The Ruling Elite
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Victorious Generals, from every country, feel entitled to live comfortably at the expense of the conquered people. Collins sequestered two castles, both furnished with loot from Polish museums, palaces and private homes, items that had originally filled twelve rail cars. He lived in one castle while his command staff lived in the other one. His posh residence was adjacent to a rail line so he acquired a private railcar for his daily trips to Salzburg. When he wanted additional items for his residence, he toured the Property Control Warehouse where he requisitioned twenty-five Oriental rugs, eight paintings, and other items for entertaining. Then he had his railroad car stripped and refurbished. The military even confiscated horses for personal use. Nothing was off limits. 2003
The general’s blatant plundering activities set an example for hundreds of other military officers. He issued a memo, dated March 8, 1946, stating that his men and their families could have whatever they wanted from the warehouse in Salzburg, the site of all the various treasures from the Hungarian Gold Train. The occupying forces evidently required these spoils for their comfort, perhaps viewing them as essential needs they could not legitimately acquire in any other way. 2004 The occupation forces could also “shop” for exclusive merchandise at other locations, including the Klessheim Castle, formerly owned by the Habsburg family. The NSDAP had purchased the castle and restored and furnished it to use for entertaining visiting dignitaries. American military officers hauled away truckloads of antique furniture, paintings and art objects from the castle. General Mark W. Clark, a totally inept military leader2005, a Freemason, 2006 whose mother was a Romanian Jew2007, furnished his entire residence in Vienna with items pillaged from the Klessheim Castle. 2008
Clark, a graduate of West Point and a World War I veteran, became an aide in the office of the Assistant Secretary of War (1921-1924). Like other officers, he attended General Staff School at the Army War College, and attained the rank of Lt. Colonel by 1940. General George C. Marshall took note of him, and began mentoring him in his meteoric military advancement, after a twenty-four year relatively obscure career, including assigning him to the War College just before its temporary closure due to the impending war. On August 4, 1941, before Pearl Harbor, his superiors promoted Clark two grades to a brigadier general, just as the country prepared to enter the war. They then made him an Assistant Chief of Staff at General Headquarters. When Marshall asked him to recommend ten brigadier generals who could lead the war planning section, he suggested Dwight D. Eisenhower who he knew from West Point. Both Churchill and Eisenhower claimed Clark was a brilliant officer and trainer. 2009
America liquidated $25 million dollars’ worth of German assets in other countries for use in the resettlement of displaced persons. The American military was supposed to turn over all plunder to the Inter-Governmental Committee for Refugees (IGCR). The United States totally administered the Property Control Warehouse in Salzburg, the target of large-scale looting. In the summer of 1946, officials designated the majority of the contents of the warehouse as un-returnable due to ownership issues, despite adequate evidence to the contrary. The Hungarian Restitution Ministry, through their humanitarian efforts, finally received some of the poorer quality clothing which it distributed to the Poles, Hungarians, and Russians in DP camps. The Final Act of the Paris Conference, Article 8D, allowed the allies to retain the personal property that they had seized from the Hungarians. However, despite this policy, Hungarian officials unsuccessfully filed claims for asset return. Many items found their way into the black market where people often saw them in the display cases and windows of Salzburg shops. 2010
At the Berchtesgaden, Colonel Willard White seized Hitler and Göring’s silverware and crystal goblets, originally purchased from Napoleon’s palace. White mailed these treasures home to Austin, Texas. He and his wife, Lyndon B. Johnson’s sister-in-law, later sold many of the items for $25,000 each. 2011 The Germans concealed a 159-ton cache of gold at Merkers-Kieselbach, a small village in Thüringen, located in central Germany, about two miles from the former East German border. Thüringen has forested valleys, a rugged terrain with numerous large hillside mines. During World War II, the Germans enlarged these mines to use as military facilities and as storage vaults. Bretton Woods, Resolution VI, authorized the seizure of the Merkers-Kieselbach gold. 2012 Where is it now?
