SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology

by Joseph P. Farrell

  From one point of view, then, the 2004 election was indeed, “fixed,” since no matter what the outcome, a Bonesman would be in the White House. But surely it does not matter if both Bush and Kerry were members of the same innocent, prank-filled college fraternity.

  It would not, if Skull and Bones were merely a “college fraternity.” The trouble is, it is not, nor are its members and alumni ordinary “common” people.

  2. Daddy and Dubya Bush: The RNC and the Eastern

  European Émigré Community

  Consider, for example, that President Bush’s father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush, was also a member, as was his father, former Senator Prescott Bush, as was former President and Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft….and on an on the list would go, including prominent clergymen, businessmen, lawyers, and government officials.

  While this is not the place to go into an exhaustive history of Skull and Bones, for our purposes it is important to note that the Society itself, founded at Yale in 1832, has German roots, being the first, and presumably not the only, chapter of some very secret society that existed in Germany at the time, a society that, as of yet, no one seems to know the name of.61 But given Skull and Bones’ members’ heavy involvement in religion, law, finance, and politics, one can guess at one German secret society with similar interests, initiatory methods, and goals: Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati. We have already pointed out that Bormann made his legal residence near Ingolstadt.

  It must be recalled that a great deal of the Bush family fortune was made by Prescott Bush precisely in utilizing his “German connections” to do business with Nazi Germany. Indeed, the business interests of Prescott Bush with Germany were considered so extensive that his concerns fell under the “Trading with the Enemy Act”.62

  Son George H.W. Bush went on, of course, to become a Texas oilman, founding Zapata Oil company, and later became director of the CIA, and Ronald Reagan’s Vice President. And, during both Reagan’s first run for the Presidency as the Republican candidate in 1980, and again, during George H.W. Bush’s run in 1988, the Republican national committee had some unusual and powerful political allies: the Eastern European émigré groups, whose leaders maintained publicly impeccable facades that cloaked their fascist and Nazi pasts.63

  3. Secret Germany

  That there are long, and secret, associations and contacts between the United States and Germany is evident from the Skull and Bones society, both as an organization founded as a chapter of some similar lodge in Germany, as well as through the individual and family connections represented by the Bushes and others who are members of that society. The connections, and associations, have played significant roles in American politics as well, as is evident in the fallout from Operation Paperclip, the Kennedy assassination, and even its much more limited role in the election of Presidents Reagan and G.H.W. Bush.

  But there may be a far older association, a far older historical pedigree, one dating back to the Hohenstaufen Emperors of Germany, and to their global imperialistic ambitions.

  In 1943, while World War Two was raging in its full fury, an American author published a little-known and long-forgotten book called The Thousand Year Conspiracy: Secret Germany Behind the Mask.64 The author’s name was Paul Winkler, and he sought to explain the most fundamental mystery of World War Two – and indeed, in a certain sense, of World War One as well – and that was, what on earth had happened to the Germans?

  The Germans, Winkler was careful to point out, were no more or less warlike than any other people. Germany had exercised a profound cultural influence on the formation of the “Western ethos”: engineers and musicians and physicists and biologists all studied German before the war, and clamored to enter her universities. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Dürer, Luther, Einstein, Planck, and on and on the list could go, of famous Germans who profoundly enriched human experience.

  Yet, that was the mystery, for while being no more or less warlike as a people than anyone else, when they did go to war, they did it…. they did it well. And with Nazism, it seemed to many as if something in the genius of the German people had gone quite insane, that some “ethnic character defect” had become so pathological that many called for the actual sterilization and extermination of Germans after the war. Indeed, serious plans were drawn up in the United States – the so-called “Morgenthau Plan” – that would have left Germany stripped of all industry and reduced to a servile agrarian state depopulated by some tens of millions, the ultimate Jewish revenge, perhaps, for Nazism’s crimes.

  But for Winkler, Nazism, and Germany’s well-known ability to wage war, was “not the product of some ‘spontaneous generation’ crystallized by Hitler’s evil genius” nor was it “simply a reaction to the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty” nor did it derive “from some basic trait in the German character.”65 For Winkler, Nazism was the manifestation of something far older, and far more sinister. It was the manifestation of a millenium’s long secret conspiracy. It was, in short, a “secret society gone public.”

  In 1921….during one of the sessions of the Bavarian ‘Landtag’ (Pariliament), the Deputy Gareis, with a heavy pile of documents in his hands, made a statement to the other Deputies which none of them seemed able to understand: ‘I have here the evidence of a thousand years’ conspiracy – evidence which I shall present to you shortly.’

  A few days later Gareis was murdered. The criminal escaped punishment and the incident was practically forgotten. The evidence to which Gareis referred was never revealed.66

  But this incident was enough to fuel Winkler’s own quest to reconstruct what Deputy Gareis had unearthed.

