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FTR #1058: This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
FTR #1059: This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
FTR #1060: This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In the wake of the 25 1‑hour interviews with Jim DiEugenio about his landmark text Destiny Betrayed, we present three programs integrating elements of Jim’s presentation with historical, economic and political dynamics central to an understanding of the events surrounding the coup d’etat of 11/22/1963.
Most of the material presented in these programs will be review for veteran listeners, although presented and analyzed here in a context that will hopefully prove enlightening.
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty has written about events in August of 1944 that are indicative of the coalescence of the “Christian West” concept that we discussed in AFA #37 and further developed in FTR #1009.
We note that it was in August of 1944 that the famous “Red House” meeting at which the Bormann flight capital network realized under the auspices of Aktion Adlerflug was launched.
” . . . . On August 23, 1944, the Romanians accepted Soviet surrender terms and in Bucharest the OSS rounded up Nazi intelligence experts and their voluminous Eastern European intelligence files and concealed them among a trainload of American POW’s who were being quickly evacuated from the Balkans via Turkey. Once in “neutral” Turkey, the train continued to a planned destination at a site on the Syrian border, where it was stopped to permit the transfer of Nazis and POW’s to a fleet of U.S. [Army] Air Force planes for a flight to Cairo. . . .”
The concept of “The Christian West” is explained in the description for AFA #37: ” . . . . When it became clear that the armies of the Third Reich were going to be defeated, it opened secret negotiations with representatives from the Western Allies. Representatives on both sides belonged to the transatlantic financial and industrial fraternity that had actively supported fascism. The thrust of these negotiations was the establishment of The Christian West. Viewed by the Nazis as a vehicle for surviving military defeat, ‘The Christian West’ involved a Hitler-less Reich joining with the U.S., Britain, France and other European nations in a transatlantic, pan-European anti-Soviet alliance. In fact, The Christian West became a reality only after the cessation of hostilities. The de-Nazification of Germany was aborted. Although a few of the more obvious and obnoxious elements of Nazism were removed, Nazis were returned to power at virtually every level and in almost every capacity in the Federal Republic of Germany. . . .”
Next, we review an article about Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen highlighting:
- The fact that his work with the U.S. was approved by a Nazi chain of command that was still functioning: ” . . . . Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Doenitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received approval from Doenitz too!44. . . . 47. As Gehlen was about to leave for the United States, he left a message for Baun with another of his top aides, Gerhard Wessel: “I am to tell you from Gehlen that he has discussed with [Hitler’s successor Admiral Karl] Doenitz and [Gehlen’s superior and chief of staff General Franz] Halder the question of continuing his work with the Americans. Both were in agreement.” Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61. In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans. . . .”
- That Bormann worked closely in designing his flight capital program with Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi finance minister, close associate of the Dulles brothers and friend of Clay Shaw.
- That the OUN/B (currently in command of the reins of power in Ukraine), the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustachis and other members of the Anti Bolshevik Bloc of Nations were part of the Gehlen “Org.” They became a key element of the Republican Party through the Crusade For Freedom. ” . . . . Gehlen became chief of the Third Reich’s Foreign Armies East (FHO), on April 1, 1942. He was thus responsible for Germany’s military intelligence operations throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. His FHO was connected in this role with a number of secret fascist organizations in the countries to Germany’s east. These included Stepan Bandera’s “B Faction” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B),15 Romania’s Iron Guard,16 the Ustachis of Yugoslavia,17 the Vanagis of Latvia18 and, after the summer of 1942, “Vlassov’s Army,” . . . .”
Supposedly killed in Berlin near the end of the war, Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller in fact escaped. Mueller was captured by U.S. forces, subsequently released and the files about his activities redacted: ” . . . . on grounds of ‘national security,’ including the possibility that more complete disclosure could compromise intelligence-gathering methods. . . . .”
Not only did Mueller apparently work for U.S. intelligence, he served as the security director for the remarkable and deadly Bormann flight capital organization, aiding CIA and the final incarnation of the Gehlen “org” while working for the Reichsleiter. ” . . . . The CIA could have pulled aside the gray curtain that obscured Bormann—at any time. But the CIA and Mueller’s crack organization of former SS men found it to their mutual advantage to cooperate in many situations. . . . Even General Gehlen, when he was chief of the Federal Republic’s intelligence service, sent his agents to confer with General Heinrich Mueller in South America. . . .”
T. H. Tetens’ The New Germany and the Old Nazis details the coup attempt of 1953, in which SS officer Werner Naumann (propaganda minister Goebbels’ hand-picked successor) tried to seize power, with the assistance of other Third Reich alumni.
Of consummate significance in this context is the executive force behind Naumann’s attempt–a fuehrungsring that administered the “new” Germany on behalf of a Nazi government in exile in Spain.
Taken in conjunction with the material in Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, the disclosure that Reinhard Gehlen’s relocation of his spy outfit to U.S. intelligence was cleared with a German chain of command that had been preserved intact, the Tetens discussion of the Naumann coup permits us to view much of the structure of this Underground Reich.
Keying the development of these programs are two passages from Destiny Betrayed which locate Clay Shaw within a corporate and intelligence power structure that is part and parcel to the events and elements discussed here. (Shaw was, of course, Jim Garrison’s primary investigative target in his probe of the JFK assassination.)
Shaw’s involvement with the Permindex intelligence outfit involved him with a transnational corporate and intelligence web stretching back to the development of the Third Reich: “ . . . . But as more investigation by the local papers was done, it became clear that the real backer was J. Henry Schroeder Corporation. This information was quite revealing. Schroeder’s had been closely associated with Allen Dulles and the CIA for years. Allen Dulles’s connections to the Schroder banking family went back to the thirties when his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, first began representing them through him. Later, Dulles was the bank’s General Counsel. In fact, when Dulles became CIA director, Schroeder’s was a repository for a fifty million dollar contingency fund that Dulles personally controlled. Schroder’s was a welcome conduit because the bank benefited from previous CIA overthrows in Guatemala and Iran. Another reason that there began to be a furor over Permindex in Switzerland was the fact that the bank’s founder, Baron Kurt von Schroder, was associated with the Third Reich, specifically Heinrich Himmler. . . . The board of directors as made up of bankers who had been tied up with fascist governments, people who worked the Jewish refugee racket during World War II, a former member of Mussolini’s cabinet, and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, the economic wizard behind the Third Reich, who was a friend of Shaw’s. . . .”
One of the operations in which Ferrie and Shaw participated was an effort to bolster Freeport Sulphur. Note the networking with Canadian nickel interests, and correlate this with the information below about John Foster Dulles’s midwiving of I.G. Farben and Foster Dulles’s relationship with Clay Shaw’s friend Hjalmar Schacht. One of the operations in which Ferrie and Shaw participated was an effort to bolster Freeport Sulphur. Note the networking with Canadian nickel interests, and correlate this with the information below about John Foster Dulles’s midwiving of I.G. Farben and Foster Dulles’s relationship with Clay Shaw’s friend. ” . . . . with Castro taking over their operations in Cuba, Freeport was attempting to investigate bringing in nickel ore from Cuba, through Canada, which still had trade relations with Cuba. The ore would then be refined in Louisiana, either at a plant already in New Orleans or at another plant in Braithwaite. Shaw, an impressario of international trade, was on this exploratory team for Freeport. . . . ”
About Foster’s incorporation of the nickel cartel into the I.G. Farben cosmology: ” . . . . Among Foster’s premier clients was the New Jersey-based International Nickel Company, for which he was not only counsel but also a director and member of the executive board. In the early 1930s, he steered it, along with its Canadian affiliate, into a cartel with France’s two major nickel producers. In 1934, he brought the biggest German nickel producer, I.G. Farben, into the cartel. This gave Nazi Germany access to the cartel’s resources. ‘Without Dulles,’ according to a study of Sullivan & Cromwell, ‘Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with [International Nickel], which controlled the world’s supply of nickel, a crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate.’ . . . .”
About Foster Dulles’s relationship with Schacht: ” . . . . Both men had considered entering the clergy before turning their powerful minds toward more remunerative pursuits. Each admired the culture that had produced the other. Both believed that a resurgent Germany would stand against Bolshevism. Mobilizing American capital to finance its rise was their common interest. Working with Schacht, Foster helped the National Socialist state find rich sources of financing in the United States for its public agencies, banks, and industries. . . .”
Next, we note thatboth Dulles brothers conspired to shut down Operation Safehaven, safeguarding their corporate relationships with Third Reich industry and paving the way for the rise of the Bormann capital network. “. . . . While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother was doing the same in New York. . . . Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, [Allen] Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the families of Hitler’s victims. . . .”
We have spoken for years about The Crusade For Freedom, a covert operation with both foreign and domestic venues. Abroad, the CFF was a vehicle for financing the use of Eastern European Third Reich alumni as “fascist freedom fighters” in paramilitary operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Domestically, the CFF spawned a Nazi branch of the Republican Party, with roots in the Third Reich and the Reinhard Gehlen spy organization.
The CFF became a major element of the U.S. Cold War establishment, and CFF luminaries Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, William Casey and George H.W. Bush occupied singularly important positions in the GOP.
Many of its participants and associates were prominent not only on the far right but in the National Security Establishment as well.
Many of them also figure in the milieu of the JFK assassination:
” . . . . Members of the Texas Crusade for Freedom would become a who’s who of Texans connected to the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In addition to Neil Mallon, members included [Paul] Raigorodsky, Lewis W. MacNaughton, Everette De Golyer, and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Charles Cabell, who was Allen Dulles’s deputy CIA director [fired by JFK for his conduct in the Bay of Pigs operation along with Dulles himself]. Another member was D. Harold Byrd, who owned the building in downtown Dallas that would become known as the Texas School Book Depository. Another member was E.M. ‘Ted’ Dealey, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, who was a harsh critic of Kennedy. . . .”
Some of the most important Republicans on the national stage not only were essential parts of the CFF/Nazi GOP nexus but also figure into the investigation into the JFK assassination.
- CFF godfather Allen Dulles was the principal member of the Warren Commission and appears to have been an architect of the assassination itself.
- Richard Nixon was in Dallas on 11/22/1963, flew out about an hour and a half before the fatal shots were fired and then lied about it to the FBI.
- Ronald Reagan was on the Rockefeller Commission that found (incorrectly) that the CIA was not involved in the assassination. He also refused to honor Jim Garrison’s request to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley from California.
- George H.W. Bush was in Dallas on 11/22/1963 and says he can’t remember where he was when Kennedy was killed.
Of paramount significance for our purposes is a “Christian Wester” accommodation apparently involving Prince Egon Max von Hohenloe, who married into the Habsburg family. Operating out of Lichtenstein and traveling on a Lichtenstein passport, von Hohenloe served as an intermediary between U.S. intelligence and Walter Schellenberg, in charge of overseas intelligence for the SS. (Schellenberg was also on the board of directors of International Telephone and Telegraph and became a key operative for the postwar Gehlen organization.)
Chief among the American negotiators was Allen Dulles. Donovan also appears to have played a significant part.
Interesting perspective on the Hapsburg/U.S./Underground Reich alliance and the sensitive nature of the dealings of OSS/Wall Street operatives like Donovan and Dulles can be gleaned by the account of the frequently lethal attempts by four different authors to write the account of the OSS from the organization’s microfilmed files.
Central to understanding the concept of the actual realization of the essence of the Christian West–the merging of the U.S. with Nazi Germany in an anti-Soviet alliance–is the understanding of what globalization really is and how it precipitated fascism and the Second World War. ” . . . . fascism (Nazism in particular) was an outgrowth of globalization and the construction of international monopolies (cartels). Key to understanding this phenomenon is analysis of the Webb-Pomerene act, legislated near the end of the First World War. A loophole in the Anti-trust legislation of 1914, it effectively legalized the formation of cartels—international monopolies—for firms that were barred from domestic monopolistic practices. Decrying what they viewed as excessive and restrictive ‘regulation’ here in the United States, U.S.-based transnational corporations invested their profits from the industrial boom of the 1920’s abroad, primarily in Japan and Germany. This process might well be viewed as the real beginning of what is now known as ‘globalization.’ . . . . It was this capital that drove the engines of conquest that subdued both Europe and Asia during the conflict. . . .”
Also central to an understanding of the realization of the Christian West–the consummate realization of both globalization and fascism/Nazism–is analysis of the machinations of the Bush family. The heroic Justice Department investigator (later author) John Loftus delineated the Bush family’s role in the laundering of Nazi funds between the Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V. and the Union Bank in the U.S.
The networking of the Bush family with the Thyssens, the Schroeders and the Rockefellers, in turn, is inextricably linked with the coalescence and operation of the remarkable and deadly Bormann flight capital network, highlighed in FTR #305, among other programs.
The following article, the main focal point of FTR #370, this article warrants more intense scrutiny, both because of the increase in the dynamics of both globalization and concentration of wealth since 2002 and in the context of the Christian West and the links of Clay Shaw to the forces discussed here.
