PART ONE

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE THIRD REICH

 

A NEW REICH BEGINS
 

HITLER’S SUPPORT GROUP
FOLLOWING THE ARMISTICE OF 1918, WHICH ENDED WORLD WAR I, German soldiers returned home, to a country economically devastated by the war. The Bavarian city of Munich was hit particularly hard, with jobless ex- soldiers wandering the streets and a number of splinter political parties vying for membership.

It was in this setting that Hitler, a twenty-nine-year- old veteran, came into contact with members of the Thule Gesellschaft, or Thule Society, ostensibly an innocent reading group dedicated to the study and promotion of older German literature. But the society, composed mostly of wealthy conservatives, ardent nationalists, and anti-Semites, actually delved into radical politics, race mysticism, and the occult under its emblem—a swastika superimposed over a sword.

The society also served as a front for the even more secretive Germanenorden, or German Order, a reincarnation of the old Teutonic Knights, which had branches throughout Germany patterned after Masonic lodges.

 

It is believed that these lodges carried on the agenda of the outlawed Bavarian Illuminati, with its fundamental maxim that “the end justifies the means.” In other words, members should pretend to be anything or anybody, adopt any philosophy, tell any lie, steal, cheat, even kill as long as it accomplishes the society’s objectives.

Members of the Thule Society encouraged a Munich locksmith and toolmaker named Anton Drexler to bring workers into the political process. The unassuming Drexler founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German Workers Party, which was guided to prominence by covert aid from conservative elements within industry and the military.

Hitler, unable to make a living as an artist, turned to earning extra money by serving as an army intelligence agent reporting to a Captain Karl Mayr.

 

“One day I received orders from my headquarters to find out what was behind an apparently political society which, under the name of ‘German Workers Party,’ intended to hold a meeting... I was to go there and look at the society and to report upon it,” Hitler recalled in Mein Kampf.

Arriving at the Sterneckerbrau beer hall, he was not overly impressed.

 

“I met there about 20 to 25 people, chiefly from among the lower walks of life,” wrote Hitler.

However, the young military agent stood and “astonished” the small gathering by arguing against a proposal that Bavaria break ties with Prus sia. Impressed with the nationalistic and anti-Semitic views of the fledgling party, military authorities allowed Hitler to join and began funding the party’s work. He became the party’s seventh registered member.

Hitler’s work in the party was initially supported both by funds from Captain Mayr’s army intelligence unit and the dedicated anticommunists and occultists of the Thule Society.

 

Funding was passed through the publisher of occult literature, Dietrich Eckart, whom Hitler called the “spiritual founder of National Socialism.” Eckart was soon introducing the new member to the right social circles in Munich and his intellectual friends in the Thule Society.

 

The editors of Time-Life Books noted,

 

“Dietrich Eckart took over as editor of the Volkischer Beobachter, the renamed Munchener Beobachter, which the party had purchased from the Thule Society with money supplied partly by Mayr’s secret army account.”

Author Joseph P. Farrell stated that the covert connections of Eckart and future deputy fuehrer Martin Bormann support the idea,

 

“that Hitler was deliberately manipulated and placed into power, and secretly manipulated behind the scenes by more powerful forces than even he wielded, and, when he had served his purpose, was deliberately sabotaged and cast aside.”

The forceful Hitler, armed with adequate funds, quickly gained control of the German Workers Party, which soon claimed three thousand members. In April 1920, Hitler changed the party’s name to the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers Party, abbreviated to Nazi.

Following an ill-fated attempt to take control of the government in 1923, known as the Beer-hall Putsch, Hitler and his lieutenants were imprisoned and the Nazi Party languished. Upon his release after only nine months, Hitler began to direct the Nazi Party into more effective, and legal, activities, which resulted in the Nazis becoming the largest political party in Germany by July 1932.

It was, in fact, wealthy businessmen in Western industrial and banking circles who guaranteed Hitler’s success. Aft er Hitler lost a popular election to Hindenburg in 1932, thirty-nine business leaders, with familiar names like Krupp, Siemens, Thyssen, and Bosch, signed a petition urging the aged president Paul von Hindenburg to name Hitler chancellor.

 

In January 1933, through a compromise with German aristocrats, industrialists, and army officers, brokered by banker Baron Kurt Freiherr von Schroeder, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany.

 

The deal to name Hitler chancellor of Germany was cut at von Schroeder’s home on January 4, 1933. On hand were prominent industrialists, at least one director of the giant Deutsche Bank as well as I.G. Farben’s Hermann Schmitz and Dr. Georg von Schnitzler representing Farben’s board of directors.

 

According to author Eustace Mullins, also attending this meeting were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Schroeder bank. This claim has been disputed by other researchers.

At that time, Germany was a free republic with one of the most educated and cultured populations in the world. The country was at peace and enjoying a blossoming of democratic freedom under a coalition government of the Weimar Republic.

Oddly, Hitler went against tradition by choosing not to work out of an office in the German Reichstag, or parliament building, and on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was gutted by fire. In those slower, gentler times, this act was as great a shock to the German people as the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was to Americans in 2001. Hitler blamed the destruction on communist terrorists.

 

Inside the building, police arrested an incoherent, half-naked retarded Dutch youth named Marinus van der Lubbe. They said he was carrying a Dutch Communist Party card. After some time in custody, the youth confessed to being the arsonist. However, later investigation found that one person could not have started the mammoth blaze and that incendiary devices had been carried into the building through a tunnel that led to the offices of Hitler’s closest partner, Hermann Goering.

Despite misgivings in many quarters about the official explanation of the fire, it was announced that “the government is of the opinion that the situation is such that a danger to the state and nation existed and still exists.” Law enforcement agencies quickly moved against not only the communists but also pacifists, liberals, and democrats. Less than a month later, on March 24, 1933, at Hitler’s urging, a panicky German Parliament voted 441 to 94 to pass an “Enabling Act,” which became the starting point for Hitler’s dictatorship.

As a result of the Enabling Act, the Nazi government required national identity cards, racial profiling, the equivalent of a national homeland security chief (SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler), gun confiscation, and, later, mass murders and incarcerations in concentration camps.

 

“When Germany awoke,” wrote British reporter Douglas Reed, “a man’s home was no longer his castle. He could be seized by private individuals, could claim no protection from the police, could be indefinitely detained without preferment of charge; his property could be seized, his verbal and written communications overheard and perused; he no longer had the right to foregather with his fellow countrymen, and his newspapers might no longer freely express their opinions.”

Hitler’s financiers and especially Prussian military officers were becoming alarmed over Hitler’s growing power, especially with some three million Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm Detachment Brown Shirts under the command of Hitler’s SA chief Ernst Roehm awaiting orders.

