The Fraternity

In 1913, Franz von Papen, who would become Vice Chancellor under Hitler, entered the diplomatic service as a military attaché to von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in the United States, and worked out of the New York offices of the Hamburg-America Line. Bernstorff and von Papen became part of the Propaganda Kabinett, whose members included George Sylvester Viereck, who operated The Fatherland with Aleister Crowley, whose contributors included Wall Street banker and Zionist Samuel Untermyer, who was reportedly a member of the Golden Dawn of New York and a British newspaper called him a “Satanist.”[1] Working out of the New York offices of the Hamburg-America Line, von Papen was Heinrich Albert’s  chief accomplice in sabotage operations in the US, until their activities were exposed when Albert’s briefcase was stolen by an American secret service agent in 1915.[2] Von Papen wrote Viereck in 1915, as he was about to return to Germany after being ordered to leave the US for spying:

Very many thanks for your kind invitation to tea, which I will follow with great pleasure. Your last article was excellent and I thank you very much for the proper way you handled my case. I expect to leave the 21st for the trenches, where soldiers are better needed than over here, and I will take with me as a splendid recollection the remembrance of these times where we stood and fought together in many a good battle for our invincible cause. The promised article follows. Kind regards.[3]

Franz von Papen then first served as an officer on the western front and then, from 1917, as an officer at the general staff in the Middle East and as a major in the Turkish army in Palestine. After the war, he entered politics and was a member of the parliament of Prussia from 1921-1932. In the 1925 presidential elections, he supported Paul von Hindenburg (1847 – 1934), who chose him as Chancellor in 1932. Hindenburg was a direct descendant of Martin Luther and his wife Katharina von Bora, through their daughter Margarethe Luther. His paternal grandparents were Otto Ludwig Fady von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg (1778 – 1855), through whom he was remotely descended from the illegitimate daughter of Count Heinrich VI of Waldeck (c. 1340 – 1397), who was an ally  of Henry II, Landgrave of Hesse (c. 1299 – 1376), a great-grandson of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, of the Miracle of the Roses. After World War II, Hindenburg and his wife were buried in the Elizabeth Church, in Marburg, Germany, which was built by the Order of the Teutonic Knights in honour of Saint Elizabeth.

After two Reichstag elections increased the Nazis’ power in the Reichstag, von Papen was forced to resign as Chancellor. After Hitler lost a popular election to von Hindenburg in 1932, thirty-nine business leaders, including Alfred Krupp, Siemens, Fritz Thyssen and Robert Bosch, sent a petition to von Hindenburg urging that Hitler be appointed Chancellor of Germany. It wasn’t until after Hitler met in secret in Cologne with von Papen in January 4, 1933, at Baron Kurt von Schröder’s villa in the fashionable Braunsfeld neighborhood of Cologne, that Hindenburg would relent and appoint Hitler chancellor, effectively giving birth to the Third Reich.[4] Also attending the meeting were Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess and Hjalmar Schacht, the head of the Reichsbank. The famous meeting was also attended by Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers John Foster and his brother Allen Dulles, future head of the Central Intelligence Agency.[5]

These men formed part of what Charles Higham, in Trading With the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949, called “the Fraternity,” which was a network of the Warburgs and the Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil and First National City Bank, or the Chase National Bank, who financed the rise of the Third Reich. The key actors responsible for assisting Hitler’s rise to power were connected to a network of financiers closely associated with the infamous Skull and Bones society at Yale. Alexandra Robbins describes the Skull and Bones as “the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known,” and related that the society has been dominated by about two dozen of the country’s most influential families, including the Bush, Bundy, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney families, who are encouraged to intermarry amongst themselves.[6] Society members dominate financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Brown Brothers Harriman, where at one time more than a third of the partners were Bonesmen. As Robbins explains, “Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided financial backing to Adolf Hitler because the society then followed a Nazi—and now follows a neo-Nazi—doctrine.”[7]