Key elements of discussion and analysis include:
- The corporate masking effected by the Thyssens and their American associates, George Herbert Walker, Prescott Bush, Averill Harriman and Allen Dulles. ” . . . . Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts–from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen’s partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States. The allied investigators underestimated Thyssen’s reach, his connections, his motives, and his means. The web of financial entities Thyssen helped create in the 1920’s remained a mystery for the rest of the twentieth century, an almost perfectly hidden underground sewer pipeline for moving dirty money, money that bankrolled the post-war fortunes not only of the Thyssen industrial empire…but the Bush family as well. . . .”
- The role in this corporate shell game of Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who married into the Hungarian nobility and whose daughter Francesca married Karl von Hapsburg. ” . . . . Fritz Thyssen joined the Nazis in 1923; his younger brother married into Hungarian nobility and changed his name to Baron [Heinrich] Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Baron later claimed Hungarian as well as Dutch citizenship. In public, he pretended to detest his Nazi brother, but in private they met at secret board meetings in Germany to coordinate their operations. If one brother were threatened with loss of property, he would transfer his holdings to the other. To aid his sons in their shell game, August Thyssen had established three different banks during the 1920’s — The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking Corporation in New York City. To protect their corporate holdings, all the brothers had to do was move the corporate paperwork from one bank to the other. This they did with some regularity. When Fritz Thyssen ‘sold’ the Holland-American Trading Company for a tax loss, the Union Banking Corporation in New York bought the stock. Similarly, the Bush family invested the disguised Nazi profits in American steel and manufacturing corporations that became part of the secret Thyssen empire. . . .”
- The dual role of Allen Dulles as corporate lawyer and collaborator with the Thyssens, Bushes, Shroeders et al and his work as the head of the Bern (Switzerland) OSS office. ” . . . . If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank’s lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles’ client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles’s other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles’ cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously. . . . As soon as Berlin fell to the allies, it was time to ship the documents back to Rotterdam so that the ‘neutral’ bank could claim ownership under the friendly supervision of Allen Dulles, who, as the OSS intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin, was well placed to handle any troublesome investigations. . . .”
- Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands–SS officer, I.G. Farben spy and nominal head of the Dutch “resistance” supervised a mission to retrieve potentially incriminating documents from the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin: ” . . . . Prince Bernhard commanded a unit of Dutch intelligence, which dug up the incriminating corporate papers in 1945 and brought them back to the “neutral” bank in Rotterdam. The pretext was that the Nazis had stolen the crown jewels of his wife, Princess Juliana, and the Russians gave the Dutch permission to dig up the vault and retrieve them. Operation Juliana was a Dutch fraud on the Allies who searched high and low for the missing pieces of the Thyssen fortune. . . .”
- Both the head of the Rotterdam Bank, who discovered the true Nazi ownership of his institution traveled to New York to protest to Prescott Bush. He was found dead of a “heart attack.” ” . . . . In 1945, the former Dutch manager of the Rotterdam bank resumed control only to discover that he was sitting on a huge pile of hidden Nazi assets. In 1947, the manager threatened to inform Dutch authorities, and was immediately fired by the Thyssens. The somewhat naive bank manager then fled to New York City where he intended to talk to Union Bank director Prescott Bush. As Gowen’s Dutch source recalled, the manager intended ‘to reveal [to Prescott Bush] the truth about Baron Heinrich and the Rotterdam Bank, [in order that] some or all of the Thyssen interests in the Thyssen Group might be seized and confiscated as German enemy property.’ The manager’s body was found in New York two weeks later. . . .”
- Both of the Dulles brothers were in a position to influence the operations of the Alien Property Custodian during World War II: ” . . . . “The Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, was on the payroll of the New York J. Henry Schroeder Bank where Foster and Allen Dulles both sat as board members. Foster arranged an appointment for himself as special legal counsel for the Alien Property Custodian while simultaneously representing [German] interests against the custodian. . . .”
- A similar fate befell Eddie Roever, a Dutch reporter who attempted to interview Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1996. ” . . . . Similarly, in 1996 a Dutch journalist Eddy Roever went to London to interview the Baron, who was neighbors with Margaret Thatcher. Roever’s body was discovered two days later. Perhaps, Gowen remarked dryly, it was only a coincidence that both healthy men had died of heart attacks immediately after trying to uncover the truth about the Thyssens. . . .”
- Of paramount importance is the role of the two institutions in which Prescott Bush served–Brown Brothers Harriman and the Union Bank–as a fundamental vehicle for laundering money from the consummately powerful Rockefeller family and related interests in Nazi Germany. ” . . . . But what did the Bush family know about their Nazi connection and when did they know it? As senior managers of Brown Brothers Harriman, they had to have known that their American clients, such as the Rockefellers, were investing heavily in German corporations, including Thyssen’s giant Vereinigte Stahlwerke. As noted historian Christopher Simpson repeatedly documents, it is a matter of public record that Brown Brother’s investments in Nazi Germany took place under the Bush family stewardship. . . . It should be recalled that in January 1937, he hired Allen Dulles to ‘cloak’ his accounts. But cloak from whom? Did he expect that happy little Holland was going to declare war on America? The cloaking operation only makes sense in anticipation of a possible war with Nazi Germany. If Union Bank was not the conduit for laundering the Rockefeller’s Nazi investments back to America, then how could the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank end up owning 31% of the Thyssen group after the war? It should be noted that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest industrial conglomerate in Germany, and with a net worth of more than $50 billion dollars, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp family, famous arms makers for Hitler, leaving the Thyssens as the undisputed champion survivors of the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up money to rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II? . . . . A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies. The Bushes knew perfectly well that Brown Brothers was the American money channel into Nazi Germany, and that Union Bank was the secret pipeline to bring the Nazi money back to America from Holland. The Bushes had to have known how the secret money circuit worked because they were on the board of directors in both directions: Brown Brothers out, Union Bank in. . . .”
- Note that Paul Manning also came across the Bush, Thyssen, Netherlands link: ” . . . . Several decades after the war, investigative reporter Paul Manning, Edward R. Murrow’s colleague, stumbled across the Thyssen interrogations in the US National Archives. Manning intended to write a book about Nazi money laundering. Manning’s manuscript was a dagger at Allen Dulles’ throat: his book specifically mentioned the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart by name, albeit in passing. . . .”
1. With the New Cold War gathering momentum and Trump’s withdrawal from the treaty on intermediate range nuclear missiles pointing the world toward war, it is worth reflecting on the history and deep politics that brought this about.
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty has written about events in August of 1944 that are indicative of the coalescence of the “Christian West” concept that we discussed in AFA #37 and further developed in FTR #1009.
We note that it was in August of 1944 that the famous “Red House” meeting at which the Bormann flight capital network realized under the auspices of Aktion Adlerflug was launched.
However, even before the surrender of Germany and Japan, we began to hear the first rumblings of the Cold War. The Office of Strategic Services, and particularly its agents Frank Wisner and Allen W. Dulles in Zurich, nurtured the idea that the time had come to rejoin selected Nazi power centers in order to split the Western alliance from the Soviet Union. “Rejoin” is the proper word in this case. It was the Dulles-affiliated New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell that had refused to close its offices in Nazi Germany after the start of WWII in 1939, even while Great Britain and France were locked in a losing struggle with Hitler’s invading forces. Therefore, the Dulles OSS “intelligence contacts” in Nazi Germany during the war were for the most part German business associates with whom he was acquainted.
On August 23, 1944, the Romanians accepted Soviet surrender terms and in Bucharest the OSS rounded up Nazi intelligence experts and their voluminous Eastern European intelligence files and concealed them among a trainload of American POW’s who were being quickly evacuated from the Balkans via Turkey. Once in “neutral” Turkey, the train continued to a planned destination at a site on the Syrian border, where it was stopped to permit the transfer of Nazis and POW’s to a fleet of U.S. [Army] Air Force planes for a flight to Cairo.
I was the chief pilot of that flight of some thirty aircraft and was stunned by the discovery of two things I would never have suspected: A number of the Americans had had one or both legs amputated at the knee by their Balkan captors, solely for the purpose of keeping them immobile (the plane I flew had airline seats rather than canvas “bucket” seats, and the men on my plane had lost one or two legs in that barbaric manner), and concealed among these POW’s were a number of Balkan Nazi intelligence specialists who were being taken out of the Balkans ahead of the Soviet armies by the OSS.
As far as I know, this was one of the first visible clues to the emergence of the “East-West” Cold War structure, even while we and the Russians were still allies and remained partners in the great struggle against the Germans.
It was this covert faction within the OSS, coordinated with a similar British intelligence faction, and its policies that encouraged chosen Nazis to conceive of the divisive “Iron Curtain” concept to drive a wedge in the alliance with the Soviet Union as early as 1944–to save their own necks, to salvage certain power centers and their wealth, and to stir up resentment against the Russians, even at the time of their greatest military triumph.
I was only a pilot on that flight, and in no way involved in the diplomatic intricacies of that era, but I have always wondered whose decision it had been, back in mid-1944, a year before the end of World War II, to override the present alliances and to initiate a split between the West and our wartime partner the Soviet Union while we were still firm allies. . . . .
2. Next, we review an article about Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen highlighting:
- The fact that his work with the U.S. was approved by a Nazi chain of command that was still functioning.
- That Bormann worked closely in designing his flight capital program with Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi finance minister, close associate of the Dulles brothers and friend of Clay Shaw.
- That the OUN/B (currently in command of the reins of power in Ukraine), the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustachis and other members of the Anti Bolshevik Bloc of Nations were part of the Gehlen “Org.” They became a key element of the Republican Party through the Crusade For Freedom.
“The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt” by Carl Oglesby; Covert Action Information Bulletin; Fall/1990.
Hitler continued to rant of victory, but after Germany’s massive defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in mid-January 1943, the realists of the German General Staff (OKW) were all agreed that their game was lost. Defeat at Stalingrad meant, at a minimum, that Germany could not win the war in the East that year. This in turn means that the Nazis would have to keep the great preponderance of their military forces tied down on the eastern front and could not redeploy them to the West, where the Anglo-American invasion of Italy would occur that summer. Apparently inspired by the Soviet victory, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced at Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, their demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and the complete de-Nazification of Europe.2
Within the German general staff two competing groups formed around the question of what to do: one led by Heinrich Himmler the other by Martin Bormann.3
Himmler was chief of the SS (Schutzstaffel, “protective echelon”), the blackshirted core of the Nazi party that emerged as Hitler’s bodyguard in the late 1920s and grew into the most powerful of the Nazi political institutions. After the failure of the attempted military coup of July 20, 1944, which wounded but did not kill Hitler, the SS seized all power and imposed a furious blood purge of the armed services in which some seven thousand were arrested and nearly five thousand killled.4 The SS was at that point the only organ of the Nazi state.
Himmler’s plan for dealing with the grim situation facing Nazism found its premise in Hitler’s belief that the alliance between “the ultra-capitalists” of the U.S. and “the ultra-Marxists” of the Soviet Union was politically unstable. “Even now they are at loggerheads,” said Hitler. “If we can now deliver a few more blows, this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder.“5 Himmler believed that this collapse would occur and that the U.S. would then consider the formation of a new anti-soviet alliance with Nazi Germany. The Nazis Would then negotiate “a separate peace” with the United States, separate from any peace with the USSR, with which Germany would remain at war, now joined against the Soviets by the United States.
But Martin Bormann, who was even more powerful than Himmler, did not accept the premise of the separate-peace idea. Bormann was an intimate of Hitler’s, the deputy fuhrer and the head of the Nazi Party, thus superior to Himmler in rank. Bormann wielded additional power as Hitler’s link to the industrial and financial cartels that ran the Nazi economy and was particularly close to Hermann Schmitz, chief executive of I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm that was Nazi Germany’s greatest industrial power.
With the support of Schmitz, Bormann rejected Himmler’s separate-peace strategy on the ground that it was far too optimistic.6 The Allied military advantage was too great, Bormann believed, for Roosevelt to be talked into a separate peace. Roosevelt, after all, had taken the lead in proclaiming the Allies’ demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and total de-Nazification. Bormann reasoned, rather, that the Nazis’ best hope of surviving military defeat lay within their own resources, chief of which was the cohesion of tens of thousands of SS men for whom the prospect of surrender could offer only the gallows.
Bormann and Schmitz developed a more aggressive self-contained approach to the problem of the looming military defeat. The central concept of which was that large numbers of Nazis would have to leave Europe and at least for a time, find places in the world in which to recover their strength. There were several possibilities in Latin America, most notably Argentina and Paraguay; South Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia were also attractive rear areas in which to retreat.7
After the German defeat in the battle of Normandy in June 1944, Bormann took the first external steps toward implementing concrete plans for the Nazis’ great escape.
