46. Vichy France

Mouvement Synarchique d’Empire (MSE)

The same suspect collaboration that took place between the leaders of the German Conservative Revolution, and the George-Kreis, the Frankfurt School, the Modernists of the Avant-Garde and the transgressors around Georges Bataille, extended to the Synarchist and pro-Nazi regime that ruled France during World War II, known as Vichy, many of whose participants would later contribute to the founding the European Union after the War. Vichy was established after the Third French Republic—the system of government adopted in France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War—declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, after the German invasion of Poland. The Germans launched their invasion of France on May 10, 1940. Within days, it became clear that French military forces were overwhelmed and that collapse was imminent. Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856 – 1951) signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940, which divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones. Northern and western France, that encompassed all English Channel and Atlantic Ocean, was occupied by Germany, and the remaining southern portion of the country came under the control of the French government with the capital at Vichy under Pétain, a General who was viewed as a national hero in France because of his outstanding military leadership in World War I. Officially independent, it adopted a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.

In July, a report was submitted by Henri Chavin, at the time the Director of Sûreté nationale, to the French Minister of the Interior, which presented the synarchist conspiracy as an attempt by international capitalism to “subject the economies of different countries to a single, undemocratic control exercised by high banking groups.”[1] According to the Chavin Report, the leadership of the Vichy regime derived secretly from the Mouvement Synarchique d’Empire (MSE), founded by Pétain’s friend Jean Coutrot (1895 – 1941), as a direct successor of Papus’ Martinist Order.[2] According to the Chavin Report, Coutrot, an engineer educated at the École Polytechnique, who had been associated with Action française,[3] travelled several times to England in 1938 and 1939 to meet with Aldous Huxley, who is described as “pro-national-socialist.”[4]

The goal of the synarchists is the creation of a united Europe, as part of the fulfilment of the vision advanced by Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, a call for which appears on the first page of his first book on synarchy, Keys to the East. Coutrot’s MSE was a direct successor of Papus’ Martinist Order. Papus’ death in 1916 had resulted in a schism in the Martinist Order over its involvement in politics. After Papus’ death, Charles Détré (1855 – 1918), known simply as Téder briefly led the Martinist Order, as well as the French section of the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and from 1916 to 1918 he was the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Swedenborgian Rite of France, which had been taken up by Papus on the fringes of his Martinist Order.[5]

It was Téder’s friend Jean Bricaud (1881 – 1934) who succeeded him at the head of the Martinist Order, moving its headquarters from Paris to Lyon. Under Bricaud, who also became Grand Master of Memphis-Misraïm, and President of the International Occultist Society, a hybrid form of Martinism was developed, which included Martinism, Elus Cohen, the Gnostic Church, and the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry. Bricaud was also Patriarch of l'Église Gnostique Universelle (“Universal Gnostic Church”), which he founded with Papus in 1907, as a schematic branch of the Gnostic Church of Jules Doinel.[6]

In 1908, at International Masonic and Spiritualist Conference in Paris, organized by Papus, Victor Blanchard (1873 – 1953), Téder and others, Papus was chartered by Reuss to establish a “Supreme Grand Council of the Unified Rites of Antient and Primitive Masonry for the Grand Orient of France and its Dependencies at Paris.” The constituting letters of Patent were sent to Berlin by John Yarker. Papus apparently granted Reuss episcopal and primatial authority in the Église Catholique Gnostique, which Reuss translated into German as Die Gnostische Katholische Kirche. In his publication of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass in 1917, Reuss referred to Bricaud as the Sovereign Patriarch of the EGU, and himself as Legate for Switzerland and Sovereign Patriarch and Primate of Die Gnostische Katolische Kirche (GKK), his German branch of the church. Bricaud and Reuss then revealed their idea of introducing Crowley’s Gnostic Mass as a Gnostic religion for the 18° of the Scottish Rite, at the Zurich Masonic Congress in 1920. This, however, only led to the final rupture between the OTO and Freemasonry.[7]

In 1918, Bricaud consecrated Blanchard, had been secretary to Papus and Détré, and a member of Papus’ Supreme Council, as bishop of l'Église Gnostique Universelle, which had become the official church of the Martinist Order. Blanchard. Many Martinists left the Ordre Martiniste de Lyons, some of them joining Blanchard, who also claimed to be the legitimate successor of Papus as head of the Martinist Order, but who rejected the Masonic requirements, and in 1920 founded his own Ordre Martiniste et Synarchique (OMS). The official church of the OMS was the Église Gnostique Universelle, also known as L’Église Gnostique Apostolique (“Gnostic Apostolic Church”). The activists within the OMS established the Synarchic Central Committee in 1922, designed to pull in promising young civil servants and “younger members of great business families.”[8]

Blanchard was the Grand Master of the Brotherhood Polaires, which included Maria Naglowska and Julius Evola. In 1929, the Brotherhood Polaires received an order from the “The Oracle of the Astral Force,” a channel to the “Rosicrucian Initiatic Centre of Mysterious Asia,” to found La Fraternite des Polaires, de Thule en Shamballah (Brotherhood Polaires, of Thule in Shambhala”). Between the two world wars, the Polaires brought together a number of French occultists, such as René Guénon, Jeanne Canudo, Jean Chaboseau, Fernand Divoire, and the alchemist Eugène Canseliet, and Paul Le Cour. Jean Chaboseau (1903 – 1978), the son and successor of Augustin Chaboseau who co-founded the Martinist Order with Papus, was the author of Tarot: Interpretive Essay Based on the Principles of Hermeticism. Fernand D’ivoire (1883 – 1940) was the author of  Pourquoi je crois en l’occultisme (“Why I Believe in Occultism”) and maintained links with the Thule Society.

