In September 1944, Sims Carter, assistant chief of the Economic Warfare section of the Justice Department, testified before the Kilgore Committee that despite military defeat, the industrial cartels of German had renewed activity from bases in Argentina: "All the machinery," he said, "is ready for safeguarding German supremacy in the steadily expanding South American market." Much of that market had been quietly incorporated by I.G. Farben and other financial backers of Hitler well before the war began.
In the 1930s, as German factories tooled up for the onslaught, German entrepreneurs quietly built factories, railroads and chemical and steel plants throughout South America. The munitions industry was all but monopolized by Farben and Krupp, providing business fronts for the Nazi fifth column. The insinuation of Nazism into Caribbean politics was directed by Alfred Becker and Arnold Margerie, officers of Farben La Quimica Bayer in Caracas. Down in Argentina, Axel Wenner-Gren, a Swedish millionaire and crony of Herman Goering, Hitler's propaganda minister, established subsidiaries and gracefully snatched up key industrial plants.
After the war, Nazis quietly assumed new posts within the German government. The Konrad Adenauer government adopted an anti-Nazi facade in public while reelevating war criminals to prominence. By 1951, 134 former members of the National Socialist Party held senior positions in the West German Foreign Office. Attorney Hans Globke, author of the legal rationale underlying the Third Reich's racial laws, was placed in charge of Konrad Adenauer's Federal Press and Chancellory bureau. On January 19, 1953, the New York Times took notice: "Nazism is not dead in Germany." Given time and opportunity, "a form of Nazism could again rise to power.
Materially speaking, Nazism was smashed into a pulp by 1945," but the "vigorous roots remained."
A national priority was made of economic recovery. A memo from the German Press Department of B'nai B'rith to officials of the Jewish organization on July 1, 1953 detailed a meeting of the former Waffen SS in Verden, once a Nazi garrison town: "The reason this little alumni club exists is, one might way, plausible, even sentimental - to care for those in their ranks who survived and to locate lost comrades. The reunion, their first since the war, brought five thousand men to Verden. Mufti-clad, they marched through the cramped, flag-bedecked streets to the rally with all their famous and former military precision."
Among their contacts in the United States, the Nazi "elite" could rely on the generous assistance of a well-connected patron, Pedro Del Valle, who went on to become a vice president of ITT. In 1954, Del Valle, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, was soundly defeated in his run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. His campaign was spiced with public endorsements of a foaming aniti-Semitic tract, Know Your Enemy.
Twenty years later, Del Valle and ITT consultant John McCone, formerly a CIA director, threw in to overthrow Allende in Chile's 1970 elections. ITT funnelled $350,000 into event, and when the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet was installed, the conglomerate conspired with other "conservative" companies to pirate the country's natural resources. As a hedge against the fall of the Third Reich, German industrialists had made provisions in 1944 for protecting their loot from confiscation by the U.S and England.
On the instruction of Martin Bormann, the surviving SS, soon to be known as ODESSA, established hundreds of corporations abroad, donated handsomely to extreme right-wing political candidates in the U.S. and cleared the path for the reconstruction of the Reich on foreign soil.
All of this was accomplished by chanelling the loot through a labyrinth of secret bank accounts to non-belligerent countries, and under Bormann's direction financed 750 news companies worldwide to direct the Nazi Party reconsruction. Over 100 of those companies were based in the United States. Funds materialized in the bank accounts of Germany's agents around the world. They were instructed to invest in selected businesses, propaganda mills in the U.S. and elsewhere, give legal aid to indicted Nazis, purchase out-of-the-way estates for Nazi leaders in foreign lands, and so on. These funds also supported the "rat lines," escape routes from the Allied advance set up every 40 miles along the German border. Fascist opinion in the United States was fomented by American contacts.
For America, a spin-off of the America First Committee, was formed in 1954, ran by some of the leading WW II "isolationists." One of the organization's leading lights was Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The chairman of For America was Clarence Manion, formerly dean of law at Notre Dame University. Manion once sat on Eisenhower's Commission on Inter-Governmental Affairs. Robert Wood, then head of Sears, Roebuck, was a blustering propagandist for the bund. The stated aim of For America was the support of political candidates sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
Three congressmen made up the recruiting arm of the organization: Burton K. Wheeler, Hamilton Fish and Howard Buffett. Fish, a Republican Party leader, had as his greatest ambition the start of a third party based on principles of National Socialism. The others were already in disrepute for involvement in "non-interventionist" America First chapters and other enclabes of domestic Nazism during the war. "What will it take to disband this group?" asked the Atlanta Journal, "World War III?"
