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Bilderberg Conferences

Origins of the Bilderberg meetings

[This site campaigns for a press conference at all Bilderberg venues - and a declaration from the steering committee that any consensus reached must be in our public, not their private interest]

Creator and chairman of the Bilderbergers was a card carrying member of Hitler's SS and repeatedly lied when asked if he was a Nazi party member as a student (separate page all about Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands)

This photograph was taken at the first Bilderberg meeting at Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland in 1954. Hugh Gaitskell is in the far corner of the room looking rather sceptical and you can just see him scratching his chin.

Another more limited photo of the same room which includes chairman Prince Bernhard is here

MUST READ: The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification - by Prof. Mike Peters in 'Lobster' 32

11Apr16 - The Traitor of Arnhem by Lt. Col. Oreste Pinto - Nazi agent betrays Operation Market Garden causing Oosterbeek slaughter

Official attendee list PDF from the first ever Bilderberg meeting in Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Hotel, Oosterbeek, Holland, May 1954

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: PAX AMERICANA

http://www.angelfire.com/wv2/blueridgeprint/

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER,

A WORLD FEDERAL UNION CALLED - the UNITED STATES OF MAN (originally entitled UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN) - by Clarence K. Streit, 1941, author also of UNION NOW

This work, at the outset of Hitlers rise, led to the establishment of the United Nations and its relevance to post-9/11 geo-political foreign policy by the governments of the United States and Great Britain is evident--the precise formula being executed by Bush and Blair governments!

UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN was Streits second edition and expanded version of UNION NOW, which was widely distributed and read during WWII in America and England, what George Orwell called this much-discussed book.

Now more obscure, this publisher, upon discovery, saw immediately the relevance of this book to post-9/11 events and thought it needed new distribution to warn of this master blueprint for Novus Ordo Secloruma new world order. The relevance of UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN can be readily observed by the Bush-Blair response and Anglo-American governments coalition to launch a global War on Terrorism to reorder the world after September 11, 2001 under the guise of establishing democracy, peace, and freedom in the world.

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: PAX AMERICANA (Union Now with Britain)

Read this historical treatise and see how the events of 9/11 have accelerated this blueprint for an American-led new world order!

"Out of these troubled times [Iraq/Kuwait conflict], our fifth objective -- a new world order can emerge: a new era...We're now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders." September 11, 1990 - Iraq Speech by President George H. W. Bush

"Our mission is clear: to rid the world of evil" - Pres. George W. Bush, post-Sept. 11, 2001

"Out of the shadow of this evil [9/11], should emerge lasting good... This is a moment to seize...let us re-order this world around us." - British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Oct. 2, 2001 (BBC)

http://www.angelfire.com/wv2/blueridgeprint/

1900 hrs Wed 20th Sept 1944, Nijmegen - Can XXX Corps make it to Arnhem? My scenarios for two Market Garden wargames

The Bilderberg Group & the project of European unification

Nato=Nazi - link four - click here for next

From Lobster 32 http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk

This article copyright Lobster Magazine and Sociology Prof. Mike Peters

Lobster is a six-monthly magazine/journal devoted to parapolitics, uncovering hidden forces that govern the way we live. Typical articles include: 'The CIA, drugs and the media', Jane Affleck's web survey, 'the Rockefeller UFO initiative'. It is an independently published by the editor and needs all the support it can get. The following article has been used with permission, if you like what you read do please consider taking out Lobster's modest subscription.

The annual cost is between six and nine pounds stirling depending on where you live. Postal address and email at the bottom of the article.

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

Prof. Mike Peters

Introduction

Despite their reputation for 'empiricism', British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called 'Establishment' in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain became diverted from empirical investigation of power, as the study of national and international power-structures became conducted under the aegis of increasingly abstract theoretical categories derived from Marxism, and in particular by a wave of concepts based on Poulantzas's 'structuralist' critique of Miliband, and was followed by ever more esoteric discussions of the 'theory' of the state (e.g. Jessop, 1990), culminating in the hegemony of a post-Marxist version of Gramsci's conception of 'hegemony' - in which 'struggle' is posited without any identifiable human beings as its active protagonists, and with the stakes reduced to ideas rather than concrete interests.

This was in sharp contrast with the USA, where the impetus of C. Wright Mills's pioneering study of the network of interests involved in the Cold War (Mills, 1956) was continued by a flourishing group of scholars. There has been nothing in Britain of comparable scope or detail to the work conducted in the USA by G. W. Domhoff, Thomas Dye, Mark Mizruchi or Noam Chomsky, etc.

The present article is concerned with one specific facet of American power-structure research which, I believe, has important implications for the study of power in the UK. This is the subject of power-elite networks and forums, conceptualised as arenas for the conduct of intra-capitalist and inter-corporate strategic debates and long-range social planning, from which wider 'democratic' interference is carefully excluded.

The particular institution about which I will present information is the so-called 'Bilderberg Group', which is an interesting example of this kind of power-elite forum. It is one among a number of little-publicised institutions which have played an important role providing a means for debates and discussions to take place amongst different capitalist groups and different national governments over long-term planning issues and, especially, in Co-ordinating strategic policy at an international level. Other such bodies on this trans-national scale include the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the USA, with its UK sister organisation, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (otherwise known simply as Chatham House) and the Trilateral Commission (which itself grew out of Bilderberg meetings and has been essentially a more globalist version of the latter, since it incorporates Japanese representatives). Each of these bodies will be mentioned in what follows.

One of the 'functions' such institutions appear to serve is that of 'mediating' between the economic interests of private capital and the requirement of a general interest on the part of the capitalist class as a whole. I shall suggest that much of the theorising about the 'state' in the tradition of structural Marxism since the 1970s has confused this relation between capital and national governments, owing to the tendency to reify the abstraction called the state' and posit it as enjoying a virtual autonomy vis-à-vis capital; whereas the empirical evidence lends more support to the rather hastily dismissed (and often grotesquely caricatured) model called 'instrumentalism.

To anticipate what will be said later, I believe that one of the key assumptions often made by structural Marxists, namely that the capitalist class is always divided into competing fractions which have no mechanisms for co-ordination other than the state, is not empirically sustainable. Part of this misconception, it could be said, derives from an over-literal understanding of the concept of the 'market' as constituting the only social relation amongst different fractions of capital. At least as far as the very large, and above all, the international (or as we would say in today's jargon, the global) corporations are concerned, this is definitely not the case: very sophisticated organs do exist whereby these capitalist interests can and do hammer out common lines of strategy. Bilderberg is one of these mechanisms.

