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7 Nov, 2009 06:31

Germany’s sovereignty restricted by US and allies, insider’s book claims

The former head of the West German Military Intelligence has issued a book revealing secret details of a 1949 US-German treaty, alleging America and its allies have been deliberately suppressing the nation’s sovereignty.

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell and the most painful wounds have healed, there seems to be no more uncomfortable truths left for Germans.

Yet some still manage to come up with hot potatoes – and the biggest these days is from the former head of the intelligence service in West Germany.

In Gerd-Helmut Komossa’s book “The German Card”, he claims Germany has, until now, been controlled by the United States and its allies, and was even viewed as a possible target.

“At a NATO meeting, I realized that a possible plan was for the alliance to hit the largest dam in West Germany with a nuclear bomb. If strikes had taken place, a great number of civilians would have died,” Gerd-Helmut Komossa says in his “The German Card” book.

The retired General details a secret pact he alleges was signed in 1949 between Germany and the US, and which will be in force for another 90 years.

Komossa says the secret agreement means that all political parties in Germany are supervised by a special Washington-based body, that the country’s army takes part in all NATO missions at first demand and that all German gold reserves are stored in New York.

For some though, the content of the book came as nothing surprising.

“Remember Prime Minister Putin’s proposal to Germany, to share with Russia natural gas trading throughout Europe? It was made a couple of years ago. And the German leadership answered exactly the same way as the German leadership did in 1952 – with silence. But what is the reason for Germany not to participate in such a lucrative business as trading natural gas throughout Europe? Of course, somebody had to advise them not to rush into it immediately,” says Aleksandr Fomenko, a political analyst from Moscow.

Surprisingly, it was a small publisher from Austria – not Germany – who first became interested in the book.

“My personal opinion is that it was obviously clear that the Democratic Republic of Germany was not a sovereign country, and that it was really under the rule of the Soviet Union,” says Wolfgang Dvorack-Stocker, publisher of “The German Card”. “And if it comes out that the Federal Republic of Germany also was not a really sovereign country, I think this could change the discussion of history a bit.”

Reviews by the first readers quickly turned into heated debates on German Television. The author was bombarded with criticism for doubting the democratic principles brought to the country by the West.

As a result, Komossa has refused to give any more interviews and has even apologized for some uncomfortable chapters in the book.

It’s not every day that a chief of intelligence discloses secrets about a political regime and, with some good promotion, the book could become a bestseller.

But in Germany its distribution is up against some difficulties. The country’s biggest bookshop – Dussmann, which is also “a cultural foundation”, has refused to sell the book at all.

The contents of the book, though, will soon be available to millions more readers. “The German Card” has recently been translated into Russian. The publisher expects strong sales and believes the most heated debates are yet to come.

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