The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Tue Jun 05, 2018 4:14 am

4. The Grand Mufti and Hitler: National Socialist Networks in the Mideast

In July 1982 a group of predominantly North African Muslims met in the foreign quarter of Paris. Officially, its purpose was to make up a plan for the pilgrimage to Mecca. That, at least, was what the French police were told when the group applied for the usual assembly permit. The signs posted at the meeting room, however, indicated a different purpose. There were the familiar Islamic portraits, including a gigantic poster of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Dominating the room, however, was a very strange portrait indeed: a likeness of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, Hitler's closest ally in the Arab world!

The conference, chaired by the former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, was keynoted by the Bern, Switzerland journalist Ahmed Huber, a convert to Islam and leading spokesman for the Nazi International. The aim of the conference was to prepare for the festivities commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power!

The year 1983, Huber told his audience, should be dedicated to reviving the ideas of the Grand Mufti. Huber, like Ben Bella, had befriended the Grand Mufti during the 1950s while in exile in Cairo, and he described in detail the volume of propaganda which would be required to accomplish this revival. "During the coming year, genuine Muslims must take over the Islamic world. Corrupt infidels such as Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, and hypocrites such as the Saudi royal family who claim they represent Islam, must be eliminated. Today the Iranian Islamic Revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini is the true inheritor of the ideas of the Grand Mufti. We must strive for a universal community of believers."

Even as Huber was delivering his speech, printing presses in many parts of the Islamic world were already gearing up to flood the markets with editions of Hitler's Mein Kampfin Arabic, Turkish, and other languages. A few copies of these books were later found by the Israelis in various sections of the city of Beirut. The translations were not all identical, of course; an edition from the "Marxist" Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of George Habash differed, for example, from the edition of the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon or in Egypt, or the Turkish fundamentalists' translation.

Today, one year later, this revival of National Socialist thought in the Arab world is in full swing. Hitler's name is once again becoming a topic for polite conversation among the many adherents of Islam. First and foremost in this regard is the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who in February 1983, in the French daily newspaper Le Matin said that "Hitler was right! He understood that the Jews were a deadly threat to the German nation. He was obliged to exterminate them'" Only a few years earlier such a declaration, even coming from someone as deranged as Qaddafi, would have unleashed a storm of indignation; now it was barely noticed. Interestingly, Time magNazine's published version of the same interview suppressed this passage without comment.

The fact that Ahmed Huber is a friend of Qaddafi, whom he praises as a "wonderful, romantic Bedouin," cannot be unrelated to Qaddafi's ability make such monstrous public statements. Huber's July 1983 "prophecy" that Arafat would soon be out of the way, is also on the verge of becoming reality. We can trace Huber's footsteps back to certain Palestinian factions in Iran, as well as to the Lebanese rebels controlled by Assad in Syria. Hidden behind Syrian President Assad's most important security advisor, a certain George Fisher, is one of Huber's closest collaborators, Alois Brunner. Brunner was Adolf Eichmann's deputy during the Third Reich!

There are many other "Brunners" in the Arab world who train the Iranian "Revolutionary Guard" or certain elements within the Palestinians around the terrorist Abu Nidal. In Iran, for example, a certain Juan Jose Torres, a 35-year-old engineer and ardent admirer of Hitler who belongs to the second generation of neo-Nazis, is working as the chief designer of a new generation of anti-tank rockets. In Libya many of Qaddafi's advisors are European Nazis who have converted to Islam, just as many Islamic and Arab terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are run by people who, though they are not old enough to have been in World War II, actively support the goals of the Third Reich. Most of these individuals can be traced back to the Swiss Nazi banker Francois Genoud, a man who has been close friends with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem since at least 1935, and who at the start of 1943 began to build up what was later to be known as the "Odessa" network. It was this network which laundered the Nazi war chest through the Swiss banks, so that these funds, from 1950 on, could be used to rebuild the old networks of the Third Reich in Latin America and the Middle East. The Berne-based Huber was Genoud's contact man with Paris and to Ben Bella. In 1952 Genoud picked up Ben Bella in Cairo and built him up as a "Fuhrer" under his own control.

Few in the Middle East today want to discuss these events and facts. Even the Israeli secret service and government circles, who for years have been using the cheap propagandistic equation "Arab = Nazi," have never investigated Francois Genoud's activities in detail; they have never looked into how the Third Reich's secret service operated in the Middle East during the war, or what happened to these networks after the war. The Arab press has behaved similarly, refusing to address this question out of fear that the responsible editor's body might be found in the gutter the next day.

Their fear is well-founded. Many thousands of soldiers and officers from the Abwehr (German Army Intelligence), the security services, and the SS found secure refuge in every country in the Middle East, Israel being no exception. Hardly had the war ended when the British commander in Jordan, Sir John Glubb Pasha, released thousands of German prisoners of war from the prison camps and enrolled them as members in his Arab Legion, in order to march them against the newly founded state of Israel. The latter state, on the other hand, did not hesitate to employ a few specialists from Nazi Germany in the building of its own secret service, the Mossad. For most of the newly independent Arab states these professional soldiers and secret service experts were more than welcome.

How the Nazis Infiltrated the Middle East

Paradoxically, the defeat of the Third Reich served to boost the reputation of "former" Nazis in many countries of the Arab world. During the war the Fuhrer of the Third Reich had made all sorts of promises to the Arabs, none of which could be kept following the collapse of Nazi Germany. These Nazis gained an undeserved reputation as people who never broke those promises. As they settled down into positions as secret intelligence, security, or economic advisors, became converts to Islam, and adopted Arab names, former leaders of the Third Reich began to capitalize on more than one hundred years of German emigration into the Middle East.

This German influence began in 1835 when the young Colonel von Moltke, who later was to become the Kaiser's Chief of General Staff, was charged with the task of reorganizing and training the army of Sultan Mahmoud 1I. Those plans came to naught when the. Sultan's forces were routed by Ibrahim, son of the Egyptian viceroy, and independence leader Mohammed Ali, whose troops had been trained by French officers of the Ecole Polytechnique. However, despite this military defeat, and despite the fact that Bismarck was more preoccupied with England than with the Middle East and Turkey, Germany was able to expand its presence in Turkey and the entire region economically as well as militarily. This culminated later on in the construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. The financial agreements for the project were signed by France and England in 1914.

This far-reaching economic project was only the leading edge of Germany's deep economic and political penetration of the area. Germany was not a colonial power· in the region, and was therefore widely regarded as the "natural" protector of the Muslims against "European imperialism" or against Russia. This fact assumed. great significance during the First World War, when von Moltke won the Turks over to his plan for a joint offensive against Great Britain in Egypt, while Germany's ambassadors von Hentig and von Niedermayer were negotiating with Afghanistan's Emir Habibullah to set off an Islamic rebellion against Great Britain on the Indian subcontinent, with the support of the Indian leader Mahandra Pratap. As outlined as early as 1911 by the Imperial staff, such a strategy was aimed at forming an alliance between pan-Germanism and pan-Islamicism, which would in turn bring about a Germanic Central European empire. This Mitteleuropa was to include the Balkan countries, Bulgaria and the Ukraine, which would join with Turkey in annexing the Caucasus region. Germany, Iran, and Afghanistan would proceed to carve up the Middle Eastern region among themselves.

With few significant differences, this was also the policy of the Third Reich. That was outlined in an April 1933 memorandum to Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels written by Dr. Kurt Kohler of the University of Leipzig, Dr. Oluf Kruckmann, director of the German School in Baghdad, and Dr. Wilhelm Eilers, director of the Archaeological School of Teheran. Titled "Raumpolitik-Kulturpolitik" ("Territorial Policy-Cultural Policy"), the memorandum begins:

Today we talk about geopolitics. Everyone in Germany agrees that the world is divided up into various large regions or will become so, whereby each of these regions is reserved for a master caste.... Whereas Great Britain, France, America, and even Japan possess their own Lebensraum [living space] ... Italy as well as Germany still have not attained theirs .... For Germany, therefore, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East and Egypt are the obvious prospects.... The Balkan countries, on Germany's flank, are the bridge into the Middle East.... Anatolia in turn is itself a bridge into the Middle East and to Egypt .... Germany must demonstrate that it does not intend to repeat the European imperialism of the pre-1914 era, but is looking only for peaceful and friendly collaboration .... Economic propaganda and economic expansion alone, without the corresponding cultural propaganda and expansion, are an absurdity, and would only have the effect of undermining our goals.... By disseminating cultural propaganda we are working one hundred percent for Germany; if we only do economic propaganda, we will be working thirty percent to the advantage of our competitors.


Throughout the period between Imperial Germany's defeat and Hitler's accession to power in 1933, when this memorandum was drawn up, Germany was continuously present in the Middle East. By the mid-1920s, German economic and trade missions were operating throughout the Middle East, especially in Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iran, the only semi-independent states of the region. In the late 1920s, a German economic advisor by the name of Lindenblatt became the first director of the National Bank of Iran. Because under the Versailles Treaty Germany was forbidden to trade in weapons and certain other items, the Swiss also became involved, functioning as an intermediary between the countries of the Middle East and Germany.

Another country which continued to promote the German empire's economic and political activity in the region was the Soviet Union. Both countries were playing the anti-British card in the region. Taghi-Zade, an Iranian Communist who had found asylum in Germany, was for years a mediator between Imperial Germany and the Soviet Union on Iranian questions. Taghi-Zade was a founding member of the Baku "Congress of the Peoples of the East," which had been convened by the Comintern in 1920. A mutual German-Soviet collaboration was established in Iran, and evidently continues up through the present day!

But the policy of the Third Reich was not merely a continuation of the policy of the Imperial Germany of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, even though the policies appear identical or coincide in some features. The principal difference lay in the ideology and the concept of universal fascism, or the "universal community of belief," as defined by Rudolf von Sebottendorf of the Munich-based cult group The Thule Society. Von Sebottendorf, a German with Turkish citizenship, was committed to promoting the erection of Islamic mosques in Germany, and had also struck up a friendship with the Pan-Turkish leader Enver Pasha, who would also turn up later at the Baku Conference. Pasha was an associate of the Bektashi dervish order which originated in Albania, and he maintained close contacts with Mazzini's P-1 (Propaganda Uno) Freemasonic lodge and the P-1's "Young Italy" movement. The latter movement spawned the "Young Turks," who overthrew Sultan Hamid II in 1908.

The programmatic content of such policies was laid out in a proposal put forward by Gregor Strasser during the first two years of the Hitler regime. Strasser advocated a "German-Soviet alliance" that would join up with the "league of oppressed nations like India, Arabia, China ... against the European imperialists." Hitler and his Eastern "specialist" Alfred Rosenberg initially opposed such a policy, since they preferred a German-British alliance. It was later adopted, however, in the form of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact. One of the most important advocates of this alliance was Hitler's personal secretary, Martin Bormann, who is often rumored to have been a Soviet agent. But the policy was also supported by von Sebottendorf and a key geopolitical strategist of the Third Reich, Prof. Karl Haushofer.

Under such influences, Hitler, who had written in Mein Kampf that he considered the Arabs an "inferior race," was induced to change his attitude, especially after his meeting with the blond and blue-eyed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Hitler decided to back the Grand Mufti, and after the meeting proclaimed that there were many similarities between Nazism and the Islam of the Mufti. No wonder that an Arab delegation sent to Hitler in the mid-1930s stated that if the Arabs not been defeated in 732 at Poitiers, then "Islam would have certainly taken over Europe. The German tribes would have been converted, and there is no doubt at all that the Muslim-Germanic tribe would have represented the spearhead of the Islamic movement. Islam is tailor-made for the Germans." Hitler took up these ideas in many of his musings on religion, declaring on one occasion that "We have the bad luck to have the wrong religion. Why don't we have the religion of the Japanese? .. Even Islam would more suited for us than Christianity." Ahmed Huber, in his recent recollections of the meeting between Hitler and the Grand Mufti, explained briefly that the Grand Mufti had attempted to do everything conceivable to induce Hitler to convert to Islam, "in order to make him realize that his goals could be better served through a universal community of belief; but Hitler was not smart enough to understand this .... "

The Third Reich and the War

When war was declared, the Third Reich had at its disposal numerous organizations in the Middle East. The most important of these was the Party of the Arab Nation of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. This was a secret organization which had branches throughout the entire region and which worked for the unification of the Arab nation under the leadership of the Grand Mufti. The concept resembled that of the Baath Party founded in the early 1940s by Michel Aflaq, who is said to have been strongly influenced by the Grand Mufti and by Nazism. In Palestine itself, a key ally of the Mufti's party was the old Temple Society, which had been founded in Stuttgart in 1856 as a splinter group of the German Lutheran Church under the influence of the later Anthroposophs. The Temple Society was an association of German settlers in Palestine who believed they were the chosen people who could return Palestine to its ancient splendor. Although they were looked upon with suspicion during the days of the empire, the order was later instrumental in altering the Third Reich's initial idea of banishing all Jews to Palestine. Several delegations of the Society traveled to Berlin to strongly protest against the immigration of Jews into the region, and they shared the Mufti's opposition to the establishment of Jewish settlements.

In alliance with the British Protector te of Palestine, the Temple Society and the Mufti saw to it that the numerous ships filled with Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis via Bulgarian and Romanian ports were all turned back. This was a replication of the racist policy of the Harriman's Eugenics Research Association, which oversaw the drastic curtailment of Jewish immigration into the United States, and who in one instance turned back a ship full of Jewish refugees, sending them to certain death.

Another fascist organization was the secret society of the "Golden Square" under Rashid Ali Geilani in Iraq. In Egypt, there were the Young Men's Muslim Association and the Workers' Syndicate led by King Farouk's uncle, Prince Abbas Hilmi; the Green Shirt movement of Ahmed Hussein and Mohammed Ali Alaba, the theoretician behind the idea of a Great Nile Kingdom; and the Young Egypt movement. In the Syrian-Lebanese region, the Arab Clubs had been established as early as the 1930s as a vehicle for Nazi propaganda. In 1937 these clubs invited the leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, on a journey to the region.

A good indication of the atmosphere on the eve of the Second World War is a declaration of Sami al-Jundi, leader of the Syrian Baath Party and the League of Nationalist Action, a pan-Arabist pro-Nazi organization in Damascus:

We are fascinated by Nazism, we study its writings and intellectual sources -- especially Nietzsche, Fichte, and [Houston Stewart] Chamberlain. And we are the first to have seriously considered translating Mein Kampf. Anyone who lives in Damascus can appreciate the force of attraction Nazism exerts upon the Arabic people, and Nazism's ability to rouse the people to action. It is totally natural that the vanquished admires the vanquisher. ...


How Nazi thought was transplanted into the Arabic movement is expressed in a declaration by Dr. Sami Shawkat, the mid-1930s Director General of Education in Baghdad:

There is something more important than money and learning, which preserves the honor of a nation and prevents its debasement. This is strength .... Strength, as I use the word here, signifies the overcoming of death .... Sixty years ago Prussia dreamed of uniting the German people. What is there to prevent Iraq, which fulfilled its longing for independence ten years ago, from now realizing the dream of unifying all the Arab countries together?


With the exception of Hjalmar Schacht's visit to Iran in 1936, and von Schirach's trip to the region in 1937, very few Third Reich functionaries visited the region officially. Most Nazi visitors were secret service agents, who limited their activity there to using local organizations for collecting intelligence. It was not until 1941 that Berlin began to recognize the military importance of the Middle East; until then the Mediterranean and Middle East regions had largely been considered the sphere of influence of the Reich's major ally, Italy, even though Arabic organizations friendly to the Nazis had repeatedly stressed that Italy, with its colonialist past, could not be regarded as trustworthy. As early as October 1940, the Grand Mufti had dispatched his secretary Osman Kemal Haddad to Berlin in order to press for joint military operations against the British in the region. But it was only when Hitler realized that he could not carry out his plan for an alliance with Britain, and saw Italy's adventures in Greece and Libya end in failure, that he finally gave the green light for the deal.

On April 12, 1941, Rashid Ali Geilani seized power in a coup d'etat in Baghdad, under the direction of the ambassador of the Third Reich, Dr. Grobba. The coup was preceded by a month of feverish activity and diplomatic exchanges. In the middle of January 1941, Al Husseini's secretary Haddad returned to Berlin for the purpose of discussing the regional situation. Otto von Hentig, the same Foreign Ministry official mentioned before with respect to World War I, was sent on a probing mission to Iraq by Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; on his return the Nazi Supreme Command (OKW) decided to fully engage its forces in Iraq. Behind the coup was the plan to open a second, southern flank against the Soviet Union which was to be launched in June of the same year. Ironically, precisely because preparations for this offensive were fully under way, the Third Reich was not in a position to mobilize the necessary military forces when the British, moving from their bases on the Gulf of Basra, marched on Baghdad in order to crush the rebellion. By early May, Geilani's forces were only receiving limited military assistance from Vichy France-occupied Syria. The Vichy regime had only reluctantly and very tardily granted the Luftwaffe permission to fly over its territory in the direction of Baghdad. By May 30 Geilani was left with no choice but to flee to Teheran along with a few other leaders of the "Golden Square." The coup was foiled, and the Third Reich had missed its chance to establish a National Socialist regime in the Middle East.

The consequences of this failure were twofold. First, there was no other country where such an attempt could ever be repeated; the Nazis did not have sufficient military forces to redeploy out of the Eastern and Western fronts. Second, Berlin decided that, judging from their actions, the Arabs could not be relied upon. This motivated the establishment in July 1941 of the German-Arab Training Division (DAL) under the command of Special Staff F, which was to be associated with Italy's own Arab Legion. Complementing these new operations were the creation, in late 1942-early 1943, of two SS divisions within the Allgemeine SS, called the Kandabak and Sabre divisions, consisting of Balkan Muslims from Croatia, Bosnia, and Albania. In the Middle East the Abwehr Division II integrated its own Arab Legion into its Brandenburg Division.

It was not long before all these formations were put to the test. The creation of these special units as part of the Abwehr and of the SS clearly meant that from now on, the Arab allies of the Reich were to operate only under direct German command.

Redeployment of the Networks

In the summer of 1941, following the defeat in Iraq and in Palestine, the Mufti el-Husseini and Geilani fled into temporary exile in Berlin. Over the following six months, el-Husseini traveled back and forth between Rome and Berlin in order to obtain from the Axis nations a firm commitment that they would guarantee Arab independence in return for unconditional Arab support of the Third Reich. While Mussolini's Italy favored independence for the Middle Eastern countries, Hitler and his advisors dismissed these demands outright, doubtless on account of the Vichy regime's interest in Lebanon and Syria. An agreement could only be reached after the circulation of a secret letter in mid-1942, promising complete independence to the Middle Eastern countries and Iraq. The Mufti could boast of the existence of this secret agreement, and show the letter in case of need; the Axis powers, on the other hand, could deny their existence in the event that France became outraged.

The Mufti and Geilani were now deployed in their respective campaigns. The Mufti was put in charge of the command of the DAL in the Egyptian-Libyan theater of war which followed hard on the heels of Erwin Rommel's North African victory and the secret negotiations between King Farouk of Egypt and Berlin, negotiations which were mediated by Farouk's uncle Abbas Hilmi, who traveled to Berlin via Teheran. Geilani himself was meanwhile deployed to the Caucasus front against the Soviet Union, which only existed on paper. Berlin was well aware of the need for a division of labor between Geilani and the Mufti, both being involved in a bitter fight over who would lead the Arab world following the victory.

The next decisive battle for these forces was the Maghreb. In November 1942 the Italians demanded that the Third Reich and Vichy France release most of the Tunisian political leaders imprisoned before the war by the Popular Front government. Among these was Bourgiba, whom the Axis wanted to win over. The results of these secret negotiations have never been made public. In mid-December, the DAL, together with the Italian army under the command of Dr. R. Rahn -- a German Foreign Ministry official and a veteran of the 1941 Syrian campaign -- marched against Tunis and Algeria, where they could count on inside support from the Revolutionary Action Committee (CUAR) under J. Guilbaud. By mid-1943 this offensive was defeated.

This was the death blow to the Grand Mufti's dreams of a Grand Maghreb Unity. The Mufti turned his attention to the Balkan Muslims; but here, too, his dreams of a united Arab world in alliance with the Third Reich were dashed to pieces. The defeat of Rommel's army and of the fascists in Tunisia also put into jeopardy the biggest prize of all, Egypt.

In Egypt the Nazis not only had friends inside the Royal Court such as Prince Abbas Hilmi, but also friends within the secondary leadership of the Egyptian army such as Aziz Ali al-Masri, who had unsuccessfully attempted to escape to Rommel's forces in order to give a signal for a domestic uprising in Egypt. Anwar al-Sadat was associated with the rebellion, as was Prime Minister Ali Maher, who was subsequently kicked out by the British. When the Free Officers took over in 1952 and installed General Neguib as president, his prime minister was this same Maher.

Fortunately, most of these Nazi forces were defeated. What remained were chiefly secret-service and paramilitary groups with little strategic importance. These included the Khasghai tribesmen in Iran, who had been in contact with the Abwehr since 1940. Some of them could still be found in 1944 within the OKW's Arab Brigade, fighting alongside the special Kurdish Units on the Iraqi-Iranian border. On the Syrian-Lebanese front there remained dozens of pro-Nazi political parties which could be employed in operations such as sabotage. These included the Syrian Popular Party and the Syrian National Socialist Party, founded in 1935 by the Greek Orthodox Antun Sa'adeh and modeled on the NSDAP. There was also the National Youth and the previously mentioned National Action League; members of these parties had flocked into the Arab Brigades of the Brandenburg Division of the Abwehr. And, in Iraq, there was the underground Futuwwa, or youth movement, which was modeled on the Hitler Youth.

But the Arabs were not alone in seeking a special relationship with Berlin. In January of 1941 Otto von Hentig, while in Turkey with German ambassador Franz von Papen, met with a very strange delegation indeed. It consisted of members of the notorious Zionist Self-Defense League, Stern. They proposed an alliance with the Third Reich with the following terms: Germany would allow the German Jews to emigrate to Palestine; the Zionists, in exchange, would form an alliance with the Third Reich in order to fight against Great Britain! The answer to this proposition, dutifully communicated to Berlin, has never been made known publicly.

After the War

Following the destruction of the Third Reich, it took only two or three years for thousands of German military personnel to find secure refuge in the Middle East. Many of these had never fought in the region during the war. By the mid-1950s, one particular unit of the Egyptian secret services could count no less than six special advisors who were refugees from Germany, namely, B. Bender, former Gestapo commander in Poland; L. Gleim of the Gestapo in Warsaw; J. Daumling of the Gestapo in Dusseldorf; H. Sellmann of the Gestapo in Ulm; the former assistant to Col. Otto Skorzeny, F. Bunche; and a former Gestapo captain in France, W. Bockler. Closer to the seat of power there was Saleh Ga'afar, who served as Sadat's private secretary up until the latter's assassination. Saleh's half-brother was Johann Eppler, alias Hussein Ga'afar. Eppler, born of a German mother and an Egyptian father and educated in Germany, had operated during the war as a liaison between the group of officers around Sadat and General al-Masry, and Rommel's staff! Most of these appointments were not only well known, but were further consolidated in the beginning of 1954, when the Egyptian Interior Minister Zakharia Mohieddin, formerly of military intelligence, approached the chief of the West German federal intelligence service (BND), Reinhold Gehlen, who had served as chief of intelligence in the East during the war, for advice on reorganizing the Egyptian secret services. This created the ironic situation that the head of the Egyptian secret service, Marxist Ali Sabri, and his second-Nazi in-command, Colonel Salah Nasr (later arrested by Sadat as a KGB agent), were appointing scores of former Nazis as their advisors, on Gehlen's advice!

How such convergences were possible was the subject of Chapter 3. It should be mentioned here, however, that by 1947 the Swiss-based Nazi International leader Francois Genoud had reorganized the Maghreb and Middle East intelligence sections of the defeated Third Reich. The Grand Mufti el-Husseini, who had been placed under house arrest in Paris, succeeded in escaping and made his last trip to Cairo. In the early 1950s at the Cairo Windsor Hotel, one might regularly run into such people as Genoud, the Grand Mufti, SS General Wolff, SS Lieutenant Reichenberg, General Ramcke, and many lesser Nazi principals who were allowed to sneak in through the back door under the protection of Prince Abbas Hilmi. Old Nazis residing in Cairo reportedly still hold weekly meetings there today. Co!. Otto Skorzeny arrived in Cairo in 1952, while his father-in-law, Hjalmar Schacht, was meanwhile traveling from one Arab country to another in his capacity as economic advisor to the Shah of Iran and the Saudi royal family.

These people easily gained control over the intelligence agencies of several countries, starting with Egypt itself. It was the Egypt-based Nazis who, in collaboration with East German and Soviet intelligence, set up the preconditions for the Suez Crisis, in order to prevent Egypt from striking too close a relationship with American President Eisenhower.

To ignite the crisis, they created new terrorist groups whose aim was to provoke Israel into a retaliatory strike. Palestinian gangs in the Gaza Strip, which for decades had been raiding Palestine in order to steal cattle, were suddenly transformed into the so-called Fedayeen. In agreement with Israeli hawks such as Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan, the Egyptian intelligence officers sent by Nasser into the Gaza Strip to bring these "Fedayeen" under control and to end the unrest, were all killed -- with Israeli letter bombs! Later on, these Nazi networks attempted to sell Nasser a rocket system. Professor van Leers, brought to Egypt by Genoud, worked out a system whose only consequence was Egypt's further isolation from the International community and a tightening of the Soviet military and economic grip on the country's economy, pushing the United States into an increasingly isolated alliance with Israel.

Meanwhile, Genoud, Skorzeny, Reichenberg, and others were occupied with supporting the war of the Algerian FLN against de Gaulle's France. Here again, the sole aim was to create the conditions under which the Nazi International could take over a country in order to use it as a secure base of operations. The key person in this operation was Ahmed Ben Bella, an illiterate former soldier who fought against the French because of a personal vendetta, and who happened to be living as an exile in Cairo in 1952, where he met Genoud.

Over the years, the Nazi International apparatus reconstructed by Francois Genoud has grown in significance. Through Ben Bella's influence, it includes a significant part of the North African and Algerian Muslims in the Maghreb and in France. Through Libya and Teheran (a frequent stopover for Genoud's co-worker Ahmed Huber), these Muslims are also integrated into a broader-based international Islamic network. Huber and Genoud sponsor the Swiss-Arab Association, a grouping closely allied with the Swiss Communist Party, which, along with Huber, supports Assad's Palestinian rebels against Arafat. Another branch is Abu Nidal and his associates, who are the direct heirs of the "Fedayeen" former Gaza gangs. Underneath this umbrella, the Grand Mufti's networks are alive and well today in Iran and within the numerous radical Islamic fundamentalist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the even more radical "Hizb al Tahrir al Islamiyya," the Islamic Liberation Party, which considers Qaddafi to be "too soft." It is no accident that Huber's sympathies nowadays lie precisely with these groups.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Representatives of the German classical period: Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Alexander von Humboldt in conversation.

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The American Revolution was the model for German republicans who in the Wars of Liberation did not wish merely to be rid of Napoleon but to create a republican constitution for Germany.

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Spokesmen for the Conservative Revolution. Houston Stewart Chamberlain

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Spokesmen for the Conservative Revolution. Ernst von Salomon.  

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Spokesmen for the Conservative Revolution. Oswald Spengler

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Spokesmen for the Conservative Revolution. Karl Haushofer.

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Spokesmen for the Conservative Revolution. Armin Mohler.

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Subverters of German classicism and the unity of the natural sciences and humanities. G. W. F. Hegel

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Subverters of German classicism and the unity of the natural sciences and humanities. Friedrich Nietzsche

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Subverters of German classicism and the unity of the natural sciences and humanities. Fyodor Dostoevsky

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In 1940, as the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still in effect, shipments of Russian grain arrive at the demarcation point between the Soviets' wide-gauge rails and the German rails.

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Before Hitler's seizure of power, it was the National Bolshevist-oriented Strasser wing of the NSDAP which did the most to organize the masses behind Hitler. Left, Gregor Strasser

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Before Hitler's seizure of power, it was the National Bolshevist-oriented Strasser wing of the NSDAP which did the most to organize the masses behind Hitler. Otto Strasser.

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At right: On Oct. 16, 1933, Alfred Rosenberg, the racial theorist and head of the NSDAP's foreign-policy office, addressed a full audience of diplomats and international journalists in Berlin.

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Dietrich Eckart in 1921. The Munich counterculturalist and Thule ideologue wielded decisive influence on Hitler and brought him into the Thule Society.

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Colonel Schellenberg and Otto Skorzeny.

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General Guisan.

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The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler, on a visit to a Muslim Waffen SS unit.

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Eichmann's representative Alois Brunner was never captured. After he fled to Argentina, the Syrian secret service was built up with his assistance. He is now known as Georg Fischer.

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Hjalmar Schacht (left) as economic advisor to Egyptian Prime Minister Nagib (right).

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Otto Skorzeny (left) with Mussolini after Mussolini's rescue by Skorzeny in 1943.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Tue Jun 05, 2018 4:23 am

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From left to right: Sadegh Tabatabui, Iranian envoy for gun-running and drug trade; Ayatollah Khomeini; and Pete,. Scholl-Latour, formerly with Stern magazine.

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Wesel am Rhein, a city near Duisburg. was practically wiped from the face of the earth by Allied bombers.

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Applicants in front of the headquarters of the De-Nazification Commission in Berlin on Feb. 21, 1949.

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Re-education: An American officer observes a discussion between Social Democrats and centrists.

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Daily food rations for Germans in the U.S. zone in 1947.

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German workers demonstrate against the dismantling policy of the Allies.

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John Rawling Rees

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 Kurt Lewin

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Theodor Adorno

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The editorial staff of the Allied newspaper Neue Zeitung. In the center is Hans Habe, alias Janos Bekessy.

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Left: Otto John; behind him, Sefton Delmer.

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Hans Globke, state secretary under Chancellor Adenauer, who worked closely with U.S. High Commissioner McCloy.

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Reinhold Gehlen, first head of the federal intelligence service in Pullach.

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The staff officers of the Fremde Heere Ost. In the center of the first row is Reinhold Gehlen; next to him on the right is the first head of the Militarischen Abschirmdienstes (MAD), Gerhard Wessel.

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Gen. Hans Oster, chief of staff of the Abwehr under Canaris.

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From left to right, Rudel, Jodi, Keitel, Goring.

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Future Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1954 as speaker at a meeting of the SS veterans' organization HIAG.

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Colonel (ret.) Hans-Ulrich Rudel as candidate of the German Reich Party on Aug. 28, 1953 in Bielefeld.

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Hitler and Schacht

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Corpses at Dachau, the result of Schacht's economic policies.

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Current representatives of the Nazi International: Jacques Verges

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Current representatives of the Nazi International: Francois Genoud

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Current representatives of the Nazi International: SS Gen. Karl Wolff

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Current representatives of the Nazi International: Klaus Barbie.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 1 of 2

5. Wilton Park and the Farce of German Re-Education

In America's Germany, whatever suits us happens. If it suits us that the Germans starve, then they will starve. If it suits us that they blow up aluminum factories, then they will blow up aluminum factories. If it suits us that they read Thomas Jefferson and watch Mickey Mouse, then they will also read Thomas Jefferson and watch Mickey Mouse.