In 1919, Averell Harriman founded W.A. Harriman & Co with fellow Bonesman George Herbert Walker, the grandfather of George H.W. Bush, which led the way in directing American money to German companies. In 1926, Walker made his son-in-law, another Bonesman, Prescott Bush, vice president of W.A. Harriman. In 1931, W.A. Harriman merged with Brown Brothers creating Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company, where more than a third of their partners were Bonesmen. Montagu Prescott Bush was a senior partner of Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company. Both E.R. Harriman and Prescott Bush were members of Yale university’s Skull and Bones society, which was the dominant American chapter of the international Brotherhood of Death secret societies, that included Germany’s Thule Society, later the Nazis.

Walker was president of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), was in fact a front for numerous German nationals. In 1926, Prescott Bush was assigned to UBC, where he oversaw its German operations from 1926 until 1942. Bush looked after the American interests of Fritz Thyssen, who controlled the vast German Steel Trust. According to government and Thyssen family records, Thyssen’s contributions were a major reason Hitler succeeded in his climb to power.[8] Under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, President Roosevelt personally approved an investigation, which concluded that UBC had been the single largest front for the Nazis operating in the United States. The Alien Property Custodian issued a Vesting Order, which detailed how UBC and other entities operated by the Bush, Walker, and Harriman families had assisted the Nazi war effort. The Alien Property Custodian also concluded that Brown Brothers had been used as a front by the Nazis and that the Germans had controlled these strategic interests since the 1920s.[9]

Prescott Bush was selected by Max Warburg to be the American Ship & Commerce Line official representative on the board of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a shipping line and cover for IG Farben’s Nazi espionage unit in the United States. IG Farben, which was indispensable to the German war effort, was formed when Carl Duisburg, the chairman of Bayer, argued for a merger of German manufacturers of synthetic dyes and other chemical products. Duisburg was inspired following a visit to the United States in the spring of 1903, when he visited several of the large American trusts such as Standard Oil, US Steel, International Paper and Alcoa. In the 1920s, the dye industry leaders, led by Duisberg and Carl Bosch of BASF, successfully pushed for the merger of the dye makers into a single company. In 1925, the companies merged into the Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG or IG Farben. During World War I, Duisberg had devised the slave-labor system later perfected by the company.[10] Duisberg was also responsible for the development and implementation of “Gruenkreuz” (phosgene) and “Mustard gas,” and aggressively pushed forth their use, in deliberate contravention of The Hague Land Warfare Convention. In Leverkusen, Duisberg set up a school specifically for chemical warfare. Duisberg also provided substantial financial support to the Nazi with the agreement that the government would only buy chemical products from IG Farben.[11]

The company had become a donor to the Nazi Party in the 1930s, and was a large government contractor after the Nazi takeover of Germany, providing significant material for the German war effort. IG Farben also ultimately produced the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi extermination camps. The huge corporation, which soon included related industries such as explosives and fibers, was the biggest enterprise in all of Europe and the fourth largest in the world, behind General Motors, United States Steel and Standard Oil of New Jersey. IG Farben and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil were effectively a single firm, having been merged in hundreds of cartel arrangements. It was led up until 1937 by Rockefeller’s partners, the Warburgs. Since 1927, Max Warburg served on the board of directors of IG Farben, while his brother Paul served on the board of directors of the company’s wholly-owned American subsidiary, which was also associated with Standard Oil.[12]

Warburg was also a close friend with Montagu Norman, chairman of the Bank of England, who was also a partner in Brown Brothers, Harriman and a close friend of Prescott Bush. Norman was a close friend of Hjalmar Schacht, who was appointed to head the Reichsbank under direct recommendation from Adolf Hitler, and the godfather to one of Schacht’s grandchildren.[13] Although born in Germany, Schacht spent part of his early upbringing in Brooklyn and maintained powerful Wall Street connections.[14] Schacht was also a Freemason, having joined the lodge Urania zur Unsterblichkeit in 1908.[15]

