Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft
In Nazi Germany in 1942, the Verein Berliner Kaufleute und Industrieller and the Wirtschafts-Hochschule Berlin published a 229-page book called Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft — European Economic Community.
Fifteen years later, the Treaty of Rome1 set up an organisation with the same name.
The 1942 volume laid out administrative instruments — Richtlinien, Directives, from a central body — and they’re the same ones the European Commission uses today. The features described in each chapter match those of the organisation set up in 1957 with eerie levels of precision.
Below is a chapter-by-chapter reading of the full volume, based on the original German document, translated into English for the benefit of the reader. Each chapter spells out features that postwar Europe later adopted.
The vocabulary, institutional form, and administrative instruments are all laid out in considerable operational detail.
Hunke’s introduction: Wirtschaftsführung
Hunke’s introduction traces the discussion back to Alfred Rosenberg’s Europa-Kongreß in Rome in November 19322 and Walther Funk’s official announcement of 25 June 19403, previously covered in the essay on Julius Wolf. Its core is three numbered principles under Wirtschaftsführung — economic leadership.
The first says economic leadership isn’t a temporary emergency measure but the core of a new theory and practice, replacing the autonomous egoism and automatic self-regulation of the Anglo-Saxon doctrine. The second says economic steering isn’t the same as a planned economy — it doesn’t seek to eliminate the individual or have the state run the economy. The third says economic leadership means redirecting the individual’s creative power toward the concerns of the whole, producing a unified economic outlook, setting decisive tasks through political leadership, and letting the state make the final decision in all economic power questions, while leaving the economy otherwise free and self-responsible.
That third principle contains the full operating sequence in compressed form: the [ethic] — reorientation toward the concerns of the whole — authorises the [standard] of a unified economic outlook, which feeds into the [clearing] function of making the final decision in all [settled] economic power questions, while the individual operates freely within parameters set by the leadership.
Replace ‘the state’ with ‘the clearing infrastructure’ and the description fits today’s system without any further change, with the individual remaining free and self-responsible — within conditions set by standards bodies and enforced at the point of settlement.
The three principles describe neither a free market nor a command economy but a ‘third way’ (Trisectoral Network in UN jargon). The left doesn’t see it because it looks like capitalism — private enterprise, profit, entrepreneurial initiative — while the right doesn’t see it because it looks like freedom — self-responsibility, performance, no state administration of the economy. Neither side tends to grasp what’s actually being described: a system where the individual is free within parameters they didn’t set, operating under standards they can’t read, settled through a clearing function they can’t see.
Hunke also sets out a five-point solidarity programme for the continental economic community, including provisions that each national economy’s growth should benefit its trading partners, that economic traffic should prioritise continental Europe, and that the community obliges its members to leave no productive capacities unused. Pages 8–9 reference two predecessors — Werner Daitz and Carlo Scarfoglio — confirming that the conference documented a programme already under implementation through existing institutional channels, rather than proposing one for the first time.
Funk: the economic face of the new Europe
Walther Funk, Reichswirtschaftsminister and President of the Deutsche Reichsbank, wrote the volume’s core chapter. It opens at the Schicksalswende — the fateful turning point — and names two defining features of the new European economy: Gemeinschaftsarbeit und Wirtschaftsfreiheit, or community work and economic freedom.
Pages 18–21 set out Funk’s diagnosis of the British clearing system. Liberal free trade theory promised that each nation would produce what it made most cheaply, buy on the world market at the lowest prices, and harmony would follow. In practice, only England benefited because it held the industrial lead, the largest fleet, and the financial infrastructure. The gold standard, manipulated from England, allowed frictionless payment settlement, so the whole world worked in englischem Solde — on English terms. Then the key passage on page 20: denn für Geld konnte man alles kaufen, insbesondere auch die öffentliche Meinung — for money one could buy everything, including public opinion.
Funk’s argument is a structural diagnosis: the British clearing system — gold standard, settlement infrastructure, commercial network — formed the governance architecture of the liberal order. He proposed to keep the clearing function itself but replace the ethic running through it. The British ethic was individual profit maximised through settlement infrastructure controlled from London. The new ethic was Gemeinschaftsarbeit — community work — run through a continental clearing system controlled from Berlin. Same form, different ethic, different operator.
The system Funk diagnosed had a specific operator. The Rothschild family controlled the Almadén mercury mines in Spain — the world’s largest mercury deposit — through financing arrangements from the 1830s. Mercury was essential to the amalgamation process that refined gold from ore. The family also held the Royal Mint Refinery contract in London, processing the gold that entered the British monetary system. They controlled the input to gold refining, the refining process itself, and the institution that certified the output as monetary gold.
At the 1892 Brussels International Monetary Conference4, Alfred de Rothschild — a former Director of the Bank of England — praised the London Clearing House as approaching ‘perfection’: an institution settling a hundred million pounds weekly without cash or banknotes as an intermediary.
At the same conference, Julius Wolf proposed scaling that exact architecture to the international plane5. On page 19 of the volume that specifies the continental replacement, Funk blames the gold standard for making the world work on English terms — diagnosing the system the Rothschilds operated while proposing to replace its operator, but retain the form. When the gold standard collapsed and the Royal Mint Refinery contract was sold in 1967, the clearing function migrated from gold settlement to managed exchange rates, then to the euro, then to programmable digital settlement. The regime that set out to replace the Rothschild clearing system ended up producing the specification for its next iteration.