The Context

As the second world war drew to a close, the capitalist class in Western Europe was under severe threat from an upsurge of working class radicalism, the management of which required a strategy more sophisticated than conventional repression, and the first steps were taken, by political panes of both left and right, to develop 'corporatist' programmes based on a kind of national protectionism. By contrast, in the USA, the war had brought to dominance an internationally-oriented capitalist class who saw very clearly that their interests lay in a thorough 'liberalisation' (1) of the world market, abolition of tariffs etc.. Only the false wisdom of hindsight could make the eventual Atlantic Alliance system that emerged by 1950 seem preordained by 'objective' historical forces. Indeed, so used have we become to hearing phrases like 'American imperialism' and witnessing US interventions throughout the world that we can forget just how difficult it was for this internationally oriented fraction of the American capitalist class to impose its agenda upon the US state: the deep-rooted tendency of American political culture has always been what Europeans call Isolationist' and it took extensive political work to drag the Americans into these foreign entanglements. In this paper I will not be looking in any detail at how these interests influenced the US government during and after the Second World War, but rather at how they succeeded in effecting the integration of the Western European capitalist class into a new Atlantic alliance system

The period 1945-50 is highly complex and debate still rages over the origin and nature of the 'Cold War': for example over the degree to which the US was acting offensively or defensively against a (real or imagined) Soviet threat, as well as over the relation between the external or geopolitical aspect of the Cold War on the one hand and its domestic, ideological or 'class' aspect. And die recent work of. Alan Milward, for example, has thrown into question many of the received assumptions about the causes and consequences of the 'supranational' institutions created in Europe in the aftermath of the war (Milward, 1984 and 1994; Anderson, 1996).

The beginnings of a clarification of these events were made with the pioneering analysis of Kees Van der Pijl, in conjunction with other Dutch Marxist scholars (Fennema, Overbeek etc.) ten years ago, together with the detailed empirical work of US power-researchers (e.g. the journal Critical Sociology). With the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent 'coming out' of veteran anti-Communists now prepared to open up some of their dubious accomplishments to outside scrutiny (Peter Coleman, Brian Crozier e.g.), more direct documentary evidence of the scope and intensity of covert US involvement in European politics in the post-war period is now available.

The Marshall Plan and NATO

The official version of the history of the creation of the Atlantic system reads like the 'lives and teachings of saints (Milward, 1992). in these school textbook accounts, each of the pillars of the post-war world order has its great founding father, whose photographs invariably appear in magazine articles:

* the IMF and the World Bank are the work of Keynes

* European economic recovery is the work of General Marshall

* NATO is the work of Ernest Bevin, and

* the European Community is the work of Jean Monnet (with his faithful discipline Schuman)

These are not just myths; they are, in intelligence parlance, more like 'cover stories'.

The Marshall Plan is named after the speech on June 5 1947 by US Secretary of State Marshall, which invited European countries to join in a co-operative plan for economic reconstruction, with explicit requirements for trade liberalisation and increases in productivity. Over the next ten months there emerged the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, which set up the Economic Co-operation Agency (ECA) to administer the European Recovery Programme (ERP) - the so-called 'Marshall Aid' - which gave $13 billion in aid to 16 western European states. In four years, the ECA was superseded by the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) in 1951 which in turn was transformed into the Foreign Operations Agency (FOA) in 1954, later the International Co-operation Agency (ICA) in 1955 and finally the Agency for International Development (AID) in 196l (Carew 1987 p. 6ff). it is generally recognised that this aid had a decidedly militaristic purpose, being essentially a prerequisite for the development of NATO. (2)

It is less generally acknowledged, however, that this unprecedented exercise of international generosity (dubbed by Churchill the 'most unsordid act in history') served direct economic purposes for the internationally oriented US corporations which promoted it. William Clayton, for example, the Under-secretary for Economic Affairs, whose tour of Europe and letters sent back to Washington played a key role in preparing the plan, and who pushed it through Congress, personally profited to the tune of $700,000 a year; and his own company, Anderson, Clayton & Co. secured $10 million of Marshall, Plan orders up to the summer of 1949. (Schuman 1954 p. 240). General Motors similarly got $5.5 million worth of orders between July 1950 and 1951 (14.7% of the total) and they Ford Motor Company got $1 million (4.2% of the total).

Roots in the Council on Foreign Relations

The origins of the Marshall Plan are in fact to be found in the 'War and Peace Study Groups' instituted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1939. (For the details see Shoup & Minter p. 117 ff). on December 6 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation granted the Council nearly $50,000 to finance the first year of the project. Well over 120 influential individuals (academics and business leaders), at least 5 cabinet levels departments and 12 separate government agencies, bureaux or offices were involved in this. There were altogether 362 meetings and no less than 682 separate documents produced. I find it frankly astonishing that virtually none of the British academic scholarship on this period even acknowledges the existence of the CFR, let alone the War and Peace Study Groups. Evidence is surely required to show that they had no influence, if that is what scholars believe.

The plan which Marshall presented in his speech had already been outlined in the proposals of a CFR study group of 1946 headed by the lawyer Charles M. Spofford and David Rockefeller, entitled 'Reconstruction in Western Europe'; and the specific proposal for unifying the Western European coal and steel basin as a bulwark against the USSR was made by John Foster Dulles in January 1947.

To trace the origin of the movement for European unification, however, requires that we go back to May 8 1946 and an address given at Chatham House by a Pole named Joseph Retinger. In this talk he outlined a plan for a federal Europe in which the states would relinquish part of their sovereignty. At the time, Retinger was secretary general of the Independent League for European Co-operation (ILEC), run by the Belgian Prime Minister Paul van Zeeland. During the war Retinger worked closely with van Zeeland and other exile leaders who would become prominent in the Bilderberg network, (including Paul Rijkens, whom we will meet again shortly). (3) Out of these connections was born in 1942-3 the Benelux customs union, a kind of prototype of the Common Market.

The ideas adumbrated by Retinger were not new: there is a whole history of such projects for European unification and for even larger global schemes. One might just note here the assumption of the need for a 'great power' status as well as the almost taken-for-granted racism which informed Retinger's thinking:

'The end of the period during which the white man spread his activities over the whole globe saw the Continent itself undergoing a process of internal disruption........ there are no big powers left in continental Europe....... [whose] inhabitants after all, represent the most valuable human element in the world.' (Retinger 1946, p. 7)

Shortly after this speech, Retinger was invited by the US ambassador, Averell Harriman, to the USA to secure American support for ILEC.

'I found in America a unanimous approval for our ideas among financiers, businessmen and politicians. Mr Leffingwell, senior partner in J. P. Morgan's [bank], Nelson and David Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan [chair of General Motors], Charles Hook, President of the American Rolling Mills Company, Sir William Wiseman, [British SIS and] partner in Kuhn Loeb [New York investment bank], George Franklin and especially my old friend Adolf Berle Jr [CFR], were all in favour, and Berle agreed to lead the American section [of ILEC]. John Foster Dulles also agreed to help. (Pomian 1972, p. 212)

Thus was formed the European Movement (whose first congress at the Hague in 1948 is- the origin of the Council of Europe), which received substantial contributions from US government secret funds as well as private sources via the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE). The names mentioned above are significant in the present context: Leffingwell preceded John McCloy and David Rockefeller as CFR chair, 1946-53, and had been a CFR director since 1927, while Franklin was executive director of the CFR 1953-7 and was later a Trilateral Commission Co-ordinator: also, incidentally an in-law of the Rockefellers.

US funding for the European Movement extended beyond 1952, most of it going to the European Youth Campaign, initiated by John McCloy, whose own career virtually personifies the Atlantic ruling class as a whole: a corporate lawyer of relatively humble origins, he became, through his contacts at Harvard, assistant Secretary of War 1941-45 and first President of the World Bank (IBRD), which he revamped to suit the interests of Wall Street; and then US High Commissioner for Germany 1949-52 (where, among other things, he enabled Krupp to regain control of his steel companies, advising on the establishment of the Krupp-Stiftung, modelled on the Ford Foundation - he was connected to Adenauer through his German wife, whose sister married Lewis Douglas, J. P. Morgan financier and later US ambassador to Britain), after which he became a director of both the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Ford Foundation in 1953. He was also an active member of the Bilderberg Group, becoming chair of the Council on Foreign Relations itself.