Confiscated Jewish assets were poured into the Nazi rebirth and turned up in the oddest places. On September 20, 1996, a half century after the fact, the Associated Press at long last noticed: "Tons of gold looted by Nazis during World War II - some of it possibly taken from the fillings in Holocaust victims' teeth - are stored in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England in London. Recently declassified federal documents show that 6 tons of gold looted by Nazis are stored in the two banks, the World Jewish Congress said. The group's president has written to the two countries asking that the gold be returned to Holocaust survivors."
Elan Steinberg, speaking for the World Jewish Congress, based his allegations on declassified State Department documents that confirm two tons of Nazi gold had turned up in New York vaults (worth about $28 million) and four tons ($56 million) in London.
During the early '30s, in Washington, Congressman Hamilton Fish's life was changed by a reading of Communism in Germany, published by a Nazi propaganda front. Inspired by the book, he joined forces with George Sylvester Viereck, the ranking Nazi agent in the United States. Viereck was graciously given the run of Rep. Fish's suite at the House Office Building. Albert Kahn, in High Treason, reports that Fish's office clerk, George Hill, was arrested and charged by authorities of being an agent of the Nazis. Well before Martin Dies took the reins, Congressman Fish conducted the first full-blown federal "investigation of Communism." widely known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. Between the pair of hooting panels came the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, formed in 1934 to stamp out Nazi propaganda in the United States. The committee unearthed "a fascist plot to seize the government." Shortly thereafter, HUAC was disbanded and its successor turned a deaf ear to any mention of fascist coups.
In The Yahoos (Marzani and Munsell, 1964), a study of Aryan Nations-type groups in America, author Mike Newberry provides the backgrounds of HUAC investigators:
EDWARD SULLIVAN, HUAC's first "Chief Investigator," a man with a record of nine arrests [from sodomy to larceny], was co-editor with James ["Kike Killer"] True's hate sheet, addressed German-American Bund rallies prior to his concern with "un-Americanism," and was director of an admittedly fascistic Ukrainian group.
Dr. J.B. MATTHEWS, HUAC's second "Chief Investigator," declared in his autobiography: "America's answer to Communism will be fascism, or something so closely akin to it that the difference will not greatly matter." His autobiography was published by a veteran anti-Semite, John Cecil. His writings were reprinted by the "Contra-Komintern," the official organ of the Nazi Foreign Office. At present, he is a close advisor of Robert Welch of the John Birch Society.
DR. FRED SCHWARTZ, currently one of HUAC's most favored "experts," is head of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.
FULTON LEWIS, III, leader of the Young Americans for Freedom, earned his spurs on the HUAC staff. [He] wrote for the anti-Semitic American Mercury, then under the editorship of Harold Lord Varney, a former paid propagandist of the Italian Fascisti.
"When it is necessary to kill an enemy, it is also necessary to leave a good impression for other enemies to see. The dead body did not care whether it had a head or not, but psychologically the individual faced with such a sight can see himself in the same decapitated condition and the heart is filled with terror. Therefore,such a principle should be adopted by guerillas for just such a reason. Not that we need a trophy, but that we might terrorize the invading enemy ["Godless" communists], always leaving bodies with some mark which would be universally understood by the guerilla fighting force."
- Liberty Lobby Pamphlet, 1962
The propagandists at CIA's House of Secrets proceeded to mold collective opinion with heavy hands. The infiltration of the media and the spread of disinformation would cost taxpayers $90 million a year by 1978, according to university of Paris economist Sean Gervasi. The CIA's assimilation of old guard Nazis was overseen by the CIA's Operations coordination board, directed by C.D. Jackson, a former executive of Time magazine and Dwight Eisenhower's "special assistant for cold war strategy."
In 1954, Jackson was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller. Rocky quit a year later, repulsed, he said, by the administration's political infighting. Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the country's key cold war strategist."