An enormous amount of Nazi treasure had to be moved out of Europe and made safe. This treasure was apparently divided into several caches, of which the one at the Reichsbank in Berlin included almost three tons of gold (much of it the so-called tooth-gold from the slaughter camps) as well as silver, platinum, tens of thousands of carats of precious stones, and perhaps a billion dollars in various currencies.8
There were industrial assets to be expatriated, including large tonnages of specialty steel and certain industrial machinery as well as blue-prints critical to the domination of certain areas of manufacturing.
Key Nazi companies needed to be relicensed outside Germany in order to escape the reach of war-reparations claims.
And tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, almost all of them members of the SS, needed help to escape Germany and safely regroup in foreign colonies capable of providing security and livelihoods.
For help with the first three of these tasks, Bormann convened a secret meeting of key German industrialists on August 10, 1944, at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg.9 One part of the minutes of this meeting states:
The [Nazi] Party is ready to supply large amounts of money to those industrialists who contribute to the post-war organization abroad. In return, the Party demands all financial reserves which have already been transferred abroad or may later be transferred, so that after the defeat a strong new Reich can be built.10The Nazi expert in this area was Hitter’s one-time financial genius and Minister of the Economy, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, available to Bormann even though he was in prison on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Hitler coup of 1944.According to a U.S. Treasury Department report of 1945, at least 750 enterprises financed by the Nazi Party had been set up outside Germany by the end of the war. These firms were capable of generating an annual income of approximately $30 million, all of it available to Nazi causes.11 It was Schacht’s ability to finesse the legalities of licensing and ownership that brought this situation about.12
Organizing the physical removal of the Nazis’ material assets and the escape of SS personnel were the tasks of the hulking Otto Skorzeny, simultaneously an officer of the SS, the Gestapo and the Waffen SS as well as Hitler’s “favorite commando.“13 Skorzeny worked closely with Bormann and Schacht in transporting the Nazi assets to safety outside Europe and in creating a network of SS escape routes (“rat lines”) that led from all over Germany to the Bavarian city of Memmingen, then to Rome, then by sea to a number of Nazi retreat colonies set up in the global south.
The international organization created to accommodate Bormann’s plans is most often called “The Odessa,” a German acronym for “Organization of Veterans of the SS.”
It has remained active as a shadowy presence since the war and may indeed constitute Nazism’s most notable organizational achievement. But we must understand that none of Bormann’s, Skorzeny’s, and Schacht’s well-laid plans would have stood the least chance of success had it not been for a final component of their organization, one not usually associated with the Odessa at all but very possibly the linchpin of the entire project.
Enter Gehlen
This final element of the Odessa was the so-called Gehlen Organization (the Org), the Nazi intelligence system that sold itself to the U.S. at the end of the war. It was by far the most audacious, most critical, and most essential part of the entire Odessa undertaking. The literature on the Odessa and that on the Gehlen Organization, however, are two different things. No writer in the field Of Nazi studies has yet explicitly associated the two, despite the fact that General Reinhard Gehlen was tied politically as well as personally with Skorzeny and Schacht. Moreover, Gehlen’s fabled post-war organzation was in large part staffed by SS Nazis who are positively identified with the Odessa, men such as the infamous Franz Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg of the Wannsee Institute. An even more compelling reason for associating Gehlen with the Odessa is that, without his organization as a screen, the various Odessa projects would have been directly exposed to American intelligence. If the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had not been neutralized by the Gehlen ploy, the Odessa’s great escape scheme would have been discovered and broken up.
At 43, Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen was a stiff, unprepossessing man of pounds when he presented himself for surrender at the U.S. command center in Fischhausen. But there was nothing small about his ego. “I am head of the section Foreign Armies East in German Army Headquarters,” he announced to the GI at the desk. “I have information to give of the highest importance to your government.” The GI was not impressed, however, and Gehlen spent weeks stewing in a POW compound before an evident Soviet eagerness to find him finally aroused the Americans’ attention.14
Gehlen became chief of the Third Reich’s Foreign Armies East (FHO), on April 1, 1942. He was thus responsible for Germany’s military intelligence operations throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. His FHO was connected in this role with a number of secret fascist organizations in the countries to Germany’s east. These included Stepan Bandera’s “B Faction” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B),15 Romania’s Iron Guard,16 the Ustachis of Yugoslavia,17 the Vanagis of Latvia18 and, after the summer of 1942, “Vlassov’s Army,“19 the band of defectors from Soviet Communism marching behind former Red hero General Andrey Vlassov. Later on in the war, Gehlen placed one of his top men in control of Foreign Armies West, which broadened his power; and then after Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was purged and his Abwehr intelligence service cannibalized by the SS, Gehlen became in effect Nazi Germany’s over-all top intelligence chief. . . .
. . . . Indeed, a partly declassified CIA document recapitulated this story in the early 1970s, noting at this time:
Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Doenitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received approval from Doenitz too!44
. . . . . . . . 47. As Gehlen was about to leave for the United States, he left a message for Baun with another of his top aides, Gerhard Wessel: “I am to tell you from Gehlen that he has discussed with [Hitler’s successor Admiral Karl] Doenitz and [Gehlen’s superior and chief of staff General Franz] Halder the question of continuing his work with the Americans. Both were in agreement.” Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61.
In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans. . . .
. . . . And the whole concept of the deal he was about to offer his conquerors had been approved by a Nazi chain of command that was still functioning despite what the world thought and still does think was the Nazis’ unconditional surrender.47
. . . . “6. Should the organization at any time find itself in a position where the American and German interests diverged, it was accepted that the organization would [consider the interests of Germany first.“56
3. Gestapo chief General Heinrich Mueller was captured by U.S. forces, subsequently released and the files about his activities redacted: ” . . . . on grounds of ‘national security,’ including the possibility that more complete disclosure could compromise intelligence-gathering methods. . . . .”
U.S. Army Intelligence records indicate that Mueller–who was nicknamed ‘Gestapo Mueller’ to distinguish him from the hundreds of other Muellers in the Nazi hierarchy–was captured by Americans in 1945, says historian George Chalou, who worked at the National Archives for 28 years. . . .
. . . . a German television network aired a program–based in part on documents from the U.S. National Archives in Maryland–claiming that Mueller was captured by the U.S. Army, but released for unknown reasons. . . .
. . . . Despite the fact that the files were opened more than 50 years after the end of World War II, numerous portions have been redacted. In February 1999, eight months before the Army records were made public by the National Archives, Army officials sent Rabbi Hier a letter saying some of his requests for information on Mueller were being denied on grounds of ‘national security,’ including the possibility that more complete disclosure could compromise intelligence-gathering methods. . . . .
. . . . Index cards stating that Mueller was in custody first in the town of Ilmenau and then in December 1945 in a ‘civilian internment’ camp in Altenstadt in Upper Bavaria. . . . It ends with the cryptic and provocative sentence, ‘case closed 29 Jan 46.’ It is unclear who placed the information on the card, which states that a Mueller dossier was to be sent to Frankfurt. . . .
. . . there have been unconfirmed reports that he served as an ‘enforcer’ for former Nazis living in South America. . . .
4. As veteran listeners know, these reports are far more than “unconfirmed.” Mueller served as the security director for the Bormann group and, in that capacity, worked directly with U.S. intelligence, the CIA, in particular.
. . . . The Bormann organization had many commercial and political links to the capitals of these three nations, and real clout was available should the chase become too hot. The CIA could have pulled aside the gray curtain that obscured Bormann—at any time. But the CIA and Mueller’s crack organization of former SS men found it to their mutual advantage to cooperate in many situations. There is no morality in the sense that most of us know it in the strange world of professional secrecy, and when it was to the advantage of each to work together they did so. . . .
5. As might be surmised, Mueller’s operatives also worked with the organization of Reinhard Gehlen.
. . . . Even General Gehlen, when he was chief of the Federal Republic’s intelligence service, sent his agents to confer with General Heinrich Mueller in South America. . . .
6. Paul Manning had direct and extensive contact with the Mueller organization, while doing the research for his remarkable book.
. . . . During years of research for this book, I have become aware of Heinrich Mueller and his security force, which provides protection for the leadership in Latin America and wherever else they may travel to Europe and to the United States to check on investments and profits. Through intermediaries, I have attempted unceasingly to penetrate to the central core of the organization in South America, but have been denied access. At the last meeting that I know about, it was voted: ‘Herr Manning’s writing would focus undue attention on our activities and his request must once again be denied.’ The elderly leaders, including Reichminister Bormann, who is now eighty, wanted me on the scene to write of their side of the story, above all his story, of one of the most amazing and successful financial and industrial cloaking actions in history, of which he is justifiably proud. I had sent word to Bormann that the true story, his firsthand account, should become a matter of historical record, and stated that I would be agreeable to writing it if I could tell his true story, warts and all. . . .
. . . . Back came the word: ‘You are a free world journalist, and can write as you think best. We, too, are interested only in truth.’ They agreed to my request to bring along a three-man camera crew from CBS News to film my conversations with Martin Bormann, and even approved my wish for at least a personal thumbprint of the former Reichsleiter and party minister, which would be positive proof of his identity. At the organization’s request, I sent the background, names, photos and credentials of the particular CBS cameramen: Lawrence Walter Pierce, Richard Henry Perez, and Oden Lester Kitzmiller, an award-winning camera crew (which got the exclusive film coverage of the attempted assassination of Governor George Wallace when he was running for president). . . .
. . . . I am sorry to say that the younger leaders , the ones now in virtual command, voted ‘No.’ They did agree, however that 232 historical documents from World War II, which Bormann had had shipped out of Berlin in the waning days of the war, and which are stored in his archives in South America, could be sent to me anonymously, to be published. They said their lengthy investigation of me had produced confidence that I was an objective journalist, as well as a brave one, for their probing stretched back to World War II days, and up to the present. . . .
. . . . Heinrich Mueller, now seventy-nine years old, who also serves as keeper of these archives as well as chief of all security for the NSDAP, rejected this decision: when the courier reached the Buenos Aires international airport bearing these documents for me he was relieved of them by the Argentine secret police acting under an initiative from Mueller. . . .
. . . . As Mueller had explained previously, he had nothing against me personally; I had been cleared of any ‘strange connections’ by his agents in New York City, whose surveillance efforts were supplemented by the old pros of the Gestapo, up from South America to assist in watching me. This continued intermittently for years, and efforts were stepped up in response to the intensity of my investigations. The statement I had originally made to their representatives in West Germany, that I was only a diligent journalist trying to dig out an important story, finally proved satisfactory to them. I observed that Mueller hadn’t lost his touch in the field of surveillance, judging by the quality, skill, and number of men and women who tracked me, at what must have been enormous cost, wherever I went in New York City, Washington, and overseas. . . .
7. Mueller didn’t restrict his security activities on behalf of the Bormann group to surveillance.
. . . . Israeli agents who move too closely to these centers of power are eliminated. One such termination was Fritz Bauer, formerly attorney general for the State of Hesse in Frankfurt, a survivor of Auschwitz and the man who tipped off the Israeli Mossad about the presence of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, who was killed on orders of General Mueller. . . .Mueller’s ruthlessness even today is what deters Artur Axmann from altering his testimony that he saw Bormann lying dead on the roadway the night of their escape from the Fuehrerbunker, May 1–2, 1945. . . .To this day, Axmann, the only so-called living witness to the ‘death’ of Bormann in Berlin, knows his life is in jeopardy if he reverses himself. General Mueller is thorough and has a long memory, and for a Nazi such as Axmann to go against Mueller’s original directive would make him a traitor; retribution would surely follow. . . .
8. T. H. Tetens’ The New Germany and the Old Nazis details the coup attempt of 1953, in which SS officer Werner Naumann (propaganda minister Goebbels’ hand-picked successor) tried to seize power, with the assistance of other Third Reich alumni.
Of consummate significance in this context is the executive force behind Naumann’s attempt–a fuehrungsring that administered the “new” Germany on behalf of a Nazi government in exile in Spain.
Taken in conjunction with the material in Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, the disclosure that Reinhard Gehlen’s relocation of his spy outfit to U.S. intelligence was cleared with a German chain of command that had been preserved intact, as well as the relationship between Helene Von Damm, Otto von Bolschwing and the Nazi faction of the GOP, the Tetens discussion of the Naumann coup permits us to view much of the structure of this Underground Reich.
We also note that BND, the successor organization to the Gehlen outfit, destroyed the files of 250 executives of the organization, who had held significant positions in the SS, SD (the SS intelligence service) or Gestapo. Furthermore, BND has deliberately recruited from the families of BND personnel, thereby enabling the perpetuation of the Nazi ethos down through the generations.