As for ACUE, its chair was William Donovan (who ran OSS - forerunner of the CLA during the war) and its vice-chair was Allen Dulles (who was a leading figure in the CFR War and Peace Study Group during the early part of the war, and later the director of the CIA); and it was run in Europe by another CIA executive, Thomas W. Braden.

The Bilderberg Group

'The Treaty of Rome [1957], which brought the Common Market into being, was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings.' (George McGhee, former US ambassador to West Germany)

'Bilderberg' takes its name from the hotel, belonging to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, near Arnhem, where, in May 1954 the first meeting took place of what has ever since been called the Bilderberg Group. While the name persisted, its meetings are held at different locations. Prince Bernhard himself (who, incidentally, was actually German not Dutch) was chair until 1976 when he was forced to resign because of the Lockheed bribery scandal. The possible significance of this group may be gleaned from the status of its participants: the membership comprises those individuals who would, on most definitions, be regarded as members of the 'ruling class' in Western Europe and North America-In particular, the conferences brought together important figures in most of the largest international corporations with leading politicians and prominent intellectuals (in both academia and journalism).

Moreover, virtually all the European institutions we take for granted today, or treat as if they 'emerged' as a matter of course, from the ECSC, EEC and Euratom down to the present European Union, were conceived, designed and brought into existence through the agency of the people involved in Bilderberg.

Secrecy

What Gill has referred to, with disarming brevity, as its 'almost completely secretive' character (Gill 1990, p. 129) is neither incidental nor superficial but integral to its functioning. It is essential that these discussions be kept out of the public sphere. The lengths to which the organisers go are quite astonishing. An entire hotel is taken over in advance (existing guests being moved out) and a whole caravanserai, including special catering staff and armed security guards, descend on the site several days in advance. I recommend the amusing account by Robert Eringer - to my knowledge the only journalistic investigation yet conducted (Eringer 1980). The maintenance of this secrecy has been remarkably effective. In 1967, Cecil King, then chair of the International Publishing Corporation (at the time the press group with the largest circulation in the UK) and chair of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, formally requested his fellow proprietors to see to it that 'on no account should any report or even speculation about the content of the conferences be printed' (quoted in Sklar 1980, p. 178).

On one of the few occasions when Bilderberg meetings were mentioned in a major British newspaper, the outcome was quite interesting. In the 'Lombard' column of the Financial Times, C. Gordon Tether wrote on May 6 1975: 'If the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.' In a column written almost a year later, for the March 3 l976 edition, Tether wrote: 'The Bilderbergers have always insisted upon clothing their comings and goings in the closest secrecy. Until a few years back, this was carried to such lengths that their annual conclave went entirely unmarked in the world's press. In the more recent past, the veil has been raised to the extent of letting it be known that the meetings were taking place. But the total ban on the reporting of what went on has remained in force....Any conspiratologist who has the Bilderbergers in his sights will proceed to ask why it is that, if there is so little to hide, so much effort is devoted to hiding it.'

This column never appeared: it was censored by the Financial Times editor Mark Fisher (himself a member of the Trilateral Commission), and Tether was finally dismissed from the 'Lombard' column in August 1976.

What goes on at Bilderberg?

It is important at the outset to distinguish the active, on-going membership from the various people who are occasionally invited to attend. Many of those invited to come along, perhaps to report on matters pertaining to their expertise, have little idea there is a formally constituted group at all, let alone one with its own grand agenda. Hence the rather dismissive remarks by people like sixties media guru Marshall McLuhan, who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1969 in Denmark, that he was 'nearly suffocated at the banality and irrelevance,' describing them as 'uniformly nineteenth century minds pretending to relate to the twentieth century'. Another of those who have attended, Christopher Price, then Labour MP for Lewisham West, found it 'all very fatuous.... icing on the cake with nothing to do with the cake.' (Eringer 1980, p. 26). Denis Healey, on the other hand, who was in from the beginning and later acted as British convenor, says that 'the most valuable [meetings] to me while I was in opposition were the Bilderberg Conferences'. (Healey 1990, p. 195)

Bilderberg from the beginning has been administered by a small core group, constituted since 1956 as a steering committee, consisting of a permanent chair, a US chair, European and North American secretaries and a treasurer. Invitations are 'only sent to important and generally respected people who through their special knowledge or experience, their personal contacts and their influence in national and international circles can further the aims set by Bilderberg.' (Retinger, cited in Sklar p. 168)

John Pomian, Retinger's secretary observed that:

'...during the first 3 or 4 years the all-important selection of participants was a delicate and difficult task. This was particularly so as regards politicians. It was not easy to persuade the top office holders to come Retinger displayed great skill and an uncanny ability to pick out people who in a few years time were to accede to the highest offices in their respective countries today there are very few figures among governments on both sides of the Atlantic who have not attended at least one of these meetings.' (Pomian, pp. 254-5)

The Bilderberg discussions are organised on the principle of reaching consensus rather than through formal resolutions and voting. Such is the influence and standing of the active members that, if consensus for action is arrived at, one might expect this to be carried out and the resulting decision to be implemented in the West as a whole. But the exact position of the group, and that of other such groups, is only discernible by a close scrutiny of the specific careers and connections of the individual participants. Here, one has to say that social theorists seem convinced of the irrelevance of this kind of information, which would be called 'prosopographic' (i.e. data pertaining to concrete individuals, which companies they represent, their family connections etc.). This is somewhat contradictory, of course, because in their every-day roles, social theorists are just as interested in this kind of information as anyone else, and display a keen sense of its political relevance when it comes to conducting their own careers: but it has it nonetheless become almost a matter of principle to denounce use of this kind of data in social science itself. This tendency seems to come from a reification of the concept of 'roles' (as if these were real rather than constructs) and possibly from a functionalist assumption that social systems are subject to laws; with concrete human actors having no significance in shaping outcomes.

Origins of Bilderberg

The initiative for the first convocation came from Joseph Retinger, in conjunction with Paul Rijkens, President of Unilever. Retinger has already been introduced; and the significance of Unilever needs to be examined briefly. Unilever is one of the largest and most powerful multinational corporations in the world and one of the top European capitalist companies. In the 1950's the advisory directors of Unilever were as follows (and I'm drawing attention to the links with the Rotterdam Bank and Philips, the electrical firm):

· H.M. Hirschfield: also on the board of Philips and Rotterdam Bank and with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs during the war, and after it Commissioner for the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands;

· K.P. Van der Mandel, also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;

· Paul Rijkens: also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;

· H.L. Wolterson: also chair of Philips and on the board of Heldring and Pearson (linked with the Rotterdam Bank);

· P S.F Otten: also President of Philips (and married to a member of the Philips family)

One of the unusual features of Unilever is its bi-national structure (Stokman et al, 1985): it is a jointly-owned AngloDutch company, with a 50/r0 structure and a unitary board. This was a very useful device during the war, when operations could be shifted easily from the Netherlands to the UK. Philips had a similar arrangement under a Dutch law called the Corvo Law, whereby in an emergency it could divide itself into two parts, which it did when the Germans invaded: one with its HQ in Germany and the other American. Both these parts got large military contracts during the war, playing a role on both sides (Aaronovitch 1961, pp. 110-11). Unilever's financial advisers are the US investment bank Lazard Freres, which handles the private financial affairs of many of the world's wealthy families, including the Agnellis of Fiat. (See Koenig, 1990, Reich. 1983, Business Week June 18 1984).