The American journalist Julian Bach did not exaggerate in this 1945 characterization from the magazine Army Talk. The Germans did everything he said. But to what purpose did the Allied soldiers fight a war against Hitler's Germany, and what made so many Germans turn their backs on their own country? The best of them believed that a "zero hour" had arrived, which could bring with it a new, republican beginning for (self-)degraded Germany -- a Germany whose history proved -- its willingness and readiness to do much good for humanity.

Zero hour never came. The powers which created the best weapons on both sides, lost the war on both sides; they discovered exciting new technological potentials, but they had forgotten that these potentials could only benefit humanity if the potential itself became the political goal.

The post-war period was politically shaped by others, by people who did not believe in technological development and progress. Their sole belief was that there exists no truth and reality, other than what the majority could be induced to believe. Technology for them was nothing -- even military technology. Their actual conviction was expressed in 1945 by John Rawlings Rees in The Shaping of Psychology by War: "Wars are not won by killing the enemy, but rather by undercutting or completely destroying his fighting morale while maintaining one's own morale."

The British, having learned from the countless psychological breakdowns caused during World War I by intensive bombardment, assigned a psychiatrist to each British division during World War II. These psychiatrists were provided with their own staff, the Army Morale Division. Since the question of soldiers' morale and psychological warfare is closely connected with espionage and secret-service activities, the two divisions formed close ties. Army psychiatry thus became the birthplace for numerous organizations, working on a worldwide basis for "mental hygiene" -- psychological control of the population -- and at the same time became inseparable from secret intelligence operations and their publishing and media extensions. The policy-makers behind these operations was not only causally responsible for the Nazi movement, but now oversaw the new post-war political order, not only in Germany, but in all of Europe and especially in the United States.

One direct connection between this policy faction and the ideologues of the Nazi movement was the "exemplary" experimental work carried out by the Nazis. As Rees expressed it with typical British understatement: "Even if the final objective and the final goal of this [mind-control] work in Germany was ominous, there is no question that it was thorough and effective, even though they lacked some of the more imaginative and sensitive aspects of work in our countries."

Which aspects Rees meant are revealed by a coworker of Rees, H. V. Dicks, in a retrospect on his own work at the London Tavistock Institute: "It is worth noting how our interest was unintentionally drawn from individual case histories to the larger problems of war and human relations, the nature of hostility, the condition of culture .... This problem had to be carefully considered in our philosophy, first in the military-psychiatric service and later in our post-war plans and policies."

Thus there had emerged a power bloc soon resolved to take the power which could be exerted over single individuals through psychological influence, and extend it to entire societies and nations. No public opinion could ever control this bloc, since it shaped public opinion itself. Post-war Germany looked like the ideal site for its experiments.

The Nazi movement was this group's original creation, which "unfortunately" got out of their control. The post-war period offered a unique possibility to examine mistakes and improve methods. The work was not limited to Germany; but here, in this conquered and humiliated country, were the best experimental conditions to be had.

Even if the measures used in post-war Germany seem to have been chaotic ones working at cross-purposes, this does not counter our thesis that Germany's post-war history sprang from a single unified psychiatric concept: the patient must remain unaware of the specific intentions and purposes of the doctor administering the treatment. Only from a "higher" standpoint, in historical retrospect, can we gain a coherent picture of all the apparently contradictory measures. As we shall see, numerous individuals who believed in noble goals were transformed unwitting into manipulated accomplices in the further moral destruction of their own country.

Since the beginning of the war, the plans worked out by the U.S.A. and Great Britain on how to treat Germany after the collapse were highly contradictory. T. N. Kaufman, in his Germany Must Perish, proposed that all women in Germany should be sterilized, and the men shipped to places "lacking in energy and vigour," so that the Germans' sperm could aid in the development of martial impulses. Other, hardly less Nazi-like plans, such as the Morgenthau Plan, which intended to completely eliminate Central Europe as an economic competitor and transform it into pasture land, were initially accepted policies, while certain German emigres in the United States pressed for reconciliation with the German population, if certain conditions were fulfilled.

'Insane and Destructive'

All the diverse plans put forward share the premise that the cause of Nazi horrors somehow lay within the Germans themselves, in their thoughts, desires, and feelings. The radical planners were skeptical about the possibility of changing the Germans. The moderates, closer to American optimism, saw the last chance for the Germans in their conversion to democracy, which would transform the psychology that had supposedly made them into Nazis.

But what was typically "German"? There were books and pamphlets on this subject for every taste and level of education. President Roosevelt distributed copies of one such document to the members of his cabinet, and the later President Harry Truman wrote the following in the margin of his copy: "Every American should read it." General Eisenhower had it published in an edition of 100,000, and made it required reading for his officers, who had to write essays on it.

Some characteristic passages include:

The Germans destroyed Latin civilization in the Battle of Adrianople in 378.... They made war their mission. Wherever they went, culture died out. They plundered Paris, Arras, Reims, Amiens, Tours, Bordeaux, and dozens of other cities which in later generations were repeatedly plagued by their criminal descendents. Four hundred years after Adrianople, Charlemagne continued the German tradition .... He sought to conquer the world, a refrain that has echoed with insane and destructive persistence throughout Germany ever since. He fought a war every year. ... The Germans followed him with the same savage devotion with which, in our own time, they have followed the Kaiser and Hitler.

In the twelfth century there was another leader, but the monotonous program was the same. Friedrich Barbarossa, who stabbed peace in the back....

The Hanseatic League organized all Germans in every country on the basis of the teaching that their loyalty was to the German leaders ....

The Great Elector, the soldier-king, who was described as one of the most repulsive louts that had ever lived, Friedrich the Great, destroyed every freedom that existed among his followers ....

Yes, there are German world conspiracies against world peace and against every free man in every land. Nazism is no new theory, which arose out of the injustice of the Versailles Treaty or out of the economic crisis. It is the expression of German aspiration, which has expressed itself in every century.


Thus the enemy in the war became, not the reign of terror of National Socialism, but rather the "German aspiration" which arose out of the "typical German mind" or "German culture." National Socialism was thus simply an expression of this mind. With astonishing thoroughness, this distortion permeated the war propaganda of the Anglo-Americans. Its most visible expression can be found in the battle instructions given to Allied bomber squadrons. The target of these bombers were not armament factories crucial to the war, but rather the center of cities teeming with culture, the expression of the urban-industrial civilization of Germany dating back to the Middle Ages.

These terror-bombings become understandable only if they are seen in conjunction with the postwar re-education program, which continues today as the "educational reform" program introduced by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s. The key lies in the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), which coordinated both bomber attacks and post-war re-education.

Two persons are particularly prominent in this connection: Sefton Delmer, the head of Britain's "black propaganda," i.e., secret operations outside democratic legitimacy; and Richard Crossman, head of Britain's "white propaganda," which encompassed all other forms of influence. Delmer was Lord Beaverbrook's correspondent in Germany before the war and practically the only journalist Hitler took with him on his election campaigns. He had been rather passionately pro-Hitler throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In post-war Germany he was put in charge of the reconstruction of the press and other media.

About Crossman, who had the ambition to "out-Goebbels Goebbels," his then-supervisor Bruce Lockhart wrote: "[he was] responsible for most if not all of what Americans learned on the psychological conduct of war." Crossman had written a book as a lecturer at Oxford entitled Plato Today, in which he put forward the thesis that the essence of fascism is found in Platonism, in opposition to British empiricism. His ideas were continued after the war by a man recruited from an education camp in Austria and later made famous by his book The Spell of Plato -- Karl Popper.

The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace—to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals .. only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it. — PLATO OF ATHENS
...

What do we really mean when we speak of 'Justice'? I do not think that verbal questions of this kind are particularly important, or that it is possible to make a definite answer to them, since such terms are always used in various senses. However, I think that most of us, especially those whose general outlook is humanitarian, mean something like this: (a) an equal distribution of the burden of citizenship, i.e. of those limitations of freedom which are necessary in social life [4]; (b) equal treatment of the citizens before the law, provided, of course, that (c) the laws show neither favour nor disfavour towards individual citizens or groups or classes; (d) impartiality of the courts of justice; and (e) an equal share in the advantages (and not only in the burden) which membership of the state may offer to its citizens. If Plato had meant by 'justice' anything of this kind, then my claim that his programme is purely totalitarian would certainly be wrong and all those would be right who believe that Plato's politics rested upon an acceptable humanitarian basis. But the fact is that he meant by 'justice' something entirely different.

What did Plato mean by 'justice'? I assert that in the Republic he used the term 'just' as a synonym for 'that which is in the interest of the best state'. And what is in the interest of this best state? To arrest all change, by the maintenance of a rigid class division and class rule. If I am right in this interpretation, then we should have to say that Plato's demand for justice leaves his political programme at the level of totalitarianism; and we should have to conclude that we must guard against the danger of being impressed by mere words.

Justice is the central topic of the Republic; in fact, 'On Justice' is its traditional sub-title. In his enquiry into the nature of justice, Plato makes use of the method mentioned [5] in the last chapter; he first tries to search for this Idea in the state, and then attempts to apply the result to the individual. One cannot say that Plato's question 'What is justice?' quickly finds an answer, for it is only given in the Fourth Book. The considerations which lead up to it will be analysed more fully later in this chapter. Briefly, they are these.

The city is founded upon human nature, its needs, and its limitations [6]. 'We have stated, and, you will remember, repeated over and over again that each man in our city should do one work only; namely, that work for which his nature is naturally best fitted.' From this Plato concludes that everyone should mind his own business; that the carpenter should confine himself to carpentering, the shoemaker to making shoes. Not much harm is done, however, if two workers change their natural places. 'But should anyone who is by nature a worker (or else a member of the money- earning class) . . . manage to get into the warrior class; or should a warrior get into the class of the guardians, without being worthy of it; ... then this kind of change and of underhand plotting would mean the downfall of the city.' From this argument which is closely related to the principle that the carrying of arms should be a class prerogative, Plato draws his final conclusion that any changing or intermingling within the three classes must be injustice, and that the opposite, therefore, is justice: 'When each class in the city minds its own business, the money-earning class as well as the auxiliaries and the guardians, then this will be justice.' This conclusion is reaffirmed and summed up a little later: 'The city is just . . . if each of its three classes attends to its own work.' But this statement means that Plato identifies justice with the principle of class rule and of class privilege. For the principle that every class should attend to its own business means, briefly and bluntly, that the state is just if the ruler rules, if the worker works, and [7] if the slave slaves.

It will be seen that Plato's concept of justice is fundamentally different from our ordinary view as analysed above. Plato calls class privilege 'just', while we usually mean by justice rather the absence of such privilege. But the difference goes further than that. We mean by justice some kind of equality in the treatment of individuals, while Plato considers justice not as a relationship between individuals, but as a property of the whole state, based upon a relationship between its classes. The state is just if it is healthy, strong, united — stable....

Why did Plato claim, in the Republic, that justice meant inequality if in general usage, it meant equality? To me the only likely reply seems to be that he wanted to make propaganda for his totalitarian state by persuading the people that it was the 'just' state. But was such an attempt worth his while, considering that it is not words but what we mean by them that matters? Of course it was worth while; this can be seen from the fact that he fully succeeded in persuading his readers, down to our own day, that he was candidly advocating justice, i.e. that justice they were striving for. And it is a fact that he thereby spread doubt and confusion among equalitarians and individualists who, under the influence of his authority, began to ask themselves whether his idea of justice was not truer and better than theirs. Since the word 'justice' symbolizes to us an aim of such importance, and since so many are prepared to endure anything for it, and to do all in their power for its realization, the enlistment of these humanitarian forces, or at least, the paralysing of equalitarianism, was certainly an aim worthy of being pursued by a believer in totalitarianism. But was Plato aware that justice meant so much to men? He was; for he writes in the Republic: 'When a man has committed an injustice, ... is it not true that his courage refuses to be stirred? . . . But when he believes that he has suffered injustice, does not his vigour and his wrath flare up at once? And is it not equally true that when fighting on the side of what he believes to be just, he can endure hunger and cold, and any kind of hardship? And does he not hold on until he conquers, persisting in his exalted state until he has either achieved his aim, or perished?' [11]

Reading this, we cannot doubt that Plato knew the power of faith, and, above all, of a faith in justice. Nor can we doubt that the Republic must tend to pervert this faith, and to replace it by a directly opposite faith. And in the light of the available evidence, it seems to me most probable that Plato knew very well what he was doing. Equalitarianism was his arch-enemy, and he was out to destroy it; no doubt in the sincere belief that it was a great evil and a great danger. But his attack upon equalitarianism was not an honest attack. Plato did not dare to face the enemy openly....

This attitude, anti-humanitarian and anti-Christian as it is, has been consistently idealized. It has been interpreted as humane, as unselfish, as altruistic, and as Christian. E. B. England, for instance, calls [35] the first of these two passages from the Laws 'a vigorous denunciation of selfishness'. Similar words are used by Barker, when discussing Plato's theory of justice. He says that Plato's aim was 'to replace selfishness and civil discord by harmony', and that 'the old harmony of the interests of the State and the individual ... is thus restored in the teachings of Plato; but restored on a new and higher level, because it has been elevated into a conscious sense of harmony'. Such statements and countless similar ones can be easily explained if we remember Plato's identification of individualism with egoism; for all these Platonists believe that anti-individualism is the same as selflessness. This illustrates my contention that this identification had the effect of a successful piece of anti-humanitarian propaganda, and that it has confused speculation on ethical matters down to our own time. But we must also realize that those who, deceived by this identification and by high-sounding words, exalt Plato's reputation as a teacher of morals and announce to the world that his ethics is the nearest approach to Christianity before Christ, are preparing the way for totalitarianism and especially for a totalitarian, anti-Christian interpretation of Christianity. And this is a dangerous thing, for there have been times when Christianity was dominated by totalitarian ideas. There was an Inquisition; and, in another form, it may come again.

It may therefore be worth while to mention some further reasons why guileless people have persuaded themselves of the humaneness of Plato's intentions. One is that when preparing the ground for his collectivist doctrines, Plato usually begins by quoting a maxim or proverb (which seems to be of Pythagorean origin): 'Friends have in common all things they possess.' [36] This is, undoubtedly, an unselfish, high-minded and excellent sentiment. Who could suspect that an argument starting from such a commendable assumption would arrive at a wholly anti-humanitarian conclusion? Another and important point is that there are many genuinely humanitarian sentiments expressed in Plato's dialogues, particularly in those written before the Republic when he was still under the influence of Socrates. I mention especially Socrates' doctrine, in the Gorgias, that it is worse to do injustice than to suffer it. Clearly, this doctrine is not only altruistic, but also individualistic; for in a collectivist theory of justice like that of the Republic, injustice is an act against the state, not against a particular man, and though a man may commit an act of injustice, only the collective can suffer from it. But in the Gorgias we find nothing of the kind. The theory of justice is a perfectly normal one, and the examples of injustice given by 'Socrates' (who has here probably a good deal of the real Socrates in him) are such as boxing a man's ears, injuring, or killing him. Socrates' teaching that it is better to suffer such acts than to do them is indeed very similar to Christian teaching, and his doctrine of justice fits in excellently with the spirit of Pericles. (An attempt to interpret this will be made in chapter 10.)

Now the Republic develops a new doctrine of justice which is not merely incompatible with such an individualism, but utterly hostile towards it. But a reader may easily believe that Plato is still holding fast to the doctrine of the Gorgias. For in the Republic, Plato frequently alludes to the doctrine that it is better to suffer than to commit injustice, in spite of the fact that this is simply nonsense from the point of view of the collectivist theory of justice proffered in this work. Furthermore, we hear in the Republic the opponents of 'Socrates' giving voice to the opposite theory, that it is good and pleasant to inflict injustice, and bad to suffer it. Of course, every humanitarian is repelled by such cynicism, and when Plato formulates his aims through the mouth of Socrates: 'I fear to commit a sin if I permit such evil talk about Justice in my presence, without doing my utmost to defend her' [37], then the trusting reader is convinced of Plato's good intentions, and ready to follow him wherever he goes.

The effect of this assurance of Plato's is much enhanced by the fact that it follows, and is contrasted with, the cynical and selfish speeches [38] of Thrasymachus, who is depicted as a political desperado of the worst kind. At the same time, the reader is led to identify individualism with the views of Thrasymachus, and to think that Plato, in his fight against it, is fighting against all the subversive and nihilistic tendencies of his time. But we should not allow ourselves to be frightened by an individualist bogy such as Thrasymachus (there is a great similarity between his portrait and the modern collectivist bogy of 'bolshevism') into accepting another more real and more dangerous because less obvious form of barbarism. For Plato replaces Thrasymachus' doctrine that the individual's might is right by the equally barbaric doctrine that right is everything that furthers the stability and the might of the state.

To sum up. Because of his radical collectivism, Plato is not even interested in those problems which men usually call the problems of justice, that is to say, in the impartial weighing of the contesting claims of individuals. Nor is he interested in adjusting the individual's claims to those of the state. For the individual is altogether inferior. 'I legislate with a view to what is best for the whole state', says Plato, ' . . . for I justly place the interests of the individual on an inferior level of value.' [39] He is concerned solely with the collective whole as such, and justice, to him, is nothing but the health, unity, and stability of the collective body.

-- The Spell of Plato, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper


"Fascism" served the psychological warriors as a pretext to attack every direction of thought which diametrically opposed fascism! In their attacks against the "German mind," their real target was the Judeo-Christian Platonism which has made Western civilization possible, and which had its last great blossoming with the German classics and the Prussian reformers. The latter constituted the fruitful impulse for all fundamental scientific, economic, and technological advances in modern times.

With an astonishing display of empiricism and pseudo-empiricism, the psychiatrists attempted to prove that the so-called "authoritarian personality" tends toward prejudice. Such a person, they claimed, does not act according to his own immediate needs; powerful childhood anxieties cause him to suppress these impulses in himself and project them onto his environment. He thus guides his life according to strict principles and maxims, which constitute a kind of father image, from which he can no longer free himself. With this sick father image, the so-called "superego," the Freudian school explained away all the ideas and values to which men dedicate themselves. The following were cited as symptoms of this extremely dangerous character type: "Clinging to conventional values such as correct behavior, success, industry, competence, psychological cleanliness, health .... "

What was asserted negatively with regard to German attitudes by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, was presented in a "positive form" by Hans Habe (a pseudonym for Janos Bekessey), editor of the Neue Zeitung and responsible for the rebuilding and orientation of the press in the American zone. In a lead article entitled "On the Right to Happiness," Habe instructed the Germans about the fundamental values of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 in the following terms:

Today, in destroyed, tormented, darkly brooding Germany, there is no goal which is worth living for if not the goal of the most highly individual, highly simple, highly human happiness ....

What remains for us to be happy about? There is ... your mother who did your laundry without ever getting tired ... there is your brother, who just returned from POW camp with an amputated leg ... there is the snow on the mountains and the green of the valleys....

Prevention of the German illness of continually thinking on a grand scale. Germans must stop waiting for plans for a new, larger, better mega-city to be established in 1966; instead, they must go and make a corrugated tin house for themselves, their father, and their mother until Christmas 1946.... [They will do so] once they grasp that not everything a man does, has to be done for his nation or for the world.


Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School of Sociology had written earlier:

Our goal is not only to describe prejudice but to explain it in order to better exterminate it. Extermination means re-education, scientifically planned and resting on the foundation of understanding achieved through scientific investigation.


As a foundation for the re-education doctrine, it was assumed that the problem with the Germans and their culture was a serious mental illness and that the "mentally ill German people" would have to undergo the same treatment administered to mentally ill individuals. Archibald MacLeish, Undersecretary of State under James Byrnes, wrote in a working paper for the 1945 Potsdam conference: "A clear parallel can be drawn between the treatment of Germany and the treatment of individual criminals in a modern prison."

The Tavistock Controllers and Lewin's Democracy

Who really ran the German re-education program? The key person is the above-cited J. R. Rees, who envisioned "building a society in which it is possible for any member of any social group to be treated, without resort to legal means, and even if they do not desire such treatment."

Using ingenious tactics, in 1932 he had successfully driven his supervisor Crichton-Miller into a nervous breakdown, so that he could take control of the Tavistock Institute. He then worked toward taking over the Directorate of Army Psychiatry, where he put together his "invisible college," an informal association of all psychiatrists working in influential positions within the military. Following the war, these people were put in charge of reeducation programs, whose aim was to foist a new value system onto an entire population to "brainwash" it.

To this purpose, the Joint Committee of Postwar Planning was organized with the backing of of the most prestigious American psychiatric associations. Names turned up such as Margaret Mead, Richard Bricknew, Talcott Parsons, Kandel, W. Koschinigg, Frank Tannenbaum, Sigrid Unset, Erich Fromm, and, first and foremost, Kurt Lewin. Rees himself was the gray eminence behind the scenes who pulled the strings. Their ideas stemmed for the most part from the Berlin Central Institute for Education and Instruction, where they had been worked up in the 1930s. Emigres took them to the United States, where they became fundamental precepts of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In England, Rees's plans were soon taken up by the highest levels of government, as shown by a speech at the London Press Club on July 7,1941, in which Anthony Eden said: "If we want to ensure peace in our time, the German people must learn to forget what has been inculcated in them, not merely by Hitler, but also, curing the last century, by his predecessors, by so many of their philosophers and teachers."

The "scientific" foundations for this task had been laid by Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, a close co-worker of the one-time "Soviet socialist" Karl Korsch. It was through Korsch, who had been retooled from a Fabian into a pro-Bolshevik, that Lewin came in contact with Tavistock. After his emigration to the United States, he maintained contacts with Tavistock through Eric Trist, a close coworker with Rees. Trist also opened many doors for Lewin in the United States, through which Lewin finally climbed to the pinnacle, the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. Through an effective application of his methods of conditioning small children at Cornell University, Lewin attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which sent him to the University of Iowa, where he worked out his position on group dynamics, of which he is considered the father.

Lewin's fundamental ideas are as follows: a man tends, under extreme stress, to revert to stages of early childhood. If this condition is induced within a "family-like" situation, then, through the group, the individual recovering from stress can be slowly reconstructed psychologically so that, in a brief period of time, he undergoes a new, more desirable development of consciousness. The result is dependent on the leadership of the small group, which functions in the process as a substitute family. Lewin developed a maximally effective leadership style for this purpose.

The goal of the Joint Committee was to extend the successful re-education methods developed with over-stressed individuals in small groups and apply them to entire populations and nations. Here, too, Lewin's work in Gestalt psychology made the decisive contributions. He specified in his 1943 piece "The Special Case of Germany" that one could not merely doctor up a few isolated characteristics or features. An individual's consciousness corresponds in a nation to a "cultural atmosphere" determined by a very large number of components and attributes which stand in a recriprocal relationship to one another. Lewin applied systems-analysis field theory in his description: in order to be successful, the cultural atmosphere as a whole must be understood and transformed: "In order to be stable, a cultural shift must penetrate more or less all aspects of national life, since the dynamic interaction between the various aspects of a culture of a nation, such as education, morality, political behavior, religious views, lead to circumstances where every deviation from the existing culture soon will be bent back into the existing current."

As a consequence of this situation he demanded a "complete destruction of the equilibrium of forces which maintain social self-regulation." A nation to be re-educated must be driven back into an "early childhood situation"; Lewin called this situation the stage of "fluidity," his term for social chaos.

There were various conceptions of how such chaos was to be produced. For example, the American banker and author James Warburg, who later helped establish the pro-terrorist Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., proposed to put Germany into "containment," cutting it off completely from the outside world. Not only would this create a terrible crisis, but this crisis would break down all still existing institutions and moral ties, thus bringing about the condition of "fluidity." The Morgenthau Plan subsumed this sort of consideration.

Lewin warned that if the occupying powers forced any new content or "pattern" on the Germans, then a national resistance would be immediately triggered. It was necessary to create for the nation a new indigenous leadership elite which would establish these new values while giving the population the impression that the elite was actively working on the basis of popular support. As in his group-dynamics research, Lewin discovered that neither a radical-democratic leadership, which would be ready to give in to the greatest diversity of tendencies among the population, nor an authoritarian leadership, which would not allow the population to have a sense of active cooperation, could work: "In order to effect a change to democracy, a situation must be created for a time in which the leader uses sufficient control to eliminate the influences he does not desire."

The leader must "have power and apply it toward active re-education." But he must above all be able to act "as if" he were using the power in the majority's interest and with their consent. The essential thing is not that this actually occurs, but rather that such an impression is made credible. Lewin therefore concludes: "It is easier to make autocratic leaders democratic than to do so with laissez-faire democrats and complacent half-democrats."

Thus, the die was cast concerning the active resistance fighters of Germany: they were not suitable as leaders of the re-education process. The decision was made to resort to a part of the Nazi elite which had not received too much public exposure. In preparation for this, former Social Democrat W. Koschnigg accordingly went into action in England and proposed in his 1943 book Slaves Need No Leader that suitable prisoners of war be sought out from the camps and trained as "opinion leaders" for appropriate re-education tasks in Germany.

The Joint Committee summarized its goals, formed on the basis of Lewin's proposals, in a resolution written in early 1945. The resolution said: "Psycho-cultural reinforcement, although new and untested, is promising because it is aimed at human beings, their ways of behaving and feeling as well as the traditions which control their individual and group life. It promises not only a new access to Germany but presents a new problem, in which the goal is the conscious transformation of a people through the alteration of their culture, their social practices. and their educational system."

Re-Education of the Resistance

If the goal had really been re-educating Germany in democracy and republican thought, the occupying powers in Germany could not have had a better opportunity. Immediately after the military surrender, the first trade-union meetings took place on a regional and industrial basis. In most cases, these were led by illegal labor groups which had conspired together during the Nazi period without coming into contact with the so-called resistance groups, which in most cases would have meant betrayal. It was due to the initiative of these groups that the arriving occupying powers found the workers in many locales already in their places, disciplined and ready to organize clean-up details or already at work on the conversion from wartime to peacetime production.

The groups grew out of the factories and were not trade unions in the narrow sense, but rather genuine political organizations. Their major concern was less a general program than the urgent problem of caring for the population. In the large factories of the Ruhr region and elsewhere, these organizations grew up mostly on the factory level, and in more rural regions where small industry prevailed, on a municipal level. Thus in the Bremen region, local "Alliances to Fight Fascism" were formed. Social Democrats, Communists, Christians, and eager young people who had had nothing to do with traditional parties, all worked together in these groups.

Thus, spontaneously, a democratic, anti-fascist organization had formed, on which the occupying powers could have relied, had they been concerned with "freedom" and "democracy." This fact could not be denied, though it was distorted, by the occupying powers. An activity report of the "Manpower Division" of the British military government said: "Immediately following the collapse of Germany, self-appointed groups of people, who did not represent the majority of the workers, set themselves up as 'industrial soviets' and attempted in some cases to take over the firms."

In Hamburg, where the process can be best documented, 50,000 workers immediately petitioned for recognition of the "Socialist Free Trade Union." By June 18, 1945, the group had been banned by the British military government. In April, similar groups in Bochum, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Herne, Aachen, and other places in the Ruhr region were broken up or banned. Lucius Clay's political advisor Robert Murphy, in a telegram of June 28, 1945, openly demanded the "negative policy of suppression of all democratic elements" in order to create a "political vacuum."

In the French occupation zone, the Wurttemberg Trade Union Alliance was founded on May 11, and on June 10, the Free German Trade Union Alliance was founded. In the U.S. zone, as Stuttgart was cleaned up, the Americans attempted to dissolve the Baden-Wurttemberg Trade Union Alliance again, and blocked all its activities until September, 1946.

The chief historian with the U.S. High Commission, Harold Zink, covered up the reasons for the moves against these organizations and for the ban on the formation of political parties: "The argument was, to proceed by a slow process of reconstruction of labor organizations, thereby significantly reducing or altogether eliminating the risk of Communist takeover of such organizations."

Somewhat less precisely but far more correctly, Field Marshal Montgomery presented the disdainful content of all re-education efforts: "The Russians 'Support the trade-unions. I decided to do nothing .... By doing so I hoped that, in the course of time, the right people would come forward out" of their own ranks, but if we went too fast, there was a danger that the trade unions would fall into the wrong hands and make trouble." He expanded on this in a May 2, 1946 memorandum: "But if the Germans become restless and major hostilities break out against the occupying powers, then they will get support from political and trade-union organizations, which they could use to carry out their harmful intentions."

Measures against the organizations usually did not take place so brusquely as in Hamburg. They consisted in an amazingly bureaucratic and demoralizing delay in the acceptance procedures which had been set up by Industrial Relations Directive Number 16. The dragging-out of these secret authorization procedures for political parties and labor organizations had the goal of placing acceptable persons into critical positions. These positions went almost exclusively to people who had held leading offices before 1945, and thus had dubious loyalties. Many of the really influential but scarcely visible positions were taken over by emigres who had been prepared for those positions abroad, where their "proper" loyalties were instilled.

Anyone who achieved any sort of position or rank belonged to a lodge, a fellowship, or a more or less informal group around some institution, which looked after him and gave him his career plan. The first round of organizers in Germany were either bought off, like the factory council chairman of Salzgitter A.G., Erich Sochtig, or were quickly obliged to give up active work.

Nothing was better prepared or planned in greater detail by the Allies than post-war Germany's personnel policies. Unless it was a question of emigres that had to be ordered back home, the military jeeps would drive cross-country with their "white lists," hunting up the designated individuals from every nook and cranny and bringing them into their designated positions. The deployment of these jeeps was based on precise psychological profiles drawn up by social democrats and other emigres in England and America working with the various Anglo-American psychological warfare units.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 2 of 2

War, Hunger, and Demolition: Part of Re-Education

The stress functions necessary for re-education in Lewin's sense were more easily created under the conditions of war than under occupation. The bombardment of cities which were known not to be the site of crucial war industries, but rather of cultural monuments and the population itself, were aimed at breaking down the population's morale. But on the contrary, the bombardment mobilized the civilian population's last will to resist, thereby prolonging the war and the destruction it brought. The bombardment nonetheless had much to do with creating the objective preconditions for re-education.

We can get a sense of the psychological effect of strategic bombing if we imagine ourselves in the bunker of a house in a city under bombing attack, and recall our feelings listening to the howl of the approaching bombs. The urgent wish that the bombs should fall anywhere else -- on our neighbors, on our aunt or uncle, only not on this house -- was the least of it.

More essential was the impotent feeling of despairing panic, issuing into a speechless, rigid form of cold terror. These moments of raging, despairing, total impotence respecting the apparently arbitrary bombing raids, were the "psychologically" right times for re-education. The actual detonation of the bombs changed this feeling of impotence into quick, determined actions to aid the victims. But soon the sirens sounded again, and the old fear returned. These periods of tension and relief produced the psychological "hot and cold bath" which was to wear down people's fighting -- and general -- morale.

The bombing of cities also had "real" results. Loss of capacity of German industry from the effects of the war was only 8.1 percent, and an estimated further 7.3 percent was demolished after the war. This should have meant a burst of prosperity unleashed by the conversion of industrial capacity to peacetime production. The purpose of the so-called dismantling threat in the Western zone was precisely to prevent this from occurring, and was not aimed at the actual destruction of industrial capacity. The Morgenthau Plan's well known threat to make Germany into a pasture, likewise served more to produce the fear required for the re-education effort, and was not an actual Allied plan.

One of the documents already under consideration by the American State Department in 1944 was a memorandum establishing a long-term strategy for Germany. The memorandum made it clear that a reconstruction of Europe without German industry was out of the question. The securing of influence in Europe was an urgent priority, while the dismantling threats and the economic chaos in the occupied areas -- which more or less directly included France and Italy -- was of primarily "psychological" importance.

