His assistant was Monnet, who had suggested combining the British and French economies to defeat Germany in the Great War. None of this came to pass, but it’s clear that Monnet didn’t need Rostow to fire his pan-European imagination. In 1941, Italian antifascists produced the Ventotene Manifesto (named for a small island where they were interned), calling for a federal socialist Europe. German dissidents inside Hitler’s Reich, such as the Kreisau Circle, associated with Helmuth James von Moltke, who was executed by the Nazis, in 1945, for “treason,” also drew up plans for a postwar European union. This Catholic genealogy helped arouse British suspicions of European integration.