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Listen: MP3 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment. NB: Mr. Emory misspeaks himself in the introduction, mis-identifying the program as “#547.”
Introduction: The tenth (and final) interview with Peter Levenda, this program sets forth the historical and ideological foundation for the postwar perpetuation and operation of Nazism–“The Hitler Legacy.” Mr. Emory views this book as one of the most important political volumes ever written. Listeners are emphatically encouraged to purchase it, read it and tell others about it.
The essence of Peter’s thesis is presented on pages 307–308: “. . . . With the Nazi diaspora, the leaders of the Third Reich who had survived—who were either living underground, or were “denazified” and living freely above ground—constituted a government-in-exile. They remained in contact, reinforced each other’s beliefs, provided logistical support where possible, and kept the faith alive. They became involved in political and military intrigues around the globe, always with the goal of causing an imbalance in global power structures. Motivated by anti-Semitism, they collaborated with Arab leaders and guerrilla organizations in attacks against Israel, even going so far as to develop weapons systems in Egypt. They wrote propaganda against Israel and against Jews in general, repeating the same libels as before. They formed “neo-Nazi” groups in Europe, Latin America, North America, and elsewhere, cultivating a fawning new generation of followers on every continent. They support Holocaust deniers and right-wing extremists everywhere, even when they do not agree on all points. They found official positions within extremist governments in the Middle East and Latin America.
They also constitute an army-in-exile. They trained troops, instructed security forces in interrogation and torture, ran guns. They conspired to assassinate objectionable leaders in various countries, as well as those who betrayed their own network. They developed weapons of mass destruction long before the identical claim was laid at the door of Saddam Hussein. . . .”
The Third Reich and its postwar underground manifestation directly impacted, intersected with, and formed the operational template for many of the world’s terrorist organizations. Recapping previous discussion of the Third Reich as a “cult” or spiritual movement, Peter notes that this “Underground Reich” not only is a parallel entity to contemporary Islamist terror groups, but has actively dovetailed with them.“Following the money” moved by what Mr. Emory calls The Underground Reich inevitably leads to Francois Genoud, Hjalmar Schacht and the extensive postwar Nazi connections to Middle Eastern anti-colonial, anti-Israel and terrorist milieux.In this broadcast, we continue to “Follow the Money” and analyze its primary role in the perpetuation of Nazism and its attendant methodologies and resultant ills.
Presenting a synoptic account of the Bank Al-Taqwa, Peter highlights this Al-Qaeda funding institution and its numerous links to people and institutions connected to the Third Reich and the postwar Nazi underground.
Next, Peter further reviews the influence of the Nazi underground on the development of the concept of non-aligned nations as a foil to both the United States and the former Soviet Union. This was later adopted by Sukarno. In addition, Peter notes the development of an Islamist underground working against China.
We conclude by noting that a crucial element of the Hitler Legacy is the re-emergence of Germany as the dominant force in Europe.
Program Highlights Include:
- Discussion of the Tri-Border area of Latin America.
- Analysis of the ancient hawala money transfer system of the Islamic world and its recent perversion by terrorist groups, who use it as a clandestine funding source.
- Austrian “Yuppie fascist” Jurg Haider’s financial dealings with Mohamar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein.
1. “Following the money” moved by what Mr. Emory calls “The Underground Reich” inevitably leads to Francois Genoud, Hjalmar Schacht and the extensive postwar Nazi connections to Middle Eastern anti-colonial, anti-Israel and terrorist milieux.
. . . . We have already seen that Nazi financiers such as Genoud and Schacht had their plans in place, and were active in moving among Nazi sympathizers in various countries and continents after the war. They were experts in setting up foreign banks, and in arranging wire transfers and other instruments, that would move money across international borders. Genoud was openly supporting anti-colonial regimes in North Africa as well as the Palestinian movement; support that was made possible by the Nazi gold he controlled in numbered in numbered Swiss accounts.
As the post-war years became the post-war decades, however, did that fortune dry up? How was the money invested? Who was managing it? Who was distributing it? . . . .
2a. Next, Peter highlights the intersection of many of the elements and dynamics figuring in his analysis in the Tri-Border area of Latin America.
3b. The ancient hawala system of Islamic transfer has been abused by jihadist elements to help finance their activities. Peter details the hawala system, how it works and why terrorists have seized upon it as a vehicle for underwriting their activities. This should NOT be misunderstood as characterizing the system asas a whole as “terrorist’ or “Nazi.”