 

The army proposed a deal—if the power of the SA was broken, the military would pledge loyalty to Hitler. Hitler agreed, and on June 30, 1934, trumped-up charges of plotting a revolution caused Roehm and hundreds of Brown Shirts to be fatally purged and the SA quietly faded away. The German military began pledging their allegiance not to their nation but to Hitler. With the German population firmly under control due to massive propaganda and fear of government retaliation, Hitler was free to launch invasions into former German territories as well as Poland.

It is instructive that Hitler did not invade Poland without pretext. A “false- flag” operation was accomplished first. SS men dressed in Polish uniforms fabricated an attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, which allowed Hitler to announce that a counterattack had been launched against Polish soldiers who had invaded German territory. Germany was simply making the world safe for National Socialism.

 

World War II ensued.

WITH THE DEATH of the eighty-seven-year-old Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, Hitler merged the offices of president and chancellor and proclaimed himself commander in chief of the armed forces, the absolute leader—fuehrer—of all Germany.

He found a huge and powerful industrial base geared for war production already in place and awaiting his command. It had been put in place at the end of World War I thanks to an influx of Western capital investment.

 

“This build-up for Europe an war both before and after 1933 was in great part due to Wall Street financial assistance in the 1920s to create the German cartel system and to technical assistance from well-known American firms... to build the German Wehrmacht,” noted financial investigator and author Antony C. Sutton, who added, “The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal.”

(For example, in 1934 Germany produced only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and synthetic gasoline. In 1944, thanks to the transfer of hydrogenation technology from Standard Oil of New Jersey to I.G. Farben, Germany produced 6,500,000 tons of oil, 85 percent of which was synthetic.)

The intertwining of American capitalism with German corporations began following World War I, with two programs: the Dawes Plan (1924) and the Young Plan (1928).

 

Both plans, engineered in America, virtually guaranteed success for the fledgling Nazi Party. The Dawes Plan, designed to restructure German war reparations, was named for chairman of the Allied Reparations Committee Charles G. Dawes and described by historian Carroll Quigley as “largely a J. P. Morgan production.”

 

This plan used American loans to create and consolidate the German steel and chemical giants, Vereinigte Stahlwerke and I.G. Farben, both major supporters of Hitler. It caused anger and frustration among the Germans, because it meant foreign control of Germany’s finances—a fact constantly pointed out by Hitler in his speeches—and appeared open- ended, as no final reparation amount was ever announced. Its successor, the Young Plan, named for J. P. Morgan agent Owen D. Young, required burdensome monetary payments from Germany. It, too, led to support within Germany for Hitler and his Nazis.

Financing the rearmament of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty proved as profitable as it was dangerous to European peace.

 

German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, a major financial contributor to Hitler, stated,

 

“I turned to the National Socialist Party only after I became convinced that the fight against the Young Plan was unavoidable if complete collapse of Germany was to be prevented.”

Finance between Germany and the Allied nations was controlled by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. It was the brainchild of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, president of the Reichsbank (in 1930, he resigned in protest to the Young Plan but was reappointed by Hitler in 1933) and the financial genius behind Germany’s economic revival.

 

Although his father was an American citizen, Hjalmar was born in Germany during his mother’s return there and named after the famous American editor and politician. It was Schacht who provided an ongoing link between Hitler and Germany’s industrialists.

The BIS was administered by a multinational staff, which historian Quigley called the “apex of the system” of bankers, to secretly exchange information and plan for the coming war. One of the corporate giants created in post–World War I Germany with assistance from American capital was Internationale Gesellschaft Farbenindustrie A. G., better known in its shortened version as I.G. Farben.

 

Created in 1926 by combining six existing chemical companies, it was the brainchild of Hermann Schmitz, who became the firm’s president. Under his guidance, I.G. Farben became the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world. It was so powerful during the Nazi regime that the firm became known as a “state within a state.”

Farben had subsidiaries, offices, and representatives in ninety-three countries, including the United States. Paul Manning, a CBS news correspondent in Europe during World War II, explained Schmitz’s connections by pointing out that the Farben chief once “held as much stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey as did the Rockefellers.” By the time war began in 1939, I.G. Farben had doubled in size, gaining participation and managerial control over 380 other German companies as well as more than 500 foreign fi rms. This growth was made possible by bond sales in America, including one for $30 million offered by National City Bank, a forerunner of today’s Citibank.

It was I.G. Farben’s patented Zyklon-B, a prussic acid poison gas, that was used to kill victims in the “shower baths” of Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka. Previously, the firm had received a contract to produce carbon monoxide, used to gas the sick and mentally deficient under Germany’s euthanasia program.

One example of the close business ties between the United States and Nazi Germany was Walter C. Teagle, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which was owned by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. Teagle also was a director of American I.G. Chemical Corporation, one of the subsidiaries of I.G. Farben, which changed its name to General Aniline and Film (GAF) in an effort to distance itself from its German owners.

Teagle, through Rockefeller banking and oil interests, made his superiors a handsome profit just prior to the war. “[Teagle] remained in partnership with Farben in the matter of tetraethyl lead, an additive used in aviation gasoline,” wrote author Charles Higham.

 

“[German Luft waff e chief Hermann] Goering’s air force couldn’t fly without it. Only Standard, Du Pont and General Motors had the rights to it. Teagle helped organize a sale of the precious substance to [Farben president] Schmitz, who in 1938 traveled to London and ‘borrowed’ 500 tons from Ethyl, the British Standard subsidiary.

 

Next year, Schmitz and his partners returned to London and obtained $15 million worth. The result was that Hitler’s air force was rendered capable of bombing London, the city that had provided the supplies. Also, by supplying Japan with tetraethyl, Teagle helped make it possible for the Japanese to wage World War II.”

Following negative publicity regarding these tetraethyl transactions in 1938, Teagle resigned from the board of GAF, to be replaced by future Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal.

 

Curiously, it was this same Walter Teagle who helped create the National Recovery Administration, one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies designed to regulate American business. This was an odd choice if the captains of American industry were as opposed to socialism as they publicly claimed.

By the mid-1930s, with the government, military, and the German cartels now firmly in hand, Hitler knew it was time to strengthen his influence over international bankers and businessmen.

 

Despite his declared intentions to nationalize German businesses and curtail the power of international business and finance, Hitler initially had little trouble getting funds from corporate sponsors who saw his National Socialism as a necessary alternative to worldwide communism.

“[H]is appeal to the common people offered a chance to win the working class away from communism,” noted James Pool, author of Who Financed Hitler.