Pages 24–25 explicitly invoke Friedrich List and the Zollverein. Before the 1843 customs union, Germany consisted of more than a hundred fragmented economic territories. Nobody today would say German economic power weakened after removing those barriers. Economic unification preceded political unification.
Funk proposes repeating List’s sequence at European scale: economic integration first, political unification follows.
David Blake’s paper cites this passage as evidence of the structural parallel with the EU.
Pages 28–31 describe how it works. Trade between states gets all the advantages of state market steering. The Romanian farmer, Dutch gardener, and Norwegian timber trader don’t need to worry about unsold products. Interstate treaties secure production and sales. Entrepreneurial initiative remains free, but entrepreneurs stay within the lanes of the state economic order and respect the general traffic regulations. The metaphor is roads and traffic rules: the state owns the infrastructure; private individuals do the driving.
Page 30 names the administrative instrument: daß das System der wirtschaftlichen Gemeinschaftsarbeit weitgehend staatlicher Direktiven bedarf — the system of economic community work needs state Directives more than entrepreneurs have been used to. The word is Direktiven. The EU’s primary legislative instrument is the Directive — Richtlinie. The same terminology runs from the volume’s title to the instruments it specifies.
Pages 32–35 trace the evolution from bilateral to multilateral clearing through a zentraler Clearingplatz — a central clearing place. Page 32 frames the system as a harmonious interplay of state and entrepreneurial economic forces — public-private partnership in 1942 language. Payment traffic always needs a minimum of state regulation — Allerdings wird der Zahlungsverkehr stets ein solches Mindestmaß staatlicher Regelung erfahren müssen — to stop uncontrollable international capital movements from disrupting planned steering.
Capital controls are a permanent design principle, not just a wartime emergency.
Pages 34–35 name five domains of management as a single coordinated system: production, sales, money, credit, and consumption — each explicitly requiring state direction, each interlocking with the others so that no domain can be managed in isolation. Then: ‘All these things are, of course, fully understood by us’. This is a specification, not a position paper: practitioners documenting the operational detail of how the clearing function governs the economy across every domain simultaneously, and stating plainly that they know exactly what they’re building.
The chapter’s closing pages contain the theoretical foundation. Page 38 states the position on gold: it is neither good nor bad in itself — it only depends on how it is used. Gold isn’t the problem. Who operates the system it flows through is the problem.
Pages 39-40 quote the Führer directly: ‘We are not talking about capital, but about labor, and we are utilizing this labor one hundred percent’. The same proposition that began with Feder’s ‘money as a voucher for completed labour’ in 19196, restated as operational policy by 1942.
Then the two prerequisites for a lasting European economic community. The first is economic: securing the European living and economic space. The second is ethical: the will to European cooperation, shaped under wartime pressure, must become the guiding principle of peacetime economic sentiment — a constant effort to coordinate the major objectives and the tasks ahead.
A post-war, centrally defined purpose.
Page 41 closes with the social conscience. Eine solche Wirtschaftsgesinnung verlangt ein soziales Gewissen — such an economic mentality demands a social conscience. And the closing line: the new European economy will regard the fulfilment of its social obligations as its foremost task.
The war is not least about a new economic order — it is also the decisive stage of a social revolution. The framework is Moses Hess‘s — the moralisation of economic life — restated without citation by the Reichswirtschaftsminister.
The ethic authorises the standard, which feeds the clearing architecture, produces settlement, and frames the outcome as a social obligation.
Jecht: the historical development
Horst Jecht, professor at the Wirtschafts-Hochschule Berlin, wrote the historical backbone. His chapter traces the European Großwirtschaftsraum from late antiquity through the medieval period, the Hanseatic League, the age of discovery, Britain’s oceanic turn, and the collapse of the liberal world economy. A Großwirtschaftsraum needs two things: mutual economic links within a defined area, and a common framework binding the space together. It doesn’t require submission to a single state will.
The Hanse passage distinguishes the Hanseatic model from a mere trade monopoly. The Hanseatic merchant didn’t just exploit commercial advantage — he stimulated and organised production in the countries he traded with. His strength lay in the connection function, controlling the path between producers rather than owning production itself.
Pages 52–57 trace Britain’s shift to an oceanic power through Carl Schmitt’s distinction between land-based and sea-based sovereignty. Free trade wasn’t a universal principle but an expression of Britain’s particular situation. List had already noted that the English might as well have packed a copy of Adam Smith with every shipment. Britain’s real aim was for Europe to stay economically fragmented, its countries dependent on vital overseas imports.
Jecht confirms this from the British side with Minister Eden’s speech of 20 November 1936 on page 216. Eden gives three principles for Britain’s relations with Europe: no power may challenge British naval supremacy in the North Sea and Channel; no small states may fall into the hands of great powers; and no great power may achieve supremacy on the European continent, as this would threaten Great Britain.
This is the clearing function as geopolitical doctrine — keep Europe fragmented, control the sea lanes, prevent continental consolidation — quoted by a historian.
Pages 62–63 set out the method: long-term bilateral treaties that shape each country’s economic structure so the contracting nations complement one another. Where old liberal-era treaties merely regulated tariffs, these new ones shape production programmes. Then the clincher: das bereits in Deutschland erprobte System der Wirtschaftslenkung wird auch auf die zukünftige europäische Zusammenarbeit übertragen — the system of economic steering already proven in Germany will be transferred to future European cooperation.
The identical proposition — conscious economic management compatible with individual freedom — was being articulated simultaneously in Britain by Political and Economic Planning, a think tank founded in 1931 whose title captured the synthesis in two words: freedom and planning.
