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Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands -
personal background and his part in starting the Bilderberg Conferences
Please note that there are two other key figures in the creation of Bilderberg: Joseph Retinger and Sir Colin Gubbins.
05Mar10
- Daily Telegraph - Dutch Prince Bernhard lied, 'was member of Nazi party'
09Mar10
- Queen's father, Bernhard, a creature of his own myths
Prince Bernhard, the father of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, was a member of the Nazi party, a new book has claimed, contracting the German-born Dutch war hero's life-long denials.
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels - 6:51PM GMT 05 Mar 2010
"Bernhard, a secret history" has revealed that the prince was a member of the German Nazi party until 1934, three years before he married Princess Juliana, the future queen of the Netherlands.
Annejet van der Zijl, a Dutch historian, has found membership documents in Berlin's Humboldt University that prove Prince Bernhard, who studied there, had joined Deutsche Studentenschaft, a National Socialist student fraternity, as well as the Nazi NSDAP and its paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung.
He left all the groups on leaving university in December 1934, when he went to work for the German chemical giant, IG Farben.
The prince always denied having been a member of the Nazi party, although he admitted that he briefly had sympathised with Adolf Hitler's regime. In one of the last interviews he gave before his death in 2004, he said: "I can swear this with my hand on the Bible: I was never a Nazi."
As the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, the young prince consort, then aged 28, organised a group of palace guards that engaged in combat with German forces.
Denied the chance to stay and organise resistance by the then Queen Wilhelmina, he became head of the Dutch Royal Military Mission based in London.
As "Wing Commander Gibbs" – an honorary rank he held in the RAF – the prince later flew Allied bombing raids over occupied Europe before returning in 1944 as a Dutch war hero.
By our news staff
http://vorige.nrc.nl/international/article2500347.ece/Queens_father_a_creature_of_his_own_myths
A new biography of the late Dutch prince Bernhard, the current queen’s father, reveals more of his Nazi past.
Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld (1911 – 2004) was the father to the Dutch queen Beatrix, a hero for the Dutch resistance against the German occupation during the second world war, and a member of the Nazi party. In a new biographical dissertation published on Monday, journalist and historian Annejet van der Zijl reveals a lot of unflattering information about this man who, even after his death, continues to inspire strong emotions.
Van der Zijl draws harder conclusions about his behaviour than other biographers before her. She writes that Bernhard’s lifestyle and the “myths” he created around his own person have done “permanent damage to the integrity of the monarchy”. She dubs him “a failure” in the history of the Dutch royal family.
In spite of his German blood, prince Bernhard was seen as a hero of the Dutch resistance against the German occupation of 1940 - 1945. But his life was also mired in controversy. In 1976, the prince was stripped of his military titles after allegations of accepting bribes from the American aircraft manufacturer, Lockheed, which was then trying to sell its planes to the Dutch military. In an interview that was published after his death, he admitted to having two illegitimate children, next to the four daughters he fathered with the late Dutch queen Juliana.
Saviour or failure?
Prince Bernhard’s marriage to Juliana, who ruled the Netherlands from 1948 till 1980, also remains the subject of frequent debate. The couple spent large parts of their lives effectively, though not publicly, separated. The marriage, and the monarchy, was cast into crisis when the queen befriended a faith healer, Greet Hofmans, in the 1950s. As the time Hofmans spent at the court and her influence on the queen grew, Bernhard increasingly objected to her presence. In 1956, he leaked the story of this ‘Dutch Rasputin’ to the German press, jumpstarting a chain of events that would lead to her removal from the court.
A biography of the couple’s marriage published in 2008 painted a far more flattering picture of Bernhard than Van der Zijl’s new work does. Its author, historian and legal scholar Cees Fasseur believed prince Bernhard had “saved the monarchy” by leaking the story to the press.
Even though Fasseur was a member of her dissertation committee, Van der Zijl comes to an almost opposite conclusion.
Lies and omissions
Van der Zijl, who is famous in the Netherlands for other biographies and works of narrative non-fiction, spent five years studying the early years of Bernhard’s life in Germany. Her dissertation was published under the title Bernhard, a secret history on Monday. According to Van der Zijl, the main question guiding her research: ‘What makes Sammy run?’ was quickly supplemented with a second: ‘What makes Sammy lie?’
Van der Zijl shows that prince Bernhard’s account of ‘facts’ in his life very often differed from reality. For example, he did not tell the (whole) truth concerning his membership of Hitler’s national-socialist organisations. “Bernhard may have later sincerely felt he was not a former Nazi, but he was one,” Van der Zijl writes.
She claims that till now Bernhard has never been placed in his proper historical context. In her dissertation, she describes pre-war Germany, where he grew up, as a place where “anti-Semitism was an everyday, almost unremarkable part of life – certainly with the nobility that classically thought in terms of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ types of people” .
Prince Bernhard always denied he harboured sympathies for the Nazis, who came to power when he was 21 years old. He admitted to being a (novice) member of national socialist organisations like the German Students Association, but he always insinuated he had been forced into membership because, without it, he would have been unable to pass his exams.
Nazi membership
Van der Zijl, however, found a membership card signed by the prince himself on which he reported being a member of the Nazi paramilitary group SA since April 27, 1933. The SA-membership was preceded by an obligatory six month novice membership, which means Bernhard must have applied for membership as early as 1932, a year before the Nazis rose to power, Van der Zijl argues. “At that time in history there was no pressing reason for him to do so,” she writes. She proposed this claim to the head archivist of Berlin’s Humboldt Universität, where Bernhard had studied. “It would be years before […] the nazification of education had progressed so far that political demands were placed on students from the top down,” he told her.
Bernhard lied about other things beside his Nazi involvement, according to Van der Zijl. For example, he omitted crucial facts regarding his athletic abilities. Bernhard, “who loved nothing more than to present himself as a born athlete”, never reported that “his athletic abilities were given a humiliating mangelhaft (lacking) grade” at the high school he attended. Bernhard had also said his parents were so rich he was the only student in Berlin in the 1930s who owned a car,but on his membership card of the German Students’ Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft), Bernhard reported he lacked means of transportation.
Money and social standing
Van der Zijl argues that Bernhard married Juliana not out of love for her, but for his own mother, Armgard. His marriage to Juliana assured Bernhard – and his family – a place in the highest circles. His father had done the opposite and lost social standing by marrying Bernhard’s mother.
Van der Zijl was allowed access to Bernhard’s Zur Lippe family archives. She also spoke to family members, friends and other people who had encountered Bernhard in the first part of his life. According to her, Bernhard himself proved to be one of the most unreliable sources.
There have been some very interesting revelations in the Project's follow-up of research data. Due to the efforts of contributing researcher Mr. Eric Brothers U.S. State Department Protocol documents are now available to confirm one of this investigation's long-standing curiosities - the visit of members of the Dutch Royal Family to Chatham, Cape Cod during the very same time-frame in which the German Type XI-B U-Boat was known to have been operational off Cape Cod.
These documents consist of a series of notifications between the representatives of the Dutch Royal Family in exile and the Protocol Section of the Department of State. On the surface they do indeed appear to be routine in nature. It is only when viewed with the other known occurrences off Cape Cod at this time that these Protocol records seem to indicate more than just routine procedure.
For example: One of the most obvious details that stand out is the sudden departure from Chatham of Princess Juliana and her royal attendants on the morning of the 26th. of August, 1944, only hours after the known destruction of the Type XI fourteen miles to the southeast. This, combined with a published news report in the local Cape Cod Times for that date, quote the Princess as opening a short public statement upon her departure, stating: "I will not talk about anything political and cannot take questions". She goes on to say how the Royal Family enjoyed their stay at the Chatham Bars Inn, etc.
Within five minutes the impromptu interview is over and the Royal Family departs by car for Boston enroute to Canada. The fact that these State Department Protocol documents were only declassified at the time Mr. Brothers requested to view them in July of 1997 is possibly indicative - fifty four years after the fact.
To add to this new information Trident had conducted background research into the Dutch Royal Family due to its suspicions and has confirmed the following:
1) The Royal Consort, Prince Bernhardt, Husband of Juliana since 1937, was previous to their marriage an active card-carrying member of Hitler's black-shirted SS.
2) Prince Consort Bernhardt was employed prior to, during, and after the war by I.G.Farben's Industrial Espionage Unit "NW-7" which, needless to say, placed him under great suspicions by both the British and American intelligence communities. The mere fact of his employment as an "industrial spy" for Farben places him squarely within the sphere of the German Industrial community, links for which have already been established with the Type XI-B U-Boat.
There are many more details regarding the Dutch Royal Family, Prince Bernhardt, Princess Juliana and the German Industrialists which have not been included in this specific brief due to space considerations. However, the basic facts as listed above give very strong indications regarding the Dutch Royal visit to Cape Cod at this specific time in July and August of 1944. Suffice it to say that there is the very strong possibility that Prince Consort Bernhardt, through his wife Princess Juliana, may very well have been acting as a sort of liaison or facilitator in connections for Armistice Negotiations between German Industrialists and certain members of the American Department of State and Intelligence Community. The final proof for this is as yet not confirmed, but the stage is certainly set for such endeavors. Perhaps the amplified documentation for such a situation is contained within the hull of the Type XI off Cape Cod.
Used with permission - from http://www.subsearecovery.com/ca35/
©1998 Trident Research & Recovery Inc. - Sub Sea Recovery Inc.
[this article] All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, downloading or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers of: The CA-35 website.
The Prince and the
Nazis
NATO=Nazi link two - click here for next
In order to finish his education quickly Bernhard had to make some compromises with the monstrous political system that was fastening its grip on Germany. The story that the Prince of the Netherlands once wore the black uniform of Hitler’s SS is quite true. It came about in this way.
Only eleven days after his father’s death, on June 30, 1934, Hitler’s first purge, known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives,’ shocked Germany and the world. On that pleasant summer evening Ernst Rohm, who had been Hitler’s friend and ally from the beginning, and other leaders of the brown-shirted SA (Storm Troopers), the private army which had brought Hitler to power and who were now challenging his will, were taken in their beds and their offices, in beer-halls and on railway trains or in the streets, and shot without even a drumhead court-martial. They were an evil and degenerate crew who lived by violence and appropriately died by it, but the capricious manner of their liquidation proved that justice in Germany had been replaced by the will of a tyrant.
Nor were they the only victims. General Kurt von Schleicher, who had opposed Hitler politically, was shot in the doorway of his home, and when his wife protested too much she was murdered too. All sorts of private grudges were satisfied in the slaughter which was said at the Nuremberg trials to have taken over a thousand lives. It lasted for thirty-six hours.
From that moment no man or woman in the land was safe from the terror, especially not those who wielded power, least of all Hitler himself. The SA was disbanded and replaced by Heinrich Himmler’s black-uniformed SS (Schutzstaffel), and the Gestapo (Secret State Police). They quickly set about tightening the screws of the police state.
At the beginning of his serious studies Bernhard learned that a new sort of test had been decreed for every one graduating from the universities - a written and oral ‘political attitude” examination. With his ideals and high temper he knew that was one examination he could not pass.
However, there was a way round it. Members of the various Nazi paramilitary organizations were ipso facto considered “politically reliable.” Bernhard had joined the League for Air Sports because he wanted to learn to fly. It had been started by the Nazi Party as a sub-rosa method of training war pilots, but it had virtually no political implications. Its leaders were the old World War I airmen like Ernst Udet, who were not Nazis and cared only about teaching young people to fly.
So Bernhard was all set until he went larking around the sky with a wild young friend who flew their plane into a lake. They swam ashore, but the plane had ceased to exist.
When they got back to the base their commander was furious.
“He was right, of course,” says Bernhard, “and we were wrong.
Even though I was not at the controls, I knew I was out. So while the commandant
was screaming at my friend I said, “ I resign too.” It was just
a question of who could get the words out first.”
His ignominious ejection from Air Sports left Bernhard in a very vulnerable position. He belonged to no organization and had no uniform or badge to wear. He knew that the law examinations were made doubly difficult for uncommitted people, and that even if he passed them the political attitude test would eliminate him. So he looked around for a harmless cover. He found it by the grace of the son of the man who owned Bernhard’s favourite Berlin pub.
Young Walter Wunderlich was an idealistic Nazi: there were many such young men who truly believed in the noble aspirations of the party as voiced, but not practised, by Hitler and his lieutenants. Wunderlich was head of the Berlin unit of the Motor SS, which was made up of young men who had their own cars. They put on their uniforms and met once a week for what almost amounted to a sportscar rally. Bernhard and five or six friends in the same boat as he, including the Langenheim brothers from Morocco, went to Wunderlich.
Bernhard knew that a man had to serve in the SS for a year and a half before he was admitted to membership; until then he was on probation. Speaking for all of them, he said, “Look, Walter, you know exactly how we think and what we are. But we need some sort of protection. Will you take us into your motor unit until we finish our studies? Then out we go.”
Is that how you want it?” Walter asked.
“Yes,” said Bernhard. “You know just why we are doing this. Under no circumstances does any of us want to become and SS man by quicker promotion or whatsoever. We’ll come in our motorcars, and we’ll all drive together till we graduate. Then out. That is the understanding.”
Though Walter was a dedicated Nazi, he was a loyal friend ready to stick his neck out to help. “I’ll take you,” he said.
They were issued overcoats, and went to the best tailor in Berlin to have their uniforms specially made. “I must say we looked smart in them,” Bernhard says. “The extent of my services included the weekly rallies and standing guard occasionally, because if you did that you could have a free garage. We had a lot of fun and no trouble.”
At the end of their studies Bernhard’s whole group, with one exception, left the SS and severed all connection with the party. This fellow appeared later in Holland and took advantage of Bernhard’s trusting nature to commit an act of treachery.
By the time Bernhard had graduated he was completely determined to get out of Germany. Von Hindenburg was dead. The last vestige of constitutionalism had disappeared as the office of President of the German Republic was abolished and Hitler named himself Fuhrer. He was now more powerful than any German Emperor had ever been, and more obsessed by lust of conquest than old Frederick Barbarossa.
The Nazi movement had gathered such momentum that Bernhard could see no hope of stopping it short of bloody catastrophe. This is not to say that he foresaw the future clearly in all its Wagnerian tragedy. He did not. But neither did he believe for a moment that the Third Reich would last a thousand years, or fifty for that matter. Even if it did he could not conceive of living in a land of government by terror. And despite the military tradition of his family and h is own creed of loyalty, he had not the conscience to become, as conscription would soon compel him to, part of a military machine dedicated to conquest.
Had he been older and his character more hardened by adversity he might have considered remaining to oppose the regime, hopeless as opposition seemed. Even so, open dissent was impossible, and he had neither the talent nor the taste for conspiracy. In addition, the only organized underground resistance was the Communist Party, which was equally distasteful to him.The only solution was self-exile.
Bernhard did not burn all his bridges immediately. As a first step he got a job in the Paris office of I.G.Farben, the great German chemical combine. Though his training had been in law, he was fascinated by industry and finance, and thought that his talents lay in this direction. Which proved to be the case.
In Paris Bernhard threw all his energy into his new career. He says that he wanted to prove that it was not nepotism that got him the job. But the truth is that by now he was so geared to high-pressure work that he could not have done otherwise. Also, the more he learned about business the more interested he became.
Though his working hours were from 8 am to 7 pm he was among the first to reach the office in the morning and the last to leave at night. In addition he took a course in shorthand and typing in the evening or during his lunch-hour, munching a sandwich while he worked. “They were mad for garlic in that school,” he says. “I have never smelt anything like it. I started eating it in self-defence and learned to like it very much. I still do, though my family is not quite in agreement with me.”
I.G.Farben’s Paris manager, Dr Passarge, soon recognized Bernhard as executive material and sent him on a training course through the various departments. In the sales department he really found his metier. He negotiated several barter deals with French Indo-China - rice for chemicals - and took part in various other selling campaigns. It gave him a chance to use all his talents - financial acuteness, ability to think fast, persuasiveness, and that God-given charm of which he was completely aware. He did so well that Dr Passarge said, “If you don’t do something stupid you’ll be a manager by the time you’re thirty.” A little later he got the same promise in writing.
In Paris Bernhard lived in the luxurious house of his uncle and aunt by marriage, Count and Countess Paul de Kotzebue. The Countess was an American, Allene Tew, whose first husband had been Anson Wood Berther, an executive of General Electric from whom she inherited a fine old-fashioned American fortune. Countess Kotzebue doted on Bernhard, Princess Armgard says, “She spoiled him terribly. All her cars were his to drive. She never refused him anything he asked. His wish was literally her command. The Kotzebues had no children, and she regarded him as a son.”
Bernhard, who always returned affection in full measure, was completely devoted to “Aunt Allene,” and equally willing to gratify her wishes. Count Kotzebue says that many years later, when the Countess was dying at Nice, Bernhard drove all the way from Soestdijk to see her once more. “Though my wife seemed to be unconscious,” he said, “she recognized his horn in the courtyard and said, ‘That’s my Bernilo come to see me.’ ”
It is not to be supposed that the life of a bachelor prince in Paris was a social blank. No matter how hard Bernhard worked he always had energy left for fun. He was invited to a great many parties and went to most of them. He was a great favourite in the embassies, with one exception. “Soon after I began working for I.G.Farben [see note below],” he says, “ the German Ambassador sent a man to ask me if I would join the organization of Germans living abroad. It was, of course, a party organization, so I said, ‘No’. They gave me no further trouble, but I was never invited to the German Embassy.”
However, the Belgian Ambassador, Count van Kerckhoven, was especially friendly. He had been Ambassador to Berlin when Bernhard was a student there and had been “awfully nice” to him. Their friendship continued in Paris. Though Bernhard had only an hour off at noon, the Ambassador often invited him for lunch and arranged things so that the meal was served the moment he arrived and protocol dispensed with, so that he could eat and run back to his job.