Tower of Basel

Schacht and Norman were both members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), founded in 1930. According to Higham, “sensing Adolf Hitler’s lust for war and conquest, Schacht, even before Hitler rose to power in the Reichstag, pushed for an institution that would retain channels of communication and collusion between the world's financial leaders even in the event of an international conflict.”[16] Though the BIS was an instrument of the Nazis, its operations were approved by Great Britain, and the British director Sir Otto Niemeyer, and chairman and devoted Hitler supporter Montagu Norman, remained in office throughout the war.[17] Formed in 1930, the BIS was an intergovernmental organization of central banks of six nations: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. According to the Bank’s charter, the respective governments agreed that the BIS should be immune from seizure, closure, or censure, whether or not its owners were at war. These owners included the Bank of England, the Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and three private international banks from the United States: J.P. Morgan & Company, First National Bank of Chicago and First National City Bank of New York, which later became Chase Manhattan Bank when it merged with the Rockefeller-dominated Chase City Bank, and eventually Citibank. Established under the Morgan banker Owen D. Young’s so-called Young Plan, the BIS’s ostensible purpose was to provide the Allies with reparations to be paid by Germany for World War I. At the time, Young concurrently served on board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, and also had been one of the representatives involved in a previous war-reparations restructuring arrangement, the Dawes Plan of 1924.

However, noted Higham, “the Bank soon turned out to be the instrument of an opposite function. It was 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.”[18] By the outbreak of World War II, reports Higham, the BIS was completely under Hitler’s control. Among the directors under Thomas H. McKittrick were Hermann Schmitz, head of IG Farben, Baron Kurt von Schroder, head of the J.H. Stein Bank of Cologne and a leading officer and financier of the Gestapo; and Dr. Walther Funk of the Reichsbank and Emil Puhl, who were Hitler’s personal appointees to the board.[19]

While in the past Norman’s role in the transferring of Czech gold to the Nazi regime in March 1939 was uncertain, a vault in Basel, Switzerland, holds politically sensitive documents from World War II, which historians believe will demonstrate that Norman “bent over backwards to help the Nazi war machine.”[20] On March 15, 1939, after Hitler completed his invasion of Czechoslovakia, he found that the country’s gold reserve had already been transferred via BIS in the Bank of England. The Germans ordered them to retrieve it. Careful investigation by historian David Blaazer of the Bank of England’s internal memos has established that Norman knowingly authorized the transfer of Czech gold from Czechoslovakia’s account with the BIS to an account which Norman knew was managed by the German Reichsbank.[21] Norman’s arrangement was no surprise says Scott Newton, lecturer in modern history at Cardiff University. “Monty Norman and the leading merchant banks in the City [of London] were up to their necks in helping to prop up the German financial system. The Germans owed a lot of money to British banks.”[22]

Freundeskreis

Hjalmar Schacht was a member of the Circle of Friends of the Economy, for Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft, a pro-Hitler lobbying group established by Wilhelm Keppler, in order to strengthen ties between prominent industrialists and members of Hitler’s inner circle. Keppler, who had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1927, and a friend of Heinrich Himmler, formed the Freundeskreis after Hitler’s request in 1932 for the formation of a “study group on economic questions.”[23] The financial manager of the Freundeskreis was Baron Kurt Freiherr von Schröder, a German nobleman, financier and SS-Brigadeführer. Dissatisfied with the instability of the Weimar Republic, Schröder first joined the center right and pro-monarchist German People’s Party led by Gustav Stresemann. After Stresemann’s death, however, Schröder increasingly veered towards the nascent National Socialist movement before becoming an influential fundraiser and economic advisor to the Nazi Party.