Pages 59–60 hold a passage that later sections link to Leontief. Jecht describes a new phase where nations balance domestic economic sectors through autonome Konjunkturpolitik — autonomous business-cycle policy — coordinating sectoral interdependencies through state direction. That’s the input-output logic stated as policy before Leontief’s formal model was widely known: balancing what each sector produces against what every other sector requires, managed through coordination rather than left to market adjustment.
Woermann: European agriculture
Emil Woermann, professor at the University of Halle, wrote the operational layer beneath Funk’s programme. Europe entered the nineteenth century able to feed itself. It left as an industrial core dependent on overseas food imports. The First World War exposed this as an existential vulnerability.
The breakdown is detailed, country by country. Germany increased its soil nutrient yield by seventy per cent through intensive cultivation but still couldn’t close the gap. Britain abandoned agriculture entirely — only twenty per cent of caloric needs produced domestically. Denmark and Holland became processing workshops for cheap overseas grain. Southeastern Europe had the land and potential but remained at roughly half of German yield levels.
Woermann’s prescription has four tracks: expanding cultivated area; intensifying yields through better varieties, fertiliser, and cultivation methods; improving livestock; and — critically — planned promotion and market organisation, including interstate agreements that eliminate price fluctuations in cross-border trade. The German-Romanian model is the template: production-steering treaties backed by credits, technical assistance, and guaranteed purchase arrangements.
What’s described is the Common Agricultural Policy7 in specification form. European food self-sufficiency, coordinated production across climatic zones, assured prices for producers, intensification of southeastern European agriculture, harmonised standards for breeding, fertilisation, and land use. Every feature of the CAP implemented from 1962 onward is specified here in operational detail.
Page 91 sets out the reform mechanism: zwischenstaatliche Abkommen und planvolle Lenkung der Erzeugung — interstate agreements and planned steering of production — ensure that agricultural operating forms undergo a step-by-step transformation. Not a one-time intervention but a continuous, treaty-backed, planned transformation of farming practice across the continent. That’s the CAP’s successive reform rounds described as a design requirement.
Woermann closes, as Funk does independently, by framing the entire programme as the result of peaceful work carried by the living power of the spiritual idea — the technical specification justified by the ethical claim, not the other way around. Three authors, three chapters, the same architecture: the ethic authorises the form.
Reithinger: European industrial economy
Anton Reithinger, head of the economics department at I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G. in Berlin, wrote the industrial specification. IG Farben was Europe’s largest industrial enterprise and the operational link between German state industrial policy and synthetic raw material production. It was also the Four Year Plan’s main contractor for synthetic fuel and rubber — the bridge between state policy and continental-scale production. When Reithinger writes about European industrial planning, he’s speaking from inside the organisation that was already doing it.
The core observation runs through pages 97–99. Capitalism solved industry’s technical and productive side brilliantly. But it barely touched the political and social consequences — class stratification, settlement patterns, dietary changes.
Auf den europäischen Raum übertragen, heißt das, daß man bei jeder industriellen Planung neben der technisch-wirtschaftlichen Seite auch die untrennbar damit verbundene politisch-soziale Seite vorausbedenken und vorausplanen muß — in every industrial plan, alongside the technical-economic side, the inseparably connected political-social side must be thought through and planned in advance. That’s a design requirement.
Page 109 divides continental Europe into five industrial regions with staggering purchasing power gaps — southeastern European per-capita purchasing power reaching perhaps an eighth to a twelfth of the central or western European level. If southeastern and southern European consumption rose to central and western levels, demand for industrial goods would be so enormous that Europe’s entire overseas finished-goods export would be consumed internally. That’s the single market described from the demand side.
Raise peripheral living standards, create internal demand, absorb production capacity, achieve continental economic self-sufficiency. The EU structural funds and cohesion policy do exactly this.
Pages 102–103 set out Reithinger’s three principles for Europe’s future industrial economy. The first reverses the old competitive logic: ‘Es geht mir besser, wenn es meinem Nachbarn schlechter geht!’ (I do better when my neighbour does worse) must become ‘Es geht mir nur besser, wenn es meinem Nachbarn besser geht!’ (I only do better when my neighbour does better). That’s the EU cohesion principle as industrial policy8.
Then pages 105–106 contain the sentence that confirms the essay’s central argument from inside the volume: the European economic community is keineswegs bereits eine gegebene Tatsache, sondern ein politisches Ziel, das durch sorgfältig überlegte wirtschaftliche, technische und psychologische Maßnahmen unterstützt und erst mühsam erreicht werden muß — not yet a given fact but a political goal that must be painstakingly achieved through carefully considered economic, technical, and psychological measures.
The IG Farben planner, writing from inside the institution that would carry it out, says it’s a specification for something to be developed.
Beisiegel: labour deployment in Europe
Philipp Beisiegel, a senior official at the Reich Labour Ministry, wrote the workforce section. The heart of this European economic community isn’t coal, ore, treaties, or currency — it’s people.
His chapter sets out free movement inside a self-contained labour market. Workers can move around the European economic space, and they’ll stay because jobs and food are guaranteed there. Page 125 links the financial clearing system directly to labour policy. Foreign workers in Germany sent home 120 million Reichsmark in savings through the Deutsche Verrechnungskasse in 1940, rising to 383 million RM in 1941. The clearing function doesn’t just settle trade — it handles labour remittances too, so the entire workforce flow stays inside the system.