4. More about the abuse of the ancient hawala system and the myriad of illegal activities in the tri-border area:
. . . . While I have no evidence that ODESSA is using the hawala system, it is clear that its colleagues and partners do: from drug-running in the Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay triangle to arms dealing in North Africa and the Levant. It provides another level of security at a time when the movement of money comes under increasing scrutiny by the world’s governments. The wire transfer system that relies on an extensive paper trail, incorporating a great deal of personal identification and verification at both ends is thus supplanted by a method where members of a specific community use an honor system to move money without official paper, and often even without actually moving the money itself. In a system such as this, “follow the money” becomes less a tactical process of investigation than a quaint memory of a simpler time. Nevertheless, the much-touted war on drugs (had it actually ever been undertaken in a serious way) would have revealed the extent of this and other financial methodologies. . . .
5. The Third Reich and its postwar underground manifestation directly impacted, intersected with and formed the operational template for many of the world’s terrorist organizations.
. . . . Modern terror organizations have learned much from the lessons provided by Nazi leaders, commandos and ideologues. In many cases, the terrorists of the 1980s and 1990s were trained directly by Nazi security personnel and SS officers, with whom they found common cause. As we have seen, not only did the Western intelligence agencies and politicians turn a blind eye to this phenomenon, in many cases they openly supported and encouraged its development. It is because we refused to take the Nazi threat seriously after the war (or because many of our leaders in the military, intelligence agencies, and at the highest levels of our governments welcomed the collaboration for their own agendas) that we now face the greatest threat to global security since the rise of the Third Reich. . . .
6. Peter notes that Jurg Haider, the so-called “Yuppie fascist,” had significant financial relationships with Saddam Hussein and Mohmmar Khadafy. Haider was depositing large amounts of money in blind accounts in Liechtenstein, which we have termed “a lean, mean money-laundering machine.”
. . . . Soon thereafter news of Haider’s financial relationships with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi became public knowledge. Millions of dollars had passed through Haider’s hands to a series of blind accounts in Liechtenstein. Handwritten notebooks were discovered. Files accessed. Suspects questioned. The darling the New Right in Austria, the man some called the “Yuppie Fascist,” had been dealing with Arab dictators and providing some kind of service for them which has yet to be identified. . . .
7. Presenting a synoptic account of the Bank Al-Taqwa, Peter highlights this Al-Qaeda funding institution and its numerous links to people and institutions connected to the Third Reich and the postwar Nazi underground.
. . . . As the Soviet Union began to crumble, some of the same personnel we first encountered during the Cold War began to focus their attentions on a different enemy. Said Ramadan, who was instrumental in the operation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, became involved with the Al-Taqwa Bank of Switzerland. One of the founders of Al-Taqwa was none other than the Swiss Nazi and Islamist Ahmed Huber, who met with Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and many other Middle Eastern despots. It should be remembered that Jorg Haider–the Austrian politician and fascist we met in the opening of this book–had been receiving financing from Gaddafi and Hussein as well. Thus, the Nazi-Islamist networks were running as late as the year 2008, more than sixty years after the end of World War II, and almost one hundred years since the idea of global jihad first occurred to the amateur archaeologist Max von Oppenheim. . . .
8. The focus of this book is summed up by Peter on page 307. This quote also frames “The Skorzeny Syndrome”–a fundamental part of the “Hitler Legacy.”
. . . . After World War II, the American people thought that Nazi Germany had been defeated and the “war” was over; this book demonstrates that it never was. Instead, we were told that Communism was the new threat and we had to pull out all the stops to prevent a Communist takeover of the country. And so our military and our intelligence agencies collaborated with surviving Nazis to go after Communists. We refused to pursue worldwide right wing terror groups and assassins. After all, they were killing Communists and leftists; they were doing us a service. Like Hoover and the Mafia, the CIA refused to believe a Nazi Underground existed even as they collaborated with it (via the Gehlen Organization and the like).
The whole thrust of this book has been that American leaders in business, finance, media, and politics collaborated with Nazis before, during, and after the war. The West’s share in the ‘blame” for Al-Qaeda, et al, goes back a long way–before Eisenhower–to a cabal of extremist US Army generals and emigre Eastern Europeans who didn’t have much of a problem with Nazism since they feared Communism more. The Church, the Tibetans, the Japanese, the Germans, the Croatians–and the Americans–all felt that Communism was the greater danger, long before WWII. We enlisted war criminals to fight on our side. We appropriated the idea of global jihad from the Nazis and their WW I predecessors. We amped up their plan to weaponize religion and convinced Muslims, who hated each other, to band together to fight Communism. And when Afghanistan was liberated and the Soviet Union was defeated?
September 11, 2001. . . .