These psychological considerations led to Directive JCS 1967 of the High Command of the American occupying troops: "You will take no steps which a) could lead to the economic re-establishment of Germany or b) are intended to maintain or strengthen the German economy."

That the demolition campaign of the Allies was primarily designed for its psychological effect is shown not only by its modest scope, but by how it was implemented. There were no clear plans or regulations. No one really knew its purpose. For that reason, the wildest rumors spread about the supposed Allied demolition plans, causing confusion, excitement, and resistance measures, which immediately proved to be unnecessary as new rumors went into circulation.

The real effect of the bombing lay in the destruction of living quarters and infrastructure. Of the 15.8 million residences which had existed in Germany before the war, more than 25 percent were completely destroyed. Five to six million homes were more lightly damaged, and could be reconstructed. Only one-third of all homes remained intact.

The indigenous population was not alone in competing for homes. Approximately 8 million displaced persons, which included foreigners conscripted by the Nazis for slave labor in Germany, were left to their own devices by the Allies and crowded especially into the villages. The so-called alien workers, drawing conclusions from how they were treated in the work camps, prepared to get similar treatment from the civilian population. To heighten the effect, SHAEF provided them with liquor and goaded them to take their own revenge on German civilians for what had been done to them. Statements from the military government announced that the alien workers would be put into the intact dwellings, while their owners would be quartered in the work camps. As far as is known, such relocations never took place. But the harsh reality was the plundering and robbing carried out by bands of these pitiful creatures, against whom the German population could not defend itself without being immediately punished by the occupying powers.

These unfortunates were finally driven back into the work camps by the occupation troops and put under strict guard. Those who did not "voluntarily" go to work in Belgian and French mines were, over the course of the next 10 years, moved back to their homelands.

In addition to the captured workers were 17 million "Germans of foreign citizenship," 8 million of whom crowded into West Germany. They were joined by 2 million refugees from the Soviet occupied zone. The distribution of these masses of people was quite unequal. Whereas the population of the French occupied zone increased by only 4 percent, in the American zone it increased by over 20 percent, and in Schleswig-Holstein by over 63 percent. Thus, the most seriously affected were the sparsely populated rural regions least prepared for such an onslaught. The resettlement of the various groups was directed by the psychological warriors to achieve a maximum of friction; mixing religious denominations was carried out precisely for this effect.

The Food Weapon

All these stress factors were only a prelude to the real treatment. "After the First World War, food has proven to be a dangerous political weapon, and during "the discussions over the founding of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), it became clear that food was obviously well suited for this purpose," wrote leftist historian Gabriel Kolko. In keeping with this, Marshall Plan chief Averell Harriman described the control of consumer goods as "one of the most efficacious weapons our arsenal possesses to guide political events in Europe in the direction which suits us."

Psychologists have found that forced hunger is the most powerful means of driving adults into an infantile level of consciousness. Observations showed that under such conditions people tend to lose their acquired morality and will submit to any self-degradation which could lead to obtaining food.

In 1945 there were still food reserves, and despite the flood of refugees distribution did not collapse with the entry of the occupation troops. But by 1946-47 the reserves had been exhausted. The well-calculated starvation of the German population began. As a rule, 2,000 calories constitute the minimum for human subsistence. In the American sector, an average of 1,275 calories were available per person; in the British zone, 1,015; and in the French, only 940. The responsibility for this shortage situation was ascribed to the Russians' refusal to sell on the world market any of the raw materials and finished goods available in their zone, in order to use the revenue to buy the necessary food supplies for all of Germany. General Clay had laid the basis for this refusal with his harsh announcement on May 3, 1946 that all reparations to the Soviet Union would be halted.

The only recourses for industrial workers in the urban regions were strikes and demonstrations for a bit more food. They could not believe that the occupying powers were behind the starvation rations, but blamed it on the Nazis still in official positions, and demanded the dismissal of those who out of "incompetence or malevolence" were responsible for the food shortage, such as Minister Schlange-Schoningen in North Rhine-Westphalia. There were violent hunger demonstrations in the urban areas, with up to 100,000 participants in a single city. Like the demonstrations after the reinstatement of Nazis in leading factory positions, these were forcibly suppressed by the occupying powers; the Allies' standard argument was that demonstrations do not make bread. And they did not neglect to point out in their announcements accompanying the tanks: "And don't forget that according to the laws of the occupying powers and the military government, the guilty can be punished with death."

Anti-fascist workers in Germany experienced the post-war period as a singular disappointment, especially those who had expected the victorious powers to make a new republican beginning: The first post-war years took them from one defeat to the next. This process began with the obstruction of their independent organizations and the installation of a leadership dependent on the grace of the allies.

Though some of these did not come until the beginning of the 1950s, by 1948 it was already clear to any relatively alert observer that no real new beginning had taken place in Germany. The cynicism with which 90 percent of the working population's hard-earned savings was devalued, after the mark had already been artificially devalued by the Allied powers' printing of 12 billion marks, while corporations still received 90 percent of face value; the cynicism with which the hoarding of goods -- despite inconceivable misery among the population -- was rewarded by the high prices caused by the currency reform; these things spoke all too clearly. One result of such policies was the rapid increase in consumption of alcohol in spite of a rapid 18 percent jump in the cost of food, "offset" by a "liberal salary increase" of a total of 4.5 percent.

The rise in living standards over the following years did not redress the psychological damage suffered by the population up to 1948. This is clear from the children of this generation: all the rekindled hopes and dreams for a new beginning, expressed in the initial enthusiasm for reconstruction, were gone. They lost hold of their ideals, goals, and exemplars, preferring to merely do their job. They learned that the important thing is to only think of oneself and seek one's own advantage. It should be obvious that such a way of thinking does not lead to great thoughts, inventions, or contributions to development, nor can it direct a maturing generation toward a future which inspires it to live and create. Whoever is cut off from his past, also loses his future. The psychological energy necessary for truly great achievement can never be mobilized for things merely to one's own petty advantage.

Re-Education and De-Nazification

Actual de-Nazification was at first carried out quite intensively, and by September 1945, more than 136,000 National Socialists were sitting in the old concentration camps. However, it soon became apparent that the occupying powers were going to rely heavily on old Nazis. In early 1947, two-thirds of the Nazis interned in 1945 were set free. De- Nazifying approximately 8 million party members would, of course, have been a big job. But the fact that no effort at all was apparently intended, shocked many occupation officers. U.S. officer Arthur D. Kahn, for example, recounted in his book Officers, Cardinals, and Concerns the outrage he felt when the general director of the armaments firm Opel A.G., who as early as 1932 had conferred with Hitler and had published appeals for supporting National Socialism, was fined a total of $200. The same penalty, along with the loss of his job, was meted out to a postman who had been a member of the NSDAP in 1939-40.

Injustices of this sort were common, and the U.S. military government made no attempt to cover them up. Robert Murphy, for example, justified them with the cynical statement: "It is not the Americans' intent to destroy the basis of private property with a thorough de-Nazification."

Against initially strong resistance, former Nazi professionals were reintroduced into three areas in particular: civil service, the economy, and the media. In the staffing of the newly formed state governments and economic councils, "mass rehabilitation of Nazis" took place. A typical example is Arnold Gehlen, one of the most intelligent and devoted ideologues of the Nazi regime, but who had never occupied an official position. In 1947 he was entrusted with the training of the top echelons of federal officials at the college for administrative science in Speyer. His cousin, Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, was able to peddle his experience from the Nazi secret service to the Americans.

The personnel at the "Office for Organization of Consular Economic Representation," (later to become the Foreign Office), was typical: 60.3 percent had earned their spurs under Ribbentrop. Old party members made up 65.3 percent.

Of course, it was also necessary to bring in entirely new people. The Allies used three different methods of recruitment. The first was to select suitable people from the POW camps for special training. This was under way during the war. The second could only begin in 1945. In this case, suitable persons from the National Socialist youth -- elite corps were sought out and put into academy-like establishments for reorientation by a correspondingly elite staff of Allied teachers. The third method was a comprehensive exchange program enabling talented young Germans to study in the United States or England, where they were grouped into more or less informal "fellowships."

The re-education of prisoners of war was already under way in England by 1941. The British War Ministry assigned this task to the Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE). The first step was to set up a screening camp. From the interrogations of Hess and other psychiatric studies of the attitudes and reactions of "genuine" Nazis, they derived criteria by which they believed suitable candidates could be selected for re-education. The purpose of the screening centers was to "use de-Nazification in order to select de-Nazified future leaders and civil servants from among the Germans," according to H. V. Dicks. At the same time, material was to be collected for later used in propaganda operations. Rees pointed out in this connection that "military and other battle units" -- which emphatically included POW camps -- "are unique experimental groups, and on the other hand, it is possible to lead them in a manner scarcely possible in civilian life."

Those first chosen were immediately involved in practical activities. Under the guidance of advisors from emigre circles, they published a camp newspaper: The Weekly Post, "Newspaper for German Prisoners of War in England." From 1943, they regularly prepared radio broadcasts designed to damage fighting morale at the front and among civilians. The radio broadcast project grew to such proportions that it had to be consolidated into its own camp, Camp 7 in Ascot. Other prisoners were then required to criticize the camp newspaper and selected radio broadcasts. Their reactions were carefully studied by the relevant agencies in order to shape military propaganda.

The anticipated need for leadership cadre in occupied Germany could not be met from these circles alone. Therefore, the Control Office for Germany and Austria (COGA) decided to intensify and professionalize the re-education program. One result was the establishment of the "Wilton Park" POW Camp 300 near London. Its task was to take prisoners specially selected as candidates for leadership positions and "reschool" them in intensive courses.

It is notable in this connection that the selection methods employed were identical to those used by the Nazis to select their own cadre, according to Rees. Individuals with stable personalities, with a sense of self-worth, and with firm convictions were not sought, but rather, quite explicitly, individuals with weak egos. Such individuals were most easily manipulated by an emotional "hot and cold bath" of hostile attack and friendly, motherly warmth until, in total uncertainty, they gave themselves over completely to the group, which could control them with the promise of protection and security. Those moved into Wilton Park were generally given a so-called "Labour Party identity"; other paws characterized Wilton Park as the "dream factory" and the "democracy mill."

Wilton Park was directed by Prof. Heinz Koppler. Born in 1912 in Prussia, he studied history in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Kiel. In 1933 he received a stipend from Oxford, became a citizen in 1937 and began his rapid rise in the academic world. In 1939, he also became a departmental director within the PWE. On the basis of the Churchill memorandum, he wrote a program for post-war Germany in which he announced the idea of determining German post-war history through the molding of public opinion. In June 1947, he expanded on his program in a speech before graduates of the Hanover Technical University, and proposed to rework the "fundamental questions of European civilization" and "to venture the reconstruction of European life." He wanted nothing less than an alternative to previous Western culture.

At Wilton Park, courses were established for every 300 individuals, broken down into 14 to 16 groups, each of which had a different responsibility. One group had to write evaluations of the political press, another dealt with organizational questions, another worked up a cultural program, and so forth. Each group was assigned a tutor.

As a rule, each course lasted for six to eight weeks. Successful prisoners could take several courses in a row. Well-known experts were invited to lecture, and lectures were discussed in workshops under the tutors' supervision. Then the tutors held sessions in which the participants could submit questions in writing; then group discussion took place once again. A series of such cycles were summarized in a group game, the so-called "Brain Trust Exercise." The high point of every course was the Brain Trust of the German parties, in which mock elections were held with the German Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Liberal Democrats (predecessor to the Free Democrats) and Communists. With astonishing regularity, the SPD received approximately 45 percent of the votes in the mock secret balloting, while the other parties had to settle for equal portions of the remainder.

The teachers at Wilton Park, representing the international elite of psychological warfare, came from England, Switzerland, and the United States; later, civilians such as trade-unionist Viktor Agartz were flown in from Germany. After 1947, women also took part in the courses.

Group Dynamics in Action

A total of 12,000 Germans passed through Wilton Park. It was their springboard into future top positions in the parties, the labor unions, and the media. Later, in order to maintain the effects of reeducation, so-called Wilton Park Friendship Societies were founded. These represented the most important informal channels for the secret background information on which the "leading forces" believed themselves to be dependent. Because it is not verifiable, such secret background information is an excellent means for exercising control over people who consider themselves to be masters of their own fate.

In addition to the general group-dynamics methods of Rees, Bion, Trist, and others, what was decisive for the success of Wilton Park was the ideology lived out by the inmates. It was not merely for purposes of introducing a sense of being "the chosen," that everything said at Wilton Park was treated as "top secret." No note-taking was allowed. Professor Koppler never tired of drumming it into participants' heads that "Free societies are based on the decisions of a minority which we call the political elite. In the final analysis, a 'society rests on the decisions of amateur, not professional politicians."

Thus course participants received a unique opportunity, not only to become acquainted with the elite, but to feel as though they belonged to it. In this connection, Koppler constantly held up to Wilton Park inmates the "aristocratic form of life" as a model for emulation, Aside from teaching more refined forms of interaction, the philosophic content of the courses was to inculcate the teachings of John Locke. Only with this training could one truly assume and maintain the correct "stance." The content of the exalted "democratic" ideal was reduced to questions of style. Political content dwindled in importance in comparison with matters of form. Content was merely the lever for lifting oneself into a position of power. The brain-trust meetings were scarcely concerned about which political standpoint was taken and defended. The important thing was the method by which any position could be sold to the majority.

Participants came to see themselves as the real democrats, who did not obstinately cling to anyone doctrine, but were free to change position at will as in a Jesuitical exercise. From there they could drive the fanatics and rigid doctrinaires from the field, clearing the way for a pragmatic approach with the broadest possible support. Their sole political obligation was to belong and remain loyal to the group, to which they owed their position and which had begun to assume a sort of mother role.

The training of later "leading" politicians in these groups is responsible for the glibness and chronic dishonesty of post-war politics in Germany, and the absence of concrete development programs and clear aims for future political work. Everything becomes submerged in empty prattle about "freedom and democracy," which seems to have lost any practical significance.

While Wilton Park provided a supply of compliant politicians for various "democratic" parties, in the United States the groundwork was being laid for post-war German culture, or what .passes for such. The United States had no German prisoners of war until 1943. In March 1943, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy commissioned Frederick Osborn of the Murphy & Company bank, director since 1941 of the Special Service Division, to work up a study on prospective re-education measures. Osborn passed the assignment to the military expert S. L. A. ("Slam") Marshall, who 19 days later produced a study titled "Indoctrination of Enemy Prisoners." Marshall emphasized that the "social attitudes of the prisoners of war" should be studied in advance in English camps. Similar studies were produced by David P. Page, Ed Davidson, and Cyrus Brooks.

K. Bondy, who had found refuge at Harvard, wrote a study which earned him the chance to establish an Institute for Psychology at the University of Hamburg, which only a few years ago attracted attention for its work on active brainwashing. Bondy published numerous essays on re-education of prisoners of war. His close co-worker was G. T. Seger, a former SPD parliamentarian from Magdeburg, who contributed his personal experience from the Oranienburg concentration camp, from which he had been released in 1935, afterwards settling in the United States. Seger and Bondy founded the Council for a Democratic Germany, which set itself the task of alerting the U.S. administration to the necessity for re-education in Germany. One other member of the Council's executive committee was Louis P. Lochner, who in his capacity as Associated Press correspondent had been with the Nazi troops in every battle up through 1942, and who published Goebbels' diary in 1948. Secretary of State Stimson, who was responsible for the American side of the Strategic Bombing Survey, was one of the first to support the Council's re-education plans, with the proviso that they "promote the external security of the United States in the post-war world and ensure the success of the USA's post-war plans."

The first project followed the English example -- the publication of a newspaper to propagandize for the "American way of life." Der Ruf (The Call) was "prepared and published by German prisoners of war for German prisoners of war." A "Special Project Branch" was formed expressly to run the paper, and whose task was to prepare "small groups for various purposes in post-war Germany," "to train [them] in theories of the social sciences." The editorial staff was brought to the Van Etten camp in Elmira, New York, "where specially selected prisoners were sent for re-education."

Reich-Ranicki reported that "failed revolutionaries" were sought who were depressive to the point of persecution neurosis, with openly existentialist attitudes. One such person was ex-Communist Alfred Andersch, who had "turned" while at the Dachau concentration camp in 1933, subsequently serving as an inconspicuous office worker from 1933 to 1940. In 1944, while in the construction corps of the army in Italy, he was able to escape to the American side. Another was H. W. Richter, the brain of the group, who had been expelled from the Communist Party in 1933 and escaped from Germany in 1943. The editors of Der Rufalso included Rene Hocke, later correspondent for Suddeutsche Zeitung; Curt Vinz, owner of the Nymphenburg publishing house I. Wilimiz; and Erich Kuby. Controllers of the groups were Robert Pestalozzi and Walter Schoenstedt, former associates of Munzenberg's anarcho-Communist newspaper Unsere Zeit. This well-known Communist from Weimar, Germany, walked around camp wearing a U.S. Army captain's uniform.

When the paper was moved to Fort Phillip Kearney in 1945, the editors received additional intelligence assignments, such as oversight of all other camp newspapers, working out personnel proposals, commenting on the material prepared by the OSS/OWI for psychological warfare in Germany and Japan.

The same editorial staff also started up an independent tabloid aimed at the younger generation and which, under a U.S. license, was able to appear in an edition of 100,000 on paper whose quality was extraordinarily high for Germany at the time. Its publisher was an earlier associate, Erich Kuby. After the 17th edition, the editorship was changed to transmit a "left" image. Writers for the paper included famous representatives of the "third way" such as Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lord Beveridge, and Harry Ehrmann of the New School for Social Research. These authors, together with Otto Suhr, Ernst Reuter, and the ex-Communist in U.S. service Ruth Fischer, called together the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" in Berlin, the launching pad for the "counterculture" revival in Germany.

The older group around Andersch and Richter started out with a "counter-paper" named Scorpion. They came across as too "nihilistic," however, and soon lost their U.S. license. Eventually, in September 1947 the Fort Kearney group landed at the estate of a woman, Ilse Schneider Lengyel, who, among her other charms, had adequate stocks of food. There, in the vicinity of Fussen, they founded Group 47, and with grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the McCann advertising agency, were able to award their first cultural prize to Heinrich Boll, a literary newcomer. The group received a special license from the military authorities which allowed its members to move from one zone to another in Germany without restraint on any available mode of transportation -- an extraordinary privilege at that time.

Next this group, together with Waldemar von Knoringer and H.J. Vogel of the SPD, formed the Grunwalder Circle "against creeping fascism." That was the seed form of the later "New Left." Since 1958, Richter has acted as the top West German brain behind the "Ban The Bomb" movement. He founded the Easter March organization in Munich and in 1959 initiated the European Congress of Opponents of Nuclear Weapons in London, where he was elected president of the European Federation Against Nuclear Armament.

It is only once we consider the re-education plan that it becomes clear why, after the unconditional surrender, the total German army, from anti-aircraft assistant to reserve member, a total of 12 million men, was crammed into prison camps. There could be no other reason, since the capitulation and occupation did away with their purpose, namely to prevent prisoners from re-entering the war as enemy combatants. At the end of 1948, there will still 2.4 million men spending their most productive years behind barbed wire: 30,976 in U.S. camps, 435,295 in British, and 631,483 in French (as well as 890,532 in Russia and 300,000 in camps of other war ·participants).

The most important re-education method in the camps was hunger. Especially notorious was the American camp at Heilbronn. The camp resembled a collection of chicken coops, where meals consisted of egg powder and prisoners dug the ground for earthworms. The reason for this treatment was that a starving man will usually experience anyone who gives him food as a liberator, even if it is the same person who had previously let the individual starve.

Naturally, there was special treatment for officers, particularly young officers ready to cooperate. (The older ones were treated as fixed in their views and of little use.) An academy founded by CIA official Otto Molden, later called the Austrian College, in the isolated Alpine village of Alpach, brought together bright, young officers from every country which participated in the war. Old antagonisms were to be overcome in discussions over a common postwar perspective, and new acquaintances were to be made. The ruling philosophical direction was the so-called Viennese School; from the beginning the entire enterprise was under British influence. Alpach's best-known product is Sir Karl Popper, who began his career there as an assistant.

Another re-education establishment was the University for Labor, Politics, and Science at Wilhelmshaven, which became a model for trade-union educational centers. It was founded on the initiative of Captain Conder and Colonel Dillon, and was organized on the model of an English college. The idea was to set up a special educational center for participants in the war whose education had been interrupted. The SPD supported the activity from the beginning. According to Maria Meyer-Sevenich, it aimed at an education "in order to shape social institutions in the spirit of the new democracy.... It will not just be to impart knowledge; it will be to live in community. People who have gone through this communal experience will be the bearers of a new spirit." The facilities chosen were isolated barracks where, in seclusion, "self-government" could be practiced in village parliaments, village executives, and village courts. As in Wilton Park, "Brain Trust" and democracy games were played. The organization was taken over in 1962 by Gottingen University, with the intention of going after Germany's only center of scientific research.

One experiment in Wilhemshaven was the joint lecture series of Prof. Wolfgang Abendroth and Rudiger Altmann, where participants were drilled in the structure of political post-war propaganda in Germany. Students were presented with opposing "left" and "right" positions, and were encouraged to take sides. What they were not supposed to notice, however, was that the opposing sides were so chosen that no matter which side they chose, the basis for both contrasting positions was the same. The special method of this indoctrination method had been worked out by the Frankfurt School's radio research program in the United States. It was proudly claimed that this method was superior to the one-sided forms of Eastern indoctrination. One application of this method in post-war history was the "positivism debate" in German sociology, which made Germany's best students, who could not stomach Anglo-Austrian empiricism, susceptible to "New Left" propaganda. Political discussion in the Federal Republic has almost exclusively followed this pattern: alternatives offered as opposites are judged according to the very same cultural and epistemological groundwork. Wilton Park perfected the application of this method.

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Bibliography

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Clay, Lucius D., Decision in Germany, New York, 1950.

Dicks, H. V., Fifty Years at Tavistock, London, 1970.

Deuerlein, E., Potsdam 1945, Munich, 1968.

Drenker, Alexander, Diplomaten ohne Nimbus!, Zurich, 1970.

Hammond, Paul Y., "Directives for the Occupation of Germany, the Washington Controversy," in H. Stein, American Civil-Military Decisions, University of Alabama, 1963.

Kahn, Arthur D., Offiziere, Kardinale, Konzerne, Berlin, n.d.

Kolko, Gabriel, Politics of War, New York, 1968.

Niethammer, Lutz, "Zum Verstandnis von Reform und Rekonstruktion in der U.S.-Zone am Beispiel der Neuordnung des Offentlichen Dienstes, in Vierteljahresheft fur Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 21, 1973.

Proudfoot, M., European Refugees, 1939-1952, Evanston, Ill., 1956.

Rees, J. R., The Shaping of Psychology by War, New York, 1945.

Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs (ed.), An Account of the Industrial Relations in Germany, 1945-1949, London, 1950.

Zink, Harold, The United States in Germany 1944-1955, Princeton 1957.  
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 1 of 2

6. Old Wine in New Casks: The German Secret Services

As has been shown in the previous sections, there was a rapid consolidation of the old international fascist networks in occupied Germany during the Cold War. The same individuals who during the war had been involved in numerous negotiations on the post-war period in the United States, in Great Britain, in Switzerland, in Sweden, Paris, or Moscow with the various factions of the Nazi leadership. now arrived as the occupiers of Germany and had the decisive power over the political and economic reconstruction, the treatment of the Germans, and the personnel of the various new institutions and parties to be formed.

First, the tremendous wealth which the Nazi leadership had hoarded from their spoils had to be brought to safety, and -- months before the war's end -- arrangements were also made for the leadership of the National Socialists, the SS, the secret service, etc. to be "successfully" installed elsewhere.

Organizations for Escape

Immediately after the war, two organizations became active, "The Spider" (Die Spinne) and "Odessa" (Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehorigen-Organization of Former SS Members), which had the. task of making possible the escape of National Socialist war criminals, SS leaders, and high officials of other Nazi organizations into foreign countries, simultaneously maintaining the interconnections within these farflung networks of these "old boys." Later, came other organizations, such as the HIAG (Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Soldaten der ehemaligen Waffen-SS e.V., Society for the Aid of Former SS Soldiers, Inc.), and "Quiet Aid" (Stille Hilfe) of Princess Ysenburg, organizations which often overlapped in their personnel.

How was the escape organized? Hundreds of escapees assembled at previously arranged locations, and were taken by the assistance organizations, in close connection with their foreign friends, via different routes abroad. One of these routes was the so-called Cloister Route, where the "clients" were disguised in monks' robes and moved from cloister to cloister through Austria to Italy. At a time when ordinary citizens were not allowed to leave their occupied zones, the specialists in Odessa were supplied with border passes for all occupied zones. Thus, the former SS member Eric Kern, alias Eric Kernmayr, travelled without difficulty as the middleman for the Spider group back and forth between Munich and Salzberg, the same Kernmayr who would become the editor of the neo-Nazi Deutsche Wochenzeitung and the head editor of the Deutsche Soldatenzeitung. He was also the founder of the influential "Gmund Circle" of former SS members in Salzkammergut, which, based in Austria, never had to undergo any "de-Nazification" or any other form of cleanup.

Otto Skorzeny, the head of the Special Commandos during the Third Reich, had a special role within the escape organizations from his base in Madrid, where he moved following his acquittal at Nuremberg. Another important figure was the Austrian Bishop Hudal in Rome. As the long-time confidante of Pope Pius XII with the rank of titular bishop and rector of the Instituto Santo Maria dell'Anima, it was possible for him to furnish passes for his future "clients," and to seek aid for the escape of hundreds of Nazis to the Middle East and South America from such organizations as the Refugee Bureau in the Vatican, Caritas, and the Red Cross. Bishop Hudal was a fanatical supporter of Hitler. Like many Austrians, he saw in Hitler and the Greater German Reich a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and was enthusiastic that finally the "great ethnic idea" had been reawakened and that the "unity of the Germans in language and culture" could now be accomplished. In his 1936 book on The Foundations of National Socialism, he expressed the same racial theories as were espoused by the fascists in Germany (and other countries) at that time.

Odessa could count on the support of a great number of collaborators. Every 25 miles along the German-Swiss border there was an "interface." In Lindau am Bodensee, Odessa had formed an import-export business, with branches irr Cairo and Damascus. Bregenz and Lindau were important locations because they lay within the Germany-Austria- Switzerland triangle; once "clients" were in Austria, further escape via the airports in Geneva or Zurich to other destinations was virtually assured. There was no lack of money, passports and visas. Swiss, Austrians, French, British, and Americans were all well informed about these operations and some actively helped out. Extremely close relations existed even during the war between the American OSS in Europe under Allen Dulles, stationed in Berne, Switzerland, and leading National Socialist officials (see Chapter 3). If, however, some leading officials were "unintentionally" confined at the Allied international internment camps, this was no disaster. The British internment camp at Wolfsberg in the Steiermark had the reputation of being a springboard for leading SS personnel. Even Otto Skorzeny, who after his acquittal in Nuremberg was automatically re-arrested as an SS man, managed to quickly escape, while thousands upon thousands of small-time party members rotted in Allied internment, often for years at the point of starvation, quite unable to manage such an elegant, quick "escape."

The Quiet Aid organization was officially founded in 1951, and pretended to be a corporation which dealt with the "old boys" who were in prison. Its founder, Princess von Ysenburg, came from one of the oldest oligarchical families of Germany. At her home in Isartal, the various threads for the financial and "moral" support of Nazis, and not only those in prison, came together. The princess naturally had close ties to the other "old families". That is why she arranged to free her relative Prince Josias zu Waldeck-Pyrmont, who was being held because of his role as SS Obergruppenfuhrer (Senior Group Leader), one of the major posts at Buchenwald. Prince zu Wladeck-Pyrmont reciprocated by concerning himself about financial support for Quiet Aid. With his approximately 4,000 square miles of land and his houses, castles, and so forth in Lahntal, he was one of the richest men in the country, whom neither the currency reform nor the other post-war confusions could harm in any way. Princess Ysenburg's friend Luise von Oertzen, the president of the German Red Cross, was also quite helpful. Previously, she had received the Golden Party Badge from the NSDAP and now repaid the favor.

More important for Princess Ysenburg, perhaps, was the fact that she had become friends with American High Commissioner John McCloy and his wife, which not only meant prosperity but also valuable further connections in the United States. The value of these connections was soon revealed. The Princess wrote an article in Reichsruf, the newspaper of the right-radical German Reichs Party (Deutschen Reichs-Partei, DRP). The first Chancellor of the Federal Republic, Dr. Konrad Adenauer, had wanted to take action against this newspaper because of itsopen Nazism, but his efforts were blocked by his State Secretary, former SS member Hans Globke, who worked closely with McCloy. Globke recommended his associate Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer to Adenauer to take care of the "negotiations" with the DRP. At that time, Dr. Aschenauer himself was on the executive committee of Quiet Aid. The organization was always in close contact with Nazi underground cells and other right-radical organizations both in Germany and foreign countries, and cultivated excellent relations with the West German Ministries of Justice and the Interior, which is not exactly surprising if one considers that more than fifty percent of the administration was carried over from the pre-occupation days.

Financial Arrangements

In the currency reform of 1948, the "little people" lost the last remnants of what they had been able to salvage from the postwar ruins. For such people, it was literally the "zero hour," while the leaders of the "Third Reich" had long before carefully taken care of themselves, primarily through numbered accounts in Switzerland.

SS Gen. Carl Wolff, who at the bidding of Himmler and Schellenberg during the war had negotiated for months at a time with Allen Dulles and the German expert of Swiss intelligence, Max Waibel, over a separate peace, did not overlook this opportunity to make appropriate financial arrangements. Somehow, millions in the bank account of the "Friends Circle of the National SS Commander," of which General Wolff had been in charge, vanished without a trace.

The legendary SS treasures, which were supposedly dropped into some lake or other or buried in frantic haste in the region of the Alpine Redoubt, were merely a rumor used to divert attention away from the really big operations being run through Swiss, New York, and London banks. A good deal of money was, of course, put aside in these primitive ways, as revealed in a list giving the total value of the treasure buried by the Reichssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service) near Altaussee (Salzkammergut): 50 kilos of gold bars, 50 cases of gold coins and other gold objects, 2 million American dollars, 2 million Swiss francs, five cases of jewels and jewelry, a stamp collection worth 5 million gold marks, and so forth. But the majority of these "salvage operations" took place through the above-named official banking channels.

The rescue of the profitable "Operation Bernhard" in the postwar period is interesting in this respect. An operation under this code name was begun in 1940 by the chief of the Secret Service, Reinhard Heydrich, to mass produce foreign pounds sterling and dollar banknotes. This gigantic counterfeiting operation was designed to solve the acute currency shortage of the Nazi Secret Service, which consumed millions in its worldwide activities. Heydrich assigned the job to Austrian Wilhelm Hoettl, who led the Italy Division of Bureau VI of the Foreign Section of the Secret Service; under him, among others, was Gestapo boss Herbert Kappler in Rome. Later Hoettl took over the Balkans special office, from which he controlled the operation of the Gestapo in Budapest, where Adolf Eichmann and Kurt Becher carried out their dirty work. Hoettl was thus hardly a small fish. He had direct ties to certain Vatican networks, and in 1943, as Ernst Kaltenbrunner's agent, he was in frequent contact with Allen Dulles in Berne.

