In my last report, I discussed why the current financial system is on the verge of a 1923-Weimar style hyperinflation driven by Federal Reserve bailouts trying desperately to support a deleveraging of the $1200 trillion derivatives bubble that has taken over the western banking system. I also discussed the Bank of England-led “solution” currently to this crisis involves a new global “green” digital currency with new “rules” which are very similar to the 1923 Bank of England “solution” to Germany’s economic chaos which eventually required a fascist governance mechanism to impose it onto the masses.

In this article, I wish to take a deeper look at the causes and effects of Weimar Germany’s completely un-necessary collapse into hyperinflation and chaos during the period of 1919-1923.

Versailles and the Destruction of Germany

Britain had been the leading hand behind the orchestration of WWI and the destruction of the potential German-Russian-American-Ottoman alliance that had begun to take form by the late 19^th century as foolish Kaiser Wilhelm discovered (though sadly too late) when he said: “the world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate aim of which is the ruin of Germany. England, France and Russia have conspired for our annihilation… that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but surely created by Edward VII”.

Just as the British oligarchy managed the war, so too did they organize the reparations conference in France which, among other things, imposed impossible debt repayments upon a defeated Germany and created the League of Nations which was meant to become the instrument for a “post-nation state world order”. Lloyd George led the British delegation alongside his assistant Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Leo Amery, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord John Maynard Keynes who have a long term agenda to bring about a global dictatorship. All of these figures were members of the newly emerging Round Table Movement, that had taken full control of Britain by ousting Asquith in 1916, and which is at the heart of today’s “deep state”.

After the 1918 Armistice dismantled Germany’s army and navy, the once powerful nation was now forced to pay the impossible sum of 132 billion gold marks to the victors and had to give up territories representing 10% of its population (Alsace-Loraine, Ruhr, and North Silesia) which made up 15% of its arable land, 12% of its livestock, 74% of its iron ore, 63% of its zinc production, and 26% of its coal. Germany also had to give up 8000 locomotives, 225 000 railcars and all of its colonies. It was a field day of modern pillage.

Germany was left with very few options. Taxes were increased and imports were cut entirely while exports were increased. This policy (reminiscent of the IMF austerity techniques in use today) failed entirely as both fell 60%. Germany gave up half of its gold supply and still barely a dent was made in the debt payments. By June 1920 the decision was made to begin a new strategy: increase the printing press. Rather than the “miracle cure” which desperate monetarists foolishly believed it would be, this solution resulted in an asymptotic devaluation of the currency into hyperinflation. From June 2020 to October 1923 the money supply in circulation skyrocketed from 68.1 gold marks to 496.6 quintillion gold marks. In June 1922, 300 marks exchanged $1 US and in November 1923, it took 42 trillion marks to get $1 US! Images are still available of Germans pushing wheel barrows of cash down the street, just to buy a stick of butter and bread (1Kg of Bread sold for $428 billion marks in 1923).

With the currency’s loss of value, industrial output fell by 50%, unemployment rose to over 30% and food intake collapsed by over half of pre-war levels. German director Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse (The Gambler) exposed the insanity of German population’s collapse into speculative insanity as those who had the means began betting against the German mark in order to protect themselves thus only helping to collapse the mark from within. This is very reminiscent of those Americans today short selling the US dollar rather than fighting for a systemic solution.

1923: City of London’s Solution is imposed

When the hyperinflationary blowout of Germany resulted in total un-governability of the state, a solution took the form of the Wall Street authored “Dawes Plan” which necessitated the use of a London-trained golem by the name of Hjalmar Schacht. First introduced as Currency Commissioner in November 1923 and soon President of the Reichsbank, Schacht’s first act was to visit Bank of England’s governor Montagu Norman in London who provided Schacht a blueprint for proceeding with Germany’s restructuring. Schacht returned to “solve” the crisis with the very same poison that caused it.