9. Further developing the Hitler Legacy, Peter encapsulaes what is, in effect, a Third Reich gone underground and its ongoing effect on our world:
. . . . With the Nazi diaspora, the leaders of the Third Reich who had survived—who were either living underground, or were “denazified” and living freely above ground—constituted a government-in-exile. They remained in contact, reinforced each other’s beliefs, provided logistical support where possible, and kept the faith alive. They became involved in political and military intrigues around the globe, always with the goal of causing an imbalance in global power structures. Motivated by anti-Semitism, they collaborated with Arab leaders and guerrilla organizations in attacks against Israel, even going so far as to develop weapons systems in Egypt. They wrote propaganda against Israel and against Jews in general, repeating the same libels as before. They formed “neo-Nazi” groups in Europe, Latin America, North America, and elsewhere, cultivating a fawning new generation of followers on every continent. They support Holocaust deniers and right-wing extremists everywhere, even when they do not agree on all points. They found official positions within extremist governments in the Middle East and Latin America.
They also constitute an army-in-exile. They trained troops, instructed security forces in interrogation and torture, ran guns. They conspired to assassinate objectionable leaders in various countries, as well as those who betrayed their own network. They developed weapons of mass destruction long before the identical claim was laid at the door of Saddam Hussein.
They are “non-state actors” like Al-Qaeda, with the difference that they recently had a state. They conduct “asymmetric warfare” because they can no longer field battalions made of tanks and planes and submarines—and no longer really need to do so. Using terror as a weapon has proven to be far more effective.They move money silently and unseen through the world’s financial institutions. People like Schacht and Genoud wrote the book.
And they are loosely organized. Individual units possess a certain degree of deniability, something that newer terror groups have copied.
Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbollah, Fatah, Jemaah Islamiyyah, Lashkar- e‑Taiba, etc. are all children of ODESSA. The pact between Nazi anti-Semitism and Arab anti-Semitism was made with Hajj Amin al-Husseini all those years ago—and has been renewed every decade since with refinements as necessary to reflect emerging political realities in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Skorzeny, al-Husseini, Genoud: one big happy family. . . .
10. Recapping previous discussion of the Third Reich as a “cult” or spiritual movement, Peter notes that this “Underground Reich” not only is a parallel entity to contemporary Islamist terror groups, but has actively dovetailed with them:
. . . . What many fail to realize is that the ideology of the Nazi Party— particularly as refined by the SS—was essentially a spiritual ideology. I have made the point elsewhere that the Nazi Party was a cult. To try to understand it as a purely political entity (in a modern, American context) is to make a grave mistake.
The Nazi network that was formed in the last days of the war and which has existed, in one form or another in the seventy years since then, is comprised of both a nationalist and a religious agenda. The Nazi Party has its origins in esoteric Aryanism, such as represented by the writings of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels, as well as occultist groups such as the Armanenschaft, the Germanenorden, and the Thule Gesellschaft. These groups combined racist ideology with spiritual, mystical ideas and practices, some of which were adapted from more mainstream esoteric groups such as the Theosophical Society and the writings of its founder, Helena Blavatsky. The Social Darwinism that is one of the hallmarks of the Nazi regime is the “outer court” of the spiritual Darwinism that is clearly elucidated in Blavatsky’s works. What this means is that Nazism is just as much a spiritual philosophy as it is a political one.
Thus the basic components of the non-state actor in asymmetric warfare are present in the Nazi Underground (what we have been calling ODESSA). The terrorist acts perpetrated by this Underground are precisely those of the modern non-state actors with which we have all become familiar. The motivation for ODESSA runs parallel to that of “Islamist” terror organizations: a spiritual viewpoint that both organizations wish to impose on the world through the medium of terrorism, assassinations, and the like. Both ideologies are exclusive rather than inclusive; both are anti-Semitic; both are anti-American and deplore what they see as Western “decadence.” (One could make a very good case that Hitler’s objection to modern art, modern music and modern culture in general is virtually identical to the point of view of Islamist critics concerning the same.)
In addition—and this may be more important than it seems at first glance—many members of the SS and the Wehrmacht converted to Islam after the war, and found employment and residence in Muslim countries. In some cases, they actively supported Arab regimes in their opposition to the State of Israel by providing technical expertise, engineers, and training in interrogation, espionage, and related arts of war.
I believe this provides an important perspective into the current terrorist phenomenon, as it shows a continuity of purpose combined with tactical and operational methods that have their origin in the murky world of the first days of the Cold War—when a cynical manipulation of religion using non-state actors took place under the aegis of a decades-long and often poorly thought-out campaign of state-sponsored anti-Communism. . . . .
11. Next, Peter further reviews the influence of the Nazi underground on the development of the concept of non-aligned nations as a foil to both the United States and the former Soviet Union. This was later adopted by Sukarno.
