The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century - Wall Street and the Rise of the Fourth Reich

The date of the third excerpt above coincides with the native fascists’ desperate three-prong attack in the United States. Further, the documents in Appendix 10 confirm that Nazi agents were well placed in the U.S. to influence the political doctrine and policy.

The intent of the Nazis can best be summarized by an excerpt from a 1944 French weekly, Combat, written by Gen. von Stuepnagel, analyzing the causes for German military setbacks in WWII:

In the next war, which should take place within 25 years, the same mistake must not be made. The principal adversary will be the United States, and the entire effort must be concentrated against this country from the beginning... Our defeat in the present war need not be considered except as an incident in the triumphal march of Germany towards the conquest of the world, and from now on we must give a defeated Germany the spirit of a future conqueror. What does a temporary defeat matter if, through the destruction of people and material wealth in enemy countries, we are able to secure a margin of economic and demographic superiority even greater than before 1939? If we can succeed in doing this, this war will have been useful, since it will enable us, within the next 25 years, to wage another war under better conditions... Our enemies will grow weary before we do. We shall have to organize a campaign of pity designed to induce them to send us needed supplies at the earliest possible moment. Above all we must hold on to the assets we have deposited in neutral countries. The present war will thus have been victorious, in spite of our temporary military defeat, because it will have been a march forward towards our supremacy. We have not to fear conditions of peace analogous to those we have imposed, because our adversaries will always be divided and disunited.

There is no more dramatic evidence of the State Department’s plan of a German bulwark against the Soviets and the resulting Marshall Plan, which basically followed the Nazis’ plan for a comeback. It’s not that Marshall or any particular individual were Nazis. However, the State Department had reams of captured German documents and was well aware of the postwar plans of the Nazi leadership to continue the war economically and psychologically, and yet, the State Department embarked on a course that could not have pleased the Nazi leadership more. The Nazi psychological warfare campaign was extraordinarily successful in playing the Americans for fools.

While the State Department was correct in opposing the Soviet Union or any other totalitarian form of government, pushing the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust was foolhardy. Moreover, as we learned later in the 1960s and 1970s, détente and trade were more effective weapons against the Soviets. By continuing a path of belligerence rather than peaceful coexistence, the United States forced the Soviets and their eastern European satellites to arm. The Marshall Plan propelled the world toward the nuclear brink.

Evidence the Nazis were trying to split the Allies was plentiful. Captured Nazi documents reveal the German High Command channeled proof of their secret negotiations with the Americans to Stalin through agents who were in contact with von Papen. This was the source of serious strife between FDR and Stalin in the closing months of the war. The Big Three, the U.S., U.S.S.R and U.K., had agreed to hold no secret talks separately with the Nazis. Yet, Allen Dulles was holding talks with Gen. Wolff and other Nazi officials. All reports suggest the talks held by Dulles were unauthorized. While FDR had not approved the talks and was not aware of them, the Nazis told Stalin about them. At one point before this incident, the Nazis boldly proposed that the West join them in a war against communism. The Americans who engaged in these secret talks wittingly or unwittingly played their part in the Nazi ruse. They included Allen Dulles.

Besides the reams of documents the State Department had acquired, the press reported further proof that the Nazis were building an underground network. On Dec. 13, 1944, the Associated Press reported that Himmler had started such plans. The article further claimed that many party members established double identities, and the aim of their propaganda was to drive a wedge between the Allies. Evidence of the Nazi underground network and escape routes emerged as early as 1943 and was extensive by late 1944.

The Nazis made good use of their occupation of France by sending carloads of files and secret formulas over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. Burnet Hershey, the foreign correspondent of the Hearst press, first reported on the German escape route through Spain on Jan. 25, 1943:

Every talk I had with the Germans in Lisbon made that fact clear. They may be defeated on the battlefield, as they were in 1918, but they expect to win again at the peace table as in 1919. Of course, they will sacrifice Hitler as they sacrificed the Kaiser; but the old gang - the generals, big industrialists, phony professors of mis-education about German race superiority - will try to go underground again to lay the eggs for another war of German conquest.

On Jan. 17, 1944, Harold Denny of the Times confirmed the early report in the following dispatch from Madrid:

Heavy new increments of German agents have been pouring into Spain in recent days in an obvious effort by Germany to save what she can of a situation that has gone badly against her.

A thousand Gestapo agents and other German representatives have appeared in Madrid alone in the past fortnight. Significant additions to the German population have been noted in other parts of Spain.

They are not easy to deal with, for Germany has extensive commercial interests in Spain and many of these agents are here in the plausible guise of executives, technicians and lesser employees of these interests as well as cogs in Germany’s vast diplomatic, consular and propaganda machinery.

On April 13, 1944, the New York Herald Tribune carried a report from the British Intelligence Service and the American Alien Property Custodian about huge sums placed by high Nazi officials and industrialists in neutral and American banks. On July 19, 1944, the Office of War Information reported that Swiss officials were alarmed about recent transfers by Germans to Swiss and Portuguese banks. The money would be used to finance the resurrection of the Third Reich. On Oct. 19, 1944, Newsweek reported that according to diplomatic sources from Buenos Aires, German technicians and military experts were believed to be reaching Argentina incognito. On Jan. 15, 1945, according to Newsweek,

Many of the men Himmler sent to Spain and Argentina to carry out Nazi plans for postwar survival, carried passports under false names and later were reported dead in Germany. All have had training in Nazi political methods and experience abroad in commercial and other posts.

In fact, the names of many of those executed as plotters in the failed attempt on Hitler’s life were later used as false identities for escaping Nazis. A Reuters News Wire on Sept. 14, 2000 confirmed the previous quoted documents about the Nazis planning a comeback. The new document on looted money and property was released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the World Jewish Congress. The document confirms a meeting at the Maison Rouge (Red House) in Strasbourg on Aug. 10, 1944. During the meeting, an SS general and a representative of the German armaments ministry told companies such as Krupp and Roehling that they must be prepared to finance the Nazi Party after the war when it went underground. Scheid, an SS general and director of Hermsdorff & Schonburg Co., presided over the meeting. Seven German companies, including Krupp, Roehling, Messerschmidt and Volkswagenwerk, and officials of the ministries of armaments and the navy attended the meeting.

German industry was told to make contacts and alliances with foreign firms, and lay the groundwork for borrowing large sums in foreign countries. The SS general cited Krupp’s sharing of patents with U.S. companies as an example of how to employ firms outside Germany for the benefit of the Nazis. The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force sent the three-page document to the U.S. Secretary of State in November 1944.

It is clear the State Department had a good idea of the Nazis’ intent. Even the press was full of articles reporting on Nazi escape plans. The papers that aligned themselves as pro-fascist before the war began a propaganda blitz for an easy peace with Germany. They claimed that Roosevelt’s call for an unconditional surrender delayed the end of the war; it became a campaign issue in 1944. Despite this barrage of propaganda that the Nazis may have provoked, there were thousands of articles and editorials against any appeasement of Germany and the Nazis. At the peak of this sympathy campaign for an easy peace, Maj. George Fielding Eliot wrote in the Herald Tribune on June 27, 1945:

Why shouldn’t the German standard of living be lower than that of Germany’s neighbors? Since when has it been considered an obligation of civilized society to see to it that a criminal, in the custody of the law, must enjoy every privilege, every luxury and every article of Lucullan diet which may be available to the law-abiding members of the community?

When Roosevelt’s Occupational Directive 1067 was published, it had the full support of the American people. The military command kept this directive secret for months because it ran counter to its program. The essential objectives of the Allies were stated as follows in Directive 1067:

The principal allied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world. Essential steps in the accomplishment of this objective are elimination of Nazism and militarism in all their forms, the immediate apprehension of war criminals for punishment, the industrial disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, with continuing control over Germany’s capacity to make war and preparation for eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis.

During the war, the Allies solemnly agreed to remove all traces of militarism and Nazism to ensure Germany would never again wage war on the world. At Potsdam, the Allies agreed to abolish all veterans’ organizations and other military clubs. The failure to continue the 4Ds program and to follow the Potsdam agreement led to additional problems for the occupying forces. The ink was barely dry on the Potsdam agreement before SS and Wehrmacht officers began setting up a close-knit society under their American captors’ eyes in the prison camps. The Bruderschaft (Brotherhood) organization flourished behind the prison gates and was soon planning a Nazi comeback.

During the first two years, the Bruderschaft operated in secret. The inner circle was made up of top SS officers and important officers from the General Staff. Among the leaders: Lt. Gen. Hut von Manteuffel, former commander of the Panzer Gross Deutschland Division; Alfred Franke-Grieksch, a high-ranking SS officer; and Gottried Griessmayer, former head of Hitler Youth. The organization was well financed, reaching across Germany and extending into Italy, Spain and Argentina.

The Control Council for Germany

The question of German remilitarization first arose when Chancellor Adenauer suggested a united Europe defended by an integrated European Army. In 1948, Adenauer presented a request to U.S. authorities in secret to rearm 25 divisions. On July 30, 1948, U.S. News and World Report exposed the request in an article.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 brought a complete change. Provisions banning military groups were no longer enforced. The Control Council allowed West Germany to set up its own General Staff, camouflaged under the name “Blank Office.” Supported by Bonn and the United States, a network of ex-Nazi officers was created to reactivate Germany’s military. The man behind the plan for remilitarization was Werner Naumann. With his old party connection from the Propaganda Ministry, the SS, the Wehrmacht and the Bruderschaft, Naumann emerged in a position of power. The devoted Nazi was the directing spirit behind almost every Nazi organization and publication in 1950-51.

One of the outgrowths of this rush to rearm Germany was the Bund Deutscher Jugend (Association of German Youth). Membership in the group rose to 22,000. However, behind it was a sinister secret division of trained saboteurs and assassination squads labeled the Technical Emergency Service. Several thousand Wehrmacht and SS officers staffed this guerrilla army. U.S. agencies, the Bonn government and a few German businesses trained and equipped it.

This Nazi group would have remained lost in history among the hundreds of others in postwar Germany if it had not been for President of the State of Hesse, August Zinn. In 1952, Zinn publicly charged that the group had drawn up a blacklist of prominent politicians to assassinate in an emergency. To the dismay of the U.S. High Commissioner, evidence surfaced revealing a large-scale political assassination plot hatched in the style of the Freikorps. The Oct. 10, 1952 edition of the New York Times carried the story. Similar plots and illegal activities were found behind other Nazi groups, such as the Freikorps Deutschland, Bewegung Reich and scores of smaller ones.

In 1952, the courts sentenced five members of a secret Hitler Action group for unconstitutional activities. Schroer, the group’s leader, had been a prominent officer in Hitler’s Munich headquarters. Schroer had given the order: “Act inconspicuously! Infiltrate all rightist organizations and make them ready for the final assault.”

American Occupation officials systematically sabotaged Directive 1067. Even Eisenhower saw the systematic way in which it was being violated and issued strong warnings to officers. As recorded in the Truman Library, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, who became Military Governor of Germany, summarized the sabotage thus.

JCS-1067 would have been extremely difficult to operate under. If you followed it literally, you couldn’t have done anything to restore the German economy. If you couldn’t restore the German economy, you could never hope to get paid for the food that they had to have. By virtue of these sorts of things it was modified constantly; not officially, but by allowing this deviation and that deviation, et cetera. We began to slowly wipe out JCS-1067. When we were ordered to put in a currency reform this was in direct violation of a provision of JCS-1067 that prohibited us from doing anything to improve the German economy. It was an unworkable policy and it wasn’t changed just without any discussion or anything by those of us who were in Germany. It was done by gradual changes in its provision and changes of cablegrams, conferences, and so on.

Gen. Clay’s words are damning. They leave no doubt the general was willingly to ignore Roosevelt’s directive and conveniently twist its meaning as needed. Further, his words clearly show that he knowingly chipped away at the directive until all of its provisions were voided.

In 1948, Clay commuted the life sentence of Ilse Koch to three years. Koch, the sadistic wife of a concentration camp commandant, known by inmates as the Witch of Buchenwald, had lampshades made from the skin of inmates with distinctive tattoos. Forensics proved the various items came from human skin. However, in 1976 in a videotaped interview prepared for the George C. Marshall Research Foundation in Virginia, Gen. Clay made the following comments:

We tried Ilse Koch. ... She was sentenced to life imprisonment, and I commuted it to three years. And our press really didn’t like that. She had been destroyed by the fact that an enterprising reporter who first went into her house had given her the beautiful name, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” and he had found some white lampshades in there which he wrote up as being made out of human flesh.

Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.

Ilse Koch and her lawyers never challenged the fact that the lampshades and other items were made from human skin. Such irresponsible comments as the general’s contributed to Holocaust denials. Further, the Koch case shows that while the general started circumventing Roosevelt’s directive by chipping away at the economic provisions, he soon intensified his sympathies to pardoning Nazi war criminals. While Gen. Clay publicly stated that Koch could not get a fair trial in an American military court, a civilian German court later sentenced her to life in prison. In 1967, the Witch of Buchenwald died in prison; the official cause of death was suicide.

Once hostilities ended in Europe, Gen. Clay was appointed as Eisenhower’s Deputy Military Governor in charge of the Control Council. Following Eisenhower’s retirement on March 15, 1947, Clay became the Military Governor of Germany. Eisenhower was reportedly disturbed to see his orders countermanded and expressed concern at seeing Nazis set free. Eisenhower did not need to look any further than his Deputy Governor for an explanation.

Secretary of Army Kenneth Royall opposed the denazification and decartelization plans. Royall was open in his support for rebuilding a strong Germany and was a vigorous opponent of the 4Ds program. In secret testimony before the House Appropriations Committee in April 1948, he told members of Congress that he wanted to end the war crimes trials much earlier. He claimed his major obstacle was Gen. Clay. Royall was the official responsible for halting all executions of war criminals after a false story of prisoner torture emerged in the Malmedy Massacre trial. Royall also opposed integrating the military after the war.

As Deputy Governor in charge of the Control Council, Clay was free to hire and staff the council, which had three general divisions: political, finance and economic divisions. See figure.

General Motors was particularly well represented on the Control Council. Besides Lewis Douglas heading the Finance Division, Edward Zdunke, a prewar head of General Motors Antwerp, was appointed to supervise the Engineering Section. Col. Grame Howard, former General Motors representative in Germany and the author of a book that praised totalitarian practices and justified German aggression, was placed in charge of personnel.

The stacking of the Control Council with Wall Street and corporate executives deeply disturbed Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. Many of the firms were guilty of willingly trading with the Nazis during the war and supported pro-fascist groups at home. General Motors’ Opel division was one of the largest tank manufacturers for Hitler. Dillon and Read was one of the Wall Street firms that helped finance and build the Third Reich. Morgenthau noted:

MEMORANDUM

May 29, 1945

Lt. Gen. Lucius D. Clay, as Deputy to General Eisenhower, actively runs the American element of the Control Council for Germany. Gen. Clay’s three principal advisers on the Control Council staff are:

1. Ambassador Robert D. Murphy, who is in charge of the Political Division.

2. Lewis Douglas, whom Gen. Clay describes as my personal adviser on economical, financial and governmental matters. Douglas resigned as Director of the Budget in 1934; and for the following eight years he attacked the government’s fiscal policies. Since 1940, Douglas has been president of the Mutual Life Insurance Co., and since December 1944, he has been a director of the General Motors Corp.

3. Brig. Gen. William Draper is the director of the Economics Division of the Control Council. Gen. Draper is a partner of the banking firm of Dillon, Read and Co.

Sunday’s New York Times contained the announcement of key personnel who have been appointed by Gen. Clay and Gen. Draper to the Economic Division of the Control Council. The appointments include the following:

1. R. J. Wysor is to be in charge of the metallurgical tatters. Wysor was president of the Republic Steel Corp., from 1937 until a recent date, and prior thereto, he was associated with the Bethlehem Steel, Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., and the Republic Steel Corp.