Le Cour (1871 – 1954) belonged to the Hiéron du Val d’Or, which believed that Christianity originated in Atlantis, and was the “universal tradition” sought by occultists. Le Cour created the organization Atlantis to continue the work of the Hiéron after the demise of the order. Also an astrologer, in 1927, Le Cour created the association and the journal Atlantis, and in 1937, he published The Age of Aquarius, which is considered to be one of the precursor texts of the “New Age” movement.[9]

Also involved in Le Cour’s Atlantis association was alchemist Eugène Canseliet, a member of the Brotherhood Polaires. Several students of Canseliet were members of the “Guénonian” Thébah Masonic lodge and associated with André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement.[10] According to Le Cour, Canseliet was none other than Fulcanelli, whose most well-known book is Le Mystère des Cathédrales (“The Mystery of the Cathedrals”), which aim to decipher the alchemical symbolism of several Templar constructions, such as Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, Amiens Cathedral, the Lallemant Hotel in Bourges, the Obelisk of Villeneuve-le-Comte.[11] Fulcanelli and his group of students would become known as Les Frères d’Héliopolis (“the Brotherhood of Heliopolis”).

Péladan and Maurice Magre (1877 – 1941)—a leading member of the Polaires—were major influences on Otto Rahn (1904 – 1939), whose research would result in his best-selling book Crusade Against the Grail. Also associated with the George-Kreis, Rahn was in the employ of the Ahnenerbe, founded in 1935 by Herman Wirth and Heinrich Himmler, for the purpose of conducting research around the globe for the lost heritage of the Aryan race, including the Holy Grail, a quest made popular in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies. Rahn’s first publisher later described him as a student of and George-Kreis member and Stefan George’s lover, Goebbels’ professor, Friedrich Gundolf.[12]

In 1937, le Cour was to be an inspiration for Pierre Plantard’s Priory of Sion hoax through his involvement in the Hiéron du Val d’Or.[13] As a student, Plantard had been a follower of Eugene Deloncle (1890 – 1944), founder of right-wing terrorist gang the CSAR (Secret Committee for Revolutionary Action), known as the Cagoule, a breakaway group of the Action Française, created by Coutrot’s MSE.[14] Deloncle even likened its recruiting procedures to the ‘chain method’ of the Illuminati.”[15] The Chicago Tribune’s correspondent in Paris, William Shirer, summed up the Cagoule as “deliberately terrorist, resorting to murder and dynamiting, and its aim was to overthrow the Republic and set up an authoritarian régime on the model of the Fascist state of Mussolini.”[16]

Plantard’s endeavors resulted in the formation of the group Alpha Galates, a pseudo-chivalric order known to have been in existence as early as 1934.  An important member of Alpha Galates, George Monti was initiated into the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix (OKR+C) by Joséphin Péladan, and then into Martinism by Papus. Monti was also connected to Leon Daudet, son of Alphonse Daudet, who together with Charles Maurras was the leader of Action Française.[17] Among the many societies Monti joined was the Holy Vehm, the German revival of the order of the same name.[18] Monti was then initiated into the OTO by Aleister Crowley. The two shared similar contacts with the superiors of several German lodges that had been involved with bringing the Nazi regime to power. Monti worked as a spy in World War I, then for the Nazis, British Intelligence as well as for the Second Bureau of the French Intelligence Service.[19]

All but two of the purported Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion are also found on lists of alleged “Imperators” and “distinguished members” of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), which shared extensive links with the synarchists and the Brotherhood Polaires.[20] AMORC was founded in 1915 in New York by Harvey Spencer Lewis (1883 – 1939), borrowed heavily from Theosophy, the Golden Dawn and the OTO. Reuben Swinburne Clymer, who headed the rival Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, claimed Lewis was aiming to transform AMORC into a cult of black magic, under the dominion of Aleister Crowley, whom he acknowledges to be his Secret Chief, and of largely plagiarizing OTO materials.[21] Along with Lewis, Blanchard and Émile Dantinne (1884 – 1969), a member of Joséphin Péladan’s Order of the Temple and the Grail and of the Catholic Order of the Rose-Croix, would become of the three Imperators of Universal Federation of Initiatic Orders and Societies (FUDOSI).

The Synarchic Central Committee became the Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire (MSE) in 1930, with the aim of abolishing parliamentarianism and replacing it with synarchy, and was headed by Coutrot.[22] While the leadership of the MSE remained a secret, the names of two of the authors the Synarchist Pact were revealed: Vivien Postel du Mas and Jean Coutrot.[23] Both du Mas and his associate Jeanne Canudo belonged to the Brotherhood of the Polaires.[24] Postel du Mas was also a member of the French Theosophical Society, and around 1936, founded the Theosophical branch Kurukshétra based on ideas of the pro-German right.[25] It is this branch that supposedly gave birth in 1937 to the MSE.[26]