Pages 128–133 spell out treaty-based labour exchange in bureaucratic detail. Bilateral interstate treaties cover recruitment, contracts, wages, housing, food, travel costs, social insurance portability, and repatriation. Standard model contracts in the worker’s own language set out tariff wages, bonuses, hours, accommodation quality, food, leave, and travel costs. A foreign worker gets pension rights in their home state, with German contribution periods counted as if they’d been earned at home. Bilateral agreements cover health insurance portability, and accident benefits can be taken home in full after returning.
This is EU Regulation (EC) 883/20049 — the social security coordination rule — described in 1942 German bureaucratic language. Mutual recognition of contribution periods, cross-border healthcare, and exportable benefits mean the operational details match.
Beisiegel insists repeatedly across pages 128–131 that all foreign worker recruitment must be entirely voluntary, with no pressure from sending states or receiving-state agencies. Only voluntary workers produce good results, while coercion brings resentment, broken contracts, and homesickness.
This insistence sits in a document produced while the regime ran a forced-labour system involving millions of prisoners of war and conscripted civilians. The gap between the text’s stated norms and the regime’s actual practice is vast, but Beisiegel wasn’t describing current practice — he was writing a specification for a peacetime system designed to operate through consent rather than coercion. The voluntary principle, welfare apparatus, standardised contracts, and social insurance portability are all designed for an architecture that works without the operator’s methods. When the postwar order adopted the specification — the Posted Workers Directive, EURES, Regulation 883/2004 — it took the architecture Beisiegel specified, not the practice the regime imposed.
Page 138 goes further, distinguishing individual worker recruitment from the deployment of a foreign entrepreneur with their entire workforce to fulfil a contract in the host country. Even in these cases, Beisiegel specifies, the foreign worker must be subject to domestic labour and social laws. That's the EU Posted Workers Directive10 — Directive 96/71/EC — specified in operational detail, down to the distinction between individual recruitment and contractor deployment, fifty-four years before the Directive was adopted.
Pages 135–138 contain something the essay’s later sections argue from the outside: Beisiegel documents it from the inside. By 1942, centralised state labour deployment organisations had been established across the Netherlands (September 1940), France (October 1940), Belgium (April 1941), Spain, Sweden (January 1940), Slovakia, Bulgaria, Finland, and England (December 1941) — across every ideological line. The same institutional form appeared under different political systems at the same time.
The institutional form aligns with the International Labour Organization’s convention framework11 — standards set internationally, implemented nationally through the same centralised labour administrations that give the state directive control over who works where, under what conditions, and for what pay. The protection infrastructure and the control infrastructure are the same thing.
Then follows the critical sentence: Die meisten der vorgenannten Gesetze sind allerdings aus der Not des Krieges geboren. Sie sind kein Ideal für eine friedliche Zukunft. Most of these laws were born from wartime necessity. They’re no ideal for a peaceful future. He separates the wartime ethic from the peacetime form.
The emergency measures are temporary, but the institutional architecture they produced — centralised labour administration, harmonised employment law, cross-border worker exchange — is designed to continue.
Koenigs: European transport questions
Gustav Koenigs wrote the physical infrastructure section. His chapter describes the pipes everything else flows through. Page 141 opens with a definition that contradicts the usual reading of the volume as a Nazi imperial project: the European economic community, unlike the British Commonwealth, läßt die Unabhängigkeit und Souveränität der europäischen Staaten grundsätzlich unberührt. Sie hat keine imperialistischen Ziele — leaves the independence and sovereignty of European states fundamentally untouched. It has no imperialist objectives. Germany pursues its role on a treaty-based or, better still, cooperative basis.
That’s the Treaty of Rome’s principle of sovereign equality, stated here by the transport chapter’s author. Germany must ensure seamless cross-border transit traffic, and transport infrastructure vital to the community but located in states that can’t build it alone must be secured through a European community effort. These tasks match the Trans-European Transport Network12 (TEN-T) policy, the EU customs union’s border-processing framework, and the Cohesion Fund’s transport infrastructure investment programme.
Koenigs shows Britain used the Treaty of Versailles to internationalise the Rhine, Elbe, Oder, and Danube — not for navigation freedom but to stop landlocked continental states from becoming economically interdependent with their neighbours.
He adds that England reached like an octopus with its tentacles into the continent, extending the free sea deep into its interior through international river commissions. Poland served the same function by building Gdynia and the Magistrale railway to direct all trade seaward rather than continental. The clearing function operates at the physical transport layer: controlling the paths through which goods flow, ensuring those paths led outward to British-controlled sea lanes rather than inward to continental integration. Every waterway project Koenigs specifies — the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, the Mittelland Canal, the continental waterway network — reverses this outward orientation by routing flows within the continent rather than out of it.
Page 142 holds Koenigs’s most important theoretical point. Transport, he writes, will become a supporting pillar of the European Economic Community and will replace the external organisation the community will never have. In Geneva, they said ‘in the beginning was the organisation’; Koenigs answers with Faust: ‘in the beginning was the deed’. Build the physical infrastructure and the economic community follows, because unwinding it costs more than continuing within it. The pipes are the governance, so no formal constitution’s required.
Railway harmonisation began in 1847 through the Verein Mitteleuropäischer Eisenbahnverwaltungen. ‘Technical Unity’ agreements among seventeen European states had already standardised gauge width, construction type, maintenance standards, rolling stock dimensions, and freight braking — all through voluntary international self-administration.
