Marshall Plan vs. Robbery, Murder and Destruction?
An Eternal Mockery of the German People!
Marshall Plan in lieu of Morgenthau Plan??
ERP Marshall-Plan Ad poster for the Marshall Plan European Recovery Program (ERP) [HICOG (High Commission of Germany) Fed. Rep. of Germany, 1950] |
Within the framework of the so-called Marshall Plan, a credit(!) of
This repayment of 13.00 billion DM must be booked exclusively for the Marshall Plan. According to the London Debt Agreement (February 12, 1953) this was also said to repay so-called "Gario" funds with which the occupation powers had allegedly provided food aid to Germany during the starvation years of 1945 to 1948.
During the years 1945-48 (in other words, before the Marshall Plan), the Western Allies gave West Germany "economic aid" (foodstuffs) in the value of 3.386 billion dollars (Deutsches Geld- und Bankwesen in Zahlen 1876-1975, p. 341, pub.: Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt/Main 1976, Fritz Knapp Verlag, Frankfurt). At the then current market price for wheat, $60 per ton, this would have been enough to buy 55 million tons of wheat. The Western Zones (later to become the Federal Republic of Germany) had a population of 40 to 45 million; so 55 million tons would have meant approx. 1,200 kilos (approx. 2,650 pounds) of wheat per citizen, a quantity equivalent to 1 kg (2.2 lbs, and roughly 4,000 calories) of wheat for each and every German, for 3½ years. 1,400 calories per day would still have been possible to attain from domestic reserves (Reichsnährstand), which means that every single inhabitant should have been able to have some 5,400 calories per day, the ration of a heavy laborer!
In actual fact, however, only 1,000 to 1,400 calories were available (reserves still secured by the Reichsnährstand in spring 1945).
So the alleged Gario funds never reached Germany. Were they misappropriated to Palestine? Or perhaps they ended up in the bank accounts of American swindlers?
Nonetheless the London Agreement charged this alleged assistance to the Marshall Plan account, so that the groveling protestations of gratitude which the current Federal German government published in a full-page article in the August/September 1997 issue of Journal für Deutschland (pub.: Federal Press and Information Office) are truly an example of brain-dead nonsense:
"...Unparalleled in world history: America's state coffers and supply stores opened up even to the enemy nation Germany, lying as it was in rubble and ashes!" ( "Enemy nation"? 4 years after the end of the war? - "Lying in rubble and ashes"? - Bombed to death by the Anglo-Saxon war criminals!) Federal Chancellor Kohl in his speech of gratitude: "We Germans will never forget that... thank you, America!" There is no other case in world history, the article continued, where the victorious nation rendered such generous aid to the vanquished and helped it regain a place in the world community... "West Germany received some 3.3 billion dollars in US aid. In 1953 the USA forgave Germany two thirds of its debt. The funds thus freed up were used to set up the so-called ERP Fund for further support of the German economy..."
So it can be shown that this was an enormous fraud perpetrated by the English and the Americans. Even Ludwig Erhard, Federal Economic Minister as of 1949, writes in his book Deutschlands Rückkehr zum Weltmarkt that there are no German receipts or confirmations of the alleged food aid.
Even as late as spring 1945 (the war ended on May 8, 1945) the German Reichsnährstand was able to secure rations until fall 1946 - in other words for one-and-a-half years in advance - of approx. 1,500 calories per person per day, so that it should have been an easy matter for the Allies to counteract any deterioration in the food situation simply by releasing the German productivity. This applied in an even greater extent to the remainder of Europe. Any additional aid (to meet peak demands) would have been necessary only on a small scale and only in extraordinary circumstances.
But in 1945 the Western Allies' boundless, criminal will to destroy had also immediately destroyed the German food supply organization (Reichsnährstand).
In the end, this was the chief cause of the disastrous starvation years of 1946 and 1947, which cost the lives of countless Germans. One must assume that the death toll was at least as high as it had been in 1919, when the British starvation blockade, together with a devastating influenza epidemic, claimed the lives of 800,000 Germans. But who still speaks of this deliberate mass murder by the Allied "liberators" today?
In the Federal German budget of 1949 the occupation expenses extorted by the (Western) Allies amounted to 4.7 billion DM. For social assistance for the 13 million refugees, the 10 million who had become homeless due to the Allied terror bombing, the millions of returning prisoners of war, and the 40 million West Germans whom the currency reform had robbed of all their savings, only 3.6 billion DM in aid were available, and "some 2.34 billion DM for the 4.5 million war-disabled and the widows and orphans of fallen soldiers", in other words exactly half as much as the occupation expenses!