First announcing a new currency called the “rentenmark” set on a fixed value exchanging 1 trillion reichsmarks for 1 new rentenmark, Germans were robbed yet again. This new currency would operate under “new rules” never before seen in Germany’s history: Mass privatizations resulted in Anglo-American conglomerates purchasing state enterprises. IG Farben, Thyssen, Union Banking, Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil, JP Morgan and Union Banking took control Germany’s finances, mining and industrial interests under the supervision of John Foster Dulles, Montagu Norman, Averill Harriman and other deep state actors. This was famously exposed in the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremburg by Stanley Kramer.

Schacht next cut credit to industries, raised taxes and imposed mass austerity on “useless spending”. 390 000 civil servants were fired, unions and collective bargaining was destroyed and wages were slashed by 15%.

As one can imagine, this destruction of life after the hell of Versailles was intolerable and civil unrest began to boil over in ways that even the powerful London-Wall Street bankers (and their mercenaries) couldn’t control. An enforcer was needed unhindered by the republic’s democratic institutions to force Schacht’s economics onto the people. An up-and-coming rabble rousing failed painter who had made waves in a Beerhall Putsch on November 8, 1923 was perfect.

One Last Attempt to Save Germany

Though Hitler grew in power over the coming decade of Schachtian economics, one last republican effort was made to prevent Germany from plunging into a fascist hell in the form of the November 1932 election victory of General Kurt von Schleicher as Chancellor of Germany. Schleicher had been a co-architect of Rapallo alongside Rathenau a decade earlier and was a strong proponent of the Friedrich List Society’s program of public works and internal improvements promoted by industrialist Wilhelm Lautenbach. The Nazi party’s public support collapsed and it found itself bankrupt. Hitler had fallen into depression and was even contemplating suicide when “a legal coup” was unleashed by the Anglo-American elite resulting in Wall Street funds pouring into Nazi coffers.

By January 30, 1933 Hitler gained Chancellorship where he quickly took dictatorial powers under the “state of emergency” caused by the burning of the Reichstag in March 1933. By 1934 the Night of the Long Knives saw General Schleicher and hundreds of other German patriots assassinated and it was only a few years until the City of London-Wall Street Frankenstein monster stormed across the world.

The New Silk Road or New World Order

Today’s world sits atop a bubble of unimagined proportions which began to blow in 2008 and has been kept afloat by nothing more than a decade of blind hope mixed with money printing, zero interest rates, speculation and austerity. The PHYSICAL economic basis supporting the money system has been crippled due to 40 years of post-industrial consumerism rampant across the west. While it is admitted that the U.S dollar cannot remain the reserve currency for the world as it has from 1945-present, those same central banking forces from London have admitted that if their plans for a “one-world” green digital currency is not forced onto nations, then China’s Yuan and the New Silk Road will shape the new system.

Whether London will manage to succeed in 2020 pushing a fascist de-carbonization (ie: depopulation) scheme onto the world where their 1920 Monster failed remains to be seen.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Historians and psychiatrists – including Dr. Sigmund Freud himself who co-authored a book on Wilson – have endlessly debated whether Wilson was sane and just deluded or raving mad. Freud clearly inclined to the latter view. And he had ample evidence to support him. What is most alarming is that, as Henry Kissinger – significantly not born an American at all – points out, all US presidents either share Wilson’s ridiculous messianic fantasies or feel they must pretend to.

During the supposed dark age of the Cold War from 1945 to 1989, the recognition that the Soviet Union was at least as militarily powerful as the United States imposed the disciplines of realism and restraint on US policymakers. But since the Berlin Wall came down, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and the Soviet Union peacefully disassembled, that restraint has vanished.

Every US president since then really believes that the United States is unique in history and fated to remake the entire world in its own image. History is over, American triumph over the whole world is ensured. And since that globalist vision is inevitable, flawless, perfect and virtuous, it follows that every bombing campaign, every war, every imposition of economic sanctions, the toppling of every government and the destruction of every society that dares to disagree is divinely approved.

Half a century ago, I thought as an impressionable teenager back in my native Ireland that the fiasco of the Vietnam War was smashing forever that extraordinary American combination of innocence, arrogance and ignorance of trying to remake Southeast Asia in the image of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s fantasies of Texas.