In America, efforts were under way to market Nazism to the public while concurrently practicing economic espionage.

 

Teagle, together with Farben chief Schmitz, hired famed New York publicist Ivy Lee to pass proprietary information on American companies to Germany and to spin news stories so as to gloss over the darker side of Nazism. By the late 1930s, Lee was being paid $25,000 a year for disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda in America.

 

Payments to Lee came from a Farben U.S. subsidiary, American I. G., and moved through Lee’s company account with Chase Bank and his personal account at New York Trust Company.

 

“They were American funds earned in the U.S. and under control of American directors, although used for Nazi propaganda in the United States,” stated author Sutton.

Another solid conduit for Nazi propaganda and intelligence activities was the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line. Max Warburg, a leader of Deutsche Bank, sat on the board of Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line along with Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two future U.S. presidents. Max Warburg was the brother of Paul Warburg, America’s first chairman of the Federal Reserve System and the man in charge of U.S. finances in World War I.

American I.G. Chemical Corporation was more than just a source of funds. It provided important intelligence to the Nazis throughout the war as noted by I.G. Farben director Max Ilgner, the nephew of Farben’s chairman Schmitz.

 

He wrote,

 

“Extensive information which we receive continuously from [American I.G.] is indispensable for our observations of American conditions... [and] is, since the beginning of the war, an important source of information for governmental, economic and military offices.”

“The full story of I.G. Farben and its worldwide activities before World War II can never be known,” noted author Sutton, “as key German records were destroyed in 1945 in anticipation of Allied victory.”

The banking industry, including foreign financial houses, provided Hitler and his Nazis with the funds to both consolidate and spread their National Socialist doctrine.

 

Throughout World War II, the bank of Baron von Schroeder acted as financial agents for Germany in both Britain and the United States. Antony C. Sutton described how John Foster Dulles handled Schroeder bank loans in the USA. In fact, Dulles, in addition to providing legal services to a joint Rocke feller-Schroeder investment firm, the Schroeder-Rockefeller Company, also sat on the board of directors of General Aniline and Film (GAF) from 1927 to 1934.

 

GAF, as it was known during the war, remained a subsidiary of I.G. Farben.

 

Schroeder, the powerful head of the J. H. Stein & Company banking house of Cologne, had long provided financial support to the Nazis in hopes they would counteract the spread of communism. Hitler had given his word to von Schroeder that “National Socialism would engage in no foolish economic experiments”—in other words, he would not attack banking practices except in rhetoric.

This closeness between Hitler and the banking industry reached back to the earliest days of the Nazi Party.

 

“On New Year’s Day 1924, the financial fate of Germany was settled in London at a meeting between Hjalmar Schacht, the new Reich Commissioner for National Currency, and Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of En gland,” noted author John Toland.

 

“Schacht, who had already abolished emergency money, began with a frank disclosure of Germany’s desperate financial situation.”

He then proposed to open a German credit bank second to the Reichsbank, but one that would issue notes in pound sterling. Schacht asked Norman to provide half the capital for this new bank.

 

“Within 48 hours Norman not only formally approved the loan at the exceptionally low interest of a fl at five percent but convinced a group of London bankers to accept bills far exceeding the loan...,” Toland wrote.

A year after the meeting at Schroeder’s home that launched Hitler into power, Nazi official and ideologist Alfred Rosenberg met with Schroeder Bank of London managing director T. C. Tiarks, who also was a director of the Bank of England.

Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of En gland, in early 1934 informed a select group of City of London financiers that Hitler’s regime was a system with a good future. With no opposition, it was decided to provide covert financial help to Hitler until Norman could persuade the British government to abandon its pro-French policy to one more favorable to Germany.

Thus a curious relationship developed between these powerful banks of two supposedly belligerent nations, which continued throughout the war. Of course, it only appears curious to those who do not understand the economic cooperation among the world’s ruling elite.

In December 1938, Schacht came to England as a guest at Montagu Norman’s home. The visit was declared to be purely personal. One month later, the hospitality was returned when Norman stopped over in Berlin for a visit with Schacht on his way to Switzerland. Although there was no public announcement as to what the two men discussed, it was rumored that they were attempting to create a common policy of settling Germany’s foreign debts and expanding its markets.

 

There were also rumors that Britain’s bankers might extend to Germany some $375 million in export credits.

 

The importance of such financial cooperation was explained by Sutton:

 

“In the 1920s and 1930s, the New York Federal Reserve System, the Bank of En gland, the Reichsbank in Germany and the Banque de France also more or less influenced the political apparatus of their respective countries indirectly through control of the money supply and creation of the monetary environment. More direct influence was realized by supplying political funds to, or withdrawing support from, politicians and political parties.”

Funds for this financial control were channeled through the Bank of International Settlements that, according to the bank’s charter and with the agreement of the respective governments, was immune from seizure, closure, or censure, even if its owners were at war.

 

These owners included the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York (among whose directors were Harold S. Vanderbilt and Wendell Wilkie), the Bank of En gland, the Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other central banks.

 

“The bank [BIS] soon turned out to be... a money funnel for American and British funds to flow into Hitler’s coffers and to help Hitler build up his war machine,” wrote Higham.

By the start of World War II, the BIS was under Nazi control with the bank’s directors including Schmitz, Schroeder, Dr. Walter Funk, and Emil Puhl of the Reichsbank.

 

In 1939, when the Nazis moved into Czechoslovaki a, officials of the Czech National Bank removed $48 million in gold reserves to the Bank of En gland for safekeeping. Under pressure from the Nazis, Bank of England governor Montagu Norman unhesitatingly agreed to move the gold to Switzerland, where it went into Nazi accounts to purchase essential war materials for Germany.

Despite the obvious rearmament in Germany in the late 1930s, the Nazis continued to find support in Britain, even within the Rothschild dominated Bank of England. This pro-Nazi proclivity by Bank of En gland officials will assume even more relevance in the events described in the next section.

Illustrating further interconnecting business associations of this time was International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) German chairman Gerhardt Westrick, a close associate of John Foster Dulles, who was a partner to Dr. Heinrich Albert, head of Ford Motor Company in Germany until 1945.

 

Two ITT directors were German banker Schroeder and Walter Schellenberg, head of counterintelligence for the Nazi Gestapo—the Nazi Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police. America’s International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation sold Germany communication and war material, including as many as fifty thousand artillery fuses per month, more than three years after Pearl Harbor.

More interconnecting business ties between America and the Nazis can be seen by studying the Rocke feller-owned Chase National Bank, now JPMorgan Chase Bank, the largest corporate bank in the United States.