The showpiece is the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, connecting the North Sea to the Black Sea through the heart of the continent. The law of 11 May 1938 ordered the Reichswasserstraße completed by 1945. The canal was eventually finished in 1992, fifty years after Koenigs called it a wartime priority. The TEN-T inland waterway network follows the same map.
The Reichsautobahn network was designed from the outset to connect to all neighbouring states. The North and Baltic Sea shipping community between German and Scandinavian groups had already created a working model of joint administration with agreed freight rates. Every project Koenigs names was either completed after the war or became a TEN-T priority corridor.
Benning: European currency questions
Bernhard Benning, Director at the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft in Berlin, wrote the most technical chapter and the one that maps most precisely onto postwar European monetary architecture.
Under the gold standard’s automatism, every national economy was subordinated to international business-cycle linkage. In the world crisis of 1930–32, this automatism collapsed. ‘Diese Automatik wird nicht wieder auferstehen!’ — this automatism will not be resurrected.
Page 163 specifies what replaces it: the central bank must carefully monitor internal economic and credit policy, because the currency’s internal face — purchasing power stability, the equilibrium between wages, prices, and credit — is inseparable from its external face, the exchange rate. That’s the ECB’s macroprudential mandate13 stated as design principle.
Page 164 defines continental European currency relationships as a mehrstufiges Gefüge — a multi-tiered structure. First: partner currencies within the Großraum relating to each other. Second: the reserve currency relating to affiliated partner currencies. Third: the reserve currency relating to the reserve currencies of other large economic spaces. Replace the reserve currency with the euro, partner currencies with national currencies in the ERM/ERM II mechanism14, and the third tier with the BIS, and the description fits today’s system.
The Deutsche Verrechnungskasse in Berlin processed multilateral payments across about fifteen states. Clearing turnover doubled between September 1940 and March 1941. By 1941, the system had nearly total reach: Hungarian National Bank data shows nine-tenths of Hungarian foreign payment traffic ran through clearing, with only 105 million Pengő arriving as freely convertible currency — mostly Swedish Kroner and Swiss Francs — against total clearing amounts of around one billion Pengő.
The Bulgarian National Bank governor said in February 1942 that the bank law was amended mainly to introduce multilateral clearing. Bulgaria had formally changed its law to accept Reichsmark clearing balances as reserve assets — alongside gold and free foreign exchange — to cover banknotes and sight liabilities. A sovereign central bank had, by statute, incorporated a foreign clearing currency into its monetary base. That’s not bilateral trade settlement; it’s a country restructuring its monetary sovereignty through the clearing mechanism. When the ECB’s TARGET2 system produces balances between eurozone national central banks, those balances function as claims within the system — not settled in gold, not redeemable in hard currency, managed through institutional arrangements. The Bulgarian National Bank in 1941 was doing the same thing, only openly, by amending the law and saying so publicly.
Page 167 names three objectives for the system’s development: expansion from bilateral to multilateral clearing, easing of clearing balances, and establishment of balanced exchange rates. The postwar sequence implemented all three — the EPU for multilateral clearing15, TARGET2 for clearing balances16, and the ERM leading to the eurozone for balanced exchange rates. Benning’s developmental programme and the postwar monetary timeline are the same sequence in the same order.
Even Switzerland was being drawn in. The president of the Swiss National Bank announced in early March 1942 that 70% of Swiss foreign trade was already tied to clearing transactions with fixed exchange rates. The neutral country — formally outside the continental system — was functionally inside it by the time the volume was published.
On a premature single currency, Benning's position is emphatic: no one is even considering eliminating the monetary independence of individual European partner countries. ‘Nicht von einer Einheitswährung, sondern von einem organischen Gefüge aufeinander abgestimmter Partnerwährungen ist also die Rede’ — not a single currency but an organic structure of mutually coordinated partner currencies. The income gaps are enormous: per-capita income in north, west, and central Europe runs between 1,200 and 1,400 RM, while in southeastern Europe it’s between 350 and 600 RM. A premature single currency would founder on these differences. This is the Maastricht convergence criteria17 problem identified with more candour than most post-1992 ECB literature manages.
Page 173 adds a further prerequisite: a true currency equilibrium presupposes an interstate price equilibrium — price convergence across member states before monetary unification can proceed. Two Maastricht convergence criteria specified independently, fifty years before Maastricht.
Benning also proposes ‘Kaufkraftparitäten’ — purchasing power parities — as the correct method for establishing exchange rates, named and specified. PPP-based exchange rate assessment is now the IMF’s standard methodology for evaluating currency misalignment.
Pages 175–176 describe Berlin becoming the centre and liquidity hub for the currency reserves of affiliated partner currencies — explicitly compared to London’s earlier position within the Sterling bloc, but substantially stronger. Replace Berlin with Frankfurt and the ECB, and the description maps precisely onto the eurozone’s monetary architecture.
Page 180 names the theoretical foundation: Georg Friedrich Knapp’s State Theory of Money18 — the value of money has nothing to do with gold or silver backing. Money is what the state says it is. That’s the chartalist position that underwrites the entire clearing architecture, from the Reichsmark through the euro to programmable digital currency.
Page 182 states the telos: ‘The geopolitical development of the 20th century is aimed at the European Economic Community’. The name, the destination, and the instruments — clearing agreements, economic treaties, monetary reorganisation — all stated in a single passage.
Page 183 assembles the end-state in a single sentence: free interstate payment traffic with minimal bureaucratic regulation, deep integration of credit markets, all under the overarching goal of full employment and secured supply within the Großraum. That’s SEPA19, the Capital Markets Union20, and the Stability and Growth Pact21 stated as a single integrated design objective — in 1942.
