6c. While serv­ing as chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, the elder George Bush shep­herd­ed the Nazi émi­gré com­mu­ni­ty into posi­tion as a per­ma­nent branch of the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

7a. Cen­tral to under­stand­ing 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 con­sum­mate man­i­fes­ta­tion 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, high­light­ed 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:

1. 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. . . .”
   
2. 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. . . .”
3. 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. . . .”
4. 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. . . .”
5. 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. . . .”
6. 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. . . .” 
7. 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. . . .”
8. 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. . . .”
   
9. 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. . . .”

“How the Bush Fam­i­ly Made Its For­tune from the Nazis” by John Lof­tus; accessed at Jim Craven’s Blog; 9/27/2000.

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.

7b. Fur­ther solid­i­fy­ing the con­ti­nu­ity between the Third Reich, the Gehlen Org and the GOP, we note that, while it was the BND (the intel­li­gence ser­vice of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic) the “Org” was financ­ing the East­ern Euro­pean fas­cist groups that were part of the Eth­nic Her­itage Out­reach Coun­cil.

Gehlen: Spy of the Cen­tu­ry by E.H. Cookridge; Ran­dom House [HC]; Copy­right 1971 by Euro­pean Copy­right Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed; ISBN 0–394-47313–2; pp. 362–363.

. . . . Gehlen even set up a num­ber of “cells” in the Unit­ed States. As ear­ly as 1963, the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions com­mit­tee dis­cussed the activ­i­ties of the Julius Klein pub­lic rela­tions com­pa­ny, which had estab­lished branch­es in Wash­ing­ton, New York and Los Ange­les and also in Cana­da, employ­ing a fair­ly numer­ous staff with­out appar­ent­ly engag­ing on any pub­lic­i­ty busi­ness. From this firm, the trail led to the Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­can Cit­i­zens of Ger­man Ori­gin, which was receiv­ing large sub­si­dies from an unspec­i­fied Fed­er­al Ger­man gov­ern­ment department—the Bun­desnachri­ten­di­enst, it was lat­er estab­lished. This for­eign sub­sidy amount­ed to the hand­some sum of 280,000 dol­lars in 1964 and was increased in lat­er years. . . .

Not so sat­is­fac­to­ry at first were the expla­na­tions of Gehlen’s con­nec­tions with the large orga­ni­za­tions of Ukraini­ans, Poles, Lithua­ni­ans, Lat­vians and oth­er East Euro­pean immi­grants in the Unit­ed States, which received finance and advice from three “reg­is­tered” BND agents—Roman Hen­linger, alias “Dr. Grau,” Vic­tor Sale­mann and Alexan­der Wieber. . . .

7c. Flesh­ing out infor­ma­tion about the BND financ­ing of groups linked to the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations, we present sup­ple­men­tal infor­ma­tion from an unpub­lished man­u­script. The author is well-known to vet­er­an researchers, but will remain anony­mous, since the work was nev­er for­mal­ly com­plet­ed or pub­lished. Note that we dis­cussed the Julius Klein Agency in FTR #158.

” . . . . Klein, rep­re­sent­ing the ‘Com­mit­tee for Return of Con­fis­cat­ed Ger­man and Japan­ese Prop­er­ty,’ lob­bied unsuc­cess­ful­ly for a 1954 bill, intro­duced by Sen­a­tor Dirk­sen, which would have con­tra­vened the 1945 Ger­man repa­ra­tions agree­ment and restored the U.S. prop­er­ties of I.G. Far­ben to their Ger­man own­ers. (A sur­pris­ing sup­port­er of this bill, which was vig­or­ous­ly opposed by the Jus­tice Depart­ment, was Sec­re­tary of State John Fos­ter Dulles.) . . . .”

“Men­gele and Dulles: The SS-OSS Con­nec­tion: Transna­tion­al­ism and the Cold War” [The author–someone well known to vet­er­an listeners–will remain anony­mous, since this work was nev­er published–D.E.); pp. 77–78.

. . . . Oth­er polit­i­cal groups and lob­by­ists were sub­si­dized by Gehlen and the BND with­out even n excuse of an intel­li­gence pre­text. One was the Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Cit­i­zens of Ger­man Descent in the USA, whose Chair­man, Austin App. an asso­ciate of for­mer WACL Chair­man Roger Pear­son, is attempt­ing to debunk the his­toric­i­ty of the SS Holo­caust. (23) Anoth­er was the right-wing pub­lic rela­tions firm of Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ist Julius Klein, who accord­ing to one of Bar­bi­e’s CIC han­dlers, had a “spe­cial rela­tion­ship” with Bar­bie in Ger­many at that time. (24) Klein, rep­re­sent­ing the “Com­mit­tee for Return of Con­fis­cat­ed Ger­man and Japan­ese Prop­er­ty,” lob­bied unsuc­cess­ful­ly for a 1954 bill, intro­duced by Sen­a­tor Dirk­sen, which would have con­tra­vened the 1945 Ger­man repa­ra­tions agree­ment and restored the U.S. prop­er­ties of I.G. Far­ben to their Ger­man own­ers. (A sur­pris­ing sup­port­er of this bill, which was vig­or­ous­ly opposed by the Jus­tice Depart­ment, was Sec­re­tary of State John Fos­ter Dulles.) . . . .