. . . . The next morning shortly after seven, the head of the press division of the Foreign Office, Sir William Ridsdale, distributed a communique which stated that a group of seven former high Nazi officials had been arrested in Duesseldorf and Hamburg for having plotted the overthrow of the Bonn Republic. The official announcement said that the British authorities had been aware for some time that the seven men had been involved in a plot and that the arrest had been made under the authority of Foreign Minister Eden. The ringleader of the group was a Dr. Werner Naumann, who, until the German collapse, had served as State Secretary in Dr. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Dr. Naumann had been with Hitler during the very last days in the bunker of the Chancellery in Berlin, and he was the one designated by the Fuehrer in his testament to succeed Dr. Goebbels as Propaganda Minister. . . .
. . . The British reply was polite but determined. It pointed out that the occupation authorities had been profoundly disturbed when they had found evidence of an advanced plot, instigated by a vast Nazi network spreading from Dusseldorf to Cairo, Madrid, Buenos AIres, and Malmo, Sweden. They stated furthermore that they had had to proceed with the utmost secrecy, since the plotters had close contacts with high government circles in Bonn. According to the New York Times) the British submitted evidence to the Chancellor which “revealed a wide-spread plot with ramifications into many political parties and other influential organizations of West Germany.” Faced with the grave implications of the Naumann conspiracy, Dr. Adenauer and his Minister of Justice, Dr. Thomas Dehler, had to confirm the seriousness of the case. . . .
. . . After taking over the investigation, Dr. Adenauer admitted at a press conference “the existence of a far-flung plot” and that Naumann’s activities “had been financed with considerable sums by Nazi groups in foreign countries.” Minister of Justice Dehler told reporters that the Naumann group had developed “a most cunning and diabolic system of infiltration” and that the conspiracy represented “an acute threat to the democratic institutions in the Federal Republic.” The captured Naumann documents, he said, “gave clear proof that the aim of the group had been to fill key positions m all Rightist parties with hard-core Nazis and thereby create propaganda vehicles which later could be used for a broad neo-Nazi mass movement.” According to the Wiesbadener Kurier of May 6, 1953, Dr. Dehler quoted from one document in which Naumann expressed the hope that, if his scheme succeeded, “the coming election might be the last of its kind.”
Soon after the British had transferred the prosecution of the case to the German authorities, the lawyers of the arrested plotters began to put pressure on the federal government to suppress the case and release their clients. The Bremer Nachrichten reported on June 15, 1953, that the Naumann lawyers had even threatened to discuss “the true background of the case openly” if their clients were not released soon.
By the end of June 1953 Dr. Naumann and his co-plotters were suddenly released, in violation of the most rigid stipulations of German law and court procedure. A year and a half later, in December 1954, in spite of the fact that the prosecutor had brought an indictment against Naumann charging conspiracy against the constitution of the Federal Republic, the highest court quietly dismissed the case without any trial or hearing. Even before the plotters were released, the British became suspicious about the handling of the Naumann case and leaked some of the incriminating material to a staunchly democratic German newspaper which had gained quite a reputation for its revealing articles on the infiltration of former Nazis into the Adenauer administration. During the early part of June 1953 the Frankfurter Rundschau published five articles dealing with Naumann’s tapped telephone conversations, notes from his appointment calendar, correspondence between the plotters, and significant excerpts from his diary. The published material gave a full inside view of the scope and character of the conspiracy. The description of the intricate structure of the plot and the background of the many people involved filled whole pages in the Frankfurter Rundschau. Here it is sufficient to state the main objectives as they emerged from the confiscated material:
1] Use the democratic constitution as a facade behind which a new Nazi movement could be organized, designed to take over the apparatus of the state when time and circumstances would make such a step necessary and profitable.
2] Let Chancellor Adenauer serve as a front, exactly as Gustav Stresemann did during the twenties, behind which a new German power could develop undisturbed without arousing premature suspicions.
3] Apply a new method of infiltration (Unterwanderung) in order to conquer the existing parties and the administrative machinery of the state from within. Avoid noisy nationalistic demonstrations, flag-waving and incidents; use the more efficient and unsuspicious procedure of working in small cells, which some day, at an opportune moment, might consolidate themselves into a broad mass organization.
The detailed plan, which the Germans soon called the “Nau-Nau” strategy, instructed former well-known Nazi leaders to stay discreetly in the background until the time was ripe for action. In the meantime the leaders were to use all their connections to bring bright and capable young Nazis, especially those trained in the Hitler Youth, into influential positions, not only in the Adenauer coalition parties but also into all other political organizations.
The Naumann documents revealed much more than a mere strategic blueprint of how to subvert a state apparatus or the existing parties from within. There was a detailed record of how Dr. Naumann had used his contacts with top industrialists and leading politicians to fill well-paid positions in the Free Democratic party with scores of young, able Nazis who once had learned the tricks of the trade in the Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Dr. Naumann’s most devoted collaborator in this enterprise was his intimate friend, Dr. Ernst Achenbach, a former Ribbentrop diplomat who, after the war, had become a prominent lawyer in the Ruhr district. It was reported that Achenbach and Naumann had been close friends during the war when they served together in important positions under Ambassador Otto Abetz in the German Embassy in occupied Paris. It was Dr. Achenbach who, in 1943, recommended to the Foreign Office that two thousand Jews be shipped to the East as reprisal for an attack on two Nazi officers. . . .
. . . A lengthy British white paper on the Naumann-Achenbach plot was ready to be released in August 1953, when it was suddenly “withdrawn at the last moment on Cabinet instructions, for reasons which never have been made quite clear.” There were rumors that the British had yielded under the combined pressure of Washington and Bonn. The confiscated material disclosed that the Achenbach/Naumann group represented a so-called Fuehrungsring‑a Nazi high command‑a kind of political Mafia, with headquarters in Madrid, which operated by remote control through clever organizational schemes on different levels, serving various purposes. This Gauleiter group met periodically in the strictest secrecy, mainly in Duesseldorf or Hamburg.
Up to thirty former Nazi top officials assembled under false names as “old friends” in hotels, where they carried on their political scheming. Among them were the ex-Gauleiters Kaufmann, Grohe, Florian, Wegener, Frauenfeld, and Scheel, a number of high officials from the Propaganda Ministry, some Ribbentrop diplomats, and top-ranking SS officers. According to the British correspondent Alistair Horne, the “roll calls of the ex-Gauleiters and high SS officials present read like a page from some nightmare Who’s Who of the Third Reich.” These Nazi leaders had either escaped the dragnet of the victorious Allies by false identification papers or had been released from internment after a year or two without any substantial penalty. The aim of the group was “to form the general staff of the ‘National Opposition’ ” and build “a new political party out of the existing parties of the right.”
Besides the infiltration of co-conspirators into positions of command within the existing parties and into government departments and party organizations on the middle and lower levels, another task of the Fuehrungsring was to organize and direct mass organizations, such as veterans’ and refugee associations, which one day could easily be used as instruments for political action. Other fields of activities for the group were political propaganda in foreign countries, carried out in close contact with the Nazi headquarters in Madrid, and the initiation of conspiracies in foreign countries on behalf of German industrial cartels. . . .
. . . Long before, they had captured numerous key positions in the Adenauer administration, in political parties, and in the Laender (state) parliaments. They were exuberant about their successes in one of their secret directives circulated by the Nazi headquarters in Madrid. This lengthy document, issued in September 1950, spoke of the total failure of the Western occupation policy and pointed gleefully to the success of the “flexible and smoothly-working organization which, at the end of the war, provided the precondition for all the gains that by necessity emerged for Germany out of the chaos of the postwar period.”
“. . . Five years after Potsdam, we can look back with pride at our accomplishments .... Nothing happened by chance; everything was carefully planned.” There is considerable material available which gives conclusive proof that the Nazis had made preparations long before their collapse to train an army of agents, often skillfully camouflaged as “resistance fighters.” About the successful continuation of the Nazi subversive activities, the Madrid Circular Letter had this to say: ‘Even after the collapse, the National Socialist party continued to work in a camouflaged way [getarnt] in dozens of seemingly innocuous societies and groups, in order to keep the national outlook of the German people alive and undiluted. Just as many small brooks go toward making a mighty stream, the various nationalistic and radical groups in the Zonen-Reich carried out, almost without exception, worthwhile and powerful propaganda. Each of these groups had its special task and had to adjust its work to certain situations and circumstances. However, it was of chief importance to direct the underlying trend of the patriotic propaganda toward the same goal. The more diverse and disconnected these groups appeared on the surface, the less they were apt to arouse suspicion that they were directed and influenced by a central organization. We have placed our confidential agents, observers, and representatives for special assignments in all parties, even among Communist organizations and their fronts. The greater the number of organizations controlled and influenced by us, the more effective will be the results of our work.” . . . .
9. A fascinating intelligence involvement of Shaw’s is his work with Permindex.
. . . . The next step in the CIA ladder after his high-level overseas informant service was his work with the strange company called Permindex. When the announcement for Permindex was first made in Switzerland in late 1956, its principal backing was to come from a local banker named Hans Seligman. But as more investigation by the local papers was done, it became clear that the real backer was J. Henry Schroeder Corporation. This information was quite revealing. Schroeder’s had been closely associated with Allen Dulles and the CIA for years. Allen Dulles’s connections to the Schroder banking family went back to the thirties when his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, first began representing them through him. Later, Dulles was the bank’s General Counsel. In fact, when Dulles became CIA director, Schroeder’s was a repository for a fifty million dollar contingency fund that Dulles personally controlled. Schroder’s was a welcome conduit because the bank benefited from previous CIA overthrows in Guatemala and Iran. Another reason that there began to be a furor over Permindex in Switzerland was the fact that the bank’s founder, Baron Kurt von Schroder, was associated with the Third Reich, specifically Heinrich Himmler. The project now became stalled in Switzerland. It now moved to Rome. In a September 1069 interview Shaw did for Penthouse Magazine, he told James Phelan that he only grew interested in the project when it moved to Italy. Which was in October 1958. Yet a State Department cable dated April 9 of that year says that Shaw showed great interest in Permindex from the outset.
One can see why. The board of directors as made up of bankers who had been tied up with fascist governments, people who worked the Jewish refugee racket during World War II, a former member of Mussolini’s cabinet, and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, the economic wizard behind the Third Reich, who was a friend of Shaw’s. These people would all appeal to the conservative Shaw. There were at least four international newspapers that exposed the bizarre activities of Permindex when it was in Rome. One problem was the mysterious source of funding: no one knew where it was coming from. Another was that its activities reportedly included assassination attempts on French Premier Charles De Gaulle. Which would make sense since the founding member of Permindex, Ferenc Nagy, was a close friend of Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle was a leader of the OAS, a group of former French officers who broke with De Gaulle over his Algerian policy. They later made several attempts on De Gaulle’s life, which the CIA was privy to. Again, this mysterious source of funding, plus the rightwing, neo-Fascist directors created another wave of controversy. One newspaper wrote that the organization may have been “a creature of the CIA . . . set up as a cove for the transfer of CIA . . . funds in Italy for legal political-espionage activities.” The Schroder connection would certainly suggest that. . . .
10. One of the operations in which Ferrie and Shaw participated was an effort to bolster Freeport Sulphur. Note the networking with Canadian nickel interests, and correlate this with the information below about John Foster Dulles’s midwiving of I.G. Farben and Foster Dulles’s relationship with Clay Shaw’s friend.
. . . . In Chapter 1, the author introduced Freeport Sulphur and its subsidiaries Moa Bay Mining and Nicaro Nickel. These companies all had large investments in Cuba prior to Castro’s revolution. And this ended up being one of the ways that Garrison connected Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. This came about for two reasons. First, with Castro taking over their operations in Cuba, Freeport was attempting to investigate bringing in nickel ore from Cuba, through Canada, which still had trade relations with Cuba. The ore would then be refined in Louisiana, either at a plant already in New Orleans or at another plant in Braithwaite. Shaw, an impressario of international trade, was on this exploratory team for Freeport. And he and two other men had been flown to Canada by Ferrie as part of this effort. More evidence of this connection through Freeport was found during their investigation of Guy Banister. Banister apparently knew about another flight taken by Shaw with an official of Freeport, likely Charles Wight, to Cuba. Again the pilot was David Ferrie. Another reason this Freeport connection was important to Garrison is that he found a witness named James Plaine in Houston who said that Mr. Wight of Freeport Sulphur had contacted him in regards to an assassination plot against Castro. Considering the amount of money Freeport was about to lose in Cuba, plus the number of Eastern Establishment luminaries associated with the company–such as Jock Whitney, Jean Mauze and Godfrey Rockefeller–it is not surprising that such a thing was contemplated within their ranks. . . .
11a. Before highlighting John Foster Dulles’ midwifing of I.G. Farben involving–among other things– Canadian-linked nickel interests, we set forth events representative of the fundamental place of Sullivan & Cromwell in the development of American Big Money.
