World War I and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles with its severe reparations imposed on Germany led to a decade of economic woes, including hyperinflation in the mid-1920s.

While the delegates of the Allies making the treaty should have been worried about the future of Europe, they allowed themselves to become preoccupied with worries about borders, power, and making Germany, as weak as possible. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, was supposed to create peace, but in the end all it created was another disaster. The treaty forced Germany to lose territory, caused serious economic problems which were only worsened by the depression of the 1930s, left thousands of Germans outside of Germany, and all of these things created German resentment towards the Western world. The effects of the Treaty of Versailles weakened Germany's government and that, along with all of the effects, allowed for the rise of fascism and Hitler in Germany after World War I. All of these factors added up to the beginning of World War II and they were all caused by the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles was the major cause of World War II.

Jews were massively over-represented in all fields of German social and economic life—except that of farming and creative work. It lists the ownership of mass media in Weimar Germany, the astonishing financial scandals, Communism and political subversion, degenerate theater, sexual psychology, Communist indoctrination in educational institutions and the media.

A new era in the history of German Jewry began when Imperial Germany collapsed and was replaced by the democratic regime of the Weimar Republic. The outstanding feature of this period was the polarization between the unprecedented integration of the Jews in every sphere of life, and the growth of political anti-Semitism among various organizations and political parties, especially in the immediate postwar years.

A snapshot of Berlin between the world wars includes nudist magazines devoted entirely to children; glittering cabaret shows parading acres of sweaty, perfumed female flesh; and an endless supply of cafes, bars and private clubs catering to gay men, transvestites, lesbians and sadomasochists. Inflation is so rampant that the local paper currency is good only for toilet paper. Cocaine, morphine and opium are peddled on every street corner. And more than 120,000 desperate women and girls of every age and stripe sell their bodies for a pittance, including mother-daughter prostitution teams and brazen streetwalkers well into the third trimester of pregnancy.

Hitler appointed German economist and banker, Hjalmar Schacht, as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. Schacht, in turn, launched a groundbreaking fiscal stimulus program that rebuilt the nation's worn infrastructure and put millions of people back to work. At the same time, Schacht took steps to strengthen the currency, jettison the gold standard, and impose capital controls, all of which served to reinforce Germany's economic independence.

through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.

Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today.

The Jews of the world, in a worldwide conference called in Amsterdam in July, 1933, declared a "holy war" against Germany.

Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you should buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronises German ships or shipping.

What we are proposing, and have already gone far toward doing, is to prosecute a purely defensive economic boycott that will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends.

Mr. Samuel Untermeyer, an American Jew... was speaking as a member of 'our race.' He was speaking as the executive official of the World Jewish Economic Federation.

The BIS was established in 1930 by an intergovernmental agreement between Germany, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, the United States and Switzerland. ... The fact that top level German industrialists and advisors sat on the BIS board seemed to provide ample evidence of how the BIS might be used by Hitler throughout the war, with the help of American, British and French banks. Between 1933 and 1945 the BIS board of directors included Walther Funk, a prominent Nazi official, and Emil Puhl, as well as Hermann Schmitz, the director of IG Farben and Baron von Schroeder, the owner of the J.H. Stein Bank.

The Bank for International Settlements actually financed Hitler's war machine. ... The BIS was founded in 1930, in effect by Montagu Norman and his close friend Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank, known as the father of the Nazi economic miracle. Schacht even referred to the BIS as "my" bank. The BIS is a unique hybrid: a commercial bank protected by international treaty. Its assets can never be seized, even in times of war. It pays no taxes on profits.

The BIS accepted looted Nazi gold, conducted foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and was used by both the Allies and the Axis powers as a secret contact point to keep the channels of international finance open.

Swiss banks have long stood accused of collaborating with the Nazis, but now The Observer has uncovered astonishing evidence of how the Third Reich was helped by a financial institution much better known on the British high street.

Before and during the early years of World War II, the German government sold a special kind of Reichsmark, known as Rückwanderer [returnee] Marks, to American citizens of German descent. Chase National Bank, along with other businesses, were involved in these transactions. Through Chase, this allowed Nazi sympathizers to purchase Marks with dollars at a discounted rate.

With chase national bank assistance, the Nazi government earned dollars in the United States through the sale of special German marks—known as Ruckwanderer ("returnee") marks—to U.S. residents of German descent. After Hitler came to power and began to re-arm, Germany continued to import large quantities of American goods.

Documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, Prescott Bush worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power, government documents show.

The records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.

After the Rockefellers, the next largest stockholder in Standard Oil was I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical company. This investment was part of a pattern of reciprocal investments between the U.S. and Germany during the Nazi years. During the Great Depression, Germany was viewed as a hot area in which to invest.