At one of these luncheons late in 1935 Bernhard found himself seated next do Dr Loudon, the Dutch Minister to Portugal, whom he also knew quite well. The conversation turned to the Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Bernhard planned to go during his winter holidays. Dr Loudon told him that Queen Wilhelmina and her daughter, Princess Juliana, also planned to go to the Olympics. “They will be staying at Igls, just over the mountain,” he said. “Perhaps you would like to call Her Majesty’s aide-de-camp and arrange to pay them a courtesy visit.”
“Thank you, I believe I will,” Bernhard said. “It might be amusing.”
Preceding extract from:
A celebration was held at the Petersburg Hotel in 1937 with top Nazis and the IG Farben board and friends to celebrate 'Nazification'.
I.G. Farben paid the SS three marks a day for unskilled concentration camp workers and four marks a day for skilled. For child labour they paid the SS 1.5 marks a day.
http://www.goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=4298&goto=nextoldest
Many American conservatives believe as a matter of faith that the Rockefellers and the Council on Foreign Relations exercise absolute control over the government and the people of United States . This thesis can be accepted as a working formula if one remains conscious of the larger issues . Two writers for whom the present writer has great respect, Dr. Emanuel Josephson and Morris Bealle, insisted on focusing on the Rockefellers and excluding all other aspects of the World Order . This severely limited the effect of their otherwise ground breaking work on the Medical Monopoly.
This writer advanced a contrary view in ``The World Order,'' fixing upon the Rothschild monetary power, which reached a point of world control by 1885, and its London policy group, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, as the policy makers for what has essentially been since 1900, re-established colonial government in the United States. The colonial, or occupation, government, functions primarily through the Council on Foreign Relations, but only as the subsidiary of RIIA and through the Rockefeller Foundation which controls government functions, the educational establishments, the media, the religions and the state legislatures.
It is true that the American colonials have ``free elections,'' in which they have the absolute right to vote for one of two opposing candidates, both of whom have been handpicked and financed by the Rockefeller syndicate. This touching evidence of ``democracy'' serves to convince most Americana that we are indeed a free people. We even have a cracked Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to prove it. American youth have been free since 1900 to be marched off to die in Hegelian wars in which both combatants received their instructions from the World Order. We are free to invest in a stock market in which the daily quantity, price and value of the monetary unit is manipulated and controlled by a Federal Reserve System which is answerable only to the Bank of England. It has maintained its vaunted ``independence'' from our government's control, but this is the only independence it has ever had.
The realization that we do indeed live under the dictates of the ``Rockefeller Syndicate'' can well be the starting point of the long road back of a genuine struggle for American independence. In exposing ``the Rockefellers'' as agents of a foreign power, which is not merely a foreign power, but a genuine world government, we must realize that this is not merely a group dedicated to making money, but a group which is committed to maintaining the power of a colonial form of government over the American people. Thus the ancient calumny of John D. Rockefeller as a man obsessed by greed (a category in which he has plenty of company) obscures the act that from the day the Rothschilds began to finance his march towards a total oil monopoly in the United States from their coffers at the National City Bank of Cleveland, Rockefeller was never an independent power, nor does any department of the Rockefeller Syndicate operate as an independent power. We know that the Cosa Nostra, or Mafia, with which the Syndicate is closely allied, has somewhat autonomous power in the regions which have been assigned to that particular ``family'' by the national directors, but this always implies that that family remains under total control and answerable for everything which occurs in its territory.
Similarly, the Rockefeller Syndicate operates under clearly defined spheres of influence. The ``charitable'' organizations, the business companies, and the policy groups, always meld into a working operation, nor can any department of the Syndicate strike out on its own or formulate an independent policy, no matter what may be its justification.
The Rockefeller Syndicate operates under the control of the world financial structure, which means that on any given day, all of its assets could be rendered close to worthless by adroit financial manipulation. This is the final control, which ensures that no one can quit the organization. Not only would he be stripped of all assets, but he would be under contract for immediate assassination. Our Department of Justice is well aware that the only ``terrorists'' operating in the United States are the agents of the World Order, but they prudently avoid any mention of this fact.
The world financial structure, far from being an unknown or hidden organization, is actually well known and well defined. It consists of the major Swiss Banks; the survivors of the old Venetian-Genoese banking axis; the Big Five of the world grain trade; the British combine, centered in the Bank of England and its chartered merchant banks, functioning trough the Rothschilds and the Oppenheimers and having absolute control over their Canadian colony through the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal, their Canadian lieutenants being the Bronfmans, Belzbergs, and other financial operators; and the colonial banking structure in the United States, controlled by the Bank of England through the Federal Reserve System; the Boston Brahmin families who made their fortunes in the opium trade, including the Delanos and others and the Rockefeller Syndicate, consisting of the Kissinger network headquartered in the Rockefeller Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, American Express, the present form of the old Rothschild representatives in the United States, which includes Kuhn, Loeb Company and Lehman Brothers.
It is notable that the Rockefeller Syndicate is far down on the list of the world's financial structure. Why then is it of such importance ? Although it is not the crucial factor in financial decision in the Western Hemisphere, it is the actual working control mechanism of the American colony. The Rockefeller family themselves, like the Morgans, Schiffs and Warburgs, have faded into insignificance, but the mechanism created in their name roars along at full power, still maintaining all of he functions for which it was organized. Since he set up the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller has functioned as a sort of international courier for the World Order, principally concerned with delivering working instructions to the Communist bloc, either directly, in New York or by traveling to the area. Laurance Rockefeller is active in the operation of the Medical Monopoly, but his principal interests are in operating various vacation spas in tropical areas. They are the two survivors of the ``Fortunate Five,'' the five sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Abby Aldrich. John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. died in an institution in Tucson, Arizona and was hastily cremated. John D. Rockefeller III died in a mysterious accident on a New York Parkway near his home. Nelson Rockefeller, named after his grandfather, died in the arms of a TV journalist; it was later revealed that he had also been in the arms of another TV journalist at the same time; the death was hushed up for many hours. It is generally believed hat he ran afoul of his Colombian drug connection, the disagreement hardly being trivial ; it involved several billion dollars in drug profits which had not been properly apportioned. Winthrop Rockefeller died an alcoholic in the arms of his black boy friend. He had been interviewed on television by Harry Reasoner to explain his hasty move from New York to Arkansas.
Winthrop leered that his black boy friend, an Army sergeant who apparently taught him the mysteries of drill, refused to live in New York. To celebrate this alliance, Winthrop Rockefeller gave magnificently to Negro causes, including the Urban League building on East 48th Street in New York. A plaque on the second floor notes that it was his gift; it might well have stated ``From Hadrian to his Antinous''.
We do not wish to imply that the Rockefellers no longer have influence, but that the major policy dictates of the Rockefeller Syndicate are handed down by other capos, of whom they continue to be a visible force. Through the person of David Rockefeller, the family is sometimes called ``the first family of the Soviet Union.'' Only he and Dr. Armand Hammer, the moving force behind USTEC, have permanent permission to land their private planes at the Moscow Airport. Others would suffer the fate of KAL 007.
Both the Rockefeller family fortune and the considerable portion set aside in the foundations of the Rockefeller Syndicate are effectively insulated against any type of government control . Fortune magazine noted August 4, 1986, that John D. Rockefeller, Jr. had created trusts in 1934 which now amounted to some $2.3 billion; another $200 million had been set aside for the Abby Rockefeller branch. The five sons had trusts which in 1986 amount to $2.1 billion. These trusts had originally amounted to only $50 million each, showing the increase in their assets as well as inflation during the ensuing half century . Fortune estimated the 1986 total Rockefeller wealth as $3.5 billion, of which $900 million was in securities and real estate.
They owned 45% of the Time Life Building; Nelson Rockefeller's International Basic Economy Corporation had been sold to a British company in 1980. For years, the Rockefeller family had deliberately kept the rents low in its major holding, the Rockefeller Center, a $1.6 billion investment yielding an annual return of 1%. This was a convenient maneuver, for tax purposes. Rockefeller Center recently went public issuing stock which was sold to public buyers. The Rockefellers are rumored to be liquidating their investments in the New York area, and reinvesting in the West, particularly in the area around Phoenix, Arizona. It is possible that they know something we don't.
However much of the Rockefeller wealth may be attributed to old John D.'s rapacity and ruthlessness, its origins are indubitably based in his initial financing from the National City Bank of Cleveland, which was identified in Congressional reports as one of the three Rothschild banks in the United States and by his later acceptance of the guidance of Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who had been born in the Rothschild house in Frankfort and was now the principal Rothschild representative (but unknown as such to the public) in the United States.
With the seed money from the National City Bank of Cleveland, old John D. Rockefeller soon laid claim to the title of ``the most ruthless American''.
It is more than likely that it was this quality which persuaded the Rothschilds to back him . Rockefeller realized early in the game that the oil refinery business, which could offer great profits in a short time, also was at the mercy of uncontrolled competition. His solution was a simple one - crush all competition. The famous Rockefeller dedication to total monopoly was simply a business decision. Rockefeller embarked on a campaign of coercing all competing oil refineries out of business. He attacked on a number of fronts, which is also a lesson to all would be entrepreneurs. First, he would send a minion, not known to be working for Rockefeller, with an offer to buy the competing refinery for a low price, but offering cash. If the offer was refused, the competitor would then come under attack from a competing refinery which greatly undercut his price. He might also suffer a sudden strike at his refinery, which would force him to shut down. Control of labor through unions has always been a basic Rockefeller technique. Like the Soviet Union, they seldom have labor trouble. If these techniques failed, Rockefeller would then be saddened by a reluctant decision to use violence; beating the rival workers as they went to and from their jobs, or burning or blowing up the competing refinery.
These techniques convinced the Rothschilds that they had found their man.
They sent their personal representative, Jacob Schiff, to Cleveland to help Rockefeller plan further expansion. At this time, the Rothschilds controlled 95% of all railroad mileage in the United States, through the J.P. Morgan Company and Kuhn Loeb & Company according to official Department of Commerce figures for the year 1895. J.P. Morgan mentions in his Who's Who listing that he controlled 50,000 miles of U.S. railways.
Schiff worked out an elaborate rebate deal for Rockefeller, through a dummy corporation, South Improvement Company. These rebates ensured that no other oil company could survive in competition with the Rockefeller firm. The scheme was later exposed, but by that time Rockefeller had achieved a virtual monopoly of the oil business in the United States. The daughter of one of his victims, Ida Tarbell, whose father was ruined by Rockefeller's criminal operations, wrote the first major expose of the Standard Oil Trust. She was promptly denounced as a ``muckraker'' by the poseur, Theodore Roosevelt, who claimed to be a ``trust buster''. In fact, he ensured the dominance of the Standard Oil Trust and other giant trusts.
During the next half century, John D. Rockefeller was routinely caricatured by socialist propagandists as the epitome of the ruthless capitalist. At the same time, he was the principal financier of the world Communist movement, through a firm called American International Company. Despite the fact that the House of Rothschild had already achieved world control, the sound and fury was directed exclusively against its two principal, representatives, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. One of the few revelations of the actual state of affairs appeared in Truth magazine, December 16, 1912, which pointed out that ``Mr. Schiff is head of the great private banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, which represents the Rothschild interests on this side of the Atlantic. He is described as a financial strategist and has been for years the financial minister of the great impersonal power known as Standard Oil.'' Note that this editor did not even mention the name of Rockefeller.
Because of these concealed factors, it was a relatively simple matter for the American public to accept the ``fact'' that the Rockefellers were the preeminent power in this country. This myth was actually clothed in the apparel of power, the Rockefeller Oil Trust becoming the ``military-industrial complex'' which assumed political control of the nation; the Rockefeller Medical Monopoly attained control of the health care of the nation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, a web of affiliated tax exempt creations, effectively controlled the religious and educational life of the nation. The myth succeeded in its goal of camouflaging the hidden rulers, the Rothschilds.
After the present writer had been exposing this charade for some twenty-five years, a new myth began to be noised about in American conservative circles, effectively propagated by active double agents. This myth found a host of eager believers, because it heralded a growing crack in the monolithic power which had been oppressing all the peoples of the world. This new ``revelation'' was that a struggle to the death for world power had developed between the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. According to this startling development, one faction or the other, depending on which agent you were listening to, had gained control of the Soviet Union and would use its power as the basis for achieving the overthrow of the other faction. The sudden death of several members of the Rockefeller family was cited as ``proof'' that such a struggle was taking place, although no Rothschild is known to have succumbed during this ``war''. This ignored the general understanding that Nelson Rockefeller had been ``eliminated'' as the result of losing deposit slips for several billion dollars of drugs from the Colombian cartel, or that the other Rockefeller deaths showed no trace of a ``Rothschild connection''.
Having maintained extensive files on this situation for several decades, the present writer could not believe anyone could be so misinformed as to think that ``the Rockefellers'' were now trying to seize power from the Rothschilds, at a time when the influence of members of the Rockefeller family was already in great decline, their family finances being handled by J. Richardson Dilworth, their legal affairs being handled by John J.
McCloy, and other faithful retainers; none of these retainers would have been willing to engage in a genuine power struggle, as they were faceless managers who lived only for their weekly paycheck. They had no ambitions of their own. Nevertheless, many hopeful Americans grasped the will-o-the-wisp notion that the Rockefellers were now ``good Americans'' who were willing to risk all to overthrow the Rothschilds. Amazingly enough, this pernicious story persisted for almost a decade before being relegated to the curiosities of history.
Like J.P. Morgan, who had begun his commercial career by selling the U.S. Army some defective guns, the famous fall carbine affair, John D. Rockefeller also was a war profiteer during the Civil War ; he sold unstamped Harkness liquor to Federal troops at a high profit, gaining the initial capital to embark on his drive for monopoly. His interest in the oil business was a natural one; his father, William Rockefeller had been ``in oil'' for years . William Rockefeller had become an oil entrepreneur after salt wells at Tarentum, near Pittsburgh, were discovered in 1842 to be flowing with oil. The owners of the wells, Samuel L. Kier, began to bottle the oil and sell it for medicinal purposes. One of his earliest wholesalers was William Rockefeller. The ``medicine'' was originally labeled ``Kier's Magic Oil''. Rockefeller printed his own labels, using ``Rock Oil'' or ``Seneca Oil,'' Seneca being the name of a well known Indian tribe. Rockefeller achieved his greatest notoriety and his greatest profits by advertising himself as ``William Rockefeller, the Celebrated Cancer Specialist''. It is understandable that his grandsons would become the controlling power behind the scenes of the world's most famous cancer treatment center and would direct government funds and charitable contributions to those areas which only benefit the Medical Monopoly.
William Rockefeller spared no claim in his flamboyant career. He guaranteed ``All Cases of Cancer Cured Unless They Are Too Far Gone.'' Such were the healing powers that he attributed to his magic cancer cure that he vas able to retail it for $25 a bottle, a sum then equivalent to two months' wages.
The ``cure'' consisted of a few well known diuretics, which had been diluted by water. This carnival medicine show barker could hardly have envisioned that his descendants would control the greatest and the most profitable Medical Monopoly in recorded history .=20
As an itinerant ``carnie,'' a traveling carnival peddler, William Rockefeller had chosen a career which interfered with developing a stable family life. His son John rarely saw him, a circumstance which has inspired some psychological analysts a conjecture that the absence of a father figure or parental love may have contributed to John D. Rockefeller's subsequent development as a money mad tyrant who plotted to maim, poison and kill millions of his fellow American during almost century of his monopolistic operations and whose influence, reaching up from the grave, remains the most dire and malignant presence in American life. This may have been a contributing factor - however, it is also possible that he was totally evil.
It has long been a truism that you can find a horse thief or two in any prominent American family. In the Rockefeller family it was more than a truism. William seems to have faithfully followed the precepts of the Will of Canaan throughout his career, ``love robbery, love lechery.'' He fled from a number of indictments for horse stealing, finally disappearing altogether as William Rockefeller and re-emerging as Dr. William Levingston of Philadelphia, a name which he retained for the rest of his life. An investigative reporter at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World received a tip that was followed up. The World then disclosed that William Avery Rockefeller had died May 11, 1906 in Freeport, Illinois, where he was interred in an unmarked grave as Dr. William Levingston.
William Rockefeller's vocation as a medicine man greatly facilitated his preferred profession of horse thief. As one who planned to be in the next county by morning, it was a simple matter to tie a handsome stallion to the back of his wagon and head for the open road. It also played a large part in his vocation as a woman-chaser; he was described as being ``woman-mad''.
He not only concluded several bigamous marriages, but he seems to have had uncontrolled passions. On June 28, 1849, he was indicted for raping a hired girl in Cayuga, New York; he later was found to be residing in Oswego, New York and was forced once again to decamp for parts unknown. He had no difficulty in financing his woman-chasing interests from the sale of his miraculous cancer cure and from another product, his ``Wonder Working Liniment,'' which he offered at only two dollars a bottle. It consisted of crude petroleum from which the lighter oils had been boiled away, leaving a heavy solution of paraffin, lube oil and tar, which comprised the ``liniment.'' William Rockefeller's original miracle oil survived until quite recently as a concoction called Nujol, consisting principally of petroleum and peddled as a laxative. It was well known that Nujol was merely an advertising sobriquet meaning ``new oil,'' as opposed, apparently, to ``old oil''. Sold as an antidote to constipation, it robbed the body of fat-soluble vitamins, it being a well-established medical fact that mineral oil coated the intestine and prevented the absorption of many needed vitamins and other nutritional needs. Its makers added carotene as a sop to the health-conscious, but it was hardly worth the bother. Nujol was manufactured by a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, called Stanco, whose only other product, manufactured on the same premises, was the famous insecticide, Flit.
