Financial crisis: German minister warns of far-Right rise
Adolf Hitler's rise to power on the back of the 1930s Great Depression is a warning to Germans against dangerous political repercussions spinning out from today's financial crisis, Germany's interior minister has said.
The Daily Telegraph | October 8th, 2008Wolfgang Schauble told Der Spiegel: “We learned from the worldwide economic crisis of the 1920s (and 30s) that an economic crisis can result in an incredible threat for all of society.
“The consequences of that depression was Adolf Hitler and, indirectly, World War II and Auschwitz.”
Mr Schauble, a conservative who has taken a hard-line stance on security issues and pushed to loosen Germany’s strict personal privacy laws, called the current turmoil a “historic break that will be recounted later in history books”.
“This was also the case on September 11, 2001,” he said in reference to the terrorist attacks on the United States.
“We thought we were not as stupid as speculators in the 17th century who traded in Dutch tulip bulbs and annihilated everything,” he said, but “we have been just as stupid”.
Global stock markets plummeted this week as the financial crisis shifted to Europe where the German government rushed in a 50bn euro bail-out of Hypo Real Estate, the country’s fourth largest bank, and Iceland sought a $5.4 billion loan from Russia after announcing its banking system was verging on bankrupt.
The leaders of Germany, France, Italy and Britain agreed at a summit in Paris on Saturday to protect Europe’s banks from the global financial crisis - “the worst since the Wall Street crash of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression”.
Hitler, whose National Socialist Party rose to power in 1933, used the financial woes expertly to his advantage blaming Jews for Germany’s collapse. The rise of far-right ideology and racist attacks today has become a growing concern across the nation.