Lis­ten: One seg­ment

After gar­ner­ing great domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al pres­tige dur­ing his long tenure in office, for­mer Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Hel­mut Kohl is the focal point of a huge (and grow­ing) group of inter­lock­ing finan­cial scan­dals. These scan­dals have irrev­o­ca­bly taint­ed Kohl’s polit­i­cal image and that of the par­ty he led, the CDU. This broad­cast high­lights some of the crit­i­cal aspects of the scan­dals, focus­ing on inter­na­tion­al finan­cial machi­na­tions, con­nec­tions of key play­ers to intel­li­gence agen­cies and (appar­ent­ly) the “Under­ground Reich”.

There are sev­er­al indi­ca­tions of a cov­er-up, includ­ing overt stonewalling by Kohl (who had to resign his posi­tion as head of the CDU because of his unwill­ing­ness to talk), the dis­ap­pear­ance of key doc­u­ments and the appar­ent sui­cide of a key CDU finan­cial offi­cer for the state of Hesse. Much of the inves­ti­ga­tion cen­ters on large sums of mon­ey cross­ing inter­na­tion­al bor­ders and end­ing up in secret bank accounts and/or cor­po­rate fronts in Switzer­land, Liecht­en­stein, Paraguay and Ger­many. The key play­ers have well doc­u­ment­ed con­nec­tions to French and Ger­man intel­li­gence agen­cies. Cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence sug­gests that the remark­able and dead­ly Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion may well be behind the scan­dal.

One pos­si­ble result of the polit­i­cal fall­out from the scan­dal may be the dis­cred­it­ing of the post-war con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy and the resul­tant rise of fas­cist polit­i­cal par­ties in Ger­many. Pro­gram high­lights include: the role of the Thyssen heavy indus­tri­al firm in sev­er­al aspects of the scan­dals (Thyssen is a cen­tral ele­ment of the Bor­mann group); the piv­otal influ­ence of Ger­man finan­cial manip­u­la­tor Karl­heinz Schreiber in the var­i­ous machi­na­tions at the heart of the scan­dals; Schreiber’s con­nec­tions to Bavar­i­an right­ist Franz Josef Strauss; Strauss’s con­nec­tions to the Bor­mann group and the Under­ground Reich; a com­par­i­son of Schreiber to P‑2 lodge head Licio Gel­li; the mys­te­ri­ous sale of a for­mer East Ger­man refin­ery to the French Elf-Aquitaine petro­le­um com­pa­ny

(Record­ed on 2/13/2000.)