Under the Nazis, the German chemical company I.G. Farben and Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey were effectively a single firm, merged in hundreds of cartel arrangements. I.G. Farben was led, up until 1937, by the Warburg family, Rockefeller's partner in banking and in the design of Nazi German eugenics. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Standard Oil pledged to keep the merger with I.G. Farben going even if the U.S. entered the war.

The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities.

Germany Must Perish! is a 104-page book written by Theodore Newman Kaufman, which he self-published in 1941 in the United States. The book advocated the genocide through sterilization of all Germans and the territorial dismemberment of Germany.

Today's war is not a war against Adolf Hitler. Nor is it a war against the Nazis. It is a war of peoples against peoples; of civilized peoples envisioning Light, against uncivilized barbarians who cherish Darkness.

The German Empire had been ahead of the other European nations not only with regard to education, research, technical innovation, and productivity but also concerning its welfare system (the first social insurance worldwide had been introduced under Bismarck). Thus, its citizens were enjoying a high standard of living.

It is amazing that it is accepted by publishers, the media and many readers to write a book about destroying an entire nation of people, as long as they are German. Yet, if such a book was written about Jews, it would be banned by publishers, attacked by the media and scorned by readers. All books of hate are disgusting! However, it is far worse when such thinking is the exclusive right of some and the crimes of another. I will keep this book available to show anyone how badly our society treats the German people.

... a rapid escalation starting on 24 August 1940, when night bombers aiming for RAF airfields drifted off course and accidentally destroyed several London homes, killing civilians, combined with the UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill's retaliatory bombing of Berlin on the following night.

Ethical restraints which had been imposed at the start of the war became slowly eroded as a result of Britain's decision to initiate 'unrestricted' bombing of targets located in Germany's urban areas.

Strategic bombing often involved bombing areas inhabited by civilians and sometimes bombing campaigns were deliberately designed to target civilian populations in order to terrorize, disorganize, and disrupt their usual activities.

The British Royal Air Force (RAF) carpet-bombed German cities at night.

Strategic bombing campaigns by Allied aircraft were pounding German territory, sometimes destroying entire cities in a night.

According to official German report ... the number of dead recovered by that date was 20,204, including 6,865 who were cremated on the Altmarkt square, and they expected that the total number of deaths would be about 25,000.

'Operation Gomorrah'... resulted in the single largest loss of civilian life in one city throughout the European war. Some 37,000 people died and over 60 per cent of Hamburg's houses and apartments were destroyed by a blaze of incendiary bombs. Overy cites a German doctor who says he had to estimate the number of dead by measuring the ash left on the floor. It was only near the end of the war, and the bombing of Dresden which killed approximately 25,000 people in a few hours, that there was any kind of outcry against Allied strategy, which incidentally had failed in any way to stem Germany's production of armaments (there was a three-fold increase between 1941 and 1944).

On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden. Night and day, Dresden was engulfed in a vast sea of flame, a firestorm that generated 1,500-degree temperatures and hurricane-force winds. Thousands suffocated in underground shelters where they had fled to escape the inferno above. The fierce winds pulled thousands more into the center of the firestorm, where they were incinerated. By the time the fires burned themselves out, many days later, a great city—known as "the Florence on the Elbe"—lay in ruins, and tens of thousands, almost all of them civilians, lay dead.

The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany. ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.

We sought no mercy and would show no mercy. We hoped to shatter twenty German cities as we had shattered Cologne, Luebeck, Duesseldorf and so on... If need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city. (Churchill to Stalin, August 1942, Moscow)

Is the deliberate mass murder of civilians on a huge scale ever justified? ... it is important to note that this was a very specific goal of England and America in World War II as the quotes above show. Germany and Japan also bombed civilians but the scale of what they did was a tiny fraction of their opponents. More people died in the bombing of Hamburg alone that in the entire German bombing campaign against England. Was the Anglo-American bombing necessary or moral? Many serious military experts feel it was a poor choice in terms of military priorities.

The air opened paths along which death and terror could be carried far behind the lines of the actual enemy; to women, children, the aged, the sick, who in earlier struggles would perforce have been left untouched.

the legitimacy or "just war" justification of massive aerial bombardment was beside the point. In large-scale national wars, even in cases where societies were under totalitarian control and citizens were not thought to have any influence over their rulers, reprisal became an accepted course of action. As a British Liberal MP wrote in 1942, "I am all for the bombing of working class areas of German cities. I am Cromwellian — I believe in 'slaying in the name of the Lord', because I do not believe you will ever bring home to the civil population of Germany the horrors of war until they have been tested in this way."

