The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  The incredible fact in regard to the above, was that Julius Klein was the only major witness in the Senate Ethics Committee probe of Senator Thomas J. Dodd. Circumstantially, the Senate Ethics procedure has the look of a “cover your tail” operation.

  The censure hearings for Senator Thomas J. Dodd must unavoidably be considered as a non-explicit, furtive investigation of the activities of SISS, Dodd, Eastland, Dirksen and the whole cast of characters who apparently signed off on the JFK assassination. It was an investigation of the JFK assassination, but this fact was never mentioned and was never made explicit. This censure investigation was done, apparently, under pressure from investigative reporters Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. A kinder interpretation could describe the Dodd investigation as a mere fact-finding mission regarding the assassination. Let you, the reader be the judge.

  One thing is crystal clear to this author. If there were five Senators in the twentieth century who were censured and two of them were named McCarthy and Dodd, then this fact alone points to the hypothesis that the JFK assassination was part and parcel of the Red-baiting outrages of the 1950s and 1960s. These censures were like the ammunition exploding when the heat generated in a battle reached the breaking point. As has been explained many times in prior chapters, the strategy of the Red-baiters in the 1950s was to buy a mean dog, i.e. Joe McCarthy. When your mean dog bites the wrong person (as when McCarthy “bit” the U.S. Army), then put him down in public. And then go buy another mean dog (this time Senator Thomas J. Dodd). Dodd again “bit the wrong person,” i.e. he plotted the murder of the President. (That was bad collateral damage).

  Author Boyd explains that Julius Klein blatantly misrepresented himself as an international statesman and also an advisor to U.S. Presidents and European chancellors.

  The Dodd censure hearings before the Senate Ethics Committee began on June 22, 1966. The official title of the committee was the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Standards and Conduct. Because of the complex nature of the charges, the Committee decided to limit the initial hearings to the relationship of Senator Dodd to General Julius Klein. The Chairman was Senator John Stennis who had also served on the Committee which censured Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  James Boyd, Dodd’s speechwriter and biographer was the first witness against Dodd.

  General Julius Klein had written a letter where he stated that he and Dodd were both in Germany together when the Berlin Wall went up on August 13, 1961.

  The evidence began immediately to include names of infamous Nazi’s found in correspondence between Klein and Dodd. The first was Dr. Wolfgang Pohle, who had told General Klein confidentially that Franz von Papen had been speaking out against Klein in Germany. Of course von Papen’s father had been the leader of the German spies in the U.S. during World War I and was expelled from the U.S. for that reason. He was later Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and served briefly as Vice-Chancellor to Hitler. Julius Klein was a name that was on the tongue of this man so well connected to German history.

  Pohle began his career in an association of Ruhr mining interests. In 1940, he became General Counsel to Mannesmann AG. From 1954 to 1959, he was a member of the board of Mannesmann AG . In 1959 he was General Manager of Friedrich Flick KG and from 1965 to 1971 was a personally liable partner.

  As a lawyer in 1946 to 1948, Pohle had defended German industrialists at the Nuremberg Trials. He also defended the Krupp, Flick and IG Farben industrialists when they were tried by the U.S. for war crimes after the war.

  Another letter from Klein to Dodd instructed Dodd on what to do when he next traveled to Germany. Klein told him to meet with Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, former Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano and State Secretary Karl Karstens “who was a Yale graduate.” But Dodd was told by Klein to first talk to Dr. Hans Globke to get a briefing on the situation in Germany now that LBJ and Ludwig Erhard were leading their respective countries.

  In his landmark book, The New Germany and the Old Nazi’s, author T.H. Tetens features Dr. Hans Globke as a major villain, possibly the most important villain in postwar West Germany. Under the Nazis, Globke was the top official in the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Interior Ministry. It was in this ministry that the Nuremberg Laws were written. The man who signed those laws, Dr. Wilhelm Flick, was hanged as a war criminal for that reason. But the man who drafted the Nuremberg Laws was Dr. Hans Globke, who went untouched.

  Tetens states “it is possible that Dr. Globke has done more than anyone else to re-Nazify West Germany.” Further, he writes “why Dr. Adenauer could not find another man capable of setting up a true democratic civil service has never been explained. Whatever lies behind this mystery, the fact is that Dr. Hans Globke, who faithfully served the Nazi hierarchy, became one of the most powerful men in the Federal Republic.”