  What Gareis had unearthed, was not a defect in Germany, but rather, a defect that dominated Germany: Prussia and “Prussianism.” Winkler comments as follows:

  For us, ‘Prussianism’ goes back to the early part of the thirteenth century and is still very much alive in our day. It is the heir of the world-embracing ambitions of the Carolingians and ‘Holy Roman’ Emperors – but at the same time it is also what it became during the centuries in the stuffy and nauseating hot-house of East Prussia.

  The principal events in Germany between the two World Wars, the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power and the events that followed can be understood only by a thorough scrutiny of the Prusso-teutonic and Fehmic organizations.67

  The “Fehmic orgamizations” that Winkler refers to are the Helige Vehme, which were secret imperial courts established by the German Holy Roman Emperors and their supporters in the various principalities and duchies, primarily Westphalia, that were to hand out and deliver death sentences to anyone convicted of treason against the empire. They were, in a sense, also secret societies, since membership was by invitation-initiation.

  But in any case, Winkler points the finger at something very significant, and usually completely ignored by histories of Nazism, even by those predisposed to view Nazism as a primarily occult or esoteric phenomenon. That something is the deep secret society connection of Nazism to the old Teutonic Knights, themselves founded by the mediaeval German Emperors to further their imperialistic ambitions.

  At a time when the Papacy and the German Emperors were locked in mortal combat and when the Papacy could call on its own “shock troops” in the form of the “military orders” like the Templars or Knights Hospitaliter of St. John, the German Emperors sought to create their own imperial version. The process began when “Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of the Hohenstaufen family had himself proclaimed ‘master of the world,’ Dominus Mundi, in 1158 in the fields of Roncaglia during his second campaign in Italy.”68 In order to offset the papal advantage with its military orders, the German Emperors created their own version, supporting “the formation of the purely German-armed Order of the Teutonic Knights.”69 This was achieved through a long-term deception, for initially the Order was founded with but vague ties to the Empire in order to secure the necessary papal blessing “indispensable to its pr
estige.”70 Nonetheless, the Emperors managed to see that the head of the order during these years were always personally loyal to themselves. Finally, when the existence of the Order was “quite secure” it “more openly put itself at the service of the Imperial plans for expansion.”71 The man responsible for putting the Teutonic Knights on this political footing was Hermann von Salza, the Grand Master from 1210 to 1239.72

  Von Salza approached the Polish Duke Conrad of Masovia and persuaded him that the Teutonic Knights would be able to assist him in his battles against “heathen tribes,” namely, the Slavic Berussians, or Prussians, that inhabited the region later to become Prussia. Winkler continues the story:

  Early in 1226 a formal invitation from Conrad arrived at the Order. Von Salza consulted with (Emperor) Frederick II at once and the latter, in his Bull of Rimini, entrusted von Salza with an imperial ‘mission’ for his future campaign.

  This Bull…. Was the very basis for all future action of the Teutonic Knights; a permanent charter for all Prussian conquest, and all German political expansion which, during the centuries to come and until this day, was to radiate from that territory.73

  In other words, if one follows the logic closely, an organization had a legal charter – a charter never revoked by competent authority that could claim descent from the original granting authority – for conquest. And that organization was, by definition, a military secret society whose core ideology was the establishment of a world empire with German, with Prussian, hegemony at its heart and height.

  The Bull of Rimini may be taken then as the de facto founding of the Order that would play such a role in European geopolitics for centuries to come. But equally important is the figure of the “renaissance man” Emperor Frederick II, well-known for his indulgence of scholars and sciences deemed esoteric by any standards, and certainly by the standards of the mediaeval Latin Church. Frederick liked to model his behavior on his famous grandfather Frederick Barbarossa,74 and also maintained “that the Teutonic Knights had been founded by Barbarossa, a claim which seems to have no justification in fact.”75 While Frederick II might have been trying to vest his Teutonic Knights with the aura of Barbarossa, and have invented this fact, it nonetheless cannot be discounted that he might have also let slip the real founder of the Order.

  In any case, it is the Order of the Teutonic Knights that must be considered the real heir to the global imperial ambitions of the mediaeval German Emperors, much more so than the German Empire itself.76

  a. The Hohenzollerns Become Grand Masters of the Order

  But by the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, northern German cities formed the trading league known as the Hansa, or Hanseatic League, in part to overthrow the rule of the Order in cities along Germany’s eastern Baltic coast. This was successful. With its fortune and military power declining, the Order was approached by a new ally – indeed its only ally in this period – the Margrave of Brandenburg, Frederick von Hohenzollern.77 The two – the Order and the Hohenzollern Margravate – entered into a pact to give assistance to each other against the subjects of each. And thus was born the unusual alliance between the house of Hohenzollern and the old Prussian noble interests represented by the Order. As a result of this relationship, by 1511 Albert von Hohenzollern und Brandenburg was elected to the Grand Mastership of the order, a “post he filled with full understanding of the Order’s traditions and ambitions.”78 As Grand Master, Albert von Hohenzollern secularized the order in 1525 by transforming it into the hereditary Duchy of Prussia.79 The “secret society” component of the Order lived on in name, and also spawned several offshoot secret societies among the Junker nobility class in Prussia, one of which, the “Society of Lizards”, maintained the Order’s original imperial designs as well as esoteric doctrines.80

  But then Winkler asks the all-important question:

  One may ask whether there is an actual secret organization behind the Junkers and Prusso-Teutonics or whether the familiar Prusso-Teutonic organizations are responsible for the sequence of events presented in this book.

