Conference Report: Why German Politicians (among Others) Have Again Become Warmongers

To understand why the German government “seems to be completely in the grip of those war-mongers who are driving the escalation with Russia”, one must look back to “the period of the late 1970s, where in less than a year, from April 1977 to March 1978, there was a wave of assassinations in Europe”, and then also, to a similar period in 1989-91, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That intriguing statement was made by Helga Zepp-LaRouche during a Jan. 14 Schiller Institute webcast, organized on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day (Jan. 15) in the United States. The proceedings focussd on the existence of the extended “assassination bureau” responsible for the assassination of King, as well as of John and Robert Kennedy, Enrico Mattei and Aldo Moro in Italy, Alfred Herrhausen and Detlev Rohwedder in Germany, and many others around the world.

What became clear over the course of the event, is that in the post-war era, an international oligarchy, faced with the rise of actual and potential sovereign nations, implemented a “strategy of tension” aimed at intimidating political leaders around the world into submission.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche went into the specific case of Germany, where the fear provoked by the series of assassinations, has dominated German political life ever since. Thus, today, “you have a climate in Germany where people don’t dare to deviate from the official line.” Germany today, has lost its sovereignty, and is “completely in the grip of NATO, and pursuing policies which I believe imply the danger of escalation to a nuclear war.” And the nuclear war danger today is what makes it so urgent to reconsider that period today, she said.

After the assassination of Deutsche Bank CEO Herrhausen in 1989, Zepp-LaRouche recalled, Germany was forced to give up the D-mark, accept the euro, and “submit to the Maastricht diktat which basically was the idea to contain Germany in the supranational structure of the EU Commission”. Herrhausen, on the contrary, “had a vision of development for Eastern Europe and Russia that would have changed the course of history. But Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand wanted to prevent a sovereign unified Germany from engaging in a partnership with Russia.”

Zepp-LaRouche’s topic was also taken up by EIR Strategic Alert co-editor Claudio Celani in his presentation on the background to the assassinations of Enrico Mattei (in 1962) and of Aldo Moro (1978). Both of them, as later revealed in declassified papers of the British government, had been declared deadly threats to British domination in the Mediterranean and North Africa.

Mattei, founder of the Italian oil industry, had engaged in a fight against the Anglo-Dutch-French oil cartel that was preventing Italy from gaining access to cheap oil, and, under his leadership, the Italian government had sought support from the U.S. government. Finally, political conditions under President Kennedy were favorable, but shortly before Mattei was scheduled to fly to Washington, his private plane crashed outside Milan on Oct. 27, 1962. Similar to the Kennedy case, an investigating commission concluded that this was an accident; however, in 1995 a prosecutor in Pavia, Vincenzo Calia, re-opened the investigation and, thanks to modern techniques, could prove that a bomb had exploded in Mattei’s plane.

Who placed the bomb? An investigation still needs to be carried out, but evidence leads to the same “Murder Inc.” that was identified in the investigation on the JFK assassination carried out by District Attorney Jim Garrison. As for the actual string-pullers, it is a known fact that Mattei had long been in the crosshairs of the British government.

Other speakers at the webcast included Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), foreign policy expert Cliff Kirakofe, journalist Garland Nixon, Schiller Institute New York leader Dennis Speed, former French presidential candidate Jacques Cheminade, and Congolese journalist Norbert Mbu-Mputu, author of a book on Patrice Lumumba. A video of the entire proceedings is available here.