. . . . . . . . In 1882, it created Edison General Electric. Seven years later, with the financier J.P. Morgan as its client, it wove twenty-one steelmakers into the National Tube Company and then, in 1891, merged National Tube with seven other companies to create U.S. Steel, capitalized at more than one billion dollars, an astounding sum at that time. The railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced as a “malefactor of great wealth” and “an enemy of the Republic,” hired the firm to wage two of his legendary proxy wars, one to take over the Illinois Central Railroad and another to fend off angry shareholders at Wells Fargo Bank. It won the first with tactics that a New York newspaper called “one of those ruthless exercises of the power of sheer millions,” and the second with complex maneuvers that, according to a book about the firm, amounted to “deceit, bribery and trickery [that] was all legal.”
Soon afterward, working on behalf of French investors who were facing ruin after their effort to build a canal across Panama collapsed, Sullivan & Cromwell achieved a unique triumph in global politics. Through a masterful lobbying campaign, its endlessly resourceful managing partner, William Nelson Cromwell, persuaded the United States Congress to reverse its decision to build a canal across Nicaragua and to pay his French clients $40 million for their land in Panama instead. Then he helped engineer a revolution that pulled the province of Panama away from Colombia and established it as an independent country, led by a clique willing to show its gratitude by allowing construction of a canal on terms favorable to the United States. One newspaper called him “the man whose masterful mind, whetted on the grindstone of corporate cunning, conceived and carried out the rape of the Isthmus.” . . .
11b. In an interesting development not described in the original program, we note that International Nickel faced an anti-trust suit in the immediate aftermath of World Wart II.
Treason’s Peace: German Dyes and American Dupes by Howard Watson Ambruster; Beechhurst Press (1947); p. 347.
. . . . A year was to pass before another alleged Farben anti-trust plot was hauled into court, after mysterious delays inside government. On May 16, 1946, the International Nickel Company of Canada and its wholly-owned namesake, both located in New York, with three of their officers, were named as defendants in a civil action accusing them of cartel price fixing alliance with Farben, and illegitimate aid to German re-armament.
Why action on this alleged conspiracy with Farben had been delayed has not been explained as a tight situation on nickel had long been a matter of common knowledge and consideration inside the Justice Department. Perhaps the delay may have been influenced by the effect that one of the directors of International Nickel was none other than that celebrated Republican statesman and adviser of high Democratic officials, John Foster Dulles, of the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. . . .
11c. Of note in the context of Clay Shaw’s friendship with Hjalmar Schacht, association with the Schroder interests, work with Canadian nickel interests on behalf of Freeport Sulphur and Allen Dulles is John Foster Dulles and his shepherding of the formation of the I.G. Farben cartel.
Note the role of nickel and Canadian nickel interests in the coalescence of Farben.
. . . . Foster had helped design the Dawes Plan of 1924, which restructured Germany’s reparation payments in ways that opened up huge new markets for American banks, and later that year he arranged for five of them to lend $100 million to German borrowers. In the seven years that followed, he and his partners brokered another $900 million in loans to Germany–the equivalent of more than $15 billion in early-twenty-first century dollars. This made him the preeminent salesman of German bonds in the United States, probably the world. He sharply rejected critics who argued that American banks should invest more inside the United States and protested when the State Department sought to restrict loans to Germany that were unrelated to reparation payments or that supported cartels or monopolies.
Foster made much money building and advising cartels, which are based on agreements among competing firms to control supplies, fix prices, and close their supply and distribution networks to outsiders. Reformers in many countries railed against these cartels, but Foster defended them as guarantors of stability that ensured profits while protecting economies from unpredictable swings. Two that he shaped became global forces.
Among Foster’s premier clients was the New Jersey-based International Nickel Company, for which he was not only counsel but also a director and member of the executive board. In the early 1930s, he steered it, along with its Canadian affiliate, into a cartel with France’s two major nickel producers. In 1934, he brought the biggest German nickel producer, I.G. Farben, into the cartel. This gave Nazi Germany access to the cartel’s resources. “Without Dulles,” according to a study of Sullivan & Cromwell, “Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with [International Nickel], which controlled the world’s supply of nickel, a crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate.”
I.G. Farben was also one of the world’s largest chemical companies–it would produce the Zyklon B gas used at Nazi death camps–and as Foster was bringing it into the nickel cartel, he also helped it establish a global chemical cartel. He was a board member and legal counsel for another chemical producer, the Solvay conglomerate, based in Belgium. During the 1930s, he guided Solvay, I. G. Farben, the American firm Allied Chemical & Dye, and several other companies into a chemical cartel just as potent as the one he had organized for nickel producers.
In mid-1931, a consortium of American banks, eager to safeguard their investments in Germany, persuaded the German government to accept a loan of nearly $500 million to prevent default. Foster was their agent. His ties to the German government tightened after Hitler took power at the beginning of 1933 and appointed Foster’s old friend Hjalmar Schacht as minister of economics.
Allen [Dulles] had introduced the two men a decade earlier, when he was a diplomat in Berlin and Foster passed through regularly on Sullivan & Cromwell business. They were immediately drawn to each other, Schacht spoke fluent English and understood the United States well. Like Dulles, he projected an air of brisk authority. He was tall, gaunt, and always erect, with close-cropped hair and high, tight collars. Both men had considered entering the clergy before turning their powerful minds toward more remunerative pursuits. Each admired the culture that had produced the other. Both believed that a resurgent Germany would stand against Bolshevism. Mobilizing American capital to finance its rise was their common interest.
Working with Schacht, Foster helped the National Socialist state find rich sources of financing in the United States for its public agencies, banks, and industries. The two men shaped complex restructurings of German loan obligations at several “debt conferences” in Berlin–conferences that were officially among bankers, but were in fact closely guided by the German and American governments–and came up with new formulas that made it easier for the Germans to borrow money from American banks. Sullivan & Cromwell floated the first American bonds issued by the giant German steelmaker and arms manufacturer Krupp A.G., extended I.G. Farben’s global reach, and fought successfully to block Canada’s effort to restrict the export of steel to German arms makers. According to one history, the firm “represented several provincial governments, some large industrial combines, a number of big American companies with interests in the Reich, and some rich individuals.” By another account it “thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime.” The columnist Drew Pearson gleefully listed the German clients of Sullivan & Cromwell who had contributed money to the Nazis, and described Foster as chief agent for “the banking circles that rescued Adolf Hitler from the financial depths and set up his Nazi party as a going concern.”
Although the relationship between Foster and Schacht began well and thrived for years, it ended badly. Schacht contributed decisively to German rearmament and publicly urged Jews to “realize that their influence in Germany has disappeared for all time.” Although he later broke with Hitler and left the government, he would be tried at Nuremberg for “crimes against peace.” He was acquitted, but the chief American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, called him “the facade of starched responsibility, who in the early days provided the window dressing, the bait for the hesitant.” He baited no one more successfully than Foster.
During the mid-1930s, through a series of currency maneuvers, discounted buybacks, and other forms of financial warfare, Germany effectively defaulted on its debts to American investors. Foster represented the investors in unsuccessful appeals to Germany, many of them addressed to his old friend Schacht. Clients who had followed Sullivan & Cromwell’s advice to buy German bonds lost fortunes. That advice, according to one study, “cost Americans a billion dollars because Schacht seduced Dulles into supporting Germany for far too long.’ . . . .
. . . . Foster had clear financial reasons to collaborate with the Nazi regime, and his ideological reason–Hitler was fiercely anti-Bolshevik–was equally compelling. In later years, scholars would ask about his actions in the world. Did he do it out of a desire to protect economic privilege, or out of anti-Communist fervor? The best answer may be that to him there was no difference. In his mind defending multinational business and fighting Bolshevism were the same thing.
Since 1933, all letters written from the German offices of Sullivan & Cromwell had ended, as required by German regulations, with the salutation Heil Hitler! That did not disturb Foster. He churned out magazine and newspaper articles asserting that the “dynamic” countries of the world–Germany, Italy, and Japan–“feel within themselves potentialities which are suppressed,” and that Hitler’s semi-secret rearmament project simply showed that “Germany, by unilateral action, has now taken back her freedom of action.” . . . .
12a. Both Dulles brothers conspired to shut down Operation Safehaven, safeguarding their corporate relationships with Third Reich industry and paving the way for the rise of the Bormann capital network. “. . . . While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother was doing the same in New York. . . . Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, [Allen] Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the families of Hitler’s victims. . . .”
Note that former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg was a possible choice to head the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
. . . . Dulles and [Thomas] McKittrick [of the Bank of International Settlements] continued to work closely together for the rest of the war. In the final months of the conflict, the two men collaborated against a Roosevelt operation called Project Safehaven that sought to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. Administration officials feared that, by hiding their ill-gotten wealth, members of the German elite planned to bide their time after the war and would then try to regain power. Morgenthau’s Treasury Department team, which spearheaded Project Safehaven, reached out to the OSS and BIS for assistance. But Dulles and McKittrick were more inclined to protect their clients’ interests. Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the families of Hitler’s victims.
Dulles realized that none of his arguments against Project Safehaven would be well received by Morgenthau. So he resorted to time-honored methods of bureaucratic stalling and sabotage to help sink the operation, explaining in a December 1944 memo to his OSS superiors that his Bern office lacked “adequate personnel to do [an] effective job in this field and meet other demands.” . . . .
. . . . While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother was doing the same in New York. By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property. Some of Foster’s legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials–such as diesel-fuel injection motors that the U.S. military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes. By the end of the war, many of Foster’s clients were under investigation by the Justice Department’s antitrust division. And Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy.
But Foster’s brother was guarding his back. From his frontline position in Europe, Allen was well-placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm. “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” observed Nazi hunter John Loftus, who pored through numerous war documents related to the Dulles brothers when he served as a U.S. prosecutor in the Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter.
If their powerful enemy in the White House had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young man served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason. . . .
13. We have spoken for years about The Crusade For Freedom, a covert operation with both foreign and domestic venues. Abroad, the CFF was a vehicle for financing the use of Eastern European Third Reich alumni as “fascist freedom fighters” in paramilitary operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Domestically, the CFF spawned a Nazi branch of the Republican Party, with roots in the Third Reich and the Reinhard Gehlen spy organization.
The CFF became a major element of the U.S. Cold War establishment.
Many of its participants and associates were prominent not only on the far right but in the National Security Establishment as well.
Many of them also figure in the milieu of the JFK assassination:
” . . . . Members of the Texas Crusade for Freedom would become a who’s who of Texans connected to the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In addition to Neil Mallon, members included [Paul] Raigorodsky, Lewis W. MacNaughton, Everette De Golyer, and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Charles Cabell, who was Allen Dulles’s deputy CIA director [fired by JFK for his conduct in the Bay of Pigs operation along with Dulles himself]. Another member was D. Harold Byrd, who owned the building in downtown Dallas that would become known as the Texas School Book Depository. Another member was E.M. ‘Ted’ Dealey, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, who was a harsh critic of Kennedy. . . .”
Some of the most important Republicans on the national stage not only were essential parts of the CFF/Nazi GOP nexus but also figure into the investigation into the JFK assassination.
- CFF godfather Allen Dulles was the principal member of the Warren Commission and appears to have been an architect of the assassination itself.
- Richard Nixon was in Dallas on 11/22/1963, flew out about an hour and a half before the fatal shots were fired and then lied about it to the FBI.
- Ronald Reagan was on the Rockefeller Commission that found (incorrectly) that the CIA was not involved in the assassination. He also refused to honor Jim Garrison’s request to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley from California.
- George H.W. Bush was in Dallas on 11/22/1963 and says he can’t remember where he was when Kennedy was killed.
. . . . Frustration over Truman’s 1948 election victory over Dewey (which they blamed on the “Jewish vote”) impelled Dulles and his protégé Richard Nixon to work toward the realization of the fascist freedom fighter presence in the Republican Party’s ethnic outreach organization. As a young congressman, Nixon had been Allen Dulles’s confidant. They both blamed Governor Dewey’s razor-thin loss to Truman in the 1948 presidential election on the Jewish vote. When he became Eisenhower’s vice president in 1952, Nixon was determined to build his own ethnic base. . . .
. . . . Vice President Nixon’s secret political war of Nazis against Jews in American politics was never investigated at the time. The foreign language-speaking Croatians and other Fascist émigré groups had a ready-made network for contacting and mobilizing the Eastern European ethnic bloc. There is a very high correlation between CIA domestic subsidies to Fascist ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1950’s and the leadership of the Republican Party’s ethnic campaign groups. The motive for the under-the-table financing was clear: Nixon used Nazis to offset the Jewish vote for the Democrats. . . .
. . . . In 1952, Nixon had formed an Ethnic Division within the Republican National Committee. Displaced fascists, hoping to be returned to power by an Eisenhower-Nixon ‘liberation’ policy signed on with the committee. In 1953, when Republicans were in office, the immigration laws were changed to admit Nazis, even members of the SS. They flooded into the country. Nixon himself oversaw the new immigration program. As Vice President, he even received Eastern European Fascists in the White House. . . .