The Marshall Plan: Looting America’s Wealth
In 1948, the U.S. Government established the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) to administer the Marshall Plan, directed by Paul G. Hoffman, a former head of Studebaker. It reported its activities to the State and Commerce Departments. The heads of major corporations managed many of the policies and business transactions. The ECA had branch offices in the capitals of sixteen countries, all participants in the Marshall Plan. The ECA functioned as a joint administrator of the Marshall Plan development projects in each European nation. Another managerial agency that influences domestic policies of foreign nations is the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the successor of the ECA. USAID currently distributes information in foreign countries in an effort to initiate family planning (restrict the birth rate) and introduce other reproductive health programs.
Secretary of State Marshall, a Freemason, 2013 and Dean Acheson (CFR), both Pilgrims Society members, collaborated on the taxpayer-financed Marshall Plan to Aid Europe, devised by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a CFR economic counterpart. Henry Stimson was on the CED executive board. The Marshall Plan effectively transferred nearly $100 billion (current value) to Europe under humanitarian claims. Its stated purpose was to provide American jobs, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc. W. Averell Harriman (CFR, S&B) and a Pilgrims Society member administered the program. 2014
The government sold the taxpayers the “altruistic” plan to rebuild devastated Europe. Senator Joseph McCarthy called Marshall “a living lie.” The Marshall Plan was just another Rockefeller plan to redistribute America’s wealth. Winthrop Aldrich, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and Nelson Rockefeller’s brother-in-law rushed it through Congress. It was just one of numerous profitable postwar swindles, which encompassed the Bretton Woods Agreement, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation and others. 2015 Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes were the architects of the Bretton Woods or IMF system which evolved into the World Bank, the world-scale model of the Federal Reserve.
On April 16, 1948, sixteen European countries responded to the generous offer of economic aid through the Marshall Plan, purportedly to impede the expansion of communism. 2016 The Organization for European Economic Cooperation (later the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) was established to restore Europe’s economy under the plan, an economic carrot, with multiple conditions. Each recipient had to sign a strict agreement promising to balance its budget, free prices, halt inflation, stabilize its exchange rate and abolish trade restrictions and allocate scarce commodities. The recipients had to devise a plan to allocate aid in collaboration with each other. From the start, the United States encouraged West European political and economic integration. 2017
America’s economy grew during the war; especially the military industrial complex—the shipbuilders, aircraft and weapons manufacturers—and they wanted new customers. Conversely, the war demolished European and Japanese industry and infrastructure. Marshall Plan money, by agreement, had to be used to purchase American exports. They would begin their marketing in Europe. 2018 What a radical business concept, bomb them and then allow politically-connected campaign-contributing corporations to reap the rich rewards through rebuilding.
McGeorge Bundy (S&B), Special Assistant to the President for National Security (1961-1966), co-authored In Active Service in Peace and War, and worked on the CFR-sponsored Marshall Plan in 1949. After the plan was implemented, the greatest expenditure in rebuilding was American oil. At least ten percent of the purchases, out of all of the commodities made through the Marshall Plan were for oil. The five
biggest companies supplied at least half of Western Europe’s oil needs. The oil companies, seeing a unique opportunity, doubled the price of oil between 1945 and 1948. Quite conveniently, the Marshall Plan would not fund the rebuilding or repair of oil refining facilities in Europe. 2019 The plan, facilitated by well-connected corporations, accomplished several objectives; (1) expanded corporate profits; (2) improved Truman’s failing popularity; (3) allegedly disseminated funds to halt communism and; (4) transfer taxpayer bribe money to the compliant leaders of other countries, including Britain, which according to Marshall would end “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” 2020 Britain, controlled by The City of London, was one of the biggest recipients of the Marshall Plan.
Theoretically, reparations are supposed to be paid by the country that loses the war, as defined by a bunch of stern-faced politicians and their banker buddies who gather at so-called peace conferences. However, the bankers, the corporate moguls and their political minions greedily sought to seize the abundant resources that American citizens had following World War II. Therefore, instead of making those who purportedly lost the war foot the entire bill, the politicos shifted it to the taxpayer, under the guise of financial aid. This burden was an economic assault against America. In as much as the taxpayers did not actually write a personal check, the politicians just had the Federal Reserve print up some of their debt-based money.