Kurt von Schroder was the head of the international Schroder banking empire, and had extensive financial contacts in New York and London. Kurt von Schroder was a co-director of Thyssen foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush’s New York bank partner. Schroeder was also the vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. George Herbert Walker helped take over North American operations of the company. Hamburg-Amerika smuggled in German agents, and brought in money for bribing American politicians to support Hitler. A 1934 congressional investigation also showed that Hamburg-Amerika was subsidizing Nazi propaganda efforts in the United States.[24]

After serving a stint in Constantinople, Allen Dulles became the first new director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, and joined his brother John Foster as a lawyer in Sullivan and Cromwell. As Dulles’ biographer Peter Grose notes, Sullivan and Cromwell, “constituted a strategic nexus of international finance, the operating core of a web of relationships that constituted power, carefully crafted to accrue and endure across sovereign borders.”[25] As partners in the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, Allen and John Foster Dulles also represented IG Farben.

An agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America was reached in Berlin after negotiations between Hjalmar Schacht and John Foster Dulles. As a result, Oliver Harriman, Averell’s cousin, formed a syndicate of 150 firms to conduct all business between Germany and the United States.[26] Beginning in 1933, Max Warburg also served directly under Hjalmar Schacht on the board of the Reichsbank. Two executives of Standard Oil’s German subsidiary were Karl Lindemann and Emil Helfferich, prominent figures the Freundeskreis, its chief financiers and close friends and colleagues of Baron von Schroder.[27] Prior to the war, Allen Dulles was a director of the J. Henry Schroeder bank in London, a prime instrument employed by Montagu Norman in his support of Nazi Germany.

Max Warburg was forced out of IG Farben through “Aryanization” in 1933. Jews were then expelled from the board of directors altogether in 1937, together with Otto von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the eldest child of Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and his first wife, Else Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1845 – 1868), born Oppenheim. The parents were as direct descendants of Moses Mendelssohn in the third or fourth generation remotely related to each other. As principal shareholder of Agfa, which was founded by his father and merged with IG Farben, Otto was a member of the supervisory board of both companies. Of the 24 directors of IG Farben indicted in the so-called IG Farben Trial (1947 – 1948) before the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 13 were sentenced to prison terms between one and eight years, but most were quickly released and several became senior industry executives in the post-war companies that split off from IG Farben and other companies.

Reichsmarschall

On January 9, 1933, von Papen and Hindenburg agreed to form a new government that would bring in Hitler. Papen’s old friend, Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893 – 1946), had joined the Nazi Party in 1932, and began his political career by offering to be a secret emissary between him and Hitler. After General Kurt von Schleicher ousted Papen in December 1932, Papen and various friends of Hindenburg negotiated with Hitler to oust him. On the evening of January 22, in a meeting at Ribbontrop’s villa in Berlin, State Secretary Otto Meissner and Hindenburg’s son Oskar met Hitler, Hermann Göring (1893 – 1946), and Wilhelm Frick, Papen made his fateful decision to concede to abandoning his claim to the Chancellorship and to support Hitler.[28]

Göring’s mother was Franziska Tiefenbrunn, a German-Jewish Surname. Hermann’s father Heinrich Ernst Göring (1839 – 1913) married Franziska in London, where he had been sent by Bismarck to study British methods of colonial administration before being appointed colonial governor of Germany’s fledgling Protectorate of South West Africa, where he became a friend of Cecil Rhodes.[29] Heinrich became involved in the Herero and Namaqua genocide. Herero skulls were eventually used by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, pursuing a policy of eugenics. In Africa, Heinrich also befriended Dr. Hermann Epenstein, a wealthy Jewish physician and businessman, who provided the Göring family, who were surviving on Heinrich’s pension, first with a family home in Berlin-Friedenau, then in a small castle called Veldenstein, near Nuremberg. Göring’s mother became Epenstein’s mistress around this time, and remained so for some fifteen years.[30] Epenstein was at Franziska’s side when his namesake, Hermann, was born and upon the birth of her youngest child, Albert Günther, he announced that he would become the Göring children’s godfather. Epenstein acted as a surrogate father to the children as Heinrich Göring was often absent from the family home.[31]