. . . . As a young movie actor in the early 1950s, Reagan was employed as the public spokesperson for an OPC front named the ‘Crusade for Freedom.’ Reagan may not have known it, but 99 percent for the Crusade’s funds came from clandestine accounts, which were then laundered through the Crusade to various organizations such as Radio Liberty, which employed Dulles’s Fascists. Bill Casey, who later became CIA director under Ronald Reagan, also worked in Germany after World War II on Dulles’ Nazi ‘freedom fighters’ program. When he returned to New York, Casey headed up another OPC front, the International Rescue Committee, which sponsored the immigration of these Fascists to the United States. Casey’s committee replaced the International Red Cross as the sponsor for Dulles’s recruits. Confidential interviews, former members, OPC; former members, British foreign and Commonwealth Office. . . .
. . . . . It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon’s promise to make the ‘ethnic emigres’ a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972, Nixon’s State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush’s tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor’s 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party’s official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush’s campaign allies were the émigré Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States. . . .
14. Many of them (participants in the Crusade For Freedom) also figure in the milieu of the JFK assassination:
. . . . In 1951, [George H.W. Bush benefactor Neil] Mallon brought together many of Dallas’s most powerful citizens, from oilmen and titans of the burgeoning military-contracting industry to German scientists who had fled the wreckage of Hitler’s Germany to help fashion weapons against the Communist threat.
George de Mohrenschildt moved to Dallas in 1952, established himself as a consulting geologist, and was quickly accepted into the city’s ruling elite. He joined the powerful Dallas Petroleum Club and became a regular at Council on World Affairs meetings. Many of the figures involved in those two entities also showed up on the boards of other influential local groups. One was the Texas chapter of the Crusade for Freedom, a private conduit for laundered money to be sent to “freedom fighters.” . . . .
. . . . Members of the Texas Crusade for Freedom would become a who’s who of Texans connected to the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In addition to Neil Mallon, members included [Paul] Raigorodsky, Lewis W. MacNaughton, Everette De Golyer, and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Charles Cabell, who was Allen Dulles’s deputy CIA director [fired by JFK for his conduct in the Bay of Pigs operation along with Dulles himself]. Another member was D. Harold Byrd, who owned the building in downtown Dallas that would become known as the Texas School Book Depository. Another member was E.M. “Ted” Dealey, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, who was a harsh critic of Kennedy. . . .
15. One of the concepts central to understanding an extension of the U.S. intelligence/Hapsburg anti-Communist alliance is the concept of “The Christian West”–explained in the description for AFA #37: ” . . . . When it became clear that the armies of the Third Reich were going to be defeated, it opened secret negotiations with representatives from the Western Allies. Representatives on both sides belonged to the transatlantic financial and industrial fraternity that had actively supported fascism. The thrust of these negotiations was the establishment of The Christian West. Viewed by the Nazis as a vehicle for surviving military defeat, ‘The Christian West’ involved a Hitler-less Reich joining with the U.S., Britain, France and other European nations in a transatlantic, pan-European anti-Soviet alliance. In fact, The Christian West became a reality only after the cessation of hostilities. The de-Nazification of Germany was aborted. Although a few of the more obvious and obnoxious elements of Nazism were removed, Nazis were returned to power at virtually every level and in almost every capacity in the Federal Republic of Germany. . . .”
Of paramount significance for our purposes is a “Christian Wester” accommodation apparently involving Prince Egon Max von Hohenloe, who married into the Habsburg family. Operating out of Lichtenstein and traveling on a Lichtenstein passport, von Hohenloe served as an intermediary between U.S. intelligence and Walter Schellenberg, in charge of overseas intelligence for the SS. (Schellenberg was also on the board of directors of International Telephone and Telegraph and became a key operative for the postwar Gehlen organization.)
Chief among the American negotiators was Allen Dulles. Donovan also appears to have played a significant part.
. . . . As early as winter of 1942, Schellenberg hinted to the uneasy Himmler that he now intended to launch discreet soundings. These ranged from Abram Stevens Hewitt in Stockholm to Theodore Morde, a Reader’s Digest correspondent in Ankara. Inevitably, Schellenberg discovered a go-between with lines to Allen Dulles, and early in 1943 a series of discussions ensued.
Thus opened the contested exchanges between “Mr. Bull” (Dulles) and “Mr. Pauls” (prince Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg). Max Hohenlohe had long been an international-set acquaintance of Dulles, a bustling, polished socialite from the Sudetenland whose status as a minor royal drew customers for munitions from the Skoda works, a concession Schellenberg helped him snag. Hohenlohe already bestowed over vast landed properties in Spain after marrying into the Hapsburg family; he was currently hedging his political future by traveling on a Lichtenstein passport.
A Canaris familiar, Prince Hohenlohe caught Schellenberg’s attention early in 1942 by sending the rising SD official his own jaundiced appraisal of prospects in Europe. With the all-seeing SD Commander Reinhard Heydrich assassinated at the end of May, possibilities had obviously widened for the opportunistic Schellenberg. Barely thirty, scarcely beyond his baby fat, the Amt VI chieftain resembled an SS doll decked out in death’s-head campaign hat and tailored parade uniform.
With Schellenberg’s cautious sponsorship, Max Hohenlohe trotted out a line of provisional peace proposals, first with the British Ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare—always a soft touch—and the sympathetic American Counselor of Embassy Wlliam Walton Butterworth (an intimate of George Kennan’s since Princeton), with Vatican sympathizers, with Fritz Klein, (a friend of both the Dulles brothers), and—evidently at the recommendation of American negotiators in Lisbon, where Kennan and Colonel Solborg were stationed—with Allen Dulles himself toward the middle of February 1943.
Exactly what was agreed upon has become a matter of dispute, largely because the SS summations of the exchanges appear to have passed through Russian hands on their way to the archives, after which the USSR News Services waited until 1948 and the upheavals of the Cold War to put them out as dispatches. Nevertheless, much of their thrust is borne out by related RSHA paperwork, private journals, and intelligence files from a variety of sources.
What seemed most scandalous at the time was Dulles’s reported pique with “outdated politicians, emigres, and prejudiced Jews.” The hope in America was that these malcontents could be resettled, perhaps in “Africa.” As one in close touch with Vatican circles, Dulles maintained, he strongly urged the “German bishops” to “plead Germany’s cause” in America, keeping in mind that “it had been the American Catholics who forced the Jewish-America papers to stop their baiting of Franco Spain.”
This has the look of crumbs spread upon the water. Pronouncements alternated with rich meals in a Liechtenstein chateau; Hohenlohe bit by bit exposed his quasi-official status as a spokesman for SS elements within the German government who now looked beyond the “wild men” in control.
What casts a longer shadow is the outline of Allen’s geopolitical ideas. The peace he has in mind, Dulles indicates, must avoid the excesses of Versailles and permit the expanded German polity to survive, Austria included and possibly at least a section of Czechoslovakia, while excluding all thought of “victors and vanquished . . . . as a factor of order and progress.” Within this decentralized nation, the importance of Prussia must be reduced, to ward off for the future—Dulles is quoted directly here—the “inwardly unbalanced, inferiority-complex-ridden Prussian militarism.”
The resultant “Greater Germany” would backstop the “formation of a cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism and pan-Slavism through the eastward enlargement of Poland and the preservation of a strong Hungary.” This “Federal Greater Germany (similar to the United States), with an associated Danube Confederation, would be the best guarantee of order and progress in Central and Eastern Europe.” . . . .
. . . . An Abwehr officer, F. Justus von Einem, later claimed to have sat in on a carefully prepared meeting at Santander in Spain in the summer of 1943 during which both Menzies and Donovan agreed to Christian Wester terms as recapitulated by Canaris personally. If this exchange occurred, Donovan kept it quiet.
Such exploratory talks pointed well beyond the uproar of the moment. “I have known Max Hohenlohe since the days of the war,” Dulles assured a lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell in 1965, apropos a legal favor requested by the aging prince, “when he worked with me on some rather difficult and delicate problems.” The exchanges in Liechtenstein amounted to a reconnoitering. . . .
16. Interesting perspective on the Hapsburg/U.S./Underground Reich alliance and the sensitive nature of the dealings of OSS/Wall Street operatives like Donovan and Dulles can be gleaned by the account of the frequently lethal attempts by four different authors to write the account of the OSS from the organization’s microfilmed files.
When former Lieutenant Edwin J. Putzell fell seriously ill, he destroyed his copy of the microfilmed files.
We remind listeners, in this context, that major intelligence services have possessed toxins that will kill without leaving a trace for a very long time.
In what was his last act of World War II, Major General William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the first American secret intelligence and special operations service and the organization from which sprang the CIA, spent several nights at OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C., with his executive officer, Lieutenant Edwin J. Putzell, Jr., microfilming the director’s files. Doing the work themselves because of the political sensitivity of the documentation, they produced two copies; Donovan took possession of one, Putzell the other. The purpose of this large operation was to provide the basis of history of Donovan’s incumbency when that became politically possible.
Several starts were made on the work. Professor Conyers Read, the Harvard historian, produced many draft chapters before Donovan himself asked him to stop work, because he felt the director’s papers were still too sensitive. Read did not resume his work, for death intervened. One of Donovan’s wartime majors, Corey Ford, then began work on the project in the mid-1950’s, producing a draft manuscript of what was really a biographical history of Donovan and the OSS, but again death intervened before Ford could complete his volume.
After Donovan’s death in 1959, the project was taken over by Whitney Shepardson, Donovan’s chief of secret intelligence during World War II. For the third time, the author died before completing the work. Then came the fourth attempt, this time by Cornelius Ryan, the author of The Longest Day. However, although Ryan had the support of Donovan’s friends President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Allen W. Dulles, then director of central intelligence, the work was stopped before it really began; a middle-rank official at the CIA managed to stop the project because he believed the book contemplated by Ryan would be too controversial. When he found himself denied access to the director’s files, Ryan was compelled to abandon the project temporarily. Then he, too died before it was possible to resume work.
In all these attempt none of the authors saw the microfilm, except Read, who saw two or three reels having to do with the OSS’s formation. During this time Putzell had been taken so seriously ill that he burned his copy of microfilm rather than leave it unguarded in his estate should die. Happily, Putzell did not die; nonetheless, the only copy of the microfilm outside the CIA (where in 1982 it was still classified) was Donovan’s. . . .
17. In FTR #‘s 278, 370, 435 and 475, we discussed the Bush family, their links to Nazi industry and Mr. Emory’s belief that the Bush family is the point element of the Bormann network in the U.S. FTR #370, in particular, highlights the violent cover-up of the Bush family/Thyssen link. Note that Bormann saw Fritz Thyssen as a pipeline to Allen Dulles.
. . . . Also, Bormann felt [Fritz] Thyssen was his ace in the hole if he ever needed a pipeline to Allen W. Dulles. . . .
18. In the wake of the Jim DiEugenio interviews, we found ourselves absorbed by a couple of the many, many consummately important items presented by the author in his masterwork.
Despite the fact that Mr. Emory has researched and broadcast about the JFK assassination for decades, the sheer power of the forces that disposed of Kennedy impressed itself once more. JFK was dispatched like a pimp on a downtown Saturday night and anyone or anything attempting to right that wrong was easily subverted, be they legal professionals, authors or journalists.
A review of some key elements of what is termed deep politics seems in order here.
In FTR #‘s 1058, 1059 and 1060–a series composed largely of review, we are fleshing out the concept of the Christian West, World War II-era geopolitical construct that was supposedly hypothetical. In fact, we have come to believe that it was, in fact realized. Again, as expressed in AFA #37: ” . . . . When it became clear that the armies of the Third Reich were going to be defeated, it opened secret negotiations with representatives from the Western Allies. Representatives on both sides belonged to the transatlantic financial and industrial fraternity that had actively supported fascism. The thrust of these negotiations was the establishment of The Christian West. Viewed by the Nazis as a vehicle for surviving military defeat, ‘The Christian West’ involved a Hitler-less Reich joining with the U.S., Britain, France and other European nations in a transatlantic, pan-European anti-Soviet alliance. In fact, The Christian West became a reality only after the cessation of hostilities. The de-Nazification of Germany was aborted. Although a few of the more obvious and obnoxious elements of Nazism were removed, Nazis were returned to power at virtually every level and in almost every capacity in the Federal Republic of Germany. . . .”
Central to understanding the concept of the actual realization of the essence of the Christian West–the merging of the U.S. with Nazi Germany in an anti-Soviet alliance–is the understanding of what globalization really is and how it precipitated fascism and the Second World War. ” . . . . Some of the books presented here illustrate the extent to which fascism (Nazism in particular) was an outgrowth of globalization and the construction of international monopolies (cartels). Key to understanding this phenomenon is analysis of the Webb-Pomerene act, legislated near the end of the First World War. A loophole in the Anti-trust legislation of 1914, it effectively legalized the formation of cartels—international monopolies—for firms that were barred from domestic monopolistic practices. Decrying what they viewed as excessive and restrictive ‘regulation’ here in the United States, U.S.-based transnational corporations invested their profits from the industrial boom of the 1920’s abroad, primarily in Japan and Germany. This process might well be viewed as the real beginning of what is now known as ‘globalization.’ . . . . It was this capital that drove the engines of conquest that subdued both Europe and Asia during the conflict. . . .”