Postel du Mas was also involved a group called Les Veilleurs (“the Watchers”) founded by a French occultist René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (1887 – 1961) who was also a student of Theosophy and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s synarchy.[27] Despite being born of a Jewish mother, de Lubicz along with other members of the Theosophical Society broke away to form an occult right-wing and anti-Semitic organization, which he called Les Veilleurs, to which the young Rudolf Hess also belonged.[28] Some have argued it was possible that Hess borrowed ideas from the Watchers which he could have introduced to the Thule Society. As Joscelyn Godwin points out, there’s even a phonetic link between “Thule” and the name of the Watchers’ inner circle, “Tala.”[29]

Banque Worms

French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz has identified Hypolite Worms (1889 – 1962), and Jacques Barnaud (1893 – 1962), the director of Banque Worms, and original founders of the MSE.[30] After the Banque de France, Banque Worms was the second most powerful bank in the country. Banque Worms was founded in 1928 by Hypolite Worms as a division of Worms & Cie, which founded by his grandfather in 1910. The Worms banking dynasty were one of sixteen Jewish families that belonged to the haute bourgeoisie d’affaires, including Oppenheim and Dupont.[31] There was also a Worms branch of the Rothschilds, after Charlotte Jeanette Rothschild, the daughter of the dynasty’s founder, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, married Benedikt Moses Worms (1801 – 1882).

The activities of the synarchists were also exposed in the French collaborationist daily L’Appel. According to L’Appel, the synarchists had connections in Britain and in the United States, especially with the American DuPont and Ford interests. Irenee du Pont (1876 – 1963), president of the DuPont company and the most imposing and powerful member of the dynasty, was an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini. Despite the fact that he had Jewish blood, he advocated a race of supermen to be achieved through eugenics policies. By 1915, Du Pont had begun to absorb General Motors. The du Pont company, and particularly GM, was a major contributor to Nazi military effort. Du Pont’s GM and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey collaborated with IG Farben, the Nazi chemical cartel, to form Ethyl GmbH.[32]

According to the newspaper, the synarchists had access to the American embassy in Vichy, then headed by Admiral William D. Leahy, a close friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[33] Banks such as Rothschild, Lazard, Banque d’Indochine or Banque Worms financed many fascinating small groups in the inter-war period.[34] Michael Sordet, in “The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism,” published in the scholarly Swiss review, Schweiner Annalen, describes the synarchist movement in Europe as “The representatives of international high finance,” who helped bring fascism to power in Germany and who contributed to the defeat of France and the rise of the Vichy regime of Pétain.[35]

The MSE’s leaders were mainly executives of Banque Worms and members of Opus Dei involved in the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis. Several researchers have suggested that the Hiéron du Val d’Or was the precursor of the Opus Dei, the group made infamous by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.[36] Among them is Jean-Pierre Bayard, a recognized scholar of Rosicrucianism, who regards Opus Dei among the organizations that “could claim to belong [to Rosicrucianism] but which however do not seem to take advantage of this.”[37]

The Third French Republic—the system of government adopted in France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War—declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, after the German invasion of Poland. The Germans launched their invasion of France on May 10, 1940. Within days, it became clear that French military forces were overwhelmed, and that collapse was imminent. Pétain signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940, which divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones. Northern and western France, that encompassed all English Channel and Atlantic Ocean, was occupied by Germany, and the remaining southern portion of the country came under the control of the French government with the capital at Vichy under Pétain, a General who was viewed as a national hero in France because of his outstanding military leadership in World War I. Officially independent, it adopted a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.

 

Sohlbergkreis

According to the Chavin Report, Coutrot had founded several groups as synarchist fronts, allegedly for the purpose of recruiting members of the MSE, including the Center for the Study of Human Problems (CSHP), X-Crise, the Comité national de l’organisation française (CNOF), Centre national de l’organization scientifique du travail (COST), the Groupements non-conformistes, and the Institute for Applied Psychology. In 1936, Huxley and Coutrot had founded the CSHP, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.[38] The CSHP met for the first time in Pontigny, where the Synarchist Paul Desjardins held his Pontigny Decades.[39] According to the Chavin Report, the CSHP was one of several synarchist fronts, which were all set up for the purpose of recruiting members to the MSE, of which Coutrot was the leader.[40] Also affiliated with the CSHP was Huxley’s friend and fellow Fabian, H.G. Wells, and the controversial Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955), who was a close friend of Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian. The coining of the term transhumanism is erroneously attributed to Julian Huxley, in a 1957 article. However, as pointed out by Olivier Dard and Alexandre Moatti, the first to use the term was Jean Coutrot in 1939, the during the Decades of Pontigny, which he helped organize, and based on his promotion of the fascist doctrine of the “New Man.”[41]

A central part of the non-conformist movement, Ordre Nouveau was founded in 1933 by French-Jewish philosopher Alexandre Marc (1904 – 2000). The Ordre Nouveau journal was founded by French-Jewish historian Robert Aron (1898 – 1975), an upper-class Jewish family from eastern France, and Arnaud Dandieu (1897 – 1933). Their work together included Décadence de la Nation Française (1931), Le Cancer Américain (1931) and La Révolution Nécessaire (1933), which constituted the principal theoretical base Ordre Nouveau, which with Esprit represented one of the most original expressions of the Nonconformist Movement. Dandieu was a friend of de Rougemont and Georges Bataille, who were all colleagues at the Bibliothèque Nationale.[42] In their infamous 1933 “Letter to Hitler,” the Ordre Nouveau welcomed the way the Nazis had overturned the liberal political order and capitalism, but denounced their idolization of the state and racism.[43] Charles de Gaulle was also associated with Ordre Nouveau between the end of 1934 and the beginning of 1935.[44]