  So this is not a pretty picture. You have Senator Dodd who was the second-in-command prosecutor at Nuremberg openly collaborating with the worst of the leftovers from Nazi Germany in order to help assassinate John F. Kennedy and to perpetrate who knows what other atrocities.

  The sorry bit of information is a hard act to follow. What else can we reveal after this has been revealed? It can’t get any worse. But we must go on and tell the rest of this sorry tale.

  Klein further instructs Dodd, “I suggest, Tom, that you see each person (i.e. each ex-Nazi) alone, without anybody from the [German] Embassy or the Foreign Office.”

  In a letter from Julius Klein to Dodd, we read “when in Bonn, see him (Globke) first … as a confidante of the Vatican, he did all that he could to save lives in Germany.”

  And further, “Mr. Abs is a leading German banker and a member of the board of directors of many of my German clients. The brunt of the attacks against me began when I started to fight for Abs.” “If you go to Duesseldorf, be sure to see your old colleague, Dr. Wolfgang Pohle. Dr. Pohle is one of the executives of the Flick concern”.

  Quoting from The Warburgs by Ron Chernow, “As Goering tried to expel Jewish owners from industries of strategic importance, especially in mining and metals, he found an enthusiastic supporter in Friedrich Flick, later a convicted war criminal. With a crude steel empire that by 1932 rivaled that of Krupp, Flick had lavishly subsidized Heinrich Himmler and the SS. By 1937, he sat atop the largest privately owned iron and steel combine in Germany.” (Chernow, p. 463).

  Chairman: You [Klein], the late Senator Bridges, Senator Javits and Congressman Celler entertained him when he was in the U.S. Also, Speaker McCormack gave him a luncheon.

  Klein: His company controls company controls Daimler-Benz. Pohle used to be chief counsel for Mannesmann AG, another account that I lost. Pohle is an important voice in industrial circles. He told me that von Papen, Jr. is not too friendly to me.

  In a memo about Heinrich von Brentano, “Brentano is strictly Adenauer. He supports Chancellor Erhard but opposes his appeasement [the policy of] certain people in the German Foreign Office.… Brentano is 100% against Soviet appeasement, hence his clash with Foreign Minister Schroeder and Mayor Willi Brandt. Brandt spends $300,000 annually in public relations man Roy Bernard [a business rival to Julius Klein’s firm].”

  In a memo dated October 21, 1962, for Senator Dodd from Charles J. Kersten, “I am leaving for Germany to participate in the trial of Stashynsky. Again, congratulations, Tom, as you are one of our most important patriots in today’s world.

  “Mr. Boyd did not know about the Stashynsky Affair until Dodd left for Germany in 1964.” Boyd testifies: “My belief is that the Stashynsky case is a cover-up and nothing more.” (Hearings, p. 89)

  A long list of Senators wrote letters to Germany in support of Julius Klein in the week before the assassination: William (D. DE), Gore (D. TN), Morton (R. KY), Jackson (D. WA), Long (D. LA), Keating (R. NY), Javits, (R. NY), Hickenlooper (R. IA), Sparkman (D. AL), Symington (D. MO), Scott (R. PA), Ribicoff (D. CT), Mundt, (R. SD), Morse (IN. OR) [In a letter Morse said] “I have known J.K. for the 19 years I have been
in the Senate,” and Humphrey (D. MN).

  Senator Eugene McCarthy inquires of witness James Boyd, (Dodd’s speechwriter):

  “Yours, Dodd’s and Klein’s views on foreign policy, were they all the same?”

  Dodd: “Klein’s views were not to my liking.”

  In an undated memo to file, presumably written by Julius Klein, the following statement was made, “Not a single U.S. Senator or Congressman criticized me after the Fulbright hearings. Somehow the people in Germany did not understand that this was not an attack against me but against the Federal Republic’s strong stand on the Soviets by the appeasers.”

  One questioner asked Boyd, “Will you state as best you can when you first became concerned about Senator Dodd’s relationship with General Klein.?”