At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Hoettl assigned Bernhard Kruger the task of finding prisoners with experience in counterfeiting and bringing them to Sachsenhausen, where they were to carry out their work in strictest secrecy. Friedrich Schwend worked as the distributor of the counterfeit money, and from his headquarters in Labers Castle in Meran in the South Tyrol oversaw a huge network of agents which included both "Aryans" and Jews. One of the "full Jews" was Georg Spencer Spitz, a friend of Hitler's photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. Operating in Holland, Belgium, and France, Spitz is said to have alone put £3 million ' into circulation. A total of 5.4 billion counterfeit marks were supposedly disbursed to the population of Germany. Hoettl and company of course managed to put aside a "nest egg" for themselves.

Friedrich Schwend put 1.5 million Swiss francs in a Liechtenstein bank and bought himself into a Vienna export and import company, Transdanubia. He also invested 100,000 Reichsmarks in securities and bonds, including those from the Steyr-Puch firm, the largest Austrian armament company, which would later make some big deals with the old boys in Latin America. His co-worker Spitz left the firm after 1945 and went to work for American intelligence. He had also taken care of himself, putting money into the Munich Bank Lenz & Company. Through this bank he gained control of the gambling casinos built after the war in Baden-Baden, Weserland, Bad Neuenahr, Bad Durkheim, and Constance. Another "distributor" in Schwend's network, Friedrich Karnatz, moved to Chile and soon became a member of the board of the Deutsch-Sudamerikanische Bank, a subsidiary of the Deutsche Bank. In short, while the German population suffered an unimaginable famine, the terror of occupation, and psychological bombardment through the de-Nazification measures, the real criminals were building up their new lives abroad.

Hoettl himself did not find it necessary to move to South America; U.S. intelligence furnished him with a handsome house directly on Altaussee, from where he directed operations for the Spider organization. Allen Dulles showed great appreciation to his old friend, and actually visited Hoettl in Salzkammergut in the first few months after the war. After 1950, Hoettl went to work for the "Gehlen Organization," which operated as a part of American intelligence. Like Hoettl, Gehlen had received a handsome house from Dulles on the Starnberger Lake. Hoettl's principal area of activity was the Austrian region around Salzburg, Linz, Graz, and Klagenfiirth. From there he also performed his old Balkan supervisory job, but now for Dulles.

Because of his experience in the Third Reich, Hoettl was one of those intelligence specialists without whom the Allied intelligence organizations simply could not manage. Hoettl was the contact man to the networks run by Jesuit general Count Vlodzimierz Halke von Ledochovsky, with whom he had worked for years during Hoettl's Balkan and Eastern European stints. Dulles had been kept very well informed about all these activities from 1943 on, and Hoettl had also given him a running account of his discussions with Adolf Eichmann in Budapest. Those discussions reveal the monstrous hypocrisy of the Allies' assertion that they did not learn until after the war -- when the concentration camps were discovered -- of the atrocities being committed by the Nazis. Not only did they know, they also had the exact locations of these camps -- yet they did not bomb the gas chambers of the camps or the rail lines which led to them, over which millions of human beings were carried to annihilation. Instead they bombed cities such as Berlin and Dresden, where there were mostly women, children, and old men, since everyone else was at the front.

Traffic in Human Beings

Other foreign transfers of Nazi money were carried out through an incredible traffic in human beings. The International Red Cross in Geneva received 5 million Swiss francs from foreign Jewish fortunes which served as escape money for Nazi criminals for whom a second career had been arranged. In exchange, selected Jews were released from German concentration camps after 1944 to go Switzerland, from where they could embark on their further journey to the United States.

Such transactions took place within the framework of the increased efforts for a separate peace led by Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg, who were already making arrangements for life after the war. Through Dr. Kersten, Himmler's doctor living in Sweden and member of the Swedish royal house of Count Bernadotte, Himmler and Schellenberg established contact with the Swiss Altbund president Dr. Jean Marie Musy, who himself had connections with the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Sternbuch.

The first negotiations between Himmler and Musy took place in October, 1944 near Vienna; after further meetings it was finally agreed that every two weeks, a transport containing selected Jews from the concentration camps would be allowed to go to Switzerland. For 1,200 to 1,300 Jews every two weeks, Dr. Musy was to take into his trust a certain sum from the Jewish side which was later to be handed over to the Germans. These sums, totalling over 5 million Swiss francs (official), were transferred to the International Red Cross.

In parallel with this operation between Himmler and Musy, Kaltenbrunner was also working out quite similar deals. In this case, Hungarian Jews were concerned, who would likewise be allowed to travel to Switzerland, as long as corresponding amounts of money were furnished for post-war use by the Germans. Kaltenbrunner and von Ribbentrop soon sought to put an end to Himmler and Schellenberg's competition. They alleged that telegraph messages had been decoded according to which the negotiations of Himmler and Musy were plotting to "work out asylum rights for 250 Nazi leaders in exchange for the release of Jews." Despite this ferment within the Nazi camp, both operations continued in a limited way. In the chaos of the last months of the Third Reich, every faction in the leadership tried its best to organize its various networks abroad.

The Case of Reinhold Gehlen

A competition between the Anglo-Saxons and the Russians over Hitler's former intelligence officers was soon acted out before the eyes of the Germans at Flensburg: An Allied Surveillance Commission under U.S. Gen. Lowell W. Rocks and a Soviet commission under General Major Trussow searched for the files and personnel of the German intelligence network.

Meanwhile, a whole section of National Socialist intelligence found a haven in south Germany with the Americans: the Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Army East) division of Gen. (rel.) Reinhold Gehlen. This intelligence network, operating under the Reich security office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), had been responsible for intelligence on the enemy in the East, which included the Abwehr (counterintelligence) activities of Abwehr chief Canaris and later Schellenberg as well as Gestapo and SS activities in the East. This section had active connections in many East European and Russian networks of Nazi collaborators such as General Vlasov's Russian units, which had fought on the side of the Third Reich. Like many other leading intelligence agents of the Third Reich, Gehlen had recognized, at the latest after the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, that the war could not be won, and began to consider his post-war career.

After extensive preparations and numerous tactical maneuvers, Gehlen had a final discussion of the situation with his close associates General Wessel and General Baun in Bad Elster in Saxony. There they discussed the final details of how the complete archives of Fremde Heere Ost could be transported to safety, so as to be able to use the files again immediately after the war. Gehlen planned to hand himself over to the Americans along with the entire Fremde Heere Ost network, and had already put out the appropriate feelers. From these early contacts, Gehlen knew of the plans for the occupation of Germany and had all the material moved into the American occupation zone in South Germany.

For this extremely delicate operation, the Regensburg cathedral's pastor, Dr. Rudolf Graber, later bishop of Regensburg and confidant of the Regensburg Prince von Turn und Taxis, was asked to be the mediator. This nominally Catholic network, which Gehlen used near the end of the war, was later to become known through its connections with the Catholic, right-radical organization "Tradition, Family, and Property." Bishop Rudolf Graber belonged to the circle of so-called Catholic anti-Freemasons around Manfred Adler as well as to other, predominantly right-radical Swiss groupings. That a Prince von Thurn und Taxis should be involved here should be no surprise, since for hundreds of years, this family, through its monopoly of news and postal services, firmly controlled part of Europe's intelligence network.

As prearranged, Gehlen turned himself over to the Americans shortly after May 8, 1945, and was first sent to Brigadier Gen. Edwin L. Sibert, who had been informed of this operation two years before, having worked together in Berne with Allen Dulles and his German advisor Gen. von Gaevernitz. In August 1945, Gehlen was transported with his co-workers to Washington, while Silbert combed zealously with Baun through the American occupation zone for secret service personnel in order to immediately start working with them.

The Gehlen Organization

Meanwhile in Washington, Gehlen developed new concepts for operations against the East with his new employers and with Swiss intelligence. A decisive role in the personnel and technical questions of this secret work was played by none other than Max Waibel, the German expert in Swiss intelligence during the war and subsequently the military attache of the Swiss embassy in Washington. The Gehlen Organization was incorporated into the CIA as the German Group and in 1955 entered the "German service" -- under the name Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service).

The Gehlen Organization was given a large estate in Pullach near Munich for its use, where its members produced reports on the Soviet occupied zone as well as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. First they concentrated on the thousands of prisoners of war who were just beginning to return from the Soviet Union; then they intensified their worldwide activity, re-establishing connections to the networks which escaped from Germany to Argentina, BrNazil, Chile, and other South American countries, and were now occupying leading positions in important organizations.

Gehlen himself cultivated close connections to Bonn through regular meetings with Globke, Adenauer's State Secretary in the Chancellory. Adenauer's interest in Gehlen was characterized by one of Adenauer's assistants as follows: "Gehlen seemed interesting to Adenauer in two respects. First, Adenauer could keep up to date on developments in the East zone. That was especially important for Adenauer because his two most dangerous opponents, Jakob Kaiser in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Kurt Schumacher in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), were very well informed about the Soviet zone. Second, Adenauer immediately recognized that through his information, Gehlen exercised influence on those to whom he delivered this information -- the Americans."

Additionally, Adenauer wanted to have at least some control over Gehlen's Swiss connections to Max Waibel through regular exchanges of information. Only after 1948 did the Gehlen Organization work "officially" with Swiss intelligence. Close connections also existed to relevant networks within Spanish, Italian, French, and other intelligence organizations.

The Gehlen Organization soon had connections with Nazi International networks throughout the world, and -- as noted in the Thurn und Taxis case -- served less the North German faction of Chancellor Adenauer than the networks of the South German oligarchy, which was nominally Catholic and, by reputation at least, anti-Freemasonic.

Adenauer had a constant if latent mistrust of Gehlen until their public break during the so-called Spiegel Affair, and his mistrust was further strengthened during his first U.S. visit. At that time Adenauer was expressly warned by the head of American military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Arthur Trudeau, against the "Nazi Gehlen" in many conversations. When Gehlen heard of these conversations, he immediately alerted Allen Dulles, who in turn intervened with President Eisenhower to have Trudeau immediately transferred. In light of these facts, Die Zeit editor Countess Marion Donhoff's evaluation of Gehlen is very revealing. In 1968 she wrote: "... his [Gehlen's] political sentiments were absolutely beyond reproach": Gehlen had always kept out of anti-Communist groups!

While a "southern faction" had been formed in post-war politics, there was formed a corresponding "North German Hohenzollern- and Freemason-faction," controlled by other oligarchs and foreign intelligence groups.

The Case of Otto John

The north German group can be best described with reference to the case of the first president of the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (Bundesverfassungsschutz-BVS), Otto John.

Otto John was the official Nazi representative in the top management of Germany's Lufthansa Airline in the Third Reich, and for this reason continually traveled abroad. After 1942 he also made contact with British and American intelligence, and met regularly with their contact people. He was on the periphery of the July 20, 1944 conspiracy's assassination attempt against Hitler, which was largely made up of individuals who wanted to overthrow Hitler in favor of a Hohenzollern monarchy.

After July 20, John moved to Great Britain, where his friends in the secret service received him with open arms. He was immediately assigned to the Psychological Warfare Division and worked there with Sefton Delmer and with the Calais black-propaganda broadcasting station. Like John, Delmer was part of the circle around the Hohenzollern prince Louis Ferdinand. Since the 1920s Delmer had also been a close friend of the late Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands; Bernhard was active during the war as an SS member with the I.G. Farben firm, and was generally known as the "Nazi Prince." At times John also worked in the re-education center of Wilton Park as an "educator" and after 1945 ran a division of the "Control Office for Germany and Austria," which played an important role in the "de-Nazification of Germany."

John's task was to seek out useful co-workers who would be helpful to the British during post-war reconstruction. Additionally, John soon became leader of Camp Number 11 in Bridgend, Great Britain, where the British held captured generals, admirals, SS-leaders, and other leading individuals of the Third Reich. Through this screening process, John assembled part of what would later become the leadership of the German army. The other part had been sought out by Gehlen and U.S. general Julius Klein; it included Gehlen's old friends Adolf Heusinger and Hans Speidel, who were to assume high positions in the German army.

John's role becomes more graphic when the activities of his friend Sefton Delmer are further examined.

Before the war, Delmer was an officer in the British secret service stationed in Berlin, working nominally for Lord Beaverbrook's newspaper empire. Delmer was given the job of putting together the forces which would most persistently work against German industrialization from inside Germany. He had contact with almost every pre-war German political grouping, and went on campaign tours with the leaders of these groups. First with Field Marshal Ludendorff, then later, in 1931, he became acquainted with SA leader Ernst Rohm and through Rohm he gained personal contact with Hitler and other senior Nazis. He was apparently one of the most fanatical followers of Hitler.

In 1931, Delmer wrote after a meeting with Hitler: "Following this conversation I had frequent opportunities to speak with Hitler -- in an official as well as unofficial capacity. But on each of these opportunities it happened the same way. I raised a question. He answered, and his answer grew into a speech, while ever new thoughts streamed through his imaginative and tremendously alert, clear mind."

The British were pushing the Hitler option not only out of personal affinity, but also for quite concrete reasons. (Hitler repeatedly and solemnly affirmed to Delmer the "division of labor" which he proposed: England as the sea power and Germany as the European land power which would incorporate the Russian "land mass" and Russian natural resources.) Funds were delivered from the Schroeder Bank in Cologne to the bankrupt Hitler. (The branch" office director of the Schroeder Bank in New York was Allen Dulles.) Through Delmer, the money of Beaverbrook and other British Hitler fanatics also flowed to Germany. In the critical year of 1932, as the NSDAP began to suffer massive electoral losses, Delmer traveled from city to city during the election as the only foreign journalist accompanying and advising Hitler. He confessed quite openly that his personal as well as business interests bound him to the would-be Fuhrer.

Delmer had close ties as well to Professor Lindemann, the later Lord Cherwell. This professor provided Delmer with psychological studies on the German population. An advisor to Winston Churchill, Lindemann was also responsible for the bombing of the civilian population of German cities, the purpose of which was to utterly destroy the last remains of German culture -- not a stone was to be left standing. Later, Delmer was put in charge of the "Special Operations Against the Enemy States and Their Allies," and it was in this capacity that he oversaw the black propaganda radio station Calais. Delmer's aim with this "military broadcast station" was to refine and improve the methods of Goebbels, the "little doctor" whom Delmer admired as extraordinarily brilliant.

On the invitation of the first President of the Federal Republic, Freemason Theodor Heuss, Otto John finally returned from the Calais propaganda station to the Federal Republic in 1949. Heuss knew John from their participation in a discussion group in the house of Klaus Bonhoffer, who was killed in the last weeks of the war. This discussion group, to which the Dominican father Laurentius Siemer, the former Chancellor Heinrich Bruning, and others belonged, supported the British proposal to choose Otto John as president of the soon-to-be-established Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (BVS), exactly as did Adenauer's old rival, Jakob Kaiser.

Adenauer's Battles

Adenauer defended himself against the "British stooge," as he called John, and sought to put in his own people, an effort which failed because of the intervention of the British high commissioner. Meanwhile, John had become friends with American High Commissioner McCloy. Adenauer became all the more angry at being characterized by John and Prince Louis Ferdinand as "American property." Adenauer had refused to give John his letter of appointment for a year, then forced John to investigate a series of his "pan-German" Hohenzollern friends. Adenauer demanded from John a report on the supposed Eastern contacts of the "pan-German" CDU member Jakob Kaiser, who Adenauer suspected of leaking plans of the European Defense Community to the East Germans.

Afterward, Adenauer instigated the investigation of John himself and his Eastern contacts and the "rumor" that John had a well-stuffed Swiss bank account. It was this faction, advocates of a neutralized, reunified Germany, which sought to sabotage Adenauer's policy of integration into the West in every possible way.

The task of the BVS is counterespionage and defense against those within the Federal Republic hostile to the constitution. With Otto John as president and with section leaders who had been slipped in early by the Gehlen faction, it was a foregone conclusion that the Federal Republic would become a playground for intelligence agents from all over the world.

The founding of the Federal Republic in 1955 did not put a stop to these activities at all. Astoundingly, the following took place on the tenth anniversary of July 10: the president of the BVS vanished and appeared a short time later in East Berlin! Although other Germans who had been active in the Calais broadcast station and Wilton Park, for example Edler von Putlitz, had moved to East Berlin after a "short stay" in the Federal Republic, still the change of residence of the leader of a counterintelligence agency was certainly a sensation. John remained in East Germany a total of 17 months. During that time he held press conferences, gave speeches, and appeared on television, advocating reunification and the pan-German way "against the Cold War policies of Adenauer."

When John returned to West Germany after 17 months, Adenauer's suspicions were indeed confirmed about John's Eastern contacts, but a loud faction publicly claimed to be able to prove John's innocence. A federal court determined that John had gone to East Germany voluntarily, and that his claim to have been taken there in a drugged state was not credible. In any case the "pan-Germans" used the controversy about him to their own purposes.

Posser and Heinemann of the Legal Office also fought for John. That is not astonishing, since Gustav Heinemann, along with his All-German People's Party, had entered into an alliance with the Soviet-financed German Confederation of Col. (ret.) Josef Weber, in order to fight Adenauer in the election campaign.

The Freemasons, too, took up John's defense, including the former FDP ministers Dehler and Stammberger. Dr. Gerhard Schroder, a prominent minister in Adenauer's cabinet, also interceded for John. Before the war Schroder had been the financial advisor of Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, and then was employed in a leading position by Fritz Thyssen, who together with Schacht joined the well-known Niederdorf "celebrity" transport which left the Third Reich during the last days of the war and went over to the Americans. Schacht too had advocated the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. (Prince Louis Ferdinand, the heir to the Hohenzollern throne, was married to the Russian Grand Duchess Kyra. According to tradition, the head of the House of Hohenzollern was the head of German Freemasonry.)

But all these intercessions were to no avail. John was found guilty by the federal court and put into prison. A short time later he withdrew from public life to live in the Hohenburn Castle in Igls, a resort in the Tyrol.

Early on, Gehlen had taken care that he would have a certain amount of control over the proceedings in the BVS in Cologne. John's representative Albert Radke, a retired colonel, was from Operation Gehlen, and one of the two division directors was Richard Gerken, who until 1945 was a leading associate with the Nazi security police in the Netherlands.

Military Counterintelligence

The battle around the third pillar of the secret intelligence service began when the re-armament of Germany was already being planned during the official "de-Nazification" period. The Allies arranged a military contact station, which was to be located in Bonn under a code name (since only recently had the law for the elimination of militarism been passed).

Interestingly enough, Countess Donhoff, who had come over to West Germany -- on horseback from her estate in East Germany -- as late as 1946, intervened in the debate over the personnel of this agency. After her move to the West, she had first been with the Metternichs, and was brought to Hamburg as the managing editor of the British-controlled newspaper Die Zeit. The Countess wanted to see her old friend and former tank corps general Count von Schwerin appointed head of the military contact station. This proposal was immediately accepted by the British High Commission. The count was known to the commission as the leader of the England-America group in the Fremde Heere Ost department. The present leader of the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies in Hamburg, Count Baudissin, was a member of the Donhoff-Schwerin group.

Adenauer also attempted to fight this appointment, but he was forced to yield to British and other pressure. Yet he was soon able to put Theodor Blank, a man he could trust, into the position, a move which was decisive for his policy of rearmament and integration into the West. Yet Schwerin was able to empower two individuals with developing the secret military intelligence service, which was later to be called Military Counterintelligence (Militarischer Abschirmdienst, MAD). The two were the former major Joachim Oster and Friedrich-Wilhelm Heinz, an old warhorse from German counterintelligence.

In a certain sense, however, Adenauer seemed to be sure of his influence, since it had originally been his idea to create an independent secret service alongside the existing one. The reason was that Adenauer "wanted to be informed about the military situation in East Germany, before West Germany had completed its remilitarization," and he wanted to be informed by "an intelligence service which was not dependent on the Americans," as was the Gehlen Organization on the CIA.

Joachim Oster's father was the leader of the central section of the Nazi foreign counterintelligence bureau and one of the close confidantes of Abwehr head Admiral Canaris. The younger Oster brought Friedrich-Wilhelm Heinz out of the old Abwehr networks. While Oster organized the central office of the new bureau, Heinz took over the agents in the field. Heinz had been a member of the national leadership of the Stahlhelm, the World War I veterans' organization, later joined the NSDAP, was soon working against the "south German group" around Hitler, and was for that reason expelled from the party. He then worked for Canaris as a group leader in the Field Counterintelligence Division and became, in 1941, a regimental commander of the Brandenburg Division.

As a monarchist and through his close connection to Canaris, Heinz worked in a leading position in the resistance group Schwarze Kapelle (The Black Orchestra) until being arrested by the Gestapo. After 1945 he first stayed in the Eastern-occupied zone, then moved to the West to form an intelligence service with an individual from Holland. His specialty was information on the placement and strength of Soviet troops in the East zone, which he passed on to the intelligence services of Holland, the U.S.A., and France. He brought the intelligence networks which he had cultivated with him to his new job. A short time after his appointment, however, a scandal was created against him to incriminate him as a Soviet agent. In December 1954, he disappeared into East Berlin, but he swore on his return that he had been kidnapped. Whether or not that was true, he was subsequently dismissed.

Joachim Oster is said to have had an "extraordinarily loyal" relation to the then SPD head and opposition leader Kurt Schumacher, who had control from Hanover over an independent intelligence network in East Germany through the Berlin Ostburo of the SPD. But Oster also maintained "loyal relations" to Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss and Strauss's foster-father Josef Muller, who had been Canaris's contact with the Vatican.

Even here, Gehlen did not sit idly by. Agents of Gehlen soon moved to the top within Theodor Blank's "Blank Office," as the defense ministry was known, since under the occupation the Germans were not allowed to officially have such an institution. The former Gehlen representative Gerhard Wessel and the former Gehlen organization boss Adolf Heusinger arranged for the appropriate flow of intelligence to Pullach exactly as did the later chief of the office, Col. Josef Selmayr, who had come as a Southeast Europe expert from Operation Gehlen. Wessel soon took over the leadership of the sub-section responsible for military intelligence in the defense ministry, and Col. Ernst Ferber, a member of Operation Gehlen, became personnel director in the Ministry for Protection of the Constitution.

How far the infiltration of all the services went is shown by a brief depiction of the "Affair Felfe."

Felfe moved, with two friends he had known from the NSDAP time in Dresden, into Organization Gehlen in the beginning of the 1950s. All three, Felfe, Clemens, and Tiebel, had first served in various functions for the NSDAP in Dresden, then, beginning in 1943, all three worked together in Berlin in the Swiss Section of the National Security Department of the SS. After the war, they worked for the British secret service and then were recruited into the Soviet service. Although then-Interior Minister Gustav Heinemann knew in April 1950 of the Soviet connection, Felfe and his two comrades were taken into Operation Gehlen. Gehlen was so enthusiastic about the "former" British and Soviet agent Felfe that he made him his Soviet Union section leader in Department III for counterintelligence. Thus a man was sitting in a position in the counterintelligence department of the foreign intelligence service of the Federal Republic who, until his arrest in November 1961,passed on all information to the Soviets. And Felfe was not the only case.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Postby admin » Tue Jun 05, 2018 6:23 am

Part 2 of 2

Licensing of Parties: The FDP Example

Since the Germans were to be spoon-fed democracy, no German in 1945 could do anything without a license from the occupying powers. Not only were the reconstruction of the press and radio, with their great influence on public opinion, completely under the control of the Allies, but also the reconstruction of political parties. But here, as with the takeover of the secret services, the principle was that the old Nazis had special rights. The case of the Free Democratic Party, which today behaves in such a liberal manner, is especially revealing.

Following 1945 the FDP was not only a collecting place for leading Nazis, but it was generally known as the party which stood up for the HIAG and other front organizations of the SS. The North Rhine-Westphalian and Hessian regional section of the FDP proposed a program in 1953 which they intended to be understood as a "call for a national assembly" and which they called the "German Program." The program contained the following: "The German Reich, as a decentralized unitary state of the tribes and regions, will give to those tribes and regions, as bodies for self-government, the possibility of unfolding their unique characteristics. On the foundation of a just division of tasks between the Reich and its members, there is no room for a multitude of governments and parliaments." The creation of this "German Reich" would be made possible through an "understanding with Russia."

Shortly before, in 1952, Werner Naumann, the spokesman for the "right" in the FDP, explained what was essential:

National Socialist thought, which has decisively influenced our people and 12 years of German policy, has been further developed by us .... We need a new style, new slogans, new concepts, and a new language if we are to reform our people politically and push them ahead. This style will not be emphatic, propagandistic, or overstated, but strictly factual, a faithful image of our position.


Werner Naumann had been undersecretary under Goebbels, and in Hitler's Last Political Testament had been selected as Goebbels' successor. Together with the Essen lawyer Dr. Ernst Achenbach, who held an influential position as chairman of the foreign-policy committee of the FDP and the Committee for a General Amnesty for War Criminals, Naumann organized a conspiracy for infiltration of parties by leading National Socialists. Achenbach served in that effort as the contact man with industrial figures.

During the Nazi period, Achenbach had held an influential position in the foreign ministry, and after the war maintained connections to the Nazi networks throughout the world. During the war, he had been the political advisor to the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, under whose leadership at that time in Paris ErnstJiinger, the leading "Conservative Revolutionary," also worked. Achenbach was named as the leader of the "Naumann Circle," but in contrast to those more politically exposed, he was not arrested by the British in their spectacular "anti-Nazi" action in 1953.

Naumann had attempted, together with the networks of former subordinates from the Reich propaganda ministry, to form a group which would serve as a gathering place for a great nationalistic opposition. He placed Dr. Friedrich Middelhauve, his closest co-worker, as an advisor to the second national chairman of the FDP, and the FDP soon became a collection of right-wing groups of all colors. Naumann had close relations to Middlehauve and to Dr. Erich Mende, who, as member of the National Committee of the FDP, was the leading fighter for former soldiers and war criminals in the Bundestag (and today is suitably praised in the Nationalzeitung). Naumann consulted with Mende before he met the former SS generals Hausser and Gille in 1952. The idea was the creation of a new "German Reich," which, it was hoped, would come through an understanding with Russia on the question of "German unity."

The FDP became the political arm of the "old boys." In a 1957 enlistment brochure of the Mutual Benefit Society of the Waffen SS, it stated:

In the Bundestag, in the regional parliaments, and everywhere else, it was the FDP which always stood up for us unequivocally .... We have in the past weeks had negotiations with important individuals of the Lower Saxony FDP and have been asked in a comradely manner to work with them. We can work unreservedly with them on the organizational reconstruction of the party on the regional level. A man we can trust will be put up for parliament in a sure district. In every conceivable way we are offered possibilities for cooperation with a new FDP....


Since any political activity in occupied Germany was possible only with the express approval of the Allies, and against the background of real de-Nazification, the suspicion is naturally aroused that the occupying powers consciously encouraged the return of the old Nazis into political affairs. In fact, this suspicion is grounded.

After the original quick trials, there came, on May 8, 1947, an equally quick absolution for all repatriated prisoners of war. As a side effect of this "generous act," many former leading National Socialists, who had until 1945 occupied the highest positions in the party and who had then taken flight to foreign countries, could now return as "war prisoners," and were additionally qualified to claim repatriation compensation and other financial benefits. They did not have anything to fear from courts, de-Nazification hearings, or trials. With that action, an additional door was opened which allowed the occupying powers to incorporate the old Nazi apparatchiks into the "reconstruction."

In this light, it can be added that sixty percent of the diplomatic apparatus of Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop's foreign ministry was incorporated into the foreign ministry of the Federal Republic -- and that specific periods in the later history of the Federal Republic show that this apparatus knew how to use its old foreign networks.

Recent studies on the reconstruction of the German judicial system from 1945to 1949 demonstrate that the same thing happened in this sphere.

In Bavaria (and the same is true in the other zones), not a single judge was tried for his activity in the Third Reich, not even the judges of Hitler's People Courts. Judges and prosecuting attorneys had the choice, after the flurry of de-Nazification died down around 1947-48, of either petitioning to retire "with honor" or entering again into judicial service, and, as the historian Dr. Korts states: "On grounds of the seniority system, they were predestined for first-class careers." In a smooth and shameless manner the judicial apparatus of the new state was furnished with the personnel of the old!

The Continuity of the "Conservative Revolution"

Toward the end of the Third Reich, not only the networks of National Socialists organized themselves into 'a Nazi International; the Conservative Revolution or "German Movement" carefully worked on the continuation of its intellectual tradition and on the necessary organizational substructures. Moeller van den Bruck's book The Third Reich had been the battle cry of the German Movement before the National Socialists made that term their own. The present intellectual leader of the Conservative Revolutionaries, the director of the Siemens Foundation, Armin Mohler, expresses this concept in his book The Conservative Revolution: "In The Third Reich, Moeller van den Bruck contrasts to the universalistic Holy Roman Empire of the German nation and to the lesser German 'transitional empire' of Bismarck a portrait of a Final Empire in which the contradictions of socialism and nationalism, of 'left' and 'right' are sublimated and find a comprehensive unity." Without any interruption, the German Movement pulled together in their various outward forms in order to realize this Final Reich through the destruction of the Third Reich.

Before the war, these circles became known as the "socialists within the NSDAP" around the Strasser brothers, but Hans Zehrer's "Black ·Front" circles (see Chapter 8), to which Sigmund Warburg, Ernst Junger, Graf von Moltke, Otto and Gregor Strasser, Ernst von Salomon, Giselher Wiersing, and other belonged, must also be noted here. The Strasser faction had attempted to push the ideas of Naumann, Masaryk, and Moeller van der Bruck into the ascendency in the NSDAP, until in 1934 it finally became clear that the south German faction around Hitler was firmly in command. Shortly thereafter, Straser, Rahm, and others were either murdered or forced into exile. Some, however, decided to cooperate with the Nazi state.

The partisans of the Conservative Revolution, especially Ernst Junger, advocated quite concrete "territorial divisions," which were taken up again in practically the same form after 1945. In the circles of the Conservative Revolution, the dividing line between the Catholic South from the Protestant North was understood more as the line of Roman conquest rather than as the "German line of destiny." Mohler advocates the idea that "a space which has never been incorporated into the West by the Roman legions has different political possibilities from any which was once within the Roman orbit." Concerning friends and foes and therefore concerning possible alliances, Mohler says, "against the civilized, capitalistic West, against the Roman-Catholic South, for and with the Germanic-pastoral North and the barbarian-Bolshevik East."

The meaning of these ideas is important because they are appropriate for bringing together and fusing the "Right" and the "Left." The National Bolshevists within the German Movement around the Strasser brothers wanted a connection between the goals of radical socialists and radical nationalists, which was to be reached through an alliance between the two "proletarian" nations of Germany and Russia against the "capitalistic" West. Gregor Strasser spoke of an "anti-capitalist longing" which gripped the entire German nation.

The Third Way

A "third way" was sought, beyond Western capitalism or Eastern Communism, a "third front" or "third party," which would gather under the banner of the peasant revolution: in the Black Front. As already cited in Chapter 1, the standpoint of the Black Front was summarized by a National Revolutionary in 1932, and is still valid today for the Conservative Revolution:

The Black Front can be clearly situated if we dispense with the bourgeois-democratic schema of "left" and "right." Let us imagine the German parties and political currents to be shaped like' a horseshoe, whose bend represents the Center and at whose end-points are the KPD and NSDAP respectively; the space occupied by the Black Front lies inbetween those two poles of Communism and National Socialism. The opposites of "left" and "right" are dissolved by their entering into a kind of synthesis, while strictly excluding the "bourgeois." This position between the two poles is the best characterization of the tensile nature of the Black Front. ...