Along with de Rougemont, Marc belonged to the Sohlberg Circle (Sohlbergkreis), which played an important role in building the circle of collaborators in France. Sohlberg was founded in 1931, at the Black Forest town of Sohlberg, by Otto Abetz (1903 – 1958), a member of the SS, who was in charge of the Nazi Party’s relations with French intellectual circles before becoming ambassador of the Reich.[45] As a member of the Hitler Youth, Abetz became a close friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.[46] Abetz was also associated with groups such as the Black Front, a political group formed by Otto Strasser after he resigned from the Nazi Party in 1930.[47] Abetz pledged his support for the Nazi party in 1931. In Paris, Abetz joined Masonic lodge Goethe in 1939.[48]

Alexandre Marc, disciple of Husserl and Heidegger, was born in 1904 as Alexandr Markovitch Lipiansky in Odessa, Russian Empire, to a Jewish family, but later converted to Catholic Christianity. As shown by Martin Mauthner, author of Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes, many of Abetz’s chief protegees in Paris had Jewish family ties. Jules Romains (1885 – 1972), a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement, who was accommodated by the German government at the Hotel Adlon when he gave a talk in Berlin in 1934, had a Jewish wife. Fernand de Brinon (1885 –1947), the first French journalist to interview Hitler, was married to Lisette, a Jewish woman converted to Catholicism. He became friends with von Ribbentrop. Another journalist, Jean Luchaire (1901 – 1946), had an actively anti-Nazi Jewish stepmother, Antonina Vallentin, born Silberstein. The political thinker, Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903 – 1987), who wrote flattering interview with Hitler in 1936, had a Jewish mother.

That same year, de Jouvenel joined the Parti Populaire Français (PPF), generally regarded as the most collaborationist party of France.[49] The PPF was founded by Jacques Doriot (1898 – 1945) and a number of fellow former members of the French Communist Party (PCF), who had moved towards nationalism in opposition to the Front populaire (“Popular Front”), an alliance of left-wing movements and the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) during the interwar period. The Popular Front won the 1936 elections, leading to the formation of a government headed by SFIO leader, the French Jew Leon Blum (1872 – 1950), and exclusively composed of republican and SFIO ministers. Another member of Ordre Nouveau, in addition to Coutrot and de Rougemont, was Charles Spinasse (1893 – 1979), a deputy of SFIO and a member of Coutrot’s X-Crise. Following the victory of the Popular Front in 1936, Coutrot was invited to head COST, which was created by an official decree signed by Blum and Spinasse, who became Minister of National Economy.[50] According to the Chavin Report, Coutrot became an intimate adviser to Spinasse, and then took the opportunity to introduce the greatest number possible of members of the MSE into the government.[51]

After the French defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, and the establishment of Pétain’s Vichy regime, the U.S. State Department placed the PPF on a list of organizations under the direct control of the Nazi regime.[52] Doriot was part of the Légion des Volontaires Français, a French volunteer force fighting alongside the Germans on the eastern front. The LVF originated as an initiative by a coalition of far-right factions including Doriot’s PPF, the National Popular Rally (RNP) of Marcel Déat, Pierre Costantini’s French League, and Eugène Deloncle’s Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), the successor organization of La Cagoule. The MSR supported the idea of the Nazis’ New Order in Europe in the belief that France could become a great power again alongside the Third Reich.[53]

In 1943, Doriot met with John Amery (1912 – 1945), the son of Round Table member and among the authors of the Balfour Declaration, Leo Amery, and inspired him to create the British Free Corps (BFC) a unit of the Waffen-SS. Amery and Doriot first met in France in 1936, and travelled together to Austria, Italy, and Germany. Amery joined Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, where he worked for Franco as a liaison with French synarchist Cagoule and gun-runner.[54]  After he settled in France, Amery travelled to Berlin in 1942, and proposed to the Nazis the formation of the BFC to help fight the Bolsheviks. Hitler was impressed by Amery and allowed him to remain in Germany as a guest. Leading members of the BFC later became known among the renegades as the “Big Six.” Thomas Haller Cooper, a former member of the British Union of Fascists, was also promoted to SS-Unterscharfuhrer in 1941. It has been stated that “the circumstantial case is compelling” that Cooper was involved in the Holocaust.[55] After being captured, New Zealand soldier Roy Courlander claimed that Hitler told BFC members that if Britain was defeated, the Duke of Windsor would replace George VI on the throne and Oswald Mosley would become the Prime Minister.[56] Amery was charged with high treason by the British and was hanged seven months after the war ended.