"Nixon," writes John Loftus, at one time an attorney for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a small boy's delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden microphones, the 'black' propaganda." Nixon especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the "special forces" learning the arts of "spycraft" he so admired.
One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence establishment was heroin smuggler Hubert von BlŸcher, the son of a German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that he'd been trained by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a civilian in his twenties. He served in a reconaissance unit of the German Army's 2nd Battallion until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin Film on a movie entitled One Day ..., and finished out the war flying with the Luftwaffe - not to engage the enemy, but to smuggle Nazi gold bullion out of the country. In 1948, he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer, now named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (doubtless a sample from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by SS from their prey).
Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at Argentina's Hotel Plaza and handed over German marks worth $80 million. He later told investigators that the loot financed the formation of the National Socialist Party in Argentina. Three years later Hubert migrated to El Norte. The Nazi landed a position with the Color Corporation of America in California, and eked out a living writing scripts for Hollywood's thriving movie industry. His voice graces a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. In 1951 he returned to Buenos Aires, then DŸsseldorf, West Germany. He established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemo-warfare agents for the German government.
At the posh Industrie Club in Dusseldorf in 1982, Von Blucher crowed to journalists, "I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these people over their second bottle of brandy."
Had the government slapped an embargo on I.Qs? The fascist war machine had been pounded to scrap in Europe and Japan, only to resurface in San Antonio, Texas ... and the American proletariet greased the gears. The 1961 "Let's Look at America" seminar, sponsored by the Fourth Army and the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce Jaycees, drew a crowd of 3,500 strong. Retired General Alfred Wedemeyer, a supporter of the John Birch Society, railed at President Kennedy's "appeasement" of the Soviet Union. Cleon Skousen, formerly an FBI agent and a ramrod of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, demanded the end of all diplomatic relations with the Eastern Bloc. Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer, a writer for the National Review, spoke at the event. So did Senator Strom Thurmond and Donald Jackson of HUAC.
The "seminar" violated the direct orders of then Secretary of the Army Elvis Stahat - a "violation of Army policy," Stahat warned. Unmoved by orders from the Pentagon, Colonel William Blythe of the Fourth Army's G-2 Division went insubordinate: "We are not interested in politics," he shot back. "The Army intends to stand up and be counted!"
General Wedemeyer flew from the San Antonio session to Dallas, where he met with oil baron H.L. Hunt, one of Joseph McCarthy's most beneficient financial sponsors (Borger, Texas News Herald on September 25, 1961).
A platoon of military personalities threw in with a host of American fascist front organizations, figureheads for the domestic cause, among them:
Generals Nathan Twining, J.B. Medaris, Rear Admiral Chester Ward and Admiral Radford - The Military-Industrial Institute.
Admiral Arleigh Burke - Featured speaker of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.
General Charles Willoughby and General Peyton Campbell - Christian Anti- Communist Crusade.
General Stratemeyer - Liberty Lobby, Christian Crusade.
General Bonner Fellers - Endorsed the Birch Society and Americans for Constitutional Action.
Admiral Strauss and General Wedemeyer- National Advisory Board, Young Americans for Freedom. And so on, a platoon of others who joined forces with hooting ultracons and Aryan Nationals alike. While ranking military officials raised the rabble against Soviet "expansionism," the Nazis sought influence in Washington, D.C. One of the most influential Nazi spies in the U.S. was Dr. Walter Becher, an anti-Communist "refugee leader" from the Hitler regime. Becher joined the Nazi Party in December, 1931, and became an editor of Die Zeit, a Nazi propaganda sheet in 1937. He was a Brown-Shirt for a spell and a member of the National Socialist Student Bund. He editorialized for the purge of all Jews from state-owned radio in Prague. During the war, Becher worked in the Goebbels Propaganda Ministry and for the Wehrmacht as a war correspondent. Soon after the war, he founded a newspaper in Germany that agitated for the restoration of National Socialism. Becher had his advocates in Washington, D.C. In 1957, Congressman Usher Burdick inserted one of Dr. Becher's propaganda pieces in the Congressional Record, and in August 1959, seven more appeared in the pages of the Record. When he junketed to the States, conferences were arranged for him by the State Department. His geopolitical opinions were trumpeted by scores of newspapers and the Mutual Broadcasting Network's 600 affiliates.
