The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  Most of the leaders of the state-run Office of State Security in Warsaw were Polish Jews, including the chief. The department directors were almost exclusively Jewish. The head of the Office in Silesia, where Gleiwitz is, was Jewish as was the director of prisons. The Secretary of State Security was a Jew. In Silesia, in 1945, three-fourths of the officers, not the GIs or the guards, but the colonels, etc. were Jewish. The Office of State Security had 227 prisons in Poland just like Lola’s, prisons for German civilians. At one camp, Sack found death certificates for 1,583 Germans. He found death records in other camps for men, women and children. At one camp, there was an unheated barracks for fifty babies overseen by a Jewish doctor, earlier interned at Auschwitz. Though the babies had cribs, the doctor did not give them milk but rather regular camp soup. Out of those fifty infants, they allowed forty-eight to perish. 1981

  Salomon Morel, a Polish-Jewish Communist official, claims that his family hid during World War II in order to avoid living in the ghetto. However, the Babylonian Talmud mandated fundamental religious and cultural views. While many Jews assimilated, those in Eastern Europe refused to cede their identity through Russianization or by becoming Christian. The rabbis instituted the ghettoization of the people, not the Russians or the other host countries. 1982 Morel stated that Polish collaborators killed his mother, father, and one brother in December 1942. Morel watched from a haystack as the Poles questioned his mother about where Solomon and his other brother were. She refused to tell them. Then the Poles shot his mother, father and brother. He also claimed that Józef Tkaczyk, a Polish Catholic hid him and his brother, Izaak and that is how they survived the Holocaust. In 1983, the Yad Vashem named Józef Tkaczyk as one of the Righteous among the Nations for saving the Morel brothers.

  The Polish narrative of Solomon Morel’s activities is considerably different from his account. An Israeli source claimed that he was an inmate at Auschwitz where the Germans had killed thirty of his relatives. The Institute of National Remembrance states that, in early 1942, Salomon Morel and his brother Izaak headed a group of thugs that committed robberies in the neighboring villages. The Polish People’s Army captured them and Morel accused his brother of the crimes. He then joined the Soviet partisans in the Parczew (a town in eastern Poland) area, noted for its Jewish partisan movement. Partisan leaders included Ephraim Bleichman and Shmuel Gruber, second to Yechiel Grynszpan, the leader of the Jewish forces in the Parczew forest. They fought along with the People’s Guard against German forces, using machine guns, mining explosives and other supplies, air-dropped by Soviet forces.

  On March 15, 1945, twenty-six year old Jewish Colonel Salomon Morel became the commander of the infamous Zgoda camp in Świętochłowice, in southern Poland. The NKVD established the Zgoda camp after the Red Army entered southern Poland. In February, the Soviets relinquished the camp to the Communist Polish secret service, the notorious Ministry of Public Security. They imprisoned about 6,000 at the Zgoda camp, a third of them were ethnic German citizens. They also incarcerated the children of those citizens. The Security Authorities interned them simply because they were ethnic Germans, not because they were guilty of any crimes.

  On the first night at Zgoda, Morel walked into a barrack and told the German prisoners, “My name is Morel. I am a Jew. My mother and father, my family… they’re all dead, and I swore that if I got out alive, I was going to get back at you Nazis. And now you’re going to pay for what you did.” Even though the Poles had killed his family, he blamed the Germans. Morel and the Jewish and Polish guards systematically tortured the inmates virtually every night. Nearly 2,000 inmates died in the camp where guards starved, tortured and abused them.