In 1920, while she was estranged from her first husband, Göring met his wife Carin von Kantzow at Rockelstad Castle in Sweden, while she was visiting her sister Mary, who was married to Count Eric von Rosen (1879 – 1948). Eric von Rosen’s father was Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen and his mother was Ella Carlton Moore of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a descendant of the Winthrop family.[32] Eric von Rosen had been using a swastika as a personal owner’s mark, and used the symbol as a decorative element throughout the house. He first found swastikas on a Viking rune-stone on Gotland, where he was attending high-school. During his travels among the descendants of the Inca in Bolivia, he was surprised to find the swastika common among them, and surmised that this was a universal symbol that had been used by many cultures all over the world.[33] Being a friend of Finland, in 1918, to signify the beginning of the Finnish Air Force, he gave the newly independent state an aircraft marked with his badge, a blue swastika on a white background. The Finnish Air Force adopted this roundel as their national insignia until sometime during World War II.[34]

Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922 after hearing a speech by Hitler. He was given command of the SA as the Oberster SA-Führer in 1923. At this time, Carin—who liked Hitler—often played hostess to meetings of leading Nazis, including her husband, Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Ernst Röhm.[35] Göring, who was with Hitler leading the march to the War Ministry, was shot in the groin. With Carin’s help, he was smuggled to Innsbruck, where he received surgery and was given morphine for the pain, developing a morphine addiction which lasted until his imprisonment at Nuremberg. Göring was certified a dangerous drug addict and was placed in Långbro asylum in 1925 where he had to be confined in a straitjacket.[36]

He returned to Germany when an amnesty was declared in 1927 and resumed working in the aircraft industry. In the May 1928 elections, Göring was elected as a representative from Bavaria. In May 1931, Hitler sent Göring on a mission to the Vatican, where he met the future Pope Pius XII. In the July 1932 election, the Nazis won 230 seats to become far and away the largest party in the Reichstag. By longstanding tradition, the Nazis were thus entitled to select the President of the Reichstag, and elected Göring to the post.[37]

Reichstag Fire

It was in the same January 29, 1933, meeting that Papen first learned that Hitler wanted to dissolve the Reichstag when he became Chancellor and, once the Nazis had won a majority of the seats in the ensuing elections, to activate the Enabling Act, a law that gave German Cabinet—in effect, the Chancellor—the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag, and to override fundamental aspects of the Weimar Constitution.[38] The Enabling Act gave Hitler plenary powers and followed on the heels of the Reichstag Fire Decree, which had abolished most civil liberties and transferred state powers to the Reich government. The arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, depicted by the Nazis as the beginning of a communist revolution, resulted in the Reichstag Fire Decree, which among other things suspended freedom of press and habeas corpus rights just five days before the election. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer wrote that at Nuremberg, General Franz Halder stated in an affidavit, that Göring boasted about setting the fire: “On the occasion of a lunch on the Führer’s birthday in 1943, the people around the Führer turned the conversation to the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears how Göring broke into the conversation and shouted: ‘The only one who really knows about the Reichstag building is I, for I set fire to it.’”[39]