The presence of occupation forces for four and more years after the end of the war was a total breach of international law. Occupation forces are a wartime measure; after a war has ended there is no need for them and thus also no legal justification. Ever since the First World War it was typical for the Allies to forcibly prevent a sensible peace in this way.
Naturally all German post-War governments were too obsequious towards the Allies to demand and enforce international law in this matter as well.
Morgenthau Plan! not Marshall Plan!
The ERP Commission itself had to admit that the pillaging and post-War destruction of Germany by the Western Allies prevented this goal from being attained, and in fact made it impossible. As early as the new year 1946/47, Western Europe (without West Germany!) had again attained the level of industrial production (the decisive economic strength) at which it had been in 1938 (1938 = 100); 1949/50, in other words three years later, Western Europe (without West Germany!) had already exceeded this level by 30%, in other words it had attained 130% of the base comparison year 1938!
(Among other things, this demonstrates how during the war Germany had spared and indeed built up the industrial capacities of the countries it had occupied, for only this solid and modern state of industrial capacities made this rapid increase possible in the first place.)
In this context it is important to note the ERP Commission's statement that in 1946/47, Western Europe altogether (i.e. including West Germany) was at 20% below the level of 1938, in other words at 80%, and did not attain 110% until 1949/50. The development of West Germany was rather different. Here the level of industrial production in 1946/47 was only 25% of what it had been in 1938, and even by 1949/50 it had attained only 79% of this comparison year!
In the Federal Republic of Germany, it took until 1950/51 to reach 100% of the 1938 production level again, and 130% was not reached until 1954. So West Germany lagged 5 years behind the rest of Western Europe.
(Statistics from: Gerhart Jentsch, Der Marshallplan und Deutschlands Platz darin, pp. 31 and 83, pub. ECA Mission for West Germany, Frankfurt/Main 1950. Note that this publication gives post-1948/49 data only for Western Europe and West Germany; in 1945 the American Crusaders had handed Eastern Europe, wholly half of Europe, over to the Bolshevist-Asiatic fiend Stalin for looting and extermination, so that these peoples could also not take part in the Marshall Plan.)
This divergent development of Germany and Europe, the 5-year (West) German lag, is the result exclusively of the destruction and looting of the German economy by the Allies.
For this reason it is especially important today (1997), in the age of the total economic unification of Europe under the Maastricht Treaty, to expose how the Allied war crimes thwarted the German economic potential, and to show how this has ramifications even for the present and future.
The following statistics are based primarily on: a) The Harmssen Report: "Reparationen - Sozialprodukt - Lebensstandard", 4 issues, 1948, b) Gustav Wilhelm Harmssen, "Am Abend der Demontage", Sechs Jahre Reparationspolitik, with documentary appendix, 1951, a) and b) pub. by Friederich Trüjen Verlag, Bremen. (The Harmssen Report was commissioned by the Premiers of the then newly constituted German lands and is therefore an official document.) The terms used in the tables (to indicate the looting and destruction) are taken from Harmssen and denote the same particulars, and from Helmut Rumpf, Professor of National and International Law, lecturing legation counselor 1st class (Ministerial Counsel) with the Foreign Office at Bonn, "Die deutschen Reparationen nach dem 2. Weltkrieg" and "Handbuch zur Deutschen Nation," vol. 1 Intellectual state and political situation, pub. by Bernard Willms, Hohenrain Verlag, Tübingen, 1986. |
Table 1 | ||
Looting of Material Property | ||
bill. RM/DM (Reichsmark) | bill. Dollar | |
Looting from 1945 to end of 1947 | 46.75 | 19.90 |
As per calculations by Rumpf, additionally | 37.00 | |
Sum, Rumpf and Harmssen (including dismantling) | 87.00 | |
Looting from 1945 until 1952 | ||
Looting of the Soviet Occupation Zone from 1948 until 1950 (including dismantling) | 70.00 | |
Military property | 50.00 | |
German weapons looted by Russians and Western Allies | ||
Theft of patents | 20.00 | |
Theft of cash | 25.00 | |