Nujol was hawked from the Senate Office Building in Washington for years during a more liberal interpretation of ``conflict of interest.'' In this case, it was hardly a conflict of interest, because the august peddler, Senator Royal S. Copeland, never had any interests other than serving the Rockefellers. He was a physician whom Rockefeller had appointed as head of the New York State Department of Health and later financed his campaign for the Senate. Copeland's frank display of commercialism amazed even the most blasé Washington reporters. He devoted his Senate career to a daily program advertising Nujol. A microphone was set up in his Senate office each morning, the first order of business being the Nujol program, for which he was paid $75,000 a year, an enormous salary in the 1930s and more than the salary of the President of the United States. Senator Copeland's exploits earned him a number of nicknames on Capitol Hill. He was often called the Senator from the American Medical Association, because of his enthusiastic backing for any program launched by the AMA and Morris Fishbein. More realistically, he was usually referred to as ``the Senator from Standard Oil''. He could be counted on to promote any legislation devised for the greater profit of the Rockefeller monopoly. During congressional debate on the Food and Drug Act in 1938, he came under criticism from Congresswoman Leonor Sullivan, who charged that Senator Copeland, a physician who handled the bill on the Senate floor, frankly acknowledged during the debate that soap was exempted from the law, because the soap manufacturers, who were the nation's largest advertisers, would otherwise join with other big industries to fight the bill. Congresswoman Sullivan complained the ``Soap was officially declared in the law not to be a cosmetic . .. The hair dye manufacturers were given license to market known dangerous products, just so long as they placed a special warning on the label - but what woman in a beauty parlor ever sees the label on the bulk container in which hair dye is shipped ?''
Just as the elder Rockefeller had spent his life in the pursuit of his personal obsession, omen, so his son John was equally obsessed, being money-mad instead of women-mad, totally committed to the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth and power. However, the principal accomplishments of the Rockefeller drive for power, the rebate scheme for monopoly, the chartering of the foundations to gain power over American citizens, the creation of the central bank, the Federal Reserve System, the backing of the World Communist revolution and the creation of the Medical Monopoly, all came from the Rothschilds or from their European employees. We cannot find in the records of John D. Rockefeller that he originated any one of these programs. The concept of the tax exempt charitable foundation originated with the Rothschild minion, George Peabody, in 1865. The Peabody Educational Foundation later became the Rockefeller Foundation. It is unlikely that even the diabolical mind of John D. Rockefeller could have conceived of this devious twist. A social historian has described the major development of the late nineteenth century, when charitable foundations and world Communism became important movements, as one of the more interesting facets of history, perhaps equivalent to the discovery of the wheel. This new discovery was the concept developed by the rats, who after all have rather highly developed intelligences, that they could trap people by baiting traps with little bits of cheese. The history of mankind since then has been the rats catching humans in their traps. Socialism - indeed any government program - is simply the rat baiting the trap with a smidgen of cheese and catching himself a human.
Congressman Wright Putman, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, noted from the floor of Congress that the establishment of the Rockefeller Foundation effectively insulated Standard Oil from competition.
The controlling stock had been removed from market manipulation or possible buy-outs by competitors. It also relieved Standard Oil from most taxation, which then placed a tremendous added burden on individual American taxpayers. Although a Rockefeller relative by marriage, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Republican majority leader in the Senate, had pushed the General Education Board charter through Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation charter proved to be more difficult. Widespread criticism of Rockefeller's monopolistic practices was heard, and his effort to insulate his profits from taxation or takeover was seen for what it was. The charter was finally pushed through in 1913 (the significant Masonic numeral 13 - 1913 was also the year the progressive income tax and of the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act). Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, another senator from Standard Oil (there were quite a few), ramrodded the Congressional approval of the charter. The charter was then signed by John D. Rockefeller, John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., Henry Pratt Judson, president of the Rockefeller established University of Chicago, Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute, Starr Jameson, described in Who's Who as ``personal counsel to John D. Rockefeller in his benevolences,'' and Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University.
The Rockefeller Oil Monopoly is now 125 years old, yet in 1911, the Supreme Court, bowing to public outrage, had ruled that it had to be broken up. The resulting companies proved to be no problem for the Rockefeller interests.
The family retained a two per cent holding in each of the ``new'' companies, while the Rockefeller foundations took a three per cent stock holding in each company. This gave them a five per cent stock interest in each company ; a one per cent holding in a corporation is usually sufficient to maintain working control.
The involvement of the Rockefellers in promoting the world Communist Revolution also developed from their business interests. There was never any commitment to the Marxist ideology; like anything else, it was there to be used. At the turn of the century Standard Oil was competing fiercely with Royal Dutch Shell for control of the lucrative European market.
Congressional testimony revealed that Rockefeller had sent large sums to Lenin and Trotsky to instigate the Communist Revolution of 1905. His banker, Jacob Schiff, had previously financed the Japanese in their war against Russia and had sent a personal emissary, George Kennan to Russia to spend some twenty years in promoting revolutionary activity against the Czar. When the Czar abdicated, Trotsky was placed on a ship with three hundred Communist revolutionaries from the Lower East Side of New York.
Rockefeller obtained a special passport for Trotsky from Woodrow Wilson and sent Lincoln Steffens with him to make sure he was returned safely to Russia. For traveling expenses, Rockefeller placed a purse containing $10,000 in Trotsky's pocket.
On April 13, 1917, when the ship stopped in Halifax, Canadian Secret Service officers immediately arrested Trotsky and interned him in Nova Scotia. The case became an international cause celebre, as leading government officials from several nations frantically demanded Trotsky's release. The Secret Service had been tipped off that Trotsky was on his way to take Russia out of the war, freeing more German armies to attack Canadian troops on the Western Front. Prime Minister Lloyd George hurriedly cabled orders from London to the Canadian Secret Service to free Trotsky at once--they ignored him. Trotsky was finally freed by the intervention of one of Rockefeller's most faithful stooges, Canadian Minister Mackenzie King, who had long been a ``labor specialist'' for the Rockefellers. King personally obtained Trotsky's release and sent him on his way as the emissary of the Rockefellers, commissioned to win the Bolshevik Revolution.
Thus Dr. Armand Hammer, who loudly proclaims his influence in Russia as the friend of Lenin, has an insignificant claim compared to the role of the Rockefellers in backing world Communism. Although Communism, like other isms, had originated with Marx's association with the House of Rothschild, it enlisted the reverent support of John D. Rockefeller because he saw Communism for what it is, the ultimate monopoly, not only controlling the government, the monetary system and all property, but also a monopoly which, like the corporations it emulates, is self-perpetuating and eternal. It was the logical progression from his Standard Oil monopoly.
An important step on the road to world monopoly was the most far-reaching corporation invented by the Rothschilds. This was the international drug and chemical cartel, I.G. Farben. Called ``a state within a state,'' it was created in 1925 as Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktien gesellschaft, usually known as I.G. Farben, which simply meant ``The Cartel''. It had originated in 1904, when the six major chemical companies in Germany began negotiations to form the ultimate cartel, merging Badische Anilin, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Weiler-ter-Meer, and Greisheim-Electron. The guiding spirit, as well as the financing, came from the Rothschilds, who were represented by their German banker, Max Warburg, of M.M. Warburg Company, Hamburg. He later headed the German Secret Service during World War I and was personal financial adviser to the Kaiser. When the Kaiser was overthrown, after losing the war, Max Warburg was not exiled with him to Holland, instead he became the financial adviser to the new government.
Monarchs may come and go, but the real power remains with the bankers.
While representing Germany at the Paris Peace Conference, Max Warburg spent pleasant hours renewing family ties with his brother, Paul Warburg, who, after drafting the Federal Reserve Act at Jekyl Island, had headed the U.S. banking system during the war. He was in Paris as Woodwow Wilson's financial advisor.
I.G. Farben soon had a net worth of six billion marks, controlling some five hundred firms. Its first president was Professor Carl Bosch. During the period of the Weimar Republic, I.G. officials, seeing the handwriting on the wall, began a close association with Adolf Hitler, supplying much needed funds and political influence. The success of the I.G. Farben cartel had aroused the interest of other industrialists. Henry Ford was favorably impressed and set up a German branch of Ford Motor Company. Forty per cent of the stock was purchased by I.G. Farben. I.G. Farben then established an American subsidiary, called American I.G., in cooperation with Standard Oil of New Jersey . Its directors included Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil, Paul Warburg of Kuhn Loeb & Company and Edsel Ford, representing the Ford interests. John Foster Dulles, for the law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, became the attorney for I.G., frequently traveling between New York and Berlin on cartel business. His law partner, Arthur Dean, is now director of the $40 million Teagle Foundation which was set up before Teagle's death. Like other fortunes it had become part of the network. Like John Foster Dulles, Arthur Dean has been a director of American Banknote for many years; this is the firm which supplies the paper for our dollar bills. Dean also has been an active behind the scenes government negotiator, serving as arms negotiator at disarmament conferences. Dean was also a director of Rockefeller's American Ag & Chem Company. He was a director of American Solvay, American Metal and other firms. As attorney for the wealthy Hochschild family, who owned Climax Molybdenum and American Metal, Dean became director of their family foundation, the Hochschild Foundation. Dean is director emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Foundation, International House, Carnegie Foundation, and the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
In 1930, Standard Oil announced that it had purchased an alcohol monopoly in Germany, a deal which had been set up by I.G. Farben. After Hitler came to power, John D. Rockefeller assigned his personal press agent, Ivy Lee, to Hitler to serve as a full- time adviser on the rearmament of Germany, a necessary step for setting up World War II. Standard Oil then built large refineries in Germany for the Nazis and continued to supply them with oil during World War II. In the 1930s Standard Oil was receiving in payment from Germany large shipments of musical instruments and ships which had been built in German yards.
The dreaded Gestapo, the Nazi police force, was actually built from the worldwide intelligence network which I.G. Farben had maintained since its inception. Herman Schmitz, who had succeeded Carl Bosch as head of I.G., has been personal advisor to chancellor Brüning; when Hitler took over, Schmitz then became his most trusted secret counselor. So well concealed was the association that the press had orders never to photograph them together . Schmitz was named an honourary member of the Reichstag, while his assistant, Carl Krauch, became Göring's principal advisor in carrying out the Nazis' Four Year Plan. A business associate, Richard Krebs, later testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, ``The I.G.
Farbenindustrie, I know from personal experience, was already, in 1934, completely in the hands of the Gestapo.'' This was a misstatement; the I.G. Farben had merely allied itself with the Gestapo.
In 1924 Krupp Industries was in serious financial difficulty; the firm was saved by a $10 million cash loan from Hallgarten & Company and Goldman Sachs, two of Wall Street's best known firms. The planned re-armament of Germany was able to proceed only after Dillon Read floated $100 million of German bonds on Wall Street for that purpose. It was hardly surprising that at the conclusion of the Second World War, General William Draper was appointed Economic Czar of Germany, being named head of the Economic Division of the Allied Military Government. He was a partner of Dillon Read.
In 1939 Frank Howard, a vice-president of Standard Oil visited Germany. He later testified, #147;We did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which would operate throughout the term of the war, whether we came in or not.'' At this time American I.G. had on its board of directors Charles Mitchell, president of the National City Bank, the Rockefeller bank, Carl Bosch, Paul Warburg, Herman Schmitz and Schmitz' nephew, Max Ilgner.
Although his name is hardly known, Frank Howard was for many years a key figure in Standard Oil operations as director of its research and its international agreements. He also was chairman of the research committee at Sloan Kettering Institute during the 1930s; his appointee at Sloan Kettering, Dusty Rhoads, headed the experimentation in the development of chemotherapy. During the Second World War Rhoads headed the Chemical Warfare Service in Washington at U.S. Army Headquarters. It was Frank Howard who had persuaded both Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering of General Motors in 1939 to give their fortunes to the Cancer Center, which then took on their names . A member of the wealthy Atherton family, Frank Howard (1891-1964) had married a second time, his second wife being a leading member of the British aristocracy, the Duchess of Leeds. The first Duke of Leeds was titled in 1694, Sir Thomas Osborne, who was one of the key conspirators in the overthrow of King James II and the seizure of the throne of England by William III in 1688. Osborne had made peace with Holland during the reign of King Charles II, and singlehandedly promoted the marriage of Mary, daughter of the Duke of York, to William of Orange in 1677. The Dictionary of National Biography notes that Osborne ``for five years managed the House of Commons by corruption and enriched himself.'' He was impeached by King Charles II for treasonous negotiations with King Louis XIV and imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1678 to 1684. After his release, he again became active in the conspiracy to bring in William of Orange as King of England and secured the crucial province of York for him. William then created him Duke of Leeds. The placing of William on the throne of England made it possible for the conspirators to implement the crucial step in their plans, setting up the Bank of England in 1694. This enabled the Amsterdam bankers to gain control of the wealth of the British Empire. Osborne's biography also notes that he was later accused of Jacobite intrigues and was impeached for receiving a large bribe to procure the charter for the East India Company in 1695, but ``the proceedings were not concluded''. It was further noted that he ``left a large fortune''.
The 11th Duke of Leeds was Minister to Washington from 1931 to 1935, Minister to the Holy See from 1936 to 1947, that is, throughout the Second World War. One branch of the family married into the Delano family, becoming relatives of Franklin Delano Roosevelt . A cousin, Viscount Chandos, was a prominent British official, serving in the War Cabinet under Churchill from 1942 to 1945, later becoming a director of the Rothschild firm, Alliance Assurance, and Imperial Chemical Industries.
Frank Howard was the key official in maintaining relations between Standard Oil and I.G. Farben. He led in the development of synthetic rubber, which was crucial to Germany in the Second World War; he later wrote a book, ``Buna Rubber''. He also was the consultant to the drug firm, Rohm and Haas, representing the Rockefeller connection with that firm. In his later years, he resided in Paris, but continued to maintain his office at 30 Rockefeller Center, New York.
Walter Teagle, the president of Standard Oil, owned 500,000 shares of American I.G., these shares later becoming the basis of the Teagle Foundation. Herman Metz, who was also a director of American I.G., was president of H.A. Metz Company, New York, a drug firm wholly owned by I.G.
Farben of Germany. Francis Garvan, who had served as Alien Property Custodian during the First World War, knew many secrets of I.G. Farben's operations. He was prosecuted in 1929 to force him to remain silent. The action was brought by the Department of Justice through Attorney General Merton Lewis, the former counsel for Bosch Company. John Krim, former counsel for the German Embassy in the United States, testified that Senator John King had been on the payroll of the Hamburg American Line for three years at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year; he appointed Otto Kahn as treasurer of his election fund. Homer Cummings, who had been Attorney General for six years, then became counsel for General Aniline and Film at a salary of $100,000 a year. During the Second World War, GAF was supposedly owned by a Swiss firm; it came under considerable suspicion as an ``enemy'' concern and was finally taken over by the United States government. John Foster Dulles had been director of GAF from 1927 to 1934; he was also a director of International Nickel, which was part of the network of I.G. Farben firms. Dulles was related to the Rockefeller family through the Avery connection. He was attorney for the organization of a new investment firm, set up by Avery Rockefeller, in 1936 which was called Schröder-Rockefeller Company. It combined operations of the Schröder Bank, Hitler's personal bank and the Rockefeller interests. Baron Kurt von Schröder was one of Hitler's closest confidantes, and a leading officer of the SS. He was head of the Keppler Associates, which funneled money to the SS for leading German Corporations. Keppler was the official in charge of Industrial Fats during Göring's Four Year Plan, which was launched in 1936.
American I.G. changed its name to General Aniline and Film during the Second World War, but it was still wholly owned by I.G. Chemie of Switzerland, a subsidiary of I.G. Farben of Germany. It was headed by Gadow, brother-in-law of Herman Schmitz. I.G. Farben's international agreements directly affected the U.S. war effort, because they set limits on U.S. supplies of magnesium, synthetic rubber and, crucial medical supplies. The director of I.G. Farben's dyestuffs division, Baron George von Schnitzler, was related to the powerful von Rath family, the J.H. Stein Bankhaus which held Hitler's account and the von Mallinckrodt family, the founders of the drug firm in the United States. Like other I.G. officials, he had become an enthusiastic supporter of the Hitler regime. I.G. Farben gave four and a half million reichsmarks to the Nazi Party in 1933; by 1945, I.G. had given the Party 40 million reichsmarks, a sum which equaled all contributions by I.G. to all other recipients during that period. One scholar of the Nazi era, Anthony Sutton, has focussed heavily on German supporters of Hitler, while ignoring the crucial role played by the Bank of England and its Governor, Sir Montague Norman, in financing the Nazi regime. Sutton's position on this problem may have been influenced by the fact that he is British. In view of the outspoken statements from Adolf Hitler about Jewish influence in Germany, it would be difficult to explain the role of I.G. Farben in the Nazi era. Peter Hayes' definitive study of I.G. Farben shows that in 1933 it had ten Jews on its governing boards. We have previously pointed out that I.G., from its inception was a Rothschild concern, formulated by the House of Rothschild and implemented through its agents, Max Warburg in Germany and Standard Oil in the US.
Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands joined the SS during the early 1930s. He then joined the board of an I.G. subsidiary, Farben Bilder, from which he took the name of his postwar supersecret policy making group, the Bilderbergers. Farben executives played an important role in organizing the Circle of Friends for Heinrich Himmler, although it was initially known as Keppler's Circle of Friends, Keppler being the chairman of an I.G. subsidiary. His nephew, Fritz J. Kranefuss, was the personal assistant to Heinrich Himmler. Of the forty members of the Circle of Friends, which provided ample funds for Himmler, eight were executives of I.G. Farben or of its subsidiaries.
Despite the incredible devastation of most German cities from World War II air bombings, the I.G. Farben building in Frankfort, one of the largest buildings there, miraculously survived intact. A large Rockefeller mansion in Frankfort also was left untouched by the war, despite the saturation bombing. Frankfort was the birthplace of the Rothschild family. It was hardly coincidental that the postwar government of Germany, Allied Military Government, should set up its offices in the magnificent I.G. Farben building. This government was headed by General Lucius Clay, who later became a partner of Lehman Brothers bankers in New York. The Political Division was headed by Robert Murphy, who would preside at the Nüremberg Trials, where he was successful in glossing over the implication of I.G.