 

Charles Higham explained how the Rockefellers owned Standard Oil of New Jersey, the German accounts of which were siphoned through their own bank, the Chase, as well as through the independent National City Bank of New York (NCB), which also handled Standard, Sterling Products, General Aniline and Film (part of the I.G. Farben combine), Swedish Enskilda Bank (SKF), and ITT, whose chief, Sosthenes Behn, was a director of NCB.

 

Two executives of Standard Oil’s German subsidiary were Karl Lindemann and Emil Helfferich, prominent figures in Himmler’s Circle of Friends of the Gestapo—its chief financiers—and close friends and colleagues of the BIS’s Baron von Schroeder.

Further banking connections, noted by author William Bramley, involved German banker Max Warburg and his brother Paul Warburg, who had been instrumental in establishing the Federal Reserve System in the United States. Both were directors of I.G. Farben.

 

H.A. Metz of I.G. Farben was a director of the Warburg Bank of Manhattan, which later became part of the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Bank.

 

Standard Oil of New Jersey had been a cartel partner with I.G. Farben prior to the war. One American I.G. Farben director was C. E. Mitchell, who was also director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and of Warburg’s National City Bank. I.G. Farben president Hermann Schmitz served on the boards of Deutsche Bank and the Bank for International Settlements. In 1929, Schmitz was voted president of the board of National City Bank, now Citibank.

In the 1930s, many people in both Britain and America were in agreement with Nazi ideology.

Automobile-maker Henry Ford became a guiding light to Hitler, especially in the realm of anti-Semitism. In 1920, Ford published an anti-Jewish book titled The International Jew. As Hitler worked on his book, Mein Kampf, in 1924, he copied liberally from Ford’s writing and even referred to Ford as “one great man.” Ford became an admirer of Hitler, provided funds for the Nazis, and, in 1938, became the first American to receive the highest honor possible for a non-German: the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.

Ford’s son, Edsel, sat on the board of American I.G. Farben and GAF. In July 1940, at a meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, between ITT’s Westrick and the Fords, it was decided that rather than build aircraft engines for beleaguered Britain, the Ford company would build five-ton military trucks for Germany, the “backbone of German Army transportation.”

 

And the Fords were not alone in providing Nazi Germany with the means to wage war. Bradford Snell told the Washington Post in 1998 that Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer once told him that Hitler would never have considered invading Poland without the synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.

One future American corporate giant provided the Nazis with the means of registering, correlating, and assigning shipment schedules to the millions of Jews and others that were rounded up and sent to their deaths in concentration camps. According to author Edwin Black, Hitler’s desire to tabulate then eliminate these people was,

Using recently discovered Nazi documents and the testimony of former Polish workers, Black found that IBM technology was passed not only through the company’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (Dehomag), but to a great extent through a subsidiary in Poland, Watson Business Machines in Warsaw, which reported directly to the IBM New York headquarters.

Watson kept in close contact with his German subordinates, traveling to Berlin at least twice a year from 1933 to 1939. Watson never sold IBM machines to the Nazis. They all were merely leased. This meant that all machines were dependent on IBM punch cards, parts, and servicing. Interestingly, IBM punch cards of that time were not standardized.

 

Each batch sent to Nazi Germany was custom- designed by IBM engineers.

 

“Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in Europe,” noted Black.

After America’s entry into the war, Nazi Hermann Fellinger was appointed as German enemy-property custodian. Fellinger maintained Watson Business Machines, keeping the original staff and ensuring continued profits for IBM. This subsidiary continued to send royalties and reports to the New York home office through IBM’s Geneva office.

Watson, a well-connected Freemason, proclaimed “World Peace Through World Trade” in 1937, while in Berlin to be named president of the International Chamber of Commerce.

 

In that same year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Watson U.S. commissioner general to the International Exposition in Paris, and Hitler created a special medal for Watson, called the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, to,

 

“honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.” “It ranked second in prestige only to Hitler’s German Grand Cross,” noted Edwin Black.

“Since the war, IBM... has obstructed, or refused to cooperate with, virtually every major independent author writing about its history, according to numerous published introductions, prefaces, and acknowledgments,” he added.

Along with aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, another American supporter of Hitler was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president. Kennedy was appointed

U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1939 but was recalled in November 1940 for voicing his sympathies for Hitler.

 

Roosevelt had been advised by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that,

 

“Joseph P. Kennedy, the former Ambassador to England, and Ben Smith, the Wall Street operator, some time in the past had a meeting with [Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann] Goering in Vichy, France, and that thereafter Kennedy and Smith had donated a considerable amount of money to the German cause. They are both described as being very anti-British and pro-German.”

One important example of a prewar effort to install a fascist dictatorship within the United States is the attempted overthrow of Roosevelt early in his presidency.

Only a year after Hitler came to power in Germany, many wealthy Americans looked with favor on a fascist system to counteract international communism. Many were disgruntled with President Roosevelt’s social policies and felt he was secretly a communist. Irénée Du Pont and General Motors president William S. Knudsen in early 1934 planned to finance a coup d’etat that would overthrow the president with the aid of a $3 million–funded army of terrorists, modeled on the fascist movement in Paris known as the Croix de Feu.

The undoing of this scheme was retired Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history, who was approached by the plotters and urged to head the new military government.

 

Butler, who had openly attacked Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, however, proved to be a loyal citizen and immediately informed Roosevelt of the treasonous conspiracy.

 

“Roosevelt... knew that if he were to arrest the leaders of the houses of Morgan and Du Pont, it would create an unthinkable national crisis in the midst of a depression and perhaps another Wall Street crash. Not for the first or last time in his career, he was aware that there were powers greater than he in the United States,” noted Higham.

Roosevelt decided to leak the story to the press, which generally discounted it as a “ridiculous” rumor. Nevertheless, some of the primary plotters skipped the country until the furor died down. But the story did prompt Congress to appoint a special committee to look into the matter. Yielding to the powerful interests involved, the committee dragged its feet for four years before finally publishing a report marked for “restricted circulation.”

 

Although downplaying the significance of this attempted coup, the committee’s report did state that “certain persons made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country” and that the committee “was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.”

Some researchers have speculated that this move against Roosevelt was merely a ploy orchestrated by the same elite families that put him into power. It was a scheme to paint FDR as an opponent of Wall Street and gain public support for his policies. If this plot was legitimate, it was the last overt move against an American president by powerful business interests until 1963. Ploy or not, this incident provides not only an example of hidden U.S. history but also the lengths to which powerful persons will go to subvert the principles of the United States.

Even at the time, some astute Americans could clearly see the connections between powerful national business leaders and Nazi Germany. U.S. ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd told reporters upon his arrival back home in 1937,

 

“A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.”

