(One 30-minute segment)

In a sup­ple­ment to a body of work that Mr. Emory believes to be as inci­sive and impor­tant as any he has done, this broad­cast fleshes out alarm­ing indi­ca­tions that Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions con­trol­ling Amer­i­can pub­lish­ing are mov­ing in the direc­tion of ful­fill­ing a Nazi agenda.

Like all major Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions, the Ber­tels­mann and Von Holtzbrinck firms ulti­mately report to, and are con­trolled by, the deadly Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion. The Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion is an insti­tu­tion that Mr. Emory believes will prove to be the deci­sive ele­ment in human affairs (bar­ring a sig­nif­i­cant change in the polit­i­cal land­scape). (Read more on the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion.)

The pro­gram begins with dis­cus­sion of the many pres­ti­gious record­ing artists and record labels con­trolled by Ber­tels­mann. (In addi­tion to pub­lish­ing, this out­fit is heav­ily involved with the music busi­ness, as well as com­puter soft­ware and com­puter games.

Ber­tels­mann is the third largest media cor­po­ra­tion in the world.) Guided dur­ing the Hitler period by Hein­rich Mohn (who was SS), the Ber­tels­mann firm con­trols Arista, RCA and Wind­ham Hill records, among other labels. Their pub­lish­ing arm (BMG) is a major fac­tor in the Amer­i­can music busi­ness. Next, the broad­cast turns to indi­ca­tions that Ber­tels­mann has not shed its Nazi her­itage. Much of Bertelsmann’s offi­cial his­tory has been crafted by an unabashed Nazi sym­pa­thizer, Dirk Baven­damm. Baven­damm secured forged diaries and sketches attrib­uted to Hitler (which painted a rel­a­tively pos­i­tive pic­ture of the Fuehrer). These forg­eries were pub­lished by the Ger­man mag­a­zine Stern, which is pub­lished by Ber­tels­mann. Baven­damm has writ­ten two books which blame Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt for World War II and claimed that Hitler was blame­less for the war. His works also claim that Hitler’s actions toward the Jews were merely a reac­tion to Roosevelt’s plot­ting against Ger­many. (The most recent of these titles was pub­lished in 1993, and re-released in 1998. Despite this, Ber­tels­mann hired Baven­damm as its house his­to­rian in 1984, the year after he wrote the first of his books blam­ing the war on Roo­sevelt.) Not sur­pris­ingly, Bavendamm’s his­tory of Ber­tels­mann falsely claimed that the com­pany had been at log­ger­heads with Hitler.

As dis­cussed in FTR-90, there are indi­ca­tions that the world-wide Nazi agenda involves con­trol­ling the Amer­i­can opin­ion form­ing media, in order to grad­u­ally change the world’s opin­ion of Hitler (prepara­tory to res­ur­rect­ing the Reich, some­time in the next cen­tury). Bavendamm’s efforts sug­gest very strongly that peo­ple should not be com­pla­cent about that pos­si­bil­ity. In spite of Bertelsmann’s record of his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism with regard to the Third Reich, the Anti Defama­tion League chose to honor the Ber­tels­mann Foun­da­tion in 1999.

The pro­gram con­cludes with analy­sis of the aborted title For­tu­nate Son, a book that charged George W. Bush with cocaine use and claimed he had been arrested, with his record hav­ing been expunged through his fam­ily con­nec­tions. This book was pulled from the mar­ket after it was dis­closed that its author had a seri­ous crim­i­nal record. The editor-in-chief of St. Martin’s Press resigned over the book, on which he appar­ently had lit­tle or no input. The book project was highly secre­tive, being referred to in house by the code-word “M.J.” St. Martin’s Press is owned by Von Holtzbrinck (the other Nazi-linked firm which, with Ber­tels­mann, con­trols Amer­i­can pub­lish­ing.) With the Bush family’s long his­tory of involve­ment with Nazi­ism, Mr. Emory spec­u­lates that the For­tu­nate Son project may have been delib­er­ately under­taken to neg­a­tively stig­ma­tize the George W cocaine story. With alle­ga­tions sur­fac­ing about W’s alleged involve­ment in an on-camera DEA sting oper­a­tion in 1985 (in which both W and Jeb Bush allegedly picked up a kilo of cocaine each), Mr. Emory won­ders if the Von Holtzbrinck firm was clear­ing the way for the Under­ground Reich’s can­di­date by ren­der­ing the story untouch­able. (For more on the Bush fam­ily and the Nazis, see also Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Shows M11, M20, M24, M29, as well as FTRs 29, 48, 113, 147.) (Recorded on 10/31/99.)