Unilever's chief adviser on international affairs was David Mitrany, whose book, A Working Peace Svstem, published in 1943, secured him this post. (He also worked for Chatham House). it was Mitrany who coined the term 'functionalism' to refer to the strategy of supra-national integration through a series of sectoral processes of internationalisation, designed to set in motion an autonomous logic, making inevitable further integration and ultimately making national states obsolete (Groom and Taylor p. 125 ff.). In the post-war period there were three basic models for European union: alongside the 'functionalists' (in this sense), were the 'inter-governmentalists' (e.g. Spaak) and the 'federalists' (e.g. Monnet himself). In the 1960s the functionalists used the slogan 'Atlantic Partnership' as the framework for the integration or synchronisation of US and European interests.

The immediate chain of events leading to the setting up of the first conference was as follows. Prince Bernhard set off for the USA in 1952 to visit his old friend Walter Bedell Smith, director of the newly-formed CIA. Smith put the organisation of the American end into the hands of Charles D. Jackson (special assistant for psychological warfare to the US President), who appointed John S. Coleman (president of the Burroughs Corporation. and a member of the Committee for a National Trade Policy), who in turn briefly became US chair of Bilderberg.

Charles Jackson was president of the Committee for a Free Europe (forerunner of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) whose extensive operations financing and organising anti-Communist social democratic political intellectuals has only recently been fully documented (see Coleman 1989); and ran the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe in Germany. Earlier he had been publisher of Fortune magazine and managing director of Time/Life, and during the war was deputy head of psychological warfare for Eisenhower. At the time of Bernhard's visit he was working with a committee of businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic which approved the European Payments Union.

It was thus a European initiative, and its aim was, in official bland language, to 'strengthen links' between Western Europe and the USA. A selected list of people to be invited to the first conference was drawn up by Retinger, with Prince Bernhard and Rijkens, from the European countries of NATO plus Sweden. The resulting group consisted of the Belgian and Italian prime ministers, Paul van Zeeland and Alcide de Gasperi (CDU), from France both the right wing prime minister Antoine Pinay and the Socialist leader Guy Mollet; diplomats like Pietro Quaroni of Italy and Panavotis Pipinelis of Greece; top German corporate lawyer Rudolf Miller and the industrialist Otto Wolff von Amerongen and the Danish foreign minister Ole Bjorn Kraft (publisher of Denmarks top daily newspaper); and from England came Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell from the Labour Party, Robert Boothby from the Conservative Party, Sir Oliver Franks from the British state, and Sir Colin Gubbins, who had headed the Special Operations Executive (SOL) during the war.

On the American side, the members of the first Bilderberg assembly included:

· George Ball, who was head of Lehman Brothers, a former high State Department official, where he was architect of the policy of Atlantic Partnership, and later member of the Trilateral Commission. Ball was closely associated with Jean Monnet, owing to his work as legal counsel for the ECSC and the French delegation to the Schuman Plan negotiations.

· David Rockefeller was the key American member of Bilderberg. Space only permits the briefest sketch of his direct economic and political involvements: head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, member of the Business Council, the US council of the International Chamber of Commerce, and, of course, the founder of the Trilateral Commission.

· Dean Rusk: US Secretary of State 1961-69, earlier President of the Rockefeller Foundation 1952-60, having succeeded John Foster Dulles, himself an earlier Secretary of State and - this is not at all a coincidence - a close personal friend of Jean Monnet whom he had first met at Versailles in 1918 as well as of Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State and the true author of the Marshall Plan.

The final list was 67. Since then, the group enlarged somewhat, but the steering group remained the same size. (4)

After Retinger's death in 1960, the role of secretary was taken over by E. H. van der Beugel, who had headed the Dutch bureau for the Marshall Plan and later became president of KLM airlines and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. After the resignation of Prince Bernhard, the role of chair was taken by British ex-prime minister Lord Home.

The status of the group and its meetings is ostensibly 'private'. Gill names it simply 'a private international relations council', but nothing could be more misleading than this name private, unless in its sense of secret When political leaders gather together with a view to arriving at consensus, in conjunction with leaders of industry and finance and press magnates and leading journalists, then this is not the same kind of thing as an assembly of ordinary private citizens. The vocabulary of pluralist political science ('lobbies', 'non-governmental organisations' etc.) systematically distorts the actual power relations at work in these different kinds of associations. It is even questionable whether Bilderberg meetings are really 'private' in the legal sense of non-governmental. Robert Eringer, for example, having received an official reply that 'government officials attend in a personal and not an official capacity', found that in fact officials had attended Bilderberg conferences at government expense and in their official capacity. The British Foreign Office responded to his queries by saying 'we can find no trace of the Bilderberg Group in any of our reference works on international organisations', while he later learnt that the Foreign Office had paid for British members to attend Bilderberg conferences.

Van der Pijl's assessment of the role of Bilderberg seems about as accurate as the available information would allow:

'Rather than constituting an all-powerful secret Atlantic directorate, Bilderberg served, at best, as the environment for developing ideas in that direction, and secrecy was necessary for allowing the articulation of differences rather than for keeping clear-cut projects from public knowledge. In this sense Bilderberg functioned as the testing ground for new initiatives for Atlantic unity.' (Van der Pijl p. 183)

But on occasions the group is known to have exerted real power. An (unnamed) German participant at the 1974 conference held six months after the Arab Israeli War at Edmond de Rothschild's hotel at Megeve in France, commented:

'Half a dozen knowledgeable people had managed, in effect, to set the world's monetary system wolfing again [after OPEC's quadrupling of oil prices], and it was important to try to knit together our networks of personal contacts. We had to resist institutionalism, bureaucratic red-tape, and the creation of new procedures and committees. Official bodies should be put in the position of ratifying what had been jointly prepared in advance.' (Sklar, p. 171)

The European 'Community'

The Treaty of Rome signed on March 25 1957 created the 'common market' (the European Economic Community) and its roots were laid down in the ECSC (the European Coal and Steel Community) established on April 18 1951, based on the Schuman Plan of May 9 1950 (Vaughan 1976, Milward 1984). It is not implausible to suggest that the route from the one to the other in fact passed through the first five Bilderberg conferences, May 1954 at Oosterbeek (Netherlands), March 1955 at Barbizon (France), September the same year at Garmisch (Germany), May 1956 at Fredensborg (Denmark) and finally in February 1957 at St. Simon's Island (Georgia, USA); and that these secret meetings played a decisive role in overcoming the opposing, centrifugal tendencies symbolised by the collapse of the European Defence Community in 1954, the Hungarian revolution and its suppression and the fiasco of the Anglo-French adventure at Suez in 1956 - the last gasp of independent European imperialism.