One of the most important advocates of the "third front" or "Black Front" was Hans Zehrer. Zehrer was head of the most important newspaper of the Black Front in Weimar Germany, Tat, in Jena, which was published by Diederichs, a leading Freemasonic publisher where the Thule Collection and a large number of Eastern Buddhist and German mystical texts were also published. Included within Zehrer's circle of activity were persons who were taken up in the post-war period into the world of the German press, promoted especially by the British occupiers. This becomes understandable if we read Zehrer's statements in Tat in 1931, where he anticipates Pan-European disciple Winston Churchill's Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) concept of a "Bavarian-Austrian-Hungarian Confederation." Zehrer demands that Germany must take up definite alliances for Central Europe and the Marches.

The federation corresponds in foreign policy to the idea of the Reich, but not the Second Reich ... but rather the idea of the Third Reich in the sense of Moeller van den Bruck. The liberal idea of the nation state collapses, the idea of the federal Reich opposes it, which will dissolve the Reich first into the federation of separate regions but which must additionally take on the care and responsibility for the space of Central Europe. This will be the task and the problem of the federation: to acquaint ourselves with the Eastern space from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, to travel through that space, to fill that space with its ideas, to find German ruins and ancient settlements in this space, to awaken, to seek bases, to fill this space ....


The leadership of this movement and this intellectual tendency could be "guaranteed only through elites and oligarchs," Zehrer wrote in conclusion. Zehrer "spent the winter" with a group of likeminded individuals at Sylt, after he had taken on various short-term positions in Nazi Germany. After 1934, the Underberg and von Opel families, the publishing families of Govert and Rowohlt, the writer Ernst von Salomon, and later Axel Springer all belonged to the Sylt group.

Other members of the Tat circle had fled the country with Otto Strasser, the leader of the Black Front who had worked with the Tat circle, the Landvolkjugend (Youth of the Country) and the Bundischen Jugend (Youth of the Federation). Ernst Junger worked with the German embassy in Paris under Otto Abetz, with whom Dr. Achenbach, already discussed, was active, while some followers of the Conservative Revolution such as Hjalmar Schacht had participated in the destructive madness and had helped organize it until a few months before the end of the Third Reich. All were in favor, however, of a return of the Hohenzollern monarchy.

After the war, the Conservative Revolutionaries came back together from every direction and immediately assumed important positions in the newly created state. Otto Strasser considered National Socialist rule as a necessary historical phase before the coming "New Order." National Socialism was "one of those periods, appearing to contemporaries and the survivors as a hideous time of destruction, of the fall of a world ready for collapse, which exactly because of its task of destruction is incapable, which intrinsically must be incapable, of building up and forming the New Order which is forcing its way up into the world." And Hjalmar Schacht was confident that "out of the misery of these two wars" a "moral new orientation of mankind will arise, which will be stronger than all technology."

Guiding the Press

Hans Zehrer was first made editor by the British of the British-controlled daily newspaper Die Welt, but was forced by overwhelming protests against his well-known pro-Nazi attitudes to give up the position. He was later cleared, however, by the Protestant Church and by Bishop Lillje, and was able to take the position of editor with the Protestant newspaper Sontagsblatt. In 1946, Zehrer returned, if only briefly, to the political scene as he wrote, with Adolf von Thadden (the later founder of the National Partei Deutschlands -- NPD) the program of the Deutschen Rechtspartei (German Right Party), which demanded a return of the monarchy and "the national unity ofthe whole German people on the hereditary land which was cultivated by their ancestors." After this interlude, he was fetched back to Hamburg again by the British as editor. There he built up a newspaper empire under Freemasonic control with Alex Springer that, in parallel to the publishing empires of Rowohlts, Goverts, Suhrkamps, and so forth, fought sharply against Adenauer's policies. In place of Adenauer's conception, he supported a reunification of a neutralized Germany under the "pan-German" faction, and, along the lines of the old national-conservative conception, viewed Adenauer's attempted Western integration of the Federal Republic as a catastrophe.

Only much later were Die Welt, Springer, et al. to acquire an anti-Soviet image. Many co-workers of the Black Front were moved up into leading positions. Giselher Wirsing was a foreign-policy expert in Zehrer's circle who had been editor of the Nazi newspaper Munchner Neueste Nachrichten, and had been a close associate of Walter Schellenberg, with whom he negotiated in the later days of the war in Hitler's name .with the Swedish and British for a separate peace. After the war he became the editor of the newspaper Christ und Welt/Deutsche Zeitung and continued there for 17 years.

Otto Strasser himself continued in exile until 1955, from where, first in Switzerland, later in Canada, he directed his international network with the help of numerous friends.

In March 1955, he returned to the Federal Republic. Many groups of the national opposition which were fighting against Adenauer's Western integration saw in Strasser the potential leader of a "national collective movement." Strasser founded the German Social Union and the "Alliance. for German Renewal" which was to serve as a nonpartisan organization to "continue the spiritual preparation for the new order:" Strasser's program stipulated a "sovereign Germany" in "the three zones of Bonn, Berlin, and Pankow," the construction of a German national army ("armed neutrality"), and a new national order in economic and social policy. In October 1958 Strasser organized a "Congress of European Neutralists" in Heidelberg n order to create an effective "third force" in German politics which could implement the reunification.

In the overheated atmosphere around the rearmament in the Federal Republic and through the anti-nuclear movement of these years, the National Bolshevists of the Conservative Revolution received a great stimulus. Participants in the congress included Soviet-influenced groups such as the Congress of German Unity, the German Bund, the Standing Congress Against Nuclear Rearmament, and the Pan-German Union. Foreign fascist groups were sent in to participate, as were reporters of various national-neutralist publications, along with observers from the Soviet zone, representatives of the National Front, the Liberal Democratic Party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD), the Soviet agency ADN, and so forth.

The NDPD had been founded in 1948 in the Soviet zone, and was a National Bolshevist party which was in favor of reunification, a general amnesty for National Socialists, and German-Soviet friendship. Their chairman, Vinzent Muller, also founded the "National Front" in 1950, in which all the "old boys" could gather and exercise a powerful influence in the Western zones. On the steering committee of the National Front was from the beginning one of the most decisive national revolutionaries of the Weimar time, Ernst Niekisch, who exercised from this position important influence over the financing and direction of "nationalist" and National Bolshevist organizations in the West. The conveyor of money for all these "nationalist" groups, which had their source in the East, was Werner Schafer, who had been a concentration camp head during the Third Reich -- in Oranienburg! Because of his extreme brutality, he was soon made the commandant of the infamous Moorland slave-labor camp in Emsland.

This confused conglomeration of left and right becomes explicable if the aforementioned principle of the Black Front is recalled. According to his own writings, as early as 1920 Otto Strasser had met with Comintern chief Zinoviev as well as Hitler, and had combined elements from Bolshevism and Hitlerism.

A statement of Armin Mohler is interesting in regard to the present situation. Mohler said that "National Bolshevism will always have its roots in Germany north of the Main River and east of the Rhineland." Mohler saw in the "messianic tones" of the two "prophets" of the Conservative Revolution, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky -- "each thereby indicating with the finest individuality the position of his country" -- the crucial reference points for Conservative Revolutionaries in East and West. In Nietzsche's literary remains was found a four-point program for German politics. The first point was called "The Sense of Reality"; according to the third, "We need an unconditional agreement with Russia, with a new common program which ,does not allow any British ideas to come to dominance in Russia. No American future!" According to the last point, however: "A European future is unstoppable and the unification in a Christian perspective a great misfortune .... " And Dostoevsky wrote, "Two great people, us and them, are predestined to change the face of Europe."

East Bloc Connections

Those in the East did not hesitate to take advantage, exactly like the Allies in the West, of the Nazis' secret-service and intelligence networks. Very early there were close alliances between certain Comintern networks and the networks of the Nazi secret service and party apparatus. In 1931, Communists and National Socialists worked together -- the joint work by Joseph Goebbels and Walter Ulbricht in 1931 on the Berlin transportation workers' strike should be recalled. A graphic picture from more recent times is the fact that on Goering's yacht, which is now in the possession of Stern magazine reporter Heidemann, who dug up the bogus Hitler Diaries, people of the type of SS General Wolff met with Leopold Trepper, the leader of the Comintern resistance group, the Rote Kapelle. And that is no isolated example.

The Ryazan School played an important role in German-Russian relations. Captured German officers, among whom was Field Marshal Paulus, commander of the German Army at Stalingrad, were taken to this Red Army school. Some of the individuals of this group later went to the East German military academy at Dresden, which is today called "the long arm of Ryazan" and which is still an important German-Russian contact point. Another important institution was the Antifa School in Krasnogorsk. Beginning in 1942, it was directed by Wilhelm Zaisser, who had been in the Soviet Union at the espionage academy of the Red Army and belonged to the faction of the Moscow police minister Lavrentii Beria.

Many German war prisoners, who, according to Soviet plans, were to assume important positions in the German post-war government, went through Zaisser's Antifa School. In Krasnogorsk, Zaisser also recruited a group of former Abwehr officials and fuctionaries out of the Gestapo, the SD, and the SS. One of the most well-known of these was Lieutenant General Bamler, former section leader in the Abwehr, a friend of Admiral Canaris, and a confidant of Heydrich. He had been taken prisoner in 1944. Even during his Abwehr service in Paris, Bamler had had contacts with the Paris cell of the Rote Kapelle.

After 1945, Wilhelm Zaisser was the first head of the ministry for state security in East Germany, sharing the leadership with his old friends Ernst Wollweber and Erich Mierlke. Zaisser had enough experienced German secret service agents available to build up the ministry. Even Gestapo head Muller had offered his service to the Soviets in 1945. He conceived a central security ministry that would borrow its organization from the Soviet state police and from the foreign-service sections of the Gestapo, and would also employ the infiltration techniques of the old Communist Party apparatus. After a short transitional period, the ministry for state security could take up its work.

Many resistance fighters or even fellow travelers may have been astonished at the individuals whom Zaisser had gathered together. For example, the former Canaris ally General Bamler advised the ministry, and some former Gestapo functionaries such as the SS Obersturmfuhrer Louis Hagemeister, the earlier director of the espionage/counter-intelligence central of the Nazi Reichssicherheitsdienst office, was now to take over the interrogation office of the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service -- SSD), in the regional government in Schwerin. SS Untersturmfuhrer Johann Sanitzer became a major in the SSD regional government at Erfurt; earlier he had been the leader of the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

As in the old days in the Nazi Reichssicherheit office, where strict party discipline was not absolutely necessary to a successful career, it was not essential here for the people of the SSD who moved up quickly to be members of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Good technocrats were preferred.

The group around Vladimir Semyonov, the chief Soviet diplomat in East Berlin who in 1942 controlled German emigre networks from Stockholm and later was a messenger for the Soviet Union for many years in Bonn, included Zaisser and Liberal Democratic Party functionaries like Kaster who, like their friends in the West, worked for the establishment of a reunited, non-Communist, neutralized Germany.

Hermann Moritz Wilhelm Kastner played a central role. Kastner was the founder and chairman of the Liberal Democrats after the war. He had come in contact with the Western secret service through Meissen bishop Wieneken, but supposedly worked with the West only after 1948. Wieneken became acquainted with the Slovak Dr. Carnol Tarnay, who worked for the ClA and who from then on exchanged information with Kastner via West Berlin. Semyonov had close relations to Kastner. Kastner also had close relations to the Soviet supreme commander in Germany, Army General Zhukov. Kastner was a possible partner for a definite Russian faction just in case a neutralized, reunified Germany came into existence.

In the Soviet Zone: the pro-Soviet faction under Ulbricht stood directly opposed to the neutralist faction around Kastner. These two factions also existed in the Soviet Union, in one form or another. Kastner declared to the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet in 1950: "Attempts to bolshevize Germany would fail; communism is not the sort of thing that can be exported from Russia to Germany." After Stalin's death, the Soviet circles around Semyonov as well as the Western reunification faction wanted to politically activate Kastner. Semyonov is said to have recommended dismantling the hegemonic position of the SED leadership under Ulbricht. and creating an entirely new government in East Germany; and Semyonov is said to have offered Kastner the leadership of the government on June 13, 1953.

The East German uprising of June 17, 1953, however, destroyed Semyonov's dreams along with the corresponding conceptions in the West.

Conservative Revolutionaries in the West

Otto Strasser's "German Social Movement" was not the only organization on the side of the Conservative Revolution which over and over again sought to effect a coalescence of the left and the right. The Socialist Reich Party (SRP), founded in 1949, was important as a temporary measure.

Zehrer and von Thadden's German Right Party (DRP), which later called itself the German Reich Party, was able to elect six individuals to the Bundestag in the first German parliamentary elections. All six came out of Lower Saxony. Chairman of the DRP faction was Dr. Franz Richter. Only in 1952, when Richter went over to the SRP, did it come out that his real name was Fritz Rossler. He had entered the NSDAP in 1930, and had served as the leader of the national center for Reich propaganda at the end of the war. As a supposed Sudeten German, he had gained a rapid influence with the Sudeten Germans after the war and became, soon after his entry into the DRP, the chairman of the party. In 1949, Rossler alias Richter was taken for six weeks to the famous British re-education center of Wilton Park, and from then on carried out with renewed elan the activities of the radical right.

Adolf von Thadden is the second prominent figure in the DRP. Acquainted with Sefton Delmer and Otto John, he was variously criticized by other right-wing politicians since he had "on orders of the British shoved himself into the reconstruction of the DRP." He was also criticized for having worked with the Polish security service; after the Soviet invasion he had remained in the part of the Eastern zone that was administered by the Poles, and worked there as an estate director. In 1946, he worked with Hans Zehrer to write the program for the DRP. Among the founding individuals of the DRP was Otto-Ernst Remer, a former SS member who had by no means given his all at the front, but rather had early made his way to the West in order to work from December 1946 to February 1948 for the U.S. Army -- writing a history of the war!

The SRP and the DRP

In 1949, the Socialist Reich Party was founded, which was later outlawed along with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) under the law for protection of the constitution. Otto-Ernst Remer was the second chairman of the SRP. Its program arose in the British internment camp at Staumuhle. There Dr. Bernhard Gericke wrote a book The European Revolution, expressing his "theses for the renewal of political life in Germany," which simply restated National Socialist ideas in a cleaned-up version for all of Europe. The SRP is interesting not least because of reports that during the Third Reich, Himmler and Schellenberg had proposed to Churchill and Montgomery that "a new ideology should be cooked up from the best parts of National Socialism and other ideologies" and an SS state superior to the Nazi regime be erected on that basis.

Dr. Gerhard Kruger and Dr. Fritz Dorls were in the same internment camp as Gericke. The "Action Program of the Socialist Reich Party" of 1949 demanded the

unification of all Germans in an organic German Reich. Every attempt to create a partial German state in the East or West as a satellite of alien powers must be viewed as an intensification of tIre fateful split of the Reich and therefore must be rejected. The claim, inherited by the Germans through history and culture, through human and ethnic rights, to the collectivity of its national space is inalienable.... The SRP affirms in the Reich concept the ethnically and historically conditioned form of order of the Germans .... The SRP acknowledges one authentic ethnic socialism of all Germans which has grown up out of the spirit of our time.


The hard core of the extreme right from the British internment camp soon controlled contacts to the Eastern sector. Dr. Dorls was in touch with Soviet officials. in Berlin-KarIshorst, the Soviet headquarters in East Germany, and through his activity as editor of the Lower Saxony CDU party newspaper, maintained simultaneously close connections to Count Westarp, who later entered the SRP but at this time still worked in the press office of the Lower Saxony regional government. Dorls and Westarp were in the confidence of the Lower Saxony CDU regional chairman, Dr. Gunter Gereke, who a short time later moved to the Soviet zone and there became active for the National Front. Wolf Graf von Westarp had been a member of the Allgemeine SS and was put into the press office in 1945 immediately by the British. Later he became a member of the editorial board of the East-financed newspaper Die Nation. The German representative of the post-war fascist Malmo International, Karl Heinz Priester, of Wiesbaden, was also a member of the SRP.

Although the Anglo-Soviet connections of this party were quite obvious, they were not once mentioned during the trial of the party before the Federal Constitutional Court. The grounds for outlawing the SRP were limited to the fact that they were identical in personnel and ideology, among other things, with the NSDAP.

The SRP branch in Hanover had close connections with Berlin-Karlshorst. In August 1951, the Berlin regional leader of the SRP resigned from his position because he was in disagreement with negotiations for financial support which the SPD members Count Westarp and Dr. Kruger had under discussion with Soviet contacts. It is therefore not surprising that the quite open contacts between the SRP and the Communist Party (KPD) in the West zone, especially with the vice-chairman of the KPD and member of the Bundestag Kurt Muller were controlled from Hanover. The old tradition of the NSDAP-KPD alliance was continued in the so-called Unemployed Committees, which existed until 1952 in Lower Saxony and North Rhine Westphalia. In the Bundestag, Dr. Doris and Rossler, alias Richter, voted with the Communists against the proposal made by the other parties on the question of German Unity.

After the prohibition of the SRP as a successor party of the NSDAP, the right collected in the German Reich Party (DRP), which was working for the same "third way" and also advocated a neutralized Germany. Additionally, this party advocated direct discussions between Bonn and East Berlin. Adolf von Thadden was again on the steering committee of the DRP. Exemplary Of the position of this grouping was a telegram of the former Hitler Youth leader Herbert Freiberger in 1956 to the Soviet ambassador in Bonn, Valerian Sorin, which said that the policies of Dr. Adenauer vis-a-vis the Soviet Union are "strongly disapproved of by many millions of Germans" and that efforts would be made to "create the preconditions for a German reunification." Freiberger was the chairman of the DRP in Lower Saxony.

The chairman and vice-chairman of the district of Greater Berlin of the DRP had direct contact to Field Marshal (ret.) Paulus, who was living in Dresden, and to the National Front in East Berlin. At the Pan-German Soldiers' meetings. which regularly took place in East Berlin, they had made contacts with the Dresden Paulus Group. Others also cultivated connections to the Dresden Group, including the former Federal Republic minister Theodor Oberlander.

The forum on fundamental principles held on the DRP Party Day in September 1956 had the theme of "Germany between East and West" and demanded a "confederation of both states." The kind of confederation they contemplated is clear from the anti-Western statements of participants who declared:

We should proceed from the fundamental principle that the so-called liberation of the central German region according to the rules of the game of economic and political managers should never take place with the purpose of replacing what is presently there in central Germany with the world of unscrupulous business and profit calculations of all sorts of firms.


On the original DRP steering committee of three, along with von Thadden, was General (ret.) Andrae, whose Anglo-Soviet profile as a "pan-German" is so typical of the post-war history of Germany. Andrae was the former German commandant on Crete, had been taken prisoner by the British, and then turned over to the Greeks. He was released in 1952, plunged into the world of the right of the DRP, and devoted himself more and more strongly as time went by to collaboration with shadow newspapers such as the Nationaler Rundschau, which were notoriously financed by the East.

With the introduction of the five-percent clause, putting a floor on the vote needed to enter a legislative body, the DRP was able to get into the regional assembly in Rhineland Pfalz in 1959 with 5.1 percent of the vote. The election theme of the party could have been written by anti-nuclear activist Bertrand Russell or the present-day peace movement. The DRP used protests "against procurement of land for NATO air bases" in exactly the way that the worked-up "fear of stationing of nuclear weapons" is used, and campaigned against the "occupation climate" of the Federal Republic. Their featured speaker of the day was Col. (ret.) Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who had just returned from Latin America.

The Continuities

The program of the DRP is still current today since the left and right have, throughout the post-war period, supported this very program, in one form or another: The Germans have the right "to build a Reich in Central Europe, the hereditary settlement land of their state .... Only after the restoration of the Reich is the unification of Europe possible." Point two of the program was: "Foreign troops maintain the division of Germany. Therefore, removal of all occupation troops! The reunification is only possible if Germany is prepared to remain neutral and not to take part in military alliances with world powers. Let Germany be open to East and West!"

Conservative Revolutionaries also permeated other parties and political groupings. The German Party (Deutsche Partei-DP), whose chairman, Dr. Heinrich Hellwege, had been appointed to the British zone advisory council in 1946. A member of the first and second Bundestags and later the prime minister of Lower Saxony, he desired a restoration of the monarchy and close collaboration between Lower Saxony and England. In 1952, Hellwege demanded that a "conservation revolution" should renew all those forces that had been absorbed by the Nazis in 1933 and thereby turned into their opposites. The Nazis had proven to be reactionaries because they had not freed themselves from the "nationalistic frame of mind of the nineteenth century." The century of nation-states and class struggles was now over; "today we live in the century of great expanses and of socialist cooperation."

Also a member of the German Party was refugee politician Dr. von Merkatz, later chairman of the Pan-Europa Union, as was the former commerce minister Dr. Seebohn.

Since we have not referred to the major parties such as the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Union, and the Christian Socialist Union, two things must be indicated: first, that many politicians of the small parties named such as the DRP and DP went over to the major parties after the dissolution of the other parties in the 1960s, and second, that the same kinds of fights on these fundamental issues had taken place from the beginning in these major parties.

It is not true that the theses presented here merely belong to 'the past; the horseshoe image is still used today as a political concept by the Conservative Revolution, in order to build up a "Fourth Reich," Quite openly, Armin Mohler says today that the enemies of Germany are those who "have instituted and maintained the split in Germany" and that "Germany will [make] itself into the spokesman of those ih the world [who] seek to defend themselves against the great homogenization under the Soviet Star and the Stars and Stripes" -- which particularly includes for Mohler Khomeini's Iran and Qaddafi's Libya! In order to create a new Reich today, the left and right must be transcended, and a new Black Front created. For, as Mohler says in the afterword of his book The Conservative Revolution: "It struck the author how much of what is said and done in today's rebellion, despite the fact that all that could be heard in the foreground was the vocabulary of 1789,comes very close to that which was reconstructed in the foregoing book. No present-day rebels may be aware of this connection. That strengthens the author in his conception of the necessity of such efforts."

Since 1945, the work for the new Reich has been carried on in a variety of external forms. In 1984, the work has come decisively closer to its goal.

The message in a lead article in the Swiss newspaper Die Tat in December 1946, "The New Antiquity," was at that time a sort of strategic directive:

Revolution means: re-volution, to roll back, the coming again of an earlier condition. In the beginning was the word, and the present teaches us to pay more attention to the original sense of the word "revolution." Europe, which has experienced for the past 150 years an era of revolution, of rolling back, has in this time overcome and negated the legacy of many centuries. This legacy is the Western community, in the spirit of Christianity. But today the cross is decayed and the disintegration of the Western community is proceeding of itself with startling rapidity wherever we look. Old idols, which were long believed to have been preached to death, seek their fallen temples. The Western superstructure, that community of Roman, German, and Slavic peoples, who recently were rooted in Christianity, is dissolving, like snow in the sun. In the new blaze of a Saturnian star that proclaims the beginning of a new antiquity, piece after piece of the thoughts of Western thought binding the peoples are melting away. Naked and isolated, the black craigs of nations appear out of the ebbing sea that has concealed them for centuries. The people seem to listen within, and to grow back into themselves.


A re-Asianization in Russia, the article claimed, has already begun despite Bolshevism, in Germany a re-Germanization, in Italy a return to the Caesar cult, and so forth. It then cites the key ideas of the Ernst Junger circle, that nation-states must be dissolved into the tribes and regions (Franconia, Silesia, Tuscany, Brittany), that is, into ever-smaller unities. This is to take place, however, so that from there, the Swiss and their allies may be able to create something greater that goes beyond nation-states. Within this retrograde motion is said to be already hidden the turn in the opposite direction. And at the end of the Swiss article of 1946, we read : "Homo revolvens plays his part in the great world theatre: He will not rest until the contents of museums are exchanged. Then the sacrificial stones will again stand in the meadows and the crosses in the showcase.... "

______________

Bibliography

Brockdorff, Werner, "Flucht vor Nurnberg" -- Plane und Organisation der Fluchtwege der NS-Prominenz im "romischen Weg," Munich-Wels, 1969.

Dulles, Allen, Germany's Underground, New York, 1947.

Frieser, Karl-Heinz, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in der Sowjetunion und das Nationalkomitee "Freies Deutschland," Inaug. Dissertation, Phil. Fakultat, Wurzburg, 1981.

Funke, Manfred (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die Machte, Dusseldorf, 1978.

Grabbe, Hans-Jurgen, Unionsparteien, Sozialdemokraten und Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika 1945-1966, Dusseldorf, 1983.

Hohne, Hemz, Canaris-Patriot im Zwielicht, Munich, 1978.

Jenke, Manfred, "Verschworung von rechts"-Bericht uber den Rechtsradikalismus in Deutschland nach 1945, Berlin, 1961.

John, Otto, Zweimal kam ich heim, vom Verschworer zum Schutzer der Verfassung, Dusseldorf, 1969.

Mader, Julius, Die graue Hand-Abrechnung mit den Bonner Geheimdiensten, Berlin, 1960.

Nollau, Gunther, Das Amt. 50 Jahre Zeuge der Geschichte, Munchen, 1978

Pomorin, Junge, Biermann, "Geheime Kanale" -- der Nazi-Mafia auf der Spur, 1981.

Schacht, Hjalmar, My First 76 Years, Bad Worishofen, 1953.

Schellenberg, Walter, The Schellenberg Memoirs, London, 1956.

Skorzeny, Otto, Secret Missions; War Memoirs of the Most Dangerous Man in Europe, New York, 1950.

Steininger, Rolf, Deutsche Geschichte 1945-1961, Frankfurt, 1983.

Walde, Thomas, ND-Report, die Rolle der geheimen Nachrichtendienste im Regierungssystem der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Munich, 1971.

Wechsberg, Joseph (ed.), The Murderer; Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs, New York, 1967.

Ziegler, Jean, Das Schweizer Imperium, Hamburg, 1982.

Zolling, Hermann, and Hohne, Heinz, Pullach intern. General Gehlen und die Geschichte des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, Hamburg, 1971.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 1 of 2

7. The Nuremberg Trials, Hjalmar Schacht, and the Cold War

Dealing with the Nuremberg Trials of 1946 is a highly ambiguous matter. There was the spectacular trial of Goering and associates, against the major war criminals. But there was also the second round of trials, against the Nazi doctors and judges, against the industrialists Flick, Krupp, and the executives of I.G. Farben, against the SSshock troops, the Wehrmacht High Command, against the Wilhelmstrasse foreign ministry, and so forth -- twelve trials in all.

The international military tribunal judging Goering and associates was conducted by many of the participants with the high-minded intent of preventing one of the darkest chapters in man's history from ever recurring, yet it acquitted one of the most evil Nazi criminals of all, economics minister Hjalmar Schacht. The later trials, the so-called trials of the "minors," presided over by three American judges, sought to try and punish others who were co-responsible for the horrors of war and genocide, but it suffered from a series of intensive operations to cover up findings proving closely intermeshed collaboration with the Nazis on all sides. What could have been a new beginning was sabotaged.

Preparations for the Trial

Before the war's end, discussions had begun over whether to hold such a trial. Allied opinion was sharply divided. As anger began to rise over the barbaric war, many began to favor a "short trial" for Germany's entire leadership, including its military leadership, in the event of a German surrender. This question came up directly in talks among Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at the so-called "Tripartite Dinner" arranged by the Soviet Embassy in connection with the Teheran Conference. Stalin demanded that Germany's entire military leadership, which he estimated to number between 50,000 and 100,000, must be immediately liquidated after the capitulation. Roosevelt assented to this at the time, whereas Churchill sharply protested against what he called the cold-blooded execution of soldiers who had fought for their country.

These positions shifted as the war drew to a close. While the Americans. and Russians were increasingly distancing themselves from the idea of liquidation, in favor of putting the German leadership on trial, Churchill made a sudden 180-degree turn, vehemently calling for the liquidation of the top leadership. Churchill had his reasons for this new attitude; for one thing, he did not welcome the prospect of a community of principle between the Americans and the Russians on this question, which might result in a trial that would set a dangerous precedent in international law. Moreover, liquidation was more in keeping with Churchill's enthusiasm for the brutal Morgenthau Plan. At the end of 1944, it looked as if Churchill would be able to get his way; at the Quebec Conference, he and Roosevelt hastily signed the Morgenthau Plan for the transformation of Germany into a politically splintered, impoverished, de-industrialized pastureland, as well as Lord Simon's and Morgenthau's joint project for executions without due process. There is in fact evidence that at this time Roosevelt went so far as to seriously consider having the entire German population sterilized. Roosevelt's legal advisor Samuel Rosenman reports that Roosevelt had fun drawing a sketch of a machine that could carry out mass sterilization operations.

Already on Sept. 5, 1944, U.S. War Secretary Henry Stimson had written to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to confront Morgenthau with the glaring flaws in his plan. Depriving Germany of all its industries would affect the other European nations as well, and would condemn millions of Germans to death by starvation. Economic oppression of this magnitude would be dangerous, "because it does not prevent war, it only paves the way for the next one." Stimson, declaring to Roosevelt that the proposed liquidation of industry would be a crime against humanity and a sheer act of revenge on the part of the war victors, wrote: "It will make more of an impression on our posterity if we put these people on trial in a manner in keeping with our advanced level of civilization.... We should therefore participate in an international tribunal which should be devoted to putting on trial the highest echelon of the Nazi leadership."

As Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull received word of the proceedings in Quebec, they mounted a common front against Morgenthau as a meddler in foreign policy. Yet before a battle broke out within the Cabinet, Morgenthau very suddenly became discredited. The Morgenthau Plan and the Quebec agreement were leaked to the press, unleashing a storm of American protest which swept Morgenthau away. Roosevelt speedily distanced himself from Morgenthau's concept, later spoke of "grave mistakes" launched in Quebec, and maintained that he could not recall having signed Morgenthau's memorandum.

In general, within the policy-making circles of Britain and the United States, unbending hatred for the Nazis criss-crossed with open sympathy for this "master race which unfortunately failed." Those who were assuming a militantly anti-Nazi stance in order to cover up their own collaboration, vied with those who wanted the horrors of the war to be quickly forgotten, so as to get to work reconstructing Germany's industry and agriculture.

Eventually, the approaching Cold War rapidly put a brake on this infighting. Decisions had to be made, and quickly. It had been decided that the Central European industrial heartland was to be built up into a strong bulwark against the Bolsheviks. In his book War or Peace John Foster Dulles described this quite graphically: "A revived Germany can be a great trump card in the hands of the West. While it pulls East Berlin into the Western sphere of power, it can gain a predominant strategic position in Central Europe, which undermines the Soviet military and political position in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the neighboring countries."

The London Accord

On Aug. 8, 1945, Justice Robert Jackson, later to be chief U.S. Prosecutor at Nuremberg, helped to bring about the conclusion of the London Great Power accord on the apprehension and trial of the leading war criminals. As the site of the trial, he chose Nuremberg, the city where the Nazis had celebrated their greatest triumphs, held their party meetings with mass torchlight processions, and in 1935 announced the infamous racial laws. Of this once magnificent medieval city, in which men like Albrecht Durer, Adam Krafft, Hans Sachs, and Peter Henlein lived and worked, practically nothing but the Palace of Justice and the adjacent prison was left.

