The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  Apollo 11, of course, did go to the moon. The billowing Stars and Stripes is explained by the simple fact that the flag was still swirling from being planted.

  The Apollo moon landings were an astronomical hoax: ALERT LEVEL 1

  Further Reading

  Bill Kaysing and Randy Reid, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, 1999

  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

  On 14 October 1791, in his last surviving letter, the composer Mozart wrote to his wife Constanze that he had taken the Italian composer Antonio Salieri to a performance of The Magic Flute, and that Salieri had been laudatory: “From the overture to the last chorus there was not a single number that did not call forth from him a bravo! or bello!” Less than two months later, Mozart was dead.

  Within a week of Mozart’s death, there were rumours of poisoning based on the strangely swollen condition of his body. Suspicion soon focused on Salieri who, despite his loud enjoyment of The Magic Flute, had long been a rival of Mozart’s on the Viennese music scene. Salieri was the mature Kappelmeister to the court of composers, Mozart the youthful upstart who threatened his position. Mozart had feared for some years before his death that his meteoric musical ascendancy would create a jealousy among his peers that might inspire one of them to murder him: in 1789 he had told Constanze “I am only too conscious [that] my end will not be long in coming; for sure, someone has poisoned me!” In summer 1791 Mozart claimed he had been given aqua toffana (an arsenic preparation); he also wrote to his father that “Salieri is poisoning me . . .” Only weeks before his death, Mozart tearfully told Constanze in the Prater Park, “I am sure I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea.” After Mozart’s demise on 5 December 1791, Constanze regularly told anyone who would listen that Salieri had conspired to murder her husband. And then, in his dotage, Salieri himself is said to have confessed to bringing down the baton on Mozart’s life.

  The rumours that Salieri assassinated Mozart were stoked by the Russian playwright Aleksandr Pushkin, who in 1830 wrote a short play called Mozart and Salieri in which envy drove the Kappelmeister to murder his rival. Rimksy-Korsakov turned the Pushkin piece into an opera, and the rivalrous Mozart-Salieri theme was later picked up by Peter Shaffer in his stage play Amadeus, which in 1984 became an award-winning movie of the same name, directed by by Milos Forman. According to Forman’s twist, Salieri did not poison Mozart but caused his death by overwork, after provoking him to finish the Requiem.

  Salieri, however, does not fit the bill of Mozart’s murderer very neatly. The nurses who cared for Salieri in his dotage testified that they had never, contrary to gossip, heard Salieri confess to the deed. Salieri himself utterly refuted the suggestion, telling musician Ignaz Moscheles in 1823, “I can assure you on my word of honour that there is no truth in that absurd rumour: you know, that I was supposed to have poisoned Mozart.” Neither did Salieri have a clear motive: in the 18th century it was Salieri who was the big noise – it was Salieri who was the Emperor Joseph II’s chief musician, it was Salieri who had the wealth and reputation. Certainly, Salieri might have obstructed Mozart’s career at court, but the reason was not personal resentment but professional estimation: Mozart’s music was not in the Style Gallant that both Salieri and the Emperor favoured. When Mozart wrote that “Salieri is poisoning me” he meant it figuratively – that he would have to trim his style to the court taste if he wanted to get on.

  Something of the close personal relations between Salieri and the Mozart family can be judged from the fact that Salieri was one of the small group of mourners who followed Mozart’s coffin as it was carried from the funeral service at St Stephen’s Cathedral to the cemetery. Salieri also became the teacher of Mozart’s son Franz Xaver Wolfgang. Would Constanze Mozart really have entrusted her son to Salieri if she believed him her husband’s murderer?

  There are other candidates as Mozart’s murderer. The composer was a serial womanizer and among his conquests was, allegedly, Magdalena Hofdemel, the 23–year-old wife of his Masonic brother Franz Hofdemel. On the day after Mozart’s funeral, an altercation in the Hofdemel house ended with Franz brutally hacking Magdalena with a razor before slitting his own throat with the implement. Magdalena, five months pregnant, was revived and gave birth to a boy which she named Johann von Nepomuk Alexander Franz. Since she named the baby after both her husband and presumed lover (Johann was Mozart’s given first name), many believed the child was Mozart’s and that her cuckolded husband had poisoned the composer in revenge before committing suicide.

