(One 30-minute segment)

As the 90s drew to a close, elec­tions in two cen­tral Euro­pean coun­tries gave evi­dence that fas­cism was alive, well and gain­ing in the “new” Europe of the EU. In Aus­tria, Jörg Haider’s inap­pro­pri­ately named Free­dom Party scored sig­nif­i­cant elec­toral gains, plac­ing him in a posi­tion to wield sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal influ­ence in that coun­try. (Haider’s Free­dom Party was founded in 1949 as a vehi­cle for the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of Aus­trian Nazis who had served under Hitler. (Read more about Haider and his pro-fascist views.)

Call­ing his polit­i­cal agenda “A Con­tract with Aus­tria,” Haider explic­itly pat­terned his polit­i­cal pro­gram after that of Newt Gin­grich. (For a com­par­i­son between the agenda of Euro-fascists and that of Gin­grich, see FTRs 72, 80.)

Rail­ing against Aus­trian par­tic­i­pa­tion in the EU and the “dan­gers” pre­sented by immi­gra­tion from East­ern Europe, Haider has suc­cess­fully played on the fears of work­ing Aus­tri­ans that they might lose their jobs. A sim­i­lar xeno­pho­bia pro­pelled Christoph Blocher to suc­cess in Swiss elec­tions. Like Haider, Blocher has tar­geted Swiss par­tic­i­pa­tion in the EU and “immi­grants”. Blocher has also railed against Swiss mem­ber­ship in the United Nations and suc­cess­fully exploited the resent­ment of older Swiss cit­i­zens about recent dis­clo­sures of Swiss col­lab­o­ra­tion with Third Reich finance before, dur­ing and after World War II. It is worth not­ing that Blocher’s polit­i­cal base con­sists of the Ger­man seg­ment of the Swiss pop­u­la­tion and that the recent suc­cess of his People’s Party is seen as fur­ther dis­tanc­ing the French-speaking minor­ity. Blocher has endorsed a book that denied that the Holo­caust took place.

Much of the pro­gram focuses on the pro­found role played in Swiss finance and busi­ness by the remark­able and deadly Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion. The eco­nomic com­po­nent of a Third Reich that lit­er­ally went under­ground, the Bor­mann group was described by one banker as “the most impor­tant con­cen­tra­tion of money power under a sin­gle con­trol in all of world his­tory”. (Read more about the Bor­mann group.)

The dis­cus­sion under­scores the crit­i­cal role that Switzer­land has played in the oper­a­tions of the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion. First of all, Switzer­land was one of the coun­tries in which Mar­tin Bor­mann located many of the 750 cor­po­rate fronts which served as repos­i­to­ries for all the liq­uid wealth of the Third Reich at the war’s end. Switzer­land was the loca­tion of numer­ous hold­ing com­pa­nies, which served to mask the real own­er­ship and con­trol of the Ger­man econ­omy. A hold­ing com­pany may only hold stock in other com­pa­nies. (Actual con­trol of the Ger­man econ­omy is main­tained through bearer bonds, which grant own­er­ship of the cor­po­rate entity in ques­tion to the bearer of those bonds.)

Of par­tic­u­lar note is the Inter­han­del com­pany, set up by I.G. Far­ben lumi­nary Her­mann Schmitz to mask own­er­ship of Far­ben assets. (I.G. Far­ben was the back­bone of the Third Reich’s econ­omy and its suc­ces­sor com­pa­nies dom­i­nate the Ger­man econ­omy. Farben’s Schmitz was very close to Bor­mann and helped set up the var­i­ous cor­po­rate fronts that com­prised the orga­ni­za­tion.) The dis­cus­sion high­lights Switzerland’s role as the vehi­cle for the Bor­mann group’s ongo­ing pur­chase of stock in U.S. blue chip cor­po­ra­tions and con­cludes with a look at Mar­tin Bormann’s demand accounts at three key Amer­i­can com­mer­cial banks in the post-war period!