After being appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Hitler asked von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. A general election was scheduled for March 5, 1933. A secret meeting was held between Hitler and a number of industrialists at Göring’s official residence in the Reichstag Presidential Palace, aimed at financing the election campaign of the Nazi Party. The Nazi Party wanted to achieve two-thirds majority to pass the Enabling Act and desired to raise three million Reichsmark to fund the campaign. Present at the meeting, among many others, were Hjalmar Schacht, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Fritz von Opel, board member of Adam Opel AG, and Georg von Schnitzler, board member of IG Farben. Schacht requested three million Reichsmark, which was made out to Nationale Treuhand, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht and deposited in the Bank of Delbrück Schickler & Co.[40] A statement from the IG Farben Trial indicated a total of 2,071,000 Reichsmark had been paid. The money then went to Rudolf Hess who transferred it to Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central publishing house of the Nazi Party which had been owned by Rudolf von Sebottendorf and published Völkischer Beobachter and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Hitler used the Reichstag Fire Decree to have the Communist Party’s offices raided and its representatives arrested, and with Communist voting bloc effectively suppressed, the Nazis were able to increase their share of the vote on March 5. While the Nazis emerged with a majority, they fell short of their goal, which was to win 50–55% of the vote, which would have allowed them to pass the Enabling Act. The Nazis devised the Enabling Act to gain complete political power without the need of the support of a majority in the Reichstag and without the need to bargain with their coalition partners. The Reichstag, led by its President, Göring, changed its rules of procedure to make it easier to pass the bill. The act passed in both the Reichstag and Reichsrat on March 23, 1933, and was signed by von Hindenburg later that day. The act stated that it was to last four years unless renewed by the Reichstag, which occurred twice. The Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) provided an intimidating presence throughout the proceedings.[41]

One of Göring’s first acts as a cabinet minister was to oversee the creation of the Gestapo, which he ceded to Himmler in 1934. Göring was made a Reich Plenipotentiary, whose jurisdiction covered the responsibilities of various cabinet ministries, including those of the Minister of Economics, the Defense Minister and the Minister of Agriculture. Upon being named Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan in 1936, Göring was entrusted with the task of mobilizing all sectors of the economy for war, an assignment which brought numerous government agencies under his control and helped him become one of the wealthiest men in the country. The plan was part of the alternative governmental structure created by Hitler and the Nazi Party, which included entities such as Organisation Todt and the unification of the SS and the German police forces, including the Gestapo, under Himmler.[42]

Ford, General Motors & ITT

After the outbreak of war in 1939, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company became crucial to the Nazi military, according to German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. Hitler admired the productivity of American assembly-line production techniques and was an avid reader of Ford’s anti-Semitic writings. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of him next to his desk.[43] Although Ford later renounced his anti-Semitism, he remained an admirer of Nazi Germany and sought to keep America out of the coming war. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria, he accepted the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

German Ford was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army after Opel, a hundred percent General Motors-owned subsidiary, according to U.S. Army reports.[44] On May 2, 1934, James D. Mooney—an American engineer and corporate executive at General Motors, which was run by the Du Pont family—and two other senior executives from General Motors and its German division, Adam Opel A.G., went to meet Hitler and von Ribbentrop the Chancellery office. The biggest auto and truck manufacturer in Germany was not Daimler or any other German company but General Motors, which since 1929 had owned and operated the long-time German firm Opel, which produced approximately 40 percent of the vehicles in Germany and about 65 percent of its exports. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the evidence they uncovered “reveals that GM and Opel were eager, willing and indispensable cogs in the Third Reich’s rearmament juggernaut, a rearmament that, as many feared during the 1930s would enable Hitler to conquer Europe and destroy millions of lives.”[45]

On December 22, 1936, in Vienna, Mooney told U.S. diplomat George Messersmith, who despite his German family origin was opposed to Hitler, “We ought to make some arrangement with Germany for the future. There is no reason why we should let our moral indignation over what happens in that country stand in the way.”[46] That Christmas, Mooney was in Berlin for talks with Hjalmar Schacht to discuss a joint future in the world of commerce between Germany and America. In 1938, Mooney, like Henry Ford, received the Order of the Golden Eagle from Hitler.

As war approached, the links between the Rockefellers and the Nazi government became more and more firm. In 1936 the J. Henry Schröder Bank of New York had entered into a partnership with the Rockefellers. Schröder, Rockefeller and Company, Investment Bankers, was formed as part of an overall company that Time magazine disclosed as being “the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” The partners in the company included Avery Rockefeller, nephew of John D., Baron Bruno von Schröder in London, and Kurt von Schröder of the BIS and the Gestapo in Cologne. Their lawyers were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen Dulles was on the board of J. Henry Schröder Bank of New York.[47]

The Rockefellers’ Chase National Bank (later the Chase Manhattan) was the richest and most powerful financial institution in the United States at the time of Pearl Harbor. 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, which also handled Standard, Sterling Products, General Aniline and Film, SKF, and International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), whose chief and founder was Sosthenes Behn (1884 – 1957). Behn was an important aid to his friend Hermann Göring. Not only did Behn own all of the German companies of ITT outright through the war but he also ran ITT factories in the neutral countries of Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden, which continued to buy, sell, and manufacture for the Axis.