Vichy Government 

During the trial of Marshall Pétain in 1945, questions were asked about his connection with the Synarchist Pact.[57] L'Appel, which recorded the announcement of Coutrot’s mysterious death in 1941, revealed that most of the ministers and generals in the Vichy regime belonged to the MSE.[58] Also closely associated was Admiral François Darlan (1881 – 1942), a major figure of the Vichy regime in France during World War II, who became its deputy leader for a time. Accusations arose that synarchists had engineered the military defeat of France for the profit of Banque Worms, a division of Worms & Cie.[59] According to former OSS officer William Langer, as reported in Our Vichy Gamble:

Darlan’s henchmen were not confined to the fleet. His policy of collaboration with Germany could count on more than enough eager supporters among French industrial and banking interests—in short, among those who even before the war, had turned to Nazi Germany and had looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism… These people were as good fascists as any in Europe. Many of them had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ‘Synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.[60]

The Chavin Report accuses the MSE of laying the groundwork for the eventual seizure of power by the Cagoule, who by blackmail helped accelerate the military defeat of 1940 that put Petain in power. Under Petain, the MSE controlled the entire Ministry of the National Economy and Finance. The aim was to design financial agreements between the French and German people in order to unite the oil, textile, mining and other big industries, in such a way that their interests lead them to put fair pressure on their government so that the Judeo-American interests were fully protected. The command was given to seek a series of agreements with German firms like IG Farben and Dupont, to create solidarity with German industry leaders, all strongly structured and designed with the aim of joining the American groups at the end of the war. The negotiations were held in the occupied zone in Lyon and in Basel, with the leaders of IG Farben and an attaché from the American Embassy in Vichy, which at the time was headed by Admiral Leahy.[61]

According to Charles Higham, author of Trading with the Enemy, Banque Worms was an important component of The Fraternity involved in financing the Nazis, through connections that linked the Paris branch of Chase to Schröder and Standard Oil of New Jersey in France. On May 23, 1940, two weeks after the Nazis occupied France, as reported by Paul Manning, in his detailing of Bormann’s Aktion Adlerflug (“Operation Eagle Flight”), all French banks were brought under the supervision of the German banking administration. In the years prior to the war the German industrialists and bankers had established close ties with their counterparts in France. Following the occupation, they agreed to the establishment of German subsidiary firms in France and permitted the acquisition of equity stakes in French companies. In Paris the usual direct penetration took place by shareowner control of such as the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie (now Banque Nationale de Paris), and Banque de l’Indo Chine (now Banque de l’Indo Chine et de Suez Group), and most importantly, Worms et Cie. (now Banque Worms Group). [62] Standard Oil’s Paris representatives were directors of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, which had intricate connections to the Nazis and to Chase.[63]

After the fall of Paris, Banque Worms “Aryanized” its entire board of Jewish executives. The head of the German subsidiary of Worms et Cie was Alexander Kreuter (1886 –1977), an influential German business lawyer and banker during the Nazi occupation of France. Kreuter was a member of the General SS, working in the Nazi foreign intelligence service headed by Walter Schellenberg.[64] Kreuter was connected to Dillon, Read, the Jewish banking firm that had helped finance Hitler until 1934 and with whom Allen Dulles was involved. According to Charles Higham, “Kreuter’s activities with the Americans are obscure, he belonged to a joint American-French- British business group in Vichy and ran so close to the wind with Hitler that he was arrested on suspicion of espionage for America, and only Schellenberg’s personal guarantee of his bona fides secured his release.”[65]

During his time in Vichy, Darlan brought a whole clique of Banque Worms into the government. After the outbreak of World War II, Hypolite Worms was placed in charge of the French delegation to the Franco-English Maritime Transport Executive in London. The key leaders of the MSE involved in the regime included Paul Baudoin, Jacques Gudrard, Jacques Barnaud, and Jacques Benoit-Mechin. Another MSE member included Paul Reynaud, who after the outbreak of World War II had become the penultimate Prime Minister of the Third Republic in March 1940. In the last months before France’s capitulation, Paul Baudoin, a major member of Opus Dei, a director of the Banque d’Indo-Chine and a friend of Mussolini, became right-hand adviser to Reynaud. Jacques Gudrard was a banker who held the post of Ambassador to Lisbon under the Vichy regime. An important Cagoule member was Joseph Darnand (1897 – 1945), who later founded the Service d’ordre légionnaire (SOL), the forerunner of the Milice, the Collaborationist paramilitary of the Vichy regime, who fought the French Resistance and enforced anti-Semitic policies. Darnand took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler after accepting a Waffen SS rank.[66] One of the three managing directors of Banque Worms, MSE member Jacques Barnaud, a favorite with Göring, was responsible for handing over to the Germans the major French chemical industries headed by the Francolor trust.[67] William D. Leahy, the United States ambassador to France reported to his friend Franklin D. Roosevelt that French industrialist and MSE member François Lehideux was part of a group of strongly pro-Nazi figures that Pétain had surrounded himself with.[68] Darlan also brought in Pierre Pucheu (1899 – 1944), former member of the PPF and director of several companies of the Worms, who became Secretary of State for Industrial Production and then for the Interior in Vichy.

Collaborators

In 1939, France expelled Abetz as a Nazi agent. However, in 1940, following the German occupation of France, Abetz was assigned by von Ribbentrop to the embassy in Paris, as the official representative of the German Government with the honorary rank of SS-Standartenführer.[69] According to Charles Higham, author of Trading With The Enemy, Abetz and the German Embassy poured millions of francs into various French companies that were collaborating with the Nazis. On August 13, 1942, 5.5 million francs were passed through in one day to help finance the military government and the Gestapo High Command. This money helped to pay for radio propaganda and a campaign of terror against the French people, including beatings, torture, and brutal murder. Abetz paid 250,000 francs a month to fascist editors and publishers in order to run their vicious anti-Semitic newspapers. He supported Déat’s RNP and Deloncle’s MSR, which liquidated anti-Nazi cells in Paris. In addition, Abetz used embassy funds to trade in Jewish art treasures, including tapestries, paintings, and ornaments, for the benefit of Hermann Göring, who wanted to get his hands on every French artifact possible.[70]