I was of course wrong: The tale of the 21st century has been a descent of successive, equally manic, ignorant and crazed US presidents into one needless, wretched, nation-smashing bungle after another.

The unimaginably ignorant and stupid George W. Bush – also from Texas – went charging into Iraq and Afghanistan, unleashing a new cycle of endless wars.

In late 2008, I attended a diplomatic dinner at the State Department to launch then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s pride and joy – yet another Israeli-Palestinian “peace initiative” that everyone knew had not the slightest chance of getting anywhere.

Every veteran US, Arab, European and Israeli diplomat who attended the dinner recognized this. Yet all of them politely pretended to be impressed and enthusiastic while Rice, who clearly believed every absurd word she uttered, gave her presentation. In her childish enthusiasm she seemed to be more like a teenage cheerleader at American college football games. She had not the slightest doubt that she would succeed in a few weeks where generations and even centuries of diplomats and leaders from all over the world had failed. How American!

Barack Obama was cut from the same mold. He was farcically offered – and typically accepted – the Nobel Peace Prize after only one year in office and just compounded the damage.

Obama casually approved the destabilization and destruction of Ukraine, the collapse of US-Russia superpower relations to levels unimagined since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the destruction of Libya, Syria and Yemen. He even blithely approved an unprecedented $1.5 trillion nuclear weapons expansion program guaranteeing a ruinous arms race for decades to come. Yet he really believed he was a great force for peace. The bubble of his vanity and complacent self-regard was as impenetrable as Woodrow Wilson’s.

Many outstanding studies have been published about Wilson’s absurd vanities, ignorance and madness at Versailles in 1919 from the writings of British diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson (Peacemaking 1919) and the great Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace to Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan’s magisterial Paris 1919 and Gene Smith’s short and haunting masterpiece When the Cheering Stopped.

The bottom line is clear: Wilson did what he did not just because he was vain, ignorant and raving mad (He was also an ugly anti-black racist who re-segregated as much of the US federal government as he could): He did so because he was American.

Wilson created an independent Polish state in the heart of Europe and then gave it a free hand to conquer every neighboring nationality in sight: Just as George W. Bush embraced the Kurds and set off decades of unresolved wars across the Middle East ever since.

Yet successive generations of Americans never learn. And nor do the endless parade of their would be “friends” and “partners” like the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Georgians and now Ukrainian neo-Nazis who eagerly embrace mantras of “liberty!” and free markets!” mindless of how soon their American protectors will tire of their new toys and throw them aside.

After World War II, another US president who admired Wilson launched the United States on its path of endless wars and global confrontations. Yet Harry S. Truman also recognized the awful absurdities and dangers of Wilson’s madness.

So it was Truman, a humble Midwesterner who plowed fields behind a stinking mule until he was almost 30 and who never enjoyed the “blessings” of American higher education who said, “There is nothing new in the world except for the history you don’t already know.”

Donald Trump, who is undoubtedly the least intelligent man to ever occupy the White House, failed to understand the importance of the 100^th centenary observations in France held to mark the armistice that concluded World War I. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns along the Western front in France fell silent. The war was entirely preventable but had been spurred on by nationalist fervor whipped up by kings, emperors, prime ministers, and foreign ministers who sent armies into battle to fight for the “honor” of their nations.

It was unbridled nationalism that led to World War I and it was nationalist feelings bent on revenge for being vanquished in World War I that ultimately led to World War II. Left unchecked, similar nationalist feelings being fanned today may lead to World War III.

The irony of World War I was that the monarchs of warring parties Britain, Russia, and Germany were all related. King George V of the United Kingdom was the first cousin of German Kaiser Wilhelm. King George and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were also first cousins. And the Tsar and Kaiser were third cousins. Nevertheless, the nationalistic passions between Germany and its ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs; Serbia and its protectors Russia and France; and the Ottoman Empire, allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary; and the United Kingdom, later allied with the United States led to the first modern world war.

