With all due respect, your friend is deriving arguments from an idiot.

This link is likely the article in question and it is filled with incorrect assertions and innuendo asserting that many of the architects of the EU were Nazi collaborators. This is just plain stupid and uses half-truths and distortions to paint a deceptive picture.

Madsen for example, states that Adenauer as

pre-war mayor of Cologne and president of the Prussian State Council, provided the Nazis with various perks, including the right to fly Nazi flags from Cologne city flagpoles.

This is just a poor sketch of Adenauer's stance during the Third Reich. For one thing, the Nazis removed Adenauer from his position as the mayor of Cologne and abolished the Prussian State Council. The conservative Zentrum mayor never got along with the NSDAP during the 1920s and 30s. Although Adenauer did not provide ammunition for the dictatorship to lead to wider persecution and imprisonment, the Cologne mayor did set himself up as an thorn in the side of Hitler's post-33 government. This included a famous February 1933 incident in which Adenauer forbade the flying of swastikas on Cologne's municipal buildings before a visit by Hitler to the city. Adenauer's order to remove the swastika banners led to a gang of unruly SA to surround his house to "protect" the mayor during the Chancellor's visit. The incident marked the end of Adenauer's political career during the Third Reich as the NSDAP engineered an illegal election in Cologne where they and their nationalist allies took power away from the Zentrum. The former mayor was actually banned from living in the Cologne district until 1936. Adenauer spent the rest of the dictatorship with a sword over his head barely escaping arrest (although he was detained after the 20 July plot), and relying upon the charity of like-minded friends to eke out a living.

The article is just as wrong-headed about the pasts of other EU champion. For example, Madsen notes that the Dutch Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was a NSDAP member and belonged to various Nazi organizations. While this is true, Madsen completely leaves out that the Prince was also a wartime Wing Commander of the RAF after the German invasion! He was involved in various Dutch emigre groups and denounced Hitler. Hardly the actions of a collaborator. Madsen is on firmer ground claiming that Walter Hallstein was a member of several NSDAP organizations. This was true, but only a partial picture. Hallstein, like many Aryan professionals, found that they had to join various Party organizations to get ahead or prevent their careers from flaming out. He never joined the Party and like Adenauer was something of a silent critic of the regime. Robert Schuman was involved in the politicking behind the Petain government, but Madsen's assertion that he was "a French politician who swore allegiance to Marshal Philippe Petain," neither does justice to the complexities of the formation of the Vichy government and ignores the fact that Schuman was arrested by the Gestapo but escaped German captivity to become part of the French resistance. Schuman's actions within the resistance were why he received a pardon for his 1940 actions.

As the above indicates, Wayne Madsen is a sloppy "researcher" who cannot get the facts of his cast of villains correct. As for the meat of the OP's question, the EU as put into practice by these men was not as Madsen contends the "Fourth Reich Lite." The Nazi vision of a German-dominated Europa was quite a different polity altogether.

For one thing, the Nazis' conceptualization of their Europa was a hazy, poorly-thought out mass of contradictions. There were some "Europeanists" among various German state agencies such as Werner Best who thought German victory could allow for the rearrangement of Europe into a German-dominated supranational entity. But these men often found themselves swimming against the tide of German policy that stressed short-term solutions to German needs at the expense of any long-term political rearrangement. The occupations' currency policies were a case in point in which German troops were paid in the occupied countries' currency at a ridiculous exchange rate to the Reichsmark. This was to combat both inflation and allow German soldiers to "legally" buy up the goods of the occupied countries. This policy destroyed the occupied countries' economies. By the same token, the Germany-first priorities did not lead to greater industrial cooperation and common economic planning within the German-controlled area despite some non-German industrialists' very tentative acceptance of this after 1940. The Third Reich often ripped the guts out of Western Europe's factories where they languished in the Reich and many German firms were more than willing collaborators in the disposal of their rivals' economic base.

The EU and its various predecessors like the European Coal and Steel Community had significant hiccups and frictions. But they were the acme of cooperation and diplomacy when compared to the Nazis' systematic plundering of Europe and politics based upon forceful domination. At the end of the day, men like Adenauer and Schuman were pushing for a political arrangement made via diplomacy between sovereign governments. The Third Reich ruled through Diktat upheld by guns. When Madsen claims that " Euro-federalists" are resurrecting the

old Nazi policy of «collective punishment» in urging draconian measures being taken by the EU against the withdrawing British.

He is making an argument that is as stupid as it is obscene. Collective punishment under the Third Reich involved mass murder, expropriation of wealth, and other actions that would be correctly termed crimes against humanity in the postwar period. The EU's responses to Brexit or the crisis in Greece, whatever their merits and demerits, do not call for mass murder. To claim otherwise is to not only insult the actual victims of Nazi aggression but also cloud contemporary politics with ahistorical shite.

Thank you for this detailed response. Indeed the article is from Wayne Madsen with completely unverified aspersions on these politicians. You’ve given me plenty of ammunition to shoot down this friend’s nonsense.