Page 177 specifies the lending model: Anglo-Saxon financial-capitalist loans, which caused balance-of-payments crises across southeastern Europe during the Depression, will be replaced by lending oriented toward mutual goods exchange and long-term development of partner countries. That’s conditional development lending22 — World Bank, EBRD, EU structural investment — stated as the replacement for the system that failed.
Clodius: European trade and economic treaties
Carl Clodius, Envoy in the Foreign Ministry, wrote the diplomatic-legal section. He’s the practitioner who actually negotiated the treaties, and his tone is conversational, almost confessional.
Page 186 sets out the method. Germany has rejected all international collective solutions since 1933. Europe’s future economic programme won’t be decided by a conference of seventy-five delegates. Natural development will slowly bring European states closer together through a great series of bilateral, state-to-state negotiations that eventually form a single line, policy, and programme. But the real shaping happens in the practical day-to-day work. This is the Monnet method23 described by its adversary — bilateral negotiations accumulating into a fait accompli.
Pages 193–194 describe the completed clearing fabric. Step by step, everything’s been brought under control: goods traffic, transactions, insurance, transfers, railway freight, post, telegraph and telephone charges — the totality of all payments between countries.
Clodius describes it as masonry: first the rough walls were erected, then the cracks where water still seeped were plugged, then the gaps that appeared afterward were sealed. Each closure revealed the next leak. The process has no natural stopping point.
Clodius confirms independently what Beisiegel documents from the labour side: workers’ savings remittances now flow through the same controlled clearing channels. Two authors, two chapters — same function.
Page 194 contains a structural observation the later sections depend on. The clearing system has fundamentally shifted trade relations. Old trade policy assumed the exporter was the supplicant, accepting whatever terms the buyer offered. Under clearing, this is reversed: der Dringende ist der, der gern etwas haben möchte — the urgent party is the one who wants something. The controller of supply, not the buyer, holds leverage.
Then come the two sentences that form the volume’s most important statement:
Praktisch ist es so, daß heute weder Zölle noch Kontingente noch sonst irgend etwas eine Rolle spielen. Das einzige Praktische, die einzige Waffe für die gesamte Lenkung des Handels zwischen den Völkern ist die Regelung des Zahlungsverkehrs.
Neither tariffs nor quotas nor anything else plays a role. The only practical thing, the only weapon for the total steering of trade between peoples, is the regulation of payment traffic.
Page 205 holds the design principle. Exchange control won’t be fully abolished even after the war. Free movement inside Europe will return — travel, trade, daily life — but a balancing clearing mechanism within the system will smooth the peaks. Der einzelne Interessent merkt hiervon nichts mehr — the individual participant notices nothing of this anymore. For him, practically speaking, a condition’s restored that’s indistinguishable from free exchange.
Put both sentences together — the one on payment regulation and the one on invisibility — and you’ve got the complete design specification for today’s global financial system in forty-seven words of 1942 German. The first gives the mechanism, the second gives the interface where freedom appears restored while the individual notices nothing. SWIFT, TARGET2, SEPA, ISO 20022, Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay — each is both sentences. The individual taps a card, the payment clears instantly, and at no point does the individual perceive that a clearing function evaluated the transaction, checked it against conditions, and settled it according to rules the individual never set, read, or voted on.
Eighty-three years later, those two sentences describe today’s operational reality without changing a word.
Page 197 holds the behavioural principle that keeps the design self-sustaining. ‘Was man in Europa kaufen kann, auch wirklich in Europa kaufen soll’ — what can be bought in Europe should actually be bought in Europe. He calls this ‘das Ei des Kolumbus’ — Columbus’s egg — and adds that if every national economy follows this principle, European economic unity’s already largely achieved ‘ohne Verträge, ohne komplizierte Dinge’ — without treaties or complicated arrangements.
The clearing function works best when formal structures aren’t needed because the behavioural norm’s been internalised. The architecture disappears into habit.
Pages 205–208 close with a passage confirming what Beisiegel and Koenigs each say independently. Clodius explicitly rejects force as a method: ‘Es kann nicht das Ziel eines Krieges sein, mit Zwang oder Gewalt auf diesem Gebiete irgend etwas erreichen zu wollen’ — it can’t be the goal of a war to achieve anything in this domain through coercion or force. The construction must ultimately be left to the voluntary cooperation of all European nations.
The regime’s chief treaty negotiator, writing during a war of conquest, specifies that the architecture he’s building must work through consent.
Five authors across five chapters — Funk, Woermann, Beisiegel, Koenigs, and Clodius — each independently insist on the voluntary principle. This specification’s designed for the system that follows the regime.
Hunke’s closing essay: the fundamental question
Hunke closes with the philosophical capstone. In August 1914, the world still saw the economy as an isolated, self-regulating phenomenon running by its own laws. Twenty-five years later, every state on earth treats the economy as a function of autonomous economic legislation.
The programme statement on page 211 turns the ethic into a standard: tasks must be seen, grasped, and carried out gleichsinnig — uniformly, in the same sense.
The strongest theoretical passage comes on page 214. The modern world economy wasn’t self-sustaining. It lived off English world power while turning continental European nations into provincial members of the English world empire. The world economy would only be real if humanity were politically unified. As long as humanity remains a concept, it isn’t a real fact but a phenomenon dependent on the political power that creates it and sets its extent and order. It isn’t natural law — it’s an artefact of whoever controls the political power that sustains it.