Despite Hitler’s hesitations and against the opposition of Himmler and Goebbels, Abetz was convinced the French could be won over to the idea of collaboration and the acceptance of their own subservience to a German world order. During several meetings with Hitler, Abetz argued that it was in the interest of Germany to implement a strategy of Divide and Rule to reduce France to the status of a “satellite state” with a “permanent weakening” of its position in Europe. Abetz claimed that “the French masses” already admired Hitler and that, with the right propaganda, it would be easy to lead them blame their misfortunes on the various scapegoats: politicians, Freemasons, Jews, the Church and others who were “responsible for the war.” The French elite and intelligentsia could be won by exposing them to German culture and especially by emphasizing “the European idea.” In Abetz’s words: “In exactly the same way as the idea of peace was usurped by National Socialist Germany and served to weaken French morale, without undermining the German fighting spirit, the European idea could be usurped by the Reich without harming the aspiration to continental primacy embedded by National Socialism in the German people.”[71]

From his German Embassy in Paris, Abetz then maneuvered three of his French publicist friends, Jean Luchaire, Fernand de Brinon, Drieu la Rochelle (1893 – 1945), into key positions, from where they could praise Nazi achievements and denounce the Resistance.[72] Like Alexis Carrel, other intellectuals who are often viewed as fascists, notably de Jouvenel and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, were members of the PPF at various times.[73] Drieu, who was also married to a Jewish woman and working with Abetz, was an admirer of England and also a friend of Aldous Huxley. Drieu was editor of the collaborationist journal Nouvelle Revue Française, whose founders, including André Gide, were closely associated with the Decades of Pontigny, to which belonged Jean Coutrot’s CSHP. Drieu sat on the governing committee of the Groupe Collaboration, established in September 1940, whose headquarters were in Paris, although the Groupe was permitted to organize in both Vichy France and the occupied zone. The initiative had the support of Abetz and was at least partially supported financially by the Nazi government.[74]

Through the ambassador to Bucharest, Paul Morand, Benoist-Méchin met with Ernst Jünger, who was assigned to an administrative position as intelligence officer and mail censor in Paris.[75] Jacques Benoist-Méchin (1901 – 1983), like Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, had been a member of Otto Abetz’s Sohlberg Circle. Benoist-Méchin, a French journalist and historian who served as an undersecretary in Darlan’s cabinet, was also a friend of James Joyce and attempted to translate Ulysses. Benoist-Méchin also developed a close friendship with Oswald Mosley who lived in France after the war.[76] According to Eliot Neaman, in his foreword to Jünger’s A German Officer in Occupied Paris, as a well-known author, Jünger was welcomed in the best salons in Paris, where he met with intellectuals and artists across the political spectrum. A number of conservative Parisian intellectuals greeted the Nazi occupation, including the dramatist Sasha Guitry and the writers Robert Brasillach, Marcel Jouhandeau, Henry de Montherlant, Paul Morand, Drieu la Rochelle, Paul Léutaud and French surrealist artist Jean Cocteau.[77]

Jünger frequented the Thursday salon of Paris editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Louise Bousquet (1885 – 1975), who was married to the playwright Jacques Bousquet. She is credited with being one of the first to recognize the potential of Christian Dior in 1938.[78] In 1918, the Bousquets launched a salon from their Paris apartment which, every Thursday, which were frequented by Pablo Picasso and Aldous Huxley, as well as Drieu la Rochelle and Henry de Montherlant. Another of Jünger’s key contacts in Paris was the salon of Florence Gould, where he fraternized with Georges Braque, Picasso, Sacha Guitry, Julien Gracq, Paul Léautaud, and Jean Paulhan, one of the founders of the resistance newspaper Lettres Françaises, and his friend Marcel Jouhandeau, well-known for his anti-Semitic lampoon Le Péril Juif (“The Jewish Peril”), published in 1938. Florence was the third wife of Frank Jay Gould, the son of Jay Gould, one of the original Robber Barons. She entertained Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Kennedy, and many Hollywood stars, like Charlie Chaplin, who became her lover. Florence became embroiled in a notorious money-laundering operation for fleeing high-ranking Nazis in France, but later managed to avoid prosecution and became a significant contributor to the Metropolitan Museum and New York University. She also became friends with friends like Estée Lauder.[79] Jünger also frequented the George V luxury hotel, where a roundtable of French and German intellectuals gathered, including the writers Morand, Cocteau, Montherlant, as well as the publisher Gaston Gallimard, and Carl Schmitt.[80]

Biographer James S. Williams describes Cocteau’s politics as “naturally Right-leaning.”[81] During the Nazi occupation of France, collaborationist and right-wing writers and critics denounced him as anti-French and a “Jewified” lover of “negroids.”[82] Cocteau eventually sought protection from those among the occupiers whom he considered Francophile, cultured and influential. They included Otto Abetz, Lieutenant Gerhard Heller, Bernard Radermacher, the artistic and personal representative of Joseph Goebbels, and Ernst Jünger, who acknowledged Cocteau as the most important French literary figure in Germany. Jünger became close to Cocteau, although he considered him “tormented like a man residing in his own particular hell, yet comfortable.”[83]