  Inevitably, Mozart’s and Hofdemel’s membership of the Freemasons would eventually cause somebody to conjure up the theory that the composer was assassinated by the Brotherhood. The Mozart-Masonic murder theory originated in 1861 with Georg Friedrich Daumer, a researcher of antiquities and religious polemicist. His thesis was elaborated in the Third Reich period, chiefly by General Erich Ludendorff and his wife, the neuropsychiatrist Mathilde.

  The case against the Freemasons takes two main lines. Daumer claimed Mozart had offended the Masons in The Magic Flute by his use of Christian religious music in the chorale of the Men of Armour. (For good measure, Daumer also believed the murder thwarted Mozart’s desire to found his own secret lodge, “The Grotto”.) Mathilde Ludendorff raised another anti-Masonic argument, suggesting the Masons were outraged at The Magic Flute’s covert counterplot, which depicted Mozart (as Tamino) attempting the release of Marie Antoinette (Pamina) from her Masonic jailers. Untroubled by historical reality, Frau Ludendorff suggested that Jews and Catholics – she was writing during the reign of Hitler after all – joined with the Freemasons in poisoning the Teutonic Mozart. Only marginally more sophisticated is Mozarts Tod (“Mozart’s Death”, 1971), by Drs Dalchow, Duda and Kerner, which found evidence of the Masonic conspiracy to murder Mozart in the eight allegories of Mercury on the frontispiece of the first libretto of The Magic Flute. Since mercury can be a poison as well as a winged messenger it is evident – to the learned doctors at least – that Mozart’s life was brought to a premature end by ingestion of this toxin at the instigation of Freemasons. Why, if the Masons wanted to assassinate Mozart for his crimes against the Order, they simultaneously requested he compose a cantata for them and, after his death, published a fulsome eulogy to him is unclear.

  The postulations that Mozart was assassinated, whether by Salieri or the Freemasons, fail finally on the forensic evidence. Although there was no official autopsy, Eduard Guldener von Lobes, the physician who examined the composer’s corpse, found no evidence of foul play. In the numerous accounts of Mozart’s symptoms pre-death, by those who attended and nursed him, there are no mentions of the conditions which would have occurred had he been poisoned by either mercury or arsenic. Mozart’s handwriting on the final Requiem script evidenced no sign of the shakes, which commonly indicates mercury poisoning; and the tell-tale cyanosis of arsenic poisoning was absent from his body. All things considered, Mozart near certainly died of disease. Many diseases have been proposed, from rheumatic fever to uraemia, from syphilis to tuberculosis, although the deadly agent cannot have been communicable since Constanze, who crawled into her husband’s bed hoping to catch his illness and perish too, would have succumbed.

  In 2001 Dr Jan V. Hirschmann, an infectious disease specialist, posited an entirely new killer of Mozart – pork chops. Hirschmann noted that Mozart had written to Constanze on 7–8 October, 1791:

  What do I smell? Why, here is Don Primus with the pork cutlets! Che gustol Now I am eating to your health!

  Improperly cooked tainted pork can harbour a parasitic burrowing worm called Trichinella. The typical incubation period for trichinosis is 50 days; the letter above was written 44 days before Mozart’s death. The symptoms of Mozart’s final illness – extreme swelling of the extremities, vomiting, fever, rashes and severe pain – are typical of trichinosis.

  And no, General and Frau Ludendorff, the Jews didn’t use pork chops to poison Mozart. They wouldn’t ha
ve known to do so. Trichonisis was not clinically identified until 1860.

