by Jim Marrs
Thus a curious relationship developed between these powerful banks of two supposedly belligerent nations, which continued throughout the war. Of course, it only appears curious to those who do not understand the economic cooperation among the world’s ruling elite.
In December 1938, Schacht came to England as a guest at Montagu Norman’s home. The visit was declared to be purely personal. One month later, the hospitality was returned when Norman stopped over in Berlin for a visit with Schacht on his way to Switzerland. Although there was no public announcement as to what the two men discussed, it was rumored that they were attempting to create a common policy of settling Germany’s foreign debts and expanding its markets. There were also rumors that Britain’s bankers might extend to Germany some $375 million in export credits. The importance of such financial cooperation was explained by Sutton: “In the 1920s and 1930s, the New York Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England, the Reichsbank in Germany and the Banque de France also more or less influenced the political apparatus of their respective countries indirectly through control of the money supply and creation of the monetary environment. More direct influence was realized by supplying political funds to, or withdrawing support from, politicians and political parties.”
Funds for this financial control were channeled through the Bank of International Settlements that, according to the bank’s charter and with the agreement of the respective governments, was immune from seizure, closure, or censure, even if its owners were at war. These owners included the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York (among whose directors were Harold S. Vanderbilt and Wendell Wilkie), the Bank of England, the Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other central banks. “The bank [BIS] soon turned out to be…a money funnel for American and British funds to flow into Hitler’s coffers and to help Hitler build up his war machine,” wrote Higham. By the start of World War II, the BIS was under Nazi control with the bank’s directors including Schmitz, Schroeder, Dr. Walter Funk, and Emil Puhl of the Reichsbank.
In 1939, when the Nazis moved into Czechoslovakia, officials of the Czech National Bank removed $48 million in gold reserves to the Bank of England for safekeeping. Under pressure from the Nazis, Bank of England governor Montagu Norman unhesitatingly agreed to move the gold to Switzerland, where it went into Nazi accounts to purchase essential war materials for Germany.
Despite the obvious rearmament in Germany in the late 1930s, the Nazis continued to find support in Britain, even within the Rothschild-dominated Bank of England. This pro-Nazi proclivity by Bank of England officials will assume even more relevance in the events described in the next section.
Illustrating further interconnecting business associations of this time was International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) German chairman Gerhardt Westrick, a close associate of John Foster Dulles, who was a partner to Dr. Heinrich Albert, head of Ford Motor Company in Germany until 1945. Two ITT directors were German banker Schroeder and Walter Schellenberg, head of counterintelligence for the Nazi Gestapo—the Nazi Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police. America’s International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation sold Germany communication and war material, including as many as fifty thousand artillery fuses per month, more than three years after Pearl Harbor.
More interconnecting business ties between America and the Nazis can be seen by studying the Rockefeller-owned Chase National Bank, now JPMorgan Chase Bank, the largest corporate bank in the United States. Charles Higham explained how the Rockefellers owned Standard Oil of New Jersey, the German accounts of which were siphoned through their own bank, the Chase, as well as through the independent National City Bank of New York (NCB), which also handled Standard, Sterling Products, General Aniline and Film (part of the I. G. Farben combine), Swedish Enskilda Bank (SKF), and ITT, whose chief, Sosthenes Behn, was a director of NCB. Two executives of Standard Oil’s German subsidiary were Karl Lindemann and Emil Helfferich, prominent figures in Himmler’s Circle of Friends of the Gestapo—its chief financiers—and close friends and colleagues of the BIS’s Baron von Schroeder.
Further banking connections, noted by author William Bramley, involved German banker Max Warburg and his brother Paul Warburg, who had been instrumental in establishing the Federal Reserve System in the United States. Both were directors of I. G. Farben. H. A. Metz of I. G. Farben was a director of the Warburg Bank of Manhattan, which later became part of the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Bank. Standard Oil of New Jersey had been a cartel partner with I. G. Farben prior to the war. One American I. G. Farben director was C. E. Mitchell, who was also director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and of Warburg’s National City Bank. I. G. Farben president Hermann Schmitz served on the boards of Deutsche Bank and the Bank for International Settlements. In 1929, Schmitz was voted president of the board of National City Bank, now Citibank.
In the 1930s, many people in both Britain and America were in agreement with Nazi ideology.
Automobile-maker Henry Ford became a guiding light to Hitler, especially in the realm of anti-Semitism. In 1920, Ford published an anti-Jewish book titled The International Jew. As Hitler worked on his book, Mein Kampf, in 1924, he copied liberally from Ford’s writing and even referred to Ford as “one great man.” Ford became an admirer of Hitler, provided funds for the Nazis, and, in 1938, became the first American to receive the highest honor possible for a non-German: the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.