2. Edward X. Zdunke is to supervise the engineering section. Prior to the war, Mr. Zdunke was head of General Motors at Antwerp.

3. Philip Gaethke is to be in charge of mining operations. Gaethke was formerly connected with Anaconda Copper and as manager of its smelters and mines in Upper Silesia before the war.

4. Philip P. Clover is to be in charge of handling oil matters. He was formerly a representative of the Socony Vacuum Oil Co., in Germany.

5. Peter Hoglund is to deal with industrial production problems. Hoglund is on leave from General Motors and is said to be an expert on German production.

6. Calvin B. Hoover is to be in charge of the Intelligence Group on the Control Council and is also to be a special adviser to Gen. Draper. In a letter to the editor in the New York Times on Oct. 9, 1944, Hoover wrote:

“The publication of Secretary Morgenthau’s plan for dealing with Germany has disturbed me deeply ... such a Carthaginian peace would leave a legacy of hate to poison international relations for generations to come. ... the void in the economy of Europe which would exist through the destruction of all German industry is something which is difficult to contemplate.”

7. Laird Bell is to be Chief Counsel of the Economic Division. He is a well-known Chicago lawyer and in May 1944, was elected president of the Chicago Daily News after the death of Frank Knox.

One of the men who helped Gen. Draper in the selection of personnel for the Economics Division was Col. Graeme Howard, a vice president of General Motors, who was in charge of overseas business and who was a leading representative of General Motors in Germany prior to the war. Howard is the author of a book in which he praises totalitarian practices, justifies German aggression and the Munich policy of appeasement, and blames Roosevelt for precipitating the war.

Morgenthau’s memorandum shows how the military systematically sabotaged the denazification program from the top down. All the firms mentioned willingly continued to trade with the Nazis during the war. Almost all took extraordinary measures to hide their Nazi trade from the United States government and to have their stateside offices remain in charge. This sabotage occurred despite clear directives from the Control Council. The relevant extracts from the Control Council follow:

You will search out, arrest and hold, pending receipt by you of further instructions as to their disposition, Adolph Hitler, his chief Nazi associates, other war criminals and all persons who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes …

8. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers holding important and key positions in (a) National and Gau Civic and economic organizations; (b) corporations and other organizations in which the government has a major financial interest; (c) industry, commerce, agriculture and finance; (d) education; (e) the judiciary; and (f) the press, publishing houses and other agencies disseminating news and propaganda.

The excerpt from the Control Council directive is specific. It leaves no doubt about who was to be arrested and detained. Further, the directive was explicit that there was no authority to release anyone detained until receiving further instructions from Washington. Gen. Clay’s words reveal that at the very least, he was guilty of not following orders. Note the directive above included American businessmen.

While there were members like Morgenthau in the Truman administration who carried on the fight for justice, the Nazis had powerful friends in the halls of Congress to protect them. One was John Rankin. Excerpts from his speech to the House of Representatives on Nov. 27, 1947 follow:

What is taking place at Nuremberg, Germany, is a disgrace to the United States. Every other country has now washed its hands and withdrawn from this Saturalia of persecution. But a racial minority, two and half years after the war closed are in Nuremberg not only hanging German soldiers but trying German businessmen in the name of the United States.

Rankin used the words racial minority to refer to Jews. He was not alone. George Dondero, R-Michigan, was mayor of Royal Oak, Mich., before his election to the House. Royal Oak was home to Father Coughlin and a hotbed for pro-Nazi groups. Dondero described the trials as a result of Jewish and communist treachery. He singled out ten lawyers from the IG Farben case, including the leading prosecutor Josiah E. DuBois Jr., whom he called a known left-winger from the Treasury Department, who had been a student of the Communist Party. Dondero became something of an art critic in the late 1940s and 1950s, dismissing modern art as communist inspired. He labored to censor the work of abstract artists.

Also based in Dondero’s district was Dow Chemical. Dow had several cartel arrangements with IG Farben and feared the trial could lead to exposing its full collaboration with IG and the Nazis. The IG Farben trial also entangled British ICI Ltd. The British Foreign Office breathed a sigh of relief when the Times discreetly omitted any reference to ICI in its reporting of the IG Farben case.

The State Department largely engineered the choice of Clay and Murphy to head positions in the Control Council. Their appointments were more of a political decision, which testified to the power of the pro-fascist faction in the State Department. Clay was the only four-star general never to have conducted a combat command. While Clay served in Europe during the war, he was a rear echelon general in charge of supply.

Both Clay and Murphy were largely responsible for convincing Truman that a punitive peace was unwise, and they immediately set about sabotaging the denazification program. Once the Kennan Doctrine emerged in 1946, Clay and Murphy both embraced it. Early in 1946, Gen. Clay banned dismantling German industrial plants for reparations. Both Clay and Murphy had a great influence in escalating the emerging Cold War. In 1948, Clay issued a warning to Washington that “war may come with dramatic suddenness.” His frantic message came from an exaggerated threat assessment from Gehlen, claiming the Soviets were mobilizing large numbers of troops in Eastern Europe. Gehlen was a former Nazi officer in charge of intelligence on the Eastern Front, recruited by OSS-CIA.

Hermann Abs’ rehabilitation by Gen. Clay could be considered as the most damning sabotage of the denazification program. While Abs was never associated with the concentration camps or the horrors of the Holocaust, he was the one in the Nazi empire who made it all possible. Abs was the Nazi banker. Without the financial magic of Abs, the Nazis would have faced a financial crisis that would have brought down the Third Reich. Clay complained that he was never able to appoint Abs finance minister of the new German government, due to American public opinion, but he was able to appoint him to head the Reconstruction Finance Corp. (RFC). RFC was somewhat outside the realm of the government, but was the sole instrument for distributing funds for Germany from the Marshall Plan. Abs later returned to the post of Chairman of Deutsche Bank which he had held during the war, and was a key figure in the reconstruction of the German economy.

Gens. Clay and Draper

On July 30, 1947, Gen. Clay announced that extraditions from the American zone would end after Nov. 1. Three weeks earlier, the general ordered JAG to end all war crimes trials by the end of the year. At that time, there remained at least 700 murders of American airmen still uninvestigated. The reason later given for closing war crime trials was that by mid-1947, the American war crimes program was discredited, a victim of a vicious political campaign. During the Battle of the Bulge, a German offensive unit was ordered to take no prisoners, and massacred 88 of the 120 American soldiers captured near the Belgian town of Malmedy. Both the Chicago Tribune and Sen. Joseph McCarthy engaged in the campaign to discredit the Malmedy massacre trial.

First to benefit from Clay’s decision to end extradition were seven Wehrmacht and SS generals. Almost no German generals faced trial by the United States or Britain. That does not include field marshals, such as Goering. This group of German officers was wanted for destroying Warsaw in 1944 and for the murder of thousands of Poles during the German retreat. Poland requested their extradition at the beginning of 1946. Unlike in other eastern European countries, the trials in Poland had been as fair as any in the West. Western Allies extradited 1,172 men and women to Poland to stand trial. Forty-two returned after acquittal. One of the generals named in the extradition request was Gen. Heinz Reinefarth, the Butcher of Warsaw.

It is revealing to look at why some Nazi criminals were never charged with crimes, but were promoted instead to new positions of power. A typical example is the case of Theodor Ganzenmuller, who participated in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. As Staatssekretar in the Ministry of Transportation during the war, Ganzenmuller organized the train services for Auschwitz, Treblinka and other concentration camps. Himmler personally telephoned Ganzenmuller to work out problems in transporting the Jews.

Seeking someone to rebuild the railways in the American zone, the U.S. Transport Division shamefully proposed Ganzenmuller. Seven of the other members proposed also were in the automatic arrest category. The U.S. Transport Division withdrew Ganzenmuller’s name only after the State Department wrote an urgent letter. Dorpmuller, Hitler’s Minister of Transport, was appointed. Such appointments of high, former Nazis to positions of power in the postwar occupation government and the later German government were rampant. More than half of those nominated by the American Legal Division were former Nazis in the automatic arrest category.

The only American having problems finding suitable personnel to fill the new positions was Bernard Bernstein, head of the Finance Division. Gen. Bickelhaupt of the American forces appointed Hermann Geitz to head the Communications Division. Bickelhaupt was a former ATT vice president. Bickelhaupt insisted that Geitz was indispensable. Geitz had been head of the German telephone company, and before and during the war, had bought equipment from ATT. However, at the last moment, Gen. Clay stepped in and blocked Geitz’s nomination.

Col. Clio Straight was selected to head the prosecution of war criminals. Straight was a lawyer from Waterloo, Iowa, with no experience in criminal cases. He had been drafted and remained in charge even after career JAG officers were dispatched to Germany. Col. Claude Mickelwaite ordered Straight to wind up the trials that he presumed would last through 1948. Straight’s office was handicapped by a constant demobilization effort that had reduced his staff by 50 percent. Further, Straight complained that his staff was untrained and not qualified. The constant moving of headquarters interrupted the group’s work repeatedly. According to Straight, Mickelwaite saw no glory in continuing the trials, and because of their unpopularity with top Army brass, refused to ask for more personnel.

Mickelwaite faced only one obstacle in his rush to close down the trials: Damon Gunn. Gunn submitted a report to Washington on June 24, 1946 complaining that there were more than 15,000 war crimes suspects at Dachau alone, but only 63 trials had taken place involving roughly 500 of the detainees. In his report, Gunn recommended an extra 1,500 trials involving a minimum of 3,000 defendants. Gunn’s recommendation was dead the day it arrived in Germany. On Mickelwaite’s suggestion, Clay turned down the request.

As late as 1982, Straight commented on the release of prisoners from Dachau: “I was ambivalent whether we should carry on or quit. We had established the principle and to carry on and try thousands would have been expensive. So when I got the orders, I saw the production line going. No special efforts were made. There was no method, no discussion about handing cases or bodies over to the Germans. We just plain turned them loose.”

Justice, it seems, died with Roosevelt. Nuremberg settled the principle of bringing war criminals to justice. However, once the Allies established that principle, they spent little effort in seeking justice for thousands of victims. American occupation forces simply turned the war criminals loose. Of course, with every new trial and every new defendant, the risk of uncovering corporate America’s treason increased.

The lack of prosecution turned the American zone into a sanctuary for war criminals. Three examples will suffice. On March 23, 1948, Lt. Gen. Dratvin, Deputy Commander of the Soviet military mission, requested in writing from Maj. Gen. G.P. Hays, Clay’s deputy, the extradition of 17 Russian collaborators. The Soviets charged the collaborators with shooting partisans and burning families alive in their homes. Dratvin supplied the American zone addresses of each collaborator. Hays rejected the request.

On March 31, 1948, the U.S. Legal Division approved the extradition of four German officers to Yugoslavia for a series of murders, but the Director of Intelligence canceled it on political grounds. Finally, on June 15, Army headquarters received a letter from a Lett refugee naming five former SS and SD officers living in a displaced persons camp. The reply:

With the exception of atrocities committed in concentration camps which were located in the U.S. area of control or overrun by U.S. troops, the war crimes activities of headquarters do not entail prosecutions of criminals who committed offences against the civilian population of other countries... We thank you for bringing the matter to the attention of this headquarters.

In short, no one gave a damn. Of course, Clay did not act in a vacuum in sabotaging the denazification program. The Nazis counted on support from their agents and friends, the corporations that did business with the Nazis before and during the war, and a faction in the State Department that wanted to use Germany as a bulwark against the Soviets.

This group had the means to effectively lobby and control the focus of the media. One tactic was sponsoring junkets for business leaders and politicians to Europe to study German recovery. American multinationals financed most of these trips. Draper paid close attention to these visitors and provided them with privileged information. Reports from the visits mentioned the proven impossibility of decartelization and the need to reverse the Morgenthau Plan before it was even implemented.

One of these reports that was influential in shaping policy was A Report on Germany, by Lewis Brown, chair of Johns-Manville Corp. The report was extremely popular, making it onto the bestseller list, and is still quoted today. Brown wrote it in 1947 after touring Germany. The experts he consulted read like a guest list for the Council on Foreign Relations: ATT’s Frederick Devereux; John Foster Dulles; Herbert Hoover; Sears Roebuck President A.S. Barrowsthen, serving as U.S. Comptroller in Germany; a host of British and Swiss banking authorities; and 25 German industrialists. Brown’s lists of experts omitted labor leaders, small businessmen, leaders of the resistance movement, and heads of denazification and decartelization.

In his report, Brown attacked the French and USSR punishment of Nazis as brutal and indiscriminate. He claimed the denazification program was depriving Germany of the leaders it needed to rehabilitate and rebuild. Typical delegates included the chairmen of the National Association of Manufacturers and of National City Bank, the head of the International Chamber of Commerce, and executives of Chase Bank. The one common denominator among the delegates was that all had extensive dealings with Nazi Germany, including General Electric.

At that time, General Electric owned about 25 percent of AEG, Germany’s own “general electric company,” and had further extensive holdings in Germany. While Reed was arguing with the government against antitrust laws in Germany, GE faced 13 criminal antitrust cases in the United States.

After the war, Clay accepted a trustee position with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which was connected to those who invested in Nazi Germany. The appointment immediately raises the question of a payoff for help in hiding American investments in Nazi Germany. The question, like many others raised in this chapter, cannot be answered without further documentation that may be sealed in government or corporate vaults.

While Gen. Clay’s record on denazification is dismal at best, it was exemplary in comparison with Gen. Draper’s. Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of Navy Forrestal engineered Draper’s appointment. Forrestal, a former president of Dillon and Read, was one of the individuals Roosevelt had under surveillance. Draper was selected to head the economic division and the anticartel section. Clay often was opposed to Draper’s views and actions.

Theoretically, the anti-cartel section should have had easy going in breaking up German cartels. The American JCS 1067 directive and the three-power Potsdam agreement were all adamant about destroying the concentrated German industrial strength. Unlike the debate over what constituted a war crime, there was little disagreement over the fate of cartels.

The anti-cartel section also employed Capt. Norbert Bogdan, a vice president of Schroeder Bank’s New York branch. Schroeder had close ties with the Stein Bank, owned by Baron Kurt von Schroeder. Von Schroeder channeled funds to the Nazis before they seized power and was instrumental in introducing Hitler to von Papen in a meeting that opened the way for his appointment to chancellor. Allen Dulles also was a director of Schroeder’s bank. Draper surrounded himself with like-minded aides. His electronic specialist was Frederick Devereux, a senior official from ATT. His steel expert was Rufus Wysor, president of Republic Steel, which had a long history of cartel agreements. Indeed, Wysor once asked a rival, “What’s wrong with cartels anyhow?”

Draper was a former investment banker with Dillon and Read, which had a long history of doing business with Germany and the Nazis. While at Dillon and Read, Draper was appointed director, vice president and assistant treasurer of the German Credit and Investment Corp. (GCI). GCI served as a short-term banker for Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper did not intend to ever implement Roosevelt’s directive calling for dismantling German cartels and industry. In one case, Draper ordered a halt to the dismantling of an IG Farben poison gas plant.

However, in Draper’s section there were three dedicated officials who worked diligently to take apart the Nazi cartels. Two of them, Russell Nixon and Bernard Bernstein, resigned by December 1945 in protest Draper’s failure to carry out decartelization measures. Bernstein, who worked in the banking section, reported to Gen. Clay in September 1945 that his team had removed 9,500 employees who were proven Nazis from the banking system. However, Bernstein demanded stricter measures, including removal of U.S. officials who refused to carry out the denazification program. Bernstein claimed that too many Nazis remained in control of the banks. Clay refused to take tougher measures, and Bernstein resigned once it was clear nothing was going to be done.