Theft by occupation forces | 1.00 | |
Theft of art, books, essentially incalculable, but at least | 10.00 | |
Total, theft of national property | 263.00 | bill. RM/DM |
Table 2 | ||
Robbery in Form of Ongoing Drains 1945-1952 | ||
bill. RM/DM (Reichsmark) | ||
For the forcible export of German coal | 4.00 | |
For so-called restitution | 2.00 | |
Theft of the entire German fleet - resultant loss of shipping revenue, and expenses for shipping costs paid to the Allies | 2.50 | |
Dismantling costs | 11.00 | |
Looting of the Saar region (coal) | 5.00 | |
Value of forced labor by German prisoners of war and civilian deportees still unlawfully detained: | ||
Prisoners of war | 35.00 | |
Deportees and abductees | 38.00 | |
Loss of royalties (until 1955) from patents, trademarks etc. | 10.00 | |
Occupation expenses according to the Fed. gov't (Zeittafel 1949-1969) only for the Western Zones from 1945 until 1952 | 50.00 | |
for the Eastern Zone, min. (as per Harmssen) | 40.00 | |
Total of ongoing drains | 197.50 | bill. RM/DM |
Table 3 | ||
Damages due to Destruction of Germany 1945-1952 | ||
bill. RM/DM (Reichsmark) | ||
Damages due to political division (btw. 240 and 2400 bill. DM, cf. the following) | 400.00 | |
Economic value of dismantling = loss of production | 65.00 | |
Loss of value increase due to 10-year ban on cutting-edge German research | 70.00 | |
Losses due to destruction of Eastern trade | 10.00 | |
Losses due to destruction of large German enterprises | 35.00 | |
Total damages due to division | 580.00 | |
Total damages due to robbery and destruction | 1040.00 | bill. RM/DM |
Theft of the German Eastern Regions, of the Sudetenland and of the National Property of the Ethnic Germans | |||
Stolen German property (reproducible material property, without the value of the land) in Eastern Germany, Danzig, Memelland, Sudetenland, and of the 6 million ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and the Balkans: | |||
at least | 300.00 | ||
Total, all of Germany | 1340.00 | billion RM/DM |
Comparison of the Values Looted from Germany with the Value of the Alleged Marshall Plan Aid to West Germany | ||
In the 8 years from 1945 until 1952, values totalling were stolen from Germany. | 1,340.00 | bill. RM/DM |
In the years from 1949 until 1952, a repaid loan of was given as Marshall Plan aid. | 6.40 | bill. DM |
That means that, in the same period, 200 times more was stolen from Germany than was given as repayable loan. That's the naked truth about the so-called Marshall Plan aid!! In other words, it is nothing but a despicable mockery of the Germans, which the Bonn regimes have continued to perpetuate for 50 years.
As recently as May of this year (1997), on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the M.-Plan, Federal Chancellor Kohl wept tears of gratitude. (However, West Germany only got its first meager hand-out from this Plan two years after its inception; in other words, Herr Kohl wept two years too early.)
The economic dimension of the looting and destruction in war-ravaged and divided Germany from 1945 until 1952, as measured by the magnitudes of the German National Product
The extent of the robbery and destruction is also shown by the development and comparison of the German National Products of 1945 to 1952 and 1953 to 1960.
Table 4 | ||||
Gross National Product and Occupation Expenses | ||||
Development of National Product, in bill. DM; Ostmark (as of 1948) | West Germany | incl. Occupation Expenses | East Germany | incl. Occupation Expenses |
1945 estimate: 50% of 1939 | 32.30 | 5.00 | 15.00 | 5.00 |
1946 ditto | 32.30 | 5.00 | 15.00 | 5.00 |
1947 (acc. to Harmssen, p. 139) | 43.00 | 6.00 | 16.00 | 6.00 |
1948 (acc. to Harmssen, p. 139) | 57.00 | 5.00 | 18.00 | 6.00 |
1949 (acc. to Harmssen, p. 139) | 73.00 | 4.70 | 21.00 | 5.80 |
1950 (acc. to Harmssen, p. 139) | 98.10 | 4.65 | 24.00 | 7.00 |
1951 (acc. to Harmssen, p. 139) | 120.00 | 6.49 | 25.00 | 8.00 |
1952 (acc. to Harmssen, p. 139) | 137.00 | 7.89 | 27.00 | 9.00 |
Total GNP 1945-1952 | 592.70 | 47.00 | 161.00 | 41.80 |
Total W. Germany 592.7 + E. Germany 161,0 = 753.7 bill. RM/DM Ostmark, including 88.8 bill. DM in Occupation Expenses |
In the four years of the Marshall Plan, the expenses associated with the occupation alone exceeded the Marshall Plan aid by a factor of nine!! |
6.4 billion DM in Marshall Plan income from the Americans, 54.00 billion DM in payments to the robbing and looting occupiers.