  The guards used clubs on the Germans. Morel used his bare hands, a wooden stool, a pistol butt or a truncheon. Morel asked, “How many blows do you want?” If the answer was unsatisfactory, it was fifty blows.” When using a wooden stool, Morel beat the prisoner until it broke apart. A report regarding Zgoda said, “Groups of prisoners brought to the camp were made to stand in the camp square for many hours, without food or drink, and sometimes in bad weather. Some prisoners spent at least a dozen or so hours in this state and some as much as 72 hours.” The guards would have two rows of prisoners stand facing and beating each other. If a prisoner refused or did not show sufficient brutality, the camp personnel would beat the noncompliant prisoner. Hunger in the camp was ubiquitous as the regular ration was a slice of bread and watery soup without any substance. Desperate inmates ate whatever available grass or anything else they could find. Soap was nonexistent and only cold water was accessible. 1983

  The camp closed in November 1945. Documented figures indicate that 1,855 prisoners perished at Zgoda camp from February until November. Most died of typhus during an epidemic that peaked in August, claiming 1,600 victims. Morel suppressed medical assistance until the disease spread throughout the entire camp. They stacked the dead bodies on carts at night, then took them outside of the camp and buried them in mass graves. Morel failed to notify his superiors about the typhus epidemic until the local newspaper reported the desperate situation. For his negligent actions, they punished Morel with a three-day house arrest.

  Between 60,000 to 80,000 Germans died in these camps, many from typhus, dysentery, starvation and torture, all under the custody of the Office of State Security and all concealed for almost fifty years. The Jews who participated in the repugnant activities did not discuss it. In 1945, the chief of Police in Breslau, Germany, a Jew, wrote a book about the Holocaust but failed to mention these prisons. Jewish reporters that were aware of them refused to write about them. In 1989, Sack visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem where they claim to have fifty million documents regarding the Holocaust. When he asked about their archived documents about the Office of State Security, they told him they had nothing. He asked what they had about the Jews functioning in that agency and they responded—nothing. When he provided information about the camps and the Jews who were heading them, the Director of Yad Vashem said that it all sounded “rather imaginary.” The director of the archives said that it was “impossible.” 1984

  In 1990, following the collapse of communism, the General Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation, initiated an investigation into the abuses carried out at the Zgoda camp. In 1992, Morel immigrated to Israel where authorities refused to extradite him, using the justification that the statute of limitations had expired on war crimes. Apparently, the authorities in various countries selectively apply that statute of limitations as the Israelis and others are still searching for Germans to punish for their alleged war crimes. As late as 2005, at least 100 witnesses, including 58 former inmates of the Zgoda camp, would provide evidence against Morel. However, the Israeli government refused to comply with the extradition, claiming that the charges were false and based on an anti-Semitic conspiracy. Morel died in Tel Aviv on February 14, 2007. 1985

  One Man Fighting, Two Men Looting, Three Men Painting Rainbows

  Despite claims of moral superiority, American soldiers engaged in opportunistic, random plunder while their superiors, who participated in the same activities, regularly overlooked. In fact, those superior officers often used their higher military status to use existing manpower to pilfer, transport and profit to an even greater degree than their subordinates. United States military regulations and reality routinely diverge on this issue. Soldiers justify pillaging their enemies to augment their paltry wages. In Germany, American forces institutionalized the plundering of personal and state assets including cultural artifacts, museum treasures, natural resources, and scientific technology (about 300,000 patents), all planned in concert with their armed invasions.

  The gold reserves of neutral countries increased considerably between 1939 and 1943. Spain’s increased from $42 million to $104 million, Sweden’s increased from $160 million to $456 million, Turkey’s increased from $88 million to $221 million, and Switzerland’s increased from $503 million t
o $1,040. On February 22, 1944, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau warned Switzerland and the other countries against all financial dealing with NS Germany—trading, storing or purchasing gold. Officials in Switzerland didn’t respond. 1986

  Henry Morgenthau, along with Harry Dexter White, maintained that Europe’s peace depended on the permanent destruction of Germany’s industrial power. Former ghetto-poor Jewish Harvard and Columbia-educated economists and lawyers supported Morgenthau. Apparently, Germany’s alleged treatment of the German Jews and the destitute European Jews outraged them. Israel Sieff, a British Zionist influenced their perceptions. 1987 White directed American policy throughout Europe. He assigned Colonel Bernard Bernstein to Eisenhower’s headquarters to coordinate Germany’s occupation at the end of World War II. Isador Lubin, a Roosevelt confidant, recognized the collaborative efforts of supposedly neutral countries and Germany. 1988