This reaches forward to the present: the Sustainable Development Goals — seventeen goals adopted by all nations, measured through 231 indicators, claiming to represent all of humanity — fill the gap Hunke identified. If humanity isn’t politically real, the world economy has no carrier. The SDGs make humanity politically real, giving the global clearing function the legitimation Hunke’s analysis said it required.
Page 215 adds Salisbury’s explicit admission: ‘We do not seek a division of territory in Europe, but only a sharing of the preponderance’. The continent’s political impotence was, in Hunke’s words, the prerequisite for English world domination.
Pages 219–220 hold the book’s main structural argument, laid out as a direct comparison between Adam Smith and Friedrich List. Smith stands for the international division of labour, harmony between individuals, and market value as the highest value. List stands for political thinking, confederation as a pooling of productive forces, developing every nation’s potential, and productive force as the highest value. Hunke says they’re completely opposed and the struggle between these two ideas will matter enormously for every European nation.
Page 219 names the three substitutions that define the new economic categories: the nation replaces the individual as the economic unit. Living space replaces the world market as the economic field. The organisation of labour replaces capital as the economic driver. Each replaces a Smith category with a List category — and each maps onto the postwar system, where the EU member state is the unit, the single market is the field, and social cohesion rather than capital accumulation is the stated driver.
Seen through the clearing function, the difference can be considered directional. Smith’s system pulls value upward. The national economy serves the international operator — London’s financial infrastructure, the gold standard, the sea lanes. Value flows up to where it’s captured, like a child serving a parent. List’s system pushes value downward. The national economy serves its own people. The tariff wall is the nation refusing to take its purpose from above. The Zollverein is neighbouring economies joining to strengthen their position against the outside operator. Flows are managed to feed the children, not the parent.
The 1942 volume is a List document. Every chapter describes the continental clearing function serving people below — Woermann’s food self-sufficiency feeding Europeans, Reithinger’s industrial convergence raising living standards in poorer regions, Beisiegel’s labour mobility helping workers, and Funk’s closing line making social obligations the top priority. The ethic serves people below. The clearing function shifts from extraction to development.
After the war, the system took in both sides. The EU talks like List — cohesion, solidarity, social market economy, community. People inside the EU feel List’s influence: protection, convergence, services flowing downward. But the EU’s governing rules come from above — the BIS, Basel Committee, NGFS, ISO framework, SDG indicator set.
The continental level pulls things together at shared standards, yet the parameters were set globally by institutions the EU can’t control. The EU looks like List on the inside but works like Smith one level up — the operator sits at Basel instead of London, and the direction’s quietly flipped from serving people below to pulling value upward, wearing the old vocabulary as camouflage. Hunke spotted Smith’s problem correctly and offered List as the fix. The postwar system adopted Hunke’s design but put Smith’s direction back inside it. The cure became the carrier for the disease it was meant to end.
Hunke himself foresaw the risk. Page 223 warns explicitly: it cannot be the intention to unite European countries through a customs union only to rebuild a smaller version of the English global economy with precisely the same flaws. He designed the architecture to serve downward. He warned against reinstalling Smith's direction inside it. The postwar system did both.
Then comes the self-referential seal. The Großraum idea must go. What matters is the type of cooperation and the Lebensstil inside the unity. The European economic community is both the goal and the means, so the architecture justifies itself.
Page 210 states the end-goal argument more plainly than anywhere else in the volume. The National Socialists found den archimedischen Punkt — the Archimedean point — from which the whole capitalist economy is lifted off its hinges. But the decisive move to act always needs deep insight into the Kommende — what’s coming. Until that future feels completely necessary and inevitable, there’s no compelling reason to move. The architecture needs people to believe it’s inevitable before it can be built.
Replace ‘what’s coming’ with anticipatory governance: planetary emergency, climate catastrophe, or systemic risk, and the mechanism’s identical: the ethic must feel inevitable before the clearing function can roll out.
Pages 225–226 tackle Clearingspitzen — clearing peaks — the persistent imbalances that build up when one country keeps exporting more than it imports within the clearing system. Hunke says these don’t matter as long as German productive capacity backs the system: ‘die deutsche Wirtschaft liefert ja auch heute noch in einem erstaunlichen Ausmaß’. German economic power is the precondition for the game that’s now begun, because ‘alles Wirtschaften ist einmal ein Ausgleichen’ — all economic activity is ultimately a balancing act. Swap Reichsmark clearing peaks for euro TARGET2 balances and Germany’s still playing the same structural role — the surplus economy whose productive capacity keeps the clearing system running.
Page 226 names the mechanism: Germany took the lead and had confidence its neighbours would deliver later. The motto is trust for trust. The same trust sustains TARGET2 — Germany accumulates claims against the system and trusts they’ll be honoured. The moment that trust breaks, the clearing peaks become unrecoverable debt.
Pages 227–228 back up what Beisiegel shows from the labour-administration side. Hunke says that ‘etwa gleichzeitig und in den meisten Fällen unabhängig voneinander’ — roughly simultaneously and in most cases independently — movements have emerged across all European peoples expressing the new political form. The single-party system can virtually be regarded as the type of the new political form in Europe, and the same convergence appears in economic steering. Three separate passages inside the volume — Beisiegel’s labour-administration survey, Benning’s documentation that price-control authorities and price-freeze laws had been set up in every European country, and Hunke’s political-form observation — back up the convergent-implementation argument the essays make from outside the document.
The volume’s own authors recognised these same institutional forms were arising independently across political systems.