In 1914, the ground was set for a conflagration. All that was needed to set off the tinderbox was a flame. That match was struck in 1914 when Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, and his wife, Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo, in Austrian-ruled Bosnia, by a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. Austria-Hungary not only blamed Serbia and a Serb terrorist group, the Black Hand, for carrying out the assassination but also implicated the Russian military attaché's office in Belgrade, Serbia. Accusations that Serbia and Russia were behind the assassinations of the Archduke and Duchess were unfounded. Nevertheless, this “conspiracy theory” of 1914 eventually led to the direct deaths of almost 20 million people around the world. Add the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which is believed to have been spread by troops returning home from the war fronts, and the indirect war dead count climbs to an additional 100 million.

Compare the Sarajevo conspiracy theory of 1914 to several that exist today, including accusations that Russia perpetrated biological warfare attacks on individuals in England and that Russian forces shot down Malaysian Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine, and we see the same irresponsible allegations about state-sponsored acts of violence that triggered World War I. In 1914, warfare led to the use of chemical and, quite possibly, biological weapons. World War II, the cause of which is nested in World War I’s aftermath, led to the use of nuclear weapons. It is unthinkable what a World War III might lead to.

Since Russia was Serbia’s patron, the Austro-Hungarians believed Serbia’s protector, Russia, and even Romania were behind the assassination plot. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Since Russia and France were pledged to defend Serbia, they declared war on Austria-Hungary, prompting Germany to honor its alliance with the Habsburgs and declare war on Serbia, Russia, and France. Eventually, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Greece, and Britain entered the war in an alliance with Russia and France. The Ottoman Empire backed the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria. The United States entered the war in 1917 on the side of Britain and France.

For all the warring parties, "the other" meant their “nefarious” enemies. Extreme nationalism took an ugly turn. For the Austrians and Germans, "the other" was the "barbaric" Slavs. For the British, French, Russians, Italians, and, eventually, the Americans, "the other" was the "beastly" Germanic "Huns." For the Ottoman Turks, "the other" was the nomadic, “uncivilized,” and “cruel” Arabs. The Greeks and Serbs, “the other” was the Ottomans Muslim “hordes” ready to re-occupy the Balkans and eradicate Christianity. And, so it went, until over 18 million military and civilian personnel were killed. World War I was the result of blaming “the other” for whatever atrocity could be conjured up by the propaganda machinery of the era. It was a case of extreme nationalism running rampant. At the end of the conflict, the royal houses of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire fell, but the nationalistic blame game continued.

Aspirant peoples, with nationalism as their trumpet, rose from the battlefields of World War I to demand independence. Some of these nations, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), were recognized at Versailles. Others, like Kurdistan, the Emirate of Darfur, the Dervish State of Somaliland, Tuareg Confederation, Zayan Confederation of the Berbers, the Emirate of Jabal Shammar (moderate rivals of the Saudis), Balochistan, and Vietnam, were not granted independence, a decision that would lead to war outbreaks later in the 20^th century.

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, statesmen, including US President Woodrow Wilson, gathered to draw new borders, grant aspirant nations their independence, and establish an international body – the League of Nations – to serve as a place for dialogue to prevent war. However, the Treaty of Versailles also, inadvertently, laid the ground for World War II. Wilson could never convince the isolationist “America Firsters” in the Republican Party to commit the United States to membership of the League of Nations. America’s absence from the League denied the organization the universality it desired. Today, President Donald Trump is ripping up treaty after treaty, withdrawing from various United Nations agencies and agreements, and sending troops to the US southern border to meet a bogus threat that Central American asylum seekers are planning an “invasion” of the United States. Trump, who fancies himself as an American “nationalist,” has seen “the other” in women and children escaping political violence and economic stagnation in countries where dictators and death squads are propped up by the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency.

Brutal reparations demanded from Germany by the victorious Allies at Versailles, as well as German disarmament, gave rise to someone who would blame “the other” for Germany’s miseries, which were accentuated by the economic depression of the 1920s.

For Adolf Hitler, a wounded veteran of the “war to end all wars,” “the other” was the “Jews,” aided and abetted by Bolsheviks and “international bankers.” Hitler blamed them all for Germany’s surrender in World War I and its subsequent economic collapse. The world failed to learn the lessons of World War I.