  The Treasury Department assigned Columbia Law School-educated Samuel Klaus, to the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA), created September 26, 1943, headed by Leo Crowley, to monitor Germany’s foreign trade. Klaus, an anti-German Jew, joined with London’s Ministry of Economic Warfare in an offensive against Germany’s essential supply lines. He focused on seizing German assets in neutral countries, especially Switzerland where they had accumulated money and technology worth at least $1 billion (1942 dollars), available for the post-war reestablishment of Germany. On May 11, 1944, Klaus developed the Safehaven Program to persuade neutral countries to seize German assets deposited within their countries. 1989

  The Allies adopted Operation Safehaven, promoted by the FEA, at Bretton Woods, the UN Monetary and Financial Conference held July and August 1944 in New Hampshire. The FEA directed Operation Safehaven with financial counsel from the Treasury Department and policy guidance from the State Department. Officials organized the operation on December 6. Four days later, the State Department requested a moderate attitude towards Switzerland. 1990

  On August 21, 1944, in London, the British and American Chiefs of Staff created the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) which would operate under Eisenhower’s SHAEF. CIOS established the Target Forces or T-Forces, composed of Americans from U.S. intelligence agencies such as the OSS, Army Air Forces, the State Department, the FEA and the Navy’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, directed by Vannevar Bush. The British members were from the Foreign Office, Navy, Military, Air Intelligence, and the Ministries of Supply, Economic Warfare, and Aircraft Production. They made the initial appraisal of the status of German warfare, including biological-chemical research and evaluated the military maneuvers, seized documents, detained scientists and other specialists to prevent them from fleeing the country. They also determined what Germany had shared with Japan, her ally. 1991

  The Document Control Section in the Operations Branch of the G-2 (intelligence) staff at U.S. Forces European Theater (USFET) in Frankfurt took control of all captured German documents. This unit, with the assistance of other United States agencies and foreign governments, created the policies for obtaining and processing captured documents. The United States seized documents, for evaluation by its officials, along with British analysts, in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, the site of the “hidden documents.” 1992

  The U.S. Army entered Germany in September 1944. In October, Prince Wolfgang of Hesse buried some family property, including the Landgrafin and Kurhesse jewels. He inventoried and secured the items in an expertly crafted zinc-lined wooden box and then buried them, along with 1,600 bottles of fine wine, in the basement of the 100-room family castle, Schloss Friedrichshof, known as the Kronberg Castle, nine miles from Frankfurt. The workers cemented over the site and walled it in, all theoretically safe until the war’s end. The fully furnished castle, complete with priceless paintings, exquisite antiques, historically significant old papers and letters, had been unoccupied since the seventeenth century. 1993

  The U.S. Third Army appropriated the Kronberg Castle sometime between April 10 and April 20, 1945 to use as an officer’s club, one of fourteen in the Frankfurt area. They staffed the thirty bedrooms with thirty young attractive females to accommodate the officer’s physical needs. Although they posted sentries to prevent people from the systematic daily removal of objects from the castle, those guards were ineffective. 1994 On November 5, in the basement, a curious corporal using a sledgehammer uncovered Prince Wolfgang’s stash. The corporal alerted Captain Kathleen B. Nash, the club’s hostess. His superiors placed that corporal in charge of the club’s social events, and soon he became the overseer of a well-stocked, luxurious 12 x 14 foot treasure showroom, complete with glass display cases, velvet lined drawers and packing boxes. Staff at the special club then invited visitors to shop in the showroom. 1995

  The war officially ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. On May 10, President Harry S. Truman signed the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Directive 1067, also referred to as the Morgenthau Plan, devised between January and September 1944. Among other things, this plan authorized the seizure of certain properties of the German Reich, the NSDAP, or any group or person affiliated with the party, and non-German absentee owners. Furthermore, the U.S. Zone Commander could confiscate all property that others had pilfered and halt the recovery of valuable art or cultural pieces, without regard to ownership. 1996