Dr. Becher's early contacts in Washington were McCarthy and William Jenner in the Senate, and a handful of congressmen in the House. T.H. Tetens in The New Germany and the Old Nazis, was awed by the Nazi's camaraderie with Beltway politicians, and tracked his movements through the District of Columbia: "During the early fifties, when he first came to Washington, he began to build for himself a formidable political machine. His scheme was very simple. If he could obtain the support of leading politicians in the United States, his prestige and stature would grow enormously at home.... With the help of the McCarthy faction in the United States, he could establish a nationwide reputation as the foremost leader of the anti-Communist crusade." Among the senators who sent personal letters of support to Dr. Becher in Munich in the 1950s: Prescott Bush, Albert Gore, Pat McNamara, William Knowland, Strom Thurmond, Thomas Dodd, Robert Byrd, William Langer and Stuart Symington. House Speaker John McCormack also offered his unblushing public support to the Nazi editor.
Major Gen. Charles A. Willoughby - real name: Adolf Tscheppe Weidenbach, born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1892, a Nazi agent in the Army Supreme Command; Army Intelligence chief under Douglas MacArthur in Korea; "security director" of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta. Willis A. Carto - Treasurer and founder. Major General Edwin A. Walker - US Army, John Birch Society. Lt. Col. Philip Corso (ret) - US Army Intelligence under Willoughby/Weidenbach. Robert Morris - Birch Society, American Security Council (ASC), Young Americans for Freedom. Senator Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.) - Since, a "defector to the Republican Party, still a Senator at the age of 94. Otto Etepka - Director of Security Evaluations, State Department. Senator James O. Eastland (D-Miss.) - Director of internal security in the U.S. Senate.
A profusion of bridges were erected by the Liberty Lobby to German Nazis. Edwin Walker, who once stated in a radio interview that "[Jack] Ruby's name was Rubenstein," was the coeval of Gerhard Frey, publisher of the Neo-Nazi Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung. A bosom ally of Maj. Gen Willoughby/Weidenbach, Theodor Oberlander, was the German commander of the Ukraine's Nightingales during the war and wrote for Frey's newspaper.
Dick Russell, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, drew connections between the Munich-based Reinhard Gehlen apparatus under the CIA's Allen Dulles and assorted WACL "Lobbies" under Willoughby:
"German veterans were included, notably Fritz Kramer [another German agent, Kramer ran the Plans Division of the DoD during the Vietnam War; his son Sven served in the National Security Council under Reagan] - a former Nazi Abwehr officer who then headed up a private vigilante group that ferreted out German Leftists at the behest of private industry. Its U.S. sister organization was the American Security Council (ASC), a private Washington group set up in 1955 by ex-FBI agents that built an index of over one million alleged 'subversives' for major corporations seeking security checks. Willoughby, a friend of Fritz Kramer, eventually sat on the ASC's board."
Researcher William McLoughlin, in a samizdat monograph on Willoughby/Weidenbach (available from Prevailing Winds Research in Santa Barbara), notes that MacArthur's Nordic intelligence chief engaged in a lifetime of acts designed "with the direct intention of facilitating the success of [the] Fourth Reich. The most frightening thing to consider is that he almost succeeded in his intentions on several different occasions. It is my contention that Charles [Adolf] Willoughby [Weidenbach] will eventually be remembered as one of the most prolific mass murderers in the history of mankind, behind only Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler." McLoughlin cites "the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the ensuing follow-up attack on the U.S. Far Eastern command in the Philippines. Both of these events were under the aegis of MacArthur and Willoughby as head of intelligence for the Far Eastern Command, at that time. Even after he was told of the occurrence of the Pearl Harbor attack, Willoughby declined to suggest a search of the Pacific rim for the Japanese carriers supporting the surprise attack and instead opted for leaving the US Army's entire air strike capability sitting on the tarmac in the Philippines in closely clustered groups, which made them easy targets for the Japanese Zeroes ten hours later."
This article contains copyrighted material that has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. MCF is offering this article available to our readers for the general purpose of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching and/or research. We believe that our use of this material falls under the "fair use" provision of Title 17, Section 107 of the United States Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes other than that provided by law, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
| Back to MFC Index | Back to Hambones Index |