At a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to mark the 1918 armistice, French President Emmanuel Macron told the collected world leaders, including an uncomfortable Trump, that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” Macron hosted a November 11-13 Paris Peace Forum for 84 world leaders in Paris for the World War I centenary. They included Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Theresa May, Moroccan King Mohammed VI, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The forum’s itinerary, including a keynote speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, touched on topics ranging from climate change and rising nationalism to abusive corporations and human rights.

In addition to skipping a ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside of Paris, where the remains of thousands of American soldiers who died at the Battle of Belleau Wood are buried, Trump boycotted the Paris Peace Forum.

Trump, like the doomed monarchs of early 20^th century Europe, the fascist dictators who rose to power in the interbellum period, and the tyrants of today, blames “the other” for everything he can imagine.

Trump wanted nothing to do with the Paris Peace Forum. His former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is finalizing plans, along with Belgian, French, German, Austrian, Brazilian, British, white South African and Rhodesian, Hungarian, Serbian, Canadian, Australian, and fascisti Italian far-right wingers, to establish a Fascist International, called “The Movement,” in Brussels early next year. It is among these far-right wing politicians where Trump will feel most at home. One hundred years after the end of World War I, we should all have progressed to a point where we no longer pay heed to the Trumps, Bannons, and others who find always find blame in “the other.”

As far as the disrespect Trump showed to the American war dead at Aisne-Marne by canceling his visit due to rainy weather, Lord Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, who previously called Trump a “daft twerp,” tweeted: “They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate Donald Trump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen.”

While history, in addition to other academic disciplines, are not Mr. Trump’s strong suit, his deciding to be the only world leader in Paris not to attend Macron’s peace forum suggests that other, darker, influences are at play in Trump’s mind. Trump has publicly stated that he admires Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. It was Mussolini’s aggression against Ethiopia, which violated resolutions by the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations that was established by Versailles conference, that helped neuter the effectiveness of that international organization. According to Trump’s first wife, he kept a book of the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler’s, “My New Order,” on his night stand.

Trump’s statements and actions suggest that he boycotted the Paris Peace Forum not because of his tiff with Macron over European defense but because he views the World War I armistice and the exacting of massive war reparations by the victorious Allied Powers from defeated Germany in the same way as Hitler. In Trump’s limited lexicon, Versailles may have been a “disgrace.” Where would Trump have gotten such a notion? Perhaps, some of his views of the aftermath of World War I were garnered from Hitler’s speeches. Yet others may have come from Trump’s father, Fred Trump, Sr., a bona fide believer in Aryan supremacy during the 1920s, a decade that saw Hitler’s Nazis bully their way into power in Germany.

Fred Trump’s German-born father, Friedrich Trump, died in New York in 1918 at the age of 49 as a result of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic. Many historians believe the flu was spread as a result of massive troop movements in Europe during World War I. It is also recorded that the flu’s first outbreak in the United States was recorded at Fort Riley, Kansas, where an Army cook contracted the disease and helped spread it to 522 men at the military installation. One thing is known about Friedrich Trump. Although Friedrich immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1885, eventually settling in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory in Canada to strike it rich in the gold rush and by running a bordello, his ultimate loyalties were with Germany.

Friedrich originally left Germany for North America to avoid military service in the Bavaria army. He returned to Germany in 1901 a wealthy man. Friedrich ran into problems with Bavarian authorities over his dodging of conscription. Friedrich permanently settled in New York City with his German wife. During World War I, as a result of anti-German feelings in the United States, Friedrich came up with the phony cover story that he and his wife were Swedish. It is a lie that would be purveyed by Frederick Trump, Sr. during the interwar years and into World War II. Frederick Trump lied when he said his family came from Karlstadt, Sweden, not Kallstadt in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany.

Although of draft age, Frederick Trump avoided military service in World War II, a distinction that was carried on by his son, Donald, during the Vietnam War. Donald also continued with the lie about his family being Swedish. In his book, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump wrote that his immigrant grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.” His grandfather was not a child, but 16 years old when he left his native Germany for the United States to avoid the Bavarian military draft.