  After the D-Day allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, led by Eisenhower, as many as 10,000 scientific investigators from the U.S. Army, Navy, the Army Air Force, along with intelligence agents from the OSS followed the troops into Germany. On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered and the Soviets occupied Berlin. The investigator’s objective was to access and exploit the Reich’s scientific secrets. They had advanced further in many areas and America was concerned that German physicists had already developed an atom bomb.

  Even before the formalization of Project Paperclip, Herbert Wagner, chief missile design engineer for the Henschel Aircraft Company and his two assistants arrived in Washington, DC on a military transport on May 19, 1945. Wagner, a member of the Sturmabteilung (storm troopers), was the creator of the HS-293, the first German guided missile used in combat during WW II. He went to work for the navy. This was the beginning of Project Paperclip, run by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), which brought at least sixteen hundred scientists and research specialists and their families to America (1945-1990). Two other Paperclip-related operations also brought hundreds of others who went to work for universities, defense contractors and CIA fronts. 1997

  When hostilities in Europe ceased, the Twelfth Army Group, established in London on July 14, organized collection points. General Omar Bradley commanded this group for the storage and preservation of all cultural items that officials uncovered in the U.S. Zone (OMGUS). They categorized the majority of these items as Nazi loot, no matter where they procured it. The Office of Military Government, U.S. Zone, under the command of General Lucius Clay, took custody of all property as of October 1, 1945. OMGUS directed all activities in American-occupied Germany and the U.S. sector of Berlin. In March 1948, the United States created the Property Division which formulated policies and managed the confiscated property. 1998

  Hungary, by 1943, was home to at least 560,000 Jews who had relocated, between the wars, and had acquired 1,100,000 acres out of 9,000,000 acres of arable land. They composed six percent of the population but owned fifty-one percent of the property in Budapest and twenty-five percent of the total national assets, and controlled thirty percent of the total national income. 1999

  The Hungarian NSDAP and Gestapo agents had confiscated personal assets, gold, jewelry, gems, diamonds, pearls, watches, paintings, Persian and Oriental rugs, silverware, chinaware, furniture, fine clothing, linens, porcelains, cameras, stamp-collections and currency. Árpád Toldi, an SS-appointed Hungarian official concocted a plan to prevent the advancing Soviets from plundering their plunder. On December 15, 1944, the loot was labeled, packed and pad-locked into twenty
-nine rail cars (sources vary on the actual number). Others willingly loaded their treasures onto the train, called the Hungarian Gold Train, which traveled under Toldi’s command. He planned to stay just ahead of the Soviets and collect treasures for safekeeping from Hungarian towns along the route, including Győr, on the banks of the Mosoni-Duna (Moson-Danube), where they loaded approximately 100 priceless paintings, along with additional train cars. 2000

  Eventually, on August 29, soldiers from G Company, Two-Hundred Forty-Second Infantry Regiment, part of the Forty-Second Division guarded the train while the Hungarian guards spent four days unloading its contents into a former Wehrmacht warehouse in Salzburg. There were 850 chests of silverware, 5,000 hand-woven Persian rugs, alarm clocks, watches, cameras, bolts of cloth, underwear, topcoats, typewriters, chinaware, stamp collections, coin collections, cases of diamonds, cases of gold coins, and large amounts of currency. Reportedly, after the unloading, American officials sent the Hungarians to a POW camp while they sent the women and children passengers to a displaced persons (DP) camp in Riederburg, Austria. The estimated value of the train, in 1945, was $206 million, several billion in today’s dollars. American troops assumed control of the spoils under the jurisdiction of Major General Harry J. Collins. 2001 According to people who were there, the Forty-Second had a standing joke for their strategy, “one man fighting, two men looting, and three men painting rainbows.” 2002