Notes: 23–Vil­lage Voice, May 7, 1985, p. 20. App, who chaired the Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee in Philadel­phia for many years, was also on the board of the Ukrain­ian Quar­ter­ly, pub­lished by fol­low­ers of Ste­fan Ban­dera (cf. Vil­lage Voice, May 14, 1985, p. 23.

24–Amer­i­can Swasti­ka by Charles High­am, p. 288.

7d. Pro­vid­ing back­ground to dis­cus­sion of the rela­tion­ship between the milieu of Resorts Inter­na­tion­al, Nixon, his bank­ing asso­ciate Bebe Rebo­zo, William Casey and (pos­si­bly) we note that Rebo­zo’s bank­ing of funds from the dead­ly Bor­mann net­work, the insti­tu­tion that Mr. Emory feels will prove to be the deci­sive ele­ment on this earth.

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Lyle Stu­art [HC]; Copy­right 1981 by Paul Man­ning; p. 275.

. . . . The Ger­man-South Amer­i­can group also had direct access to the Nixon White House through their rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Wash­ing­ton, and were proud of the fact that Bebe Rebo­zo was Pres­i­dent Nixon’s clos­est friend. For, know­ing­ly or unknow­ing­ly, Rebo­zo processed mil­lions of their dol­lars through his Flori­da bank as part of nor­mal com­mer­cial oper­a­tions. . . .

7f. Con­tin­u­ing with dis­cus­sion from the unpub­lished man­u­script ref­er­enced in 7c, the broad­cast high­lights inter­ac­tions between the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion, Bebe Rebo­zo, a mys­te­ri­ous and alleged­ly orga­nized-crime con­nect­ed com­pa­ny called Resorts Inter­na­tion­al, an even more mys­te­ri­ous sub­sidiary of Resorts Inter­na­tion­al called the Par­adise Island Bridge Com­pa­ny and the Dewey, Dulles, Nazi, William Casey milieu that is cen­tral to this dis­cus­sion.

Note that, for a time, Don­ald Trump assumed the own­er­ship of Resorts Inter­na­tion­al (after the 1986 death of James Cros­by), ulti­mate­ly pur­chas­ing the Taj Mahal Casi­no from the firm after a law­suit with tele­vi­sion star Merv Grif­fin.

“Men­gele and Dulles: The SS-OSS Con­nec­tion: Transna­tion­al­ism and the Cold War” by Peter Dale Scott; pp. 82–85.

. . . . One of the most-researched and ill-under­stood sto­ries about such pay­ments con­cerns a Bahamas casi­no, Par­adise Island, which fig­ured in inves­tiga­tive sto­ries about Richard Nixon and Water­gate. The casi­no was owned by an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny, Mary Carter Paint Com­pa­ny, lat­er known as Resorts Inter­na­tion­al; and there is no ques­tion but that, in 1968, the chair­man of the com­pa­ny, James Cros­by; “. . . . made a $100,000 con­tri­bu­tion to the Nixon cam­paign. It took the unusu­al form of thir­ty-four checks, thir­ty-three of them for $3,000 apiece, the last for $1,000” (37) In 1972, Howard Hunt, in his dou­ble capac­i­ty as an employ­ee of the Nixon White House and of a CIA-linked pub­lic­i­ty rela­tions firm, the Robert Mullen Agency, did cer­tain work for Inter­tel, an inves­tiga­tive and intel­li­gence sub­sidiary of Resorts; Inter­tel was try­ing to hush up alle­ga­tions, based on a con­tro­ver­sial inter­nal mem­o­ran­dum from a woman named Dita Beard, about a $400,000 pay­off to the Repub­li­can par­ty in exchange for set­tle­ment of a Jus­tice Depart­ment suit against ITT” (38)

In 1972, Cros­by made no acknowl­edged con­tri­bu­tion to Nixon, even though he was report­ed­ly asked to by Nixon’s per­son­al lawyer, Her­bert Kalm­bach. But in 1973, the New York Times ran a sto­ry about; ” . . . . pecu­liar move­ments . . . between the Par­adise Island casi­no and the Key Bis­cayne Bank, which belonged to then-pres­i­dent Richard Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebo­zo. There was spec­u­la­tion that the bank and the casi­no were laun­der­ing funds for the Pres­i­dent.” (39)