  Boyd: I questioned the propriety of accepting gratuities from a foreign agent … but I did not think that that by itself was a matter for me to become concerned about until I began to think of it in terms of what I thought was a misappropriation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds.

  The most important statement in all of the hearings came when chief counsel Benjamin R. Fern was addressing questions to Marjorie Carpenter, a secretary to Senator Dodd.

  Carpenter: He [Dave Martin, Dodd’s staffer who dealt with foreign relations] said that Senator Dodd had mentioned General Klein’s name to all the German officials they had visited while in Germany, and then he said “I wonder how much General Klein paid Senator Dodd to do that.” And Mr. Zeiller [another Dodd staff worker] said ‘Oh, I have known General Klein for a long time. I knew him when I worked for Senator Bridges [Sen. Styles Bridges, (R,NH)],’ and he sort of laughed. And Mr. Martin said ‘He must have paid at least $10,000,’ and Mr. Zeiller said ‘Oh, easily.’”

  Against objection, acting Chairman Cooper ruled that this claim of a bribe would be left in the record until Martin and/or Zeiller could be called to either affirm it or deny that it had been said or whether there was any evidence to support it.

  Per staffer Dave Martin, Senator Dodd’s trip to German in 1964 was only for the purpose of interviewing Bogdan Stashynsky.

  Miss Helen Batherson of Julius Klein Public Relations testified.

  Counsel Fern: Who were Julius Klein’s main clients?

  Batherson: Society for German-American Co-operation, Mannesmann AG, Rheinmetall, Der Spiegel Magazine, Flick AG, the Travel Bureau of the State of Hesse and Bayer Aspirin and Pharmaceuticals.

  Per a J.K.memo, “Adenauer has a picture of John Foster Dulles on his wall … it is I who brought these two great statesmen together … Adenauer will try to bring de Gaulle back to the hard line”

  In Exhibit 48, a letter from Klein to Dodd, dated 8/15/64, the following appears: “To save you time, I am enclosing herewith a rough draft. Maybe you want to paraphrase it and add a little about the President’s stand on Vietnam, especially since Westrick is a 100% believer in your strong policy. This also included the Congo. Both Westrick and Speaker McCormack have the same decoration from the Vatican. They are good friends. The Speaker too went out of his way with Westrick to give me a big boost.” This letter contains the annotation by Julius Klein “Please destroy this letter. I made no copy.”

  Another witness was former Congressman Charles Kersten. In a letter dated February 19, 1963 Kersten wrote to Dodd about the Stashynsky case. As described in a previous chapter, Kersten was an attorney representing the family of the slain Ukrainian hero Stepan Bandera. He explained that he had been hired for that purpose by the Ukrainian Congress Committee in the U.S. In the mid-1950’s, Kersten and Dodd had served together on the House Select Committee on Communist Aggression. Kersten made reference to Dr. Lev Dobriansky, the long-time Georgetown University professor and militant Catholic anti-Communist. Kersten offered to arrange for the Chief Justice of the West German Supreme Court to travel to the U.S. and appear before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee about the Stashynsky Case.

  The Kersten letter went on to rant as follows: “It is also the diabolical subversive tactics that the Communists employ all over the world, and in this case the potential of swift, silent and unattributable murder of even the highest officials in the United States who oppose the Soviets.

  We have seen in the chapter on Kersten that he was considered an unreliable “loose cannon” by others in the Congress. Here he unleashes a thinly-veiled reference to the JFK assassination, trying to tie the Soviets to the murder of JFK, knowing that the connection was disingenuous in the extreme. This is another smoking-gun statement out of the mouth of Kersten.

  What Kersten wanted from Dodd was for SISS to endorse the conclusions of the West German Supreme Court regarding Soviet overseas murders. Life magazine had published an article on September 9, 1962 on the subject of Stashynsky prior to his trial in Germany, so the Senators were questioning why Dodd would have to go to Germany to publicize the Stashynsky case.

  Let the reader take careful note of this paragraph. In his statement, Kersten almost proves to the reader that the frameup of the Soviets for the JFK murder was part of a general strategy which involved Stashynsky-type provocation, i.e. German-Soviet game-playing. This type of idea was apparently on the drawing boards as early as 1959 or 1960. This paralleled in time the defection of Oswald and the false-defector program. This was apparently a stew brewed up primarily by the Germans and the U.S. right wing.