Three generations of Trumps – Friedrich, Fred Sr., and Donald – have altered the biography of the Trump family and their relationship to Germany to create a false impression of the family. Donald Trump has made no secret of his admiration for dictators and leaders who believe in white European racial superiority. From where did he obtain these notions and how do they play into his abhorrence for the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 and Macron’s Paris Peace Forum? One must only look at his father Fred’s post-World War I activities in the United States.

There is evidence that Fred Trump was a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer in the years following World War I. Proof rests on not only a June 1, 1927 article in “The New York Times,” but other New York newspapers about Fred Trump’s arrest at a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) rally in Queens, New York in 1927. Donald Trump denies the incident ever took place.

The 1920s in the United States saw a KKK reach unprecedented prominence. However, its influence would quickly subside in the early 1930s and give way to the German-American Bund as the leading far-right political grouping in the United States. The Bund supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Curiously, Fred Trump’s biography does not account for his activities during this period before the outbreak of World War II. The only bit of information on Fred Trump was that he continued to maintain that his parents were Swedish. Claiming false Swedish lineage was no guarantee of avoiding accusations of pro-Nazi sympathies.

During the 1930s, one of the biggest apologists for Nazi Germany was Swedish-American, Charles Lindbergh. "Lucky Lindy" was even awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle by Nazi Air Minister Hermann Goering in Berlin in 1938. Lindbergh was a prominent member of the America First Committee, which urged the United States to avoid a war with Germany and which had much in common with the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. Interestingly, Donald Trump has resurrected "America First" in his political rhetoric.

In the years between Fred Trump's arrest as a robed Klansmen in Queens and his surfacing as a US government contractor, little is known. Trump was busy building barracks and other buildings for the US Navy troop embarkation ports in Chester, Pennsylvania and Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia. During World War II, German-American Bund member, German immigrant Waldemar Othmer, infiltrated the US military as a civilian employee and dutifully sent, via microfilm, information to his Abwehr handlers in Berlin on the movements of British and American military vessels, convoys, and merchant ships out of Brooklyn and Norfolk. Sinking American ships was a high priority for German naval commander Admiral Karl Donitz, who dubbed the program Operation “Paukenschlag” or Drumbeat. Thousands of American and Canadian troops, sailors, and merchant mariners died in the sinking of US-flagged vessels by German U-boats on patrol off the US east coast. One casualty was the passenger vessel, SS Dorchester, sunk in the north Atlantic by a U-boat, claiming 675 lives, including the revered “Four Chaplains.” The chaplains, representing the Methodist, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Dutch Reformed faiths, gave up their life vests to others after the supply ran out.

The German-American Bund agreed with Hitler and the Nazis that Germany was right to reject the punishment it had received with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Did Fred Trump agree with this belief and pass it on later to Donald after Germany was, again, defeated in World War II? Considering Fred Trump's Klan background, the 1937 "unite the right" agreement between the Klan and the Nazi Silver Shirts and Black Legion to form the Storm Troops, controlled by the Bund, presents a problem. In 1939, over 20,000 American Nazis staged a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. Considering Fred Trump’s upbringing in German neighborhoods in New York and his far-right sympathies, it would have been likely that the father of President Trump – who, incidentally, believes neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia were “fine people” – was present at the rally.

Did the father of the current US president also have wartime loyalties to another master, perhaps Herr Hitler? For a family like the Trumps, who have thrived on lies and false histories, the truth may never be known. However, Donald Trump did take to Paris some “personal baggage” that strongly suggested he wanted nothing to do with Macron’s peace forum, a conference at which 70 leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, were all present. America’s nationalist right-wing never liked President Woodrow Wilson going to Versailles to hammer out the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. Donald Trump appears to be following in those same nationalistic goose steps.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin suggested that Germany pay a total of $20 billion in reparations, anticipating that half of that sum ($10 billion) would go to the Soviet Union – the country that had made the greatest contribution to the victory and endured more than any of the other nations in the anti-Hitler coalition. With some conditions, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agreed to Josef Stalin’s suggestion.Ten billion dollars is approximately what the US spent on aid to the Soviet Union under the lend-lease program during the years of the Second World War. Ten billion US dollars, when they were backed by gold (one dollar at that time was technically worth 1/35 troy ounce of gold), were equal to 10,000 tons of gold, so the entirety of the reparations was worth 20,000 tons of gold. In fact, the German reparations that the USSR agreed to accept would barely provide compensation for a mere 8% of the direct damages inflicted upon the Soviets. And the costs of only 2.8% of the total damages were recouped. This appeared to be a generous gesture on Stalin’s part.