Even more important the 'protectionism' implicit in the European unification project was successfully subordinated to the liberalising hegemony of the Americans, through the close involvement of the key US players at every stage. The evidence for this is entirely circumstantial, and this hypothesis must remain speculative, but I believe there is a prima facie case to launch an investigation. It should be clear from the details recounted earlier that not all the possible roads led to the Rome Treaty, and that there is far more to the politics of European 'integration' than the legislative enactments already known about.

Monnet's network

Monet himself, who mentions-neither Retinger nor Bilderberg in his memoirs (Monnet 1978), cannot have been unaware of the activities of these crucial constituents of his programme. However much he may be portrayed in the hagiographies as a far-sighted idealist, Monnet was, first and foremost, an international financier, with an extensive network of connections on both sides of the Atlantic, occupying a particular place in the configuration of capitalist interests forming what Van der Pijl calls the Atlantic circuit of money capital (Van der Pijl 1984). He was, for example, a close friend of all the key figures in the US power structure; but, more importantly, his network centred around the New York investment banks Lazard Freres (run by Andre Meyer who was also on the board of Rockefeller's Chase International Bank), and Goldmann Sachs, which, after the war gravitated into the Rockefeller orbit. Monnet's right-hand man, Pierre Uri, was European director of Lehman Brothers; and Robert Marjolin, one of Monnet's assistants in the first modernisation plan, subsequently joined the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Uri and Marjolin were also active in Bilderberg.

When Monnet resigned from his position of 'High Authority' in the ECSC in 1955 to run his Action Committee for a United States of Europe (ACUSE), his secretary at ECSC, Max Kohnstamm who had earlier been private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina, (i.e. Prince Bernhard's mother-in-law), and then Dutch representative in the Schuman Plan negotiations, became the vice-president of ACUSE, which had extensive overlaps with Bilderberg. Kohnstamm, for example, later became a member of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, and Georges Berthoin, who was Monnet's private secretary at the ECSC 1951-55, took over Kohnstamm's place on the Trilateral Commission in 197S. Francois Duchene and Paul Delouvner, who both worked for ECSC in the fifties (and joined the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s), Guy Mollet and Antoine Pinay were in the Bilderberg network (5)

Europe since the fifties

It would be simply too large and complex a matter to trace the twists and turns in the politics of European unification since the period from the fifties to the present. Too much water has flowed under the bridge, and it is doubtful that it is any longer even the same bridge, so many times has Europe' or the European idea' had to be periodically 'relaunched'. Instead of even attempting this in broad outline, I will draw attention very briefly to the role played by secretive and unaccountable organisations of members of the European economic and political elites.

One little-reported group, for example, which seems to wield immense influence is the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). To my knowledge there have only been two or three reports of this group in the British press, and yet in articulating the demands and interests of the largest and most powerful European multinational corporations, it surely calls for close study. I suspect this is the same group as that mentioned in passing in Charles Grant's biography of Jacques Delors. Delors' arrival as European Commissioner in 198S, he says, could not have occurred at a more propitious moment: he had spent the autumn of 1984 searching for a 'Big Idea' to relaunch the EEC.

'That autumn, in Brussels, Delors had met a group of officials and industrialists brought together by Max Kohnstamm, who had been Monnet's chief assistant. After Monnet's death in 1979, Kohnstamm had become one of the guardians of the sacred name of federalism. The Kohnstamm group advised Delors to make the internal market his priority and to lay down a timetable of eight years (the life of two Commissions) for its achievement...... At the same time Wisse Dekker, the chairman of Philips, made several speeches calling for the EEC to remove its internal barriers by 1990.' (Grant 1994, p. 66)

If this is in fact referring to the same group as that known as the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), then we have an example of a continuity between the fifties and today. This ERT comprises the chairs/CEOs of the leading European multinational corporations and it is by no means a mere assembly of dignitaries. This is an extremely powerful body. According to research conducted by the ASEED collective, its reports feed directly into the European Commission decision making process. One of its first reports, for example, entitled 'Missing Links', urged the immediate construction of a series of large-scale transport projects, including the Channel Tunnel. As well as Dekker of Philips, other leading figures in the ERT are Agnelli of Flat, Gyllenhammer of Volvo, and Denys Henderson of ICI.

Theoretical Excursus

A persistent problem with theories of power over the last 20 years has been their lack of engagement with empirical evidence, compounded by the demonstrable empirical ignorance of theorists. It is as if every academic feels able to develop theories about power, and engage in debates it, without any requirement for relevant information, or at any rate with a tacit assumption that everyone at has such information.

One possible place to start an attempt to 'theorise' the role of Bilderberg and other international power-elite forums, might be to re-enter an old debate at the beginning of the present century: this is the debate between Lenin and Kautsky over imperialism.

Lenins theory of imperialism sought to explain the first world war by reference to what he called inter-imperialist rivalries. While this theory has had an enormous influence during this century (it under-pins, for example, much contemporary discussion of the relations between 'the West' and the 'Developing World, in which it is assumed that power operates between geographically-defined regions, and that nation-states act at the behest of nationally-based capitalist classes), it is nevertheless demonstrably false in a number of crucial particulars. For example, one of the difficulties in Lenin's theory is reconciling it with the increasing interpenetration of national economies by trans-national capitalist blocs. To put this issue simply: wars take place between states, but inter-capitalist rivalries do not necessarily coincide with the territories between states, especially where international or trans-national corporations have developed. The material presented here, I would suggest, is of just this kind: it shows an inter-penetration of capitalist interests between the USA and Western Europe, and indicates a field of 'political struggle' within and between states, entirely outside that of the public sphere.

What is far less well-known today, however, is Kautsky's alternative conception which explicitly addressed this issue, and can be summed up by his notion of ultra-imperialism (Fennema, 1982). The simple hypothesis is that rival capitalist interests may, at least for a time, be able to coalesce into a relatively unified hegemonic bloc. Now this idea of a tendency towards stabilisation on a global scale may sound unrealistic today, but arguably this was what was achieved for fifty years, at least in the American-dominated half of the world, after 1945. It could even be said that the demise of the other half permits its universalization. Where are the 'inter-imperialist rivalries in the world today'?

Silence of the Academics

When first asked for a title for this paper, I briefly entertained the idea of using the above sub-heading, (paraphrasing a recent film-title), and I do believe it is important to ask why certain topics rather than others are deemed worthy of investigation. The material presented here is certainly 'dated' and therefore unfashionable, but similar information about the present could be investigated. It is surprising and somewhat depressing that such investigations no longer seem to be being carried out in universities today. (6) Academics often represent themselves somewhat flatteringly as 'critical' intellectuals, independent from or even determinedly opposed to the established systems of power in society, willing to face personal or professional risks in the pursuit of truth. Maybe they are more like lambs.

Footnotes

(1) The term 'liberal' signifies policies opposed to restrictions on international trade. The distinction between 'free trade' and 'protectionism' in international trade does not correspond exactly with the theoretical opposition of 'competition' and 'monopoly'. None of these concepts have straightforward empirical reference. The 1992 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) for example, is in fact profoundly 'protectionist' in relation to such matters as intellectual property rights (software, patents for seeds, drugs etc.) with elaborate 'rules of origin' designed to keep out foreign competitors etc. see Dawkins 1993.