It was not just the ruling families that looked favorably on National Socialism and a fascist government. Prior to World War II, right-wing demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald K. Smith, an ordained minister, drew thousands of supporters from Christian American workers into their America First and Union Party with their message of nationalism and fears of a “Jewish conspiracy.”

 

Smith’s planned religious theme park in the 1960s was never completed, but his “Christ of the Ozarks” draws tourists to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to this day. Prior to the war, no one paid serious attention to warnings against the spread of fascism, just as few people seem willing to consider the possibility of a fascist takeover of the USA today.

A successful political movement requires money, lots of it. There is no question that Hitler’s rise to power rested heavily on the support of the major German banks—Schroeder’s Cologne banking firm, the Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft, and the huge insurance firm Allianz—all with many interconnecting ties to foreign banks and companies.

 

There were also close ties to prominent U.S. banks. Higham described how, in 1936, the J. Henry Schroeder Bank of New York had entered into a partnership with the Rockefellers.

 

Named Schroeder, Rockefeller and Company, Investment Bankers, the firm became what Time magazine called the economic booster of “the Rome-Berlin Axis.”

 

“Avery Rockefeller owned 42 percent of Schroeder,” Higham reported. “Their lawyers were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen Dulles (later of the Office of Strategic Services) was on the board of Schroeder.”

One Deutsche Bank executive outlined a few of the bank’s wartime loans: 150 million reichsmarks to the aircraft industry; 22 million to Bavarian Motor Works (BMW); 10 million to Daimler-Benz (Mercedes) in 1943 alone. Similar amounts were loaned again in 1944.

But all the tightest business connections came to naught, for by 1941, the international order had turned against Hitler. Germany’s blitzkrieg had shocked the ruling elite, as first Poland, then the rest of Europe, came under Nazi control. Britain was helpless to stop Hitler, who was already making preparations for a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union.

 

In short, Hitler was getting out of hand.

 

 

 

THE STRANGE CASE OF RUDOLF HESS

ALTHOUGH RELEGATED TO A MINOR FOOTNOTE IN HISTORY, THE strange case of Nazi deputy fuehrer Rudolf Hess in 1941 provides a rare glimpse of the elitist control over events during World War II.

The bushy-eyebrowed Hess flew alone to En gland in May 1941, in an effort to make peace. The conventional view of the Hess flight is that of an increasingly marginalized member of Hitler’s inner circle who sought to regain favor with his fuehrer by making an unauthorized visit to Britain in the hope of personally negotiating an end to the war and even enlisting En gland’s aid in the fight against Soviet expansionism.

 

Hitler disavowed Hess as insane, while British prime minister Winston Churchill more kindly described Hess’s attempt at negotiation as a “frantic deed of lunatic benevolence.”

At the Nuremberg trials, Hess was found guilty of “crimes against peace” and spent the rest of his life a prisoner in Berlin’s Spandau Prison. In August 1987, British military authorities announced that Hess had committed suicide, a judgment that continues to be disputed. Several recent studies of the Hess incident show there was much deeper meaning to this intriguing story, which was only magnified by his sudden and mysterious death just as his release from captivity seemed imminent.

RUDOLF HESS WAS born in Egypt in 1894, the son of a German importer. He was well schooled and well traveled by the time he joined the German Army during World War I, serving in the same regiment as Corporal Adolf Hitler. He was wounded twice and later became a fighter pilot, but the war ended before he could experience much combat.

Returning to Munich after the war, Hess helped other ex-servicemen in the paramilitary Freikorps to oust a short-lived Communist local government. After helping to break the Communist coup, Hess joined the Thule Society and enrolled as a student at the University of Munich, where he met his future wife and the man who was to prove a major influence on both Hitler and himself: Professor General Karl Haushofer.

According to author William Bramley, Professor Haushofer was a member of the Vril, another secret society based on a book by British Rosicrucian Lord Bulward Litton, about the visit of an Aryan “super race” to earth in the distant past.

 

A mentor to both Hess and Hitler, Haushofer had traveled extensively in the Far East before becoming a general in the kaiser’s army of World War I.

 

“His early associations with influential Japanese businessmen and statesmen were crucial in forming the German-Japanese alliance of World War II,” wrote author Peter Levenda.

Haushofer became the first ranking Nazi to form relationships with South American governments in anticipation of a war with America. These relationships would prove instrumental in the later escape of war criminals from Europe.

Haushofer, as a professor at the University of Munich, worked out Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum, “living space” for a hemmed-in Germany. Although he gained a reputation as the “man behind Hitler,” Haushofer’s views on geopolitics were largely accepted by Hitler, but only after they came from the mouth of Hess. “I was only able to influence [Hitler] through Hess,” he told his American captors in 1945.

Both Hess and Haushofer first met Hitler at one of the beer hall meetings of the German Workers Party. During the abortive Beer-hall Putsch of 1923, when the new Nazi Party tried to seize power in Bavaria, Hess was at Hitler’s side. When the coup failed, Hess drove off to Austria, where he was sheltered by members of a paramilitary wing of the Thule Society.

Voluntarily returning to Germany, Hess joined Hitler in Landsberg Prison after being convicted of conspiracy to commit treason. Due to the political climate at the time, both men were released within a year. During their months of imprisonment, Hess became a close confidant to Hitler and helped produce Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf.

 

Hess edited, rewrote, and organized the book so extensively that some researchers believe he should have been credited as coauthor.

 

“As far as I know, Hess actually dictated many chapters of that book,” Haushofer told interrogators in 1945.

Following the reorganization of the Nazi Party in 1925, Hess became Hitler’s private secretary. He moved upward through other major party positions until 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, when he was appointed deputy fuehrer. It was Hess who initiated the “Heil Hitler!” salute and was the first to call Hitler “mein Fuehrer.”

Furthermore, as a member of the Geheimer Kabinettsrat—the Nazi Secret Cabinet Council—and the Ministerial Council for the defense of the Reich, Hess was well aware of the secret work to develop a German atomic bomb.

 

Proof of this knowledge came during an interview with Britain’s home secretary Sir John Simon, following his flight to England.

 

“[O]ne day sooner or later this weapon will be in our hand and... I can only say that it will be more terrible than anything that has gone before,” Hess revealed.

It is clear that Hess was much more powerful and well connected than is generally reported. He was the person closest to Hitler, one who shared his aspirations and beliefs. On the eve of war in 1939, Hess was even named the successor to Hitler after Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.

THE EXCEPTIONAL POWER and position of Rudolf Hess demands close scrutiny of his ill-fated flight to En gland and its consequences.