Farben officials and Baron Kurt von Schröder. Schröder was held a short time in a detention camp and then set free to return to his banking business. The Economic Division was headed by Lewis Douglas, son of the founder of Memorial Cancer center in New York, president of Mutual Life and director of General Motors. Douglas was slated to become U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, but he agreed to step aside in favor of his brother-in-law, John J. McCloy. By an interesting circumstance, Douglas, McCloy and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of Germany had all married sisters, the daughters of John Zinsser, a partner of J.P. Morgan Company.
As the world's pre-eminent cartel, I.G. Farben and the drug companies which it controlled in the United States through the Rockefeller interests were responsible for many inexplicable developments in the production and distribution of drugs. From 1908 to 1936 I.G. held back its discovery of sulfanilamide, which would become a potent weapon in the medical arsenal.
In 1920, I.G. had signed working agreements with the important drug firms of Switzerland, Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy. In 1926, I.G. merged with Dynamit-Nobel, the German branch of the dynamite firm, while an English firm took over the English division. I.G. officials then began to negotiate with Standard Oil officials about the prospective manufacture of synthetic coal, which would present a serious threat to Standard Oil's monopoly. A compromise was reached with the establishment of American I.G., in which both firms would play an active role and share in the profits.
Charles Higham's book, ``Trading with the Enemy,'' offers ample documentation of the Rockefeller activities during the Second World War.
While Hitler's bombers were dropping tons of explosives on London, they were paying royalties on every gallon of gasoline they burned to Standard Oil, under existing patent agreements. After World War II, when Queen Elizabeth visited the United States, she stayed in only one private home during her visit, the Kentucky estate of William Irish, of Standard Oil.
Nelson Rockefeller moved to Washington after our involvement in World War II, where Roosevelt named him Coordinator of Inter- American Affairs.
Apparently his principal task was to coordinate the refueling of German ships in South America from Standard Oil tanks. He also used this office to obtain important South American concessions for his private firm, International Basic Economy Corporation, including a corner on the Colombian coffee market. He promptly upped the price, a move which enabled him to buy seven billion dollars worth of real estate in South America and also gave rise to the stereotype of the ``Yanqui imperialismo''. The attack on Vice President Nixon's automobile when he visited South America was explained by American officials as a direct result of the depredations of the Rockefellers, which caused widespread agitation against Americans in Latin America.
After World War II, twenty-four German executives were prosecuted by the victors, all of them connected with I.G. Farben, including eleven officers of I.G. Eight were acquitted, including Max Ilgner, nephew of Herman Schmitz. Schmitz received the most severe sentence, eight years. Ilgner actually received three years, but the time was credited against his time in jail waiting for trial, and he was immediately released. The Judge was C.G. Shake and the prosecuting attorney was Al Minskoff.
The survival of I.G. Farben was headlined by the Wall Street Journal on May 3, 1988 - GERMANY BEATS WORLD IN CHEMICAL SALES. Reporter Thomas F. O'Boyle listed the world's top five chemical companies in 1987 as 1. BASF $25.8 billion dollars. 2. Bayer $23.6 billion dollars. 3. Hoechst $23.5 billion dollars. 4. ICI $20 billion dollars. 5. DuPont $17 billion dollars in chemical sales only.
The first three companies are the firms resulting from the ``dismantling'' of I.G. Farben from 1945 to 1952 by the Allied Military Government, in a process suspiciously similar to the ``dismantling'' of the Standard Oil empire by court edict in 1911. The total sales computed in dollars of the three spin-offs of I.G. Farben, some $72 billion, dwarfs its nearest rivals, ICI and DuPont, who together amount to about half of the Farben empire's dollar sales in 1987. Hoechst bought Celanese corp. in 1987 for $2.72 billion.
O'Boyle notes that ``The Big Three (Farben spin-offs) still behave like a cartel. Each dominates specific areas; head to head competition is limited.
Critics suspect collusion. At the least, there's a cosiness that doesn't exist in the U.S. chemical industry."
After the war, Americans were told they must support an ``altruistic'' plan to rebuild devastated Europe, to be called the Marshall Plan, after Chief of Staff George Marshall, who had been labeled on the floor of the Senate by Senator Joseph McCarthy as ``a living lie''. The Marshall Plan proved to be merely another Rockefeller Plan to loot the American taxpayer. On December 13, 1948, Col. Robert McCormick, editor of the Chicago Tribune, personally denounced Esso's looting of the Marshall Plan in a signed editorial. The Marshall Plan had been rushed through Congress by a powerful and vocal group, headed by Winthrop Aldrich, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and Nelson Rockefeller's brother-in-law, ably seconded by Nelson Rockefeller and William Clayton, the head of Anderson, Clayton Company. The Marshall Plan proved to be but one of a number of lucrative postwar swindles, which included the Bretton Woods Agreement, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation and others.
After World War II, the Rockefellers used their war profits to buy a large share of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, an African copper lode owned by Belgian interest, including the Societe Generale, a Jesuit controlled bank.
Soon after their investment, the Rockefellers launched a bold attempt to seize total control of the mines through sponsoring a local revolution, using as their agent the Grangesberg operation. This enterprise had originally been developed by Sir Ernest Cassel, financial advisor to King Edward VII - Cassel's daughter later married Lord Mountbatten, a member of the British royal family, who was also related to the Rothschilds.
Grangesberg was now headed by Bo Hammarskjold, whose brother, Dag Hammarskjold was then Secretary General of the United Nations - Bo Hammarskjold became a casualty of the Rockefeller revolution when his plane was shot down during hostilities in the Congo. Various stories have since circulated about who killed him and why he was killed. The Rockefeller intervention in the Congo was carried out by their able lieutenants, Dean Rusk and George Ball of the State Department and by Fowler Hamilton.
In the United States, the Rockefeller interests continue to play the major political role. Old John D. Rockefeller's treasurer at Standard Oil, Charles Pratt, bequeathed his New York mansion to the Council on Foreign Relations as its world headquarters. His grandson, George Pratt Shultz, is now Secretary of State. The Rockefellers also wielded a crucial role through their financing of the Trotskyite Communist group in the United States, the League for Industrial Democracy, whose directors include such staunch ``anti-communists'' as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Sidney Hook. The Rockefellers were also active on the ``right-wing'' front through their sponsorship of the John Birch Society. To enable Robert Welch, a 32nd degree Mason, to devote all of his time to the John Birch Society, Nelson Rockefeller purchased his family firm, the Welch Candy Company, from him at a handsome price. Welch chose the principal officers of the John Birch Society from his acquaintances at the Council On Foreign Relations. For years afterwards, American patriots were puzzled by the consistent inability of the John Birch Society to move forward on any of its well-advertised ``anti-Communist'' goals. The fact that the society had been set up at the behest of the backers of the world Communist revolution may have played some role in this development. Other patriots wondered why most American conservative writers, including the present writer, were steadily blacklisted by the John Birch Society for some thirty years.
Despite thousands of requests from would be book buyers, the John Birch Society refused to review or list any of my books. After several decades of futility, the Society was totally discredited by its own record. In a desperate effort to restore its image, William Buckley, the CIA propagandist, launched a ``fierce'' attack against the John Birch Society in the pages of his magazine, the National Review. This free publicity campaign also did little to revive the moribund organization.
The Rockefeller monopoly influence has had its effect on some of New York's largest and wealthiest churches. Trinity Church on Wall Street, whose financial resources had been directed by none other than J.P. Morgan, owns some forty commercial properties in Manhattan and has a stock portfolio of $50 million, which, due to informed investment, actually yields a return of $25 million a year! Only $2.6 million of this income is spent for charitable work. The rector, why receives a salary of $100,000 a year, lives on the fashionable Upper East Side. Trinity's mausoleum sells its spaces at fees starting at $1250 and rising to $20,000 . St. Bartholomew, on Fifth Avenue, has an annual budget of $3.2 million a year of which only $100,000 is spent on charity. Its rector resides in a thirteen room apartment on Park Avenue.
In medicine, the Rockefeller influence remains entrenched in its Medical Monopoly. We have mentioned its control of the cancer industry through the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. We have listed the directors of the major drug firms, each with its director from Chase Manhattan Bank, the Standard Oil Company or other Rockefeller firms. The American College of Surgeons maintains a monopolistic control of hospitals through the powerful Hospital Survey Committee, with members Winthrop Aldrich and David McAlpine Pyle representing the Rockefeller control.
A medical fraternity known as the ``rich man's club,'' the New York Academy of Medicine, was offered grants for a new building by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, its subsidiary group. This ``seed money'' was then used to finance a public campaign which brought in funds to erect a new building. For Director of the new facility, the Rockefellers chose Dr. Lindsly Williams, son-in-law of the managing partner of Kidder, Peabody, a firm strongly affiliated with the J.P. Morgan interests (the J.P. Morgan Company had originally been called the Peabody Company).
Williams was married to Grace Kidder Ford. Although Dr. Williams was widely known to be an incompetent physician, his family connections were impeccable. He became a factor in Franklin D. Roosevelt's election campaign when he publicly certified that Roosevelt, a cripple in a wheelchair who suffered from a number of oppressive ailments, was both physically and mentally fit to be the President of United States. Dr. Williams' opinion, published in an article in the widely circulated Collier's Magazine, allayed public doubts about Roosevelt's condition. As a result, Williams was to be offered a newly created post in Roosevelt's cabinet, Secretary of Health. However, it was another thirty years before Health became a cabinet post, due to the politicking of Oscar Ewing.
The Rockefellers had greatly extended their business interests in the impoverished Southern states by establishing the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission. It was headed by Dr. Wickliffe Rose, a longtime Rockefeller henchman whose name appears on the original charter of the Rockefeller Foundation. Despite its philanthropic goals, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission required financial contributions from each of the eleven Southern states in which it operated, resulting in the creation of State Departments of Health in those states and opening up important new spheres of influence for their Drug Trust. In Tennessee, the Rockefeller representative was a Dr. Olin West, who moved on to Chicago to become the power behind the scenes at the American Medical Association for forty years, as secretary and general manager.
The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research finally dropped the ``Medical Research'' part of its title; its president, Dr. Detlev Bronk, resided in a $600,000 mansion furnished by this charitable operation.
Rockefeller's general Education Board has spent more than $100 million to gain control of the nation's medical schools and turn our physicians to physicians of the allopathic school, dedicated to surgery and the heavy use of drugs. The Board, which had developed from the original Peabody Foundation, also spent some $66 million for Negro education.
One of the most far-reaching consequences of the General Education Board's political philosophy was achieved with a mere six million dollar grant to Columbia University in 1917, to set up the ``progressive'' Lincoln School.
From this school descended the national network of progressive educators and social scientists, whose pernicious influence closely paralleled the goals of the Communist Party, another favorite recipient of the Rockefeller millions . From its outset, the Lincoln School was described frankly as a revolutionary school for the primary and secondary schools of the entire United States. It immediately discarded all theories of education which were based on formal and well-established disciplines, that is, the McGuffey Reader type of education which worked by teaching such subjects as Latin and algebra, thus teaching children to think logically about problems. Rockefeller biographer Jules Abel hails the Lincoln School as ``a beacon light in progressive education ''.
Rockefeller Institute financial fellowships produced many prominent workers in our atomic programs, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was later removed from government laboratories as a suspected Soviet agent. Although most of his friends and associates were known Soviet agents, this was called ``guilt by association.'' The Rockefeller Foundation created a number of spin-off groups, which now plague the nation with a host of ills, one of them being the Social Science Research Council, which single-handedly spawned the nationwide ``poverty industry,'' a business which expends some $130 billion a year of taxpayer funds while grossing some $6 billion income for its practitioners. The money, which would amply feed and house all of the nation's ``poor,'' is dissipated through a vast administrative network which awards generous concessions to a host of parasitic ``consultants''.
Despite years of research, the present writer has been able to merely scratch the surface of the Rockefeller influences listed here. For instance, the huge Burroughs Wellcome drug firm is wholly owned by the ``charitable'' Wellcome Trust. This trust is directed by Lord Oliver Franks, a key member of the London Connection which maintains the United States as a British Colony. Franks was Ambassador to the United States from 1948 to 1952. He is now a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, as its principal representative in England. He also is a director of the Schröder Bank, which handled Hitler's personal bank account, director of the Rhodes Trust in charge of approving Rhodes scholarships, visiting professor at the University of Chicago and chairman of Lloyd's Bank, one of England's Big Five.
Other Rockefeller Foundation spin-offs include the influential Washington think-tank, the Brookings Institution, the National Bureau of Economic Research, whose findings play a critical role in manipulating the stock market; the Public Administration Clearing House, which indoctrinates the nation's municipal employees ; the Council of State Governments, which controls the nation's state legislatures; and the Institute of Pacific Relations, the most notorious Communist front in the United States. The Rockefellers appeared as directors of this group, funneling money to it through their financial advisor, Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, of Kuhn, Loeb Company.
The Rockefellers have maintained their controlling interest in the Chase Manhattan Bank, owning five per cent of the stock. Through this one asset they control $42.5 billion worth of assets. Chase Manhattan interlocks closely with the Big Four insurance companies, of which three, Metropolitan, Equitable and New York Life had $113 billion in assets in 1969.
With the advent of the Reagan Administration in 1980, the Rockefeller interests sought to obscure their longtime support of world Communism by bringing to Washington a vocally ``anti-Communist'' administration. Reagan was soon wining and dining Soviet premiers as enthusiastically as had his predecessor Jimmy Carter. The Reagan campaign had been managed by two officials of Bechtel Corporation, its president, George Pratt Schultz, a Standard Oil heir, and his counsel, Casper Weinberger. Shultz was named Secretary of State, Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, Bechtel had been financed by the Schröder-Rockefeller Company, the 1936 alliance between the Schröder Bank and the Rockefeller heirs.
The Rockefeller influence also remains preeminent in the monetary field.
Since November, 1910, when Senator Nelson Aldrich chaired the secret conference at Jekyl Island which gave us the Federal Reserve Act, the Rockefellers have kept us within the sphere of the London Connection.
During the Carter Administration, David Rockefeller generously sent his personal assistant, Paul Volcker, to Washington to head the Federal Reserve Board . Reagan finally replaced him in 1987 with Alan Greenspan, a partner of J.P. Morgan Company. Their influence on our banking system has remained constant through many financial coups on their part, one of the most profitable being the confiscation of privately owned gold from American citizens by Roosevelt's edict. Our citizens had to turn over their gold to the privately owned Federal Reserve System. The Constitution permits confiscation for purposes of eminent domain, but prohibits confiscation for private gain. The gold's new owners then had the gold revalued from $20 an ounce to $35, giving them an enormous profit.
In reviewing the all-pervasive influence of the Rockefellers and their foreign controllers, the Rothschilds, in every aspect of American life, the citizen must ask himself, "What can be done?'' Right can prevail only when the citizen actively seeks justice . Justice can prevail only when each citizen realizes that it is his God-given duty to mete out justice. History has documented all of the crimes of the usurpers of our Constitution. We have learned the painful lesson that the Rockefeller monopolists exercise their evil power almost solely through federal and state agents. At this writing, former Congressman Ron Paul is running for the Presidency of the United States on an eminently sensible and practical campaign - abolish the Federal Reserve System - abolish the FBI - abolish the Internal Revenue Service - and abolish the CIA. It has been known for years that 90% of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ostensibly set up to ``fight crime'' has been to harass and isolate political dissidents.
The criminal syndicalists are now looting the American nation of one trillion dollars each year, of which about one-third, more than three hundred billion dollars per year, represents the profitable depredations of the Drug Trust and its medical subsidiaries . Before a sustained effort to combat these depredations can be mounted, Americans must make every effort to regain their health. As Ezra Pound demanded in one of his famous radio broadcasts, ``Health, dammit !'' America became the greatest and most productive nation in the world because we had the healthiest citizens in the world. When the Rockefeller Syndicate began its takeover of our medical profession in 1910, our citizens went into a sharp decline. Today, we suffer from a host of debilitating ailments, both mental and physical, nearly all of which can be traced directly to the operations of the chemical and drug monopoly and which pose the greatest threat to our continued existence as a nation. Unite now to restore our national health - the result will be the restoration of our national pride, the resumption of our role as the inventors and producers of the modern world, and the custodian of the world's hopes and dreams of liberty and freedom.
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We have demonstrated with documentary evidence a number of critical associations between Wall Street international bankers and the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany.
First: that Wall Street financed the German cartels in the mid-1920s which in turn proceeded to bring Hitler to power.
Second: that the financing for Hitler and his S.S. street thugs came in part from affiliates or subsidiaries of U.S. firms, including Henry Ford in 1922, payments by I.G. Farben and General Electric in 1933, followed by the Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiary payments to Heinrich Himmler up to 1944.
Third: that U.S. multi-nationals under the control of Wall Street profited handsomely from Hitler's military construction program in the 1930s and at least until 1942.
Fourth: that these same international bankers used political influence in the U.S. to cover up their wartime collaboration and to do this infiltrated the U.S. Control Commission for Germany.
Our evidence for these four major assertions can be summarised as follows:
In Chapter One we presented evidence that the Dawes and Young plans for German reparations were formulated by Wall Streeters, temporarily wearing the hats of statesmen, and these loans generated a rain of profits for these international bankers. Owen Young of General Electric, Hjalmar Schacht, A. Voegler, and others intimately connected with Hitler's accession to power had earlier been the negotiators for the U.S. and German sides, respectively. Three Wall Street houses - Dillon, Read; Harris, Forbes; and, National City Company - handled three-quarters of the reparations loans used to create the German cartel system, including the dominant I.G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, which together produced 95 per cent of the explosives for the Nazi side in World War II.
The central role of I.G. Farben in Hitler's coup d'etat was reviewed in Chapter Two. The directors of American I.G. (Farben) were identified as prominent American businessmen: Walter Teagle, a close Roosevelt associate and backer and an NRA administrator; banker Paul Warburg (his brother Max Warburg was on the board of I.G. Farben in Germany); and Edsel Ford. Farben contributed 400,000 RM directly to Schacht and Hess for use in the crucial 1933 elections and Farben was subsequently in the forefront of military development in Nazi Germany.