(2) If the Marshall Plan had military objectives (containment of Soviet influence) as much as economic ones (creation of markers for US industry), then NATO has a civilian, political and ideological role as much as a military one. NATO has been relatively neglected by students of 'supranational' organisations, and it is often Presumed to be just a treaty rather than a quasigovernmental organisation in its own right. Its highest political body, the North Atlantic Council, covers foreign policy issues as well as strictly military questions, and the North Atlantic Assembly works to influence the parliamentary members of individual countries. It falls within the brief of NATO to conduct propaganda and defend states the 'infiltration of ideas'. Few citizens of NATO countries are aware of the whole apparatus to which membership commits them - e.g. Plans 10 G and 100-1 under which in 'emergency situations' special US units would be activated to suppress any movement 'threatening to US strategic interests'.

(3) It is extremely difficult to define the exact status of Retinger. One Polish war-time exile leader has been quoted as saying that Retinger was 'suspected of being in close touch not so much with British politics as with certain of its discrete institutions'. Presumably SIS. See Korbonski p. 20.

(4) Later American participants included Robert MacNamara, US Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson (earlier chair of the Ford Motor Company, and later President of the World Bank); and McGeorge Bundy, who worked on the Marshall Plan, was US National Security Adviser and later special foreign policy adviser to Kennedy and Johnson 1960-65, and became President of the Ford Foundation 1966-79. His brother, William Bundy, was with the CIA 1951-61 and later managed the CFR journal Foreign Affairs from 1979, after working at the Pentagon 1964-69. He married Dean Acheson's daughter. Finally, all three Directors of the CIA in this period were also members of Bilderberg: Allen Dulles (John Foster Dulles's brother), John McCone and Richard Helms. Needless to say, all these figures were also members of the CFR. For more details of participants see the essay by Thompson in Sklar ed. 1980, and Eringer 1980.

(5) Pinay, who was French Prime Minister in 1951, figures rather allusively in Brian Crozier's memoirs (Crozier, 1993 ch. XV) as the eminence grise of the controversial 'Pinay Cercle', an anti-communist intelligence outfit in the 1970s and 80s (Ramsay & Dorril 1986, p. 39 and Teacher 1989).

(6) It is ironic that while the initial research which discovered the existence of the Bilderberg network and explored its ramifications within the power structure of Atlantic capitalism came entirely from Marxist and left-inclined scholars in the USA, the whole subject has now been virtually taken over by the US far right as the centre piece of its own bizarre world-view. These writers of the far right (Anthony Sutton, Lyndon La Rouche, Spool and the Liberty Lobby etc.) have added virtually nothing to our understanding or knowledge of the phenomenon, and accordingly, are not referenced in the bibliography below. They have, however, contaminated the topic with their confusion. Since around the mid-1980s, the American Left has dropped the whole issue like a hot potato. For a singular exception sec Brandt 1993, which is essentially a response to Bcrlet, 1992.

Bibliography

Aaronovitch, Sam The Ruling Class, Lawrence & Wishart 1961

Anderson, Perry 'Under the Sign of the Interim', London Review of Books, 4 January 1996

Ayala, Cesar J. 'Theories of Big Business in American Society' Critical Sociology, Vol.16 No. 2-3, Summer-Fall 1989

Beret, Chip Right Woos Left, Political Research Associates, October 1992

Brandt, Daniel 'Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite', NameBase Newsline, October- December, 1993

Businessweek, June 18 1984

Carew, Anthony Labour under the Marshall Plan Manchester University Press, 1987

Chomsky, Noam Necessary Illusions, South End Press, 1989

Chomsky, Noam What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1993

Chomsky, Noam Secrets, Lies and Democracy, Odonian Press, 1994

Chomsky, Noam Powers and Prospects, South End Press, 1996 Coleman, Peter A Liberal Conspiracy, Macmillan 1989

Crozier, Brian Free Agent, Harper Collins, 1993

Cumings, Bruce 'Chinatown: Foreign Policy and Elite Realignment' in Ferguson, Thomas & Rogers, Joel (ads.) The Hidden Election, Random House, 1981

Hawkins. Kristin NAFTA: The New Rules of Corporate Conquest Open Magazine, 1993

Domhoff, G. William The Power Elite and the State, Aldine de Gruyter, 1990

Eringer, Robert The Global Manipulators, Pentacle Books, 1980

Fennema, Meindert International Networks of Banks and Industry Maninus Nijhoff, 1982

Fennema, Meindert & van der Pijl, Kees 'International Bank Capital and the New Liberalism' in Mizruchi, Mark & Schwartz, Michael (eds.) Inter-corporate Relations, Cambridge University, 1987

Freitag, Peter J. 'The Cabinet and Big Business: A Study of Interlocks', Social Problems Vol. 23, 1975

Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society, Polity Press, 1984

The Nation-State and Violence, Polity Press, 1985

Gill, Stephen American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge University Press, 1990

Grant, Charles Delors, Nicholas Brealey, 1994

Groom. A. J. R. & Taylor, Paul beds.) Frameworks for International Co-operation, Pinter, 1990

Hatch, Alden HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Harrap, 1972

Healey, Denis The Time of My life, Penguin, 1990

Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan The Wise Men, Simon & Schuster, 1986

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri The CIA and American Democracy Yale University Press, 1989

Jessop, Bob State Theory, Polity Press, 1990

Koenig, Peter 'A prince among bankers who wears Lazard's triple crown' Independent on Sunday, 11 February 1990

Korbonski, Stefan Warsaw in Exile, Allen and Unwin, 1966

Milward, Alan The Reconstruction of Federal Europe, Methuen, 1981

The European Rescue of the Nation State, Routledge, 1992

Milward, Alan et al The Frontier of national Sovereignty, Routledge, 1994

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956

Mizruchi, Mark The American Corporate Network 1904-1971 Sage, 1982

Monnet, Jean Memoirs Collins, 1978

Pisani, Sally The CIA and the Marshall Plan University of, Edinburgh Press, 1992

Pomian, John (ed.) Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise Sussex University Press, 1972

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril, Stephen Lobster 11, April 1986

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril, Stephen 'The Pinay Circle' Lobster 17, 8 November 1988

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril Stephen 'In a Common Cause: the AntiCommunist Crusade in Britain 1945-60' Lobster 19, May 1990

Reich, Cary Financier: the biography of Andre Meyer Quill, 1983

Retinger, Joseph The European Continent? Hodge, 1946

Schuman, Frederick The Commonwealth of Man Robert Hale 1954

Shoup, Laurence H. & Minter, William Imperial Brain Trust Monthly Review Press, I977

Sklar, Holly (ed.) Trilateralism South End Press, l980

Stokman. Frans et al. (eds.) Networks of Corporate Power Polity Press, 1985

Teacher, David The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe' Lobster 18, October 1989

Tether, C. Gordon The Banned Articles of C Gordon Tether Hetheringstoke, 1976

Van der Pijl, Kees The Mating of an Atlantic Ruling Class Verso, 1984

Vaughan, Richard Post-War Integration in Europe Edward Arnold 1976

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CHAPTER FOUR MARTIN BORMANN AND NAZI GOLD Extracted from

Marilyn, Hitler and Me

The memoirs of Milton Shulman

Andre Deutsch (1998)