In his report to the President on preparations for putting National Socialist criminals on trial, he wrote:

Doubtless what appeals to men of good will and common sense as the crime which comprehends all lesser crimes, is the crime of making unjustifiable war. ... But International Law as taught in the Nineteenth and the early part of the Twentieth Century generally declared that war-making was not illegal and is no crime at law.... This, however, was a departure from the doctrine taught by Grotius, the father of International Law, that there is a distinction between just and unjust war. ...

The reestablishment of the principle of unjustifiable war is traceable in many steps. One of the most significant is the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928, by which Germany, Italy apd Japan, common with ourselves and practically all the nations of the world, renounced war as an instrument of national policy, bound themselves to seek the settlement of disputes only by pacific means .... Unless this Pact altered the legal status of wars of aggression, it has no meaning at all and comes close to being an act of deception .... This Pact constitutes only one in a series of acts which ... brought International Law into harmony with the common sense of mankind, that every unjustifiable war is a crime .... We therefore propose to charge that a war of aggression is a crime, and that modern International Law has abolished the defense that those who incite or wage it are engaged in legitimate business.[/quote]

With this line of argument, Jackson had forged a link to that rich humanist tradition of the seventeenth century which in the sphere of law is inseparable from the names Leibniz, Grotius, and Pufendorf. Hearkening back to Grotius is particularly appropriate, because with his work De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) it was Grotius who laid the basis for the Peace of Westphalia and thus for the resolution of the Thirty Years War; at that time as well, the world had faced the rubble-heap inflicted by barbarism.

Along with the London accord came a statute for the court which contained the most important norms of law. They dealt with punishable offenses and punishments as well as certain general questions of justice, and specified the applicable rules of procedure. The decisive article in the statute, on which the indictments hinged, is Article 6, under the general heading "Jurisdiction and General Principles," which runs as follows:

.. .The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility.

(a) Crimes Against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include but not be limited to murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;

(c) Crimes Against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such plan.


Arguments Against the Trial

Opponents of the Nuremberg Trials have always raised the objection that the trials violated the most elementary principles of law, specifically the principle of nullen crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege, which is to say, there can be no crime or punishment unless defined by a pre-existing law. The relevant laws for the trials at Nuremberg were only resolved upon after the events in question had taken place. The defense argued that such a procedure ran counter to the law of all civilized nations; since no legal statute had determined the concept of a war of aggression as of the time of the allegedly criminal actions, and no punishment had been established for the perpetrators, no court of law could be convened to judge and sentence the criminals.

The Nuremberg Court examined all these arguments, and after careful evaluation rejected them as unfounded, instead fully associating itself with Jackson's argument on this question. The relevant passage in the judgment reads:

The working out of the statute took place in the exercise of the sovereign power of the legislature of those countries to which the German Reich had unconditionally surrendered; and the indubitable right of those countries to mandate laws for the occupied areas is recognized by the civilized world. The statute is no arbitrary exercise of the power of the victorious powers, but is, in the view of the Tribunal, as will be shown below, the expression of the timely creation of statutes of international law; and in so far as that is true, the statute in itself is a contribution to international law.


Even after the London accord was signed, opposition continued to be voiced against the trials. In the United States, criticism was particularly strong, as shown by the statements of U.S. Supreme Court Chief justice Harlan Stone, who made no secret of his low regard for the Nuremberg Trials. In view of this mood, it was certain that a morally steadfast man who conceived of the trials as a "mission" for the future good of mankind would have to contend with difficulties, animosities, and obstacles within his own camp.

On Dec. 4, 1945, a report appeared in the American Army journal Stars and Stripes sharply attacking Jackson. The attack should be seen in conjunction with the resignation of the acting prosecution spokesman, "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Their self-estimations illustrate the sharp difference between the character of the two: while Jackson said, "Time will show whether you are right or I am," Donovan's view was, "Time will not care one way or the other whether we are right or not."

In the courtroom, their methods were equally disparate. Jackson set himself to work on the extensive documentary material, with which he intended to prove the guilt of the leading Nazis, certainly a laborious task which attracted no publicity but was appropriate to the gravity and import of the trial. Donovan had no intention of missing out on the glamor and glitter of the trial, and even thought up the idea of presenting a Nazi "witness for the prosecution." For a time, he succeeded in interesting Reichsmarshal Goering in his scheme, and Hjalmar Schacht himself offered under certain conditions to speak as a crown witness. But Donovan ran into strong opposition from Jackson, who under no circumstances wanted to create even the impression that he had entered into some deal with Goering by promising leniency or any other advantage merely in order to impel him to "tell all." When Donovan saw that he could not get his way, he resigned in a rage, "because he wanted to have nothing more to do with the trial."

In fact, the negative news coverage must be seen as part of the psychological warfare against Justice Jackson. The portrayal of the mass murderer Goering as "highly intelligent," "artful," and so forth was intended to finally free the "idealist" Jackson from his "mission." Part of this perversity was the IQ testing of the accused, whose meticulous results were distributed by the Anglo-Americans, with the conclusion that Schacht, Goering, and Austrian Nazi leader Artur Seyss-Inquart were geniuses! For the moment, no commentary was made on this subject, yet this episode explains a great deal about the ( singular admiration not infrequently showered on these butchers.

An indirect broadside against the trial was delivered by Winston Churchill in his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946, which signaled the start of the Cold War. The speech was intended to announce to the world the disintegration of the Allied victors' coalition. Churchill, at that time already voted out of office, advised Britain and America to be cautious and defense-ready toward Moscow: the Soviet Union now constituted a growing provocation and danger to Christian civilization. "From Stettin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent of Europe .... This is certainly not the free Europe we fought to build." Half a year later, on Nov. 6, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes, in his well-known Stuttgart speech, promised the Germans a quick return to German self-determination and economic reconstruction. He did not add that he meant only the reconstruction of West Germany, at least not in public; to journalists, he confided at the time that he had given up hope of a reunified Germany.

With these speeches, political lines were drawn which threw overboard the concept of a political community of principle, the basis on which the Nuremberg Trials were first brought about. A man like Jackson was no longer in demand in this political Ice Age.

Meanwhile, as the Cold War emerged, the Nazis and their friends around the world welcomed a splintering of the Allied coalition. When Goering read Churchill's Fulton "Iron Curtain" speech, he declared: "In the summer of last year, I had no hope of living to see the autumn, the winter, and a new year, and now, if I can make it until next fall, then it seems that I will experience many more falls and winters and summers." He added, with a sardonic laugh: "The only members of the Allies who still hold to the alliance are the four prosecutors, and they are united only against the accused."

Jackson's Statement for the Prosecution

If people later attached so much hope to the events at Nuremberg, it was above all because of the highly moral, politically civilized standard which Jackson established in his speech. He evoked the best humanist traditions of the West and showed himself firmly resolved to counterpose law, as a moral necessity for mankind, to the horrible crimes of the Nazis and the inhuman devastation of the war. In his eyes, the first task of the trial consisted in laying the foundations for a law of war and of war-avoidance, solely in the interests of the self-preservation of humanity. The core of his indictment was to bring forth the accountability of the Nazi leaders, and to present the assemblage of their actions as a coherent conspiracy on behalf of a war of aggression and as a conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity. In his opening statement to the tribunal, Jackson declared:

This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories .... The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.


Jackson rejected any notion of the collective guilt of the German people, an accusation from which many other participants at Nuremberg, especially on the judge's bench, could not free themselves. Jackson's outlook culminated in the statement: "Truly, the Germans -- no less than the world outside -- have a score to settle with the accused."

On the question of procedure, Jackson stated:

In general, our case will disclose these defendants all uniting at some time with the Nazi Party in a plan which they well knew could be accomplished by an outbreak of war in Europe. Their seizure of the German state, their subjugation of the German people, their terrorism and extermination of dissident elements, their planning and waging of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples -- all these are ends for which they acted in concert; and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one ....

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority in back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folks as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions of this terrible war. ...

Experience has shown that wars are no longer local. All modern wars become world wars eventually. And none of the big nations at least can stay out. If we cannot stay out of wars, our only hope is to prevent wars. I am too well aware of the weaknesses of juridical action alone to contend that in itself your decision under this Charter can prevent future wars. Judicial action always comes after the event .... This trial represents mankind's desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world's peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors ....

The real complaining party at your bar is Civilization.... Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of International Law, its precepts, its prohibitions, and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will in all countries may have 'leave to live by no man's leave,' underneath the law.


The question now became whether the judges would apply this standard in their verdict, or whether they would find the charges too sweeping, too vague, to allow them to render a judgment.

The Conspiracy Question

The panel of judges at Nuremberg had discussed the prosecution charge of a conspiracy to conduct a war of aggression. Continental Europe generally lacks a concept of conspiracy as a criminal action; the Russians temporized on the subject of the concept while the French rejected it. In Anglo-American law, this concept has long been known and is well established, being defined as agreement or consent between two or more persons in order to commit a crime. The accused is convicted if it is proved that he actually and voluntarily participated in a plan to commit an act known to him to be a crime. This definition is not so far from the continental European concept of guilt, if a limitation is made to the basic concept which can be summarized in the question: What degree of closeness to the crime must be proven in order to declare an accused as guilty?

However, there was also no unified position in the Anglo-American camp. Especially from the British, there was opposition to the conspiracy approach, even though the criminal nature of conspiracy has been developed in their Common Law since at least the 13th century. The German Section of the Foreign Office warned against using conspiracy as a charge in a memorandum of June 30, 1945: "Criminal conspiracy would become an arbitrary phrase in foreign relations and would necessarily contribute to the founding of strange and curious measures." Four weeks later, the advisory historian of the Foreign Office, E. L. Woodward, wrote that it was not practical to charge the Germans with a conspiracy to a war of aggression:

There was no conspiracy. The great powers knew exactly in 1937 that Germany was rearming. It is therefore unrealistic and will seem so to future historians to speak of a plan or a conspiracy of the Germany .... The great powers silently tolerated that the Germans violated agreements, they concluded treaties with the German government nonetheless.... How difficult it is to prove "intention" by means of documents is well known; we should limit ourselves to the war crimes and atrocities committed by the Nazis and leave their foreign policy out of it....


Jackson had stated at the London Conference why he attached such great value to the conspiracy findings. For Goering, Gauleiter General of Poland Wilhelm Franck, security chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keiter, or Plenipotentiary General for the Utilization of Manpower Fritz Saukel, he did not need this charge. These men had themselves committed so many crimes that their conviction was hardly in doubt. But what about Krupp or people like Hjalmar Schacht? Schacht, as Jackson said in the meeting of July 16, "is either a major war criminal or nothing .... Only a theory of a common plan or of conspiracy will catch him and his kind .... "

If agreement was finally reached in London on the principle of conspiracy, the controversy broke out again during the deliberations of the court. For months, this discussion played the central role. In fact, what was decided here was how the Nazi leadership was to be evaluated politically, determining the severity of punishment.

The French justice Donnedieu de Vabres argued most vehemently against this charge as "underdetermined," failing to allow a firm specification of the time, place, or method of the crimes committed; instead only principles, perhaps passages out of party programs and quotes out of Mein Kampf were brought out, and then the assertion made that these form the essential parts of a conspiracy. But generally there had not been a well-determined, unalterable plan, he contended. A guilty verdict because of "conspiracy" could therefore only follow ex post facto, and would thus be a violation of the fundamental principles of law.

Donnedieu de Vabres also took the point of view that the charge of conspiracy was totally superfluous for a guilty verdict since it could be easily proven that the accused had committed quite concrete crimes in unleashing a war of aggression. Since the accused planned the war, prepared for it, brought it about, and conducted it, it is more intelligent to proceed according to the principle "the conspiracy goes over into the crime," and to punish them for what they had done, not that which they had possibly conspired about. Also, he had the conception that a conspiracy presupposes an equality of stature among the participants. But the Fuhrer Principle of the Nazis flatly excludes that. Rather, every foundation for the conspiracy theory must be withdrawn and the 22 accused convicted and punished appropriately for their precisely defined crimes.

The Russian judge Gen. I. T. Nikitschenko rejected these explications as irrelevant. He proposed that the judges should' act as practical men and not as a "debaters' 'club." For international law, the conspiracy was an innovation and doubtless would lead to judgments ex post facto. But he did not understand why the Western judges were so excited about that. There was much that is innovative in this trial: thus certain specific crimes were defined for the first time, and it was prohibited for the accused to justify themselves by the claim that they were merely following orders, but that didn't cause anyone any particular problems. According to the Russian view, it is the job of the judges to establish new legal norms. Why not admit that that is what they were doing? Nikitschenko added that the crimes were so unique and extensive that the court is justified to pioneer new areas, through conviction on the basis of conspiracy in violation of international law. Colonel Volchow, the Soviet delegate on the Tribunal, repeated that the unprecedented atrocities of the Nazis, for example, mass extermination, were so complex that the crimes could not be dealt with unless they were condemned with something as comprehensive as conspiracy.

The British judge Birkett spoke most emphatically on retaining the charge of conspiracy. The principal purpose of the trials is to prove the existence of a common plan in respect to a conspiracy. If this charge were to be dropped, the heart of the general charge would be torn out and the process would be without value. Some of the defendants could be found guilty, of course, without appealing to conspiracy; "however, the Nazi regime would be acquitted."

Yet Birkett maintained that the conspiracy charge should be restricted to conducting a war of aggression and limited to the years 1937-45. This conception was incorporated into the final judgment, which states:

The prosecutors asserted that any important participation in the affairs of the Nazi Party or the government is a proof for participation in a conspiracy which is criminal per se and therefore presents a criminal conspiracy. The concept of conspiracy is not defined in the statutes. Yet according to the view of the tribunal, the conspiracy must be clearly defined in reference to their criminal intentions. There must not be too great a temporal gap between the decision and the act. If the plans are designated as criminal, then this cannot merely depend on declarations in a party program, as they are to be found in the 25 points of the Nazi Party of the year 1920, and also not from the later expressions of opinion in Mein Kampf The tribunal must investigate whether a concrete plan for carrying out the war existed and determine who had participated in this plan.


With that, the court had decided against Jackson's essential thesis, according to which a long-term Nazi conspiracy existed. Temporarily, the conspiracy was limited from 1937, the year of the Hossbach Conference -- at which Hitler laid out for the Nazi economic and military leadership his war plans -- to the end of the war, and in content to the "planning of concrete crimes" without regard to general programmatic assertions.

In restricting the conspiracy charge to certain operations beginning in 1937, the court was forced to delimit the evidence of crimes against humanity. The statute had intended that such crimes had to be committed in coincidence with other crimes which were expressly cited in the statute; thus criminal acts could not be condemned which were committed before late 1937. Since no evidence was presented to the court on concrete plans for the enslavement or murder of Czechoslovakian, Austrian, or Polish populations, plans which were a part of the preparations for attack on these countries, not a single defendant was convicted under the crimes against humanity charge for crimes he had committed before 1939. In addition, no defendant had to answer before this court for any crimes which had been committed in Germany before the beginning of the war, and which were committed without knowledge of Hitler's criminal intentions. With this single stroke of the pen, the tribunal swept at least one-third of the evidence from the table and saved defendants such as Schacht and von Papen from harsh punishment.

The Controversy over Schacht

The dilemma of the Nuremberg Trials is personified by former Reichsbank president and economics minister Hjalmar Schacht. The key to a successful conclusion of the trial, that is, a politically realistic judgment of the Nazi regime, of the extent of its crimes, and its long-term planning, as Jackson had intended, lay in an evaluation of the role of defendant Schacht. In contrast to the other major defendants, Schacht dispensed with the racialist-cultist zeal of the Nazis. Quite coolly, in discussions around a conference table, Schacht had laid the foundations for not only Auschwitz but for the military campaigns of the Nazis as well.

It was known that Schacht had helped bring Hitler to power, that he had made Hitler "socially acceptable" among industrialists and the nobility. What did not enter into the discussion at Nuremberg, however, was the fact that Schacht was the center of extensive international connections because of his position as a founder and member of the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, and was able to control crucial changes of political climate which originally made the Nazi seizure of power possible.

Long before Nazi hegemony, Schacht had his feelers out to the Anglo-Americans in order to determine, in advance, how they would act toward Hitler as the Reichschancellor. The answer he received was entirely positive, for at the same time that Germany was being squeezed financially, the preparations were being made for Hitler's appearance. Such preparations go back to the middle of the 1920s, and indeed, Schacht had already in the beginning of the 1920s formed close connections with the Dulles brothers who, like himself, were at the Versailles reparations negotiations. The contact was never broken and was to prove indispensable for Schacht and the Nazis.

It was this international faction that was determined to subject Germany to the kind of austerity only a demagogic dictator could impose. The internal looting of Germany's living standards, labor power, and capital base under Hitler led inexorably to a drive for conquest of Western Europe and the territories to Germany's East. The great industrial installations that could have been turned to humanity's benefit were assigned, under the compulsion to turn the austerity outward and find new looting grounds, to fuel the Nazi war machine. The Schacht-imposed principle of primitive Bauarbeit -- labor-intensive production-led inexorably under the Nazis to the slave-labor camps, and, for used-up slave laborers and other "useless eaters," the death camps.

One of the most important international contact points for Schacht was British central bank chief Montagu Norman, who was openly sympathetic with the Nazis and, since the time when both were on the board of directors of the BIS, had been a friend and advisor to Schacht. Schacht and Norman had frequently met before the Nazi seizure of power for secret conferences in Badenweiler. Before the seizure of power, Norman had provided all the support for the Nazis that he could, and refused any credit to the Weimar government for overcoming the financial crisis. This connection ran through the Stein Bank of Cologne, the London Schroeder Bank, and the Bank of England, on whose directorate was F. C. Tiarks, the director of the British Schroeder Bank who acted as a middle man and who was also a partner of the Stein Bank in Cologne. We also find the Dulles brothers here, for Foster represented the legal interests of the U.S. Schroeder Bank, and his brother Allan was on the directorate of this bank. Foster was also a leading spokesman and financial supporter for the isolationist America First organization, which was riddled with Nazi supporters, and wrote apologies for the Hitler regime.

Exemplary of the international connections behind the Nazi seizure of power is the tie of the Hitler financier Fritz von Thyssen -- who, through the Keppler Circle, together with Schacht had convinced German industrialists of Hitler's merits -- to the U.S. investment bank Dillon, Read.

On Jan. 10, 1925, Dillon, Read loaned a Thyssen firm $12 million, and one year later loaned the Rheine Elbe Union $25 million; six months later the Thyssen factory received another $5 million. In 1926, a series of the largest mining firms of Germany merged, including the firms named above, into the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, A.G., a gigantic trust overseen by von Thyssen. He received $30 million from Dillon, Read on June 26, 1926, and another $30 million in July 1927. A year later, Dillon, Read invested $15 million in the Gelsenkirchen Bergwerks A.G., a principal component ofthe steel trust, and $16 million in Ruhrchemie A.G. and Ruhr Gas A.G., both businesses contracted by the Thyssen factory. The Siemens firm received no less than $24 million in 1925-30 from Dillon, Read, while the Deutsche Bank received $25 million in September 1927.

If the Anglo-Americans were to avoid fouling their own nest, it was evidently decided, this whole body of evidence had to be excluded. The prohibition of the tu quoque (accusations which are equally valid against the accuser), which at Nuremberg was scrupulously observed with the other defendants, hung invisibly in the air around Schacht. That body of evidence was a precondition for understanding the entire conspiracy from the seizure of power by the Nazis to the concentration camps.
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Part 2 of 2

Schacht before the Court

Before the trial, the victorious powers were not in agreement over whether Schacht should be put on the list of major war criminals. The Americans and Russians were in favor, the British were vehemently opposed. Indeed, the British were generally averse to putting any name from German industrialist circles on the list, while Jackson insisted that at least representatives of Krupp, I.G. Farben, and Flick be brought before the court. The French swung the vote on this question in favor of placing Schacht on the list, for they harbored at this particular time considerable hatred against. German industrialists.

Schacht behaved in Nuremberg from the very first day as though he had nothing to do with the whole proceedings, as though his transfer from a concentration camp (where Hitler had put him in 1944) to the defendant's box had all been an error and was totally unjustified. He was outraged that he had been placed in the same position as "these monsters." He did not speak a single work to Goering, "that murderer and thief." He turned away, full of contempt, from Kaltenbrunner, that "hangman with a law degree," and also wanted to have nothing to do with the "parvenu and careerist" von Ribbentrop.

From the beginning, Schacht played on his international connections, on his extensive knowledge of events on the international level of diplomacy. He appealed, for example, to acting U.S. prosecution representative Donovan, in a letter describing the background of the Nazi regime and indicating that he would rather go into such a comprehensive summary with a man of Donovan's judgment than with the German defense attorneys. A man such as Schacht, who had been indispensable for the fascist preparations and conduct of the war, could presume to give the court assistance on the international collaboration of the German industrialists and not even shy away from referring to assurances which departing U.S. Ambassador Dodd had given him in Berlin concerning the post-war period. Schacht was also one to whom the then-acting U.S. Secretary of State Sumner Wells had stated in the spring of 1940 that the United States was not interested in the overthrow of the fascist regime. Finally, Schacht could have documented conversations from the years 1942-43 with American bankers to whom he had offered, in Basel, to continue the war in common with the Greater German Reich against the Soviet Union.

How arrogantly this defendant could behave toward the court and how double-edged his testimony was for the Allies, is shown in Jackson's interrogation of Schacht. The American prosecutor went into Schacht's role in the partition of Czechoslovakia, whereupon Schacht became outraged that the British and Americans wanted to pose as the protectors of this country, for it was well known that in 1939, the Western powers, a few days before Munich, had demanded that Czechoslovakia capitulate to Hitler. As Jackson, with complete justification, referred to the fact that Schacht had confiscated all the assets of the branches of the Czechoslovak central bank immediately after the occupation of the Sudetenland, Schacht parried, with equal justification: "But pardon me, he [Hitler] did not take it with force. The Allies gave him that country." And the dialogue continues:

Schacht: I cannot answer your question for the reason that, as I have already said, there was no "taking over"; rather, it was a gift. When someone gives me a gift such as this, I accept it with thanks.

Jackson: Even if it doesn't belong to those giving it away?

Schacht: Well, in that case, I naturally have to leave that up to the judgment of those giving it away.

Exemplary of Schacht's confidence in his escape from punishment was an episode on the periphery of the trial: In a pause in the proceedings one day, an American guard noticed how defendant Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and slave-labor coordinator, was industriously drawing something. Questioned by the guard, Speer replied: "You see, Schacht has commissioned me to design a villa which he will have built after the trial is over." Schacht later confirmed Speer's words with a nod of his head.

Schacht was obviously an extremely painful sight for the Anglo-Americans. The longer the trial extended, the more this "highly respectable man in the high, stiff collar" was able to build a wall between himself and the "Nazi oddities" whose bloody atrocities were all too obvious.

Schacht's Policy

When the Nazis took control, they could count again on financial support, especially from the United States and Great Britain. With these funds and with his gigantic public works program, Schacht was able in a relatively short time to take millions of unemployed off the streets. Freeways and dams were built, swamps drained, and other labor-intensive projects launched. This program encompassed however only 20% of the Nazi economy, with the other 80% flowing into a gigantic rearmament program unprecedented at that date.

At Nuremberg, the American prosecutors had dated the Nazi conspiracy from 1920, the year of the founding of the Nazi Party, citing the party program and Hitler's later Mein Kampf This was accurate as far as it went; but so long as primary attention was directed merely to the paramilitary internal structure of the NSDAP and the military and racialist statements of the program and Mein Kampf, a look at the international financial forces behind Hitler, and the conceptual authors of Mein Kampf-Haushofer and his British co-thinkers Halford Mackinder and Houston Stewart Chamberlain -- would be ruled out.

These geopoliticians advanced an extreme Malthusianism which must necessarily end in a search for new living space. In the strategic considerations of these people, the "Eurasian Heartland" -- the Soviet Union -- played a central role. If one does not take this absolutely central motor of the Nazi ideology into consideration, then fascism will always be viewed as a mere "sociological phenomenon."

The conspiracy the American prosecution wanted to prove is established precisely by this fusion of the Nazis with the British geopolitical concept of conquest of the Eurasian heartland. Out of this· ideological brew, the Nazis drew their strength; and against this background, the political-economic decisions of the Nazis can be portrayed coherently, down to the very last battle of the war.

The attempt was made at Nuremberg to prove that Schacht had always known that Hitler's rearmament program would end in war. In speeches from the year 1935-36, Schacht clearly acknowledged that he was quite familiar with the connection between his policy and the impetus toward war. Again and again he complained that Germany "had too large a population in too small a space, that this fact weighed upon him like a nightmare." The proposal which came from America, that the problem be solved through a severe restriction of the birth rate, was rejected in outrage by Schacht -- he did not name those American friends who had suggested it; he saw the solution only in overcoming the "political apportionment of possession" ("politische Besitzverhaltnisse"), which could mean nothing other than the creation of new "living space." He wrote in 1936 in an article in a Reichsbank publication: "Here it must be asserted that the attempt to shrink a great people down through external force must lead with necessity to social misery and unrest, eventually however to an explosion .... Peace in Europe and therefore the whole world rests on whether the crowded masses in Central Europe receive the possibility of life or not." Such a statement can only be taken as a sheer threat, especially in a year when the German air force was making its first test flights in the Spanish Civil War.

Schacht further wrote: "A great question which must be taken up in consideration ofthe population density is whether the people have completely utilized the existing space at their disposal. ... Germany has with enormous expenditures of capital and labor taken everything from its land that is possible. The results of the last three years show that the upper limit reached in 1933 cannot be gone beyond. The German man cannot produce sufficient foodstuffs for the German people from the land which is presently given to him."

Here is expressed the great Malthusian theme of over-population, coupled with the battle for survival which is always the first move of predatory military actions. Schacht adopted a moderate tone in these years, and an expedition toward the East was not yet discussed. He demanded instead the restoration of former German colonial possessions for overcoming the "Lebensraum dilemma."

But how serious could these demands have been, given Schacht's knowledge of the other European powers' jealous clamp on their overseas possessions? Hitler's aims, as expressed in Mein Kampf, were direct: "As much as we recognize the necessity of coming to terms with France, it still remains utterly ineffective if this were to exhaust our foreign policy aims. They can and will have a point if they form a cover for our flank for an enlargement of our living space of our people in Europe .... If, however, we speak today of new territory, we are thinking primarily only of Russia and the border countries subordinate to it."

In contrast perhaps to many industrialists and Nazi sympathizers in Germany, Schacht was thoroughly familiar with Hitler's Mein Kampf The above passages and similar ones could not have escaped Schacht's attention, since he was interested in all questions of foreign policy; nor those passages in which Hitler so clearly said, "Now the time has come to finally stop the colonial and trade policies of the pre-war period and to move to the territorial policy of the future." Schacht could derive no hopes from meetings with Hitler that Hitler did not mean exactly what he said. Schacht's proposals on a new division of the colonial sector must be seen as a diversionary tactic from the real plans which the Nazis were considering, without in the least implying that Schacht did not have in secret his own conceptions of the "opening up of living space," or, as he called it, overcoming "political apportionment of possession."

The mass deportation of prisoners of war, Jews, and political prisoners into German slave labor camps was the direct consequence of Schacht's economic policy. Schacht's primitive accumulation, the plundering of domestic resources without any hope of replacement, necessarily forced the Nazis to war and predatory expeditions. The crimes against humanity which the Nazis committed were the lawful consequence of Schacht's bestial measures.

Because the prosecution neglected to consider the economic measures which Schacht had set in motion, measures of whose consequences Schacht, as well as his friends in London and Wall Street, were perfectly aware, the Nuremberg plaintiffs could not prove the existence of a long-term Nazi plan and conspiracy for a war of aggression. The potential for doing so was pulverized between the millstones of British geopolitics and American high finance. At least with respect to prosecuting Schacht, Jackson ~as very much "on the outside looking in." The world of international finance was a "closed society," and Schacht was emphatically part of it.

Schacht as 'Conspirator against Hitler'

At Nuremberg, Schacht liked to play up his own role as a conspirator against the Nazi regime. He did, in fact, have contact with the group of conspirators around Dr. Carl Goerdeler, and he provably made many attempts to establish contact with the Western powers. But should that exonerate him?

Schacht boasted to the court that in 1942-43 while in Basel, he had attempted to persuade American bankers to join with the "Greater German Reich" in a war against the Soviet Union. In fact, it seems that one of his chief aims had been to draw the Western powers into conspiracy for an aggressive war against the Soviet Union. The First Secretary of the American Embassy in Berlin at the time, Donald Heath, claimed that Schacht informed him about the imminent attack on Russia. He reported that" Around June 6, 1941, some two weeks prior to the surprise attack on Russia, Schacht apprised us that Hitler was determined to invade Russia on or around July 20. Schacht assured us that this had to be viewed as an established fact, not to be doubted." (It is doubtful, however, that Schacht, who was out of favor with Hitler as of 1937, knew about the top-secret Operation Barbarossa plan.)

Already in March, 1939, Goerdeler and Schacht had established contact in Ouchy, Switzerland, "with a man who maintained very good relations to the English and French governments," in order to let London and Paris know that Hitler was determined under all circumstances to move eastward toward Danzig and Warsaw to annex the rich black soil of the Ukraine and the oilfields of Rumania and the Caucasus.

Since it has also been documented that the English and French likewise planned a surprise attack on the Caucasus oilfields, it appears that the conspiratorial group of generals had already resolved by the summer of 1939 to conclude some sort of behind-the-scenes deal with the Western powers and to negotiate a price for Hitler's overthrow. The central point is that, as the currently accessible materials on the German underground plot show, if Hitler had been overthrown and the Nazis wiped out, the conspirators were expected by London, Paris, and Washington to pressure Poland into making territorial concessions. In other words, the principles of foreign policy of Hitler's Germany would have remained the same, regardless of what regime was in power.

Seen in this light, Schacht's conspiratorial doings are exposed as merely an attempt to distance himself from the Nazis, whose ideological, anti-Semitic orientation did not suit him, but whose foreign-policy convictions he shared. Schacht, not wishing to go along with Hitler on a policy whose groundwork -- in the sense of Jackson's accusation of long-term conspiracy and planning -- he himself had laid, now had to look around for other confederates. The conspiratorial, criminal content of Schacht's policy, which aimed at a war of aggression, never changed.

Schacht's conspiracy against Hitler bore all the characteristics of the idea of universal fascism as proclaimed by Mussolini: "Either we succeed in giving unity to politics and life in Europe, or the axis of world history will finally shift to the other side of the Atlantic, and Europe will playa second-rate role in history," or as preached by Richard Coudenhove- Kalergi, leader of the fascist Pan-European Union, who in 1922 called upon Mussolini to announce a European Monroe Doctrine, "Europe for the Europeans."

Schacht's ideas fit in with that Euro-fascist attitude which prevailed following Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. There were high hopes for a continental anti-Bolshevik crusade; but Hitler rejected this idea, saying it was aimed against German supremacy, and raged against a "shameless Vichy newspaper" which had dared to describe the war against the Soviet Union as Europe's war. "We are not fighting for a new European order, but for the defense and security of our vital interests."