In addition, Peter notes the development of an Islamist underground working against China.
A crucial element of the Hitler Legacy is the re-emergence of Germany as the dominant force in Europe.
It was Skorzeny and his colleagues in ODESSA who, as early as 1950 and the outbreak of the Korean War, proposed forming a bloc of non-aligned nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to stand up to America and Russia: exactly the same position taken by Sukarno five years later. The position of the Islamist theoreticians of today is not dissimilar: the difference is that the Soviet Union has already fallen.
While China may develop into a threat, Uzbek and other activists in western China are creating another Muslim front with the intention of destabilizing that regime. Seen as both Communist and Capitalist, China could be an interesting adversary for the Third Way position of contemporary Nazism. China is at least as nationalist as its former enemy, Japan. . . .
. . . . As for Germany, it has developed exactly as planned so long ago. It is reunited and the leader of the European Union, easily its most powerful and influential member. It is true that growing numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe and especially Muslim immigrants from Turkey, the Balkans, and North Africa, are providing an environment where questions concerning German identity and responsibility are being raised. But as German cities have been rebuilt, industrial growth is strong, and memories of the war are fading with each new generation, it is doubtful whether any serious soul-searching will occur. With tensions rising in Europe over the fate of Ukraine and the Russian annexation of Crimea, it may be that the world will look to Germany again to provide the buffer between a newly-aroused Russia and the much more vulnerable nations of Eastern and Southern Europe.
It is doubtful whether the world will once again be confronted with jack-booted storm troopers wearing swastika armbands, singing the Horst Wessel song; but that does not mean that Nazism has disappeared. It has merely changed uniforms and moved to a different theater of operations. I do not wish to deprive the Islamic groups of agency in their present conflict with the West, but it is important to emphasize that they were as manipulated and exploited by the Germans in two World Wars as they had been by the colonial powers.
The concept of global jihad was foreign to Islam until created by a German spy—of Jewish ancestry, no less—with a view towards using Muslims as proxy soldiers in Germany’s fight with the Allied forces of England, France, and Russia. And when the Cold War began, they were manipulated once again: this time by American intelligence efforts to weaponize Islam against the Soviet Union. . . . .
Here’s a reminder that, while many who use the term “Islamofascism” use it with the intent of suggestion that militant Islamists resemble the Nazis in a number of ways, here’s an article that’s a remind that the actual phenomena of “Islamofascism” involves Islamists and fascists actually helping each other. Sometimes it might involve direct assistance and coordination like we saw with folks like Achmed Huber and Francois Genoud, but we can’t forget all the indirect mutual assistance that, intentionally or unintentionally, is still very real:
“The caliph would certainly not have cause to celebrate, but would be awarded at least some satisfaction: the rise of right-wing political parties in European elections was one of the results Al Baghdadi predicted and hoped for in his plans for the destabilization and conquest of Europe. As Maurizio Molinari recounted in his last book Jihad, the “Lord of ISIS” repeatedly described the rise of extreme-right parties in elections as one of the positive consequences of the attacks on Europe in his recent speeches. A rise which, according to the predictions of the terrorist group, would create conditions of intolerance in the West which would serve to radicalize an ever-growing number of young Muslims.”
So exactly thing thing that Al Baghdadi predicted and hoped for is coming to pass, in large part due to ISIS’s terror attacks. While the above piece suggests that the National Front’s victory in France isn’t something ISIS would have cause to celebrate, that actually sounds like a pretty big achievement for ISIS to celebrate! One of many.
The Fourth Reich is the latest in a grand series of works that Rosenfeld has devoted to the afterlife of Nazism. But towards the end of the book he makes one small assumption that strikes me as opening up the possibility of a further volume, about the Nazi afterlife in Asia. “Germany’s popularity”, he writes, “did not last” after the financial crisis of 2008. This may be true for Europe, but it is hardly the case globally, where, especially in south and south-east Asia, Germany is regularly ranked as the favourite country.
What is disconcerting for any European traveller to Indonesia, for instance, is not merely that people equate Germany with perfection – automobiles, appliances and football – but that Nazi prowess is also admired as an example of German excellence. That there was a genocide is not particularly notable for people who have lived through one of their own, but German nationalism coupled with industrialism and the apparent bounty of its socialism draws admirers. The news-stands of Jakarta are full of magazines devoted to U‑boats alone. At the Soldatenkaffee in Bandung, couples order “Nazi goreng”, below the German heraldic eagle and a wall decorated with a slogan that reads: “We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalist economic system…” In a country where to be on the left is still forbidden, it’s at least cool to quote to Hitler.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/03/fourthreich-specter-nazism-world-war-gavriel-rosenfeld-review