  Really secret organizations seldom betray their existence by outward signs. Nevertheless the founding of the secret ‘Society of Lizards’ (Eidechsengesellschaft) is an historical fact. Reliable historians have related how this society tried to pull the strings in Prussia while the Order of the Teutonic Knights still existed. Kotzebue attributes to the activities of this secret society the secularization of Prussia.

  The unilinear evolution which has taken place since then – in Prussia and in a Germany dominated by Prussia – and which corresponds point by point to the basic principles of the Society of Lizards might be considered sufficient circumstantial evidence of the survival of a secret Prusso-Teutonic organization right down to our time. But there is more. The entire process of Prussian growth seems to be inspired by an uninterrupted organic plan…. No interruption in the logic of events is observable, however, even since the time when the order ceased to manage the affairs of Prussia….

  Our circumstantial evidence goes further: Germany was defeated in 1918 and the old ambitious plans of the Prussian elements seemed shattered forever; yet within a few months somebody, somewhere, behind the curtains in Germany, made decisions of the highest importance. These decisions meant revival of the old Fehme, the organization of systematic terror planned to undermine the young German Republic and to facilitate Germany’s secret rearmament. So-called ‘secret societies’ sprang up from one day to the other all over Germany – societies which were secretive as regards the details of their decisions and activities, but whose existence itself was a secret from nobody. All these secret societies were closely connected among themselves; and there was no rivalry between them. Their activities complemented each other wonderfully. Even a superficial observer must conclude that all this was possible only if these societies received instructions from the same hidden, absolutely secret sources.81

  And remember, Martin Bormann became a member of one of these secret societies, as did his then boss in the Nazi Party Rudolf Hess.

  b. Hitler’s Only Known Initiation

  Here the story takes on another bizarre turn, a turn that is the only known verification of what many have long suspected: that Hitler was a secret society initiate, at some time and some place. But Winkler’s version of the story points not to the usual suspects – the Thulegesellschaft and its shady associations with Viennese esotericists and racists Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels – but to the old Teutonic Knights:

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Emperor Wilhelm II, who was nurtured on the traditions of the Prusso-Teutonic Order, actually reestablished this Order in Prussia and Germany. The descendants of those who, acting in the Society of Lizards, displaced the ancient Order from Prussia – and contributed thus to its disintegration – now claimed for themselves the right to appear cloaked in the dignity of those whose place they had taken…. Not much was said about the activities of the revived Order, but its yearly conventions in East Prussia were generally noted by the German newspapers. A few months after the beginning of the present war, a short notice appeared in German papers announcing that Hitler himself had been initiated into the Teutonic Order.

  No information is published about the internal organization of the contemporary Prusso-Teutonic Order, nor about its exact connections with what – if it still exists – is the present-day survival of the Society of Lizards.

  ….In this connection it is interesting to note that in May, 1924, when the 700th anniversary of the University of Naples, a University founded by Emperor Frederick II, was celebrated, a crown was found near the sarcophage of the Emperor in the Cathedral of Palermo with the following inscription:

  “Seinem Kaiser und Helden

  Das geheime Deutschland”

  (“To Their Emperor and Hero, From Secret Germany”)

  If we assume the existence of a Secret Germany, the open Junker organizations like the Reichs-Landbund and the Herrenklub – which also derive from the Order of t
he thirteenth century – have only a secondary role, carrying out instructions of the secret group like all the other recently established societies which we have mentioned. But even if we disregard the circumstantial evidence which proves the actual survival of Secret Germany, we must admit that a straight line can be detected between the Teutonic Order of the thirteenth century and the Germany of today.82

  In other words, Kaiser Wilhelm II could well afford to abdicate the imperial throne in 1918 at the end of World War One, and go into exile in Holland, for, as Grand Master of whatever secret society entity still existed in Prussia, he and the Hohenzollerns and the Prussian imperialist interests they represented still exercised power and influence behind the scenes. And in any case, the purpose of the initiation of Hitler into this order is clear enough: the bargain had been made with the public political party that would best carry through its secret ambitions.

  And what of Bormann? All of this would have been known to him as well.

  And it should come as no surprise that this ideology of world domination by an elite also forms the motivation of another secret society, one with its own Germanic connections: Skull and Bones.