Ford’s son, Edsel, sat on the board of American I. G. Farben and GAF. In July 1940, at a meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, between ITT’s Westrick and the Fords, it was decided that rather than build aircraft engines for beleaguered Britain, the Ford company would build five-ton military trucks for Germany, the “backbone of German Army transportation.” And the Fords were not alone in providing Nazi Germany with the means to wage war. Bradford Snell told the Washington Post in 1998 that Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer once told him that Hitler would never have considered invading Poland without the synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.
One future American corporate giant provided the Nazis with the means of registering, correlating, and assigning shipment schedules to the millions of Jews and others that were rounded up and sent to their deaths in concentration camps. According to author Edwin Black, Hitler’s desire to tabulate then eliminate these people was “greatly enhanced and energized by the ingenuity and craving for profit of a single American company and its legendary, autocratic chairman. That company was International Business Machines [IBM], and its chairman was Thomas J. Watson.” Using recently discovered Nazi documents and the testimony of former Polish workers, Black found that IBM technology was passed not only through the company’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (Dehomag), but to a great extent through a subsidiary in Poland, Watson Business Machines in Warsaw, which reported directly to the IBM New York headquarters.
Watson kept in close contact with his German subordinates, traveling to Berlin at least twice a year from 1933 to 1939. Watson never sold IBM machines to the Nazis. They all were merely leased. This meant that all machines were dependent on IBM punch cards, parts, and servicing. Interestingly, IBM punch cards of that time were not standardized. Each batch sent to Nazi Germany was custom-designed by IBM engineers. “Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in Europe,” noted Black.
After America’s entry into the war, Nazi Hermann Fellinger was appointed as German enemy-property custodian. Fellinger maintained Watson Business Machines, keeping the original staff and ensuring continued profits for IBM. This subsidiary continued to send royalties and reports to the New York home office through IBM’s Geneva office.
Watson, a well-connected Freemason, proclaimed “World Peace Through World Trade” in 1937, while in Berlin to be named president of the I
nternational Chamber of Commerce. In that same year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Watson U.S. commissioner general to the International Exposition in Paris, and Hitler created a special medal for Watson, called the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, to “honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.” “It ranked second in prestige only to Hitler’s German Grand Cross,” noted Edwin Black.
“Since the war, IBM…has obstructed, or refused to cooperate with, virtually every major independent author writing about its history, according to numerous published introductions, prefaces, and acknowledgments,” he added.
Along with aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, another American supporter of Hitler was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president. Kennedy was appointed U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1939 but was recalled in November 1940 for voicing his sympathies for Hitler. Roosevelt had been advised by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that “Joseph P. Kennedy, the former Ambassador to England, and Ben Smith, the Wall Street operator, some time in the past had a meeting with [Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann] Goering in Vichy, France, and that thereafter Kennedy and Smith had donated a considerable amount of money to the German cause. They are both described as being very anti-British and pro-German.”
One important example of a prewar effort to install a fascist dictatorship within the United States is the attempted overthrow of Roosevelt early in his presidency.
Only a year after Hitler came to power in Germany, many wealthy Americans looked with favor on a fascist system to counteract international communism. Many were disgruntled with President Roosevelt’s social policies and felt he was secretly a communist. Irénée Du Pont and General Motors president William S. Knudsen in early 1934 planned to finance a coup d’etat that would overthrow the president with the aid of a $3 million–funded army of terrorists, modeled on the fascist movement in Paris known as the Croix de Feu.
The undoing of this scheme was retired Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history, who was approached by the plotters and urged to head the new military government. Butler, who had openly attacked Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, however, proved to be a loyal citizen and immediately informed Roosevelt of the treasonous conspiracy. “Roosevelt…knew that if he were to arrest the leaders of the houses of Morgan and Du Pont, it would create an unthinkable national crisis in the midst of a depression and perhaps another Wall Street crash. Not for the first or last time in his career, he was aware that there were powers greater than he in the United States,” noted Higham. Roosevelt decided to leak the story to the press, which generally discounted it as a “ridiculous” rumor. Nevertheless, some of the primary plotters skipped the country until the furor died down. But the story did prompt Congress to appoint a special committee to look into the matter. Yielding to the powerful interests involved, the committee dragged its feet for four years before finally publishing a report marked for “restricted circulation.” Although downplaying the significance of this attempted coup, the committee’s report did state that “certain persons made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country” and that the committee “was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.”
Some researchers have speculated that this move against Roosevelt was merely a ploy orchestrated by the same elite families that put him into power. It was a scheme to paint FDR as an opponent of Wall Street and gain public support for his policies. If this plot was legitimate, it was the last overt move against an American president by powerful business interests until 1963. Ploy or not, this incident provides not only an example of hidden U.S. history but also the lengths to which powerful persons will go to subvert the principles of the United States.