James Martin chose to remain and fight for decartelization. Martin’s position was undoubtedly weakened by the resignations of Nixon and Bernstein. Martin failed to take into account the strength of opposition from his own side. British and American bankers and industrialists openly worked with their Nazi partners until war broke out. Most of this continued clandestinely after the war. Investment by American corporations in Germany was staggering. In 1939, American corporations held controlling interests in German corporations worth at least $400 million.

Until mid-1946, Martin could have defeated Draper if two conditions had been satisfied. First, Martin needed information about German corporations in order to organize a breakup. Second, Americans had to control the Ruhr district in which the large steel and coal trusts were located. The Ruhr was under British control.

Draper’s British counterpart was Sir Percy Mills, who arrived in Germany with no formal directive to remove Nazi businessmen. Mills was unrepentant about appointing former Nazis to control industries. He selected industrialists he had last met in 1939, who should have been under arrest, according to SHAEF.

A typical Mills appointment was Wilhelm Zangen, a Nazi Party member since 1927. Zangen employed slave labor at Mannesmann. Another appointee, Ernst Ponsgen, was selected to direct the steel industry. In 1941, Hitler awarded him with the Eagle Shield, the Nazis’ highest economic award, for his “extraordinary services in arming Germany.”

An estimated 100 industrialists and six major banks had controlled two-thirds of the German economy. This concentrated power made it easy for the Nazis to mobilize for war.

Martin’s assessment was controversial. British and American politicians and military officials were divided about the relationship between the corporations and Nazi government.

Martin and Nixon arrived in Frankfurt at the end of April 1945. They discovered that while IG Farben’s headquarters had escaped bombing, the records stored there were being dumped out of windows and burned in the courtyard. SHAEF decided to use the building as headquarters and ordered it cleared of refuse. To dismantle IG, documentary evidence was needed; those records were vital. The surviving records took two years to assemble.

The tribunal of judges on the IG Farben case in which 23 directors faced charges included Curtis Shake, Supreme Court Justice of Indiana; James Morris, Supreme Court Justice of North Dakota; and Paul Hebert, Law School Dean at Louisiana State University. From the beginning, the investigations into IG centered on two directors, Hermann Schmitz and von Schnitzler. Nixon located von Schnitzler and he eventually faced trial after making several confessions and conflicting statements. Judge Curtis Shake ruled to ignore those statements in von Schnitzler’s trial, claiming the accused was trying to help the Allies by telling them what he thought they wanted to hear.

The decision outraged the prosecutor. The court acquitted all 23 accused of waging an aggressive war and 10 of all charges; the rest were found guilty of lesser charges. Only four were found guilty of employing slave labor. Judge Hebert wrote a dissenting opinion.

Prosecutor Josiah E. DuBois was especially irate with Judge Morris, who questioned the pace of the prosecutors’ presentations and the relevancy of much of the evidence. Judge Merrell, an Indiana lawyer, was the alternate judge and agreed with Hebert. The sentences were extremely light, some being only a year and a half long. Hebert’s dissenting opinion ran 114 pages. An excerpt follows:

I concur in the acquittals on charges of planning and preparation of aggressive war. I concur, though realizing that on the vast volume of credible evidence, a contrary result might as easily be reached by other triers of the facts who would be more inclined to draw the inferences usually warranted in criminal cases. The issues of fact are truly so close as to cause genuine concern whether or not justice has actually been done.

While concurring in the acquittals, I cannot agree with the factual conclusions of the Tribunal. I do not agree with the majority’s conclusion that the evidence falls far short.

Utilization of [slave] labor [by Farben] was approved as a matter of corporate policy. To permit the corporate instrumentality to be used as a cloak to insulate the principal corporate officers who approved and authorized this course of action from any criminal responsibility therefore is a leniency in the application of principles of criminal responsibility which, in my opinion, is without any sound precedent under the most elementary concepts of criminal law... The evidence shows Farben’s willing cooperation in the utilization of forced foreign workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates as a matter of conscious corporate policy.

In his criticisms of Morris, DuBois charged the judge was more preoccupied with the threat of Russian communism than in justice.

In June 1956, Draper returned to Germany from Washington with a new economic team. All were harsh critics of the punitive policies. Draper’s Economic Division had not broken apart a single cartel. Among them was Lawrence Wilkinson, the new head of the industry branch. Wilkinson was sharply critical of decartelization, claiming it would hinder German economic recovery. He claimed that like denazification, it achieved nothing and only built resentment. Wilkinson aligned himself with Britain’s Percy Mills. According to Martin, Wilkinson and Draper conspired with Mills to raise certain issues in the Four-Power discussions, which would give Draper a suitable pretext for seeking Washington’s agreement to change American policy.

In September 1946, Gen. Clay reprimanded Draper for telling visitors that denazification and decartelization were responsible for Germany’s dire economic conditions. Clay’s reprimand had no effect. On Nov. 13, Sir Cecil Weir cabled the American embassy in Washington that Draper assured him that it was just a matter of time before American policy fell into line with British policy. Weir soon replaced Mills. A month later, Willard Thorp, an Assistant Secretary of State, informed the British that the State Department was doing its best to keep the wild men in check. In addition, in November, the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress, tilting American policy in favor of big business and cartels. The Four-Powers law against cartels approved in January 1947 fit the lax British policy toward cartels.

Martin held off resigning until May 1947. Draper appointed Philip Hawkins, his son-in-law and a relative of the du Ponts, as Martin’s successor. On his return to Washington, Martin continued to fight for decartelization. He and some of the remaining members of the decartelization branch testified before the Fergusson Committee. Arrayed against him were those who produced largely false statistics to prove German industry was unused and any further breakups would force the American taxpayer to subsidize Germany. However, Fergusson’s report ignored the easy choice and blamed Hawkins and Wilkinson for deliberately sabotaging the decartelization policy. The report recommended their firing.

In retaliation, Wilkinson fired Martin and one other member of the remaining decartelization team who testified against him, Alexander Sacks, who stated: “They have done whatever they could by innuendo and misstatement, to discredit a program, which they did not understand or like.” Wilkinson also dismissed 120 of the section’s staff, leaving only 25 in Germany. Draper, promoted to Assistant Secretary of War, continued to dismantle the antitrust campaign against the Japanese multinational corporations.

While employed at Dillon and Read, Draper was in charge of the Thyssen account. He worked closely with the man in charge of this account at Brown Brothers and Harriman, Prescott Bush. (Gen. William Draper is not to be confused with Wickliffe Draper, founder of the Pioneer Fund, although they were related.) In 1932, William Draper financed the International Eugenics Congress. Doubts remain if Draper used his own money or funds from Thyssen or other corporate accounts. He helped select Ernst Ruaudin as chief of the world eugenics movement, who used his office to promote what he called Adolf Hitler’s holy, national and international racial hygienic mission.

Prescott Bush shared Draper’s view on eugenics. In fact, late in Prescott’s first run for office in 1950, he was exposed as an activist in the old fascist eugenics movement, and Prescott lost his first bid for office as a result.

In 1958, Eisenhower appointed Draper as head of a committee to study the proper course for U.S. military aid to other countries. A year later, Draper changed the focus of the committee and recommended the U.S. government react to the threat of population explosion by planning to depopulate poorer countries. The growth of the world’s nonwhite population, he proposed, should be regarded as dangerous to the national security of the United States. Eisenhower rejected the recommendation.

In the 1960s, Draper founded the Population Crisis Committee and the Draper Fund, and joined with the Rockefeller and du Pont families to promote eugenics as population control. The Rockefeller family has been associated with eugenics since the turn of the century. In 1950-51, John Foster Dulles, chairperson of the Rockefeller Foundation, led John D. Rockefeller III on a series of world tours, focusing on the need to stop the expansion of the nonwhite populations. In November 1952, Dulles and Rockefeller set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars from the Rockefeller family.

Gen. Draper served as George H. W. Bush’s population expert. While serving in Congress, Bush chaired the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. He invited Professors William Shockley and Arthur Jensen to explain how allegedly runaway birthrates for African-Americans were down-breeding the American population. On Aug. 5, 1969, Bush summed up the testimony his black-inferiority advocates had given gave the task force. As a candidate for Congress in 1964, Bush campaigned against the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, where his friends urged the U.S. Agency for International Development to make an official contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The league, which had changed its name twice, was now called the Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception. The U.S. government began paying the old fascist group to sterilize nonwhites in foreign countries.

In Bush’s 1988 campaign for president, Gen. Draper’s son, William Draper III, served as co-chairman for finance. The younger Draper also was involved in United Nations depopulation efforts. Bush’s Treasury Secretary was Nicholas Brady, Frederic Brandi’s partner from 1954 until he replaced him in 1971. Brandi was the German who was Draper’s co-director for Nazi investments and his personal contact with the Nazi German Steel Trust.

In 1958, Gen. Draper founded the first West Coast venture capital firm. His son continued in venture capital, founding additional firms in the 1960s. In 1981, Draper’s son was appointed chairman of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and four years later, was selected Administrator and CEO of the United Nations Development Program.

On July 19, 1948, Walter Lippmann summed up the sabotaging of the denazification plan:

Though our German policy is in fact the determinant of our whole European policy, and will be decisive for peace or war, it is notorious that it has not been made by the President, or by Secretary Marshall, or by the so-called policymakers but General Clay and General Draper, and in the Pentagon … .

John McCloy

In 1949, John McCloy was appointed High Commissioner of Germany. In the 1920s, McCloy was a senior partner at Milbank and Tweed, whose most important client was Rockefeller’s Chase National Bank. McCloy was not the first choice for high commissioner; it was Lewis Douglas, head of the Finance Division of the Control Council, but Douglas agreed to step aside in favor of McCloy. It appears nothing was left to chance in postwar Germany; governing was a family affair. The three most powerful men in postwar Germany: High Commissioner McCloy; Douglas, Head of the Finance Division of the Control Council; and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer were all brothers-in-law; each had married one of the daughters of the wealthy Fredrick Zinsser, a partner of JP Morgan. The Morgan empire controlled the fate of Germany.

What little justice was achieved under the Control Council and Gen. Clay was rapidly undone. Until 1940, McCloy had been a member of the law firm Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine, and Wood, which represented IG Farben and its affiliates. In 1940, Stimson appointed McCloy as Assistant Secretary of War. At least three others from the same law firm turned up in the War Department. Alfred McCormick and Howard Peterson both served as Assistants to the Secretary. Richard Wilmer, commissioned as a colonel after the war started, served in a similar vein. Peterson later served as the finance chairman of the Eisenhower National Committee for President, 1951-53.

McCloy was appointed by Henry Stimson, whom Roosevelt selected to head the War Department in 1940 in an attempt to make the war effort a bipartisan effort, and to blunt criticism of the coming war by the Republicans. One of Stimson’s first acts on taking over the War Department was to appoint McCloy as Special Consultant to the War Department on German sabotage. Before 1940 ended, McCloy was appointed Assistant Secretary. As Secretary of State under Hoover, Stimson surely was aware of the cartels of IG Farben and how the Hoover administration aided their formation. McCloy spent most of the 1930s in Paris working on a sabotage case stemming from WWI. In 1936, he shared a box with Hitler at the Olympics.

In one of his first acts as Assistant Secretary of War, McCloy helped plan the internment of Japanese Americans. Once the war began, McCloy followed the American troops across North Africa. Such travel by an assistant cabinet secretary was highly unusual. However, McCloy’s actions partly revealed his motivation. While in North Africa, McCloy helped forge an alliance with the Vichy France and Adm. Darlan.

McCloy continued to follow the advancing Allied troops across Europe and into Germany. In the closing days of the war in Europe, McCloy made one of his most noted decisions. After 16 planes bombed Rothenburg on March 31, McCloy ordered a halt to any further bombing of the city. McCloy said he wanted to preserve the medieval walled city. He also ordered Maj. Gen. Jacob L. Devers not to use artillery in taking Rothenburg. The city would have to be liberated by infantry alone, regardless of the cost in lives of GIs.

However, there are a few facts that McCloy and others have conveniently left out. For instance, just two days before the bombing, a German general with his division of troops left battered Nuremburg for Rothenburg. With the Nazi forces already stationed there, the general gave the order to defend the city to the last man. Also located in Rothenburg was Fa Mansfeld AG, a munitions maker that employed slave labor from Buchenwald.

By late 1943, the slaughter of Jews reached a feverish pace. The Allies were then in a position to bomb the concentration camps to stop the slaughter. John McCloy was almost solely responsible for blocking the bombing of the death camps. Allied planes were already bombing the industrial plants associated with Auschwitz. However, in written memos, McCloy advanced a banker’s argument that the cost would be prohibitive. Such missions would risk men and planes with little damage to the Nazi war effort. McCloy even banned bombing the rail lines leading to the death camps.

In the late spring of 1944, Morgenthau was pressing the War Refuge Board to find an unused army base or some other haven to serve as a temporary home for a small group of mostly Jewish refugees from Italy. The question was put to McCloy, who responded gruffly that it was not the Army’s business to take care of refugees. Outraged at McCloy’s response, Morgenthau presented it at a cabinet meeting with Roosevelt. Roosevelt stated that under no circumstances should those people be turned away. Stimson dictated a memo after the cabinet meeting that someone had accused McCloy of being an oppressor of Jews. McCloy confronted Morgenthau on the charge. Morgenthau did not confess the remark directly, but happily exploited McCloy’s discomfort. McCloy soon responded to Morgenthau that Fort Ontario in Oswego, N.Y., could accept 1,800 refugees.

The average American at that time would probably have granted the Jews sanctuary in the United States if they had known the truth, but evidence of the Holocaust was kept from the average citizen, and even from Roosevelt. The State Department often waited for months before forwarding to Roosevelt memos with evidence of the slaughter. By the time FDR received them, it was too late to act on the intelligence. The prominent newspapers either did not print a single line about the Holocaust or, at best, relegated a few lines to the back pages. In 1943, an eyewitness described Auschwitz to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was Jewish, but he refused to believe the report.

Western politicians were well aware of the massacre taking placing on the European continent. As early as 1941, military attachés were filing weekly body counts. The British were equally aware and firmly opposed to aiding the Jews. Britain’s Foreign Office had a greater fear of the Nazis allowing the Jews to emigrate to the West. Undoubtedly, those fears could not be separated from British-ruled Palestine. Both Britain and the United States also were well aware of the views in the Arab world toward Jews, and the inseparable nature of a Jewish homeland and Mideast oil.

On March 23, 1943, Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple went before the House of Lords to plead for help for the Jews. In response, the British government proposed a conference with the United States on the refugee question. The British Foreign Office organized the Bermuda conference in such a way that no results were produced. The State Department refused to allow any Jewish organization to attend. Jewish leaders then sent a list of proposals. Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State, proposed setting up a temporary safe haven for up to 100,000 Jews in eastern Libya. The President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees also sent a list of proposals, including using British Honduras as a sanctuary. The conference closed with no decisions reached.

Roosevelt desperately wanted to help the Jews, but was misled by his own intelligence advisers, opposed by the British and Soviets, and blackmailed by the Dulles brothers. Roosevelt was a man under secret siege, trying to avoid a rift among the Allies - a rift the Nazis would gladly exploit.

As early as 1939, the same shadow government of bigots in corporate America and their cronies in Congress led to the defeat of the Wagner-Rogers bill. Sen. Robert Wagner, a Democrat from New York, sponsored the bill. Wagner also introduced the Social Security legislation. On the House side, Edith Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican, sponsored a bill to allow 20,000 Jewish children to emigrate to the United States. In Congress, the bill was amended to require reduction of other Jewish immigration by the same amount. Out of frustration, both sponsors dropped support for the bill.

