Goering And Schauble In Berlin

Germany today is a parliamentary democracy.  However, within the Eurozone some find that Germany exercises power over macroeconomic policy by other nations also in it that reminds them of an earlier more authoritarian Germany that dominated their policies, with such views especially strongly held in Greece since that nation's last crisis. German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, has been accused particularly accused of exercising such power in budgetary policymaking and enforcing an austerity policy on the nations in the Eurozone that has exacerbated recessionary tendencies within the Eurozone, especially for nations with heavy debt burdens such as Greece.

There is a curious irony in the accusations made against Schauble in particular.  He sits in the same office and even at the same desk in an ugly grey building in Berlin that Nazi Air Marshall Hermann
Goering used after 1936 when the construction of this ugly structure was completed by the Nazis.  Somehow this structure survived allied bombing in World War II, after which it was located in the Soviet zone adjacent to where the Berlin Wall would later be located.  It was where in 1949 the former East German Democratic Republic was declared and from where it was ruled.

There is neither a swastika nor a hammer and sickle hanging today behind where Schauble sits in Goering's old office, but it is widely claimed that the desk there is still the one used by Goering.

Barkley Rosser