ISBN 0 233 99408 4 Back to Bilderberg.org history page or index | INTRO., go here for COMPLETE CHAPTER | download as a 60 pp. Word document for printing/sharing Am instructed to find Martin Bormann or go to the Palladium... 40 years on, Creighton's mysterious claims unfold... Nazi gold and Ian Fleming's plot... Bormann dead or a double?.. Convincing publishers... Doubt and death threats... The conspiracy theory (i) Involved in the mystery of Nazi Gold The Fuhrer and his cohorts re-entered my life over 40 years later when I received a mysterious letter in response to an article I had written about my first day at the Evening Standard, back in 1947. On that day, the Standard's editor, Herbert Gunn, told me that my initial assignment, because I was a German army expert and had just written Defeat in the west, was to go to Berlin and find Martin Bormann. Startled by such a task, I protested, 'But Bormann is dead. I don't think it would be much of a story.' 'Are you sure he's dead?' persisted Gunn. '1 thought there was considerable doubt about that.' 'Yes,' I said. 'Some historians don't believe the evidence, but it would take some time to discover anything fresh.' 'How long?' 'About three or four weeks at least. And it would be rather expensive with probably nothing new to show for it.' Gunn pondered my reply for a few minutes. 'Alright,' he said. 'If you don't think you can find Martin Bormann will you go to the Palladium and interview Chico Marx?' Like a barrister who one day will sue a tabloid for libel and soon after defend another tabloid for a similar sort of libel, the journalist's briefs are the idiosyncratic demands of his editor. News, the lifeblood of a newspaper, has no orderly agenda. The dominant criterion of a journalist's work is readability; chronology is far less important. In August 1989, complying with the imperative of topicality that is expected to dominate every weekly newspaper column, I used the peg of the anniversary of the defeat of Japan to write about the last days of Hitler. I retold my first day's experience on the Evening Standard when I was told to go to Berlin and find Martin Bormann. The headline read 'Find Bormann? But he's dead. . .' My life has had many curious twists but none so strange as the Consequences of that innocuous headline on the next eight years of my career. The following day I received a letter from Christopher Creighton. The name meant nothing to me, although he assured me we had met some years before because of my friendship with his sister, a very attractive girl who was studying to become an opera singer. She gave up those aspirations when she married the owner of a small country inn and helped him run it. I had not seen her for many years when I heard that she had unexpectedly died after a brief illness. Creighton, knowing my background in Intelligence, thought I might be more interested in Bormann than was indicated in my column. Did I want to know how he and Ian Fleming got him out? To establish his credentials as someone knowledgeable about Intelligence and Security matters, he told me he was the author of The Paladin, a novel written with Brian Garfield, which was based upon his true operations as a boy spy in 1940 and '41. The book was a great success, having made the best-seller lists in Britain and America, sold over 100,000 copies and been serialized in the Daily Express. My first inclination was to treat the letter as one of those crank missives, usually written in red or purple ink, that often plague journalists and are dealt with by a quick toss into the nearest wastepaper basket. But because I had been extremely fond of his sister - and I was convinced that his introductory credentials were genuine - I felt I ought to put him off with a courteous reply. I asked Angus McGill, the paper's most experienced feature writer, for some advice about how to handle this strange note and, to my surprise, he was intrigued by its contents. He urged me not to dismiss Creighton and to find out more about him. I decided to give him a call. It was a decision that was to involve me in an intriguing international mystery whose ramifications - after having been investigated by intelligence experts, historians, academics and journalists - are still bewilderingly unresolved eight years after I first spoke to Christopher Creighton. I listened with increasing fascination to the startling story Creighton summarized for me on the phone. I was, of course, well aware of the atmosphere of disbelief that existed in Fleet Street about any purported account of yet untold secrets about the final days of Germany's defeat. There had been a gullible market for such tales in the years immediately after the Armistice, but two intricate stories that turned out to be elaborate hoaxes had converted this area of historical speculation into a mendacious minefield that no editor was likely to put a toe into. The editor of the Daily Express, Stewart Steven, was forced to admit that he had been conned into believing Martin Bormann had been discovered alive in the Argentine. An even more notorious hoax was the forging of documents purporting to be Hitler's War Diaries, which had taken in the Sunday Times as well as other respectable European papers. When Creighton had divulged what appeared to be another incredible Bormann story I told him I was intrigued by his tale but I had a small reputation as a military historian and did not want it to suffer the fate of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the author of The Last Days of Hitler, who supported the authenticity of Hitler's Diaries only to have to make a humiliating confession that he had been thoroughly duped. After the collapse of the Ardennes offensive, the failure of Hitler's V-I and V-2 secret weapons to wreak any significant havoc against England and the speedy advance of the Russian armies in the East, it was obvious to anyone other than an ardent Nazi fanatic that Germany, had lost the war. By the beginning of 1945, senior Nazi officials and functionaries were already making plans to get as much money as they could out of Germany, and trying to arrange some bolt-hole for themselves and their families in some neutral land, either disguised or not. Vast amounts of gold, foreign currency and art treasures were being lodged in foreign banks, chiefly in Switzerland. Some of those closest to Hitler - Ribbentrop, Goering, Himmler - were making clandestine approaches to contacts in Sweden, Portugal, Switzerland, Paraguay and the Argentine for a safe haven after the surrender and Hitler's expected assassination or suicide. They assumed that, even if they were arrested after the war, they might have to face a term in prison after which they could live out their days with the hidden resources they had stashed away. The concept of War Crimes trials and the execution of the defeated leaders was a novel and unthinkable prospect. After Germany's defeat in the First World War political and military leaders like the Kaiser, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been allowed to become prominent and powerful figures in a vanquished Germany. It was a tradition that the Nazi establishment expected the Allied victors to respect. Aware of the avalanche of German resources and pillaged treasures leaving the Reich, Churchill was determined to do something about it. One of the many steps taken was to put Naval Commander Ian Lancaster Fleming in charge of an exercise to discover where some of this gold and currency was being hidden and how it could be returned to the Allies when the war was over. He had been the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral John Godfrey. In Room 60 in the Admiralty on the 4th January 1945 Fleming met Major Desmond Morton, Churchill's personal security chief and a personal friend since World War I. Creighton told me that Morton was his godfather. Morton, born in 1891, had served in the First World War and received a bullet in his heart which no operation could remove and remained with him all his life. His bravery was recognized by his awards of a Military Cross, a Croix de Guerre and a mention in despatches. After the war he was seconded to the Foreign Office and In 1930 he set up a body known as the Industrial Intelligence Centre, a front for a super-secret organisation which was privately financed by successive monarchs George V, Edward VIII and George VI. Although Creighton referred to it as the M Section, he told me that there was no official intelligence operation with that title. One of its earliest activities was to Supply Winston Churchill, then out of office, with Information about German rearmament, which helped alert the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments about Hitler's aggressive intentions. Creighton described Morton as a tall, athletic man with an authoritative manner and an upper-class accent. He was a friend of Creighton's father, Jack Ainsworth- Davis, who had qualified as a doctor at Cambridge and was a member of the British 4 x 400 metre relay team which won a gold medal at the Antwerp Olympics in 1920. Involved with supporting that team were three undergraduates: Sub-Lieutenant Lord Louis Mountbatten and two of his cousins, the Duke of York (later George VI) and his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester. These contacts with his father brought the young Creighton, as a boy, to the attention of both Desmond Morton, Churchill and Lord Louis Mountbatten. As