In the Euro-fascist camp, National Socialist policies were considered egotistic and imperialistic. The French Euro-fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle summed it up as follows: "German policy in all conquered European countries has been fundamentally guided by prejudice, by old methods of war, and by diplomacy. It was not capable of developing something new out of the fabulous opportunities presented to it. It proved incapable of transforming its war of conquest into a revolutionary war.... "

Of course, whether Hitler carried out the invasion of the European countries and, above all, of Russia with support from Americans and English or in the context of a supranational Euro-fascist crusade could make no difference with respect to the charge of conspiring to plan a war of aggression. The problem was, however, that Schacht could not be convicted without revealing in the courtroom the ambiguous role of the victorious Allied powers. And precisely in this lies the whole tragedy of the Nuremberg process.

Schacht was acquitted at the Nuremberg military tribunal, against the votes of the Russians and the Americans (the Soviet members of the Tribunal insisted on publishing their dissent). For the second and third leadership levels of the Nazis, that acquittal meant new hope for a quick rehabilitation, and they were not disappointed.

The Later Trials

The later trials took place as the Cold War began to break out, offering incentives to the U.S. State Department for concealment and rehabilitation of Nazi criminals, under the rubric of using such types against the Soviet bloc -- a policy which had extremely destructive effects pn the course of German history.

The question of how Hitler could have attained power, who had prepared the way for him nationally and internationally, was a question which involved the long-term design of National Socialist policy, and was therefore no longer of interest at these trials. A lasting contribution was made by putting individuals on trial for crimes against humanity -- as in the case of Nazi practitioners of euthanasia. But examination of the trial documents makes it impossible to avoid the impression that the only issue now was to recover as elegantly as possible from these vexing proceedings, and to create as quickly as possible a technical-administrative and political foundation in occupied Germany that would counter the Red menace as efficiently as possible. In 1950, the Nuremberg defense counsel Carl Haensel wrote concerning this phase of the proceedings:

The phase in the Nuremberg proceedings that manifested Renaissance natural-law judicial methods seems to have lapsed once again. The classical form in which the international proceedings were carried out before the international military tribunal ... has been reduced to a trial procedure that has even given up the externally maintained unity of intent of the court. ... The strength of this eruption of natural law which ended the international proceedings with thirteen death sentences has ... died away, and a death sentence or a conviction for conspiracy to breach the peace will no longer be handed down.

The protocols of the London Conference .exhibited with special force the fundamental conception of the American chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson that an international tribunal of law would be established for the punishment of riot only the war of aggression, but for every breach of peace, every "plan for making an illegal war." The publication of this verdict and its codicils ... makes it possible to trace how this great idea of Jackson's has been transformed.


The original intent of justice Jackson and his co-thinkers, to set forth in broad strokes the anatomy of an inconceivably unjust state, to uncover the driving force and motives, to punish the principal instigators at all levels of the system, had given way to an excruciating effort to adjust the Nuremberg trials to fit the changed post-war political realities. By virtue of the Cold War, a tendency had set in within the United States which, if not in sympathy with the Nazi criminals, believed that the Germans could not become good allies of the Western powers if German generals were sitting in confinement.

A brief examination of the proceedings against the I.G. Farben company will show how the proceedings at Nuremberg were transformed. The firm's international connections make it easy to recognize how directly these international ramifications shaped the Nazi regime and, in the long run, guided its course.

The International Connections of I.G. Farben

For many years, especially in the United States, the German industrial giant I.G. Farben had cultivated close international business connections. Even during World War II these connections continued, es.pecially with Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company and the Nickel Trust -- both of which also conveyed strategically important products to the Nazis during the war, products that were denied to America's ally Britain. This went so far that on Capitol Hill, Sen. Harry Truman quite accurately charged Standard Oil with treason; he declared on March 27, 1942: "Even following our entry into the war, Standard Oil has made every effort to secure German control over vitally important war materials."

At the interrogation of the I.G. Farben directors at Nuremberg, it was documented how the Nickel Trust, which controlled 85% of world nickel production, supplied the Hitler regime with nickel for political-military reasons. On Sept. 29, 1947, testimony of I.G. Farben director Paul Hafliger was read which stated that in 1934, one year after Hitler's seizure of power, an agreement was concluded between I.G. Farben and the Nickel Trust which sanctioned I.G. Farben to supply approximately half of the German requirements at a 50% foreign-exchange saving.

A lack of political foreknowledge cannot be presumed on the part of the Nickel Trust. One of Hafliger's memoranda of Oct. 19, 1939 states: "The Nickel Trust must be concerned not to allow its basic attitude to become' public. Typical, for example, was its behavior when in the spring of this year at Ottawa as well as in the British Parliament interventions were made to at least reduce exports to Germany. The Trust understood even in time of crisis how to divert the action from behind the scenes with misleading statements and thereby prevent any results."

In the same memorandum Hafliger proposed inducing the Finnish government to reserve for Germany the major part of nickel production at Petsamo, Finland. The Nickel Trust had owned the concession for these mines since 1934. The trust had no objections whatsoever to Hafliger's autocratic actions: "Knowing the personalities and the basic attitude of the Nickel Trust previously shown," he wrote, "I take it for granted that such an arrangement will be welcomed cordially by the Trust. And for its part will perceive the supplying of Germany as a desirable protection against a possible Russian attack. . .. Obviously the Trust will endeavor to abstain as much as possible from anything that could frustrate further cooperation with us after the war."

Who were these personalities whose basic attitudes Hafliger knew so well? The most important was John Foster Dulles, director and trustee of the Nickel Trust and its chief counsel in all matters outside the American continent.

Another connection of I.G. Farben in the United States is significant: the previously mentioned investment bank Dillon, Read. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the president of the bank, James Forrestal, was chosen by I.G. Farben to head its largest enterprise in the United States, the General Aniline and Film Corporation. Under Forrestal's direction, General Aniline supplied German fascism via the South American route with militarily important products during the first year of the war.

Forrestal became the U.S. Defense Secretary in 1947-49, while the vice-president of the bank, William Draper -- one of the twentieth century's most rabid advocates of reducing the world's population of "lesser races" -- headed the U.S. economic policy division in occupied Germany and was assistant defense secretary of the United States in 1947-49. Forrestal appointed to a senior Defense Department post a certain Howard Peterson, who had argued I.G. Farben's most important legal cases in the United States between the two world wars. Is it an accident that Howard Peterson, the lawyer of I.G. Farben, was chosen as the judge in the Nuremberg trials against the directors of the Farben Trust? Or that (unlike Goethe's house), during the massive American bombardments of the city of Frankfurt, the I.G. Farben headquarters, a gigantic building in the middle of Frankfurt, did not receive a single hit?

The Trial Against I.G. Farben: Indictment and Verdict

Under such conditions, the trial could not go too badly for the I.G. Farben defendants.

No indictments for plotting a war of aggression were brought against the company's supervisory board of directors, even though the chairman of the board, Carl Krauch, had demanded on April 28, 1939: "Today, as in 1914, the German political and economic position appears ... to demand a rapid development of war through annihilating attacks at the very beginning hostilities .... The creation of a unified large-scale economic bloc of the four European anti-Comintern partners is required, which Yugoslavia and Bulgaria must soon join. The bloc must extend its influence over Romania, Turkey, and Iran."

This thinking corresponded exactly to that of Carl Duisberg, the chairman of the I.G. Farben board, president of the Reich Association of German Industry, and a Pan-Europa member. Duisberg had dreamed earlier of an economic bloc from Bordeaux to Odessa, whose centerpiece would be the German Reich.

In the spring of 1940, LG. Farben was able to propose a 100-point comprehensive plan for a "new order" for "Establishing a European Grand Economic Sphere." On March 27, 1941, Continental Oil A.G. was founded, which, together with the Deutsche Bank, was to be primarily concerned with the Caucasus petroleum refining area. The president of the executive committee was I.G. Farben director Ernst Rudolf Fischer; the board chairman of Continental was Karl Blessing, a member of the Reichsbank directorate who later became the postwar Bundesbank's president. Hermann Josef Abs, the dean of West Germany's post-war banking community, was also involved in the operations of Continental A.G.

In view of these deliberate policies for dividing up the spoils of the East, it is inconceivable that the leadership of I.G. Farben -- particularly Hermann Schmitz (a director of the Bank for International Settlements), Baron Georg von Schnitzler, August von Knieriem, Paul Hafliger, Max Ilgner, Wilhelm Mann, and Heinrich Oster -- were not tried for plotting a war of aggression. A summary of the indictment is contained in the Dee. 28, 1948 dissenting opinion by Judge Paul M. Hebert:

Under Count Three of the indictment, all defendants are charged with having committed war crimes [using I.G. Farben as an instrument] and crimes against humanity as defined in Article II of Control Council Law Number 10. It is alleged in the document that defendants participated in the enslavement and deportation to slave labor on a gigantic scale of members of the civilian populations of countries and territories under the belligerent occupation of, or otherwise controlled by, Germany; that the defendants participated in the enslavement of concentration-camp inmates, including German nationals; that the defendants participated in the use of prisoners of war in war operations ... and, that the defendants participated in the mistreatment, terrorization, torture, and murder of enslaved persons. . . . [committing] war crimes against humanity.


The court acquitted the board of directors of I.G. Farben on these charges, primarily on the ground of insufficient evidence that the I.G. Farben defendants had on their own initiative employed prisoners of war in an illegal manner. It was also not proven that the members of the board of directors had participated in connection with the procurement or employment of forced labor. It could not be established that the accused had participated on their own initiative in the employment of concentration camp inmates. Finally, it was stated in the verdict: "We cannot arrive at the determination that they were criminally responsible for the indicated instances of mistreatment of the laborers utilized in the various I.G. installations. Nor do we hold the accused responsible for the incidents in the buildings of Auschwitz."

This verdict was not unanimous. judge Hebert's statement appended to the verdict, in which he declared he would write a dissenting opinion, contained the following crucial passage:

Admittedly, Farben would have preferred German workers rather than to pursue the policy of utilization of slave labor. Despite this fact, and despite the existence of a reign of terror in the Reich, I am, nevertheless, convinced that compulsion to the degree of depriving the defendants of moral choice did not in fact operate as the conclusive cause of the defendant's actions, because their will coincided with the governmental solution to the situation, and the labor was accepted out of desire for, and the only means of maintaining war production ....

I concur in the conviction of those defendants who have been found guilty under count three, but the responsibility for the utilization of slave labor and all incidental toleration of mistreatment of the workers should go much further and should, in my opinion, lead to the conclusion that all of the defendants in this case [insofar as they belonged to the board of directors] are guilty under count three ... [emphasis added].


Consolidation

In January 1951, soon after the follow-up trials were completed, the U.S. High Commissioner for occupied Germany, John J. McCloy, declared a general amnesty. One example of the drastic relaxation of penalties and punishments is the trial of the notorious SS Einsatzkommandos (Special Force Commandos): Of the original 13 death sentences pronounced, only 4 were carried out, and the other 9 were reduced to prison sentences. All remaining prison sentences were obligingly set aside by McCloy. As early as 1951, the first prisoners were freed; in 1958, Ernst Biberstein was one of the last to leave imprisonment.

The SS Einsatzgruppen were formed four weeks before the Nazi attack on the U.S.S.R. through an agreement between the Reichssicherheitsamt and the Armed Forces High Command (OKW). The groups were about 800-1,200 men strong and their officers came from the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (secret service, SD), and the 5S. The task of the Einsatzgruppen was to destroy partisans and members of the Resistance and exterminate entire sections of the occupied populations.

The SS murderers Heinzjost and Franz Six, who were originally condemned in the trial of SS Einsatzkommandos to prison sentences of from 20 years to life, now found lucrative positions in the West German business sector. Since 1960, for example, SS Brigade Leader Six occupied the company-wide directorship for the Porsche diesel auto company at Friedrichshafen, a subsidiary of Mannesmann A.G. This employment, however, was only a cover for work in the Federal intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) -- the West German equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency -- to which Six had belonged since his release from prison in 1952. The BND employed no fewer than 4,000 former SS officers and SD agents.

Despite the incontrovertible evidence concerning the slaughter carried out by the Einsatzgruppen which was presented before the Tribunal, by 1951 SS units were being resurrected, in the guise of "social help associations," such as the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit ehemaliger Angehoriger der Waffen-SS, HIAG. The members of these SS units demanded their full rehabilitation with increasing loudness. On Oct. 6, 1959, the HIAG was declared an "organization in the public interest." After frequent discussions between political officials in Bonn and the leadership of the HIAG, the Bundestag resolved on June 29, 1961 that all former full-time members of the SS Verfugungstruppe, later the Waffen-SS (the Armed SS), who could prove as of May 8, 1945 that they had a minimum of ten years' service with Hitler, would become "entitled to pensions." With this measure, the last barrier to penetration of the Bundeswehr and the police by former SS members was opened.

In the judgment against the OKW, all 13 field marshals and generals who had been accused were acquitted of the charge of crimes against peace, on the grounds that punishment for conducting a war of aggression must be limited to the politicians in charge.

Given this line of argument, it was only a small step to putting the blame for all the horrors of the war on the German people, which happened as a result of the altered U.S. post-war policy toward Germany, under the slogan of "collective guilt." This "collective guilt" finds no support whatever in the evidence prod uced at the trials.

In the wake of this change in U.S. policy, an alliance came about that the European fascists had hoped for up to the last moment of defeat: that the Third Reich could perhaps succeed at five minutes to midnight in forming an alliance with the Anglo-Americans. For many of these "universal fascists," who had streamed into the Waffen SS until the very end of the war, it seemed unthinkable that the West would look on while Eastern and Central Europe were bolshevized. Thus they awaited a military alliance with the Western powers in order to jointly drive back the Red Army.

This hope was carried out in a different way. The alliance between fascists and Anglo-Americans did come about. The Cold War made it possible. It was the Cold War which diverted the United States from promoting the bold economic and political post-war reconstruction of Europe and the underdeveloped world, and which justified in the name of "anti-Communism" an alliance with many of the Nazis whose ties with the East remained.

______________

Bibliography

Ahrens, Hans D., Demontage-Nachkriegspolitik der Alliierten, Munich, 1982.

Buck, Andreas, "The Nuremberg Trials -- How the Crime of Genocide was Judged and Punished," in New Solidarity, Feb. 22, Mar. 4, and Mar. 7, 1984.

Deschner, Gunther, "Die Fracht der Tante Ju, die beinahe Geschichte machte," in Die Welt, Oct. 1, 1983.

Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, Secret Journal and Other Writings, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

Dulles, John Foster, War or Peace, New York, 1950.

Fall 9 -- Das Urteil im SS-Einsatzgruppenprozess, Berlin, 1963.

Fall 12 -- Das Urteil gegen das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Berlin, 1961.

Gisevius, Hans Bernd, Bis zum bitteren Ende, Munich/Zurich, 1982.

Grunder and Manikowski, Das Gericht der Sieger, 1967.

Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, Boston, 1943.

Jackson, Robert Hougwout, U.S. State Department -- Trial of War Criminals, Documents ... , Washington, 1945.

Kempner, Robert M. W., Anklager einer Epoche, cited in Gerd Ressling, "Jagd auf die Morder im Staatsauftrag," in Rheinische Merkur, Oct. 14, 1983.

LaRouche, Lyndon H. and Goldman, David P., The Ugly Truth about Milton Friedman, New York, 1980.

Loth, Wilfried, Die Teilung der Welt-Geschichte des Kalten Kriegs, Munich, 1980.

Maser, Werner, Nurnberg-Tribunal der Sieger, Munich/Zurich, 1977.

Neulen, Hans Werner, Eurofaschismus und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Munich, 1980.

Norden, Albert, Thus Wars Are Made!, Dresden, 1970.

Poltorak, Arkadi, Nurnberger Epilog, Berlin (DDR), 1971.

Pool, James and Pool, Suzanne, Who Financed Hitler? The Secret Funding of Hitler's Rise to Power, 1913-1933, New York, 1978.

Schacht, Hjalmar, "Germany's Colonial Demands," in Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1937.

Skorzeny, Otto, Secret Missions; War Memoirs of the Most Dangerous Man in Europe, New York, 1950.

Smith, Bradley F., Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg, New York, 1977.

Taylor, Telford, The Nuremberg Trials, War Crimes and International Law, New York, 1949.

Wheeler-Bennett, John W., The Nemesis of Power, the German Army in Politics, 1918-1945, London/New York, 1964.

Das Urteil im IG-Farben-Prouss, Offenbach, 1948.

Das Urteil von Nurnberg 1946, dtv-Dokumente.

Das Urteil im Wilhelmstrassenprozess, Schwabisch Gmund, 1950.

It should be noted that the "Nuremberg Court state" has also been one of history's greatest bonanzas for historians and political scientists. "Where else has a country been researched more systematically than was done at Nuremberg?" asks Robert Kemper in his recently published autobiography. In fact, as the Allies moved into Germany they also took possession of the state secret archives, the written history of an entire nation. Almost none of the Allies was able to resist the temptation to join in seizing of these documents. In this way, a people became deprived of their own history. Since that time, any German historian desiring to do research has had to politely knock on doors in Washington, London, Paris, or Moscow in order to gain access to' the plundered documents.  
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Re: The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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8. The Global Danger: Today's Nazi-Communists

As international strategic tensions and the world economic crisis intensified since the beginning of the 1970s, so did a systematic activation of an extensive destabilization apparatus within Europe. The 1970s were marked by successive waves of terror and the rapid growth of militant, irrationalist movements -- specially the "Green" movement, which sprang up since 1976-77, and after the briefest period of time is in a position to paralyze decision-making in the Federal Republic of Germany. During the course of the terrorist escalation from 1972 to 1977, an international network of left and right terrorist groups were able to lodge themselves within the growing milieu of the various "drop-out" movements.

Over the same period, the activities of international organized crime grew to a similar extent, especially in the narcotics traffic, and it has become increasingly evident that the terrorist infrastructure has extensive overlaps with smuggling in drugs and weapons. In spite of a few tactical successes scored by security agencies, terrorism and the militant organizations surrounding it, as well as organized crime, have proven to be extremely capable of self-regeneration, for at no time have the authorities been able to seriously impair their underlying control structures.

By the 1960s at the latest, research into the background of the Kennedy assassination had already shown that a "Murder, Inc." was operating on the highest level, crisscrossing intelligence channels, financial and political power brokers, terrorist activities, and organized crime.

Aside from initiatives of private entities such as the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) and a few others, serious moves by governmental agencies against this apparatus were only resumed during the late 1970s. These initiatives concentrated on terrorist and Mafia-inspired threats to Italy, where a group of young magistrates and public prosecutors began to apply a method which had already been publicly suggested by EIR in 1978 following the Red Brigades' murder of Italian President Aldo Moro. According to that analysis, the following elements overlap within terrorism's control structure: certain oligarchical families (particularly in Italy, Switzerland, and Great Britain); their associated financial institutions; elements of various Eastern and Western intelligence services; secret conspiratorial societies, particularly of Freemasonic and other pseudo-religious stripes; the international organized crime network; and the still-extant "Nazi International."

For the first time in post-war history this control structure was brought under public scrutiny in May of 1982 in connection with the scandal surrounding the secret Italian P-2 Lodge. Since then this group of Italian investigative magistrates has circulated further ground-breaking results in connection with the Moro kidnapping, the attempted assassination of the Pope in Rome, and the P-2 Lodge, which have even more precisely zeroed in on the character of this international apparatus.

In the course of these Italian investigations and parallel research by EIR concerning the role of the Swiss banker Francois Genoud, peeling away the outer layers has increasingly revealed that the infrastructure of the Nazi International plays a substantially greater role than was previously assumed. Nodal points of this International were turned up in left-wing and right-wing terrorism and their milieu, as well as in separatist and Islamic fundamentalist movements, in drug and weapons smuggling, and in the business and banking world. In what follows, we shall describe some of the forms and methods of this operation, which is utilized by both Eastern and Western sides for purposes of destabilization.

The 'Bulgarian Connection'

In early 1983, the Italian investigative magistrate Carlo Palermo (weapons and drug smuggling) and Ilario Martella (papal assassination attempt) released results which provide a precise look at the East-West intermeshing of terrorism and organized crime. A year earlier, investigative magistrate Ferdinando Imposimato had taken the first step in this direction in the Moro case, when he spoke of the existence of an "international directorate" from which left and right terrorism, drug and weapons smuggling, political murder and destabilization operations were all steered. In addition to the significance of these researches for his own case -- the murder of Aldo Moro -- Imposimato had already established the connection between this constellation and the attempt on the Pope on May 13, 1981.

Imposimato's initiative contributed substantially to one of the severest blows against the Red Brigades and its infrastructure, one which succeeded in liberating the abducted General Dozier and capturing the Red Brigades leader Giovanni Senzani.

Palermo's initiative struck to the core of a gigantic drug and weapon smuggling syndicate, at whose apex was the 70-year-old Syrian Henri Afsan and his export-import firm, Stipam International Transport. Significantly, in recent years the firm has been located within a building in Milan belonging to the Banca Ambrosiano, the financial center of the P-2 Lodge. The business accounts of Stipam were handled by this bank.

Arsan's firm dealt not only in giant quantities of small arms, but also in tanks, military helicopters, and other heavy equipment. For transport, ships and railroad trains were made available through close cooperation with the Turkish mafia, which in payment had to acquire and refine raw opium from the Middle and Far East. The Turkish mafia, which itself overlaps with such organizations as the right-extremist Gray Wolves, is the jumping-off point for research concerning the Pope's assailant Mehmet Ali Agca.

Morphine was brought via Trieste into the Trento-Verona-Bolzano triangle, where it was stored and further distributed. Here Sicilian mafia circles took over the further expedition and refining. Northern Italy contains the greatest concentration of military installations in all of Europe. From here was directed the infamous 1973 right-wing "Rosa dei Venti" armed uprising that attempted to overthrow the Italian government.

Another bastion of Arsan's business dealings was Sofia, the second largest center of illegal transactions next to Milan. According to the estimates of Turkish experts, a considerable portion of the illicit sale of weapons would take place via Sofia, whence they were passed into the hands of right and left terrorist groups. In connection with this, there have been repeated references to the role of the Bulgarian export-import firm Kintex.

Judge Martella then picked up the strings of this investigation in connection with the assassination attempt on the Pope. In the wake of Agca's confession, various persons from this "Bulgarian Connection" circle were arrested, including employees of the Bulgarian airline concession in Italy and the Turkish mafioso Bekir Celenk, who according to Agca had offered him a considerable sum for carrying out the attempt.

Another element of this weapons and drug network is the Iranian Sadegh Tabatabai, an arms dealer and confidant of Khomeini. Tabatabai is reported to maintain close relations with the Italian right-wing terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie, as well as with the Swiss businessman Hans-Albert Kunz. Kunz is considered to be close to Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, in turn a close friend of Licio Gelli, head of the P-2 Lodge. Kunz also maintains relations with the Swiss banker Francois Genoud, a key figure of the Nazi International. It is interesting to note how these networks have been protected by some West German authorities. Tabatabai was repeatedly given protection by Hans-Dietrich Genscher and his foreign ministry, notwithstanding the fact that he was convicted of narcotics smuggling on German soil, and had already previously abetted terrorist actions and carried out illegal weapons purchases there. Apparently this was not the first time that Genscher personally intervened to protect such tools of the Nazi International. In 1975 Genscher expressly intervened with the Italian government in order to effect the release of the Gestapo war criminal Herbert Keppler, who at that time was still in the custody of the Italian authorities. Similar behavior on the part of the foreign ministry has also been observed with respect to Libyan operations inside West German territory.

Let us now turn to the key figure in the Nazi International.

The case of Francois Genoud

Two interrelated phenomena have increasingly dominated society in the post-war period: the Black, or Nazi, International of the disciples of Adolf Hitler who have never given up their dream of the "Fourth Reich," and its direct offshoot, international terrorism. Left and right terror, and even the currently thriving brutal religious fanaticism, -- are sides of the same coin. Terrorist formations have increasingly come to be instruments of the faction in Moscow whose conscious mission is to make Moscow into the "Third and Final Rome." At the hub of all these operations is the mysterious figure of Swiss-Nazi banker Francois Genoud. Genoud may not be the real head of the entire operation; we will, however, prove that he is one of its most important coordinators, along with a number of lesser-known members of the directorate who are responsible for the Nazi International's financial and political activities.

Today's Nazi International has at its command an extensive financial apparatus which is primarily fed from the loot amassed by the Third Reich. Between 1943 and 1945, this loot had been invested in not less than 700 private holdings by Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann, a close friend of Genoud. Of these 700 companies, 214 are in Switzerland, 200 in the Near East, 34 in Turkey, and numerous others in Asia and Latin America. In 1973, ninety tons of the gold in global circulation was in the hands of the Nazis, thanks to the machinations of Hitler's former economics minister Hjalmar Schacht, who, after his acquittal at Nuremberg, directed the reorganization of the Nazi International's finances in collaboration with Francois Genoud.

The boards of directors of many of these corporations discreetly include Schacht's niece Elsa Skorzeny, wife of the late SS Col. Otto Skorzeny. Otto Skorzeny could always be counted on as Hitler's man to carry out the most arduous command tasks; he rescued Mussolini from imprisonment (for a brief period at least); he ran the commandos in the Battle of the Bulge; and he was also the person who set up the Nazis' escape organization Die Spinne/Odessa and many other organizations after the collapse of the Nazi Reich. Elsa Skorzeny is a member of the directorate of the Nazi International. This directorate oversees financial transactions in North Africa, Latin America, and in the Middle East. Its recent intensification of ties to the Soviet and East German camp was not all that dramatic; since the 1950s, at the latest, many of its members had collaborated with the Soviets, Otto Skorzeny and Otto Ernst Remer among them.

A glance at Genoud's curriculum vitae shows the continuity in his political career. At every crucial point, Genoud has the right kind of assistance. In Genoud's words, this began with his father, a banker, who had decided to send him to Munich in the 1920s "to further my education as well as to teach me discipline." Years later Genoud acknowledged that when he was not yet twenty years old, he had become "deeply influenced by Hitler."

Genoud also made a month-long trip to India, about which little is known. It is possible that he made a side-excursion to Tibet, like many other Nazi principals before him. Be that as it may, Genoud suddenly resurfaced in Palestine in 1936, where he met up with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, thereby laying the ground work for a friendship and collaboration that lasted until the Mufti's death in the 1970s. Genoud's presence in Palestine coincided with the increasing activity of the Nazis' military secret service, the anti-Jewish agitation financed on a grand scale by the Mufti, and also the Palestinian Revolt of 1936. During the period from the mid-1930s to the beginning of the war, Martin Bormann, Adolf Eichmann, and the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach also met with the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, and Schirach visited the numerous pro-Nazi Arab organizations that were sprouting up like mushrooms in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Friendships were established at that time which have lasted right up to the present, such as with the Syrian People's Party and the Syrian National Socialist Party, the latter led today by the wife of Hafez Assad, Anita Makhlouf. The same holds true for numerous Iranian and Iraqi mullah organizations, including the founding members of the Iraqi-Shiite Al-Dawa'a terrorist organization in Teheran. Al-Dawa'a was founded at the end of the 1950s by Ayatollah Khoy, the same mullah who had worked for the Abwehr during World War II, and who was responsible for the kamikaze bombings in Kuwait on Dec. 12, 1983.

Following 1939, Genoud was always very secretive about his Nazi activities. Was Genoud already working for the German Abwehr in the mid-1930s? The most reliable reports concerning this, those of the International Union of Resistance Fighters in the Second World War, only take note of his activities in the spring of 1940, when he founded the "Oasis" nightclub in Lausanne with the Lebanese Omar Bey. He is cited as a member of the Nazi Swiss National Front in 1939, and worked closely with the National Union in Switzerland. The National Union was headed by the Swiss patrician Georges Oltramare, whose family still sits on the board of one of the oldest banking houses in Switzerland, the Lombard-Odier Bank in Geneva. The Lombard-Odier Bank was not accidentally the depository of th~ gold used by Allen Dulles in conjunction with his secret negotiations with the Nazi leadership. Genoud maintained close contact with Oltramare, who under the pseudonym George Dieudonne was editor-in-chief of the anti-Semitic hate-sheet Pilori in Nazi-occupied France. He turned up again under the same pseudonym as a radio commentator for Radio Cairo in the 1950s.Around Oltramare were gathered all the young Swiss Nazis who later joined the Waffen-SS, such as Gaston Amaudruz, who joined up with the "Charlemagne" SS division at the Eastern Front, and who was one of the founders of the fascist Malmo International after the war.

Genoud took frequent trips to Berlin, where he was brought into Hitler's closest circles, especially through his good relations with Goebbels' wife. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Genoud was operating as an intelligence contact out of Switzerland and out of Belgium. On account of this activity he was imprisoned for a brief time after the war; he was soon set free through the intervention of the head of Interpol, Paul Kickopf, a former agent of the Abwehr who had resigned in 1942. In 1943, Genoud was incorporated into Martin Bormann's preparations for the period following the expected collapse of the Reich. The goal was a "Fourth Reich," this time on a global scale. Genoud became the key figure in gigantic market transactions on Swiss and other foreign bank accounts. Crucial for Genoud's work was the role of the well-known Swiss banker Dr. Alfred Schaefer, who for decades was chairman of the Union Bank of Switzerland (see Chapter 3). Schaefer was not only Eva Braun's lover before Hitler took her over, but the confidant of Hitler's sister Paula. A multitude of corporations were established, such as the Lausanne-based Diethelm Brothers, which organized the escape of Nazi Luftwaffe Col. Hans Rudel to Argentina.

Francois Genoud's Career

1929 Meets with Hitler in Munich.

1936 Meets with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hadschi Amin al Husseini.

1939 Joins the German Abwehr, after which his contact with Martin Bormann and Josef Goebbels became closer.

1943 Negotiates with OSS head Allen Dulles in Berne concerning the post-war period.

1950 Flees after the war to Belgium and then to Tangiers.

1952 Meets in Cairo together with SS Co!. Otto Skorzeny, Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohammed Ben Khidder, and the first Fedayeen groups; among them is also Sabri al-Banna.

1956 Wins a legal action in Frankfurt concerning the publication rights to Goebbels', Bormann's, and Hitler's writings.

1959 Founds at Lausanne the Banque Commerciale Arabe with ben Khidder and the Syrian Mardam family.

1962 Works with Ben Bella as a banker in Algiers. 1965 Becomes active in Lebanon with the mafia grouping Casino du Liban.

1969 Legal counsel for three PFLP members brought before a court at Winterthur. Defense attorney is Jacques Verges.

1970s Associated with Quaddafi regime, which has just taken power. Turns up as financial advisor to Libyan banks and organizes an international campaign to free the Swiss terrorist Bruno Breguet, who is interned in an Israeli prison.

1980s Attempts to obtain Jacques Verges as an attorney for Breguet, who was arrested in Paris in February 1982. Secures Verges as attorney for the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie. Involved in the "Hitler Diaries" swindle of Stern magazine.


Rudel later founded the "European-Argentine Friendship Society." Organizations including the journal Der Weg, founded not later than 1948, served as the mouthpiece for the Nazi exiles in Latin America. A perusal of this journal reveals that after the war a bitter struggle broke out between the various secret services for control of the old Nazi secret-service apparatus. While Allen Dulles and his friends in the U.S. State Department were shutting their eyes to the emigration of principal Nazis to Latin America, some of the latter were already extending feelers to Moscow. The editorial policy of Der Weg favored an alliance between the Nazis and Russia, against the "decadent West and American imperialism"!