  Kersten verified that there was a branch of the Ukrainian Congress Committee in Connecticut and a large Ukrainian community in Hartford. Kersten testified that he had approached Senator Dodd as early as 1960 with a concern about a Soviet murder agent. In August, 1961, with Stashynsky’s preliminary confession, Kersten met with Dodd and Boyd and asked them to arrange for an East European expert to be hired by the SISS committee. Stashynsky defected to West Germany on August 12, 1961, the day before the Berlin wall went up.

  In testimony by David Martin, the foreign policy specialist on Dodd’s staff, Martin discussed his role in the Dodd-Stashynsky case. According to Martin, he drafted a letter from Dodd to Senator Eastland because Eastland was chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on German Security. [When searching the Internet for this subcommittee, there is no record of it ever having existed].

  Senator Dodd wrote to Senator Eastland, “In light of JFK’s assassination, we need a hearing on Stashynsky.”

  Prior to Dodd’s trip, Julius Klein had given him a folder which contained detailed instructions as to what Dodd should say to Chancellor Erhard and similar directives. Staffer Martin testified that he “exploded” when he saw this and considered it an affront and extremely presumptuous on the part of Klein.

  Mr Martin submitted for the record a diary and notes of the trip to Germany with Senator Dodd. Some of the details from that exhibit are as follows:

  Adenauer asked “what’s wrong with Fulbright?”

  Per Adenauer, de Gaulle’s hold on power has been challenged by repeated conspiracies in the French Army.

  Adenauer was never critical of the U.S. but he was critical of Britain.

  Adenauer was very critical of American policy under Kennedy.

  Arthur H. Stimson of the U.S. Embassy picked us up and drove us to Cologne to the German FBI. We met with the head, Mr. Hubert Schruebers and his assistant Dr. Richard Meier.

  Mr. Ford of the Embassy took us to where the Auschwitz trial was being held.

  Dodd interviewed Stashynsky.

  They met with Yaroslav Stetzko [a Nazi collaborator and] President of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. [Kersten was involved with the ABN].

  Senator Bennett: In this whole process, were the Senators on SISS consulted? How many Senators were on SISS?

  Martin: Four Democrats and three Republicans.

  Bennett: Was there any meeting of SISS called at which this report [which was titled Murder International, Inc.] was made?

  Martin: No.

  Bennett: This looks like a “one Senator/one staff” trip in which no other members of the committee were involved.
When does an activity become a personal activity and when does it become an official Committee activity? This was apparently a personal trip by Senator Dodd.

  Martin: A copy of the report was circulated and the Senators signed off on it with no hearings or anything. (Hearings, p. 420).

  Senator Cooper: In the documents from Julius Klein to Senator Dodd asking him to go to Germany, why did Klein display such a demanding tone?

  Dodd testifies: “General Klein was a good friend of the late Robert A. Taft. I believe he was with him when he died. He was also a friend of Herbert Hoover and General MacArthur. [This is almost a who’s-who of American pro-fascism].

  Dodd: Regarding the possible appointment of General Klein to the U.S. Advisory Committee on Information, Klein was recommended by McCormack, Morse, Neuberger, Kefauver and Javits.

  Chairman Stennis: Now 2 years had elapsed since the murder happened when you went over there and a year had passed before there were any hearings. It was Friday, March 26, 1965 when there was a hearing. Why the delay?

  Dodd: There were some investigations going on, the Otepka case being one. Also, the Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee was holding hearings.

  Dodd: I was impressed here that former Congressman Kersten emphasized the need to get this out with some kind of official stamp or document of some kind to make it more impressive and authentic, and that he had urged me to go and was anxious for me to go. There is a wide variety of groups that are troubled by the Soviet apparatus. They are particularly people from the Eastern European countries. There is constant pressure of one sort or another.

  Senator Bennett: This [lack of a hearing] leaves the other members of the subcommittee without the opportunity to share…the knowledge that I am sure you received…from the prisoner and with the judicial officers in Germany. Why did you want to get the information out to the American public and not to the members of SISS?