  SALIERI MURDERED MOZART: ALERT LEVEL 4

  Further Reading

  Albert Borowitz, “Salieri and the ‘Murder of Mozart’”, Legal Studies Forum, vol. 29, No. 2, 2001

  Jan V. Hirschmann, MD, “What killed Mozart?”, Archives of Internal Medicine, vol. 161, 2001

  David Weiss, The Assassination of Mozart, 1970

  HILDA MURRELL

  In March 1984 an intruder broke into the Shropshire home of Hilda Murrell and abducted her. Her body was found three days later in a nearby wood, where she had died of hypothermia, although she had also been repeatedly stabbed. Because a little cash had been stolen from Murrell’s home the police dismissed the case as a “bungled burglary”. No fewer than seven books plus three police investigations and countless TV documentaries and newspaper articles have sought to show instead that Murrell was assassinated by the British state, namely MI5. For Hilda Murrell was not merely a harmless gardener; she was a prominent opponent of nuclear power and was scheduled to present her paper An Ordinary Citizen’s View of Radioactive Waste Management at the Sizewell Inquiry. Murrell was also the aunt of Commander Robert Green RN, a staff naval intelligence officer during the 1982 Falklands War, who was suspected of having passed proof to her that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the sinking of the Argentine ship Belgrano to provoke open war with Argentina.

  Conspiracists are convinced that Murrell’s anti-nuclear campaigning secured her state-sponsored death. Or perhaps MI5 raided her home to seize the top-secret Belgrano information but were discovered in flagrante by Murrell, necessitating her elimination (this was the favoured view of ex-Labour MP Tarn Dalyell).

  A two-year cold-case police reinvestigation of the Murrell case uncovered DNA evidence which linked labourer Andrew George to Murrell’s killing, and in May 2005 George was found guilty of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering the 78–year-old. A year later the Court of Appeal upheld the murder conviction.

  Among those the police and judiciary have failed to convince is Commander Robert Green RN (Retd), who is on record as saying that George’s conviction is “unsafe” and that “many unanswered questions” remain about Murrell’s death.

  MI5 killed campaigner Hilda Murrell after botching robbery of her house: ALERT LEVEL 6

  Further Reading

  Judith Cook, Unlawful Killing, 1994

  Graham Smith, Death of a Rose Grower, 1985

  NAZI GOLD

  In the dying days of the Second World War in Europe, there was a desperate scramble by Allied forces to fight their way into Germany. There were concentration camps to liberate, last-ditch SS fanatics to quell, regions to seize from rivals (US/UK versus the USSR), war criminals to apprehend, technological secrets to appropriate . . . and Nazi gold to grab.

  Around $238 million of the Third Reich’s gold reserves was sent from the Reichsbank to a mine at Merkers, 200 miles (320km) south-west of Berlin, after the Berlin Reichsbank was partially destroyed in a B-17 raid on 3 February 1945. With Berlin nearly encircled by the Red Army in early April, Reichsbank director Walter Funk removed the remaining gold reserves, together with large amounts of foreign currency, to Oberbayern in southern Bavaria, where the Nazis intended to create a redoubt. This gold was unloaded under cover of night by German Alpine troops commanded by Colonel Franz Pfeiffer, and hidden in the mountains above Lake Walchensee. Despite the last best hopes of the Nazis, neither the Merkers mine nor the Walchensee stash escaped seizure by the Allies. The mine was captured by Patton’s Third Army and the Oberbayern occupied by the 10th Armoured Division. During April and May 1945 the Allies dug up the Nazi gold and placed it under military authority.

  Or did they? Even by the estimates of the US Army, 2 per cent of the closing balance of the Reichsbank went missing, amounting to several million dollars (at 1945 values), and the true value of the disappeared gold was probably more. Additionally, jewellery and artworks hidden by the Nazis at Merkers were also “lost”. Small wonder, then, that the Guinness Book of Records has called the disappearance of the Nazi gold from Merkers and Oberbayern “the largest robbery on record”. Some conspiracy researchers suggest the missing gold was appropriated by the clandestine SS escape network ODESSA. Trenton Parker, an ex-Marine colonel with CIA connections, told Radio Free America on 29 July 1993 that the missing Nazi gold had been siphoned into Spain by ODESSA, where General Franco had kindly looked after it – with the help of the Third Reich’s Martin Bormann. “I can assure you that Martin Bormann did not die in Berlin,” Parker informed the audience. “He looked very much alive, in March of 1975, in a villa outside of Madrid, Spain, where I went to negotiate the liquidation of various tons of gold which were turned into perfect Krugerrands.”

