The Rise of the Fourth Reich

by Jim Marrs

  EVERY U.S. GOVERNMENT administration since the CFR’s inception has been packed with council members. Conservative journalist and CFR researcher James Perloff noted that through 1988, fourteen secretaries of state, fourteen secretaries of the treasury, eleven secretaries of defense, and scores of other federal department heads were members of the CFR. This trend continued through both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Current and former members of the CFR in the 2007 Bush cabinet included Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Elaine Chao, Robert M. Gates, Joshua B. Bolten, and Susan Schwab.

  The like-mindedness of CFR members—one cannot ask to join, you must be invited and pass a stringent vetting process to show that you are in agreement with their worldview—along with their close ties with the corporate business world has caused many conspiracy writers to view the CFR as a group with plans to control the world through multinational business mergers, economic treaties, and global government. The activities of the CFR may have been summarized by sociologist G. William Domhoff, who wrote: “If ‘conspiracy’ means that these men are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR, not to mention the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “Many of the council’s members have a personal financial interest in foreign relations because it is their property and investments that are guarded by the State Department and the military,” noted researcher Laurie Strand in the 1981 edition of The People’s Almanac #3.

  Nothing had changed since the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy’s special adviser John Kenneth Galbraith bemoaned, “Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations.”

  EVEN TODAY’S TERRORIST groups may be traced back to the Nazis, which prompts speculation on who is truly behind them.

  According to Peter Levenda’s Unholy Alliance, Otto Skorzeny, the Nazi commando who may have found Solomon’s treasure, made his way to postwar Egypt, where he created an Egyptian “Gestapo” staffed almost completely with former SS officers. According to Levenda, this was a measure “that received wholehearted support from CIA director Allen Dulles, who was at that time involved with Reinhard Gehlen in developing an anticommunist espionage service within the ranks of CIA.”

  This operation encompassed the Nazi-associated Muslim Brotherhood, a progenitor of today’s al-Qaeda terrorist organization.

  The connection between Muslim fanatics and Nazis, according to John Loftus, began with Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, who formed a group of Egyptian youth dedicated to social reform and Islamic morals. He was a devotee of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth-century Muslim who founded the Wahhabi sect that teaches that any additions or interpretations of Islam after the tenth century are false and should be eradicated, even by violence.

  “In the 1920s there was a young Egyptian named al-Banna. And al-Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna was a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930s, al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi intelligence,” said Loftus, who had unprecedented access to secret U.S. government and NATO intelligence files. “The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside Egypt. When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommell and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.” While they obviously failed in this, it is a fact that Arab raiders caused continual problems for Allied forces.

  After World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood and its German intelligence handlers were sought for war crimes, as they were not considered regular military units. Following arrests in Cairo, captured Brotherhood members were turned over to the British Secret Service, who hired them to fight against the infant state of Israel in 1948. Loftus stated:

  Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood. What the British did then, they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor (the OSS) of what became the CIA (soon to be headed by Allen Dulles). It may sound stupid, it may sound evil, but it did happen. The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against [them]. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll. But the Egyptians became nervous. [Egyptian President Gamal Abdal] Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood [to get] out of Egypt [in 1954] or be imprisoned, and we would execute them all. During the 1950s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia [still a stronghold of the Wahhabi sect]. Now when they arrived in Saudi Arabia…[one] student was named Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.

  In 1979 the CIA drew fanatics from these Saudi Brotherhood members and sent them to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Russians. “We had to rename them,” said Loftus. “We couldn’t call them the Muslim Brotherhood, because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK…. we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.” Once out of Afghanistan, the mujahideen became known as al-Qaeda, or the Base. While many people still think the term “base” refers to some central headquarters, former British foreign secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons the term actually referred to a computer database containing the names of Muslim activists, mujahideen, and others long used by the CIA.

  Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Saudis didn’t want the fanatics to return, so they bribed Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia.

  “There are many flavors and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods…. So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East, and on 9/11, it began to spread around the world,” concluded Loftus, who added that current CIA members don’t know this history. “[T]he current generation CIA are good and decent Americans and I like them a lot. They’re trying to do a good job, but part of their problem is their files have been shredded. All of these secrets have to come out.”

  DURING THE 1950S, while Dulles headed the CIA, his brother, John Foster Dulles, was President Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Both were in prime positions to shape the Nazification of America.