During the Nazi occupation, Cocteau’s friend Arno Breker (1900 – 1991)—Hitler’s favorite artist—convinced him that Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France’s best interests in mind. Writing privately in his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect and ingratitude towards the Führer who loved the arts and all artists. Cocteau even considered the possibility that Hitler, who was still unmarried, might be a homosexual, and might be sublimating his repressed sexuality by supporting such artists as Breker. Cocteau praised Breker’s sculptures in an article entitled “Salut à Breker” published in 1942. As a consequence of the public repercussions of what became known as “the Breker Affair,” Cocteau was branded in 1944 even by the BBC as a collaborator. Cocteau’s friend Max Jacob died from pneumonia in 1944 after a month’s internment on his way to Auschwitz at the transit camp for Jews in Drancy. Cocteau had attempted to no avail to exercise his influence Abetz by formulating a petition on Jacob’s behalf, who had contact with key Germans in the deportation process.[84]

After the liberation of France, the principals of Worms & Cie were investigated for possible collaboration with the Germans. Hypolite Worms was arrested on September 8, 1944. He was released on January 21, 1945, and the charges dismissed on October 25, 1946. The inquiries found that Worms & Cie Banking Services had only played a small and involuntary role in financing for the Germans.[85]


[1] Henry Chavin. Rapport confidentiel sur la société secrète polytechnicienne dite Mouvement synarchique d’Empire (MSE) ou Convention synarchique révolutionnaire (1941), p. 8.

[2] Ibid., p. 6.

[3] Olivier Dard. Jean Coutrot: de l'ingénieur au prophète (Presses Univ. Franche-Comté, 1999), p. 335, 347.

[4] Chavin. Rapport confidentiel, p. 8.

[5] Serge Caillet. La Franc-maçonnerie swedenborgienne (Ed. de la Tarente, 2015).

[6] “L’Église Gnostique Apostolique – Gnostic Apostolic Church.”

[7] Peter-R. Koenig. “Stranded Bishops: Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.” Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20011108135612/http://www.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/bishops.htm

[8] André Ulmann & Henri Azeau. Synarchie et pouvoir (Julliard, 1968), p. 63.

[9] Evelyne Latour. La Théorie de l'ère du Verseau, depuis les origines jusqu'à Paul Le Cour et ses successeurs (1780 - XXIe siècle), mémoire sous la direction d’Antoine Faivre (1995).

[10] Jean-Pierre Lassalle. “André Breton et la Franc-Maçonnerie” Histoires littéraires, 1 (January 2000).

[11] Patrick Rivière. Fulcanelli: His True Identity Revealed (Red Pill Press, Ltd, 2006), p. 84.

[12] Victor Trimondi. Hitler, Buddha, Krishna – eine unheilige Allianz vom Dritten Reich bis heute (Ueberreuter 2002), p. 264–265; Franz Wegener. Alfred Schuler, der letzte deutsche Katharer. Gnosis, Nationalsozialismus und mystische Blutleuchte (Gladbeck 2003), p. 67–69.

[13] Philip Coppens. “Raymond Abellio: a modern Cathar?” PhilipCoppens.com.

[14] Rémi Kauffer. “La Cagoule tombe le masque” Historia, n°108, July 1, 2007.

[15] Ibid.

[16] William L. Shirer. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Enquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (William Heinemann, 1970), 209.

[17] Alexandre Adler. Sociétés secrètes : de Léonard de Vinci à Rennes-le-Château, (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2007), p. 27-28; Stéphane Piolenc. “Pour un compromis… royaliste!” L’Action française 2000, no 2815, April 21 to May 4 2011, p. 13.

[18] Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince. The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 237.

[19] Guy Patton. Masters of Deception: murder intrigue in the world of occult politics (Amsterdam: Frontier Publishing, 2009), p. 124.

[20] Massimo Introvigne. “Beyond The Da Vinci Code: History and Myth of the Priory of Sion.” CESNUR 2005 International Conference (June 2-5, 2005 – Palermo, Sicily).

[21] R. Swinburne Clymer. Not Under the Rosy Cross (The Rosicrucian Foundation, 1935).

[22] Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince. “Synarchy: The Hidden Hand Behind the European Union,” New Dawn, (March 15, 2012).

[23] Picknett & Prince. The Sion Revelation, p. 362.

[24] Ibid., p. 369.

[25] Zam Bhotiva. Asia Mysteriosa: La Confraternita dei Polari e l’Oracolo della Forza Astrale (Edizioni Arkeios, 2013).

[26] Milko Bogard. “In the Wake of the Astral Force: la Fraternite des Polaires.”

[27] Fr. L, “Esotericism and Espionage: the Golden Age, 1800–1950,” Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, No. 16, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2009.

[28] Joscelyn Godwin. “Schwaller de Lubicz: les Veilleurs et la connexion Nazie.” Politica Hermetica, number 5, pp. 101-108 (Éditions L’Âge d’Homme, 1991).

[29] Lachman. Politics and the Occult, Kindle Locations 3748-3752.

[30] Interview with Annie Lacroix-Riz. “le choix de la défaite.” Nouvelle Solidarite (July 28, 2006).

[31] Esther Benbassa. The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 104.

[32] “Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism.” Press for Conversion. Issue 53 (April 2004).

[33] “Sabotage, Recruiting For Free France Present Problems To Nazis In Paris.” Daily News (Huntingdon, Pa. August 23, 1941).