Of the nineteen people on the executive board of the Marshall Plan Committee, eight of them belonged to the CFR, including Wall Street lawyer Allen Dulles, president and CFR founding member and a long-time Rockefeller agent. Among other things, he was in charge of Operation Paperclip and Operation Mockingbird and was CIA Director (1953-1961) during which time Operation 40 and MKULTRA (1953) were developed. Other members of the CED Executive Committee included Henry Stimson (S&B), Robert Patterson, War Secretary (1945-1947) and Philip D. Reed (CFR, Pilgrims Society). Reed was chair of J. P. Morgan-financed General Electric (1940-1942, 1945-1958). 2021 He had both an electrical engineering and a law degree and was elected chair of the Research and Policy Committee for the CED in August 1948. 2022 He was a member of the CFR Board of Directors (1945-1969). 2023
Private sector support for the Marshall Plan came from the leadership of academic circles, major trade unions, the CFR, the Business Advisory Council (BAC), the Committee for Economic Development (CED) and the National Planning Association (NPA), three agencies that developed during the depression. All four groups were on the President’s Committee on Foreign Aid, also known as the Harriman Committee, and also on the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery, a private, nonpartisan organ composed of labor, farm and business leaders. Of the nineteen people on the executive board of the Marshall Plan, eight were members of the CFR and two of these eight were also members of BAC, CED, or NPA Inc. The list included Dulles, CFR President; Reed, and former Secretaries of War Stimson and Patterson, along with Acheson, who also served on the executive board. Dulles, Patterson and Acheson all testified in Congress on behalf of the ERP. 2024
The Allies’ Ethnic Cleansing in Europe
Point ten of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, encouraging autonomy for national minorities, placed more than five million Germans in the newly-created states of Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. 2025 The Treaty of St. Germain amputated Austria from its industrial areas and natural resources, in the German-populated Austrian Silesia and the Sudetenland. Austria, now a skeleton of a state, had a population of just seven million. The Allies partitioned the multinational Austria-Hungary into the state of Czechoslovakia whose population consisted of Czechs (46%), Slovaks (13%), Poles (2%), Ukrainians (3%), Hungarians (8%), and 3.5 million Germans (28%). There was another 1.5 million German minorities in various successor states to Austria Hungary. There were 750,000 Germans in Romania, 550,000 Germans in what remained of Hungary and there were over two million Germans in the new state of Poland. 2026
In 1933, after Hitler came to power, he encouraged the German minorities to petition for autonomy because of the persecution inflicted upon them by local governments. East-Central Europe was not composed of definitively marked states that were devoted to specific ethnic groups. Instead, omitting some ethnic majority areas, various ethnicities resided in small pockets in key cities of Central and Eastern Europe. These ethnicities had enjoyed constant interaction on a daily basis for generations on both a civic and economic level. With the advent of nationalism in the nineteenth century, citizens became more aware of ethnic status and the importance of designated territories.
The Sudeten Germans were the largest group of expellees who were living outside the Reich’s 1937 borders. They had inhabited the border mountain ranges of Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries. In 1933 and again in 1938, Hitler wanted to annex those border areas. The Sudeten German population sought some form of autonomy, part of their own political tradition and something for which they had long advocated. There were, in Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia, per the census 3,149,820 persons of German nationality. Of those, 2,326,090 lived in Bohemia and 823,730 lived in Moravia. They comprised 30-38% of the total population of those areas. 2027 The Allies expelled the Germans from Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland as a form of collective punishment. 2028
On October 19, 1944, Dr. Heinrich Amberger, head of the 13th Company of paratroopers described a macabre scene. He stated that there was a large quantity of dead civilians who he surmised that the Soviet soldiers deliberately murdered. He said that the Soviets had killed many of these women with a bullet to the head and that before killing them, they had raped them. In addition to the women, there were many dead children. 2029
Encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, a Soviet propagandist, Red Army soldiers, during their advance west, raped, mutilated and committed every imaginable atrocity while they looted and pillaged, often in a drunken state, because of their merciless revengeful attitude toward both German civilians and military. On October 21, 1944, the army invaded Nemmersdorf, a German village, in East Prussia. A 1953 report said that in one farmyard, the Soviets had “crucified” some naked women on the barn wall by driving nails through their hands. The Soviets had murdered a total of seventy-two people in the village, all non-combatants, including children. An international commission, headed by Hjalmar Mäe, listened to the evidence from a medical commission which confirmed that the Soviets had raped all of the dead females, aged eight to eighty.
