Curse Those Plutocrats!

I recently started following WW2 Tweets from 1940 on Twitter. The author is live-tweeting the war from that year. Here is the latest.

Churchill: "In garden of the Quai d'Orsay I see venerable officials burning secret documents. Already preparations are being made for the evacuation of Paris."

— WW2 Tweets from 1940 (@RealTimeWWII) May 16, 2018

I've been a student of WW II and the Nazis since high school (what wargamer isn't?), but a few things have popped out at me recently. Reading Mein Kampf and then Man's Search for Meaning, I finally figured out that the Jews were the personification of the 1% or Wall Street to Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler was a committed socialist and, like Occupy Wall Street, was motivated by his hatred of people he saw as getting rich off the labor of others.

The 1940 tweets have been fascinating, so I spent a little time finding archives of newspapers from that time. I don't have the links with me, but I believe the Sydney Morning Herald and one American paper have free online copies of their issues from 1940. It's interesting to read the French and British press releases, trying to put a good face on the German breakout at Sedan that doomed France, but more intriguing to me now are the German press releases. A lot of them talk about the British and French plutocrats.

Nazi propaganda loved to portray Allied leadership as in the control of Jews, bankers, Wall Street and other finance capitalists. Der Volk of those countries were being exploited by the 1%, dying so that the idle rich could reap war profits.

Hmm. Where have we heard that before?