A donation of 60,000 RM was made to Hitler by German General Electric (A.E.G.), which had four directors and a 25-30 percent interest held by the U.S. General Electric parent company. This role was described in Chapter Three, and we found that Gerard Swope, an originator of Roosevelt's New Deal (its National Recovery Administration segment), together with Owen Young of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Clark Minor of International General Electric, were the dominant Wall Streeters in A.E.G. and most significant single influence.
We also found no evidence to indict the German electrical firm Siemens, which was not under Wall Street control. In contrast, there is documentary evidence that both A.E.G. and Osram, the other units of the German electrical industry - both of which had U.S. participation and control - did finance Hitler. In fact, almost all directors of German General Electric were Hitler backers, either directly through A.E.G. or indirectly through other German firms. G.E. rounded out its Hitler support by technical co-operation with Krupp, aimed at restricting U.S. development of tungsten carbide, which worked to the detriment of the U.S. in World War II. We concluded that A.E.G. plants in Germany managed, by a yet unknown manoeuvre, to avoid bombing by the Allies.
An examination of the role of Standard Oil of New Jersey (which was and is controlled by the Rockefeller interests) was undertaken in Chapter Four. Standard Oil apparently did not finance Hitler's accession to power in 1933 (that part of the "myth of Sidney Warburg" is not proven). On the other hand, payments were made up to 1944 by Standard Oil of New Jersey, to develop synthetic gasoline for war purposes on behalf of the Nazis and, through its wholly owned subsidiary, to Heinrich Himmler's S.S. Circle of Friends for political purposes. Standard Oil's role was technical aid to Nazi development of synthetic rubber and gasoline through a U.S. research company under the management control of Standard Oil. The Ethyl Gasoline Company, jointly owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey and General Motors, was instrumental in supplying vital ethyl lead to Nazi Germany - over the written protests of the U.S. War Department - with the clear knowledge that the ethyl lead was for Nazi military purposes.
In Chapter Five we demonstrated that International Telephone and Telegraph Company, one of the more notorious multi-nationals, worked both sides of World War II through Baron Kurt von Schröder, of the Schroder banking group. I.T.T. also held a 28-percent interest in FockeWolfe aircraft, which manufactured excellent German fighter planes. We also found that Texaco (Texas Oil Company) was involved in Nazi endeavours through German attorney Westrick, but dropped its chairman of the board Rieber when these endeavours were publicised.
Henry Ford was an early (1922) Hitler backer and Edsel Ford continued the family tradition in 1942 by encouraging French Ford to profit from arming the German Wehrmacht. Subsequently, these Ford-produced vehicles were used against American soldiers as they landed in France in 1944. For his early recognition of, and timely assistance to, the Nazis, Henry Ford received a Nazi medal in 1938. The records of French Ford suggest Ford Motor received kid glove treatment from the Nazis after 1940.
The provable threads of Hitler financing are drawn together in Chapter Seven and answer with precise names and figures the question, who financed Adolf Hitler? This chapter indicts Wall Street and, incidentally, no one else of consequence in the United States except the Ford family. The Ford family is not normally associated with Wall Street but is certainly a part of the "power elite."
In earlier chapters we cited several Roosevelt associates, including Teagle of Standard Oil, the Warburg family, and Gerard Swope. In Chapter Eight the role of Putze Hanfstaengl, another Roosevelt friend and a participant in the Reichstag fire, is traced. The composition of the Nazi inner circle during World War II, and the financial contributions of Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiaries, are traced in Chapter Nine. Documentary proof of these monetary contributions is presented. Kurt von Schroder is identified as the key intermediary in this S.S. "slush fund."
Finally, in Chapter Ten we reviewed a book suppressed in 1934 and the "myth of 'Sidney Warburg.'" The suppressed book accused the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, and the major oil companies of financing Hitler. While the name "Sidney Warburg" was no doubt an invention, the extraordinary fact remains that the argument in the suppressed "Sidney Warburg" Book is remains that the argument in the suppressed "Sidney Warburg" book is remarkably close to the evidence presented now. It also remains a puzzle why James Paul Warburg, fifteen years later, would want to attempt, in a rather transparently slipshod manner, to refute the contents of the "Warburg" book, a book he claims not to have seen. It is perhaps even more of a puzzle why Warburg would choose Nazi von Papen's Memoirs as the vehicle to present his refutation.
Finally, in Chapter Eleven we examined the roles of the Morgan and Chase Banks in World War II, specifically their collaboration with the Nazis in France while a major war was raging.
In other works, as in our two previous examinations of the links between New York international bankers and major historical events, we find a provable pattern of subsidy and political manipulation.
Looking at the broad array of facts presented in the three volumes of the Wall Street series, we find persistent recurrence of the same names: Own Young, Gerard Swope, Hjalmar Schacht, Bernard Baruch, etc.; the same international banks: J.P. Morgan, Guaranty Trust, Chase Bank; and the same location in New York: usually 120 Broadway.
This group of international bakers backed the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequently profited from the establishment of a Soviet Russia. This group backed Roosevelt and profited from New Deal socialism. This group also backed Hitler and certainly profited from German armament in the 1930s. When Big Business should have been running its business operations at Ford Motor, Standard of New Jersey and so on, we find it actively and deeply involved in political upheavals, war, and revolutions in three major countries.
The version of history presented here is that the financial elite knowingly and with premeditation assisted the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in concert with German bankers. After profiting handsomely from the German hyper-inflationary distress of 1923, and planning to place the German reparations burden onto the backs of American investors, Wall Street found it had brought about the 1929 financial crisis.
Two men were then backed as leaders for major Western countries: Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States and Adolf Hitler in Germany. The Roosevelt New Deal and Hitler's Four Year Plan had great similarities. The Roosevelt and Hitler plans were plans for fascist take-overs of their respective countries. While Roosevelt's NRA failed, due to then-operating constitutional constraints, Hitler's Plan succeeded.
Why did the Wall Street elite, the international bakers, want Roosevelt and Hitler in power? This is an aspect we have not explored. According to the "myth of 'Sidney Warburg,'" Wall Street wanted a policy of revenge; that is, it wanted war in Europe between France and Germany. We know even from Establishment history that both Hitler and Roosevelt acted out policies leading to war.
The link-ups between persons and events in this three-book series would require another book. But a single example will perhaps indicate the remarkable concentration of power within a relatively few organisations, and the use of this power.
On May 1st, 1918, when the Bolsheviks controlled only a small fraction of Russia (and were to come near to losing even that fraction in the summer of 1918), the American League to Aid and Co-operate with Russia was organised in Washington, D.C. to support the Bolsheviks. This was not a "Hands off Russia" type of committee formed by the Communist Party U.S.A. or its allies. It was a committee created by Wall Street with George P. Whalen of Vacuum Oil Company as Treasurer and Coffin and Oudin of General Electric, along with Thompson of the Federal Reserve System, Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and assorted socialists.
When we look at the rise of Hitler and Nazism we find Vacuum Oil and General Electric well represented. Ambassador Dodd in Germany was struck by the monetary and technical contribution by the Rockefeller-controlled Vacuum Oil Company in building up military gasoline facilities for the Nazis. The Ambassador tried to warn Roosevelt. Dodd believed, in his apparent naiveté of world affairs, that Roosevelt would intervene, but Roosevelt himself was backed by these same oil interests and Walter Teagle of Standard Oil of New Jersey and the NRA was on the board of Roosevelt's Warm Springs Foundation. So, in but one of may examples, we find the Rockefeller-controlled Vacuum Oil Company prominently assisting in the creation of Bolshevik Russia, the military build-up of Nazi Germany, and backing Roosevelt's New Deal.
Within the last decade or so, certainly since the 1960s, a steady flow of literature has presented a thesis that the United States is ruled by a self perpetuating and unelected power elite. Even further, most of these books aver that this elite controls, or at the least heavily influences, all foreign and domestic policy decisions, and that no idea becomes respectable or is published in the United States without the tacit approval, or perhaps lack of disapproval, of this elitist circle.
Obviously the very flow of anti-establishment literature by itself testifies that the United States cannot be wholly under the thumb of any single group or elite. On the other hand, antiestablishment literature is not fully recognised or reasonably discussed in academic or media circles. More often than not it consists of a limited edition, privately produced, almost hand-to-hand circulated. There are some exceptions, true, but not enough to dispute the observation that anti-establishment critics do not easily enter normal information/distribution channels.
Whereas in the early and mid-1960s, any concept of rule by a conspiratorial elite, or indeed any kind of elite, was reason enough to dismiss the proponent out of hand as a "nut case," the atmosphere for such concepts has changed radically. The Watergate affair probably added the final touches to a long-developing environment of scepticism and doubt. We are almost at the point where anyone who accepts, for example, the Warren commission report, or believes that the decline and fall of Mr. Nixon did not have some conspiratorial aspects, is suspect. In brief, no one any longer really believes the Establishment information process. And there is a wide variety of alternative presentations of events now available for the curious.
Several hundred books, from the full range of the political and philosophical spectrum, add bits and pieces of evidence, more hypotheses, and more accusations. What was not too long ago a kooky idea, talked about at midnight behind closed doors, in hushed and almost conspiratorial whispers, is now openly debated - not, to be sure, in Establishment newspapers, but certainly on non-network radio talk shows, the underground press, and even from time to time in books from respectable Establishment publishing houses.
So let us ask the question again: Is there an unelected power elite behind the U.S. Government?
A substantive and often-cited source of information is Carroll Quigley, Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University, who in 1966 had published a monumental modern history entitled Tragedy and Hope. Quigley's book is apart from others in this revisionist vein, by virtue of the fact that it was based on a two-year study of the internal documents of one of the power centres. Quigley traces the history of the power elite:
.The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each county and the economy of the world as a whole.
Quigley also demonstrates that the Council on Foreign Relation, the National Planning Association, and other groups are "semi-secret" policy-making bodies under the control of this power elite.
In the following tabular presentation we have listed five such revisionist books, including Quigley's. Their essential theses and compatibility with the three volumes of the "Wall Street" series are summarised. It is surprising that in the three major historical events noted, Carroll Quigley is not at all consistent with the "Wall Street" series evidence. Quigley goes a long way to provide evidence for the existence of the power elite, but does not penetrate the operations of the elite.
Possibly, the papers used by Quigley had been vetted, and did not include documentation on elitist manipulation of such events as the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's accession to power, and the election of Roosevelt in 1933. More likely, these political manipulations may not be recorded at all in the files of the power groups They may have been unrecorded actions by a small ad hoc segment of the elite. It is noteworthy that the documents used by this author came from government sources, recording the day-to-day actions of Trotsky, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, J.P. Morgan and the various firms and banks involved.
On the other hand, such authors as Jules Archer, Gary Allen, Helen P. Lasell, and William Domhoff, writing from widely different political standpoints, are consistent with the "Wall Street" evidence. These writers present a hypothesised "power elite" has manipulated specific historical events.
Obviously any such exercise of unconstrained and supra-legal power is unconstitutional, even though wrapped in the fabric of law-abiding actions. We can therefore legitimately raise the question of the existence of a subversive force operating to remove constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Twentieth-century history, as recorded in Establishment textbooks and journals, is inaccurate. It is a history which is based solely upon those official documents which various Administrations have seen fit to release for public consumption.
But an accurate history cannot be based on a selective release of documentary archives. Accuracy requires access to all documents. In practice, as previously classified documents in the U.S. State Department files, the British Foreign Office, and German Foreign Ministry archives and other depositories are acquired, a new version of history has emerged, the prevailing Establishment version is seen to be, not only inaccurate, but designed to hide a pervasive fabric of deceit and immoral conduct.
The centre of political power, as authorised by the U.S. Constitution, is with an elected Congress and an elected President, working within the framework and under the constraints of a Constitution, as interpreted by an unbiased Supreme Court. We have in the past assumed that political power is consequently carefully exercised by the Executive and legislative branch, after due deliberation and assessment of the wishes of the electorate. In fact, nothing could be further from this assumption. The electorate has long suspected, but now knows, that political promises are worth nothing. Lies are the order of the day for policy implementors. Wars are started (and stopped) with no shred of coherent explanation. Political words have never matched political deeds. Why not? Apparently because the centre of political power has been elsewhere than with elected and presumably responsive representatives in Washington, and this power elite has its own objectives, which are inconsistent with those of the public at large.
In this three-volume series we have identified for three historical events the seat of political power in the United states - the power behind the scenes, the hidden influence on Washington - as that of the financial establishment in New York: the private international bankers, more specifically the financial houses of J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank, and in earlier days before amalgamation of their Manhattan Bank with the former Chase Bank), the Warburgs.
The United States has, in spite of the Constitution and its supposed constraints, become a quasi-totalitarian state. While we do not (yet) have the overt trapping of dictatorship, the concentration camps and the knock on the door at midnight, we most certainly do have threats and actions aimed at the survival of non-Establishment critics, use of the Internal Revenue Service to bring dissidents in line, and manipulation of the Constitution by a court system that is politically subservient to the Establishment.
It is in the pecuniary interests of the international bankers to centralise political power - and this centralisation can best be achieve within a collectivist society, such as socialist Russia, national socialist Germany, or a Fabian socialist United States.
There can be no full understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century American politics and foreign policy without the realisation that this financial elite effectively monopolises Washington policy.
In case after case, newly released documentation implicates this elite and confirms this hypothesis. The revisionist versions of the entry of the United States into World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam reveal the influence and objectives of this elite.
For most of the twentieth century the Federal Reserve System, particularly the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (which is outside the control of congress, unaudited and uncontrolled, with the power to print money and crate credit at will), has exercised a virtual monopoly over the direction of the American economy. In foreign affairs the Council on Foreign Relations, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessmen, and politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, a power centre that unilaterally determines U.S. foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged - and obviously subversive - foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power (profits, if you will), for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families.
Through foundations controlled by this elite, research by compliant and spineless academics, "conservatives" as well as "liberals," has been directed into channels useful for the objectives of the elite essentially to maintain this subversive and unconstitutional power apparatus.
Through publishing houses controlled by this same financial elite unwelcome books have been squashed and useful books promoted; fortunately publishing has few barriers to entry and is almost atomistically competitive. Through control of a dozen or so major newspapers, run by editors who think alike, public information can be almost orchestrated at will. Yesterday, the space program; today, an energy crisis or a campaign for ecology; tomorrow, a war in the Middle East or some other manufactured "crisis."
The total result of this manipulation of society by the Establishment elite has been four major wars in sixty years, a crippling national debt, abandonment of the Constitution, suppression of freedom and opportunity, and creation of a vast credibility gulf between the man in the street and Washington, D.C. While the transparent device of two major parties trumpeting artificial differences, circus-like conventions, and the cliché of "bipartisan foreign policy" no longer carries credibility, and the financial elite itself recognises that its policies lack public acceptance, it is obviously prepared to go it alone without even nominal public support.
In brief, we now have to consider and debate whether this New York-based elitist Establishment is a subversive force operating with deliberation and knowledge to suppress the Constitution and a free society. That will be the task ahead in the next decade.
The arena for this debate and the basis for our charges of subversion is the evidence provided by the revisionist historian. Slowly, over decades, book by book, almost line by line, the truth of recent history has emerged as documents are released, probed, analysed, and set within a more valid historical framework.
Let us consider a few examples. American entry into World War II was supposedly precipitated, according to the Establishment version, by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Revisionists have established that Franklin D. Roosevelt and General Marshall knew of the impending Japanese attack and did nothing to warn the Pearl Harbour military authorities. The Establishment wanted war with Japan. Subsequently, the Establishment made certain that Congressional investigation of Pearl Harbour would fit the Roosevelt whitewash. In the words of Percy Greaves, chief research expert for the Republican minority on the Joint Congressional Committee investigation Pearl Harbor:
The complete facts will never be known. Most of the so-called investigations have been attempts to suppress, mislead, or confuse those who seek the truth. For the beginning to the end, facts and files have been withheld so as to reveal only those items of information which benefit the administration under investigation. Those seeking the truth are told that other facts or documents cannot be revealed because they are intermingled in personal diaries, pertain to our relations with foreign countries, or are sworn to contain no information of value.
But this was not the first attempt to bring the United States into war, or the last. The Morgan interests, in concert with Winston Churchill, tried to bring the U.S. into World War 1 as early as 1915 and succeeded in doing so in 1917. Colin Thompson's Lusitania implicates President Woodrow Wilson in the sinking of the Lusitania - a horror device to generate a public backlash to draw the United States into war with Germany. Thompson demonstrates that Woodrow Wilson knew four days beforehand that the Lusitania was carrying six-million rounds of ammunition plus explosives, and therefore, "passengers who proposed to sail on that vessel were sailing in violation of statute of this country."
The British Board of Inquiry under Lord Mersey was instructed by the British Government "that it is considered politically expedient the Captain Turner, the master of the Lusitania, be most prominently blamed for the disaster."
In retrospect, given Colin Thompson's evidence, the blame is more fairly to be attributed to President Wilson, "Colonel" House, J.P. Morgan, and Winston Churchill; this conspiratorial elite should have been brought to trial for wilful negligence, if not treason. It is to Lord Mersey's eternal credit that after performing his "duty" under instructions from His Majesty's government, and placing the blame on Captain Turner, he resigned, rejected his fee, and from that date on refused to handle British government commissions. To his friends Lord Mersey would only say about the Lusitania case that it was a "dirty business.
Then in 1933-4 came the attempt by the Morgan firm to install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. In the words of Jules Archer, it was planned to be a Fascist putsch to take over the government and "run it under a dictator on behalf of America's bankers and industrialists." Darlington Butler, who blew the whistle on the Wall Street conspiracy. And once again Congress stands out, particularly Congressmen Dickstein and MacCormack, by its gutless refusal to do no more than conduct a token whitewash investigation.