On August 4, 1933, Behn and his representative in Germany, Henry Mann of the National City Bank, held a meeting with Hitler that established a political partnership with Nazi Germany that continued until the end of the war. Through Mann, Behn was closely connected with Himmler’s friend Wilhelm Keppler, who formed the Freudeskreis, and introduced him to German financier Baron Kurt von Schröder and Gerhardt Alois Westrick. Keppler, Schröder, and Himmler ensured that Behn’s German funds and industries remained untouched by forfeit or seizure, and Schröder arranged for Emil Puhl at the Reichsbank to pay off ITT's bills. Schröder would organize the banking firm of J. Henry Schröder in London and J. Henry Schröder Banking Corporation in New York in order to serve as conduit for ITT money funneled to Himmler’s SS in 1944. During the war, all of ITT’s German holdings were put under Nazi control. During the war, all of ITT’s German holdings were put under Nazi control. These included a minority share in airplane manufacturer Focke-Wulf, which ITT had acquired through its contacts with German financier Kurt Baron von Schröder.

Behn traveled frequently to Germany to meet with his Nazi directors, Baron Kurt von Schröder and German agent Gerhardt Alois Westrick, an associate of Allen Dulles, who had been a high-level German spy in Washington during World War I, and was gathering information about American armaments and intentions concerning the European war.[48] Westrick was a German lawyer and businessman who represented several major American companies in Germany before World War II. He joined the law firm of Heinrich Friedrich Albert in 1921, who were associated with Allen Dulles and his New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.[49] Albert was head of the Ford operation in Germany, under direct orders from Edsel Ford in Dearborn, Michigan.[50] Westrick also was well-connected with the Nazi regime. His brother Ludger was head of the aluminum industry in Germany under Hermann Göring. On the advice of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Charles Bedaux met Westrick in August 1939 and hired him as his lawyer.[51] Others of Westrick’s circle included William Donovan, who became head of the OSS, precursor of the CIA, on its formation in 1942.

According to Higham, Westrick was an important agent of the Fraternity through his association with Behn. Behn appointed Westrick to the board of Focke-Wulf after the reconstitution in 1936. Westrick was known for his efforts during a trip to New York in 1940 to gain support for the Nazi government. At the beginning of that year, Westrick was sent to the United States by Behn, who shared von Ribbentrop’s concern of connecting the various corporate entities that would remain secure throughout World War II. Westrick represented in Germany not only Ford but General Motors, Standard Oil, the Texas Company, Sterling Products, and the Davis Oil Company. During the early days of 1942, Karl Lindemann, the Standard Oil representative in Berlin, held a series of urgent meetings with two directors of the American ITT: Walter Schellenberg, head of the Gestapo’s counterintelligence service (SD), and Baron Kurt von Schröder of the BIS and the Stein Bank. The result of these meetings was that Westrick was sent to Madrid for a meeting in March with Behn to discuss how best they could improve ITT’s links with the Gestapo, and its improvement of the whole Nazi system of telephones, and other electronic equipment, as well as the Focke-Wulf bombers.

[1] Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 255.

[2] James P. Duffy. Target America: Hitler's Plan to Attack the United States (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), p. 7.

[3] Franz von Papen writes to G. S. Viereck in 1915. Retrieved from https://historical.ha.com/itm/autographs/non-american/franz-von-papen-writes-to-g-s-viereck-in-1915-as-he-is-about-to-leave-for-germany-after-being-ordered-to-leave-the-usa-for-s-total-2-/a/629-25452.s

[4] Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of America (Joshua Tree, Calif: Progressive Press, 2008), p. 19.