The sto­ry focused on the move­ments of a close friend of Rebo­zo called Sey­mour Alter, “whom a lot of peo­ple called Resorts’ ‘bag­man.’ ” (40) Tes­ti­mo­ny by an IRS infor­mant to a House Sub­com­mit­tee, two years lat­er, sug­gest­ed that the mon­ey was, in fact, skim from anoth­er of James Cros­by’s com­pa­nies, the Par­adise Island Bridge Com­pa­ny, and that Alter had on at least one occa­sion car­ried $200.000 of such mon­ey and been met on a Key Bis­cayne dock by Bebe Rebo­zo him­self (“they head­ed for either Bebe’s or Nixon’s house.”) (41)

Through­out the Water­gate scan­dal, there were rumors among inves­tiga­tive reporters that Nixon and Rebo­zo were silent part­ners with Cros­by in the lucra­tive bridge com­pa­ny. I myself was sent a list of the share­hold­ers at this time: the­list, lat­er con­firmed by Cros­by in pub­lic tes­ti­mo­ny, did not show Nixon or Rebo­zo. It did, how­ev­er, name a num­ber of Ger­man and Swiss investors, One of these, for exam­ple, was Dr. Heinz Ros­terg of Lau­sanne, a for­mer “prin­ci­pal stock­hold­er” and direc­tor of the Win­ter­shall potash con­cern; Win­ter­shall was one of the major sub­sidiaries of BASF, the largest sin­gle suc­ces­sor firm to I.G. Far­ben. (42)

By itself, this would be a ten­u­ous link between the CIA-Gehlen‑I.G. Far­ben con­nec­tion and the alleged pay­ments to Richard Nixon. But the same IRS infor­mant tes­ti­fied to links (lat­er cor­rob­o­rat­ed by inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists) between Resorts and a Bahamas Bank, Cas­tle Bank, which the Wall Street Jour­nal lat­er revealed to have had among its deposits “a $5 mil­lion CIA fund.” (43) Cas­tle Banik had been found­ed by an OSS and CIA vet­er­an, Paul Hel­li­well, whose role in help­ing to con­sol­i­date the post-war CIA-mafia-nar­cotics con­nec­tion I have described else­where. (44) CIA’s oper­a­tional inter­est in the mob-con­nect­ed Cas­tle Bank was so great that, accord­ing to the Wall Street jour­nal, the Jus­tice Depart­ment dropped its pur­suit of Cas­tle Bank under pres­sure from the CIA. (45)The Wall Street Jour­nal’s rev­e­la­tion revived inter­est in a con­tro­ver­sial claim, print­ed four years ear­li­er in the Rolling Stone mag­a­zine, that Resorts Inter­na­tion­al “in its ear­li­er incar­na­tion as Mary Carter Paint, was a CIA front set up by for­mer New York dis­trict attor­ney and gov­er­nor Thomas Dewey and Allen Dulles, first chief of the CIA, to laun­der funds to sup­port coun­terin­sur­gency groups in Latin Amer­i­ca.” (46)

After a suit for libel brought by Resorts, Rolling Stone retract­ed the claim. (47)

Still unan­swered is the ques­tion of whether the sto­ry of the Dewey-Allen Dulles inter­est in Resorts should have referred to funds, not from the CIA itself, but from its Ger­man-Swiss part­ners in the Par­adise Island Bridge Com­pa­ny. Such a hypoth­e­sis might explain some of the many strange coin­ci­dences which sur­round the com­pa­ny’s con­tro­ver­sial his­to­ry. It might, for exam­ple, explain the “for­tune in legal fees” that Mary Carter Paint, on the advice of Thomas Dewey, paid to Allen Dulles’ long­time law part­ner David Peck. (48) The SS-OSs con­nec­tion cer­tain­ly had rea­son to be grate­ful to David Peck. It was on the basis of Peck­’s rec­om­men­da­tion, as chair­man of a three-man advi­so­ry board to review all the Nurem­berg sen­tences, that John J. McCloy com­mut­ed to time served the sen­tence of Sko­rzeny’s post-war employ­er, Baron Alfried Krupp, and eight of his col­leagues, and also ordered Krup­p’s prop­er­ty to be restored. (49) The release of Krupp and oth­er indus­tri­al­ists ful­filled an ear­li­er demand to McCloy from Her­mann Abs, who him­self nar­row­ly escaped pros­e­cu­tion at Nurem­berg. Abs was the first post-war chair­man of BASF, the I.G. Far­ben suc­ces­sor com­pa­ny rep­re­sent­ed among the stock­hold­ers of the Par­adise Island Bridge Com­pa­ny. (50)