These figures stand in stark contrast to the enormous bill for reparations that the Entente Powers (excluding Russia) submitted to Germany at the Paris Conference in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles set the amount of reparations at 269 billion gold marks – the equivalent of approximately 100,000 (!) tons of gold. That nation, which had initially been battered and weakened by the economic crisis of the 1920s, and later by the Great Depression, was unable to pay the enormous sums demanded as reparations and was forced to borrow from other countries in order to meet the terms of the treaty. In 1921, the Reparations Commission reduced the amount to $132 billion, or by approximately 50%, but even that new sum was the equivalent of 50,000 tons of gold. When Hitler took power in 1933 he put an end to the reparations payments altogether. After the Second World War and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the foreign ministers of the US, UK, and France forced that new nation to resume payments on the debts owed under the Treaty of Versailles. In accordance with the 1953 London Debt Agreement, the German lands that had been lost after the war were permitted to forgo interest payments until after East and West Germany were reunified. The reunification of Germany on Oct. 3, 1990 reinstated her reparations obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was given a respite of 20 years to pay off her debts, for which the country had to take out a twenty-year loan of 239.4 million marks. Only late in 2010 did Germany make her final reparations payment to her closest allies. This was very different from the Soviet Union’s policy – only a few years after the end of WWII the USSR refused reparations from Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, which were by then fellow members of the socialist community! Even East Germany stopped making any reparations payments to the Soviet Union shortly after that nation was established.

Stalin did not want to see a replay of what had happened in Germany and Europe after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. It was precisely that treaty that forced Germany into a corner and set the stage for Europe’s slide into the Second World War. Speaking about the peace treaty with Hungary at the Paris Peace Conference, Andrei Vyshinsky, at that time the Soviet deputy minister of foreign affairs, explained the idea behind the Soviet policy on reparations, “The Soviet government consistently follows this line in its reparations policy, which consists of starting with a realistic plan, so as not to suffocate Hungary or rip up the roots of her economic recovery, but rather to help in her economic revival, help her get back on her feet, and help her to join the common family of the United Nations and to play a role in Europe’s economic revival.”

The USSR also took this magnanimous approach to other countries that had fought alongside the Germans. This can be seen in the peace treaty with Italy that required the payment of $100 million in restitution to the Soviet Union, although this offset no more than 4-5% of the direct damage inflicted on the USSR.

The principle behind this magnanimous approach to determining the sum of the reparations settlements complemented another important principle of Soviet policy – that of using a country’s current industrial outputas the principle means of discharging the reparations debts. This principle was phrased with due regard for the lessons of the First World War. It is important to remember that the demands for reparations imposed on Germany after World War I were exclusively monetary, and to be paid in foreign currency. As a result, Germany had to focus on manufacturing products that were never intended to supply her domestic market with basic necessities, but were instead destined for export, in order to obtain the needed foreign currency. In addition, Germany was compelled to obtain loans in order to pay off each new installment of her reparations bill, which forced her into debt bondage. The Soviet Union had no desire to see that repeated. Vyacheslav Molotovexplained the Soviet position at a session of the Council of Foreign Ministers on Dec. 12, 1947: “No deliveries of reparations are currently being made from the western zones, and industry in the combined Anglo-American zone is operating at only 35% of its 1938 level. Deliveries of reparations are currently being received from the Soviet zone in Germany, and industry there is operating at 52% of its 1938 level. Thus, the index of industrial production in the Soviet zone – even though a more challenging environment exists here for industrial recovery – is 50% higher than the index of industrial production in the Anglo-American zone.”