Similarly, President Truman met the same shadow government in the postwar years that blocked any attempt to allow Jewish refugees to emigrate to the United States and nearly blocked the United Nations creation of Israel. Leading the charge to block postwar Jewish emigration was none other than John McCloy.

While still in Europe as Assistant Secretary of War, McCloy helped block the executions of several Nazi war criminals. On Nov. 8, 1945, he delivered a speech before the Academy of Political Science in New York. McCloy blasted the “infamous” JCS 1067 directive and the Morgenthau Plan to prevent the decartelization of IG Farben, and decartelization in general. He belittled the operating capacity of Germany’s industrial plant, although Allied bombing destroyed at most 20 percent of German industry.

Instead Congress was bombarded with a lobbying effort to go easy on Germany, and the agents of the Nazis proceeded according to the plan. Too many members of Congress were sympathetic to the Nazis. Without exception, they were all either conservative Dixiecrats or Republicans. Nebraska Sen. Kenneth Wherry, Mississippi Democrat James Eastland and Indiana Republican Homer Capehart were just some of many who stood up and denounced the decartelization of Germany. Capehart was perhaps one of the more vicious. In his speech before the Senate, he blamed Morganthau - not the Nazis - for the mass starvation of the German people. He claimed the technique of hate had earned both Morgenthau and Bernard Bernstein the title of America’s Himmler.

While Gen. Clay reduced the sentences of many of the war criminals, it was the High Commissioner of Germany, John McCloy, who threw open the doors of Landsberg prison. He blocked some executions of war criminals even before arriving in Germany.

Both Clay and McCloy acted with their respective advisory committees. Advising Clay was the Simpson Commission: Judge Edward Leroy van Roden of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Justice Gordon Simpson of the Texas Supreme Court. The committee was appointed after Lt. Col. Willis N. Everett Jr., defense counsel for the 74 defendants charged in the Malmedy massacre, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming they had not received a fair trial. The Supreme Court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction, but Everett’s petition forced Secretary of War Royall to appoint the commission. The only evidence the Simpson Commission relied on came from the defendants and German clergy who wer Nazi collaborators working to free all war criminals.

Evidence the Simpson Commission gathered regarding torture of prisoners was implausible at best. More often than not, it did not bear up to examination. In one case, the witness said he saw guards torturing another prisoner. However, the window to the torture chamber was not visible from where the prisoner said he was.

Van Roden’s ludicrous claims of torture were the beginning of the revisionist movement about the Holocaust. To be fair, there were minor incidents of abuse of prisoners, but nothing to justify van Roden’s bombastic claims. The Malmedy trials marked an extremely critical turning point in history. After the Malmedy trials, the factions sympathetic to the Nazis were clearly in control in both Germany and the United States. Further, efforts to disrupt the trials were coordinated in both countries.

The charges raised by the Simpson Commission were without merit. The Commission’s attempt to derail justice is summed up in the words of van Roden:

My conclusion is that the entire program of War Crimes Trials, either by International Courts, the members of which comprise those of the victorious nations, or by Military Courts of a single victor nation is basically without legal or moral authority... The fact remains that the victor nations in World War II, while still at fever heat of hatred for an enemy nation, found patriots of the enemy nation guilty for doing their patriotic duty. This is patently unlawful and immoral. One of the most shameful incidents connected with the War Crimes Trials prosecutions has to do with the investigations and the preparation of the cases for trial. The records of trials which our Commission examined disclosed that a great majority of the official investigators, employed by the United States Government to secure evidence and to locate defendants, were persons with a preconceived dislike for these enemy aliens, and their conduct was such that they resorted to a number of illegal, unfair, and cruel methods and duress to secure confessions of guilt and to secure accusations by defendants against other defendants. In fact, in the Malmedy case, the only evidence before the court, upon which the convictions and sentences were based, consisted of the statements and testimony of the defendants themselves. The testimony of one defendant against another was secured by subterfuge, false promises of immunity, and by mock trials and threats.

Judge van Roden’s words belie his objectivity. He disagreed fully with the premise of the war crimes trials. Also, he sought to confer on the defendants the legal rights present in civil cases. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt intended the trials to be anything more than a military tribunal in which civilian rights need not apply fully. On returning to Texas, Simpson was offered the job of vice president and general counsel of the General American Oil Co.

An obstacle to justice at Nuremberg was the quality of the judges and their own political motives. One Nuremberg judge was Robert Maguire of Oregon. In the fall of 1949, Maguire decided to run for Oregon’s Supreme Court. In November 1949, the American Bar Association Journal published a speech delivered by Maguire, “The Unknown Art of Making Peace: Are We Sowing the Seeds of WWIII?” In the speech, Maguire argued against further trials. His speech was an effort to appease the right wing of the Republican Party in Oregon to strengthen his election chances.

McCloy was advised by the Peck Commission: David Peck, a judge in the New York Appellate Division; Fredrick Moran, chairman of the New York Board of Parole; and Brig. Gen. Conrad Snow. The Peck Commission was only authorized to reduce sentences, not to challenge the legal decision of guilt. While the Simpson Commission was limited to reviewing the trials held at Dachau, the Peck Commission was limited to the trials at Nuremberg.

It was not until after McCloy’s appointment as High Commissioner that he opened the doors of Landsberg Prison. McCloy insisted until his death that releasing the war criminals was not politically motivated, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The industrialists’ trial, once considered of equal importance to the main Nuremberg Trial, ended because the Soviets blockaded Berlin. Even as the convicted directors of Krupp and IG Farben were being taken to Landsberg, they knew there was little prospect of serving their sentences. Germans and the fascists in America believed that they were just the innocent victims of left-wing fanatics. The Nazis’ allies in the United States were successful in smearing the trial as such. In Landsberg, the prisoners settled into a comfortable routine. Flick controlled his empire through weekly visits from his lawyers and business associates. He chose Hermann Abs as his financial adviser. Abs, already “rehabilitated” by Gen. Clay, headed the Reconstruction Loan Corp.

When McCloy arrived as High Commissioner, there already was a concerted drive to rebuild German industry as a bulwark against the Soviets. Abs informed McCloy that the key to Germany’s recovery and cooperation was the release of the industrialists from Landsberg. McCloy also was told the same by Karl Blessing, a war criminal whom Allen Dulles saved. In fact, McCloy could have been told that by any German citizen.

On Aug. 28, 1950, McCloy received the recommendations of the Peck Commission. The commission, appointed on March 20, 1950, was controversial from the beginning; indeed, under various state laws, it was illegal. Some of the cases the commission examined had already been reviewed three times. Under most state laws, it was illegal to appoint a second appellate court to reexamine the findings of a primary appellate court. Nor would an appellate court have the authority to pardon criminals; it would be limited to reducing the sentence or commuting death sentences to life in prison, but the Peck Commission had the power to grant pardons.

The Peck Commission reported it had examined the judgments on all the prisoners, and interviewed them and their lawyers. While that sounded reasonable enough to the inexperienced, it was not.

Even in a clemency hearing in front of a governor, the views of the district attorney and trial judge are presented. Yet, not a single prosecutor or judge from the tribunals was consulted. Nor had the Peck Commission opened a single page of the transcripts and documentary evidence. In fact, the crates of transcripts and evidence available to the commission were never opened. The only materials from the trials that were reviewed were the verdicts, which spanned 3,000 pages. Reviewing all the material from the trials was an impossible task in the time McCloy allotted the Peck Commission. Transcripts, excluding briefs and documents, spanned some 330,000 pages. At the rate of 1,200 words a minute, a speed-reader would need 17 months to get through the Nuremberg transcripts.

In reality, the Peck Commission served as nothing more than a politically motivated blue-ribbon panel. McCloy used the commission’s recommendations as an excuse to justify freeing war criminals.

Both the Simpson and Peck commissions were politically motivated. The Nazis were counting on their agents and sympathizers in other countries, including the United States, to do their bidding after the war. The conservative faction of Congress did not disappoint them. By the end of the 1940s, conservative Republicans succeeded in perpetrating the myth that the Nuremberg war criminals were victims of Roosevelt. By the end of the decade, many people came to accept that myth. This conservative faction was roused to action by the Malmedy Trial and the false charges made by Nazis in Germany of torture and brutality. Included in this faction were John Rankin; Harold Knutsen, the pro-fascist Minnesota congressmen; Francis Case, Republican representative from South Dakota; and John Taber, Republican representative from New York.

Freeing Krupp

Republican Sen. William “Wild Bill” Langer from North Dakota portrays the congressional politics behind the Simpson and Peck commissions. His election to the Senate in 1940 reflects the beginning of a shift to conservatism and the end of New Deal liberalism. However, Langer’s seating in the Senate was not smooth.

Before running for the Senate, Langer served twice as governor for North Dakota. In his first campaign, Langer ran as the candidate for the Nonpartisan League. He had been a member of the Progressive Republicans. He made enemies within the Republican Party with Gerald Nye and William Lemke. Nonetheless, Langer received the nomination and was elected to the governor’s mansion in 1932. His opponent’s defense of the policies of the failed Hoover administration contributed to Langer’s easy victory. Langer then cleaned out the executive departments and appointed people loyal to him.

He also openly promoted the newspaper, the Leader. A subscription to the Leader cost the subscriber 5 percent of his state pay. Langer viewed this as a legitimate way to raise campaign funds. In 1934, the court indicted Langer for soliciting and collecting money for political purposes from federal employees, and for conspiring to obstruct the orderly operation of an act of Congress. On June 17, 1934, the court found Langer guilty and sentenced him to 18 months in prison and fined him $10,000. On July 17, the North Dakota Supreme Court removed Langer from office for his felony. On May 7, 1935, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. The first conspiracy trial resulted in a hung jury. A perjury trial in December found Langer not guilty. A second conspiracy trial, also held in December, settled the issue by finding Langer not guilty. In 1936, failing to win the Nonpartisan League endorsement, Langer ran as an independent and regained the governor’s office.

More conspiracies and corruption marked Langer’s second term. For example, Langer directed the State Mill and Elevator to pay 35 cents a bushel over the market price, while also appropriating nearly $6 million for general relief. Three of Langer’s close friends were found buying county bonds at a discount price and selling them back to the Bank of North Dakota at full value. In 1938, the State Board of Equalization reduced the assessment on property owned by the Great Northern Railroad by $3 million. It was then revealed that an attorney for the railroad bought $25,000 of worthless stocks from Langer and never asked for their delivery. In Langer’s second term, the conspiracy and corruption stories contributed to his defeat by Gerald Nye in the Republican primary.

Yet Langer was successful in his bid for the U.S. Senate in 1940. Although he had won the election, his enemies were determined not to allow him to take his seat. Langer appeared to take the oath of office on Jan. 3, 1941, but the Senate had a petition refusing to seat him. The matter was turned over to the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections. The committee listened to much testimony, some of it damaging, about Langer’s conduct. Langer was forced to admit he paid the son of the judge who presided at his second and third trials in 1935. The committee recommended 13-3 that Langer not be seated.

Reflecting the shift toward conservatism, the full Senate voted to seat Langer by a vote of 52-30. He held the seat until his death in 1959. While the Democrats controlled the 77th Congress by a 66-28 margin, the vote seating Langer reflects how control of the Senate was largely in the hands of an alliance of Republicans and conservative Dixiecrats.

Embarking on his Senate career, Langer adopted a strict isolationist policy. He opposed Lend-Lease extending the draft; the NATO alliance; and formation of the United Nations. Langer did vote to declare war after Pearl Harbor.

Winston Churchill was a frequent object of Langer’s scorn. In March 1949, while Churchill was touring the United States, Langer charged that Churchill had fought against the United States in the Spanish-American War. His colleagues in the Senate rebuked him when Tom Connally of Texas noted that the historical record showed Churchill was never in Cuba. In 1951, before a visit by Churchill, Langer telegraphed the pastor of Boston’s Old North Church to request that two lanterns be placed in the belfry to warn Americans the British were coming.

While in the Senate, Langer served on the Judiciary Committee from 1953 to 1955, during one of America’s darkest hours, at the height of McCarthyism. Langer was one of only 22 senators who voted against censoring McCarthy.

On Dec. 18, 1950, Langer blasted the Nuremberg Trials in the Senate:

These war-trials were decided on in Moscow and they are carried on under Moscow principles. These trials were essentially the same as the mass trials held in the 1930s by Stalin when Vyshinsky used treason trials to liquidate his internal enemies. At Nuremberg the Communist used war crimes trials to liquidate their external enemies. It is the Communist avowed purpose to destroy the Western World which is based on property rights.

Lumping Nuremberg together with property rights was a new tack. Whether Langer was sympathetic to the Nazi movement or just a useful stooge, his actions were in line with the Nazi strategy to promote strife between the United States and the USSR.

After the war, one of the most influential Nazi agitators in the United States was Walter Becher, an anti-communist “refugee leader” from the Hitler regime. Becher joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and became an editor of Die Zeit, a Nazi propaganda sheet. During the war, Becher worked for Goebbels’ propaganda ministry as a war correspondent.

Becher founded a pro-Nazi newspaper in Germany and sought out influence in Washington. Two of his early contacts in the Senate were McCarthy and William Jenner. Other early supporters were Francis Walter, B. Carroll Reece, Albert Bosch and Walter Judd.

His scheme was simple; as a staunch leader in the anti-communist movement in Germany, he could gain the support of leading politicians in the United States, and his prestige and stature would grow enormously at home. Among those who sent letters of support to Becher were William Langer, Prescott Bush, Strom Thurmond, Thomas Dodd, Robert Byrd, Stuart Symington, Herbert Hoover and retired U.S. Generals del Valle, Willoughby and Wedemeyer. All three generals were involved with many hard-right groups, including the lunatic fringe.

In all, Becher claimed support from more than 150 members of Congress. The list of his supporters is a virtual roster of the hard right of the 1950s. Republican Sen. William Jenner from Indiana chaired the Senate’s Internal Security Committee, the counterpart to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the 1952 presidential campaign, he led the attack on the Truman administration, charging George Marshall was soft on communism. Rep. Francis Walter, D-Pennsylvania, was a member of the House Un-American Activities. Walter accepted money from Wickliffe Draper. Republican B. Carroll Reece from Tennessee headed a committee looking into the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as agents spreading communism. Rep. Walter Judd, R-Minnesota, was a principal in the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Judd also was a member of the Committee for One Million and the first U.S. branch of the World Anti-Communist League, a haven for former Nazis which keeps a close relationship with Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

In 1955, Becher decided to install a permanent aide in Washington. His choice was Richard Sallet, a former Nazi diplomat who was an expert on America. Captured Nazi documents reveal his expertise. Several hundred pages testify to his success in launching an anti-Semitic campaign in the 1930s. Sallet had help from the Republican Party, which paid for broadcasts by known Nazis in New York State. Sallet also had a more limited success in undermining Americans’ confidence in Roosevelt.

John Grombach headed another Nazi-infested organization with close ties to this group. Grombach, a former G2 or military intelligence officer, recruited former Nazi SS officers, Hungarian Axis Quislings and Russian nationalists. His network of former Nazis produced intelligence offerings for the State Department, the CIA and corporations. Grombach’s organization originally began as a G2 operation to rival the CIA, but soon evolved beyond that. In addition to funding from the U.S. government, he received funds from Philips of the Netherlands and its American affiliate, Philips North America. One of Grombach’s prized assets was Karl Wolff, a major war criminal.

Grombach had visions of grandeur with an eye on becoming Director of the CIA. High on his list of political targets were those who carried out President Truman’s containment policy. Grombach viewed people such as George Kennan and Charles Bohlen as too soft on communism. He found ready allies in McCarthy and Jenner. By the 1950s, Grombach and his network of Nazis specialized in gathering dirt. He would then leak the smears to his political allies, the chief beneficiary being Joe McCarthy.

This brief look at the congressional politics of the conservatives and Republicans behind the Simpson and Peck committees leads to three significant conclusions.