Hunke himself bookends the volume with the 1932 Rome conference — citing it in the introduction as the origin and returning to it on page 227 as the starting point from which shared hardship revealed common problems and produced convergent movements across all European peoples.
The structural finding
Ten sections by nine authors, 229 pages, published in September 1942 under the title that became the name of the institution the Treaty of Rome established fifteen years later.
One absence matters as much as anything in the book. Published seven months after the Wannsee Conference, it contains virtually no antisemitic content. Funk’s passing reference to Ricardo carrying ‘a considerable dose of Jewish thought’ is the only instance across 229 pages. Nine Nazi-era authors wrote the regime’s most detailed economic plan, yet the racial ideology that defined them is almost entirely absent. This confirms what the structural reading shows: the architecture doesn’t depend on any specific ethic. The authors wrote a design meant to outlast whatever ethic justified it, including their own.
Every layer of postwar European institutional architecture appears in operational detail in this single volume.
Funk’s central clearing place, Benning’s three-tier currency structure, and Clodius’s confirmation that payment regulation is the only instrument that matters describe the clearing mechanism.
Woermann’s country-by-country breakdown, production-steering treaties, guaranteed prices, and planned complementarity cover agriculture.
Reithinger’s five-region model, convergence logic, and the integration of social consequences into planning cover industry.
Beisiegel’s treaty-based labour exchange, standardised contracts, social insurance portability, and remittance clearing handle human capital.
Koenigs’s railway harmonisation, canal network, motorway extension, shipping pools, and aviation protocols describe transportation.
Benning’s partner-currency system, managed exchange-rate flexibility, and rejection of premature single currency on convergence grounds set out the monetary architecture.
Clodius’s bilateral-to-multilateral accumulation and the invisible clearing system where the individual notices nothing describe the treaty method.
Funk’s Direktiven are the administrative instruments.
Five sections of the report assemble into a single operating manual. The architecture’s purpose is the fulfilment of social obligations (Funk), and the world economy serves whoever operates it — it’s a power artefact, not natural law (Hunke). Every state on earth has already made its economy a function of state direction (Hunke), and the German economy should serve the nation’s goals (Reithinger). The individual, meanwhile, should notice nothing: freedom appears restored while the clearing function works beneath the surface (Clodius).
The economy is a control surface subordinated to political purpose. It looks like freedom from the inside, because the control mechanism is invisible. And the architecture serves whoever sets the standards for the clearing function.
In other words — this is Julius Wolf and Eduard Bernstein’s ‘Third Way’. The clearing mechanism designed by one Jewish economist and the installation method designed by another. The architecture took both, credited neither, and erased both from history.
It carries attributes of both socialism and capitalism, ensuring neither political camp will take ownership, with neither understanding quite where to place it. And the Nazi leadership realised that this was a fight for economic supremacy, and identified London as their primary adversary.
The system the Nazi leaders laid out in detail mirrors what was later adopted in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. David Blake’s 2020 City University paper, Striking Similarities: The Origins of the European Economic Community24, documents the terminological and structural parallels. Blake notes that it is not known whether Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman were directly aware of the 1942 plan, but that it seems inconceivable that Walter Hallstein25 — who became the first President of the European Commission in 1958 — didn’t know, given his institutional background in Nazi-era legal academia.
The operating sequence shown across nine chapters — ethic authorising standard, standard feeding clearing, clearing producing settlement, settlement reinforcing ethic — was identified by Julius Wolf in the 1890s through his analysis of the London Bankers’ Clearing House and his proposals for international monetary coordination at the Brussels Conference of 1892. Wolf designed the grammar, the 1942 volume wrote sentences in it, and everyone since has written sentences in it without knowing where the grammar came from.
The ethic shifted from national community (Volksgemeinschaft) to European solidarity, and later to global sustainability, while the capital moved from Berlin to Brussels, and the clearing function to Basel. The plan was laid out in considerable detail in 1942, and the institutional form was established in 1957.
They didn’t even bother changing the name.
Thank you to Geck0h on my Telegram channel for the 1942 report.
ICYMI, a re-post of a note from Escape Key that is particularly illuminating in this connection. Quoting verbatim:
"The system they construct is context-agnostic.
Replace the 'ethical' SDGs with racial purity, and you're in Nazi Germany. Replace with 'duty towards the collective' and you're in the Soviet Union. Replace it with 'Silly Hat Thursdays', and . . .
• The NGFS would produce silly hat scenarios.
• The Basel Committee would translate them into capital requirements for hat-deficient entities.
• ISO would publish a hat management system standard.
• FATF would grey-list jurisdictions with insufficient hat compliance.
• CBAM would levy charges on imports from countries with low hat-wearing rates.
• CBDC payment at the coffee shop would clear, conditional on hat verification.
And it would feel normal. Because the ethic would have been endorsed by the Vatican, the Crown, and the scientific consensus. The IPCC equivalent would have published hat-necessity projections. The SDG equivalent would include Universal Hat Access as Goal 18. The MSM would explain why hat resistance is rooted in privilege. The platforms would flag hat-scepticism as misinformation.
And anyone who said 'this is insane, it's just hats' would be told they were a hat-denier threatening public safety.
Should a system which can enforce something that obviously silly with identical efficiency even be allowed to exist?"
Escape Key's answer, at least, should be obvious.
I spent hours reading your research and going sideways, leading from one rabbit hole to another. Fascinating how it all morphed into the monstrous machine it is today. Thx for sharing your expertise.