Also central to an understanding of the realization of the Christian West–the consummate realization of both globalization and fascism/Nazism–is analysis of the machinations of the Bush family. The heroic Justice Department investigator (later author) John Loftus delineated the Bush family’s role in the laundering of Nazi funds between the Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V. and the Union Bank in the U.S.
The networking of the Bush family with the Thyssens, the Schroeders and the Rockefellers, in turn, is inextricably linked with the coalescence and operation of the remarkable and deadly Bormann flight capital network, highlighed in FTR #305, among other programs.
The following article, the main focal point of FTR #370, this article warrants more intense scrutiny, both because of the increase in the dynamics of both globalization and concentration of wealth since 2002 and in the context of the Christian West and the links of Clay Shaw to the forces discussed here.
Key elements of discussion and analysis include:
- The corporate masking effected by the Thyssens and their American associates, George Herbert Walker, Prescott Bush, Averill Harriman and Allen Dulles. ” . . . . Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts–from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen’s partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States. The allied investigators underestimated Thyssen’s reach, his connections, his motives, and his means. The web of financial entities Thyssen helped create in the 1920’s remained a mystery for the rest of the twentieth century, an almost perfectly hidden underground sewer pipeline for moving dirty money, money that bankrolled the post-war fortunes not only of the Thyssen industrial empire…but the Bush family as well. . . .”
- The role in this corporate shell game of Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who married into the Hungarian nobility and whose daughter Francesca married Karl von Hapsburg. ” . . . . Fritz Thyssen joined the Nazis in 1923; his younger brother married into Hungarian nobility and changed his name to Baron [Heinrich] Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Baron later claimed Hungarian as well as Dutch citizenship. In public, he pretended to detest his Nazi brother, but in private they met at secret board meetings in Germany to coordinate their operations. If one brother were threatened with loss of property, he would transfer his holdings to the other. To aid his sons in their shell game, August Thyssen had established three different banks during the 1920’s — The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking Corporation in New York City. To protect their corporate holdings, all the brothers had to do was move the corporate paperwork from one bank to the other. This they did with some regularity. When Fritz Thyssen ‘sold’ the Holland-American Trading Company for a tax loss, the Union Banking Corporation in New York bought the stock. Similarly, the Bush family invested the disguised Nazi profits in American steel and manufacturing corporations that became part of the secret Thyssen empire. . . .”
- The dual role of Allen Dulles as corporate lawyer and collaborator with the Thyssens, Bushes, Shroeders et al and his work as the head of the Bern (Switzerland) OSS office. ” . . . . If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank’s lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles’ client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles’s other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles’ cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously. . . . As soon as Berlin fell to the allies, it was time to ship the documents back to Rotterdam so that the ‘neutral’ bank could claim ownership under the friendly supervision of Allen Dulles, who, as the OSS intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin, was well placed to handle any troublesome investigations. . . .”
- Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands–SS officer, I.G. Farben spy and nominal head of the Dutch “resistance” supervised a mission to retrieve potentially incriminating documents from the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin: ” . . . . Prince Bernhard commanded a unit of Dutch intelligence, which dug up the incriminating corporate papers in 1945 and brought them back to the “neutral” bank in Rotterdam. The pretext was that the Nazis had stolen the crown jewels of his wife, Princess Juliana, and the Russians gave the Dutch permission to dig up the vault and retrieve them. Operation Juliana was a Dutch fraud on the Allies who searched high and low for the missing pieces of the Thyssen fortune. . . .”
- Both the head of the Rotterdam Bank, who discovered the true Nazi ownership of his institution traveled to New York to protest to Prescott Bush. He was found dead of a “heart attack.” ” . . . . In 1945, the former Dutch manager of the Rotterdam bank resumed control only to discover that he was sitting on a huge pile of hidden Nazi assets. In 1947, the manager threatened to inform Dutch authorities, and was immediately fired by the Thyssens. The somewhat naive bank manager then fled to New York City where he intended to talk to Union Bank director Prescott Bush. As Gowen’s Dutch source recalled, the manager intended ‘to reveal [to Prescott Bush] the truth about Baron Heinrich and the Rotterdam Bank, [in order that] some or all of the Thyssen interests in the Thyssen Group might be seized and confiscated as German enemy property.’ The manager’s body was found in New York two weeks later. . . .”
- Both of the Dulles brothers were in a position to influence the operations of the Alien Property Custodian during World War II: ” . . . . “The Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, was on the payroll of the New York J. Henry Schroeder Bank where Foster and Allen Dulles both sat as board members. Foster arranged an appointment for himself as special legal counsel for the Alien Property Custodian while simultaneously representing [German] interests against the custodian. . . .”
- A similar fate befell Eddie Roever, a Dutch reporter who attempted to interview Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1996. ” . . . . Similarly, in 1996 a Dutch journalist Eddy Roever went to London to interview the Baron, who was neighbors with Margaret Thatcher. Roever’s body was discovered two days later. Perhaps, Gowen remarked dryly, it was only a coincidence that both healthy men had died of heart attacks immediately after trying to uncover the truth about the Thyssens. . . .”
- Of paramount importance is the role of the two institutions in which Prescott Bush served–Brown Brothers Harriman and the Union Bank–as a fundamental vehicle for laundering money from the consummately powerful Rockefeller family and related interests in Nazi Germany. ” . . . . But what did the Bush family know about their Nazi connection and when did they know it? As senior managers of Brown Brothers Harriman, they had to have known that their American clients, such as the Rockefellers, were investing heavily in German corporations, including Thyssen’s giant Vereinigte Stahlwerke. As noted historian Christopher Simpson repeatedly documents, it is a matter of public record that Brown Brother’s investments in Nazi Germany took place under the Bush family stewardship. . . . It should be recalled that in January 1937, he hired Allen Dulles to ‘cloak’ his accounts. But cloak from whom? Did he expect that happy little Holland was going to declare war on America? The cloaking operation only makes sense in anticipation of a possible war with Nazi Germany. If Union Bank was not the conduit for laundering the Rockefeller’s Nazi investments back to America, then how could the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank end up owning 31% of the Thyssen group after the war? It should be noted that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest industrial conglomerate in Germany, and with a net worth of more than $50 billion dollars, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp family, famous arms makers for Hitler, leaving the Thyssens as the undisputed champion survivors of the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up money to rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II? . . . . A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies. The Bushes knew perfectly well that Brown Brothers was the American money channel into Nazi Germany, and that Union Bank was the secret pipeline to bring the Nazi money back to America from Holland. The Bushes had to have known how the secret money circuit worked because they were on the board of directors in both directions: Brown Brothers out, Union Bank in. . . .”
- Note that Paul Manning also came across the Bush, Thyssen, Netherlands link: ” . . . . Several decades after the war, investigative reporter Paul Manning, Edward R. Murrow’s colleague, stumbled across the Thyssen interrogations in the US National Archives. Manning intended to write a book about Nazi money laundering. Manning’s manuscript was a dagger at Allen Dulles’ throat: his book specifically mentioned the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart by name, albeit in passing. . . .”
For the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients, the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team. For four long years, successive teams of inquisitors tried to break Thyssen’s simple claim to possess neither foreign bank accounts nor interests in foreign corporations, no assets that might lead to the missing billions in assets of the Third Reich. The inquisitors failed utterly.
Why? Because what the wily Thyssen deposed was, in a sense, true. What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts–from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen’s partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States.
The allied investigators underestimated Thyssen’s reach, his connections, his motives, and his means. The web of financial entities Thyssen helped create in the 1920’s remained a mystery for the rest of the twentieth century, an almost perfectly hidden underground sewer pipeline for moving dirty money, money that bankrolled the post-war fortunes not only of the Thyssen industrial empire…but the Bush family as well. It was a secret Fritz Thyssen would take to his grave.
It was a secret that would lead former US intelligence agent William Gowen, now pushing 80, to the very doorstep of the Dutch royal family. The Gowens are no strangers to controversy or nobility. His father was one of President Roosevelt’s diplomatic emissaries to Pope Pius XII, leading a futile attempt to persuade the Vatican to denounce Hitler’s treatment of Jews. It was his son, William Gowen, who served in Rome after World War II as a Nazi hunter and investigator with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. It was Agent Gowen who first discovered the secret Vatican Ratline for smuggling Nazis in 1949. It was also the same William Gowen who began to uncover the secret Dutch pipeline for smuggling Nazi money in 1999.
A half-century earlier, Fritz Thyssen was telling the allied investigators that he had no interest in foreign companies, that Hitler had turned on him and seized most of his property. His remaining assets were mostly in the Russian Occupied Zone of Germany (which he knew were a write-off anyway). His distant (and disliked) relatives in neutral nations like Holland were the actual owners of a substantial percentage of the remaining German industrial base. As innocent victims of the Third Reich, they were lobbying the allied occupation governments in Germany, demanding restitution of the property that had been seized from them by the Nazis.
Under the rules of the Allied occupation of Germany, all property owned by citizens of a neutral nation which had been seized by the Nazis had to be returned to the neutral citizens upon proper presentation of documents showing proof of ownership. Suddenly, all sorts of neutral parties, particularly in Holland, were claiming ownership of various pieces of the Thyssen empire. In his cell, Fritz Thyssen just smiled and waited to be released from prison while members of the Dutch royal family and the Dutch intelligence service reassembled his pre-war holdings for him.
The British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, in Rotterdam. This bank did a lot of business with the Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in Munich. But somehow the allied investigations kept going nowhere, the intelligence leads all seemed to dry up.
If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank’s lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles’ client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles’s other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles’ cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.
Several decades after the war, investigative reporter Paul Manning, Edward R. Murrow’s colleague, stumbled across the Thyssen interrogations in the US National Archives. Manning intended to write a book about Nazi money laundering. Manning’s manuscript was a dagger at Allen Dulles’ throat: his book specifically mentioned the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart by name, albeit in passing. . . .
. . . . And so the Dutch connection remained unexplored until 1994 when I published the book The Secret War Against the Jews. As a matter of historical curiosity, I mentioned that Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly, the Nazi Party) had obtained their early financing from Brown Brothers Harriman, and its affiliate, the Union Banking Corporation. Union Bank, in turn, was the Bush family’s holding company for a number of other entities, including the “Holland American Trading Company.”
It was a matter of public record that the Bush holdings were seized by the US government after the Nazis overran Holland. In 1951, the Bushes reclaimed Union Bank from the US Alien Property Custodian, along with their “neutral” Dutch assets. I did not realize it, but I had stumbled across a very large piece of the missing Dutch connection. Bush’s ownership of the Holland-American investment company was the missing link to Manning’s earlier research in the Thyssen investigative files. In 1981, Manning had written:
“Thyssen’s first step in a long dance of tax and currency frauds began [in the late 1930’s] when he disposed of his shares in the Dutch Hollandische-Amerikanische Investment Corporation to be credited to the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, the bank founded in 1916 by August Thyssen Senior.”
In this one obscure paragraph, in a little known book, Manning had unwittingly documented two intriguing points: 1) The Bushes’ Union Bank had apparently bought the same corporate stock that the Thyssens were selling as part of their Nazi money laundering, and 2) the Rotterdam Bank, far from being a neutral Dutch institution, was founded by Fritz Thyssen’s father. In hindsight, Manning and I had uncovered different ends of the Dutch connection.
After reading the excerpt in my book about the Bush’s ownership of the Holland-American trading Company, retired US intelligence agent William Gowen began to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Mr. Gowen knew every corner of Europe from his days as a diplomat’s son, an American intelligence agent, and a newspaperman. William Gowen deserves sole credit for uncovering the mystery of how the Nazi industrialists hid their money from the Allies at the end of World War II.
In 1999, Mr. Gowen traveled to Europe, at his own expense, to meet a former member of Dutch intelligence who had detailed inside information about the Rotterdam bank. The scrupulous Gowen took a written statement and then had his source read and correct it for error. Here, in summary form, is how the Nazis hid their money in America.
After World War I, August Thyssen had been badly burned by the loss of assets under the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. He was determined that it would never happen again. One of his sons would join the Nazis; the other would be neutral. No matter who won the next war, the Thyssen family would survive with their industrial empire intact. Fritz Thyssen joined the Nazis in 1923; his younger brother married into Hungarian nobility and changed his name to Baron [Heinrich] Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Baron later claimed Hungarian as well as Dutch citizenship. In public, he pretended to detest his Nazi brother, but in private they met at secret board meetings in Germany to coordinate their operations. If one brother were threatened with loss of property, he would transfer his holdings to the other.