[5] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 436.

[6] Alexandra Robbins. Secrets of the Tomb.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Joseph Trento. Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005), p. 5.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Hopsicker. Welcome to TerrorLand: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida (MadCow Press, 2004), p. 337.

[11] Mihai Andrei. “Former BAYER Chief Who Promoted Heroin Use Spurned by German Cities.” ZME Science (December 17, 2014).

[12] Ron Chernow. The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 377.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Charles Higham. Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi - American Money Plot 1933-1949 (Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 1.

[15] Hjalmar Schacht. Confessions of the “Old Wizard.” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 105.

[16] Higham. Trading with the Enemy, p. 7.

[17] Ibid., p. 7.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Chris Blackhurst. “The Nazis’ British bankers.” Independent (March 29, 2997).

[21] David Blaazer. “Finance and the End of Appeasement: The Bank of England, the National Government and the Czech Gold.” Journal of Contemporary History (2005) 40 (1): 25–39. 

[22] Blackhurst. “The Nazis’ British bankers.”

[23] Antony C. Sutton. “Chapter 9: Wall Street and the Nazi Inner Circle.” Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (Clairview Books, 2010).

[24] Trento. Prelude to Terror, p. 5.

[25] Peter Grose. Gentlemen Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Amherts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 90.

[26] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 386.

[27] Higham. Trading with the Enemy, p. 20.

[28] Henry Ashby Turner. Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996), p. 112.

[29] Roger Manvell & Heinrich Fraenkel. Goering: The Rise and Fall of the Notorious Nazi Leader (Skyhorse, 2011).

[30] Blaine Taylor. Hermann Goering in the First World War: The Personal Photograph Albums of Hermann Goering (Fonthill Media, 2017).

[31] William Hastings Burke. “Albert Göring, Hermann’s anti-Nazi brother.” The Guardian (February 20, 2010).

[32] William Addams Reitwiesner. “The Ancestors of Senator John Forbes Kerry (b. 1943).” WARGS.COM. Retrieved from http://www.wargs.com/political/kerry.html

[33] Manvell & Fraenkel. Goering, pp. 403–404.

[34] Rockelstad History". Rockelstad.se. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20131226072518/http://www.rockelstad.se/english/hermann-goring.asp

[35] Manvell & Fraenkel. Goering, p. 47.

[36]  Ibid., p. 404.

[37] Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 297.

[38] Blum. The Rise of Fascism In Europe, pp. 145–146.

[39] Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Touchstone, 1959). p. 193.

[40] Helmut Müller. Die Zentralbank — eine Nebenregierung: Reichsbankpräsident Hjalmar Schacht als Politiker der Weimarer Republik (Springer-Verlag, 2013), p. 114.

[41] Martin Collier. From Kaiser to Fuhrer: Germany, 1900-45, p. 131.

[42] Alan Bullock. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Knopf, 1991), p.426.

[43] Michael Dobbs. “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration.” Washington Post (November 30, 1998), p. A01.

[44] Ibid.

[45] “Hitler’s Carmaker the Inside Story of How General Motors Helped Mobilize the Third Reich.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (November 30, 2006).

[46] Higham. Trading With The Enemy.

[47] Ibid.

[48] M.A. Oraizi. Amérique, pétrole, domination : une stratégie globalisée: Tome 3, Apocalypse des dieux pétroliers (L'Harmattan, 2012), p. 60.

[49] Reinhard R. Doerries & Gerhard L. Weinberg. Hitler’s Intelligence Chief: Walter Schellenberg (Enigma Books, 2013), p. 90.

[50] Yeadon. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 189.

[51] Sol Bloomenkranz. Charles Bedaux – Deciphering an Enigma (iUniverse. 2012), p. 32.

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. The League of Nations

7. avant-Garde

8. Black Gold

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union