[34] Ceci. “Une banque collaborationniste : la banque Worms.” Agora (October 30, 2007). Retrieved from

https://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/politique/article/une-banque-collaborationniste-la-30816

[35] Michael Sordet. “The Secret  League of Monopoly Capitalism,” Schweiner Annalen No. 2, 1946- 47; cited in “The People’s Front.” The Nation (November 9, 1946).

[36] Picknett & Prince. The Sion Revelation, p. 355.

[37] Jean-Pierre Bayard. La Symbolique de la Rose-Croix (Paris: Payot, 1975), p. 274.

[38] Sharon Zukin & Paul Dimaggio. Structures of Capital: The Social Organization of the Economy (Cambridge University Press, 199), p. 360; Johan Heilbron. French Sociology (Cornell University Press, 2015), p. 119.

[39] “Notice d’autorité : Coutrot, Jean (1895-1941).” France Archives. Retrieved from https://francearchives.gouv.fr/fr/authorityrecord/FRAN_NP_051701

[40] Chavin Report, p. 6.

[41] Olivier Dard & Alexandre Moatti. “Aux origines du mot ’transhumanisme.” Futuribles (Association Futuribles, 2016).

[42] Dubreuil. The personalism of Denis de Rougemont, p. 98.

[43] Edward Baring. Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2019), p. 269.

[44] “LOUBET DEL BAYLE Jean-Louis Les non-conformistes des années 30. Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions (2001 Paris). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20061123180436/http://www.ehess.fr/centres/ceifr/assr/N118/78.htm

[45] Robert Kopp. Denis de Rougemont: “Le National-Socialisme est un Jacobisme Allemand.” Revue des Deux Mondes (December 2019), p. 76. Retrieved from https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/1912-10-kopp.pdf

[46] Caroline Moorehead. Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life (Macmillan, 2004), p. 64.

[47] Mark Antliff. Avant-garde fascism: the mobilization of myth, art, and culture in France, 1909-1939 (Duke University Press, 2007).

[48] Jean-André Faucher. Histoire de la Grande Loge de France (Albatros ed, 1981).

[49] Laurent Kestel. “L’engagement de Bertrand de Jouvenel au PPF de 1936 à 1939, intellectuel de parti et entrepreneur politique.” French Historical Studies, n.30, hiver 2007, pp. 105–25.

[50] Chavin Report, p. 7.

[51] Chavin Report, p. 7.

[52] 9 FAM 40.35(a) Exhibit II. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20010919094050/http://foia.state.gov/masterdocs/09fam/0940035aX2.pdf

[53] Antony Beevor. The Second World War (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2008).

[54] Morris Freedman. Fact and Object (Harper & Row, 1963). p. 67.

[55] Adrian Weale. Renegades: Hitler's Englishmen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2nd edition, 2014).

[56] “Astonishing Politician, Astonishing Failure.” Human Events (September 28, 2006). Retrieved from http://humanevents.com/2006/09/28/astonishing-politician-astonishing-failure/

[57] Richard F. Kuisel. “The Legend of the Vichy Synarchy.” French Historical Studies (spring 1970), p. 378.

[58] “The People’s Front.” The Nation (November 9, 1946).

[59] Annie Lacroiz-Riz. Le choix de la défaite : Les élites françaises dans les années 1930 (Armand Colin, 2006).

[60] Our Vichy Gamble, (Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1947).

[61] Chavin Report, p. 16.

[62] Manning. Martin Bormann, p. 71.

[63] Higham. Trading With The Enemy.

[64] Jonathan Petropoulos. Göring’s man in Paris: the story of a Nazi art plunderer and his world (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021)

[65] Higham. Trading With the Enemy.

[66] “Joseph Darnand.” Spartacus International. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20080423010733/http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FRdarnard.htm

[67] “Synarchie: la Banque WORMS.” (Octobre 24, 2007). Retrieved from http://dondevamos.canalblog.com/archives/2007/10/24/6638102.html

[68] Charles Williams. Petain (Little, Brown, 2005), p, p. 398.

[69] Thomas Johnston Laub. After the fall: German policy in occupied France, 1940-1944 (Oxford University Press US, 2010), p. 52-54.

[70] Higham. Trading With The Enemy.

[71] Kupferman. Pierre Laval, p. 254; Burrin. La France à l’Heure Allemande, pp. 98, 99; cited in Daniel Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017), p. 130.

[72] Martin Mauthner. Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes: French Writers Who Flirted with Fascism, 1930–1945 (Yale University Press, 2008).

[73] Karen Fiss. Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 201.

[74] Nicholas Atkin. The French at War, 1934-1944 (Routledge, 2014), p. 142.

[75] Ernst Junger. A German Officer in Occupied Paris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). p. xvi.

[76] Graham Macklin. Very Deeply Dyed in Black (IB Tauris, 2007), p. 136.

[77] Ibid.

[78] Marie France Pochna. Christian Dior: The Man who Made the World Look New (Arcade Publishing, (1996), pp. 62–3.

[79] Susan Ronald. A Dangerous Woman: American Beauty, Noted Philanthropist, Nazi Collaborator - The Life of Florence Gould (2018).

[80] Ernst Junger. A German Officer in Occupied Paris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). p. xvi.

[81] James S. Williams. Jean Cocteau (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 123.

[82] Ibid., p. 179.

[83] Ibid.,

[84] Ibid., p. 185.

[85] Ley. “Historique de la Banque Worms (1928-1978).”

Zionism