First, the release of the war criminals was politically motivated by those previously sympathetic to the Nazis. Second, and more importantly, it confirms the Nazi plan to carry on the war after the hostilities ended on the battlefield. Captured documents revealed the Nazis were planning to use their sympathizers after the war to protect them and to reestablish fascism.

Finally, it proves the Cold War was largely due to Nazi intrigue. Similarly, it confirms the Nazi plans in the captured documents were well thought out, using communism as a ploy to ease peace terms and other burdens on Germany. That same faction of conservatives was the most vocal of the Nazi sympathizers and Cold War Warriors in Congress. Intertwining of the Cold War with Nazi intrigue extended well into the 1960s.

Originally, there were two trials planned for Nuremberg, both of equal importance and stature at that time. The first trial was of top Nazi officials; second was of the industrialists. The industrialists’ trial at Nuremberg was canceled and held in the American zone. By the end of the first trial, chief American Prosecutor Robert Jackson succumbed to the American disease of an irrational fear of communism and spoke out against a second trial:

A trial in which industrialists are singled out may give the impression that they are being prosecuted merely because they are industrialists. This is more likely since we would be associated in prosecuting them with the Soviet communist and the French leftists... I have some misgivings as to whether a long public attack concentrated on private industry would not tend to discourage industrial cooperation with our government in maintaining its defense in the future while not at all weakening the Soviet position, since they do not rely on private enterprise.

Jackson’s words were the final nail in the coffin of Roosevelt’s pledge to bring the Nazis and those who aided them to justice. American corporations could now breathe easily. There would be no extended trial of Nazi industrialists to expose them.

Sen. Langer’s committee forced Gen. Clay to stop the execution of all death sentences. While conservatives in the United States succeeded in swaying American opinion to view war criminals as victims of Roosevelt, it was clear by 1950 that West Germans also rejected the validity of the trials. Leading the cause of war criminals in Germany were the German Catholic and Protestant churches. Bishop Fargo Muench went so far as to call for a general amnesty. Langer compared the Nuremberg Trials to the purges by Stalin.

The industrialists were among McCloy’s first beneficiaries. He arrived in Germany in 1949 and, by mid-1950, the Peck Commission completed its review. On Jan. 31, 1951, Landsberg: A Documentary Report, with statements by McCloy and the Peck and Simpson commissions, was made public. Following the commission’s recommendation, McCloy freed a third of the inmates at Landsberg. In the stroke of a pen, McCloy freed the lawyers, executives and industrialists convicted in the IG Farben, Flick and Krupp trials. Those most responsible for building the Third Reich on the backs of slave labor were now free.

McCloy was hardly in a position to grant a general amnesty after President Truman spoke in January 1951. The State Department’s legal adviser, John Raymond, drafted a memo on war crimes for Truman that was a wholesale reaffirmation of the original Nuremberg and Dachau trials, and an unequivocal argument against amnesty.

The release of Krupp proved to be the most controversial. Once again, background events are important in understanding the event. The United States was already embroiled in the Korean War. A new war scare was spreading like wildfire across the American homeland. Fears of a Soviet invasion of Europe were pervasive. A debate about the vulnerability of Europe opened in Congress. Sen. Taft charged that President Truman already usurped his authority by defending Korea and had no right to increase American troop strength in Europe. Former President Herbert Hoover argued it would be pointless to try to defend Europe. News from Korea was dismal. UN forces were taking a terrible beating at the hands of the Red Chinese. MacArthur asked whether Washington considered the possibility of being driven out of Korea. The day McCloy signed the release of the industrialists, Frankfurt radio was reporting the plight of a United States-French combat regiment trapped 12 miles behind enemy lines north of Yoju.

In the trial of Krupp, the prosecution decided to try Alfried and not his father, Gustav. The prosecution judged Gustav too sick to endure the rigors of a trial. After his conviction, Alfried retained the services of an American attorney, Earl Carroll. Carroll’s job was to free Krupp and get his property restored. Rumors reported Carroll was to get 5 percent of everything he could recover, roughly $25 million. Some disputed that his fee was that high, but it was very handsome, so much so that once Krupp was freed, Carroll reportedly retired.

Carroll’s argument for Krupp’s release was based on three false assumptions. First he argued that Alfried held a junior position at the Krupp firm. Second, that under American law, assets could only be forfeited if they had been acquired illegally, which was not the case with Krupp’s prewar assets. Finally, Carroll argued that Krupp was a victim of discrimination because he was the only war criminal whose assets were confiscated.

The answering brief responded to all three claims. The first claim was proven false by a 1943 interfirm circular declaring Alfried directed the entire enterprise. The second pointed out that the Nuremberg Trials acted under the law of the Four-Power coalition and not American law. The four-power agreement specified the forfeiture of assets. Finally, Krupp was not the only industrialist whose assets were confiscated. The brief noted that IG Farben was a corporation and not solely owned like the Krupp firm, and forfeiture would penalize the stockholders for the crimes of the management.

Nevertheless, by freeing Krupp and returning his seized assets, McCloy justified his position by first claiming that Alfried was a playboy with no real authority in the firm. Second, McCloy portrayed Alfried’s Nazi connections as indiscriminate youthful distractions. However, the record is clear that Alfried was more than a youthful playboy who hung around with a bad crowd.

Krupp was the largest employer of slave labor in Nazi Germany. By 1941, Germany faced a severe labor shortage, compounded by Hitler’s dictate against employing women. Both Britain and the United States filled many jobs in their defense factories with women. American housewives turned out in droves to work in West Coast aircraft plants in response to the famed Rosie the Riveter posters. More than 3 million American women, many in their teens, worked in war-related jobs. In England, more than 2 million women worked in munitions factories. However, in Germany, fewer than 200,000 women were employed, mainly as cooks and maids. It was not until July 1944 that Hitler reversed his ban on employing women. By then, it was too late and Allied bombing disrupted the registration.

After Albert Speer turned over his labor responsibilities to Fritz Sauckel, manhunts became coordinated and routine in the occupied territories. The Nazis rounded up men and women and transported them back to the fatherland as slave laborers. Krupp was one of the most persistent customers of the new labor czar. At Nuremberg, Brig. Gen. Walter Schieber conceded that Krupp negotiated directly with the SS for concentration camp inmates.

Krupp’s attorneys argued Alfried had no role in enslaving foreign civilians. While in theory the roundups were official acts of the Nazi government, once concluded, industrialists were invited to take their share. Some refused, but there is no record of Krupp turning down the offer. Alfried’s files were full of incriminating evidence. In the third year of the war, his files revealed the slave labor was reaching Essen two months, sometimes three months, after requisitioned. Krupp sent three executives to lodge formal protests about the dealy with the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo and the SS. Alfried appointed Heinrich Lehmann as his liaison with the German Labor Front, and as director of labor procurement and recruiting. With cooperating authorities, Lehmann drafted entire factories in France. In Holland, Lehmann drafted 30,000 ironworkers and shipwrights, many of whom were sent to Germany in chains when they showed reluctance.

Often, Alfried would complain about the quality of workers he received. In a file note from 1942 he said:

I am under the impression that the better Russian workers are at this time being chosen for works in central and eastern Germany. We really get the rejects only. Just now 600 Russians consisting of 450 women and 150 juveniles arrived.

Any complaint from Krupp drew instant attention in Berlin. On July 8, a frantic subordinate sent a report to Speer denying that Krupp was getting low-grade slaves.

The requirements of the firm Fried Krupp A.G. for replacement for German workers drafted into the armed forces have been met currently and in time. The complaints of the Krupp firm about allegedly insufficient labor allocations are unfounded. I have once again asked Sauckel to send Krupp 3,000 to 4,000 more workers in entire convoys from the Russian civilian workers presently arriving in Service Command VI.

The quotes above show that Krupp was somewhat of an antagonist, demanding more and better slaves, once again destroying the myth the Nazi Party was all-powerful. It was not the party that held the power; it was the moneyed industrialists behind the party who were all-powerful.

An excellent example was the “Jewish problem.” The Nazi Party and top officials were committed to the Endlösung, the Final Solution or liquidation, and vehemently opposed enslaving the Jews. By 1942, the SS began questioning the Final Solution. It was working, but the cost of ammunition was shocking and hurt the war effort. Himmler then began experimenting with gas vans. An April 25, 1942 memorandum from the Krupp headquarters noted that to produce 80 new SIGs (heavy infantry guns), expansion was needed. Alfried recommended manufacturing in the concentration camp in Sudetenland.

Four weeks later, Alfried put the question to Hitler. In his appeal to Hitler, Krupp affirmed his belief that every party member was in favor of liquidating Jews, Gypsies, anti-Nazi criminals and antisocials. However, Krupp believed they should contribute something to the fatherland before being exterminated. Properly driven, each could contribute a lifetime of work in months. Hitler hesitated, but Krupp persisted. Soon Krupp had the solution. The answer was merely economics or bribery. Krupp proposed paying the SS four marks a day for each inmate, from which seven-tenths of a mark would be deducted for food. Opposition to his new proposal vanished overnight. In September, Hitler signed the order approving the use of Jewish slave labor.

Krupp anticipated Hitler’s order of Sept. 18 and teletyped a message to Sauckel’s Berlin office, notifying the labor director that Krupp was ready to employ between 1,050 and 1,100 Jewish workers. In his teletype, Krupp requested workers with specific skills in metalworking. Krupp had an immediate objective: producing fuses. The Sudetenland camp was too small for mass production, so Krupp proposed to start production at Auschwitz. Assured that Auschwitz would have ample labor supplies, Krupp executives approved 2 million marks for the project.

Krupp’s project was delayed largely because of the commandant’s view that the work should be done by Germans. Krupp contacted Obersturmfuhrer Sommer, a junior SS officer stationed in Speer’s office. Krupp requested a record of all skilled Jews, selected 500 and demanded immediate action.

As the war continued and Alfried rose in power, the use of slave labor by Krupp increased. By the end of the war, Krupp employed nearly 100,000 slaves in more than 100 factories. Slaves were beaten and tortured regularly in Krupp’s factories. The slightest infraction could bring on a life-threatening beating. Shelter and food for the inmates employed by Krupp was inadequate at best. Many inmates were forced to sleep on the ground, unprotected from the elements. The cruelty and barbaric treatment of the slave laborers in Krupp’s camps was unsurpassed anywhere in Germany. In fact, Gen. Adolf Westhoff of the OKW, the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, stated that Krupp’s treatment of Russian prisoners did not meet with the Wehrmacht’s approval.

While there is no evidence of Krupp ordering his slaves beaten or tortured, there also is no evidence he discouraged it. There is evidence that Krupp withheld prisoners’ food allotment, and proof that Alfried was aware of the beatings and torture of slaves, making him a full accomplice.

Drexel Sprecher, a prominent Washington attorney, observed the Nuremberg Trials and decided that Krupp’s treatment of slave labor was far worse than any other firm, including IG Farben. Sprecher reasoned the cause lay in Krupp’s one-person rule. Alfried’s power was absolute.

Slavery was the most serious charge lodged against Krupp, but Krupp was equally guilty of plunder. Before the Allied invasion of North Africa, Krupp ruled a vast empire stretching from the Ukraine to the Atlantic, and from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. Most of this empire was procured from their original owners in the occupied lands. Alfried Krupp toured Europe in a Luftwaffe fighter looking for plants to add to his empire. Using subterfuge, the plants were technically purchased. The reality was the plants had been signed over to Krupp under duress and threats of death from the Nazis.

One such company was the Elmag factories in Alsace. The plants on three sites were seized and transferred to Krupp under the laws covering enemy property. What sets the Elmag factories apart from the hundreds of other looted plants were the actions taken by the workers following the Allied invasion of Normandy. Once the Allies established beachheads at Normandy, workers started to disappear into the hills at an alarming rate, to await liberation. Krupp sent roughly 60 slave laborers to build a camp for 1,250 more slaves. The workers at Elmag were so alarmed over the treatment of the slaves, they openly protested and threatened to strike. At Nuremberg, Ernst Wirtz, head of the concentration camp, was sentenced to eight years. As the Allies closed in on Alsace, Krupp removed the slave laborers and simply moved the factories to Bavaria.

The actions of the workers at Elmag are noteworthy. Even under the barbaric rule of the Nazis, some men stood up and refused to be crushed by the yoke of fascist despots. Their defiance should be remembered and praised. Their actions point to the guilt of those who simply shrugged off Nazi atrocities. Cowards should have no peace.

Alfried’s father, Gustav Krupp, initially opposed Hitler, but Alfried was an early supporter of Hitler and the Nazi Party. He joined the party and the SS in 1931. Throughout the 1930s, Alfried remained a loyal contributor. In the SS, he rose to the rank of colonel. McCloy’s portrayal of Alfried as an indiscriminate youth was a transparent smoke screen. Born a year after Adolf Eichmann, Alfried was part of the generation that included Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.

Thus, it should be no surprise McCloy’s pardons were met with much controversy in the United States and Great Britain. Nevertheless, this Nazi war criminal would receive an even greater reward in the span of 10 short years after walking out of Landsberg Prison. At the end of that decade, Krupp’s industrial empire was the 12th largest firm in the world - and the only one of them solely owned.

“Good” Nazis like Krupp could count on being rewarded. However, the Jewish victims of Nazi war criminals could count on receiving nothing or, at best, a meager settlement for their slave labor. In 1959, under the threat of a lawsuit by an American lawyer representing Jewish survivors of the Krupp camps, Krupp announced a voluntary settlement. A fund setting aside 4 million marks would pay each survivor $750 for their ordeal. The payment was soon cut to $500 when more survivors were found than Krupp anticipated. The fund ran out of money before all survivors received their meager payments.

Cover Up

Friedrich Flick was another who walked out of Landsberg Prison with Krupp. At Nuremberg, Flick was found guilty of one count of using slave labor. Generally, the judges at Nuremberg were poorly qualified and hostile to the prosecution, especially in the trials of the industrialists. Three judges ruled the director and owner of a corporation should not be held accountable for slavery and looting by his companies, unless the prosecution could prove that he personally ordered each particular crime to be carried out. This wrongful ruling allowed a defense of necessity, the corporate equivalent of acting under orders.

Amazingly, with the legal precedent set by this ruling, a 19-year-old soldier could be found guilty of war crimes for following orders, but the head of a corporation employing thousands of slaves could not.

There were other factors that contributed to such a bad decision. First, the judges brought their own prejudices to Germany. The sad state of U.S. corporate law left corporate directors and owners virtually immune from prosecution, regardless of the severity of the crime. Very few corporate executives in the United States have ever been tried for the death of an employee or consumer of the product, regardless of the severity of the crime or the complicity of the executive. The judges obviously were affected by such habits.

Second, a state of panic was already emerging over the evils of communism. The emerging fears forced the prosecution to argue the cases as crimes of individuals and not as attacks on capitalism to avoid charges of socialism and communism.

Like Krupp, Flick was a steel and coal baron who employed roughly 48,000 slave laborers from the concentration camps. An estimated 80 percent of these workers died. From 1929-32, Flick gave money to several right-wing parties, including 50,000 Reichmarks to the Nazis. He joined Himmler’s Circle in 1935 and the Nazi Party in 1937. From 1936 to 1944, Flick contributed 100,000 Reichmarks annually to Himmler’s Circle.

On his release, Flick immediately set about rebuilding his empire. By 1955, he owned more than 100 corporations, including a 40 percent share of Daimler-Benz AG. He was reportedly the richest man in Germany, the fifth wealthiest in the world. On his death in 1972, Flick left over $1 billion to his son. The slave laborers have yet to receive any compensation from Flick.

