“Au revoir in 20 years,” spat Col. Herman Kriebel of the German Armistice Commission as he bid farewell to the Allied personnel in Belgium following the conclusion of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

True to his word, the colonel was part of the Nazi movement that sought 20 years later to finish off the German imperialists’ unfinished business of seeking to establish global rule. World War ii, embracing a horrific holocaust, was the result of those perverse visionaries’ dream of world empire.

The most notable record of German elites seeking the continuation of their imperialist intentions following World War ii is the document labeled the Red House Report to which we have often referred.

In his famous treatise On War, German military theorist Karl von Clausewitz declared that “even the final decision of a whole war is not always to be regarded as absolute. The conquered state often sees in it only a passing evil, which may be repaired in after times by means of political combinations.”

Following the terrible devastation of Germany in World War ii and the empowerment of Communist Russia through its dominance of Eastern Europe, it was always going to take longer than 20 years for Germany to recover, to reunite, “to repair” its empire “by political combinations” embraced in successive treaties, and for the current generation of elites to get ready for a third attempt at world dominion.

That the euro crisis is presenting a timely opportunity for those elites to begin forcing their ultimate imperialist vision on Europe must soon become evident to all but the most blind.

Dr. George Friedman of Stratfor, for whose analyses of current events we have a considerable respect, has summed up the return of the age-old “German question” neatly in an excellent piece published Tuesday.

Commenting on Germany’s stringent demands on Greece in exchange for bailing out its economy (not withstanding Germany’s failure to pay reparations for its occupation of that Balkan nation during the war), Friedman sums up Greece’s prospects thus: “[W]hoever controls a country’s government expenditures, tax rates and monetary policy effectively controls that country. The German proposal therefore would suspend Greek sovereignty and the democratic process as the price of financial aid to Greece” (January 31; emphasis added throughout).

So for the Greeks, inventors of democracy, they sit now between a rock and a hard place. They either default on their debts, retain their national sovereignty, and become a pariah to world markets—or they yield up their sovereignty to the control of a German-dominated EU in exchange for an attempt to bail them out of their crisis, and yet still be looked upon as a pariah by world markets.

Hardly a real choice in pure market terms.

Yet with a German-appointed prime minister at the helm, one could perhaps anticipate the latter result.

But then again, to further quote Dr. Friedman, “Much of the political crisis inside of Greece stems from the Greek public’s antipathy to austerity. But another part, which would come to the fore under the German proposal, is that the Greeks do not want to lose national sovereignty. In their long history, the Greeks have lost their sovereignty to invaders such as the Romans, the Ottomans and, most recently, the Nazis. The brutal German occupation still lives in Greek memories.”

And that could prove the cruncher.

It is a sad fact that Anglo-Saxon memories of Germany’s World War ii atrocities have been so greatly reduced by the almost complete erasing of that history over three generations of increasingly politically correct tampering with their nations’ education curricula. Otherwise they would be railing at the gates of Berlin over the prospect of the imminent economic enslavement of their loyal World War ii ally.

Dr. Friedman has a better memory. As he declares, “Given that Germany was the historic nightmare for most of Europe, and it is Germany that is pushing this doctrine, the outcome could well be explosive ….”

We have a feeling that we shall not have to wait too long for that outcome, and that its explosive effect on the world will be far greater than it was 70 years ago.