Might not the OSS-SS con­nec­tion also throw light on the unex­plained inter­lock between James Cros­by’s com­pa­ny Resorts Inter­na­tion­al, tight­ly con­trolled by the relat­ed and dou­bly inter­mar­ried Cros­by-Mur­phy fam­i­lies, and Cap­i­tal Cities Broad­cast­ing, the major invest­ment of the CIA’s present direc­tor William Casey. (51) Casey would be the log­i­cal per­son to have estab­lished the orig­i­nal con­nec­tion between the Cros­by-Mur­phy fam­i­lies and their mys­te­ri­ous Ger­man-Swiss part­ners. For it was Casey in 1944–45 “who was giv­en over­all oper­a­tional con­trol of [OSS] Ger­man projects,” and “co-ordi­nat­ed . . . the over 150 men” whom OSS sent into Ger­many. (52) With Dulles, Wis­ner, and For­gan, Casey was also one of the OSS vet­er­ans who lob­bied suc­cess­ful­ly for a CIA which could legit­i­mate­ly uti­lize the resources of the Gehlen Org. (53)

Notes:

(37) The Com­pa­ny That Bought The Board­walk by Gigi Mahon, p. 117; Night­mare: The Under­side of the Nixon Years by J. Antho­ny Lukas, p. 182.

(38) Lukas, pp. 182–183.

(39) Mahon, p. 32; New York Times, 12/6/1973.

(40) Mahon, p. 33.

(41) Mahon, pp. 39–40; U.S. Cong., House, Comm. on Gov­ern­ment Oper­a­tions, Over­sight Hear­ings, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 191.

(42) Cf. Mahon, pp. 44, 216.

(43)  In Banks We Trust by Pen­ny Lernoux, p. 83; Wall Street Jour­nal, April 18, 1980, p. 1. The infor­mant also tes­ti­fied he had seen “a name that said Richard Nixon” on a print­out of trust accounts at the Cas­tle Bank. (p. 179, cf. p. 187.)

(44) The War Con­spir­a­cy by Peter Dale Scott, p.211; The Great Hero­in Coup by Hen­rik Krueger, pp. 15–16. Cf. Lernoux, pp. 79–88; XXX Chap­ter VI.

(45) Lernoux, p. 93; Wall Street Jour­nal, April 16, 1980, p. 1.

(46) Mahon, p. 42, sum­ma­riz­ing Rolling Stone, May 20, 1976. Paul Hel­li­well, whose law firm had rep­re­sent­ed a com­pa­ny involved in a gam­bling ven­ture with Resorts, was described by the Wall Street Jour­nal as a CIA pay­mas­ter dur­ing the 1961 Bay of Pigs inva­sion. The Wall Street Jour­nal also iden­ti­fied Wal­lace Groves, the Resorts part­ner rep­re­sent­ed by Hel­li­well, as an under­cov­er agent for the CIA’s clan­des­tine sec­tion; cf. Lernoux, pp. 77, 83; Wall Street Jour­nal, April 18, 1980, p. 1.

(47) Rolling Stone, April 28, 1983, p. 6. A Bar­ron’s reporter, Gigi Mahon, sub­mit­ted a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion request to CIA. After two years, she report­ed that “they admit they have files on Mary Carter/Resorts, but to date have found excus­es not to pro­duce them” (Mahon, p. 42.)

(48) Mahon, pp. 57–58.

(49) The Pledge Betrayed  by Tom Bow­er, pp. 347–50. In all, 74 out of 110 sen­tences were dras­ti­cal­ly reduced as a result of Peck­’s rec­om­men­da­tions. This includ­ed the sen­tence of I.G. Far­ben offi­cials such as Her­mann Schmitz, and of Dr. Alfred Six, the Hirschfeld-Bar­bie asso­ciate whom Wis­ner had tried to release back in 1948.

(50) The Pledge Betrayed  by Tom Bow­er, pp. 341–342.

(51) James Cros­by’s cousin and broth­er-in-law, Thomas S. Mur­phy, was in 1964, the Exec­u­tive Vice-Pres­i­dent and a direc­tor of Cap­i­tal Cities, as well as a direc­tor of Mary Carter Paint. Low­ell Thomas, a long-time radio broad­cast­er with intel­li­gence con­nec­tions, was a direc­tor of both com­pa­nies. At the time, William Casey was an offi­cer, direc­tor, and major stock­hold­er of Cap­i­tal Cities. For more on the takeover of ABC by Cap­i­tal Cities, after CIA had lodged an unprece­dent­ed com­plaint about ABC News with the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion, cf. Cov­er-ups, May 1985.

(52) OSS: The Secret His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca’s First Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency by R. Har­ris Smith; Lyons Press [SC]; Copy­right 1972, 2005 by R. Har­ris Smith; ISBN 978–1‑4930–4217‑3; p. 206.

(53) Casey memo, in For­gan papers, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.