  “In the chill of the Cold War, few Americans remembered that John Foster Dulles had been pro-Nazi before Hitler invaded Poland,” observed Walter Bowart, a journalist and former editor who authored the book Operation Mind Control. “No one thought, either, to question the fact that while John Foster Dulles was running the State Department, his brother Allen was running the CIA, which he once described as a State Department for dealing with unfriendly governments. No one seemed at all disturbed by the Dulles dynasty, and only a handful of people realized to what extent the Dulles brothers held power in the Eisenhower administration.”

  The German banking industry particularly profited from such connections as the Dulles brothers and McCloy. Immediately after the war ended, Allied authorities ordered the breakup of Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank. Initially, the banking giant was split into ten regional banks, but by 1953 these were consolidated into three major banks—Nordeutsche Bank
AG, Suddeutsche Bank AG, and Rheinisch-West-falische Bank AG. A mere four years later, without any opposition, these three major banks merged and began takeovers, including the London Morgan Grenfell investment bank in 1989, the East German central bank following reunification in 1990, Banker’s Trust of New York in 1999, and two large Russian banks in 2006. By the turn of the current century, Deutsche Bank was reunited and had become a world banking leader.

  Astute authorities in both Britain and the United States undoubtedly recognized Deputy Fuehrer Martin Bormann’s flight capital plan. But they were dissuaded from action by the general euphoria at the war’s end, the chaotic conditions in Europe, the idea that growth would restore the wrecked European economy, and the increasing belief that the United States would soon have to confront a victorious and powerful Soviet Union. There was also the behind-the-scenes power of men in banking and commerce who had been in league with the Nazis and still carried sympathy for their cause.

  “Treasury officials in Washington, as in London, knew what was transpiring; the teams they sent into the field uncovered enough evidence to prove a definite pattern,” wrote Paul Manning. “As for the news media, it did not seem important, although long-term it was really the biggest of the postwar stories. Yet so quietly was it handled by the Germans, and so diffident was the reaction by the Allies, that few ripples rose to the surface, and investigators of the U.S. Treasury Department were taken off the case.” Investigators were reassigned by their superiors, some of whom had been business partners with the Nazis for years.

  One such example was attorney Russell A. Nixon, who, as a member of the U.S. Military Government Cartel Unit, found himself working directly under Brigadier General William H. Draper Jr., an advocate of eugenics who sat with James Forrestal on the board of directors of Dillon, Read Company, the firm that early on had helped finance the German cartels. According to Professor Antony C. Sutton, “Three Wall Street houses—Dillon, Read; Harris, Forbes; and National Citys Bank—handled three-quarters of the reparation loans used to create the German cartel system, including the dominant I. G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, which together produced 95 percent of the explosives for the Nazi side in World War II.”

  Nixon was blocked at every turn in his attempt to break up the Farben cartel. He finally went over the head of Brigadier General Draper, meeting with General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the U.S. zone in Germany. The general was told Draper had canceled orders to dismantle or destroy Farben facilities, lied about bomb damage to Farben plants, and deliberately violated General Eisenhower’s orders to break up the Farben cartel. Despite Nixon’s complaints, nothing was done. When Nixon took the initiative and had Nazi industrialist Richard Freudenberg arrested, U.S. ambassador to Germany Robert Murphy ordered him released. One occupation official explained Murphy’s decision by commenting, “This man Freudenberg is an extremely capable industrialist: a kind of Henry Ford.”

  Nixon later told a Senate subcommittee in Washington, “Generally speaking, in spite of the efforts that have been made, at the present time there is a continuation of the dissipation and further concealment of these [Nazi] assets throughout all the neutral countries.”

  Another Allied investigator, Department of Justice attorney James Stewart Martin, was sent to U.S. Military Command in London to investigate collaboration between the Nazis and American businessmen. Martin bristled when he found his commanding officer was a Colonel Graeme K. Howard, an official with General Motors. After Martin pointed out the cozy relationship General Motors had with the Nazis, Howard was quietly reassigned back to the States.

  Martin later investigated the fate of ITT’s German chairman Gerhardt Westrick, who, after the war ended, had fled Berlin and hidden out in a castle in southern Germany. After presenting a report on the status of ITT firms to U.S. military authorities, Westrick was given a light prison sentence and released. Martin found that queries concerning General Aniline and Film’s connections to I. G. Farben had been referred to Allen Dulles with no results.