Since World War II we have seen the Korean War and the Vietnamese War - meaningless, meandering no-win wars costly in dollars and lives, with no other major purpose but o generate multibillion-dollar armaments contracts. Certainly these wars were not fought to restrain communism, because for fifty years the Establishment has been nurturing and subsidising the Soviet Union which supplied armaments to the other sides in both wars - Korea and Vietnam. So our revisionist history will show that the United States directly or indirectly armed both sides in at least Korea and Vietnam.
In the assassination of President Kennedy, to take a domestic example, it is difficult to find anyone who today accepts the finding of the Warren Commission - except perhaps the members of that Commission. Yet key evidence is still hidden from public eyes for 50 to 75 years. The Watergate affair demonstrated even to the man in the street that the White House can be a vicious nest of intrigue and deception.
Of all recent history the story of Operation Keelhaul is perhaps the most disgusting. Operation Keelhaul was the forced repatriation of millions of Russians at the orders of President (then General) Dwight D. Eisenhower, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the long-standing American tradition of political refuge. Operation Keelhaul, which contravenes all our ideas of elementary decency and individual freedom, was undertaken at the direct orders of General Eisenhower and, we may now presume, was a part of a long-range program of nurturing collectivism, whether it be Soviet communism, Hitler's Nazism, or FDR's New Deal. Yet until recent publication of documentary evidence by Julius Epstein, anyone who dared to suggest Eisenhower would betray millions of innocent individuals for political purposes was viciously and mercilessly attacked.
What this revisionist history really teaches us is that our willingness as individual citizens to surrender political power to an elite has cost the world approximately two-hundred-million persons killed from 1820 to 1975. Add to that untold misery the concentration camps, the political prisoners, the suppression and oppression of those who try to bring the truth to light.
When will it all stop? It will not stop until we act upon one simple axiom: that the power system continues only so long as individuals want it to continue, and it will continue only so long as individuals try to get something for nothing. the day when a majority of individuals declares or acts as if it wants nothing from government, declares it will look after its own welfare and interests, then on that date power elites are doomed. The attraction to "go along" with power elites is the attraction of something for nothing. That is the bait. The Establishment always offers something for nothing, but the something is taken from someone else, as taxes or plunder, and awarded elsewhere in exchange for political support.
Periodic crises and wars are used to whip up support for other plunder-reward cycles which in effect tighten the noose around our individual liberties. And of course we have hordes of academic sponges, amoral businessmen, and just plain hangers-on, to act as non-productive recipients for the plunder.
Stop the circle of plunder and immoral reward and elitist structures collapse. But not until a majority finds the moral courage and the internal fortitude to reject the something-for-nothing con game and replace it by voluntary association, voluntary communes, or local rule and decentralised societies, will the killing and the plunder cease.
AUTHOR :Sutton, Antony C.
TITLE :Wall Street and the rise of Hitler
PLACE :Seal Beach, California
PUBLISHER :'76 Press,
ISBN/ISSN :0892450045
Certainly there was no hint, late in 1974, of a Lockheed connection. Which is why, in total ignorance of the time-bomb on which his American friends were sitting, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands felt confident enough in September to write to Burbank asking for a new commission arrangement. The sum involved this time: anything up to six million dollars.
Early in 1973 the Dutch government had begun to consider a long-term replacement for the navy's obsolete Lockheed P-2V Neptune patrol and anti-submarine planes. By June the admiralty council had three candidates under consideration: the British Nimrod from Hawker Siddeley, the French Breguet Atlantique Mark lA and II, and Lockheed's P-3C Orion.
The Dutch deliberations soon came to the notice of Fred C. Meuser in his mountain retreat at St Moritz. Mouser was by now something of an elder-statesman among the master-salesmen of the aerospace industry. He had served Lockheed, Northrop, and Lockheed again. His loyalty to Prince Bernhard, meanwhile, had never wavered. Now, with an immense new order in the offing (the Dutch admiralty were talking of spending up to 148 million guilders on thirteen planes between 1974 and 1978, and a further 452 million in the 1979-83 period) his eye for the main chance did not fail him.
Meuser contacted the prince and put to him a simple proposition. If the Orion were selected, and if a consultant's contract were concluded with Lockheed on the basis of commission for aircraft supplied to the Dutch navy and for the supply of spare parts, a large sum of money would be at the prince's disposal. He might wish to pass it, for instance, to his very own prestige charity, the World Wildlife Fund.
Bernhard didn't turn down the idea and Meuser was encouraged to take it a step further. In April 1974 he gave the prince a draft note and suggested he send it to Lockheed. It read:
Last time around it would have been of no use to accept Lockheed's offer to appoint Dr. H. Weisbrod agent for the reequipping of the Navy's ASW aircraft fleet with Orions, as European pressures required a European solution. This time around the situation may be more favourable for the Orion, in part due to Dr. Weisbrod's efforts, and it would now seem appropriate for Lockheed to appoint him their 'sub silentio' agent for a prospective Orion program. This could be done on the basis of an agent's agreement between Lockheed and Dr. Weisbrod, calling for a 4 per cent commission on all Lockheed billings for complete aircraft and 8 per cent for parts, services, etc., for the life of the program. As and when payments are received by Lockheed, corresponding commission payments to be made in a manner to be indicated by Dr. Weisbrod.
It was the same old formula that had proved so successful in the past: The Meuser-Weisbrod connection, with Bernhard as the intended principal beneficiary. When Meuser wrote that the Orion's prospects were good 'in part due to Weisbrod's effort,' he was unmistakably signalling to Lockheed that the prince himself had been, and could continue to be, active on Lockheed's behalf. In fact there is no evidence whatever that Bernhard really did involve himself in any way with the admiralty's evaluations. But what mattered was that Lockheed should believe he was rooting for them, and that this could be decisive.
Bernhard accepted Meuser's draft but did not send it to Lockheed immediately. Possibly he was shaken by the much-publicised conviction of his friend Tom Jones on May 1 and fearful of further revelations: but if so, he had overcome such fears by September. On the ninth of that month he sent the note to Roger Bixby-Smith, the intermediary with Lockheed on the abortive Orion deal in 1968 when $100,000 had ended up in the pocket of 'Victor Baarn'. With it he sent a covering letter in his own handwriting. It was one of two letters which, when unexpectedly made public, would finally destroy his good name.
It was short and to the point. He recalled the talks of 'a few years ago', evidently meaning 1968, and said that 'after a hell of a lot of pushing and pulling' it now looked as if something positive might develop and that it therefore might be a good idea to 'process the enclosed idea personally'. Neither the letter nor enclosure referred to the World Wildlife Fund, which seems by now to have dropped from Bernhard's mind.
Bixby-Smith passed the letter and note on to Burbank, probably direct to Haughton or Kotchian, but when they calculated that commission at the rate suggested would add up to between $4 million and $6 million they decided the prince's price was altogether too high. Smith was asked to convey as much to Bernhard, and to explain that in any case commission wasn't allowed on a government-to-government contract - though this prohibition hadn't always inhibited the company in the past.
Accordingly, Bixby-Smith arranged to meet the prince on October 30 on one of his frequent visits to Paris in the elegant company of Miss Helen 'Pussy' Grinda. The prince expressed surprise that the commission rate he was asking had checked out at so high a total. He had in mind, he told Smith, 'only about $1 million'. But he was angry at Lockheed's flat rejection of his proposal, and as the evening wore on he became angrier.
Three days later the prince despatched a second hand-written letter to Burbank. He was to claim later that he based it on a draft suggested by Smith. It seemed incredible, he wrote, that his approach had been rejected without discussion and without consideration of other possibilities. And he added bitterly: 'It would never have happened in the days of Bob or Courtlandt Gross.' He had 'spent a great deal of time and effort' since 1968 'to turn things in the right direction and to prevent wrong decisions influenced by political considerations'—meaning a French or British purchase in the interests of European unity (of which he was a professed champion.). He had done this because of his old friendship for Lockheed 'and based on its past actions'. He now felt 'a little bitter' and would do nothing more for the company. What's more, he would make his attitude clear if he were consulted on the procurement decision by the admiralty or government. Finally, he was considering writing to or phoning Courtlandt Gross, who was still on Lockheed's board with the title 'Senior Adviser', and—at least in Bernhard's view—not without influence.
The letter evidently made a strong impression on Haughton and Kotchian. Whether moved by Bernhard's recollections of old and productive friendships, or by the implied threat to throw his influence decisively against the Orion, Lockheed came up with a new otter. Presumably Bixby-Smith had conveyed to them the prince's expectation of 'about $1 million', because that is exactly what was now proposed: a fixed commission of $1 million provided at least four aircraft were bought. The prohibition of commission on a government-to-government sale was conveniently forgotten. Bixby-Smith conveyed the offer to the prince on December 2 during a visit to the royal palace at Soestdijk, and he accepted immediately. Weisbrod, however, was to be cut out of the reduced sum. The prince, for reasons which are not clear, told Smith he did not wish the money to be paid through the Weisbrod route and would prefer it to be paid into a numbered account in Geneva specially opened for the purpose.
As it turned out, Bernhard never received his million dollars. The Dutch Government opted for defence cuts and postponed its purchase of a successor to the Neptunes. The prince's fateful, tell-tale letter lay forgotten in Haughton's files. And meanwhile the timebomb in Washington ticked away on an ever-shortening fuse.
Concurrent with all the Watergate investigations and quite independent of them was another which had quite separate origins. In 1972 the Democratic Senator from Idaho, Frank Church, had set up a Sub-committee on Multinational Corporations of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to follow up disclosures of ITT's interventions in Chile and to investigate how far big companies were influencing or forming foreign policy. From ITT Church and his Sub-committee moved on to the oil giants, opening public hearings on Gulf, Exxon and Mobil on May 16, 1975.
'What we are concerned with', Church told a huge array of press, radio and television reporters who would soon become very familiar with the dark-panelled Hearings Room, No. 4221, in the Dirksen Senate Building, 'is not a question of private or public morality. What concerns us here is a major issue of foreign policy for the United States.' Watergate had shown how domestic corruption could weaken democratic government. The multinationals' investigation would show that corruption abroad subverted the free world and weakened America's international standing.
The Senate's revelations of huge, systematic bribery by the oil companies caused a sensation. Suddenly it was Church rather than Sam Irvin, Archibald Cox or Stanley Sporkin who held the limelight; and now the Sub-committee decided to expand its reach and go after Northrop.
To attract donors, large and small, as well as media attention, Nicholson, Scott and the founding fathers of WWF wanted the royal family to lend their name. They approached Prince Philip to be president. Philip was an avid outdoorsman and hunter—in January 1961 he had bagged a Bengal tiger in India—and he and Queen Elizabeth had been to Kenya, on a safari best remembered because King George VI died while they were watching wild animals and Princess Elizabeth had become Queen. Scott sent Philip a draft of the proposed charter. Philip read it carefully, replying that one provision was "unctuous," and another "to wordy." This careful reading was not what Scott hold expected. It is "a great bore that he suggests so much alteration," Scott wrote Nicholson. The founding fathers had wanted the Prince only as a figurehead. Philip agreed to head up the British chapter of WWF, but he turned down the presidency of the International and suggested his friend Prince Bernhard for the post. The men were alike in many ways. Both had been born into European royal families, but not very distinguished ones, and had acquired their status and string of titles when they married—Bernhard to the future Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. The two men were handsome, dashing, and staunchly conservative politically.
Scott, who liked consorting with royalty, made the pitch. "Prince Philip (who was sailing with me at Cowes in the 12 metre 'sceptre' on Saturday) . . . told me that he was very keen that you should 'head-up' the international Trustees," Scott wrote to Bernhard. "Please may I ask Your Royal Highness to say that you will be President of the Trustees of The World Wildlife Fund.'' Prince Bernhard he eventually said yes, and he served as president until 1976, when he was forced to resign after it became public that he had solicited more than a million dollars in 'commissions" from Lockheed in exchange for Lockheed's receiving contracts to build warplanes for the Netherlands. (At One point after the scandal broke, Bernhard said that he had intended to give the money from Lockheed to WWF; a member of the board at the time insists this is not true.
Bernhard remained active behind the scenes in WWF, but a couple of years after he resigned, Philip became president of the International, and though it was thought he would serve for only a few years, he is still in power. The Prince is a committed conservationist and he undoubtedly has given prestige and visibility to WWF around the world. At the same time, however, many in the Third World have questioned whether he is the right person to head an organisation that does most of its work in developing countries. At a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of state, most of them from the Third World and black, Philip said to an aide, "You wouldn't think the peace of the world rested on this lot, would you'?" on another occasion, he referred to the Chinese as "slitty-eyed."
WWF WAS SET UP to raise money, but in spite of the initial successes, it did not prove very effective. Nicholson had said that $1.5 million each year would be needed for conservation, which Scott thought he could easily raise; indeed, he anticipated coaxing $25 million from the rich. Scott discovered that socializing with the elite was one thing, getting them to part with their money quite another, and it was several years before the total of WWF's revenues reached $1 million.
WWF's financial fortunes began to change dramatically after a hard-driving South African businessman, Anton Rupert, joined the board. An Afrikaaner from the Cape, Rupert had already made millions as the owner of Rothmans International tobacco company, the foundation of the Rembrandt Group, his wholly owned business empire. When Rupert expanded beyond South Africa, he bought Dunhill and Cartier, and eventually he became one of the richest men in South Africa, rivalled only by Harry Oppenheimer, the gold and diamond industrialist. Rupert had long been interested in conservation, including the restoration of historic buildings, and in 1968 he joined the WWF board of trustees; he stayed on the board for twenty-two years, ill spite of a provision in the organisation's original incorporation documents that limited members to two three-year terms, a provision that was routinely ignored for the benefit of several other influential members of the board as well. Rupert brought a considerable amount of his own money to WWF, but, more important, he conceived a plan that would raise millions
Rupert's idea was the "1001 Club" The "one" was Prince Bernhard The other one thousand were wealthy individuals who could be persuaded to part with $10,000. The one-time donation brings lifetime membership, and the names of the generous patrons are kept secret by the organisation. According to these secret lists, American givers have included August A Busch, Jr, of the beer company; Henry Ford II; Peter Grace; Nelson Bunker Hunt, the silver trader; Mrs Geoffrey Kent, of Abercrombie & Kent; Robert S. McNamara; Cyril Magnin; Lew Wasserman, of MCA; Thomas Watson, of IBM. Many of the donors understandably wish to remain anonymous (in part to avoid being badgered by other charities), but it is also understandable why WWF does not want the list made public. It has included many less savoury individuals—Zaire's President Mobutu, Sese Seko, one of the most corrupt leaders in Africa; Daniel K Ludwig, the reclusive American billionaire, whose companies destroyed thousands of miles of the Amazon rain forest; Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCC1); Robert Vesco, the financier who fled the United States in the 1970s to escape trial on charges of fraud, embezzlement and obstruction of justice; Tibor Rosenbaum, founder of a Swiss bank that laundered billions of dollars of organised crime money and who was accused of embezzling Israeli deposits in the bank; Thomas Jones, who was forced out as chief executive of Northrop after it was revealed that the company paid $30 million in bribes to government officials and agents around the world in exchange for contracts; Lord Kagan, a British businessman convicted of theft and conspiracy to defraud the British tax service; a Norwegian shipowner convicted of taking a £1 million bribe; an individual who was the conduit for the money from Lockheed to Prince Bernhard.
There has been another remarkable feature about the 1001 Club—the number of South Africans. On the 1989 list, at least sixty individuals were from South Africa, including seven of Rupert's relatives. Many were also members of the Broederbond, the secret, conservative Afrikaaner society that has traditionally wielded immense political power in South Africa. Only five countries had more donors, and as a percentage of their population, South African whites had three hundred times as many members as the United States. It is easy to understand why so many South Africans have been willing to part with $10,000 to Join the 1001 and not all of it has to do with conservation. Not many international clubs welcomed white South Africans, and membership in the 1001 provided them an opportunity to mingle and do business with tycoons, as well as with Prince Philip and Prince Bernhard. What else they may have gained from the membership is unknown, in part because so much of what WWF-lnternational does is kept from the public and even from the organisation's own trustees. Because of the secrecy and closed nature of the WWF club, it is also difficult to know the extent of the influence that so much South African money has had on the organisation's conservation work. There can be little doubt, however, that WWF-International's initial opposition to the ivory ban reflected South African power on the board—South Africa was adamantly opposed to the ban, because its elephants were not being poached and it made money from selling ivory.
One place where South Africa's clout has been felt is in the office of the director-general, the man who runs WWF. Since 1977 that man has been Charles de Haes. Much of de Haes's past is vague, which seems to be by design: he has chosen to reveal very little about his background and some of what the organisation does say publicly about him is at odds with the facts. On WWF's public list of officers and trustees, de Haes is identified as being from Belgium, and he was born there, in 1938. But as a young boy, he moved with his family to South Africa. After graduating from Cape Town University with a law degree, he got a job with Rothmans International, Rupert's tobacco company. De Haes's Official resume—that is, the one WWF distributes—makes a point of noting that he went to work for the tobacco company "although himself a nonsmoker." It then says de Haes "helped establish companies" in Sudan, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. What it does not say is that these were companies that sold cigarettes. Maybe de Haes didn't smoke, but he made money by encouraging others to do so.
De Haes was brought to WWF through the back door by Anton Rupert in 1971. He was first assigned to be personal assistant to Prince Bernhard. One of his tasks was to implement the 1001 Club project. He was tremendously successful. Ten thousand dollars was worth even more back then, yet it took de Haes only three years to find one thousand donors. Prince Bernhard provided the letters of introduction, but de Haes was the salesman who clinched the deals. Even de Haes's fiercest critics—and they are many—use the word "brilliant" when describing his fund-raising skills.
In 1975, with the backing of Rupert and Prince Philip de Haes was named joint director-general of WWF, and two years later he had the top position to himself. De Haes had no education or experience in conservation, other than his few years at WWF, yet he was now in charge of the most prestigious and influential conservation organisation in the world. It was a position that would have appealed to the most qualified and eminent individuals in the field, yet no effort was made to recruit any of them.