  How does Parker know all this? Aside from his own meeting with Bormann, Franco’s physician’s sister passed the information on to her sister, who married one Ortega-Perez who served as a staff interpreter for General Eisenhower.

  Ian Sayer, author of Nazi Gold, has a less convoluted explanation for the missing gold, the bulk of which was “lost” at Walchensee: it was heisted in bits by just about every GI and soldat who could get his hands on some of it. (Colonel Franz Pfeiffer, it is said, lived very well after the war in Argentina.) According to Sayer, the US government turned a blind eye to thefts by its own soldiers since it did not want to antagonize them or admit the crimes to the international public.

  The Third Reich had a lot of gold aside from that stored in the vaults of the Berlin Reichsbank, however. The story of this further missing Nazi gold is yet more sordid still.

  In 1997 the US Department of Commerce published “US and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany during WWII”, a document more generally called the Eizenstat Report after its director, Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart E. Eizenstat. The report was harshly critical of Switzerland’s wartime dealings with the Third Reich, saying that “in the unique circumstances of World War II neutrality collided with morality”. Not to put too polite a point on it, the Swiss Bank for International Settlements and National Bank had laundered gold bullion from Nazi Germany, enabling the Third Reich to secure trade goods from other countries. Swiss banks, Eizenstat’s report concluded, still clung obstinately to around $20 billion of Nazi gold deposits looted from the banks of occupied Europe and the victims of the Holocaust.

  In response, the seven-page “Declaration of the Swiss Federal Council” asserted that the conclusions of the Eizenstat report were “unsupported” and its assessments “one-sided”. The holier-than-thou demeanour of the “Gnomes of Zurich”, however, was dented by the Swiss government’s admission in 1998 that the national bank had not bothered to enquire until late in the war (that is, when the Allies were clearly winning) whether the gold paid in by the Nazis was from Holocaust victims – and much of it was, having been melted down from jewellery, gold coins and even dental fillings seized from Jewish victims. Faced with Eizenstat’s report, class actions by US-based Holocaust survivors and the US government’s threat to freeze Swiss assets, the Swiss government suddenly found $5 billion annually to compensate the victims of the Holocaust and other human tragedies.

  Following the declassification of a 1946 US Army document, representatives of Holocaust victims also brought, in 2000, a civil action against the Vatican, alleging that it too held Nazi-era loot. The declassified document was an intelligence memo from treasury agent Emerson Bigelow asserting that, at the time of the collapse of Ustasha, the Nazi puppet state in Croatia, 200 million Swiss francs, together with gold looted from Serbs, gypsies and Jews, was lodged in the Vatican “for safekeeping”, with the connivance of the Roman Catholic clergy and the Franciscan Order. Holocaust researchers further accused the Vatican of using this Nazi loot to set up “gold lines” to smuggle Nazi and SS officials to South America.

  The Vatican strenuously denied handling the Nazis’ stolen gold, and opened its Second World
War archive to historians. There is no doubt that one pro-Nazi office of the Vatican, the German College of Santa Maria dell’Anima under Bishop Alois Hudal, was running a ratline for SS war criminals (including SS commando Otto Skorzeny), but whether this was funded by stolen gold held in the Vatican Bank is unclear.

  The Vatican is a frequent target for conspiracy theories – not without cause, as the Roberto Calvi case proves – but during the Nazi era it tended to side with the angels. Any reckoning of the Vatican has to weigh in the 700,000 Jews Pope Pius XII saved from the Holocaust by providing them with sanctuary and false baptismal certificates.

  US authorities turned a blind eye to $3 million stolen by its own troops in the “greatest robbery on record”: ALERT LEVEL 9

  Vatican Bank handled stolen Nazi gold: ALERT LEVEL 5

  Further Reading

  Kenneth Alford and T. P. Savas, Nazi Millionaires: The Allied Search for Hidden SS Gold, 2002