If you think mortgaged property ownership will protect your assets in Germany, you are wrong. The German state has plenty of experience of fleecing homeowners. Ever thought of escaping the euro crisis through buying property financed with a very low-interest loan?

Germans like to hold real estate to safeguard their assets. History shows that this strategy does not always work out; notably not in the context of a currency reform.

From today's perspective, a 90-year-old German, thus far, has experienced at least six currency reforms in his lifetime; if he had lived in West Germany, mercifully, it would have "only" been five. On average, that has meant a new currency every 15 years. Even if the younger generation has a different perception, currencies come and go in this country far too often. So you should say goodbye right now to the linear thinking that the national currency is a static factor in the lives of Germans.

Less than 100 years ago, during the early days of the Great War in August 1914, the first monetary Enabling Act ("Ermächtigungsgesetz") was passed: the German Reich received direct access to central bank credit and the backing of bank notes with gold was prohibited by law. The associated money creation led from 1921, seven full years later and long after the end of the war, to hyperinflation.

In November 1923, just days after Adolf Hitler's "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich, the Reichsmark was converted into Rentenmark. The public debt of the German Reich was thus slashed from 164 billion marks to no less than 16 pfennigs (the "debt brake" of the Weimar Republic).

The second monetary Enabling Act was pushed through in 1933 when the German Reichsbank was put under the "direction and supervision of the Führer and Reichskanzler". The financing of the Second World War occurred so quietly that even in 1948, three years after the war, the majority of Germans believed in the continuity of the Reichsmark.

However, a not insignificant proportion of Germans, then as now, anticipated monetary and fiscal policy disaster and no longer trusted the system. What had been the options to safeguard assets against currency loss or inflation during the First and Second World Wars?

Then as now, many citizens began to take on debt and leveraged their wealth to invest in real estate. Throughout all this though, the German state knew how to use the "apparent property safeguard" to its own benefit - it consistently exploited the collapse of the old system to finance the new.

David Fuller's view You will not want to miss the rest of this fascinating history, not to mention Dr Grandinger's conclusion.

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