Even at the time, some astute Americans could clearly see the connections between powerful national business leaders and Nazi Germany. U.S. ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd told reporters upon his arrival back home in 1937, “A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.” It was not just the ruling families that looked favorably on National Socialism and a fascist government. Prior to World War II, right-wing demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald K. Smith, an ordained minister, drew thousands of supporters from Christian American workers into their America First and Union Party with their message of nationalism and fears of a “Jewish conspiracy.” Smith’s planned religious theme park in the 1960s was never completed, but his “Christ of the Ozarks” draws tourists to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to this day. Prior to the war, no one paid serious attention to warnings against the spread of fascism, just as few people seem willing to consider the possibility of a fascist takeover of the USA today.
A successful political movement requires money, lots of it. There is no question that Hitler’s rise to power rested heavily on the support of the major German banks—Schroeder’s Cologne banking firm, the Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft, and the huge insurance firm Allianz—all with many interconnecting ties to foreign banks and companies. There were also close ties to prominent U.S. banks. Higham described how, in 1936, the J. Henry Schroeder Bank of New York had entered into a partnership with the Rockefellers. Named Schroeder, Rockefeller and Company, Investment Bankers, the firm became what Time magazine called the economic booster of “the Rome-Berlin Axis.” “Avery Rockefeller owned 42 percent of Schroeder,” Higham reported. “Their lawyers were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen Dulles (later of the Office of Strategic Services) was on the board of Schroeder.” One Deutsche Bank executive outlined a few of the bank’s wartime loans: 150 million reichsmarks to the aircraft industry; 22 million to Bavarian Motor Works (BMW); 10 million to Daimler-Benz (Mercedes) in 1943 alone. Similar amounts were loaned again in 1944.
But all the tightest business connections came to naught, for by 1941, the international order had turned against Hitler. Germany’s blitzkrieg had shocked the ruling elite, as first Poland, then the rest of Europe, came under Nazi control. Britain was helpless to stop Hitler, who was already making preparations for a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union. In short, Hitler was getting out of hand.
CHAPTER 2
THE STRANGE CASE OF RUDOLF HESS
ALTHOUGH RELEGATED TO A MINOR FOOTNOTE IN HISTORY, THE strange case of Nazi deputy fuehrer Rudolf Hess in 1941 provides a rare glimpse of the elitist control over events during World War II.
The bushy-eyebrowed Hess flew alone to England in May 1941, in an effort to make peace. The conventional view of the Hess flight is that of an increasingly marginalized member of Hitler’s inner circle who sought to regain favor with his fuehrer by making an unauthorized visit to Britain in the hope of personally negotiating an end to the war and even enlisting England’s aid in the fight against Soviet expansionism. Hitler disavowed Hess as insane, while British prime minister Winston Churchill more kindly described Hess’s attempt at negotiation as a “frantic deed of lunatic benevolence.”
At the Nuremberg trials, Hess was found guilty of “crimes against peace” and spent the rest of his life a prisoner in Berlin’s Spandau Prison. In August 1987, British military authorities announced that Hess had committed suicide, a judgment that continues to be disputed. Several recent studies of the Hess incident show there was much deeper meaning to this intriguing story, which was only magnified by his sudden and mysterious death just as his release from captivity seemed imminent.
RUDOLF HESS WAS born in Egypt in 1894, the son of a German importer. He was well schooled and well traveled by the time he joined the German Army during World War I, serving in the same regiment as Corporal Adolf Hitler. He was wounded twice and later became a fighter pilot, but the war ended before he could experience much comba
t.
Returning to Munich after the war, Hess helped other ex-servicemen in the paramilitary Freikorps to oust a short-lived Communist local government. After helping to break the Communist coup, Hess joined the Thule Society and enrolled as a student at the University of Munich, where he met his future wife and the man who was to prove a major influence on both Hitler and himself: Professor General Karl Haushofer.
According to author William Bramley, Professor Haushofer was a member of the Vril, another secret society based on a book by British Rosicrucian Lord Bulward Litton, about the visit of an Aryan “super race” to earth in the distant past. A mentor to both Hess and Hitler, Haushofer had traveled extensively in the Far East before becoming a general in the kaiser’s army of World War I. “His early associations with influential Japanese businessmen and statesmen were crucial in forming the German-Japanese alliance of World War II,” wrote author Peter Levenda. Haushofer became the first ranking Nazi to form relationships with South American governments in anticipation of a war with America. These relationships would prove instrumental in the later escape of war criminals from Europe.
Haushofer, as a professor at the University of Munich, worked out Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum, “living space” for a hemmed-in Germany. Although he gained a reputation as the “man behind Hitler,” Haushofer’s views on geopolitics were largely accepted by Hitler, but only after they came from the mouth of Hess. “I was only able to influence [Hitler] through Hess,” he told his American captors in 1945.
Both Hess and Haushofer first met Hitler at one of the beer hall meetings of the German Workers Party. During the abortive Beer-hall Putsch of 1923, when the new Nazi Party tried to seize power in Bavaria, Hess was at Hitler’s side. When the coup failed, Hess drove off to Austria, where he was sheltered by members of a paramilitary wing of the Thule Society.
