nazis were appealing to Islamic fanaticism, and promising a return to the Ottoman spirit. (To show how seriously Himmler and Hitler took their alliance with Islamic fanatics, even the Handzhar Waffen SS division's commanding officer was "required" to wear the fez.). Handzhar was set up for Bosnian Muslims - the name resurfaced in the 1990s in Bosnia as the German inspired break up of Yugoslavia reached its zenith.

According to German documentation of the visit to Hitler by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on 30th November 1941, the latter told the Fuehrer that the German Reich was "admired by the whole Arab world". "The Arabs were Germany's friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists". "The Mufti welcomed the statement that Germany recognised the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs just as she supported the elimination of the Jewish national home."

Hitler told the Mufti that "Germany was resolved to ask (sic) one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non European nations as well."

In an echo of what is happening today in Germany's refusal to attack Iraq, Hitler's Germany told the Mufti that "the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from the Caucusus. As soon as this happened the Fuehrer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived." Today as the new Reich reaches out to Poland, and subsequently to Bulgaria and Roumania, Chancellor Schroeder even dares openly and aggressively to oppose US and British policy against the fascist leadership in Iraq.

It is today an insidious tactic of Germany and France - who together have provided Iraq with more facilities for chemical biological and nuclear production than anyone - to demand that Iraqi refugee scientists, never mind scientists in Iraq, openly expose themselves to death at the hands of Saddam for telling to the international media the truth about the weapons programmes they worked on. This is particularly obnoxious when the German Secret Service knows all too well the nature of the materials supplied to Iraq.

Friedbert Pflueger, foreign policy spokesman of the main opposition Christian Democratic parties recently accused the red-green coalition government of deliberately keeping the German and world public uninformed of BND (German Intelligence Service) evidence of the continued existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "If we trust our (intelligence) services, and I do, then we know that there exist weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". In February 2001, the BND compiled a report and intelligence chief August Hanning told Spiegel magazine that, "Since the end of the UN inspections [December 1998], we have determined a jump in procurement efforts by Iraq," adding that Saddam was rebuilding destroyed weapons facilities "partly based on the German industrial standard". The lists of suppliers to Iraq contain many of the leading German firms, at least one of which, Preussag, being intimately connected to the Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

As the Franco German empire in Western Europe (in the disguise of the European Union) consolidated its power over other nations - including the constitutionally castrated Britain (whose Prime Minister has even allowed a French company to provide vital weaponry to the British army and navy) so the French and German governments have become more aggressive and arrogant. The expansion to the east by the European Union was to be the achievement of the German historic destiny so annoyingly frustrated in 1918 and 1945. For France and its Napoleon admirers the eastern expansion would prove the visionary nature of that "great leader of Europe" so disgracefully stopped in his imperial tracks by Wellington!

But the arrogance of the Franco-German political class never anticipated that the Eastern applicants for membership of the European Union would be anything other than forelock-tugging sycophants and blind followers of the Franco German project. The Iraq affair has exposed both the aggressive nature of the imperialist European Superstate and the fact that those nations which have just escaped from the dictatorship of the Soviet Union will not tolerate a similar oppression by the European Union.

Those who forget history are condemned to relive it. The tragedy in Britain is that our politicians never even knew any history in the first place. Fortunately the Bush administration is learning fast and the true nature of their so-called "Allies" on the continent of Europe has never been more evident.