WWF may have taken on someone without conservation experience, but then, it cost the organisation nothing: Rupert agreed to pay de Haes's salary—which, according to a British trustee, goes far in explaining why de Haes got the Job. WWF never said at the time that Rupert was paying de Haes, and it still tries to conceal this fact. The organisation's chief spokesman, Robert SanGeorge, stated emphatically during an interview in 1991 that de Haes had not been seconded from Rothmans to Prince Bernhard and WWF during the early years. But an internal WWF memorandum signed by the organisation's executive vice-president in 1975 talks specifically about "Mr. de Haes's period of secondment to WWF." What this means, of course, is that de Haes was still employed by a South African corporation while working for WWF. "I thought it was a scandal," says a former board member from North America, Who added that it was only by accident that he learned that Rupert was paying de Haes. This board member did not like the arrangement. "Who does the director general serve'? Is the interest of a South African tobacco company synonymous with the world conservation movement? Even more troubling to this director was the fact that it was kept a secret. "lf it was such a good thing, why weren't they willing to say so in the annual report?"
In a similar vein, the organisation treats as a state secret the question of who paid de Haes after he became director-general. It was "an anonymous donor" SanGeorge says. Even board members have been in the dark. When on occasion one asked, he was told that the donor wished to remain anonymous.
It is unlikely that any other charitable organisation that depends on public support operates with such little accountability and in such secrecy as WWF has under de Haes. It is easier to penetrate the CIA. And when WWF has been caught in embarrassing conducts it has engaged in damage control and cover-ups of the kind that might be expected from a company whose products have caused injury to consumers and the environment. Under rules de Haes promulgated, WWF employees are prohibited from talking to anyone outside the organization about anything except what the organisation has already made public; the obligation to secrecy binds the employee even after he or she has left WWF. Few are willing to break this code of silence—given their fear of de Haes and, in the case of current employees, the generous salaries and pleasant living conditions in Switzerland.
It may well be, as one senior WWF officer put it somewhat defensively, that a dollar given to WWF is still a dollar well spent for conservation. But, as this person added, "imagine what the organisation could be with better leadership."
Over the years there has been increasing dissatisfaction with de Haes's leadership. One of the most serious challenges to his rule came in the early 1980s, when the heads of the WWF organisations in Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland began to discuss among themselves changes they thought were necessary in the organisation. These organisations should be able to effect change because they provide most of the funds for the International—WWF-UK alone contributes nearly one-third of the International's budget, and Switzerland and the Netherlands rank second and third. The way WWF was set up, two-thirds of the money raised by the national organisations goes to the International, while one third remains with the national organisation. The "dissident" leaders of the three national organisations objected to this because there was no accountability over how the International spent the money. They also did not like the fact that the WWF-International board of trustees doesn't represent the national organisations. The board is a self-selected body— that is, those on the board decide whom to place on it—and the national organisations, even though they give the money, have no right of representation. In short, the heads of the British, Dutch and Swiss organisations felt that too much power was concentrated in Gland—the Swiss town where WWF-lnternational's headquarters is located—and that the local organisations should have more autonomy.
Sir Arthur Norman, the head of WWF-UK at the time, was particularly disturbed by the manner in which WWF-International set up chapters in other countries. He thought they should "be triggered off by local people, local enthusiasm, and not by someone in Bland saying "it's time".
Phillipson found that "a diligent auditor set among the project account files in Switzerland would surely open a cupboard full of skeletons." He was referring to the International's field projects—from some there were no reports at all, and many others had made no accounting of how the money was spent. Phillipson's conclusion that WWF's attitude engendered accusations of "neo-colonialism" remained in the summary.
Occasionally other skeletons got out, and when they did, it became clear that WWF had lost its ethical way, at least in carrying out its conservation work in Africa. In the late 1980s, for example, WWF provided Zimbabwe's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management with funds to buy a helicopter for its anti-poaching operations in the Zambezi Valley, where the black rhino was on the verge of extinction because of poachers. The department used the helicopter to deploy anti-poaching units when it received reports of poachers in an area. At least fifty-seven poachers were killed in the helicopter-supported operations, and the WWF office in Zimbabwe reported that the helicopter "has made an enormous difference to staff morale and efficiency" in the wildlife department.
That WWF was involved was not flown publicly until the environment correspondent of the British newspaper The Guardian, Paul Brown, broke the story. WWF responded with a statement saying that it had provided the funds for the helicopter "on the strict understanding that the helicopter would never be used as a gun-ship," and that it was "official WWF policy not to use any of its funds for purchase of arms or ammunition." The truth is the organisation knew that the helicopter would be used in operations in which poachers would be killed. Indeed, there had been a long and fierce debate within WWF about the project, and many on the staff were opposed because Zimbabwe's policy was "Shoot first, ask questions later," as one of those involved in the debate puts it. Providing the helicopter "made the policy more effective," he said. As for WWF's statement that it did not provide funds for arms or ammunition, the organisation's internal documents show that it was doing precisely that for at least one project in Tanzania in 1987.
De Haes and WWF-International had to work harder to cover up another scandal in Africa, this one involving mercenaries, intrigue, high level WWF officials and Prince Bernhard. The mercenaries were former British commandos who worked for KAS Enterprises, a company headed by Sir David Stirling, the legendary founder of Britain's Special Air Services (SAS), Britain's most elite commando force. Stirling, who died in 1990, engaged in clandestine activities throughout the world, setting up ostensibly private companies that were in fact covers for Britain's MI-5 and MI-6. In Africa s conservation wars, in the late 1980S KAS, as part of its arrangement with WWF officials, trained anti-poaching units in Namibia, which was then still under the control of South Africa, as well as Mozambicans in South Africa. (The South African government was trying to destabilise Mozambique.) KAS also set up a "sting" operation to catch traffickers in ivory and rhino horn. The project was code-named "Operation Lock," Lock being the maiden name of the wife of a former SAS officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Crooke, who was in charge of it.
Some of KAS's anti-poaching activities were exposed in July 1989 by Robert Powell, the Reuters correspondent in Nairobi. Powell, however, was unable to link WWF to the operation, and so WWF remained silent when Powell's story appeared, and continued working with KAS. But Powell's article provoked Stephen Ellis, editor of Africa Confidential, a fortnightly newsletter published in London, to probe further. Ellis, also a freelance journalist, got an assignment from The Independent to write an article about Operation Lock. In the course of his reporting he called WWF and talked with Robert SanGeorge, the organisation's chief spokesman. SanGeorge, an American, had come to WWF-International in 1940 along with his wife, a tough lawyer who became executive assistant to de Haes. Without telling Ellis, SanGeorge, who has been seen with a recording device attached to his phone, made a verbatim transcript of their conversation, which he passed on to de Haes—SanGeorge even noted when Ellis "paused to fetch a cup of coffee he had left in another room.
A few days later, SanGeorge faxed a statement to Ellis. The statement began: "it is, and always has been, the policy of WWF not to engage in clandestine or covert operations which might be considered unethical by governments, the public, or supporters of WWF." The organisation then went on to lay the blame for the covert operation on John Hanks, head of the Africa Programme at WWF-International. It said that Hanks had initiated the project "without the knowledge or approval of WWF-lnternational's management." Six months earlier Hanks had been forced out of WWF by de Haes and had gone to South Africa as director of the Southern African Nature Foundation, the name of WWF's affiliate in South Africa. Not wanting to cross de Haes again and being loyal to WWF, Hanks signed a statement assuming responsibility for Operation Lock.
Ellis wrote his story, and the day it appeared, SanGeorge sent a memorandum to all WWF national organisations. The memo reiterated what SanGeorge had told Ellis, and emphasised that Operation Lock "was initiated without the knowledge or authority of the Director General" and that "no funds for the Operation were channelled through WWF International's books." It was a carefully crafted statement, befitting the work of a lawyer who wants to keep his client out of Jail. But it was hardly an honest explanation befitting a charitable organisation.
The truth, which has never come out publicly, is found in a series of communications from Frans Stroebel, executive director of WWF's South African affiliate when Operation Lock commenced and the man who had introduced Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke to senior police and conservation officials in South Africa. Stroebel wrote Prince Philip:
I have given Mr. de Haes a number of comprehensive briefings on the project since I first became involved. In May 1989, I gave him full details. He then went to HRH Prince Bernhard to confirm that Prince Bernhard was indeed the sponsor. Mr. de Haes satisfied himself with the developments, and in subsequent discussions with me he never expressed any concern about my involvement, or, for that matter, the covert programme itself.
As for the funds for the operation, Stroebel said, in another letter, "The funds for Operation Lock were actually WWF funds." The money had come to WWF-lnternational, then was channelled back out to Bernhard for Operation Lock in a series of strange transactions. First, in December 1988, Sotheby's auctioned two paintings owned by Bernhard—The Holy Family, a seven-by-five-foot oil by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, and The Rape of Europa, a four-by-five-foot oil by Elisabetta Sirani. Together they brought in £610,000. On Bernhard's instructions the proceeds were donated to WWF-International; Sotheby's had noted in its catalogue that they would be. But if the buyer—who remains anonymous—thought the money was going toward WWF's general conservation work, he was mistaken. Within a few weeks after the sale, Bernhard called the administrator of the 1001 Club and asked her to transfer £500,000 from the 1001 Club account to Queen Juliana's (his wife's) account in the Netherlands. The £500,000 was needed for Operation Lock, according to Stroebel, and de Haes "agreed to the use of these funds as requested." (Bernhard told WWF it could keep the remaining £110,000, which at the time was worth a little less than $200,000.)
After Ellis's story appeared, many Western conservationists working in Africa were embarrassed, because Operation Lock had been exposed—not because they thought it was wrong to engage in a covert operation to stop the illegal trade in rhino horn and ivory. Indeed, the possibility of covert operations had often been discussed by elephant and rhino specialists. On one occasion, at a meeting attended by conservationists from WWF, AWF and other organisations, Hanks outlined what he had in mind and the general response, as described by a person who attended, was "Get on with it. Don't tell us what you're doing, but get on with it." Government officials in Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya did not feel quite the same way. They declined offers of assistance from KAS.
That there was a schism as big as a canyon between the approach to conservation taken by the Africans on the one hand and the conservation organisations on the other was not surprising, not when one looked at the conservation organisations: they were the monopoly of white Westerners. Whites headed them, hired whites to staff them, and implemented programs that reflected Western values.
WWF-International has its headquarters in Gland, a quintessential Swiss town—small, quiet, neat, and white. It carries out programs around the world, most of them in the Third World, yet one has rarely seen other than a white face in the Gland offices.. For thirty years, not a single African, and only a handful of Asians and Latin Americans, were ever hired by WWF-International. Only one black has ever held a professional position in the Africa section of WWF-US, and he was not hired until 1991. In the field—that is, in Africa—walk into the organisation's offices, and it is like colonial days: white at the top, blacks in the inferior positions. WWF's major presence in Africa has been its regional office in Nairobi, which in various incarnations has existed since the 1960s; it has always been headed by whites, and not until 1989 was there a single African in a professional position. Only one WWF program anywhere on the continent has ever been headed by an African.
Dodgyness is the keyword in all the Dutch Royal Affairs. Following the tradition of Queen Beatrix's marriage to an ex-Hitlerjugend member and her mother Juliana's marriage to an up-to-1938 member of the German Nazi's, Dutch crown prince Willem Alexander is marrying the daughter of a minister in the Argentinian fascist junta.
Committee March on the House of Orange (COMODO) is planning to have a big party of resistance and anarchy in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on the day of the royal wedding, 2-2-2002 of the crownprince with his Argentinian sweetheart Maxima.
As the Dutch royal family, the Dutch parliament, the police and security services are preparing for the wedding, so should we.
It will be a day with lots of actions, fun and possibilities: so please join us and come to Holland on the wedding day! Interested to help preparing? Send an email to comodo@squat.net
A first public meeting, dicussion and action will take place on May 26th in Amsterdam by De Vrije Zone (The Free Zone) and COMODO.
In dutch newspapers and magazines the hype around the father of Maxim, Jorge Zorreguieta, who has been Minister of agriculture in the Videla-junta in Argentinia and was spokesman for the big farmers and landowners, has been going on for months now.
"Is it appropiate for such a person to attend the wedding of his daughter with 'our' prince?" Or: "Shouldn't he be ill just for that day?". And the most progressive: "Should she not denounce the junta publicly before she can become princess of the Netherlands?"
For us the questions are of course different: should there be a royal family at all and is this case not precisely what is wrong with an institute like the monarchy? The Dutch royal family is quite famous for their contacts with "wrong" regimes and dictators throughout history. This is nothing new for us. An institute like the monarchy is an expression of how this capitalistic world works, nothing is democratic, just 'bread and plays' for 'normal people'. Give us queensday every year, a handwaving queen and people will be happy?
We cannot accept backward institutes like monarchies. That is why we will not accept the royal wedding. There is no justification for the existance of a wealthy elite which stands above the law, consolidates hierarchic strucures, stimulates nationalism and tortures animals. We want the entire monarchy abolished.
Well, it shouldn't. But it is interesting to note that our current queen, Beatrix, is one of the few permanent members of the Bilderberg group, and very respected in those high level circles that discuss what should happen to the world. The secretary general of the group is a Dutch economic professor, Victor Rosenboom, and has been put in charge by Beatrix of teaching Maxima Zorreguieta the finer points of Dutch society, such as the world renowned dutch policies of repressive tolerance.
The Dutch monarchy is a powerful party in global high-circles and represents Dutch transnationals, such as Shell, Unilever and Philips on the forefront of developments in globalisation. The Dutch tend to be a favorite for international posts because of their pseudo-neutrality, always wearing the coat of political correctness and compromise. Recent example is the appointment of ex prime minister Ruud Lubbers as UN high commissioner for refugees. In the eighties and early nineties he was the responsible cabinet leader for closing the borders, disallowing refugees to work, the Schengen and Maastricht treaties.
In this time, the Dutch also invented the 'third way', now so revered by social democrats worldwide, by starting the Dutch 'poldermodel' of permanent negotiation between unions and employers, effectively paralysing what was left of worker's protests, while inequality kept growing.
A decade earlier, the Dutch were one of the major economic partners for the fascist Argentinian junta under general Videla. Tens of thousands of people, especially thousands of leftists and jews, were tortured and murdered. "We have to seperate the economic and political side of things", have always been the Dutch motto. Thus the Dutch supplied the Fokker planes with which the Argentinian victims where simply thrown in to the ocean. "Now we have to seperate politics and romance", and thus allow one of the fascist cabinet members become the queen's father and have a direct line of influence in both dutch and global politics.
Anarchists and antifascists may find the Dutch monarchy a worthy symbol of hierarchy, backwardness, fascism and especially deceit.
There is a lot more about the Dutch royal family. Interested in the history of the Dutch royal family?
Send us an email: comodo@squat.net or look at the website
Our group, Committee March on the House of Orange (COMODO) was formed last year when queen Beatrix planned to visit Leiden on queensday (30th of april, the birthday of her mother) and a lot of repressive measures were announced. With a succesful day of action and a public tribunal against the royals in Leiden, we had a load of fun.
For the manifesto (in English as well) of Comittee March on the House of Orange: see our website http://squat.net/beakomt There is the possibilty to get on the mailinglist.
Note: our phone nr. has changed! (see below)
NO COMPROMISE!
http://www.antenna.nl/nvda/groenfront
groenfr@dds.nl (PGPkey on site)
PO BOX 85069 3508 AB Utrecht Netherlands
Giro 4370351 tnv Steungroep NVDA te Utrecht ovv GroenFront!
Phone/fax: +31 84 8666018
The sensibility for "shadow governments" and "New World Order" is quite minor in Ger"money"... the reasons may lie in the tendency of Germans to "black out" their past. So far as I know Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was a former SS-officer before marrying into the Dutch Kings-House. He was also employee of a sub-division of the German "IG Farben", "IG Farben und Bilder". The latter fact indicates, that the choice of the Hotel Bilder-Burg for the first meeting was not accidental. There was even a close relationship between Exxon (Standard Oil company) and IG Farben. This connections last until the present time - Monsanto Inc. took over much of the expertise of IG Farben concerning chemical weapons. "Agent Orange" was a "follow up" of Sarin, Senfgas and Tabun. When Monsanto faced financial difficulties in restructuring from a chemical to a biogenetic Company, Citibank (part of the Rothschild-universe) helped out with a loan.
Hannes Oberlindober <h2o@tekomedia.de>
In the article 'Prince Bernhard and the Nazi's' his aunt's name is wrongly spelled. Her correct name is The Countess Paul de Kotzebue née Allene Tew formerly Princess Heinrich Reuss XXXIII formerly the Widow Anson Wood Burchard (1876-1955).
Queen Wilhelmina (1880-1962) was the only surviving child of King Willem III of the Netherlands, Grand Duke of Luxembourg (1817-1890). The whole future of the Dutch monarchy and the House of Orange-Nassau was on the shoulders of the young Wilhelmina.
Would something happen to her, then via her father's sister -Queen Wilhelmina's aunt- Grand Duchess Sophie von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach the most likely Heir to the throne was Prince Heinrich XXIII Reuss, who would later marry the dazzlingly rich American widow Mrs Anson Wood Burchard née Allene Tew. This lady would divorce Prince Heinrich and marry for a third time, now with Count Paul de Kotzebue.
For some reason she managed it to bring the apple of her eye, Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld (1911-2004) in contact with Queen Wilhelmina's single child and heiress, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands (1909-2004). They would have a stormy marriage of 67 years surviving the Hofmans Affair, the Lockheed Scandal, etc. Prince Bernhard, co-founder and central figure of Bilderberg, was the father of the present Queen Beatrix.