 

Just such a study was undertaken in 2001 by three British authors—Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince, and Stephen Prior.

 

“It soon becomes apparent that the whole Hess affair, from 1941 onward, is riddled with so many contradictions and anomalies that it is obvious that the British authorities were desperate to conceal something,” they concluded. “Judging by the fact that they are still desperate to conceal it, common sense dictates that they deem this secret to be unsuitable for public consumption, even after sixty years.”

A detailed study of Hess’s flight clearly indicates that it was not just a sudden whim of an unstable individual. There is evidence of foreknowledge in Germany. Hess prepared for the flight meticulously over a period of months, even having famed aircraft designer Willy Messerschmitt modify a twin-engine Messerschmitt-110.

 

Hess also received special flight training from Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot, as well as Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur—evidence that Hitler had knowledge of Hess’s plans. On his flight, Hess carried the visiting cards of both Haushofer and his son, Albrecht Haushofer, yet another indication of his intent as a peace mission, since the elder Haushofer had long been an advocate of maintaining friendly relations with Britain as a cornerstone of German politics.

According to the French scholars Michel Bertrand and Jean Angelini (writing under the name of Jean-Michel Angebert), Haushofer passed along to Hess the names of members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society in England, as well as names of supporters of a peace initiative, such as the duke of Hamilton, the duke of Bedford, and Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick.

 

The Golden Dawn, most popularly connected to England’s foremost occultist, Aleister Crowley “the Beast”, was an outgrowth of the Theosophical Society, from which much Nazi mysticism was derived, and had close ties with the Thule Society.

According to some theories, British Intelligence manipulated Hess’s belief in the occult to provoke his flight to En gland.

 

Oddly enough, this scheme involved Crowley as well as British Intelligence agent Ian Fleming, who would later write the popular James Bond novels.

 

“Via a Swiss astrologer known to Fleming, astrological advice was passed along to Hess (again, via the Haushofers and by Dr. Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, an astrological adviser and occultist on Hess’s staff since 1935) advocating a peace mission to En gland,” wrote Levenda.

 

“May 10, 1941, was selected as the appropriate date, since an unusual conjunction of six planets in Taurus (that had the soothsayers humming for months previous) would take place at that time.”

Once in England, Hess was to be debriefed by fellow occultist Crowley.

One clue that such an outrageous plan may have been put into operation was somewhat supported by Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer, who wrote in later years,

 

“[I]n Spandau Prison, Hess assured me in all seriousness that the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by supernatural forces.”

But whatever Hess’s motivations, it is clear that foreknowledge of his flight existed in Britain as well as Germany. In fact, both Haushofer’s son and Hess wrote to the duke of Hamilton, whom Hess had met briefly during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, in hopes of initiating peace talks between the two men, perhaps even opening a direct link to King George VI.

On orders of the government, Hamilton did not reply. However, one letter to Hamilton from the younger Haushofer was shown to British foreign secretary Lord Halifax and air minister Sir Archibald Sinclair.

 

“Both of these ministers were supportive of the peace initiative, which had to be kept officially secret and distance [sic] from Churchill,” wrote Picknett, Prince, and Prior.

 

“So, while it is true to say that Hamilton showed the letter to his superiors, what is omitted is the fact that they kept quiet about it [emphasis in the original].”

It should be recalled that the Windsor family have always been sensitive about their German extraction. Peace with their relatives would have been very desirable during the war years. In 2000, senior British government sources confirmed that private letters between the Queen Mother and Lord Halifax showed hostility toward Churchill and even a willingness to submit to Nazi occupation if the monarchy was preserved.

 

Even Churchill, who was tightly connected to the empire-builders of Britain, made it clear that the object of the war was to stop Germany—not the Nazis.

 

“You must understand that this war is not against Hitler or National Socialism,” Churchill once stated, “but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all, regardless whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit priest.”

In a letter to Lord Robert Boothby, Churchill explained that “Germany’s unforgivable crime before the second world war was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world’s trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny world finance its opportunity to profi t.”

It also must be recalled that in 1941, despite the successful Battle of Britain, En gland was economically strangled and near defeat. At the time Hitler seemed unstoppable and it was quite easy to envision a Nazi victory.

 

The aristocracy, industrialists, bankers, and even the royal family were eager for peace.

 

“Hess did not imagine a peace group,” concluded Picknett, Prince, and Prior, “nor was it invented by MI6, but its existence at such a level [as the royals] would explain why so much about the Hess affair was—and continues to be—hushed up.”

As for Hitler, Germany was preparing to strike Russia, and he did not want a two-front war, the very situation that caused Germany’s defeat in World War I. Hitler wanted En gland as an ally against communism.

 

“With En gland alone [as an ally], one’s back being covered, could one begin the new Germanic invasion [of Russia],” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.

In other words, Hitler needed peace with Britain before undertaking an attack on Russia.

Securing peace on the Western Front may have become an urgent priority for Hitler. According to former Soviet military intelligence officer Vladimir Rezun (writing under the pen name Viktor Suvorov), Hitler was forced to launch a preemptive assault against the Soviet Union in June 1941, to forestall an attack on Western Europe by Stalin in July.

Suvorov’s work has been published in eighty-seven editions in eighteen languages, yet has received virtually no mention in the U.S. corporate mass media, despite the fact that his assertions turn conventional history upside down. Most people have been taught that Stalin naively trusted Hitler and was totally surprised by Hitler’s attack.

Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov, who in 1941 was the Soviet Navy minister and a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, was quoted by Suvorov as stating in his postwar memoirs,

 

“For me there is one thing beyond all argument—J. V. Stalin not only did not exclude the possibility of war with Hitler’s Germany, on the contrary, he considered such a war... inevitable.... J. V. Stalin made preparations for war... wide and varied preparations—beginning on dates... which he himself had selected. Hitler upset his calculations.”

While Suvorov’s conclusions grate against the conventional view of Hitler’s attack on Russia, he has provided a compelling argument. Suvorov pointed out that by June 1941, Stalin had massed vast numbers of troops and equipment along Russia’s European frontier, not to defend the Motherland but in preparation for an attack westward.

 

Stalin’s motive was to bring communism to Europe by force, a plan he expressed in a 1939 speech.

 

“The experience of the last twenty years has shown that in peacetime the Communist movement is never strong enough to seize power. The dictatorship of such a party will only become possible as the result of a major war,” stated Stalin.

Noting that when the German attack began on June 22, 1941, they could field a mere 3,350 tanks, mostly lightly armored and gunned, as compared to the Russians 24,000 tanks, many of superior armor and armament.