While rebuilding his empire, Flick cultivated and rebuilt his political connections. That influence extends to the present. In 1975, his son sold a 29 percent share in Daimler Benz, incurring a huge capital gain, taxable under German law unless the profit were reinvested before the end of 1978 in projects judged by the government to be “especially beneficial to the national economy.” Although the son invested more than half the money in the United States, buying a 29 percent share in Grace Chemical, he was granted tax-exempt status.

One of the beneficiaries of Flick’s empire was the Christian Democratic Party and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Former Nazis, including Flick, contributed handsomely to the Christian Democrats after the war. In 1972, the old leader of the Christian Democrats, Rainer Barzel, stepped down. After leaving politics, Barzel accepted a lucrative post at a Frankfurt law firm. Barzel managed to earn $700,000 in legal fees from the Flick Group for what Der Spiegel depicted as phantom services. Barzel’s choice for a successor was none other than Helmut Kohl. Kohl admitted to accepting payments totaling $53,000 from the Flick group from 1977 to 1979. The German press reports the sums were four times larger. If the Allies had not relented in the 4Ds program, Kohl might never have come to power.

There is no question that Flick was a Nazi war criminal who exerted his influence soon after leaving prison on the policies of Germany’s postwar government. There is no question of his guilt in employing slave labor, or that he refused to pay restitution to the victims of his slave labor camps. Yet within 10 years of the war’s end, he was a behind-the-scenes force in German politics. One can only wonder who really won the war.

Flick’s connections went far beyond the new German government, extending as far as the White House through the Bush family. On March 19, 1934 the New York Times reported that the Polish government was fighting American and German stockholders who controlled the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Co., accusing the company of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. In December, the Polish government issued warrants for several directors accused of tax evasion. The directors accused were German, and they fled to Germany for sanctuary. They were then replaced with Polish directors. Flick retaliated by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workers regularly. The Times noted Flick owned two-thirds of the company’s stock; U.S. interests owned the other third.

The owner of the U.S. interests was none other than the Harriman Fifteen Corp. President of this American corporation was George Walker, Prescott Bush’s father-in-law. The sole directors of Harriman Fifteen were Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman. Harriman also served as chairman of Consolidated Silesian Steel Corp. The holdings of Brown Brothers Harriman in Consolidated Silesian were a small part of a larger partnership between Brown Brothers Harriman and the German Steel Trust. In the 1920s, the relationship between Brown Brothers Harriman and the German Steel Trust was established through Thyssen. Flick was a major co-owner of the trust. Before 1932, the German Steel Trust also was one of the most generous donors to Hitler, the SS and SA, and it figured prominently in his appointment as chancellor. Prescott Bush and George Walker supervised the partnership between the Trust and Brown Brothers Harriman. This relationship extended to Union Bank, which made Prescott and Walker bankers for the Trust. The U.S. government seized control of Union Banking from Prescott Bush during the war.

The relationship of Brown Brothers Harriman with the German Steel Trust extended across the sea to England. Brown Brothers was an English firm that had merged with Harriman’s firm after the stock market crash of 1929. In England, it continued to operate under the traditional name of Brown Shipley. The company’s tradition served it well in supporting Hitler. During the Civil War, Brown Brothers were renowned for their ships running the blockade and transporting cotton from the South to England.

In 1931, the Governor of the Bank of England was Montagu Collet Norman, grandson of the boss of Brown Brothers during the Civil War. Norman was known as the most avid of Hitler’s supporters within British ruling circles. When Montagu of the Bank of England visited New York, he always stayed at the home of his close friend, Prescott Bush. The Bush family dealings with the Nazis were extensive. The U.S. Property Custodian seized 23 corporations from Prescott Bush during and after the war for trading with the enemy. Much of the Bush wealth came from the Nazis.

The Allies never charged Thyssen with war crimes at Nuremberg. However, a German court later found him guilty and seized 15 percent of his empire for reparations to the slave laborers he employed during the war. By the 1970s, Thyssen had reassembled a considerable empire spanning the globe. In the United States, Thyssen Inc., was headquartered at 1114 in the W.R. Grace & Co., building.

Another holding of Thyssen’s was Indian Head at 1200 Avenue of the Americas, New York City. Indian Head was a wide-ranging conglomerate with 42 plants in the United States and annual sales of $604 million. One holding of Indian Head was Peerless Pumps, bought in 1970. Another was Budd Manufacturing, purchased for $275 million in cash. By buying in cash, there were no SEC reports to file. Indeed, neither Thyssen Inc., nor Indian Head are required to file SEC reports because they are privately held. Indian Head has since changed its name to Thyssen-Bornemiza.

Following the war, the government of Germany fervently denied the guilt of the war criminals, particularly the industrialists. The government was not alone in its denial; German business leaders were at the forefront in proclaiming German industries innocent of collaborating with the Nazis. During the Cold War, only a few pamphlets and publications condemned the Nazi industrialists. The corporations hired journalists and historians to flood the markets worldwide with material exonerating their corporations and placing full blame on the Nazi leadership. Most of the material produced was whitewash. This propaganda blitz fits the Nazis’ plan.

The control former Nazi businessmen exerted over the press came almost immediately after the war. In 1949, the autobiography written by Richard Willstätter, a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist, was published posthumously. Willstätter fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and wrote his autobiography in exile in Switzerland. He included a short passage critical of the anti-Semitic remarks made by Carl Duisberg, the founder of IG Farben, when Willstätter resigned from the University of Munich in 1924.

The short passage was unremarkable and would have passed through history unnoticed by all except a few scholars if executives from Bayer had not intervened. Bayer was part of IG Farben. Heinrich Hörlein, a Bayer director and retired executive, launched an all-out attack besmirching Willstätter’s reputation and promoting Carl Duisberg and Bayer. Hörlein found himself in the dock at Nuremberg, but was acquitted. For a short time, an open debate persisted in Germany over the culpability of the German chemical industry and war crimes. Bayer and Hörlein soon prevailed. Under pressure, the publisher agreed to delete the short passage in all future editions and the English translation.

German corporations still protect their image in the most ruthless fashion. Twenty-three years after publishing Willstätter’s autobiography, another controversy arose. In 1972, F.C. Delius, a German satirist, published a mock history of Siemens, coinciding with the company’s 125th anniversary. Delius’ book was not immediately recognized as a satire and, within a month, Siemens took action against the publisher. After three years of legal procedures, a provincial appeals court in Stuttgart ruled that several of the book’s claims, including the Auschwitz assertion, were false, and ruled that Delius’ ideas, despite being presented as satire, were damaging. In the settlement, both parties agreed to have the lines in dispute blacked out in all future editions, including the latest, published in 1995.

While some Americans may feel smug that such censorship occurred in Germany, the English translation of Willstätter’s book also does not contain the passage that was offensive to Bayer. The censorship effort was global.

Perhaps the best example of historical revisionism and whitewashing comes from the United States. In several chapters, the relationship between the pro-Nazi America First group and the American Security Council is mentioned. One member of both fascist groups was the founder of Regnery Press, publisher of many of the smears made against President Clinton. The first two books published by Regnery are prime examples of pro-Nazi sympathizers whitewashing the Nazi crimes. One of the books was critical of the Allied bombing of Germany, and the other was critical of the Nuremberg Trials. Both contain many factual errors and present a revisionist view of history that in no way conforms to the truth. A review of the current officers of Regnery reveals the organization is still slanted to the hard right. Various officers are connected with fringe right-wing groups, such as the Claremont Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as the Republican Party.

The censorship and whitewashing of Nazi atrocities and collusion of German business with the Nazis continue today in the Untied States. One of the largest publishers in the Untied States is the former Nazi publisher, Bertelsmann. The Bertelsmann publishing empire includes Random House, Bantam and Doubleday Dell; it is a partner with Barnes & Noble in a new Internet bookstore. Bertelsmann also holds a large share of America Online, and owns book clubs, magazines, newspapers and music labels, such as RCA; it co-owns CLT-UFA, Europe’s biggest TV and radio company. Bertelsmann owns Brown Printing Co., although that information is conspicuously missing from the Web pages of Brown Printing. Brown prints many of the popular magazines, including such titles as Byte and Seventeen, and a host of scientific journals, such as Science and The New England Medical Journal. Bertelsmann is the world’s third largest media empire and the largest publisher of English-language trade books in the world.

Bertelsmann makes a concerted effort at hiding its Nazi past. In its official corporate history, Bertelsmann circulates the myth that the Nazis closed its publishing business for refusing to follow the party line. That is a lie. The Nazis did not close Bertelsmann; Bertelsmann willingly cooperated with the Nazis. When investigative reporters asked Bertelsmann to verify the claim that the Nazis closed it, the company removed all references to the era from its Web pages.

Throughout the 1930s, Bertelsmann published books favored by Goebbels. Some of the titles were People Without Space (Volk ohne Raum) and Between the Vistula and the Volga. The latter was an anti-Jewish diatribe claiming the Jews massacred Ukrainian women and children. Following the war, the Allied Control Council denied Bertelsmann’s application for a publishing license. Heinrich Mohn, a founder, principal owner and chief executive, conveniently omitted his membership in SS and his support for Hitler’s Youth. In 1949, Mohn stepped down as chief executive and was replaced by his son, Reinhard. Bertelsmann then reapplied for a publishing license. According to the denazification files, Reinhard served in the Luftwaffe and the elite Hermann Goering Division. With the Cold War already emerging and the failure of the 4Ds program evident, the license was promptly granted.

Besides freeing the Nazi industrialists, McCloy announced a drastic reduction in the sentences of 74 of the remaining 104 cases, including commuting 10 death sentences. Even McCloy’s whitewashing committee, the Peck Commission, recommended that all death sentences for members of the Einzatzgruppen were justified. Only four of the Einzatzgruppen prisoners and Oswald Pohl’s death sentences were upheld. The cold-blooded murderers of Malmedy would go free.

Not only did high commissioner McCloy empty Landsberg of war criminals, he also helped some of the most notorious war criminals escape justice. One benefactor of McCloy’s generous protection was the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. The French were aware that Barbie was in the American Zone and requested that the United States hand him over. McCloy’s reply was brutally cold; he refused. He turned down the French “because the allegations of the citizens of Lyon can be disregarded as being hearsay only.” McCloy was well aware his reply was a lie, as Barbie was identified on the CROWCASS list of war criminals for immediate arrest.

Others benefiting from American protection were Eichmann and Baron Otto von Bolschwing. The latter directed the murder of Jews in Bucharest. In 1954, the CIA brought von Bolschwing to the United States. Former CIA director Richard Helms justified such action by saying: “We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we would have joined the Boy Scouts.”

Throughout his reign in Germany, McCloy was bedeviled with one problem the Allied army had faced in its march across Germany: requests from priests and pastors demanding clemency for the convicted war criminals.

Cardinal Faulhaber, the head of the Catholic Church in Bavaria, was a vigorous opponent of the denazification program, and would readily offer help and protection to those whose employment was threatened by their Nazi past. The cardinal found a sympathetic ear in Col. Charles Keegan. Keegan was a soldier, but not an administrator. He welcomed any help and suggestions to organize a postwar government. Keegan had only one political adviser, and like his commander, George Patton, was indifferent to politics.

At a news conference at his headquarters in Bad Tolz, Patton made the offhand remark: “This Nazi thing is just like a Democratic and Republican election fight.” Patton’s remark brought a stern reprimand from Eisenhower, and he was removed three days later. Nevertheless, Patton’s remark characterized the common apathy of the American Army about German history and Nazi policies.

Cardinal Faulhaber was not alone in his opposition to denazification. From 1933, Catholic and Protestant churches openly supported Hitler. Despite their knowledge of Nazi crimes, they never withdrew their support. In May 1945, the German cardinals refused to accept the shared guilt of all Germans for the war and the unfolding story of the Holocaust, shamefully reaffirming the 1934 concordat. In June 1945, in the first joint pastoral message, the bishops praised the clergy for having resisted the Nazis. According to the bishops, maintaining the Catholic schools was an act of supreme resistance. The achievement was praised by Pope Pius XII. Pius XII had extensive dealings with the Nazis and, after the war, used the church as a ratline to help Nazi war criminals escape from Europe and justice.

Bishop von Galen told his flock: “If anyone says that the entire German population and each of us is implicated in the crimes committed in foreign countries, and especially in the concentration camps, that is an untrue and unjust accusation against many of us.” Theological support for political survival was at hand. Since the Catholic Church considers guilt is an individual matter, it denied the possibility of collective guilt.

The Protestant Church was slower to reach such a self-serving conclusion. Of all the Protestant leaders, Pastor Niemöller was the only one to accept the idea of collective guilt. Bishop Wurm did so at first, but his early acceptance of the denazification program soon turned to total opposition, largely because of Law No. 8. This law originated from Gen. Clay’s anger on hearing that an Augsburg butcher, a former Nazi, still gave preferences to former party members. On Sept. 26, 1945, Clay issued Law No. 8, requiring the dismissal of any party member or sympathizer from any employment other than common labor. Ironically, the butcher was self-employed.

While Law No. 8 followed the guidelines for denazification, it was largely unenforceable. Once the law was issued, Bishop Wurm from Württemberg led the campaign against it. In the political vacuum left by Germany’s defeat, the clergy held enormous power. No other body had the organization or self-confidence. As the church’s opposition to the 4Ds program intensified, its influence over the people increased. Wurm’s early protest against Law No. 8 was what he termed the dismissal of thousands of innocent civil servants who had been members of the Nazi Party. Wurm claimed many were politically indifferent to the Nazis and had simply joined the party to keep their job. There was some truth to this.

Nevertheless, Wurm admitted to Gen. Clay that many clergy, including himself, had joined the Nazi Party and supported Hitler, believing it might produce a religious revival. Wurm even referred to Mein Kampf, where Hitler had written that National Socialism and Christianity could work together. Wurm justified his beliefs by the signing of the Concordat, and the agreements between Nazi Germany and Britain before the war.

The American Religious Affairs Division listed 351 Protestant clergy as active Nazis. While the Catholic Church hid its Nazi priests in monasteries, the Protestant church refused to remove Nazis from its churches. By October 1946, only three of the 351 active Nazi clergy had been removed.

Bishop Wurm also was a principal member of A Committee for Christian Aid to War Prisoners, formed illegally in 1948. A group of Nazi jurists in Munich, who served as counsel for major war criminals, formed the committee. Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer and Ernst Achenbach were two prominent leaders behind the group, whose purpose was to spread propaganda denouncing the war crime trials. The Nazis used Wurm and other leading clerics to camouflage their activities. Other prominent religious leaders in the committee were Cardinal Josef Frings, Catholic Bishop Johann Neuhaeussler and Protestant Bishop Meiser. Cardinal Frings demanded a halt in the executions.

Under the sponsorship of Frings and Wurm, the group developed a wide network to save the war criminals from the hangman. The Catholic Church and the Protestant Evangelisches Hilfswerk supported them. The latter organization provided shelter and jobs to hundreds of ex-Nazis, especially Ribbentrop’s diplomats.

Frings and Wurm also headed another group, The Committee for Justice and Trade. This group consisted of ex-officers, high government officials, jurists, educators, industrialists and church leaders who raised money to aid all war criminals. The organization had a mysterious bank account (Konto Gustav) in which more than 60 industrialists regularly deposited large sums.

The New German Government and Old Nazis

In January 1946, a secret report issued by the Public Safety Branch revealed the true extent of opposition that Gen. Clay and the occupying army faced. This report estimated that only one percent of the German population were committed anti-Nazis. In the same month, David Robinson, an American negotiator for Gen. Clay, reported that German political leaders admitted a free election would bring a modified Nazi government to power.

Bishop Wurm was relentless in his opposition to the 4Ds program and pushed Gen. Clay into setting up tribunals that included two German citizens to review and remove known Nazis from positions of power. Under pressure, Clay relented to the bishop’s demands. The resulting tribunals made a mockery of justice.