The Nazi International in the Middle East

By the mid-1950s, less than ten years after the military dismemberment of the Third Reich, the apparatus for the coming "Fourth Reich" was already in place. In a July 1983 interview with Swiss Radio, SS Gen. Karl Wolff stated, "We are greatly indebted to Francois Genoud. His contributions following the war were of immeasurable value to us. Without him we would not have survived!" -- a compliment of which Genoud is justly proud. In February 1984, he told Stem magazine "Everyone has his hobby; mine is to help people like him," by which he meant the SS "Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie.

Genoud has traveled a great deal over the last thirty years in pursuit of his "hobby." Immediately after the war he turned up in Tangiers, the neutral zone where the spies and intelligence services of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe could hold their rendezvous. During the war Tangiers had been a center of the Nazi secret service. Besides Genoud, following the war, General Wolff, General Ramcke, Gen. Hans Rudel, SS Captain Reichenberg, SS Colonel Skorzeny and numerous others took up residence there, and repeatedly turned up as Genoud's closest collaborators. This was especially the case during 1952-56, when the entire pack could be found back together in Cairo, together with their old friends, the Grand Mufti al-Husseini-and Hjalmar Schacht.

Before he went to Cairo, Genoud appeared in public once more in 1951, although very discreetly, when he helped found the Black International in Malmo, which was later named the Malmo International. Genoud, who then withdrew from active political life, was the actual godfather of this organization.

Among those present at the founding meeting in Malmo were the previously mentioned Gaston Amaudruz, Per Engdahl from Sweden, the former German SS officers Heinz Priester arid Fritz Richter, Pierre Clementi of the French Volunteer Divison of the Vichy regime, Sir Oswald Mosley from Great Britain, and Count Loredan from Italy. Their stated purpose was to found the "European Social Movement'. for a "New European Order." This "movement" has been the spawning ground for every neo-Nazi organization of the past thirty years, and Lausanne and Malmo have served as coordination centers, out of which Amaudruz operates his intelligence newsletter Courier du Continent.

This newsletter receives regular contributions from former SS officer and concentration-camp administrator Thies Christophersen, who is sought by numerous police authorities because of his evil Nazi propaganda, exemplified by his contention that mass murder was never practiced in the concentration camps. In a 1982 interview with the Executive Intelligence Review, Amaudruz said he worked most closely with Christophersen's Society for Biological Anthropology, La Nouvelle Ecole of Alain de Benoist, and its offshoot GRECE, which in turn collaborates with Siemens Foundation chief Armin Mohler, as demonstrated by his attendance at its last annual conference. Mohler, with whom we are already familiar through his book The Conservative Revolution, was a Swiss member of the Waffen SS whose dreams of fighting on the Eastern Front were shattered when the Nazis declared him physically unfit for service. It therefore comes as no surprise to find Mohler in the orbit of the recently founded "Republican Party" of Franz Schonhuber, a friend of Genoud and Remer.

In Cairo, Genoud primarily collaborated with Colonel Skorzeny, who had gotten the green light from certain American circles to offer his services to the new regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser. Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, and Averell Harriman decided that "It is better to have the Nazis in Cairo than the Communists." The Egyptians, who had not been asked beforehand, quickly found themselves in the clutches of both Nazis and Communists. Taking advantage of the catastrophic shortage of suitable personnel in all areas of the new republic, the Nazis soon settled into key positions of the intelligence services.

This process was coordinated from the West German side by Gehlen's representative in the federal intelligence service (BND), Heinz Felfe, who a few years later defected to the Soviet side. In Cairo, Genoud, Skorzeny, and their friends again rebuilt the olq "National Minorities" apparatus formed by the Abwehr of Admiral Canaris, and was later put under the control of Amt IV of Himmler's Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office -- RSHA). Genoud's old friend, the Grand Mufti, relied on this apparatus for aid in carrying out the 1941 Iraqi coup, as well as for the formation of numerous Muslim military units in the Mideast and Africa, such as the "Saber" and "Dagger" divisions of the Allgemeine Waffen-SS, which were deployed in the Balkans and the Caucasus regions; and the "Arab Legions," which were deployed in North Africa along with Italian armed forces. In Europe, North African Muslims were chiefly funnelled into the "Er Rashid" organization, while other minorities such as Bretons, Basques, and Alsatians were controlled through Fred Moyshes' "Organization of National Minorities," which had existed long before the war, by the Paris-based Nazi intelligence official Dr. Best.

The Algerian agitator Ahmed Ben Bella and his friend Mohammed Ben Khidder, along with a few other friends, were all staying in Cairo at the same time. Some reports claim that Ben Bella, who liked to boast about his participation in the 1944 Italian campaign, had already been recruited much earlier into the German Abwehr and its "Er Rashid" organization. However that may be, Genoud and Skorzeny recommended him to one of their associates, SS officer Gerhard Muller, alias Si Mustapha, former advisor to Egyptian General Neguib. Ben Bella was now one of them.

The importance of such operations for Genoud lay in the possibility of putting state power to work in the interests of the Nazi International. This explains Genoud's enduring relationship to Ben Bella, whom he regularly visited while imprisoned in France. During the Algerian war of independence, Genoud procured weapons through the Nazi International for the FLN and thus became a crucial asset of the so-called Curiel network, which worked within France for the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Most members of the FLN network probably never heard of Genoud, and were definitely unaware of the details of his activities. The secret was hidden behind the apparent neutrality and respectability of a bank which was eager to expand the FLN war chest. Such banks were rare; Genoud, however, headed up one such bank, the Banque Commerciale Arabe, founded by him in 1959. Hundreds of millions of francs flowed into the bank from sympathizers of the FLN. Algerian political leaders only found out later that this was serving the interests of Genoud and the Nazi International more than it was their own.

One of the bank's advisors was none other than Hjalmar Schacht, who was also active as an advisor in many Third World countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. Sitting on the board of the bank were Martial Gaffiot, Gerard-Charles Borguin, the mafia lawyer Max Mosher, as well asJ amil Mardam Bey and, later, his son Zuhair Mardam.

The old Syrian Mardam family were longstanding friends with the Mufti, a friendship going back to Jamil Mardam Bey's work as Syrian foreign minister and also as leader ofthe Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Syrian People's Party at the end of the 1940s. Zuhair Mardam, who played a key role in the oil business along with the Akram Odscheh from Saudi Arabia, is now with the Saudi-Swiss Finance Corporation. It was not until 1979 that the Algerian government was able to regain control over their bank and their gold which, after the murder of Mohammed Khidder, was under Francois Genoud's exclusive control.

During this period Genoud established two new and important friendships: Michel Raptis alias "Pablo," and Jacques Verges. After the war, Raptis became secretary to a founder of the Trotskyist Fourth International, Ernest Mandel, and in this capacity became a leading figure in his own right. Before the war, Raptis had joined the Trotskyists together with an individual who is not unknown today, the current Socialistprime minister of Greece, Andreas Papandreou. After a somewhat miraculous escape from prison at the outset of the war, Raptis wound up in 1952 as Ben Bella's Minister of Planning. A Feb. 5, 1984 interview with Pablo and Ben Bella in the Greek newspaper To Vema indicates that they have never broken these ties.

Ben Bella decided in January 1983 to seek refuge at Genoud's residence in Switzerland, at the point it became clear to him that he could never again return to France. Since Ben Bella's release from imprisonment in Algeria, Genoud has helped him build an international fundamentalist network, whose aim is to topple every North African regime.

The paths of Genoud and Raptis criss-cross again and again. In the mid-1960s, while Raptis was busy recruiting European students for military training camps of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other: Palestinian terrorist groups in Syria, Genoud's Belgian friend Francois Thiriart of the "Young Europe" movement was meanwhile up to the same thing with his "European Brigades for Palestine." During this time Genoud was in direct contact with George Habash, as he told a journalist of L'Express in 1982, adding that since that time he had lost contact with Habash.

Today Raptis also plays an important role in the regroupment of the militant left. In France and West Germany his "International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency" (IRMT) is currently attempting to unite various split-offs from orthodox Communist, Trotskyist and Maoist organization into a catch-all vehicle that will join up with the activities of the Green and "alternative" movements.

The Terrorist Scene

Genoud's public support for the Swiss terrorist Bruno Breguet has also recently caused quite a stir. Breguet came into the limelight in the 1960s in connection with the PFLP, when he was seized by the Israeli security forces for planting a bomb at Haifa. The bomb attack was commissioned by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, another key figure in international terrorism. Following Breguet's arrest, Genoud was active in the background of a campaign of broad support for the "political prisoner" Breguet. Almost every notable member of the left and left-extremist delicatessen and intelligentsia participated in this campaign: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, Dario Fo, Noam Chomsky, Gunther Grass, Max Frisch, Friedrich Durrenmatt, to name a few. It is certain that Genoud's financial power and extensive Mideast connections were responsible for the Israeli decision to reduce Brequet's sentence from 15 to 7 years.

After his release in 1977, Breguet plunged back into the terrorist scene, settling down in Berlin during the outset of the hot phase of the house-squatters movement. Today there is stilla circle of friends in Berlin belonging to this scene, including Breguet's girlfriend, who are suspected of functioning as a safe-house for Palestinian and Islamic terror commandos. In the spring of 1982 Breguet was arrested together with a German accomplice, Magdalena Kopp. They were caught with large quantities of explosives, probably destined for use in a bombing attempt on the Paris-Toulouse express train. Kopp is thought to belong to the West German Revolutionary Cells. Breguet, Kopp and others are components of the same network which has repeatedly surfaced around the international terrorist "Carlos."

The defense attorney for Breguet and Kopp is Genoud's confidant Jacques Verges, the French terrorist lawyer who has also taken over the legal defense of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. French security circles and others consider Verges to be a high-level KGB agent of influence. French experts have also indicated that in 1938 Barbie was transferred from RSHA Division IV to the "Bureau of Jewish Affairs." The leader of this division was Col. Walter Nikolai, founder of the military Abwehr. At that time, circles around Canaris expressed the suspicion that Nikolai worked for Soviet secret intelligence; French sources indicate that Nikolai went over to Soviet intelligence after 1945.

Examining the network of Francois Genoud with all its left- and right-leaning connections and its multiplicity of political operations in Latin America and Europe, one might conclude that it overlaps with the "Bulgarian Connection," brought to light by the May 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope. This impression would not be entirely wrong. However, the "Bulgarian Connection," along with its component of East bloc intelligence operations, is only one of many flanks in the network of the Nazi International and Francois Genoud.

Genoud was already involved in trading weapons for drugs during the mid-1960s when he clinched a weapons deal under the auspices of the French gangster Jean-Marie Tine for the Lebanese Casino du Liban, one of the most important Mediterranean centers where the threads of Asia's drug trade and smuggling to Europe and America intersect. The Casino du Liban is financially backed by the powerful Intra-Bank of Beirut, headed by the mafioso Jussuf Beidas. Beidas and Tine are also involved in the "French Connection" of August Ricord in Latin America.

In earlier days this connection went through Genoud's old friend Hans-Albert Kunz, a Swiss businessman whom the Italian authorities would very much like to put under cross-examination concerning his involvement in the conspiratorial P-2 Freemasonic Lodge, on the role of Licio Gelli in countless arms deals, and on the relationship of the P-2 Lodge to the Pope's assailant Ali Agca. Like many of his associates, Kunz was present in Cairo at the same time as Genoud and Skorzeny, and remained in the Mideast for a long time. He was advisor to the Libyan King Idris, and in a June 1983 interview boasted that he had mediated the first agreement between Libya and the Soviet agent of influence Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum.

In recent years, from his position on the board of the Dreykott company, Kunz has mediated hundreds of arms deals, especially with Iran. His agent was the Italian fascist Stefano delle Chiaie, who is wanted by the police for masterminding the August 1981 bomb attack on the Bologna train station, which killed more than 80 persons. After delle Chiaie fled Europe, he collaborated with Klaus Barbie in Bolivia in expanding the drug traffic. What a small world! Another friend of Genoud and Kunz is the Swiss businessman Peter Notz, who is still suspected by the Swiss and Italian police of having organized the escape of the P-2 Lodge's Grand Master Licio Gelli from a Swiss jail. His regular guests at Notz's country seat, Gland (between Geneva and Lausanne), include the Lebanese politicians Suleiman Franjieh and Walid Jumblatt. Their last meeting took place in connection with the "national Lebanese reconciliation talks" in Geneva in November, 1983. The Swiss press took that occasion to cast some light on a few more aspects of Notz's business relations in Lebanon, especially with respect to arms deals.

For these kinds of operations Genoud also has a firm of his own, WEFA, located in Basel, which is currently under investigation in France. It is rumored that Genoud is the financial advisor to dozens of Arab banks, especially in Libya. In Spain, one of his most important contacts is Alfredo Fiero, who works for the Spanish export bank Banesco. In late 1983 Fiero and Notz signed an important weapons-trade agreement to aid Ahmed Ben Bella, who maintains extensive operations in Spain, including Spain's Muslim community and the Spanish Communist "Party through the "Red Caliph" Julio Anguitar, mayor of Cordova, a city which serves as one of the most significant coordination centers for the Libyan and Iranian terror and destabilization actions conducted against Tunisia and Morocco by Genoud in early 1984.

It is even reported that Ben Bella is preparing to set up a permanent office in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. In early January 1984 Genoud was in Tripoli, at the same time as the Libyan news agency Jana . described the founder of Executive Intelligence Review, Lyndon LaRouche, as the intellectual instigator of anti-Libyan activities. Genoud's Libyan sojourn coincides with the increasing exposure of his activities, and it is now rumored that he may want to stay away from Switzerland for some time. Perhaps he will ask his friend Qaddafi for political asylum.

The Role of Muammar Qaddafi

A key figure in finance and logistics for the formation of terrorist groups, separatist organizations, and Green-peace movements is the Libyan head of state Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi plays an extremely menacing role in the destabilization of Africa and several European states. And over the past few years the Soviet Union has continually expanded its military support for Qaddafi; Libya currently has 5,000 military advisors from the Soviet Union and its allies. Approximately $12 billion in weapons and materiel has flowed into Libya from the Soviet Union over the past seven years. One of the co-authors of Qaddafi's Green Book is an East German Communist Party operative named Hannes, who has changed his name to Chalifa Hanesh and is considered a confidant of Qaddafi.

Qaddafi's role in the financial and logistical support of the "peace movement" became public in the spring and summer of 1982. At a March 1982 meeting in Vienna under the auspices of the Austrian , Society for North-South Questions, Qaddafi received a delegation of Greens and peace activists. The delegation included Roland Vogt, Otto Schily, Alfred Mechtersheimer, the South Tyrolean leftwing extremist Alexander Langer, and the Austrian Socialist Egon Matzner.

In May 1982, the head of the Libyan Embassy in Bonn, Mehdi Imberesh, appeared along with two other representatives of the Libyan People's Bureau at an event held by the Greens, who had also invited European and American representatives. The meeting was the scene of demonstrative embraces between Imberesh, Roland Vogt of the West German Greens, and Daniel Berrigan, a leading representative of the American "peace movement." Shortly thereafter an expanded delegation traveled to Libya for extended discussions with Qaddafi. Mechtersheimer, who took part in both conferences with Qaddafi, was so impressed by all these experiences that in May 1983 he warned that the peace movement would run out of steam if it did not take new inspiration from the "universal impulses of the Islamic world"!

The element of "Islamization" of the peace movement and the Greens is becoming increasingly evident. Roland Vogt, for example, has pointed out the significanceof such leaders as Ahmed Ben Bella. The Swiss Nazi Ahmed Huber, a journalist who converted to Islam and is a close friend of Genoud and Ben Bella, agrees with Mechtersheimer on the perspective for the Greens: "They are turning away from the right-left mode of thinking. They are developing remarkably original and interesting religious impulses. In a few years the Greens will be completely transformed."

Huber, an admirer of Qaddafi and co-founder of the Swiss-Arab Society, which cooperates with the Geneva-based Islam and the West organization, also sees the Greens' development as one step in a process which, he proudly announces, will sooner or later lead to the "establishment of a Fourth Reich." The "Greater German" Huber is much more comfortable with the German Democratic Republic than he is with the "Americanized," "effeminate" Federal Republic of Germany. As a step toward a "Fourth Reich," he sees a "fully sovereign, nationally independent and reunified Germany" approaching in the next three to five years. With his paeans to the "revitalized Holy Russia," in which he places the greatest trust, the Muslim Huber is very clearly reflecting the currently prevailing irrational fundamentalist direction within the Soviet Union, a direction being played out fully with their support of Khomeini and Qaddafi, their "Islamic card."

There is also a direct line through Qaddafi to the German National Revolutionary grouping around the magazine Wir Selbst and its theoretician, Prof. Henning Eichberg. This grouping is an extremely important connecting link between the new generation of neo-Nazi groups and disoriented leftists and Maoists, Greens and peace movement activists. This magazine, which is financed by Qaddafi himself, ran in its August/September 1983 issue a lengthy interview with Qaddafi, who declared that "I have a very positive evaluation of the Green Movement, especially because it is creating the framework for the peace movement as well as for the protection of the environment, and because it is developing ideas which are also to be found in the Green Book. I hope that out of the Green movement there will develop a movement for the liberation of all Germany. You must find new methods of struggle against oppression in Germany."

The Qaddafi-supported Wir Selbst group plays a crucial role in furnishing the ideological impulse for the entire alternative-anarchist, Green/National-Revolutionary spectrum. Henning Eichberg, who once wrote programs for the neo-Nazi German National Party (NPD), has found that both right and left extremist groups are responding positively to his concept of "national identity." His ideas were circulated in the left scene by Pflasterstrand, taz and other left-extremist newspapers and publishers. The group has already established a solid network of contacts from within the Berlin Alternate List electoral slate, left-wing SPD members and other organizations.

Eichberg's ideas are no less important for the new generation of extremely dangerous, openly neo-Nazi groups, such as the National Socialist Action Front grouping around Michael Kuhnen or the Nazi-terrorist group around Odfried Hepp. Eichberg and his pupils are attempting, to form a "broad-based movement" out of "Greens, Socialists, Citizens' Initiatives, and National Revolutionary components."

Eichberg is at the same time one of the most explicit theoreticians of separatism. He is the creator of the idea of "ethno-pluralism." "The revolutionary ideology of the region" is "not 'left,' it is not 'right'; this is precisely why it has revolutionary implications," he preaches.

Members of the Wir Selbst group also maintain extensive contacts with European separatist-terrorist organizations. Wir Selbst also functions as a launching pad for the international "Society for Endangered Peoples," whose German business manager Tilman Zulch, when asked once about differences between Amnesty International and his organization, explained that "Amnesty is only for the theory, but we are for the weapon!"

One of the participants in the 1983 "Second Armenian World Congress" was the Berlin representative of the "Society for Endangered Peoples," Thessa Hoffman. The congress unanimously rejected a proposal to condemn bloody terrorist attacks such as the one at the Paris Orly airport, in which eight people were killed.

The ideology of extreme regionalism as embodied by Eichberg and his group and organizations like the "Society for Endangered Peoples" is one more example of the ideological intersections between the old and neo-Nazis, Greens and left extremists. Here there is full agreement between persons such as Club of Rome veteran Robert Jungk, Greens like Roland Vogt and Jo Leinen, and old Nazis like the Swiss Amaudruz; all of them glorify such things as the mythologies of old Indian tribes.

The list of separatist-terrorist organizations and initiatives supported by Qaddafi could be drawn out further. An important bastion in this connection is the "International Center for Ethnic and National Minorities" (Ciemen), based at the Benedictine cloister St. Michel de Cuxa in southern France. Ciemen functions as one of the the most important coordination points for southern European separatist organizations. The radicalization of guest workers in European countries as a result of Islamic fundamentalist ideas, also can be placed directly at Qaddafi's doorstep, since it is predominantly directed by such Qaddafi cohorts as Ahmed Ben Bella.

Libya's direct logistical and financial support for terrorist and separatist groups has assumed dangerous proportions. According to American estimates, something like 5,000 terrorists of all stripes and nationalities are processed through Libyan training camps each year. Numerous terrorist and radical organizations are directly financed with Libyan money.

The New Generation of Neo-Nazis

One of the central figures of the neo-Nazi scene is Michael Kuhnen and his National Socialist Action Front (ANS/NA) and its electoral organization, Action for Repatriation of Foreigners (AAR). Both were banned in late 1983 by the West German government as Nazi successor organizations. The example of Kuhnen allows us to draw all the relevant connections that elucidate the interplay between the Nazi International, the ideological and tactical overlapping of left and right extremist groups, and the Green movement.

In the early 1970s, after the traditional right extremist organizations like the NPD ceased to be effective, Kuhnen began to build a new National Socialist shock troop, which first made its appearance as the Hansa-Bund, and later on as the ANS. After a few street provocations the group went over into terrorist operations, robbing a bank in Hamburg and attacking a group of Dutch soldiers during a maneuver at the military drill grounds at Bergen-Hohe. Kuhnen, Uwe Rohwer, and four other ANS members were caught and convicted in 1978. Rohwer and Kuhnen are disciples of various old Nazis whose connections reach directly into the higher echelons of the Nazi International, as exemplified by Gelli and Genoud. Kuhnen's enthusiastic backers included the former Luftwaffe colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who belongs to Genoud's circle of friends. "Kuhnen is a vanguard in many respects. Ninety-nine percent of what he says and does is right," Rudel raved.

Other "old warriors" in Kuhnen's immediate circle are Otto-Ernst Remer and Willi Kramer. Remer likewise belongs to the hard-core of the Nazi International. During the war he commanded the Berlin Guard Battalion, which was largely responsible for putting down the attempted putsch against Hitler on July 20, 1944. After the war Remer was a functionary of the banned Socialist Reich Party (SRP) and constantly commuted between the Mideast and his illegal existence in the Federal Republic. Since 1981 he has emerged from obscurity and has appeared at various international meetings of old Nazi associations in Luxembourg and Alsace. Since the spring of 1983 he has repeatedly made public appearances with Kuhnen.

Willi Kramer also comes out of the SRP, and was Joseph Goebbels' adjutant during the war. Kramer has been named honorary chairman of the ANSI NA.

Another "old boy" and glowing admirer of Kuhnen, who nominally comes out of a completely different corner, is the "left-wing" poet Erich Fried. It has become increasingly evident that there is a communality on the "left" and "right" scene which is not only ideological, but which extends to manifold organizational and logistical relationships.

Fried came from a Viennese Jewish family which in 1938 emigrated to England. In the 1950s, Fried. was working as a political commentator for the BBC. In the mid-1960s, his anti· Vietnam War poems earned him a reputation as the "poet of the extra-parliamentary opposition." Fried, who defines himself as a "leftist anti-Zionist," suddenly joined up with the Baader-Meinhof and RAF sympathizers. By 1971 he was describing political measures against RAF sympathizers as "Nazi methods." The darling of taz and the entire scene from left-alternative-Green to terrorist, Fried suddenly began to enthuse about the Nazi-terrorist Kuhnen. In the spring of 1983 he offered to do a joint television appearance with Kuhnen, which was only prevented at the last minute by a Jewish representative of the Radio Commission.

Fried talked about Kuhnen in the following terms: "Sure he's a neo-fascist; he just doesn't know enough yet, but he is subjectively a very honest person; his fascism is revolutionary, just as Mussolini's fascism in the Salo Republic and the Peronists' fascism was revolutionary .... For him the Americans are the main danger for Germany, and on this we can only agree with him." Fried went on to state that Kuhnen was "a together person" who has "charisma." Minor "slip-ups," such as his hostility to foreigners, could be ironed out. Fried explained that Kuhnen even lives next to a Turkish family, and gets along splendidly with their children. Kuhnen, according to Fried, is a "left fascist," a "social revolutionary," who represents the same current as the old left SA grouping.

Such remarks might be shocking, but for those familiar with the "scene" they are perfectly coherent. Already in 1979 "Red Danny," Daniel Cohn-Bendit, veteran of the Frankfurt anarcho-terrorist scene, had taken the public position that one cannot simply dismiss the neo-Nazis' "revolutionary potential."

Unity between Brown and Red 'Environmentalists'

During the same time period, the Communist Alliance (KB-Nord), one of the key organizations in the anarchist-autonomist spectrum, began to integrate Punkers, decorated with swastikas and runic SS letters, into their violent riots. In 1979 a tract by the old Nazi Erwin Schonborn, entitled "Green Correspondence," was published, large sections of which read like one of the Greens' pamphlets. Its demands included: "Action for protection of environment, nature and animals"; "ecology before economy"; "the fight against nuclear weapons, the instruments of the holocaust"; "for peace and humanity against the global arms-race insanity"; "political solidarity with the Islamic green revolution." Schonborn's co-authors, Walter Kexel and Dieter Sporleder, later became terrorist bombers who were arrested during the latter half of 1983 for a series of brutal attacks against American GIs. And the list of these overlaps between the left and right radical scene could be infinitely extended. Old Nazis such as Per Engdahl in Sweden and Gaston Guy Amaudruz in Switzerland repeatedly underline these links. Engdahl is a leading light among the successors to the fascist Malmo International, which in the 1950s was already trying to find a common platform between the diverse neo-Nazi organizations. Engdahl once said: "I totally agree with the environmentalist movement. Traditionally the theme of environmental protection was a theme of the right, but now the left has taken it over." Genoud's confidant Amaudruz has repeatedly expressed the same views with almost identical words.

Calls for a common struggle of the left and right were also evident in 1977 during the climax of the demonstrations against the nuclear plant at Brockdorf, West Germany. The National-Socialist terrorist Manfred Roeder wrote at the time:

We must bring things to a boil as we did at Brockdorf. Brockdorf was the beacon and the ray of hope on the horizon. The soul of the people is boiling over. The democratic rabble is starting to tremble. We have waited years for this situation. Finally the hour is come! Brockdorf is the Achilles heel of democracy! The time is ripe to strike!


Rejoicing over the Red Army Fraction's assassination of West German Attorney General Siegfried Buback, Roeder exclaimed that "Buback has not only persecuted me and other patriots, but he has also tolerated two different kinds of law. We must feel sympathy for those who persecute German soldiers and patriots! There he lies, he who would destroy us, buried in the earth!" At another point he stated: "No longer are the police our helpers and friends. I am fighting shoulder to shoulder with the anarchists and the left."

Michael Kuhnen made this liaison clear in a lengthy interview with the Deutsche Allgemeine Sonntagsblatt in February 1982. He described the Munich shootout with the Busse group as "an incident that I'm already thinking of as a Stammheim in reverse. That is, I'm convinced that these events in Munich will boomerang just like it happened at Stuttgart-Stammheim with the RAF comrades. Here we're dealing with a police-attack .... " Asked about the possibility of an action unity between National Socialists and Communists, as occurred off and on during the 1930s, Kuhnen's words were:

The readiness to do something like that [is] more marked in left circles than it is in right circles. Once, for example, I offered the KBW in Hanover, as well as the Communist Alliance in Hamburg on the occasion of the municipal elections, a direct or indirect moratorium so as not to disperse our forces, because I have always said that these guys are against the system, too, in their own way. The first thing is to weaken the system.... I see on the left -- the alternatives, the peace movement, the antinuclear movement -- people who for very honorable reasons are against certain aspects of this system. And here I think that action unity is possible.... And it's not difficult for me to imagine young National Socialists jointly demonstrating as easily against the [Frankfurt airport's) West Runway as they would against speculation in housing construction.


But these relationships are not merely on the level of declarations of intent. It can be proven that this red-brown partnership is reflected with increasing frequency in organizational and personnel overlaps.

For example, it was already known in 1981 that Udo Reinhard, an activist of the Green Alternative Citizens List (GABL) in Hanover, was also a member of the National Revolutionary organization NRAO/SdV. Moreover, Reinhardt was friends with one of the National Socialist terrorists who were killed in ttte Munich police shootout with members of the Busse group. A better known case is that of Werner Vogel, the Green member of parliament who turned out to be an old Nazi official but who nevertheless continued to enjoy the support of the greater part of the Greens. But this is not surprising, since the "environmentalist movement" was from its inception largely the work of old Nazis.

The example of Kuhnen can serve as a case study for the development of tendencies within neo-Nazi layers. But more than that, Kuhnen's group exhibits a dangerous recruitment potential for violent terrorist acts. Kuhnen's following is increasing particularly among the proto-fascist "Skinheads" and violence-prone soccer fan clubs and rock bands. For example, fan clubs are being formed with names like "Zyklon-B" and "Borussenfront" (a take-off on the name of a Dortmund soccer team, with the double-S written in the old SS runic characters). Kuhnen is also playing a considerable role in making international contacts in the United States and France. There is also collaboration with old Nazis like Schonborn, Christophersen, Roeder, Remer, and Ainaudruz, etc., who have little organizational relevance today, but who provide backup for the young Nazis with their wealth of intelligence, international connections, money, and logistics.

An interesting glimpse into the activities of Nazioriented terrorist groups and their associations is provided by the group around Odfried Hepp, whose members include Walter Kexel, Hans-Peter Frass, Hans Sporleder, Helge Blasche and Ulrich Tillman. This group has gotten over a half million deutschmarks by robbing banks, and has taken responsibility for the December 1982 attacks against American GIs. Three members of this organization come out of "new right" groups such as the Hoffman paramilitary group or the VSDB/PdA (Busse group). Furthermore, Hepp's people completed a course at a Lebanese training camp, which professionally qualified them in weaponry and explosives. In the estimation of French experts, this group is particularly dangerous because they are said to have international contacts. Kexel and Tillman were arrested in the English city of Poole, notably in the home of a former SAS major.

In 1982 this group circulated a paper entitled "Parting with Hitlerism," which announced a formal split with the Kuhnen group, which was labeled the "National Socialist chaotics" and "Hitler-fascists." The paper, however, reveals very strong leanings toward the National Bolshevist ideology of Henning Eichberg's Wir Selbst group, which puts heavy emphasis on the National Revolutionary Ernst Niekisch. The paper includes the following:

Our goal is not to turn back the wheel of history and to resurrect a state on the Hitler model, but rather to lead a non-dogmatic liberation struggle, which guarantees the survival of our people. In this struggle against Americanism we welcome everyone who, like us, has recognized that we will have a chance only if the activist youth within left and right circles overcome their dogmas and join up with the liberation struggle. We in the FRG will also, of course, heartily welcome anti-Americans from other countries who wish to take part in our struggle. In conclusion we wish to emphasize once more that we are neither "left" nor "right," and we wish to establish neither an American-style federal state nor another Soviet republic. ... But under no circumstances must we fail to appreciate the antibourgeois-capitalist driving power of Bolshevism, and it is our desire and will to live, as a neutral Germany, in peace and friendship with Soviet Russia.


The declaration concludes with the slogan: "Forward in the anti-imperialist liberation struggle!"

As is usually the case in West Germany, investigations into this extremely strident group seem to have petered out into "lone-culprit" theories. The first results of a special commission of the Hesse State Criminal Office (LKA) consisted of the groundbreaking discovery that the group had resorted to crime primarily because of "avarice"! The commission claimed that this "small Hessian group" could not be ascertained to have had contact with supraregional or international right extremist movements. When, following their arrest, the group's weapons depot was discovered near Dietzenbach, located only one hundred meters from one of the RAF's weapons depots, near where the RAF terrorists Schulz and Mohnhaupt were also arrested, the LKA was just as quick to explain that there was no collaboration between left and right extremists -- the reaction of most German authorities whenever key points are touched in the structure of terrorism and organized crime.
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