  “We had not been stopped in Germany by German business. We had been stopped in Germany by American business,” Martin wrote in the 1950 book All Honorable Men. “The forces that stopped us had operated from the United States but had not operated in the open…. Whatever it was that had stopped us was not ‘the government.’ But it clearly had command of channels through which the government normally operates. The relative powerlessness of governments in the growing economic power is of course not new…. national governments have stood on the sidelines while bigger operators arranged the world’s affairs.”

  One of those insiders who helped protect Nazi interests in the wake of World War II was aforementioned William H. Draper Jr., a business partner with Prescott Bush, who, in July 1945, was appointed head of the economic division of the U.S. Control Commission, which decided which Nazi corporations would be saved and who would face war crimes prosecution. This placed Draper in almost as powerful a position as Germany’s new high commissioner John J. McCloy, who, besides banking for the Nazis, had spent a year in Italy as a financial adviser to Mussolini and shared Hitler’s box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

  Martin also may have stumbled across the answer to why the international business community turned against Hitler. The leading bankers and industrialists were looking forward to a postwar world composed of intertwining corporate business connections among the nations of the world—a New World Order.

  Hitler, on the other hand, was planning to attack the United States just as soon as he had effective rocket and long-range bomber delivery systems in place. The globalists did not desire a continuous war, nor did they want Hitler to control a world National Socialist government. They had their own plans.

  “[T]he 750 new corporations established under the Bormann [flight capital] program gave themselves absolute control over a postwar economic network of viable, prosperous companies that stretched from the Ruhr to the ‘neutrals’ of Europe and to the countries of South America; a control that continues today and is easily maintained through the bearer bonds or shares issued by these corporations to cloak real ownership,” stated Paul Manning, who worked with Edward R. Murrow covering the war in Europe for CBS Radio. Manning revealed that “there are U.S. Treasury old-timers of World War II still not aware of the magnitude of the Bormann operation and of its success. Those who know, in Washington, in South America, and in the capitals of Europe, are locked together in a conspiracy of silence.”

  No one in a position of power within the financial centers of Washington, Wall Street, the City of London, or Paris desired a real search for the scattered German assets. Manning explained: “They had understandable reasons if you overlook morality: the financial benefits for cooperation (collaboration had become an old-hat term with the war winding down) were very enticing, depending on one’s importance and ability to be of service to the organization and the 750 corporations they were secretly manipulating, to say nothing of the known multinationals such as I. G. Farben, Thyssen AG, and Siemens.”

  Without the German industrial base that had been its foundation for years, the European economy was suffering. U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff directives had ordered that nothing be done to rebuild Germany’s industries. But business is business, and by the summer of 1947, President Roosevelt’s friend and chief of staff General George Catlett Marshall had become secretary of state under President Truman. The son of a prosperous coal producer and a participant in every high-level policy conference from Casablanca to Yalta and Potsdam, Marshall convinced Truman that it was in the best interests of European prosperity that Germany be allowed to rehabilitate its economy. Thus, the Marshall Plan was born, and millions of dollars of aid began pouring into war-devastated Europe.

  Many Americans, including Colonel Robert McCormick, editor of the Chicago Tribune, and Senator Joseph McCarthy, attacked the Marshall Plan as merely another Rockefeller scheme to bilk Amerian taxpayers. According to Mullins, “The Marshall Plan had been rushed through Congress
by a powerful and vocal group, headed by Winthrop Aldrich, president of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Nelson Rockefeller’s brother-in-law, ably seconded by Nelson Rockefeller and William Clayton, the head of Anderson, Clayton Company.”

  Marshall Plan money flowed through the same banking conduits as before the war, such as the 1936 partnership between the J. Henry Schroeder Bank of New York and Rockefeller family members, described by Time magazine as “the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” Partners in Schroeder, Rockefeller and Company included Avery Rockefeller, nephew of John D., Baron Bruno von Schroeder in London, and Kurt Freiherr von Schroeder of the Bank of International Settlements and the Gestapo in Cologne. Attorneys for the firm were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell. Future CIA director and Warren Commission member Allen Dulles sat on the board of Schroeder. “Further connections linked the Paris branch of Chase National Bank to Schroeder as well as the pro-Nazi Worms Bank and Standard Oil of New Jersey in France. Standard Oil’s Paris representatives were directors of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, which had intricate connections to the Nazis and to Chase,” noted New York Times journalist Charles Higham.

  William Bramley, who researched the causes of war in his 1990 book The Gods of Eden, noted these international banking connections: Max Warburg, a major German banker, and his brother Paul Warburg, who had been instrumental in establishing the Federal Reserve System in the United States, 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.