Special Agent Charles Hick visited the villages of Marktheidenfeld and Aschaffenburg after hearing rumors the locals referred to the denazification panels as Nazi Welfare Organizations. He reported the conditions were far worse than could be imagined. The case against the Nazi wartime mayor Wilhelm Siebenlist had collapsed. Siebenlist, a long-time party member, made a fortune by exploiting his office under the Nazis. This Nazi profiteer had 14 witnesses, including 10 employees, willing to speak in his favor. There was only one witness for the prosecution, a suspected Nazi.

Hick first believed the case collapsed because of Horst Schutze, the prosecutor. Schutze had been jailed three times in three months for embezzlement. Hick also thought Heinrich Müller, the second prosecutor, might be blamed. Müller, a long-time party member, had nine charges of fraud against him. However, Julius Listmann publicly claimed credit for Siebenlist’s acquittal. Listmann, the tribunal’s investigator, was the proud owner of a new car from the former Nazi mayor.

The Siebenlist case was not exceptional. Rather, it typified the findings of the tribunals across Germany. Much of the blame for the failure of the tribunals was due to the Catholic Church. Local priests created the impression that it was a sin to give damaging testimony. Instead, it became an honor to testify that former Nazis were good churchgoers and not Nazis. Such testimonies were known as Fragebogen, or questionnaires, false testimony that they had been resistance fighters. The Catholic Church even went as far as to order its members not to work in any of the tribunals.

The Catholic priest in Steinach went further, convincing a nearly illiterate panel that even the most rabid Nazis were mere followers. The panel then ranked these rabid Nazis in the “lowest threat” categories. The priest had joined the Nazis in 1925. In Uffenheim, the local priest warned his followers not to speak to the prosecutor, who was a Jew who had just returned from Auschwitz. In Unterfranken and Mittelfranken, Nazi profiteers such as Hans Glas, a former SS member, was fined only 2,000 marks. Glas had an annual income of more than 2,000 marks. Xavier Lang, another Nazi profiteer, also was fined the same paltry sum. Lang had an annual income of more than 700,000 marks.

American forces failed to protect the few tribunal members and prosecutors who were anti-Nazi. Those members were subject to intimidation and assault from former Nazis. The Werewolves, an underground Nazi organization that continued a guerrilla war after the surrender of Germany, murdered other tribunal members and prosecutors.

Churches seeking revitalization were very concerned about the growing menace of godless Red hordes, and former Nazis were in positions to exploit this fear. Captured documents revealed that this was precisely their plan. A quote by Bishop Wurm in the July 28, 1946 The New York Times provides little doubt of his fears: “Extreme left-wing elements are using denazification laws to destroy Germany’s leading classes of educated men... There is something Bolshevistic about it.”

This was the same argument being promoted in the United States by rightists, many of whom had been Nazi supporters and sympathizers before the war. American Nazis, like their German confederates, felt the events of World War II did not lessen their right to rule.

Conditions in Germany after the failure of the 4Ds program was summed up by Strang and Steele, two British political officers who toured Germany. They reported the Nazis remained a privileged class. The failure to remove Nazi supervisors and shopkeepers left them in control of the daily lives of the German population. The anti-Nazis did not have the strength to challenge the former order. The foremost anti-Nazis had been executed by the Nazis, or perished in the concentration camps.

The views of Strang and Steele let the British lose interest in denazification further. Only American criticism prevented them from completely leaving the program.

In 1952, McCloy returned to the United States and became a consultant for the Ford Foundation, which had close ties to the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1953, he became chairman of Chase National Bank, which soon merged into Chase Manhattan Bank. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he served on the Warren Commission, and was involved in many dealings between the U.S. and other governments, private industry and banks.

McCloy’s departure from Germany marked the beginning of a new phase of postwar Germany. Western Germany from then on was self-governed with little interference from the occupying armies. Adenauer had been elected as chancellor and his government was loudly proclaimed to be a democracy that had rid itself of the Nazi menace. This was excessively optimistic. Former Nazis filled the ranks of the Adenauer government. Adenauer himself was compromised by past associations with Nazis. He took money from Nazis that was intended to reestablish national socialists like Friedrich Flick, who gave generously to Adenauer’s party.

Two of the most influential men in the chancellery were Dr. Hans Globke and Dr. Herbert Blankenhorn. Despite their loathsome records, Adenauer entrusted them men to rebuild the government. Hans Globke served the Nazis as the top official in the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of Interior. He was involved in forming the racial laws and drafting the text of Hitler’s race laws. Globke also was the author of the notorious commentary that interpreted the Nuremberg laws, easing the way for the Holocaust. When the Nazis decided on mass extermination of the Jews, Globke’s superior resigned as a matter of conscience. Globke filled his position. As chief legal adviser and head of Jewish Affairs, Globke was a direct participant in the Holocaust.

On Sept. 28, 1960, Der Spiegel reported Globke had direct dealings with Eichmann. The article quoted testimony from convicted war criminal Max Marten. In 1943, Eichmann requested to send 20,000 Jews from Macedonia to Palestine. Marten needed Globke’s permission for the release, but Globke refused, insisting on a strict adherence to Hitler’s order for liquidation.

On Oct. 30, 1955, Die Welt described Globke as the second in command of the German ship of state. The paper reported that he alone had access to Adenauer at all times. Globke used his power to appoint many Nazis to important government positions. Some suggested he did more to renazify West Germany than anyone else.

McCloy and the Military Occupation Government had to have known of Globke’s record, because there was criticism from the start. On July 12, 1950, the legal expert of the Social Democratic Party, Adolf Arndt, spoke before the Bundestag, describing Globke’s record in detail, and accusing him of committing mass murder with legal paragraphs. On Oct. 16, 1951, Dr. Gerhard Luetkens, the Social Democrat’s deputy, charged Globke before the Bundestag with packing the Foreign Office with ex-Nazis.

On June 11, 1958, Deutsche Zeitung in a full-page article explained how Globke was able to keep rigid control over every ministry. As Secretary of State, Globke opened all cabinet meetings and determined the agenda. All appointments to office had to cross Globke’s desk, so he was able to install loyal friends in every ministry. Globke was an old friend of Reinhard Gehlen, and provided him access to Adenauer. In 1955, when the federal Republic became a sovereign state, the Bonn government openly recognized Gehlen’s network of spies, a home to ex-SS and other Nazis, as an arm of the government. The network was now effectively directly under Globke.

The Federal Press Department was also under the Globke’s control. Throughout the 1950s, the department became involved in several scandals involving multimillion-dollar slush funds. Globke was charged with paying journalists 1,000 or 2,000 marks for political analyses - obvious bribes to support Globke’s agenda. The Federal Press Department spent other funds on friendly publishers. More than 40 million marks in additional secret funds were earmarked for discretionary use of the chancellor and secretary of state. It is obvious Globke was adhering to the Nazi comeback plan.

Blakenhorn’s record is as dark as Globke’s. Nevertheless, the Allied occupation allowed Adenauer to appoint Blankenhorn to rebuild the Foreign Office, where he served as chief for many years. Secretary of State Stettinius warned the occupation government about him, in a letter to Robert Murphy on April 20, 1945. An excerpt:

While in Washington, Blankenhorn is known to have been active and aggressive as a propagandist working through mainly social contacts, for the Nazi party and Hitler. Racialism was one of his favorite subjects. While professing great sympathy for the United States, he was yet an ardent and convinced member of the Nazi Party and was also a member of the SS.

Stettinius sent his warning letter after receiving an OSS report from Murphy that summed up Blankenhorn as truly, thoroughly Nazi. Three weeks after the Stettinius letter, Grew sent another warning to Murphy.

Long before the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, Nazi diplomats made extensive plans for a quick comeback. They organized a Niederlage (defeat) section tasked with working out detailed plans to overcome any surrender. Many of the Nazi diplomats disappeared into harmless and previously prepared emergency shelters, such as director positions of orphanages or employment in the Evangelical Relief Society. These positions seemed harmless, but their intent was not.

Many of the Nazi diplomats were heavily implicated in war crimes. However, the Allies only investigated a few of them in the Wilhelmstrasse Trial of 1949. Around that time, the Neue Zeitung, the official American newspaper in Germany, warned of preparations for the Ribbentrop clique to recapture the Foreign Office. In 1950, when Adenauer asked him to set up a new Foreign Office, Blankenhorn presented the nucleus of the Ribbentrop group. Adenauer must have known that Blankenhorn was implicated in war crimes of deportation and mass murder. On April 22, 1952, the Swiss newspaper, Die Tat, reported that in the Rademacher trial, documents implicating Blankenhorn were never introduced as evidence, despite their presence in the prosecutor’s files. The article stressed that the Bonn Foreign Office pressured the court not to introduce the incriminating evidence.

The persistent attacks by a few democratic papers over reactivating to the Ribbentrop group were soon echoed by the Social Democratic opposition in the Bundestag. Two broadcasts on Bavarian Radio Network by Wilhelm von Cube, a fighting democrat, aroused public anger. Von Cube proved that 85 percent of the leading officials of the Foreign Office had been Nazi Party members serving Hitler. The Bundestag then took up the investigation of 20 officials. The Bundestag report confirmed that former Ribbentrop diplomats held domineering positions in the Foreign Office, who had done the utmost to whitewash their records by exchanging affidavits - Persilscheine or “soap coupons,” a pledge the accused was whiter than white. The report called for the immediate ouster of Werner von Grundherr, Werner von Bargen, Kurt Heinburg and Herbert Dittmann, and recommended preventing seven other former Nazis from assuming diplomatic missions abroad.

In addition, the report also proved the Foreign Office conspired to protect Franz Rademacher, who was guilty of the murder of 1,500 Jews in Belgrade. The court sentenced him to only three years and eight months in prison, while allowing him to remain free pending his appeal. Rademacher quickly escaped to Argentina where he was greeted as a hero who escaped the clutches of Jewish jackals.

On Oct. 23, 1952, in a debate before the Bundestag, Adenauer admitted that two-thirds of the diplomats in higher positions were former Nazis. He lamented that he could not build a Foreign Office without their skills, and quickly ignored the Bundestag’s report. After the 1953 election, Adenauer presented his second cabinet members as staunch democrats. However, the truth was this cabinet was full of Nazi Party and SS members. Few were ever removed from office.

One exception was the Minister for Expellees, Theodor Overlaender, the Reichsfuehrer of the German Alliance in the East. He packed his ministry with ex-Nazis. However, he was soon at the center of a storm when it became known that he was responsible for liquidating thousands of Jews and Polish intellectuals in July 1941. A special SS task force under his command committed the mass murder when it occupied Lvov, Poland. In 1960, Overlaender was forced to resign.

In the early 1960s, more than 60 West Germany ambassadors and foreign diplomats were former Nazi Party members who worked with Rademacher in organizing the Final Solution. Hans Albers, formerly assigned to Warsaw by Ribbentrop, became ambassador to Nicaragua. George Vogel, a former SS officer, served as ambassador to Venezuela. The South American appointments are noteworthy, because that continent became a favorite destination of war criminals escaping from Europe.

The Nazi penetration of the Bonn government was not confined to key federal government positions. All across Germany, city governments, schools and police departments were rife with former Nazis. Nazi penetration of the police was acute in Germany’s larger states, such as North Rhine-Westphalia, Scheswig-Holstein and Bavaria. On Oct. 16, 1959, the Social Democrats exposed 20 SS officers who held top police positions in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Social Democrats specifically charged that former SS officers were chiefs of criminal divisions in cities like Cologne, Dortmund and Essen. They also charged that former Nazis dominated the whole police organization, where promotions and appointments were awarded to reliable SS men.

In March 1959, the government of Baden-Württemberg reported to the Diet that 152 former Gestapo officials were employed as state police. The chief of the criminal division in Stuttgart was Dobritz, a former Gestapo officer sentenced to death by a French court in absentia for torture and manslaughter.

In the late 1950s, an avalanche of reports and investigations surfaced charging current police officials with war crimes. In April 1959, the State Prosecutor launched an investigation of 23 police officers in Berlin. All were suspected of the mass murder of 97,000 Jews in Bialystok, Poland. In July of 1959, officials arrested the chief of the criminal division in the district of the Palatinate, Georg Heuser, for liquidating Jews in Minsk. Then the head of the criminal division in Saarbrücken, Klemmer was arrested in 1959. Klemmer, a former Gestapo officer, admitted to ordering mass executions in the East. In January 1960, Georg Lothar Hoffmann, chief of the criminal division in the state of Hesse, was arrested and charged with mass murder in Maidanek concentration camp.

While other agencies of state and local government were just as infested by former Nazis, the infiltration of the police was an especially serious matter. No citizen could report a war criminal without fear of reprisal, especially when the criminal divisions of the police were under the control of former Gestapo and SS officers. Citizens risked their lives and freedom if they challenged the Nazi line.

There is plentiful evidence that this infestation of the police was pre-planned. The November 1957 issue of the Frankfurter Hefte exposed the number of news and publishing media willing to promote the Nazi line:

In the Federal Republic there exist today 46 political associations of this character. The Nazi-militaristic wing is served by 30 newspapers, 68 Rightist book and magazine publishers, and 120 former Nazi publicists. In addition there are approximately 50 nationalistic youth organizations.”

The failure to denazify Germany was largely due to a deliberate sabotaging of the 4Ds program by those seeking to protect U.S. corporations that traded with Hitler throughout the war, yet one cannot overlook the Nazis’ determined plan to regain power after war’s end. Gen. Otto Remer, who founded the Socialist Reichs Party, denied the Holocaust ever happened, and claimed the Allies had the ovens built after the war. In 1952, Germany outlawed the Socialist Reichs Party. Within a few months, authorities found the Nazis reorganized more than 60 Tarn (camouflaged) groups in the state of Lower Saxony.

Roosevelt’s death a month before the surrender of the Nazis also contibuted to the 4Ds program failure. The burden on Truman in his first year in office was immense. In the first month alone, he had to deal with Germany’s surrender and, before the summer was out, the use of the atomic bomb and Japan’s surrender. When he came into office, Truman had no idea of Roosevelt’s Operation Safehaven or the details of the atomic bomb. He therefore put his trust in his advisers.

One of those advisers was independent oilman Edwin Pauley. Like Forrestal, he was a spy for Allen Dulles in the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party. He had been part of Roosevelt’s Petroleum Administration for the War, and played a role in selecting Truman as the vice presidential candidate in the 1944 election. In gratitude, Truman appointed Pauley to be the U.S. representative in the Allied Reparations Committee, despite his obvious conflicts of interest. He was simultaneously made industrial and commercial adviser to the Potsdam Conference, and given the rank of ambassador. Using his position, Pauley was able to help the Dulles brothers shift Nazi assets out of Europe. He knew that most of the Nazi assets were located in the Western zone, but deceived the Soviets long enough for Allen Dulles to spirit much of the remaining Nazis assets out of Europe.

After losing his nomination as Naval Secretary to replace Forrestal, Pauley returned to the oil business. Pauley was soon embroiled in another controversy, this one over Mexico and oil. In short, Pauley was caught running a CIA shakedown of Mexican politicians. At one point, the CIA was using Permex as a business cover and money laundry for Pauley’s political contributions. The CIA-Permex connection lasted many years. One notable employee of Permex during these years was William F. Buckley Jr. Politically, Pauley played both sides, and was a committed Nixon supporter.

George H. W. Bush set up Zapata Petroleum during this time and leased oil rigs to Pauley. Pauley was Bush’s best customer. In 1959, Mexico changed its laws to mandate that Mexican nationals must own oil companies. Bush stood to lose his most lucrative account. Using a fiscal sleight of hand, Bush sold the Nola 1 rig, thus hiding an American share of 50 percent. The only losers in the deal were the shareholders of Zapata, according to Barrons. Unfortunately, the details of the deal can no longer be scrutinized since the SEC destroyed Zapata records for 1960-66. The destruction of the SEC records occurred shortly after George H. W. Bush was sworn in as vice president in 1981.

