During the Blitz, Britain risked all to defend London. Vastly outnumbered British pilots desperately engaged the Luftwaffe. The cumulative effect of thousands of bombs dropped by 346 German bombers on the first of 57 consecutive days of terror set the city aflame.

Sixty-nine years later, London is under attack again. Only this time, the Huns are burning it economically. Why won’t Britain defend itself?

Germany declared economic war on Britain last Wednesday. That’s the conclusion of leading papers across the country. “This is the closest thing I have seen to a declaration of economic warfare in Western Europe in my lifetime,” wrote the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The Evening Standard said the City of London suffered an “astonishing attack.” The Daily Mail said that Germany had hit out at Britain.

The European Union, led by Germany, is using the global economic crisis as an opportunity to do to Britain what all the bombs and V-2 rockets failed to accomplish—destroy London as a global financial center.

Perhaps more accurately, Germany, with the aid of France, is now seeking to loot it. Germany is overtly challenging the rule of the City of London as Europe’s main financial hub, and is keen to see Frankfurt as a new, powerful financial center in next global order.

A new balance of power is rising in Europe. And politicians are letting Britain’s last industry of significance—global banking—be burned with barely a whimper.

In an interview with Stern magazine, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück delivered a violent assault on London. And remember, Steinbrück speaks officially for the German government of the German nation. In this interview, he said in effect that “Germany will marshal its forces to ensure that a chunk of the British economy is shut down—whatever the social consequences” (Telegraph, September 23; emphasis mine). He says that Britain’s financial sector was the cause of the global economic crisis and it must be curtailed.

Stern reported that Steinbrück said he saw “dark powers at work” hampering financial system reform in Britain, but that nevertheless the resistance would be crushed. “We will effectively change the rules on the financial market,” he said. “Politics is sometimes like a locomotive which comes slowly up to full speed,” but once a train gets going, its momentum makes it hard to stop.

Steinbrück’s comments, which came just hours ahead of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, carry special significance. Germany and France have been using the summit to push for tougher global regulations over the financial sector. During last year’s G-20, the world’s most powerful nations, including Britain and the United States, quietly signed over their sovereign rights to regulate their own economies. With barely any noise, they agreed in principle to subordinate national law to a new overarching European-dominated international body charged with preventing future economic accidents. This new regulatory body’s powers were being hammered out at this year’s G-20.

Britain has a disproportionally large financial sector, charged Steinbrück. London must “share the burden” of paying for the financial crisis by paying more taxes. “Each euro which we can collect from the financial markets relieves the taxpayer,” he said. Steinbrück made no mention of the disproportionally large automotive sector in Germany, or the disproportionately large aerospace technology sector in France. Neither did he mention the Netherlands’ disproportionately large commercial shipbuilding sector, Norway’s disproportionately large energy sector, or Spain’s disproportionately large fishing industry.

Clearly there is another motive than just ensuring that another economic accident doesn’t occur.

“The world will never be as it was before the crisis; the financial system will become more multipolar,” Steinbrück opined last year. “Anglo-Saxon capitalism” is “finished,” he said.

But why is Anglo-Saxon capitalism finished? Is it because it imploded—or because European regulators are about to hammer the final nail into the coffin? As the Adam Smith Institute observed earlier this year, the newly proposed regulatory regime seems like an opportunistic excuse “to provide an opening for long-held political objectives.” Europeans are capitalizing on the crisis while Britain “is too weak to object.”

Just as manufacturing is the core of the German economy, the financial sector is the main pillar of Britain’s economy. Take away the City of London as a global financial center, and Britain becomes a second-rate nation almost as geopolitically impotent as Spain or Poland.

More importantly, the willing divestiture of banking-sector control to a European regulatory agency in effect signs away the sovereignty of the British economy to European overlords.

Hundreds of thousands of British gave their lives during the war to prevent this very thing. Germany is conquering Britain without even firing a shot.

For decades, Herbert W. Armstrong warned readers of the internationally circulated Plain Truth magazine that Germany would rise from the rubble of World War ii, that it would reunite and dominate Europe and the world.

In May 1945, Herbert W. Armstrong warned that Germany may have been defeated militarily, but the Nazi spirit had not been broken. While attending the San Francisco United Nations conference, he told an audience of World Tomorrow listeners: “Men plan, here, to preserve the peace of the world. What most do not know is that the Germans have their plans for winning the battle of the peace. Yes, I said battle of the peace. That’s a kind of battle we Americans don’t know. We know only one kind of war” (Autobiography, Volume ii).

Germany is winning the battle of the peace. Through economic and political means, it looks imminent that Germany will achieve its long-sought-after goal—the subjugation of the City of London. During World war ii, only Britain stood in the way of Germany conquering the Continent. Who will stand now?