At the Yalta Conference, the leaders of the USSR, USA, and Great Britain reached an agreement regarding the principle of the non-monetary nature of the reparations. The Anglo-American allies once again endorsed this at the Potsdam Conference. But in 1946 they began to work actively to scuttle this policy. In addition, they also undermined other agreements pertaining to reparations. Even at the Potsdam Conference, the allies of the USSR agreed that Germany could partially offset her reparations debts by supplying products and dismantling equipment in the western occupation zones. However, the allies devised obstacles to prevent the Soviets from obtaining goods and equipment from the western occupation zones (only a small percentage of the planned quantities were received).

One consequence of the Cold War launched against the USSR by the West in 1946 was that no single mechanism for the allies to collect and tally reparations was ever created. And once the Federal Republic of Germany was established in the western zones of occupation in 1949, any opportunity for the Soviet Union to obtain reparations compensation from western Germany vanished forever.

After the Yalta Conference, the precise total of the reparations imposed on Germany after the Second World War was never again cited. And that issue remains fairly opaque. The full sum of Germany’s reparations debts was not documented. An effective mechanism was never created for the centralized collection and tallying of Germany’s reparations payments. The victorious countries satisfied their reparations claims against Germany unilaterally.

Judging by statements from her officials, not even Germany herself knows exactly how much she has paid in reparations. The Soviet Union preferred not to receive reparations in cash, but in kind. According to Russian historian Mikhail Semiryaga, for one year beginning in March 1945, the highest bodies of power in the Soviet Union made almost a thousand decisions related to the dismantling of 4,389 companies from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other European countries. In addition, approximately one thousand factories were moved to the USSR from Manchuria and even Korea. These are impressive figures. But that depends what you compare them to. The Nazi invaders razed 32,000 industrial plants in the USSR. That means that the number of manufacturing facilities dismantled by the Soviet Union in Germany, Austria, and Hungary represented merely 14% of what was destroyed in the USSR. According to Nikolai Voznesensky, who was at that time the chairman of the Soviet Union’s Gosplan Committee, the value of the equipment taken as spoils from Germany compensated the Soviet Union for only 0.6% of the direct damage she suffered.

Some data can be found in German documents. Thus, according to information from the West German Ministry of Finance and the Federal Ministry of Intra-German Relations, all that was confiscated from the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR prior to 1953 was worth 66.4 billion marks, or 15.8 billion dollars. German experts claim this is equivalent to $400 billion in today’s dollars. Confiscations were made both in kind as well as in cash. The reparations that passed from Germany to the USSR primarily consisted of the following (in billions of marks): goods currently being manufactured by German firms – 34.70 and cash payments in various currencies (including occupation Reichsmarks) – 15.0.

Between 1945 and 1946 a common form of reparations consisted of dismantled equipment from German companies that was sent to the USSR. In March 1945 a Special Committee of the Soviet State Defense Committee was created in Moscow, which coordinated all the work to dismantle German military-industrial facilities in the Soviet zone of occupation. Between March 1945 and March 1946, decisions were made to dismantle more than 4,000 industrial plants: 2,885 from Germany, 1,137 from German companies in Poland, 206 from Austria, 11 from Hungary, and 54 from Czechoslovakia. The key equipment was dismantled at 3,474 sites, and 1,118 million pieces of equipment were confiscated: 339,000 metal-cutting tools, 44,000 presses and sledgehammers, and 202,000 electric motors. Sixty-seven factories that manufactured only military goods were dismantled in the Soviet zone, 170 were destroyed, and 8 were converted to civilian production.

However, once this equipment was dismantled, manufacturing came to a halt in eastern Germany and unemployment surged, so by early 1947 the Soviets began to limit reparations of this type. Instead, 31 joint-stock companies created with Soviet entities were established, based on 119 large firms in the eastern occupation zone. In 1950, these were responsible for 22% of the GDR’s industrial output. In 1954, all joint-stock companies created with Soviet entities were freely transferred to the German Democratic Republic. This represented the final word in that chapter from the history of WWII reparations.