To aid his sons in their shell game, August Thyssen had established three different banks during the 1920’s — The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking Corporation in New York City. To protect their corporate holdings, all the brothers had to do was move the corporate paperwork from one bank to the other. This they did with some regularity. When Fritz Thyssen “sold” the Holland-American Trading Company for a tax loss, the Union Banking Corporation in New York bought the stock. Similarly, the Bush family invested the disguised Nazi profits in American steel and manufacturing corporations that became part of the secret Thyssen empire.
When the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, they investigated the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. Fritz Thyssen was suspected by Hitler’s auditors of being a tax fraud and of illegally transferring his wealth outside the Third Reich. The Nazi auditors were right: Thyssen felt that Hitler’s economic policies would dilute his wealth through ruinous war inflation. He had been smuggling his war profits out through Holland. But the Rotterdam vaults were empty of clues to where the money had gone. The Nazis did not know that all of the documents evidencing secret Thyssen ownership had been quietly shipped back to the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, under the friendly supervision of Baron Kurt Von Schroeder. Thyssen spent the rest of the war under VIP house arrest. He had fooled Hitler, hidden his immense profits, and now it was time to fool the Americans with same shell game.
As soon as Berlin fell to the allies, it was time to ship the documents back to Rotterdam so that the “neutral” bank could claim ownership under the friendly supervision of Allen Dulles, who, as the OSS intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin, was well placed to handle any troublesome investigations. Unfortunately, the August Thyssen Bank had been bombed during the war, and the documents were buried in the underground vaults beneath the rubble. Worse, the vaults lay in the Soviet Zone of Berlin.
According to Gowen’s source, Prince Bernhard commanded a unit of Dutch intelligence, which dug up the incriminating corporate papers in 1945 and brought them back to the “neutral” bank in Rotterdam. The pretext was that the Nazis had stolen the crown jewels of his wife, Princess Juliana, and the Russians gave the Dutch permission to dig up the vault and retrieve them. Operation Juliana was a Dutch fraud on the Allies who searched high and low for the missing pieces of the Thyssen fortune.
In 1945, the former Dutch manager of the Rotterdam bank resumed control only to discover that he was sitting on a huge pile of hidden Nazi assets. In 1947, the manager threatened to inform Dutch authorities, and was immediately fired by the Thyssens. The somewhat naive bank manager then fled to New York City where he intended to talk to Union Bank director Prescott Bush. As Gowen’s Dutch source recalled, the manager intended “to reveal [to Prescott Bush] the truth about Baron Heinrich and the Rotterdam Bank, [in order that] some or all of the Thyssen interests in the Thyssen Group might be seized and confiscated as German enemy property. The manager’s body was found in New York two weeks later.
Similarly, in 1996 a Dutch journalist Eddy Roever went to London to interview the Baron, who was neighbors with Margaret Thatcher. Roever’s body was discovered two days later. Perhaps, Gowen remarked dryly, it was only a coincidence that both healthy men had died of heart attacks immediately after trying to uncover the truth about the Thyssens.
Neither Gowen nor his Dutch source knew about the corroborating evidence in the Alien Property Custodian archives or in the OMGUS archives. Together, the two separate sets of US files overlap each other and directly corroborate Gowen’s source. The first set of archives confirms absolutely that the Union Banking Corporation in New York was owned by the Rotterdam Bank. The second set (quoted by Manning) confirms that the Rotterdam Bank in turn was owned by the Thyssens.
It is not surprising that these two American agencies never shared their Thyssen files. As the noted historian Burton Hersh documented:
“The Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, was on the payroll of the New York J. Henry Schroeder Bank where Foster and Allen Dulles both sat as board members. Foster arranged an appointment for himself as special legal counsel for the Alien Property Custodian while simultaneously representing [German] interests against the custodian.”
. . . . He [Manning] was very close to uncovering the fact that the Bush’s bank in New York City was secretly owned by the Nazis, before during and after WWII. Once Thyssen ownership of the Union Banking Corporation is proven, it makes out a prima facie case of treason against the Dulles and Bush families for giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.
PART TWO
The first key fact to be proven in any criminal case is that the Thyssen family secretly owned the Bush’s Bank. Apart from Gowen’s source, and the twin American files, a third set of corroboration comes from the Thyssen family themselves. In 1979, the present Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza (Fritz Thyssen’s nephew) prepared a written family history to be shared with his top management. A copy of this thirty-page tome entitled “The History of the Thyssen Family and Their Activities”was provided by Gowen’s source. It contains the following Thyssen admissions:
“Thus, at the beginning of World War II the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart had become the holding of my father’s companies – a Dutch firm whose only shareholder was a Hungarian citizen. Prior to 1929, it held the shares of .the August Thyssen Bank, and also American subsidiaries and the Union Banking Corporation, New York. The shares of all the affiliates were [in 1945] with the August Thyssen Bank in the East Sector of Berlin, from where I was able to have them transferred into the West at the last moment”
“After the war the Dutch government ordered an investigation into the status of the holding company and, pending the result, appointed a Dutch former general manager of my father who turned against our family.. In that same year, 1947, I returned to Germany for the first time after the war, disguised as a Dutch driver in military uniform, to establish contact with our German directors”
“The situation of the Group gradually began to be resolved but it was not until 1955 that the German companies were freed from Allied control and subsequently disentangled. Fortunately, the companies in the group suffered little from dismantling. At last we were in a position to concentrate on purely economic problems — the reconstruction and extension of the companies and the expansion of the organization.”
“The banking department of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, which also functioned as the Group’s holding company, merged in 1970 with Nederlandse Credietbank N.V. which increased its capital. The Group received 25 percent.The Chase Manhattan Bank holds 31%. The name Thyssen-Bornemisza Group was selected for the new holding company.”
Thus the twin US Archives, Gowen’s Dutch source, and the Thyssen family history all independently confirm that President Bush’s father and grandfather served on the board of a bank that was secretly owned by the leading Nazi industrialists. The Bush connection to these American institutions is a matter of public record. What no one knew, until Gowen’s brilliant research opened the door, was that the Thyssens were the secret employers of the Bush family.
But what did the Bush family know about their Nazi connection and when did they know it? As senior managers of Brown Brothers Harriman, they had to have known that their American clients, such as the Rockefellers, were investing heavily in German corporations, including Thyssen’s giant Vereinigte Stahlwerke. As noted historian Christopher Simpson repeatedly documents, it is a matter of public record that Brown Brother’s investments in Nazi Germany took place under the Bush family stewardship.
When war broke out was Prescott Bush stricken with a case of Waldheimers disease, a sudden amnesia about his Nazi past? Or did he really believe that our friendly Dutch allies owned the Union Banking Corporation and its parent bank in Rotterdam? It should be recalled that in January 1937, he hired Allen Dulles to “cloak” his accounts. But cloak from whom? Did he expect that happy little Holland was going to declare war on America? The cloaking operation only makes sense in anticipation of a possible war with Nazi Germany. If Union Bank was not the conduit for laundering the Rockefeller’s Nazi investments back to America, then how could the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank end up owning 31% of the Thyssen group after the war?
It should be noted that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest industrial conglomerate in Germany, and with a net worth of more than $50 billion dollars, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp family, famous arms makers for Hitler, leaving the Thyssens as the undisputed champion survivors of the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up money to rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II?
The enormous sums of money deposited into the Union Bank prior to 1942 are the best evidence that Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Banks’ books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951. At that time, Union Bank shares representing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of industrial stocks and bonds were unblocked for distribution. Did the Bush family really believe that such enormous sums came from Dutch enterprises? One could sell tulip bulbs and wooden shoes for centuries and not achieve those sums. A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies.
The Bushes knew perfectly well that Brown Brothers was the American money channel into Nazi Germany, and that Union Bank was the secret pipeline to bring the Nazi money back to America from Holland. The Bushes had to have known how the secret money circuit worked because they were on the board of directors in both directions: Brown Brothers out, Union Bank in.
Moreover, the size of their compensation is commensurate with their risk as Nazi money launderers. In 1951, Prescott Bush and his father in law each received one share of Union Bank stock, worth $750,000 each. One and a half million dollars was a lot of money in 1951. But then, from the Thyssen point of view, buying the Bushes was the best bargain of the war.
The bottom line is harsh: It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920’s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush’s bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed allied soldiers. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen’s coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family’s complicity.
19. Prescott Bush, Sr. was the Senate’s liaison with Dulles’s CIA. As can be seen from the Loftus post above, Dulles and Prescott Bush have the most profound of deep political connections.
. . . . Dulles’s CIA operated with virtually no congressional oversight. In the Senate, Dulles relied on Wall Street friends like Prescott Bush of Connecticut–the father and grandfather of two future presidents–to protect the CIA’s interests. According to CIA veteran Robert Crowley, who rose to become second-in-command of the CIA’s action arm, Bush “was the day-to-day contact man for the CIA. It was very bipartisan and friendly. Dulles felt that he had the Senate just where he wanted them.” . . . .
I just wanted to point out that the Schroeder banking family, according to a 18 January 2000 article by The Guardian (which can be found at this link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2000/jan/19/4), helped finance the American Confederacy during to Civil War to the tune of three-million dollars in bonds (that’s three million in 1863 money, which is hundreds of millions in 2019 money)!
Strange that the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, under Allen Welsh Dulles (a legal counsel to the J. Henry Schroeder Banking Corporation), would be United States Air Force General Charles Pearre Cabell, the grandson of Confederate Army Brigadier General William Lewis Cabell!
So, when John F. Kennedy accepted the mantel of President Of The United States Of America in 1961, the two senior intelligence agents were a Nazi financier and the grandson of a man who tried to rip the country in half just nine decades prior.
I should note, that Avery Rockefeller was president of the J. Henry Schroeder Banking Cooperation in 1936, and oversaw the financing and creation of the Bechtel Corporation. Bechtel was nominally controlled by John Alexander McCone, Allen W. Dulles’ replacement.
I would also like to note that Mr. McCone was chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1958 to 1960. The man who created the Office Of Policy Coordination’s assassination capabilities “Program Branch 7”, a one Col. Boris Theodore Pash, was also the Chief Of Security for the Atomic Energy Commission until 1957!
Col. Pash’s deputy during his reign as PB7’s assassination capabilities was Everette Howard Hunt Jr., who in 1962 was Chief Of Covet Action for the Domestic Operation’s Division.
Read em and weep: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/26/archives/hunt-says-cia-had-assassin-unit-watergate-figure-tells-of-small.html
I do not know who gave the order to have President Kennedy murdered, however, just maybe the Grandson of a Confederate General and a Nazi bagman had something to do with it. The two men who were closest to JFK wiped him out and perverted his memory.
According to recent CIA documents, Prince Egon Max von Hohenlohe was in 1963, the CIA’s “...principle agent...” in Mexico City.
Apparently, according to this same document, Nazi Prince Hohenlohe was target of District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.
At the time in 1963, the world’s largest CIA base was located in Mexico city, and under the control of Winston Mackinley Scott, George Frederick Munro, Raymond G. Leddy, & David Atlee Phillips
Read ’em and weep:
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=101443#relPageId=40&search=hohenlohe
Don’t you get tired of being correct all the time about the worst of the worst, Mr. Emory?
@Robert Ward Montenegro–
Thanks for the kind words.
A major point, however.
Mary Ferrell is widely viewed as a vacuum cleaner and disinformation specialist.
She actually has significant links to the assassination milieu itself, having provided a car that was actually in the fatal motorcade.
Read “Into the Nightmare” by James McBride.
It goes into Ferrell’s strange connections at length.
That doesn’t mean this is wrong, but I would cross check the information to make sure it is accurate.
Best,
Dave
Yeah, James McBride’s book is a brilliant read (I have it on my bookshelf).
And I heartily agree with you Mr. Emory, Mary Ferrell.
Incidentally, Dr. Carl Oglesby, Michael Parenti, Arthur Kinoy, & Professor Peter Dale Scott all expressed public concern over the handling of redacted intelligence documents when it came to Mrs. Ferrell. Hell, one of Peter Dale Scott’s protégé, Professor Jeffrey M. Bale, practically called Mary Ferrell an intelligence asset in his dissertation on Prince Junio Valerio Borghese!
But as for the CIA document on Prince Egon Max von Hohenlohe, I gave it to civil-rights attorney Bill Simpich to review (a subject matter expert on Oswald’s purported Mexico City adventures), and he is convinced it is the genuine article.
And if it is, this is some of the best evidence that Nazi Prince Hohenlohe was the senior CIA agent in Mexico City in 1963!
To borrow a phrase, food for thought & grounds for further research.
@Robert Ward Montenegro–
Actually, I had a minor brain fart–it’s Joseph McBride, not James.
If Hohenlohe was working for the Agency in MC in ’63, THAT is some deep politics indeed!!
Keep up the great work,
Dave Emory