Marcel d'Ailly, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
U.S. World Wildlife Fund president Kathryn Fuller didn't just rattle the Clinton administration with her May 12 declaration of opposition to any "first step toward the resumption of commercial whaling." More significant was her statement that, "Even if commercial whaling could be sustainable, it cannot be justified," a welcome marked departure from 35 years of WWF policy, which essentially has endorsed any use of wildlife that even promised to be sustainable.
The most influential of all animal and habitat protection groups internationally, WWF has been problematic since 1961, when founder Sir Peter Scott, a trophy hunter, recruited the leadership elite from among fellow hunters who feared that African independence would lead to the rapid loss of target species. The elite included longtime WWF International president Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, who escaped punishment for allegedly overshooting bird quotas in Italy in the early 1970s to resign, finally, in 1987, after being implicated in a Dutch bribery scandal. Bernhard was succeeded by another of the founding elite, Prince Philip, long the honorary head of the British chapter. One of the world's most prolific tiger-killers when tigers were abundant, Philip showed his allegiance to conservation ethics that Christmas by leading his sons Charles, Andrew, and Edward in killing 10,000 pigeons, 7,000 pheasants, 300 partridges, and several hundred ducks, geese, and rabbits--all captive-raised--in a six-week vacation bloodbath. This slightly exceeded Philip's previous record of 15,500 captive birds killed during a five-week spree. Early WWF U.S. chapter presidents included C.R. "Pink" Gutermuth, who doubled as president of the National Rifle Association, and Francis L. Kellogg, a notorious trophy hunter.
The attitude of WWF in those days was characterized by support for seal-clubbing off the east coast of Canada, benefit fur auctions (only halted in 1988), and Bernhardt's formation of the 1001 Club, a group of billionaire patrons. A 1988 probe of the 1001 Club by the magazine Private Eye found that the members "by and large owe their fortunes to activities completely at odds with preserving wildlife habitat." The most notorious member was Mobuto Sese Soto, who ruled Zaire from 1965 until mid-1993. Under Mobuto, Zaire protected about 84,000 elephants on spacious reserves. Then, as two decades of reckless spending and blatant corruption brought on the national crisis that finally toppled Mobuto, poachers slew about 60% of the elephants in just five years--while Mobuto and supporters reputedly stashed the take in Swiss banks.
Despite or perhaps because of such fancy patronage, WWF meanwhile spent so much of its income on direct mail fundraising that in 1990 it failed to meet the National Charities Information Bureau requirement that it spend at least 60% on program service. Simultaneously WWF was severely embarrassed by a leaked internal study that documented 20 years of massive waste. Nearly every major WWF project had failed. Even pandas, the WWF symbol species, were near extinction. WWF had bribed Chinese officials to preserve panda habitat by allowing them to use donated funds for such projects as building a hydroelectric dam--which only brought demands for still bigger bribes.
WWF turned down the heat by officially turning from a so-called "preservationist" philosophy, which in WWF practice meant only the privileged were allowed to kill endangered wildlife, to endorsement of "sustainable use"--interpreted to mean killing animals for the most profitable use possible at the fastest rate each species can withstand. The WWF doctrine has huge influence. Just a month ago Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy director Andrew Rowan found a single difference in the responses of zoo and humane representatives to 12 hypothetical ethical problems he posed at the White Oak conference on zoos and animal protection. Most agreed that hunting is both ethically and pragmatically dubious as an alleged tool of wildlife management. Yet, endorsing the WWF view, the zoo people were virtually all willing to tolerate trophy hunting as a way to make wildlife lucrative for poor nations, and presumably therefore worth protecting.
The case for "sustainable use" holds accurately enough that poor nations usually can't or won't protect wildlife without both economic means and an economic incentive; notes that trophy hunters pay much more for a head than tourists do for a snapshot; and asserts that trophy hunters, armed with guns and bribes, will go places and take risks that most tourists won't. One might counter that since potential tourists are much more plentiful than trophy hunters, and since tourism creates more jobs than trophy hunting, even though tourists spend less per capita, a wise conservation strategy would help poor nations to create the political stability and economic infrastructure that would attract more tourists, and would oppose activity, including both poaching and trophy hunting, that contributes to instability by heightening the concentration of wealth and privilege with the well-positioned few instead of the desperately needy many.
Instead, the sustainable use doctrine asserts that since hunting is going on, and will go on anyway, legally or not, better to regulate it and make a buck than to merely spend bucks trying to control poaching, as the wildlife traffickers continually jack up the price for bootlegged animal parts and corrupt officials accept ever larger bribes to ignore poachers who often are better equipped than their national armies--or in many cases are themselves renegade army units, with strong clandestine ties to government leaders.
Currently, "sustainable users" point out, hunting is restricted, at least on paper, across much of Africa and Asia. Yet poachers are annihilating elephants, rhinos, and tigers wherever they can, to supply the Asiatic demand for aphrodisiacs and traditional medicines derived from their ivory, horns, bones, and genitals. The demand increases as growth of the leading Asian economies comes faster than the absorption of modern medical knowledge, while ruthless mercantilism shoves aside Buddhist and Hindu teachings which stress human kinship to other species. Because the only current source of the most coveted animal parts is the international black market, and because prices climb as supplies become scarcer, cartels such as the notorious Poon or Pong family of Hong Kong not only promote poaching, but allegedly seek the extinction of the target species, at least in the wild, to guarantee the lasting value of their animal part stockpiles.
Species conservation programs should cash in, the "sustainable users" contend, by helping poor nations to manage wildlife reserves like huge game farms, combining canned hunts for culled animals with the legal sale of their remains. This would supposedly undercut poaching in the marketplace.
Principles and Practice "Sustainable use" is attractive to free marketers who don't know their wildlife history--but there is no evidence that legal traffic in wildlife parts can preserve species. On the contrary, legal ivory traffic provided the cover that nearly wiped out elephants in much of Africa before 1989, when the ivory trading ban adopted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species curtailed poaching by giving customs officials worldwide the ability to interdict ivory shipments, regardless of purported origin.
The elephant episode duplicated the disastrous attempted international regulation of commercial whaling, begun with the formation of the International Whaling Commission in 1946: by 1986, when the current whaling moratorium began, every species of whale was severely depleted and some were near extinction because of ruthless poaching that used the legal quotas for cover. Russian whaling authorities disclosed recently that some Soviet vessels killed from 10 to 30 times as many whales as they admitted killing--and killed hundreds of some species which were completely off limits.
Even in the closely regulated climate of the U.S. and Canada, the "sustainable use" theory doesn't work, as flagrant poaching continues to masquerade behind legal hunting and game farming. The high rate of poaching in North America also belies the claim, made in support of "sustainable use" in Africa, that the presence of hunters deters poachers. "Sustainable users" contend the mandatory employment of guides will discourage hunters from becoming poachers--but that hasn't worked in Maine, Alaska, or Alberta, where veteran guides have lately been caught running poaching rings after many years of simultaneously catering to both wealthy trophy hunters and the Asian wildlife parts market. Hunters and parts traffickers in effect subsidize each other, with corrupt guides as brokers.
Truth is, those who commit crimes against wildlife will exploit any opportunity. "Sustainable use" is a one-way ticket to extinction because bloodlust and greed, once accepted as legitimate conduct, cannot be appeased or restrained by mere regulation. The political argument against "sustainable use" is equally rooted. "Sustainable users" hope to convince poor Africans and Asians that they should not kill wildlife to collect the equivalent of several years' wages, while rich Europeans and Americans kill the same animals for fun--a new and dangerous idea to people whose own killing is mostly from need, especially when coupled with the idea that thrill-killing has a higher rationale.
"Sustainable users" argue that giving poor Africans and Asians a collective economic stock in wildlife will lead to the development of a collective ethic, whereby poachers will become pariahs. This ignores the history of collectivism wherever it has been attempted, from the failed USSR to Africa's own overgrazed grasslands. It also overlooks the poachers' own collective ethic (perhaps a higher ethic in that it excludes mere thrill-killing). They already use the animals they kill for what they perceive as the common good, the good of their families. Having no faith in corrupt governments that purport to protect wildlife, but in fact sell animals to the highest bidder, they see no reason why they should not poach animals now, before others do and take the profits.
Finally, Africa in particular already suffers too much from the idea that whoever has the most money and firepower is above morality. The example of the Great White Hunter who receives special privileges because he has money reinforces the notion of the Big Man who is above the law because he commands a well-armed tribe.
The "sustainable use" doctrine could be applied to other Third World problems. For instance, the same newly rich and ethically alienated Asian men who buy aphrodisiacs made from wildlife parts are also the chief patrons of the increasingly notorious brothels of the poorest regions of Southeast Asia, where up to 400,000 children a year are bought from illiterate parents in remote villages and held for enforced prostitution until, diseased and often cruelly injured, they are cast out and replaced at the advanced age of perhaps 15. One hopes "sustainable users" would not also endorse financing schools and orphanages by letting well-heeled pedophiles rape selected children--even though child prostitution is reportedly a $3.77-billion-a-year business in Taiwan alone, twice the size of the U.S. retail fur trade at its peak.
Some may respond that the ethics of human welfare should not be the same as those of species conservation. Yet the leaders of the Rwandan massacres in April and May rationalized their deeds with "sustainable use" rhetoric. Hutus didn't massacre Tutsis, reporters were told; they merely culled them. Then, Juliana Mukankwaya explained to Mark Fritz of the Associated Press, she and other women of their village bludgeoned the orphaned children as a purported act of mercy.
WWF is not responsible for the deaths of half a million civilians in Rwanda, nor for the ongoing tribal strife elsewhere in Africa. Nor is WWF to blame for perversions of conservation rhetoric, any more than humane societies are to blame for Mukankwaya's warped notion of euthanasia. Yet WWF is culpable for advancing the view that thrill-killing can be excused--for a price. We hope Fuller's apparent turn away from "sustainable use" means WWF is ready to take a different direction. -- Merritt Clifton Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE P.O. Box 960 Clinton, WA 98236 Telephone: 360-579-2505 Fax: 360-579-2575 E-mail: anmlpepl@whidbey.com Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org
[ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide, founded in 1992. Our readership of 30,000-plus includes the decision-makers at more than 8,300 animal protection organizations. We have no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.]
By Friso Endt and Karen Lowry Miller
30 June 2003
Newsweek International
"Kings, Queens and Despots," a short list of the world's most wealthy rulers published by Forbes magazine, comes with a number of caveats. Valuing these multibillion-dollar private fortunes is a "tricky business," says Forbes. Most royal families decline to comment on their wealth. But last December, as the 2003 list was being compiled, a prominent member of the Netherland's illustrious House of Orange broke the family's long silence on the issue. Prince Bernhard, feisty 92-year-old father of Queen Beatrix, phoned Christopher Forbes, who is married to his German niece, and demanded that he stop printing "bulls--t" exaggerations of his family fortune. Forbes told him to call editor Luisa Kroll, who wanted evidence. Bernhard faxed a handwritten letter with enough detail about holdings in companies like Royal Dutch Shell and ABN AMRO to persuade her to slash the estimate from $2.5 billion in 2002 to $250 million.
The Oranges would have been in the billionaire class occupied by the House of Saud and Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein. But when the list was published earlier this year, they were wedged in among the lowly multimillionaires, like Yasir Arafat and Fidel Castro.
It was the first time Kroll had ever gotten a call from a complaining prince, but the plainspoken Bernhard is not your typical royal. In an increasingly transparent financial world, the massive restatement is a reminder of how difficult it remains to penetrate the regal sphere. Dutch stipends are a matter of public record--Queen Beatrix takes home 3.8 euros million per year in "salary" and other expenses. But support for the family is spread across so many departments and "hidden posts" that "nobody, no member of Parliament," knows the real total, according to the Republican Association, a Dutch group of royal reformers. As for the Orange family fortune, which goes back to the early-19th-century spice-, rubber-, tea- and coffee-trading exploits of King Willem I in the East Indies, the discreet Dutch generally consider the subject off-limits. "We are not so rich," Bernhard said in a brief phone interview. "People think we are stingy with money and the truth is that we have to be careful with money."
So why would a prince bother downplaying his fortune for the commoners? According to people who have spoken to Bernhard recently, he worries that exaggerated estimates could inspire personal attacks--either from criminals like those who tried to kidnap his wife, Juliana, in the 1970s, or perhaps from budget cutters in Parliament. (In fact, Parliament last discussed royal funding in the 1960s, when Juliana complained that she had to spend her own money on royal-household expenses, and Parliament agreed to pick up the tab.) The whole episode also fits the prince's reputation for impulsive meddling. Last year, after two supermarket workers were fined for injuring a thief while handing him over to the police, the outraged prince called newspapers to complain about the fine and made a public show of paying it for the two men.
His actions this time have exposed cracks in a family that prides itself on not behaving badly. Bernhard told a close family friend that his daughter was angry at him for calling Forbes. She has been titular head of the family since 1980, when she took over the mantle of queen from her aging mother, but that doesn't mean Bernhard listens to her--"he just reminds her that he is her father," says one royal watcher.
Once a high flier (who in 1954 helped launch a secretive gathering of the global elite called the Bilderberg Group), Bernhard's reputation took a sharp blow in the Lockheed scandal of 1976. He was accused of taking a $1 million bribe. Queen Juliana kept the law at bay, but the prime minister devised a devastating penalty: a onetime Spitfire pilot, Bernhard was forbidden to don a military uniform in public. The wounds are still raw. He and his wife have barely spoken since, and live in separate halves of the Soestdijk Palace. Each has different treasurers, says a former member of the government information service.
That's led some Dutch royal watchers to suspect that Bernhard is now underestimating the family fortune. It's not clear he's privy to the right information: like all royal spouses, Bernhard lives on a stipend and does not have access to the family capital. Republican Association member Hans van den Bergh scoffs at the $250 million estimate and figures the Oranges have a fortune worth between $17 billion and $23 billion, including Rembrandt paintings and silver services from tsarist Russia. "He has a sharp mind, he knows what he wants and he gets what he wants," says Cor de Horde, editor of a monthly royals magazine. "If Prince Bernhard phones you up and doesn't like what you've written, you have to stand firm." Estimating the real wealth of kings, queens and despots remains as tricky as ever.
By Friso Endt and Karen Lowry Miller.
26 June 2003
New Zealand Herald
"Kings, Queens and Despots," a shortlist of the world's most wealthy rulers published by Forbes magazine, comes with several caveats. Valuing these multibillion-dollar private fortunes is a "tricky business", says Forbes.
Most royal families decline to comment on their wealth. But in December, as the 2003 list was being compiled, a prominent member of the Netherlands' illustrious House of Orange broke the family's long silence on the issue.
Prince Bernhard, feisty 92-year-old father of Queen Beatrix, phoned Christopher Forbes, who is married to his German niece, and demanded that he stop printing "bulls***t" exaggerations of his family fortune.
Forbes told him to call editor Luisa Kroll, who wanted evidence. Bernhard faxed a handwritten letter with enough detail about holdings in companies like Royal Dutch Shell and ABN Amro to persuade her to slash the estimate from US$2.5 billion ($4.28 billion) last year to US$250 million.
The Oranges would have been in the billionaire class occupied by the House of Saud and Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein.
But when the list was published this year, they were wedged in among the lowly multimillionaires, like Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro.
It was the first time Kroll had ever had a call from a complaining prince, but the plainspoken Bernhard is not your typical royal.
In an increasingly transparent financial world, the massive restatement is a reminder of how difficult it remains to penetrate the regal sphere.
Dutch stipends are a matter of public record - Queen Beatrix takes home 3.8 million ($7.49 million) a year in "salary" and other expenses.
But support for the family is spread across so many departments and "hidden posts" that "nobody, no member of Parliament", knows the real total, says the Republican Association, a Dutch group of royal reformers.
As for the Orange family fortune, which goes back to King Willem I's trading of spice, rubber, tea and coffee in the East Indies in the early 19th century, the discreet Dutch generally consider the subject off-limits.
"We are not so rich," Bernhard said in a brief phone interview.
"People think we are stingy with money and the truth is that we have to be careful with money."
So why would a Prince bother downplaying his fortune for the commoners? People who have spoken to Bernhard recently say he worries that exaggerated estimates could inspire personal attacks - either from criminals like those who tried to kidnap his wife, Juliana, in the 1970s, or from budget-cutters in Parliament.
(In fact, Parliament last discussed royal funding in the 1960s, when Juliana complained that she had to spend her own money on royal-household expenses, and Parliament agreed to pick up the tab.)
The whole episode also fits the Prince's reputation for impulsive meddling. Last year, after two supermarket workers were fined for injuring a thief while handing him over to the police, the outraged Prince called newspapers to complain about the fine and made a public show of paying it for the two men.
His actions this time have exposed cracks in a family that prides itself on not behaving badly.
Bernhard told a close family friend that his daughter was angry at him for calling Forbes. She has been titular head of the family since 1980, when she took over the mantle of Queen from her aging mother, but that doesn't mean Bernhard listens to her - "He just reminds her that he is her father," says one royal watcher.
Once a high flyer (who in 1954 helped to launch a secretive gathering of the global elite called the Bilderberg Group), Bernhard's reputation took a blow in the Lockheed scandal of 1976. He was accused of taking a US$1 million bribe.
Queen Juliana kept the law at bay, but the Prime Minister devised a devastating penalty: a one-time Spitfire pilot, Bernhard was forbidden to don a military uniform in public.
The wounds are still raw. He and his wife have barely spoken since, and live in separate halves of the Soestdijk Palace. Each has different treasurers, says a former member of the Government information service.
That's led some royal watchers to suspect that Bernhard is now underestimating the family fortune.
Republican Association member Hans van den Bergh scoffs at the US$250 million estimate and figures the Oranges have a fortune worth between US$17 billion and US$23 billion, including Rembrandt paintings and silver from tsarist Russia.
"He has a sharp mind, he knows what he wants and he gets what he wants," says Cor de Horde, editor of a monthly royals magazine.
"If Prince Bernhard phones you up and doesn't like what you've written, you have to stand firm."
Estimating the real wealth of Kings, Queens and despots remains as tricky as ever. - NEWSWEEK.