 

Retired U.S. Department of Defense official Daniel W. Michaels wrote,

 

“Stalin elected to strike at a time and place of his choosing. To this end, Soviet development of the most advanced offensive weapons systems, primarily tanks, aircraft, and airborne forces, had already begun in the early 1930s.... The German ‘Barbarossa’ attack shattered Stalin’s well-laid plan to ‘liberate’ all of Europe.”

Suvorov supported his contention by pointing to the fact that Russian troops were prepared to attack, not defend, which led to the early German victories; that Rus sian troops had been issued maps only of Eastern Europe an cities, not for the defense of Russia; that Russian troops had been issued Russian-German phrase books with such expressions as “Stop transmitting or I’ll shoot”; and that none of Stalin’s top commanders were ever held accountable for the Barbarossa debacle, since they had all merely followed Stalin’s orders.

Suvorov concludes,

 

“Stalin became the absolute ruler of a vast empire hostile to the West, which had been created with the help of the West. For all that, Stalin was able to preserve his reputation as naive and trusting, while Hitler went down in history as the ultimate aggressor. A multitude of books have been published in the West based on the idea that Stalin was not ready for war while Hitler was.”

He also said the resources of Stalin’s war machine have been underestimated.

 

“Despite its grievous losses, it had enough strength to withdraw and gather new strength to reach Berlin. How far would it have gone had it not sustained that massive blow on 22 June, if hundreds of aircraft and thousands of tanks had not been lost, had it been the Red Army and not the Wehrmacht which struck the first blow? Did the German Army have the territorial expanse behind it for withdrawal? Did it have the inexhaustible human resources, and the time, to restore its army after the first Soviet surprise attack?”

Perhaps the best support for Suvorov’s claims came from Hitler himself. “Already in 1940 it became increasingly clear from month to month that the plans of the men in the Kremlin were aimed at the domination, and thus the destruction, of all of Europe. I have already told the nation of the build-up of Soviet Russian military power in the East during a period when Germany had only a few divisions in the provinces bordering Soviet Russia.

 

Only a blind person could fail to see that a military build-up of unique world-historical dimensions was being carried out. And this was not in order to protect something that was being threatened, but rather only to attack that which seemed incapable of defense... I may say this today: if the wave of more than twenty thousand tanks, hundreds of divisions, tens of thousands of artillery pieces, along with more than ten thousand airplanes, had not been kept from being set into motion against the Reich, Europe would have been lost,” the fuehrer stated in his speech on December 11, 1941, when he declared war against the United States.

Of course, the victors always write history, so whether Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union was sheer aggression or a necessary preemptive strike will probably be argued for many years.

 

But, if it proves true that Hitler was merely forestalling an imminent attack by the Soviet Union, it places the history of World War II in an entirely different context. It would certainly go far in explaining Hitler’s otherwise inexplicable actions in starting a two-front war, the very situation he had warned against in Mein Kampf.

 

It also would help explain why Franklin Roosevelt, at the bidding of the globalists, was arming the Soviet Union in blatant violation of the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937. By the end of 1940, with all Europe under German control and Britain threatened, they may have determined to stop Hitler.

Hitler clearly indicated what he saw as the machinations undertaken to prevent any negotiated end to hostilities in 1941.

 

In a speech to the Reichstag less than a week before Hess’s arrival in Scotland, he declared,

 

“All my endeavors to come to an understanding with Britain were wrecked by the determination of a small clique, which, whether from motives of hate or for the sake of material gain, rejected every German proposal for an understanding due to their resolve, which they never concealed, to resort to war, what ever happened.”

Picknett, Prince, and Prior even argue that Seelowe—or Sea Lion, the code name for the proposed German invasion of England—was a “sham right from the beginning,” an effort by Hitler to distract Stalin by feinting west when he actually planned to strike to the east. It was merely a cover for the mobilization of men and equipment needed for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

 

One clue that this tactic was in play can be seen in the fact that Hitler, who was known for constantly interfering with his generals on the smallest of details, never showed any real interest in the plans for an invasion of England, according to German military historian Egbert Kieser. These authors, along with other historians, explain that Hitler’s strange order to halt the German advance at Dunkirk allowed the British Army to escape the continent. Hitler wanted his future ally intact.

And the prelude to such an alliance was Hess’s peace initiative. On May 10, 1941, when Hess’s ME-110 arrived over Scotland, he was to have landed at an airstrip near the Hamilton ancestral home, negotiate peace terms with the anti-Churchill faction, and then be flown to Sweden as the first leg of a return trip home. This faction was prepared to oust Churchill and agree to a ceasefire with Germany.

This proposition may not be as absurd as it first sounds. Picknett, Prince, and Prior noted,

 

“The extravagant postwar mythologizing of Churchill has obscured the fact that he remained in a very insecure position politically for at least the first two years of his premiership, largely because it was well known that he did not—to put it mildly—enjoy the support and confidence of the king.”

The notion of an internal coup against Churchill was even broached to President Roo sevelt by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

 

In a memorandum written only a week before the Hess flight, Hoover informed Roosevelt,

 

“[I]t was reported that the Duke of Windsor entered into an agreement which in substance was to the effect that if Germany was victorious in the war, Hermann Goering through his control of the army would overthrow Hitler and would thereafter install the Duke of Windsor as the King of England.”

Interestingly, Hess’s flight brought him through the weakest section of the British coastal radar net, plus he overflew a Royal Air Force base twice without provoking any response—clues that orders had been given somewhere along the chain of command to facilitate his arrival. But he missed his landing spot and, low on fuel, finally was forced to bail out over a farm just south of Glasgow.

 

Unarmed, his ankle broken from the jump, he was captured by a farmer with a pitchfork. The Home Guard quickly became involved and the whole secret operation was blown. Although Hess initially claimed to be a Luftwaffe pilot named Alfred Horn, this subterfuge quickly failed. “Horn” kept asking to be taken to the duke of Hamilton.

The whole scheme was a massive embarrassment to all concerned. Everyone, including Hitler, had to disavow any connection with the plot. After all, for Hitler to admit that he was preparing to make peace with Britain would have tipped off Stalin that a German attack on Russia was imminent.

British intelligence found itself conflicted over the Hess affair.

 

“MI6 was supportive of a negotiated peace with Germany, as it saw Communist Russia as the real enemy,” noted the three authors, “whereas SOE [Special Operations Executive] was in favor of an alliance with Stalin against Hitler. As the Prime Minister’s creation, SOE was naturally pro-Churchill.”

This rivalry led to strange occurrences along Hess’s path to prison. He was moved to a variety of locations, some recollections of his whereabouts conflicting with others. There was every opportunity for pulling a switch before Hess was finally locked up in the Tower of London.