It is most noteworthy that in the four years of the Marshall Plan, in West Germany, the cost of the occupation alone amounted to 24.00 billion DM, in other words some 4 times as much as the entire Marshall Plan "aid"! or: in each and every year we paid an average of 4 times as much to the Western occupation powers than we received in so-called aid!
If one then also adds the occupation expenses paid to the Soviet occupiers, who depopulated and looted East Germany almost out of existence with the consent of the barbaric Western Allies, then from 1949 until 1952 fully 9 times as much in occupation costs was extorted from the German rump state as the entire Marshall Plan "credit" gave us in 4 years!
Occupation Expenses Prevent Necessary Social Services
in Impoverished Germany!
Table 5 | |||||
Marshall Plan Aid - Occupation Expenses - Social Services (1949-52) | |||||
M. Plan payments bill. DM | Share of GNP in % | Occupation expenses bill. DM | Share of GNP in % | Social services bill. DM | |
1949 | 2.4 | 3 | 4.7 | 6 | 3.6 (2.34) |
1950 | 1.3 | 1.3 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.7 |
1951 | 1.7 | 1.4 | 6.5 | 5.5 | 5.8 |
1952 | 0.5 | 0.3 | 7.9 | 5.5 | 7.7 |
Losses due to reduced productivity of East Germany
under the Communist regime of terror 1945-1990
Loss of approx. 5.5 billion DM (= 5,500,000,000,000 DM).
Destruction of material property in East Germany due to deterioration of reproducible material wealth of approx. 3.3 billion.
Table 6 | ||||
War damages and Dismantling - losses in % of capacities extant in 1936 | ||||
East Germany | East Berlin | West Berlin | West Germany | |
War damages in % of 1936 capacity | 0% | 23% | 24% | 8.1% |
Dismantling, losses in % of 1936 capacity | 45% | 25% | 53% | 7.3% |
Total losses | 45% | 48% | 77% | 15.4% |
Statistics from: Kurt Pritzkoleit, Gott erhalte die Mächtigen, p. 126, Karl Rauch Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1953. |
Table 7 | ||
Possible productivity as of 1945, given intact/undamaged capacity (GNP data) West Germany (Fed. Rep.) | ||
bill. DM | This level of productivity, which would have been possible if there had been no destruction of German economic potentials, must be compared with the actual results, achieved under conditions of looting, destruction and suppression: 592.7 bill. DM (cf. Table 4); 1,261.8 - 592.7 = 669,6 bill. DM lost productivity 1945-52 (corresponds to Table 3: 580 bill. in 8 years!) | |
1945, GNP of 1950 | 98.1 | |
1946, GNP of 1951 | 120.0 | |
1947, GNP of 1952 | 137.0 | |
1948, GNP of 1953 | 147.7 | |
1949, GNP of 1954 | 158.6 | |
1950, GNP of 1955 | 181.4 | |
1951, GNP of 1956 | 200.5 | |
1952, GNP of 1957 | 218.5 | |
Total | 1,261.8 |
More than 100 times the Marshall Plan credit to West Germany!! |
"Without the Marshall Plan Germany would have turned into one giant graveyard, into a vast plain of destruction, brutality, inhumanity, disease and death... Not the USA profited from it, but rather all of Europe - but most of all the German people under the occupation by the Western Allies. In the face of the humanitarian motive, the massive financial and material aid takes on an aspect of nobility. We here in Germany owe a debt of gratitude to our American supporters, for generations still to come." (General opinion) |
The West German living standard and investment opportunities were thus deliberately kept at a level of less than 50%.
The effects on the other European nations were proportional; 20% on average, and significantly more for those such as The Netherlands, who were economically closely interconnected with Germany.
To clear up misunderstandings disseminated by Bonn: before, during and after the War and right to the present day, Germany, due to the nature of her location and history, has always worked in close economic association with the rest of Europe, so that the European share of her foreign trade amounts to approx. 70%. Thus, every increase in German productivity directly benefits the rest of Europe in the form of a commensurate increase in Germany's foreign trade.
Incidentally, the Marshall Plan also depended largely on this European economic union; with relatively few exceptions, it gave aid only if the recipient would grant special "drawing rights" for its products for other European nations.
In light of these deliberately ruined possibilities, what is the point of the hullabaloo everyone makes over the peanuts that were shelled out under the Marshall Plan?
Huttenbriefe für Volkstum, Kultur, Wahrheit und Recht, February 1998, pp. 3-7.
Article by academically accredited economist Karl Baßler.