ARTICLE XXII: Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants is prohibited. ARTICLE XXIV: 1 ) Aerial bombardment is legitimate only when directed at a military objective.

Kill. In Germany nothing is guiltless. Neither the living nor the yet unborn. Crush forever in its den the fascist beast. Violently break the racial pride of the German women. Ravish them as booty. Kill, you gallant Red soldiers. Kill!

The Germans are not human beings. ... We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day ... If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime. If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another -- there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German -- that is your grandmother's request. Kill the German -- that is your child's prayer. Kill the German -- that is your motherland's loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through. Kill. (Alfred M De Zayas - Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans)

While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem entitled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.

All of us knew very well that if girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.

Twelve million Germans served in the Nazi army. There is not one German who has not murdered our fathers. Every German is a Nazi. Every German is a murderer.

As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of World War II, mass rapes took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation. ... committed by Soviet servicemen, ... by U.S. servicemen... many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint... British troops... there was a 'good deal of rape going on'. ... French soldiers were alleged to have indulged in an orgy of rape.

Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."

Thousands of Germans passed through the unit that became known as the London Cage, where they were beaten, deprived of sleep and forced to assume stress positions for days at a time. Some were told they were to be murdered and their bodies quietly buried. Others were threatened with unnecessary surgery carried out by people with no medical qualifications. Guards boasted that they were 'the English Gestapo'.

The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948.

On May 8th, 1945, according to American statistics, there were 252,592 prisoners of war in the camps near Remagen and Sinzig. Conditions were devastating. There was no drinking water or food, only a few prisoners had a coat or a tent canvas. Life took place on the bare ground. In order to protect themselves from the elements, the prisoners dug holes in the ground. Due to the catastrophic hygienic conditions, disease became rampant. There was not enough medication.

General Eisenhower denied the Germans access to any foreign aid, meaning that German civilians were forced to subsist on about 1,200 calories a day.

Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as a direct result of the policies of the western Allies.

Over 127,000 United States citizens were imprisoned during World War II. Their crime? Being of Japanese ancestry.

The United States was fighting the war on three fronts — Japan, Germany, and Italy — compared to the number of Japanese Americans, a relatively small number of Germans and Italians were interned in the United States. But although Executive Order 9066 was written in vague terms that did not specify an ethnicity, it was used for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. The government claimed that incarceration was for military necessity and, ironically, to "protect" Japanese Americans from racist retribution they might face as a result of Pearl Harbor. (These reasons were later proved false by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in the 1980s.)

Between 1944 and 1948 about 31 million people, with the majority of which including ethnic Germans ('Volksdeutsche') as well as German citizens ('Reichsdeutsche') were ethnically cleansed from Central and Eastern Europe. ... The current official position of the German government is that the death toll resulting from the flight and expulsions ranged from 2 to 2.5 million civilians.

The genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What is little known is the fate of fifteen million German civilians who found themselves on the wrong side of new postwar borders. All over Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of communities that had been established for many centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans did not survive. Some of these people had supported Hitler, but the great majority were guiltless.

More than 9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II—one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over 2 million of these alone, including countless children, died on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. That these deaths occurred at all is still being denied by Western governments.

Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program used to recruit scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of WWII.

Paperclip had two aims: to exploit German scientists for American research, and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union.

These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas.

At a secret black site in the years after the end of WWII, CIA and US intelligence operatives tested LSD and other interrogation techniques on captured Soviet spies, all with the help of former Nazi doctors.

During its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s leading members of this organization [Intermarium] were deeply involved in smuggling Nazi fugitives out of Eastern Europe to safety in the West. Later Intermarium also became one of the single most important sources of recruits for the CIA's exile committees. ... about a score of Intermarium leaders ended up as activists or officials in Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), each of which the U.S. government has since admitted as having been a CIA-financed and -controlled organization.

The history of the United Nations as an international organization has its origins in World War II. ... The text of the "Declaration by United Nations" was drafted by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins, while meeting at the White House on 29 December 1941.

In Britain and the US, too, a certain idea of the second world war is enthusiastically kept alive and less flattering memories suppressed. ... The British and American publics share a sunny view of the second world war. The evil of Auschwitz and Dachau, turned inside out, clothes the conflict in a shiny virtue. Movies, popular histories and political speeches frame the war as a symbol of Anglo-American courage, with the Red Army's central role forgotten. This was, we believe, "a war for democracy". Americans believe that they fought the war to rescue the world. For apologists of the British Empire, such as Niall Ferguson, the war was an ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expiated. We are marked forever as "the good guys" and can all happily chant "Two world wars and one world cup."