Hundreds of other cases of Nazi war criminals in positions of power in the Adenauer government could be cited. Full disclosure of all the Nazis in the new German government would literally fill volumes. Nevertheless, it is obvious from the examples cited that the Nazis were still in positions of power in the postwar government of Germany. What had gone wrong was not a mere series of errors or mistakes. Rather, it was a well-organized and well-financed plot. The understanding of the plot is critical in recognizing the rise of fascism late in the 20th century and attempts to take corporate fascism global in the form of so-called free trade and globalization of the world’s economy.

James Stewart Martin of the Department of Justice’s investigation team in Europe summed it up in his book All Honorable Men.

We had not been stopped in Germany by German business, we had been stopped in Germany by American business. The forces that stopped us had operated from the United States, but had not operated in the open. We were not stopped by a law of Congress, by an Executive Order of the President, or even by a change of policy approved by the President. ... in short, whatever it was that had stopped us was not “the government.” But it clearly had command of channels through which the government normally operates. The relative powerlessness of governments in the growing economic power is of course not new ... national governments stood on the sidelines while bigger operators arranged the world’s affairs.

Roosevelt understood this plot and planned accordingly. He knew the industrialists would cover up their crimes. He placed some of the suspected American supporters of fascism in positions where they could be watched closely by the British Intelligence service. He knew that evidence gathered in this manner would be inadmissible in a court of law, yet he realized this group of industrialists wielded far more power than that conferred on the president of the United States. The only chance for success in bringing this group of traitors to justice was in exposing their crimes and arousing public opinion against them. He therefore planned to leak evidence to the press and counted on the reaction of the American people to demand full investigations. He used the same tactic to foil the coup attempt against him. Unfortunately, the evidence and the plan were buried with Roosevelt, and his pledge to bring all Nazis and their supporters to justice died with him.

Moreover, there is evidence that total destruction of Germany was never part of the plan by the hidden powers. In May 1945, only days after the surrender of Germany, a small group around William Stephenson (Intrepid) formed a new company, British American Canadian Corp. S.A., based in New York and registered in Panama. On April 2, 1947, it changed its name to World Commerce Corp. The most remarkable aspect of this corporation was that with one exception, all of its directors and almost everyone associated with it had connections with British or American intelligence.

All officers of the corporation were members of either the OSS or Intrepid’s network. Included in the list of officers were Sir Charles Hambro, George Muhle Merten, David Ogilvy and John Arthur Reid Pepper. The officers selected at the formation were Pepper, president; Ogilvy and Merten, vice presidents; and Thomas William Hill, Intrepid’s British Security Coordinator in New York City.

Donovan apparently was not involved with either corporation until he became a director on Oct. 23, 1947, the same time that former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius joined. Stettinius had a large financial holding in the corporation. However, Donovan’s law firm acted as legal advisers from the beginning. Among the legal advisers was Otto Doering.

Soon World Commerce Corp. (WCC) attracted several other prominent intelligence operatives to join as directors, officers or stockholders. Included in this group were Russell Forgan, Lester Armour, Sydney Weinberg, W.K. Eliscu, Lt Col Rex Benson and several others connected with the Canadian intelligence service. Also included were Nelson Rockefeller, former head of the agency in charge of South America intelligence; John McCloy, former Under Secretary of War; Richard Mellon; and Sir Victor Sassoon. When Frank Ryan took over as president, Stephenson provided him with connections to a group of men prominent in government, intelligence and finance. The WCC contact in Greece was a former member of the Greek and British intelligence services. In Thailand, the WCC’s contact person was a former OSS agent. In short, almost all members of the WCC and its contacts were formerly connected with the intelligence services during the war. Yet, this remarkable company lasted only 15 years, even with the backing of the world’s financial elite. In 1962, WCC was liquidated for tax reasons.

One of the first clues about this strange corporation of former intelligence experts emerged in a letter Donovan sent to Gen. Clay, high commissioner; Robert Murphy, political adviser to Clay; and Gen. Charles Saltzman, assistant secretary for occupied areas at the State Department in November 1947. WCC’s new president, Frank Ryan, wrote the letter defining the general purpose of the corporation:

In our view the restoration of economic balance in Europe is fundamentally a problem of industrial and agriculture production. The purposes to be served by such development are the maintenance of population and the creation of internationally exchangeable values, which are essential in supporting the continuance of productive operations. The restoration of production and the continuing processes which involve the international exchange of goods are the fields of primary interests to World Commerce Corporation. In these directions we are prepared to cooperate with private industry and with official bodies.

Ryan advised Clay that WCC had its head office in New York City, close connections in all other major centers in the United States and representatives in 47 other countries. Ryan’s letter to Clay was more specific about Germany:

WCC is prepared to provide its full cooperation to the Joint Occupying Authority toward the restoration of production in Germany. World market and price reports, industrial investigations looking toward the development and submission of specific proposals and a general commercial information service are contemplated as proper elements of cooperative activity by WCC in Germany.

WCC will submit offerings of raw materials, supplies or equipment which are required in Germany for the purposes of production.

WCC will submit bids for products of general commercial usage, which may become available for export out of German production.

WCC will develop and submit for coordinating the purchases, production and export sales of a specific plant, of a group of plants or of an industry. These proposals will look toward a specifically integrated and self-supporting operation in which the facilities of the German producers on the one hand and the WCC on the other will be joined to accomplish the require result.

Here, in a nutshell, is the reason for the existence of this strange and short-lived corporation staffed by former intelligence agents connected with the wealthiest groups of the English-speaking world. The British, Canadian and United States intelligence services were running a corporation to rebuild Germany, in direct violation of Roosevelt’s orders.

This corporation, formed only days after war’s end by a man at the top of the British intelligence services suggests that the British never intended to destroy Nazi Germany. Including OSS members followed naturally; the OSS recruited heavily from Wall Street and families of the American industrial elite. It also is indicative that the world’s financial elite, led by the British, had a plan from the beginning not to destroy Germany and to reduce the cost of rebuilding after the war to protect German industry from bombing. It cannot be stated with any certainty if the RAF’s reliance on the terror bombing of civilian centers throughout the war was part of this plan until further classified government documents are made available.

Such a plan would fit with the British policy toward Europe for the previous century. Until WWI, England was the dominant power in Europe, and the British were determined to hold onto their position. England’s strategic geographical location allowed it to block the sea-lanes of any European challenger. The only serious threats to British power before WWI were France and Germany. Besides the threat of a blockade, Britain fostered wars between continental rivals, thereby weakening the dominant power on the continent. In this way, England preserved her supremacy in Europe at minimal cost. Throughout the latter half of the 1700s and the 1800s, England faced no serious threat to its position. Any potential threat was quickly dealt with.

Toward the end of WWI, a new threat arose for the British - the Bolshevik Revolution, if it spread beyond the borders of Russia. Between the wars, Britain regarded the Soviets as their prime enemy on the continent. Hitler’s armies had come within sight of Moscow, but at a heavy price to both the Soviets and the Nazis. Churchill delayed any invasion of Europe as long as possible. He was following the long English tradition of allowing Britain’s enemies to kill each other. Rather than a cross-channel invasion, he talked Roosevelt into an invasion of North Africa, primarily to protect the Suez Canal and British shipping lanes. He further delayed the Normandy invasion by promoting the invasion of Italy. Churchill then argued for an assault through the Balkans, thereby cutting the advancing Soviets off from central Europe.

It was only faced with Roosevelt’s stern demand for a cross-channel invasion after the meeting of the Big Three that Churchill agreed. Churchill favored an easy peace with Germany and only reluctantly accepted the Morgenthau Plan at Montreal. However, by this time Britain was reduced to beggar status and was desperate to hang on to its remaining empire. It was in no position to disagree if postwar aid was at stake.

Thus, the formation of the World Commerce Corp., by one of England’s top intelligence officers dovetails with the British conduct of the war. Those in the top ranks of the OSS who came from Wall Street or families of leading American industrialists did not wish to see their assets in Germany destroyed, and readily climbed aboard the WCC. The motivation no doubt included decisions of empire as well as the financial interests of particular members of the elite.

Martin Bormann carefully planned the Nazi comeback plan and had the support of Hitler. The plans relied solely on two proven methods - an unyielding loyalty to the fatherland and the Nazi Party. Bormann based his plans on the two successful methods that the Germans used in WWI: the old German concept of total warfare and Tarnung, which proved indispensable during WWI and its aftermath.

Bormann’s plan relied on carefully chosen Nazi agents and sympathizers placed in foreign countries. Captured documents confirm that the sabotage of 4Ds was systematic and part of Bormann’s intricate and well-planned plot for the Nazis to regain power. Further conformation comes from the attitude of top IG Farben officials during their interrogation and trial. Well aware that they would not suffer any harsh penalty, they were indignant at having to suffer through the charade of an interrogation and trials.

The captured documents also confirm the distinct trends starting around 1943: the removal of officials who steadfastly opposed fascism, the rise in anti-communism and the frantic peace efforts. These were all parts of the Nazi plot to regain power. Moreover, the captured documents note the connection between the Republican Party and the Nazis. Indeed, the 1946 election played a pivotal role in the Nazis’ plan as the Republicans gained a majority in Congress. Once they held the majority in Congress and the 4Ds program was dead, there would be no decartelization or harsh peace. Businesses would be free to renew their cartel ties to IG Farben and other German corporations. Standard Oil was bold enough during the war to confirm that it intended to renew its cartel agreements once the war ended.

The disruption of the Malmedy trials in both Germany and in the United States by such figures as Joe McCarthy confirms the outline of the plot as laid out in the captured documents. It is well-documented that McCarthy received election funding from known fascists. This was only the beginning of Tail Gunner Joe’s role in the Nazi comeback plot. He later played a greater part in the removal of dedicated people from government offices who staunchly opposed fascism.

This chapter has presented a wealth of evidence to show the sabotaging of the denazification program was systematic and proceeded at the highest levels of the occupation army, as well as the lower ranks. The young lieutenant who wrote Pa Watson of his efforts to place a former Dehomag official in a position of power probably thought he was doing his best for his country, while putting a feather in his hat for his return to IBM. It is unlikely that he was part of this plot. It is more likely he thought that he was aiding his country. Nevertheless, his actions and those of hundreds of other young officers protected IBM and Watson from being charged with aiding the Nazis.

The real rot and corruption came at the top ranks of the occupation army and the military government. American business leaders with ties to the Nazis filled the top echelon of the military government. The Kilgore congressional committee questioned the wisdom of appointing such business leaders to the control board. The committee’s 1946 report singled out Rufus Wysor, president of Republic Steel, and Fred Devereux, vice president of ATT. Both served as section chiefs under Gen. Draper. Wysor signed several cartel agreements with Nazi steel companies and aggressively defended cartels. Yet the committee was powerless to prevent appointments or reverse decisions, so the control board could act with impunity. Gen. Draper had nothing to fear when he ordered a halt to the dismantling of an IG Farben plant. John McCloy was able to free the war criminals on the flimsiest excuses, with nothing to fear except a little bad publicity.

The sabotage conducted at higher levels was part of a larger plot on the part of the Nazi element in the United States to protect itself. As revealed in captured documents, the sabotage by Nazis was connected with, and was an integral part of, the Nazis’ plans to regain power. These documents stressed that their agents and friends in the United States would help protect them. They were not disappointed when McCloy opened the gates to Landsberg prison. Once freed, Flick continued to fund Nazis in the new political system in Germany. The result was a German government composed largely of former Nazis.

At the center of the sabotage of the denazification program in the United States were three Wall Street firms: Brown Brothers Harriman, Dillon and Read, and Sullivan & Cromwell. At the very eye of this corruption were Prescott Bush, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. All were traitors to their country, and all worked feverishly to cover up their own crimes and those of others. None gave up their Nazi connections; in fact, the Bush family’s continuing connection to known Nazis was a campaign issue in the 1988 election.

The second part of the Nazi comeback plot involved provoking a war between the West and East. The Nazis felt secure with their Tarnung and hidden looted treasure, but their quickest and easiest way back to power would be by provoking a war between the United States and Soviet Union.

The Nazis recognized Americans harbored an abhorrent phobia toward communism, and were wildly successful in exploiting it. Gen. Clay’s war warning from Berlin was the product of the Gehlen organization, a group of former Nazi intelligence officers and SS recruited by the OSS-CIA. It could be regarded as the first shot of the Cold War. Clay’s message and the Gehlen group will be more fully discussed in a later chapter.

The Nazis were willing to provoke a war even if it meant propelling the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It was the only part of the comeback plot that relied almost entirely on Nazi sympathizers in the United States. The Nazis were not disappointed. Joe McCarthy soon brought the nation to a feverish peak of mass hysteria in Red hunting. The Dulles brothers rose to positions of power to further the hysteria. John Foster Dulles had a key role in the inciting the Korean War. Any government official dedicated to fighting fascism was removed from office, often by being branded a communist.

Throughout his administration, Truman faced a hostile Congress with a Republican majority and anti-communist hysteria reigning supreme. Old fascist supporters such as Fred Hartley, who was a staunch backer of fascism and Japan on the floor of the House, were rehabilitated. In less than 10 years of having his companies seized for trading with the enemy, Prescott Bush was elected to Congress. He never faced treason charges. Bush played a pivotal role in selecting Richard Nixon as vice presidential candidate in 1952. Nixon made his first step in politics by agreeing to hide evidence from captured Nazi documents that implicated Allen Dulles as a traitor. In return, Dulles agreed to finance Nixon’s first election campaign. Much of Nixon’s funding for his race for the House of Representatives was provided by the same New York banks that helped to fund the Nazis. The man Nixon replaced was dedicated to removing the last traces of fascism in Europe, and was a sharp critic of the direction the 4Ds program was taking, in going soft on the Nazis and cartels. Native fascists in the United States missed no tricks in branding Voorhis as a communist.

Indeed, every Republican president and vice president since Eisenhower, with the two possible exceptions of Agnew and Cheney, have either direct ties in aiding the Nazis and Nazi war criminals, or strong family ties directly linked to the Nazi cause.

Throughout the early years of the Cold War, every brushfire or hot spot that flared up had an element of Nazi intrigue. The Cold War dragged on four decades. It was the early 1960s when the Cold War reached its feverish peak of hysteria, as the world stood on the brink of a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was a turning point in the Cold War. In spite of his advisers, President John F. Kennedy chose a path of détente with Khruschev. Of course, there was no greater threat to the Nazis’ plot than peaceful negotiations between the Soviets and the United States. Once détente was established between the two superpowers, the Nazi plot to regain power was dead. Indeed, following the crisis, test ban treaties were completed and the Cold War was reduced to a series of small brushfires in the Third World, with the exception of the Vietnam War. The full extent of the Nazi role in fomenting the Cold War will never be realized until all the classified documents from World War II and the postwar period are released.

The Nazi plan for a comeback had two fatal flaws. It called for a comeback about 15 years after the end of the war. They did not realize that the Allies would divide Germany. At first, the Allies planned to reunite Germany as soon as possible, but with the rising tide of anti-communism whipped up by Nazi sympathizers in the United States, the NATO Allies decided on a permanent division of Germany. The Korean War appeared too soon for the Nazis. Germany was still divided and largely in ruins; while reconstruction had advanced at a rapid pace in Western Germany, there was still a large Allied occupying force there. German reunification would be delayed until the 1980s, after the Soviet Union imploded.

With no other superpower to hold the United States in check, fascism began a rebirth in the 1980s.

The Fourth Reich indeed rose, but not in Germany.

It rose in the United States.

(Click here for Chaper 6 Bibliographical notes)