On October 27, 1944, ICRC doctors arrived at Nemmersdorf. They testified on October 31, in Berlin. The doctors discovered that the Soviets had raped all of the females, girls from eight to twelve years old, and an eighty-four year old blind woman. Amberger testified, “I saw fully confirmed the rumors regarding the Russian massacre of German civilians. On the road through Nemmersdorf, near the bridge over the brook Angerapp, I saw where a whole trek of refugees had been rolled over by Russian tanks; not only the wagons and teams, but also a goodly number of civilians, mostly women and children, had been squashed flat by the tanks. At the edge of the road and in the farm yards lay quantities of corpses of civilians who evidently had not all been killed in the course of military operations but rather had been murdered systematically . . .” 2030
Amberger continues, “On the edge of a street an old woman sat hunched up, killed by a bullet in the back of the neck. Not far away lay a baby of only a few months, killed by a shot at close range through the forehead… A number of men, with other marks of fatal wounds, had been killed by blows with shovels or gun butts; their faces were completely smashed. At least one man was nailed to a barn door. Yet, not only in Nemmersdorf itself, but also in the near-by villages between Angerapp and Rominten similar cases were noted after these villages were cleared of Russian troops. Neither in Nemmersdorf nor in the other places did I find a single living German civilian despite the fact that the Russian invasion had come as such a surprise that no appreciable number of civilians could have fled . . .” 2031
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Johann Walz, a witness stated, “From afar we witnessed how the ghastly massacre took place in Nemmersdorf. There was terrible screaming by women and children and in the light of fires, we could see how the drunken Russians killed children, cut off breasts of women and nailed them to the barn doors. Others had their hands chopped off. It was the most terrible thing you can imagine, this massacre in Nemmersdorf… A short time afterwards the parachutist unit of lieutenant-colonel Schirmer arrived and drove the Russians away… I myself was then shot in the lungs by a Russian sharpshooter.” 2032
On December 15, 1944, Churchill spoke of the proposed German expulsion, “A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. The disentanglement of populations which took place between Greece and Turkey after the last war—was in many ways a success, and has produced friendly relations between Greece and Turkey ever since . . .” 2033
The expulsion order covered the Germans under Polish jurisdiction in southern East Prussia, Pomerania, and the former Province of Brandenburg, parts of Posen-West Prussia, Lower Silesia and areas in Upper Silesia that Germany retained following the 1921 Upper Silesia plebiscite. It was “the largest forcible population transfer in human history” 2034 involving from twelve to fourteen million Germans and functioned as genocidal ethnic cleansing. It also applied to the German minority residing within the former Second Polish Republic in Greater Poland, eastern Upper Silesia, Chelmno Land and the Polish Corridor with Danzig.
Towards the end of the war, German officials, seeing the potential danger to their people living in the path of the invading Red Army had prepared evacuation plans. Beginning on April 1, 1944, officials also began evacuating some of the guards and inmates from the Majdanek camp. Some people refer to those evacuations as death marches. Because of inadequate transportation resources such as trains and ships and the constant allied bombing, there was a delay in the full implementation of the plans. Many families had to relinquish most of their possessions because of the time factor. Germans first began fleeing from their homes in the eastern territories in mid-1944, which would continue through the spring of 1945. However, they waited too long, until January 1945, and were unable to conduct the evacuation in an orderly manner because the Soviet forces were already rapidly advancing westward. They succeeded in evacuating about six million Germans from the territory east of the Oder-Neisse line just prior to the seizure of the area by the Red Army and the Polish People’s Army, under the direction of the Soviets.