Picknett, Prince, and Prior introduced yet another mystery—the death of George, the Duke of Kent, King George VI’s youngest brother and the first member of the royal family to die while on active military service since the fifteenth century. The duke, like others in the royal family, was an admirer of the Nazis and was likely to have joined a peace group in a negotiated peace. He also served as an unofficial intelligence officer to his brother, the king. (It may be noteworthy that in 1939, King George installed the duke as the grand master of English Freemasonry at a ceremony at Olympia in West London.)

Superficially, the duke’s death on August 25, 1942, was the result of a routine wartime air accident. It was reported that the Sunderland flying boat in which he was a passenger crashed into a low hill called Eagles Rock, in Caithness, Scotland.

 

The official account of the accident said the seaplane was taking the duke on a morale-boosting mission to Iceland when the pilot changed course “for reasons unknown,” descended through clouds without making sure he was above water, and crashed into a hillside. However, the complete file containing the details of the crash, made by a court of inquiry, has disappeared and anomalies abound.

The duke’s plane clearly was in the process of ascending when it crashed, indicating it may have lifted off from nearby Loch More near Braemore Lodge, where accounts place the captive Hess. Second, when statements from witnesses and the one survivor are compared with the official rosters, it becomes clear that there was an unaccounted-for passenger on the craft .

These factors, coupled with much other evidence—both hard and circumstantial—support the conjecture that the anti- Churchill peace group waited until mid-1942, a low ebb in Britain’s war fortunes, before attempting to fly the duke of Kent and Rudolf Hess to Sweden to announce a peace plan that would topple the Churchill government. Of course, this never happened, due to the plane crash. Whether this was sabotage or an accident has not been clearly established.

If Hess died in the duke’s plane, it would have presented a thorny problem for Churchill—how to explain the mangled corpse of a man who was supposed to be their prized prisoner. Any investigation would have revealed the involvement of ranking members of British society, even the royals, in the peace initiative.

Here the story takes an even more bizarre twist.

 

Evidence gathered for their book by Picknett, Prince, and Prior—including Hess being reported as seen in different locations at the same time, and inconsistencies in official reports—indicated that a duplicate Hess may have been prepared prior to the plane crash.

 

“We are convinced that in the summer of 1942 there were two Hesses, one in Scotland and one at Maindiff Court, Abergavenny, Wales,” they wrote.

The real Hess died in the crash and the double lived to stand trial at Nuremberg and serve his sentence at Spandau.

But even these astute authors acknowledged a huge problem with such a scenario.

 

“Even though it seems to fit the evidence perfectly, it has to be admitted that the mind skids on the thought that any man would allow himself to be tried and sentenced in Hess’s name, not to mention continuing with the deception for the rest of a very long life in the harshest and most hopeless of conditions,” they remarked.

The idea of a Rudolf Hess double is not new, and various theories have been advanced. One suggested that the look- alike was forced to play Hess out of fear for his family.

 

Another was that the Hess double was a German—whoever the man was, German was his first language—and an ardent Nazi, who was convinced it was necessary to the party that he maintain the subterfuge, especially since he might become the founder of a Fourth Reich.

But the most provocative explanation comes from Picknett, Prince, and Prior, who learned that former CIA director Allen Dulles, a founder of the Council on Foreign Relations and high commissioner of Germany after the war, had dispatched Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron to Nuremberg to examine Hess.

 

Dulles expressed to Cameron his belief that the Hess being held in Germany was an impostor and that the real Hess had been secretly executed on orders from Churchill. Knowing of Hess’s war wounds, Dulles wanted Cameron to especially note if there were any scars on the prisoner’s chest. Interestingly enough, British military authorities in Nuremberg refused to allow such an examination.

But the story grows stranger. Dr. Cameron was a Scot who pioneered brainwashing techniques before the end of the war, at the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. He went on to become president of the American Psychiatric Association as well as the first president of the World Psychiatric Association.

 

He also became part of the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA mind-control program. Various researchers have wondered if Dulles’s choice of Dr. Cameron to study Hess might have grown from the knowledge or suspicion that the man posing as Hess had been brainwashed into actually believing he was the Nazi deputy fuehrer. Mind-control experimentation was much further along—particularly in Europe, as shall be seen—than most people realize.

 

Why else should Dulles have chosen a brainwashing expert to study Hess when any competent physician could have checked for scar tissue?

This subterfuge could account for Hess’s eccentric behavior at the Nuremberg trials, during which he repeatedly claimed he had lost his memory, a convenience for someone who had not lived Hess’s life.

Once the peace plan went awry, all the usual methods of cover-up came into play—documents disappeared or were locked away from public scrutiny, witnesses were coerced into silence, and multiple “theories” from authoritative sources were spread.

One clue that a geopolitical game was being played out in the Hess affair is that the last person to dine with the duke of Kent prior to the fatal crash that killed him and perhaps the real Hess was a foreign exile, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The dinner represented an unusual gathering of the British royals at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, which, in addition to the duke and Prince Bernhard, included King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

But it is Bernhard’s presence that has caught the interest of researchers. Prince Bernhard originated meetings of the Bilderberg Group, a collection of world movers and shakers so secretive they have no proper name.

 

Bernhard was a former member of the Nazi SS and an employee of Germany’s I.G. Farben in Paris. In 1937, he married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and became a major shareholder and offi cer in Dutch Shell Oil, along with Britain’s Lord Victor Rothschild.

After the Germans invaded Holland, the royal couple moved to London. It was here, after the war, that Rothschild and the founder of the Europe an Movement for Unity, Polish socialist Dr. Joseph Hieronim Retinger, encouraged Prince Bernhard to create the Bilderberg Group. The prince personally chaired the group until 1976, when he resigned following revelations that he had accepted large payoff s from Lockheed to promote the sale of its aircraft in Holland.

It is impossible to know for certain whether Prince Bernhard sided with the British royal family and the peace initiative or was monitoring their activities for the prowar Churchill clique. But it is an indication of the machinations of the global elite.

 

The peace initiative was stopped and the globalists’ decision to stop National Socialism at all costs proceeded.

There can be little doubt that the failure of Hess’s peace mission to Britain on the eve of the attack on Russia created the unwanted two-front war that cost Hitler the victory. After the failure of Hess’s ill-fated flight, his place in the Nazi hierarchy was taken by Martin Bormann, a man who will be discussed later.

 

Some Nazi leaders, including Himmler and Bormann, became uncertain of victory and began laying plans for their survival.

 

They also turned to science for new Wunderwaffen, or wonder weapons, that might turn the tide of war in their favor.
 

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