a surgeon, Jack Ainsworth- Davis had operated on Joachim von Ribbentrop when he was Germany's ambassador to Britain. They were also on social terms. Their friendship had begun when they were at school together in Metz before the First World War. It was there that Creighton's father spent a year studying German. Convinced that war was on the way, Morton could see in the young Creighton's social contacts with Ribbentrop prospects of using him in some clandestine activity when hostilities began. After Creighton's parents divorced, Morton had him enrolled at Ampleforth for a short period and then sent him to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in September, 1939, at the age of fifteen and a half, where he was instructed to call himself by a pseudonym and never be known as John Davis nor John Ainsworth-Davis again. I learned about this background information many months after I agreed to offer him some advice about the book he was planning about Martin Bormann. His first letters were so startling, giving me a general outline of what he had done, that I could not resist finding out much more about it. The task Fleming was given when he met both Morton and Churchill early in 1945 was to discover what means the German government and the Nazi Party were using to remove from their territory the billions of pounds of cash, gold, jewellery and art treasures and hide it away in foreign banks and secret caves where it could be recovered when the war was over. Using intelligence resources that had been nurtured before the war, Fleming discovered the names of two Swiss banks where this plundered loot was held in secret numbered accounts. In the course of acquiring this information and transmitting it by wireless to England, a young woman secret agent, very close to Creighton, had been tortured and murdered. When I first discussed with Creighton how he planned to write this story, he believed it could only be done, even as late as 1989, as 'faction' - a combination of fiction and the truth. Because Creighton was almost paranoic about security, my initial contacts with him were almost comical in their remoteness. I did not meet him personally until well after he had started sending me the first sections of his book which was then called Project X-2. At first I never wrote to him but telephoned him with any comments I had to make. He has been to my flat a number of times but I have never been to his home, although I have spoken to his wife on many occasions on the phone. At the beginning he stressed that because Operation James Bond - which was later the real code name of Project X-2 - was under the M Section, its existence was never to be made public. In his book OpJB Creighton writes: 'Even at the highest level, only a handful of people outside the M Section should know of the project's existence. It had never been mentioned in any document, except under its naval party assignation, or code number. It never would be mentioned. It had simply never existed, and never would.' It would be an understatement to say that the details of Creighton's adventure with Ian Fleming and Bormann, if true, provide one of the most daring and amazing stories of the last Great War. Perhaps Otto Skorzeny's rescue of Mussolini from Allied hands, with German parachutists, comes close to the venture in magnitude of audacity. As Creighton's story unfolded to me in batches of about 2,000 words every fortnight under the pseudonymous title, Project X-2, I learnt that Ian Fleming's first task was to read through the file of the young man whom Morton had recommended to him as a particularly qualified deputy. So weird and secret were the contents of those papers disclosing Creighton's war-time career to date, that the room in which Fleming read them had to have its doors and windows firmly bolted and two of M Section's security officers stationed outside while Fleming perused the official documents. 'Fleming read my record with astonishment,' comments Creighton in OpJB. 'If he himself had not been on the periphery of some of the events described, he would have doubted the account's veracity; but because he had often been involved he knew that the narratives were genuine. Fleming's second task after agreeing to have Creighton as his operational commander was to fly to Basel in Switzerland where on 11 January 1945, a pre-arranged meeting had been organized with the Swiss Foreign Minister, Ernest Nobs, and two of his colleagues. He carried with him a diplomatic passport, wore civilian clothes and bore a personal letter from Winston Churchill. The letter asked the Swiss minister for help in returning to the Allies the vast wealth that had been deposited in Swiss vaults by the murderers and tyrants of the Nazi hierarchy. The minister's first reaction was to deny any knowledge of any illegal accounts held in Swiss banks by Hitler's despoiling minions. When Fleming revealed that he knew the names of the banks in which most of this exported money was held, as well as the numbers of the suspected accounts, the Foreign Minister's answer was that it would be a criminal offence for him to disclose such information. Even if he knew it. Swiss banking regulations prevented him from naming the holders of such accounts and their identification could only be revealed if the proper signatories were obtained. But, Fleming pressed on, surely if it were proven that such funds had been illegally expropriated from conquered territories, the Swiss government would agree to have them frozen and investigated as soon as the war was over. The Foreign Minister agreed that if proof could be found that individuals or even explicit companies had been robbed by the Nazis, the banks would be ready to look into their claims; but as far as funds belonging to independent foreign states like Germany were concerned, they had absolute immunity unless the proper signatures for release were produced. They had reached stalemate when Nobs asked what would happen to these monies if they were handed over to the Allies. Fleming had a prepared answer. They would ask the Swiss government to act as trustee of these funds until an international committee had studied the claims made upon them and agreed who were the rightful owners. Any money that could not be traced to its original source would be distributed to peoples most damaged by the war - even Germans and Italians - as a form of reparations. Although the discussion appeared to have hit a dead-end the minister was strangely insistent that Fleming stay for a few minutes for sandwiches and coffee. Sipping his coffee in a large empty room, Fleming was joined by a young, smartly .dressed woman wearing a raincoat and carrying a briefcase. She indicated that she was a member of the Swiss Intelligence Service and that she had something of interest to show him. An hour's drive away, they arrived at a small village in a high valley in the Alps. Fleming's observant eye noticed small gun emplacements deployed unobtrusively m the area and innocent-looking chalets hiding large steel doors opening into a side of the mountain. Fleming was told by his guide that this was a secure vault of the National Bank of Basle carved out of pure rock, and once inside his eyes feasted on an incredible Aladdin's Cave of gold nuggets, diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones including Crown jewels from the Hohenzollerns and other royal dynasties of Europe. In huge wooden crates were stacked masterpieces that had been looted from museums and galleries in France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, the Ukraine and Luxembourg. The means by which these art treasures were seized or bought with unstated threats at ludicrously low prices has been meticulously documented in a scholarly work, The Rape of Europa, by Lynn H. Nicholas, in which Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, is pin-pointed as the individual who decided which of this growing art treasure should be seized or purchased after being shown to the Fuhrer. Hitler personally selected the ones to be sent to the town of Linz where he was amassing what he hoped would be the greatest art museum the world had ever seen. These masterpieces were probably destined for Linz. Fleming, amazed at the vastness of this cornucopia, asked what part of it belonged to Germany. All of it, he was told. On the military airstrip outside Basle, a white envelope was handed over to Fleming by his Swiss companion. He was told the Finance Minister had asked her to give it to him before he flew off. Inside was a single sheet of white paper, bearing one typed line: 'Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei 60508.'

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04Apr12 - Inaugural 1954 Bilderberg meeting held at Nazis Oosterbeek Hexenkessel ten years after Arnhem slaughter of British paratroopers

More on this episode - from September 2018 talk - Oosterbeek

As we have already heard, TWO chairmen - former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Lord Peter Carrington were both heavily involved in the Nijmegen/Arnhem Operation Market Garden debacle of September 1944 (see below).

http://groups.google.com/group/pepis/browse_thread/thread/a26394696535644a and below

For the background watch the fine film A Bridge Too Far

Sometime over the next decade the name of the Wolfheze Hotel became a branded Bilderberg Hotel..

Model was the direct opposite equivalent to Allied commander Bernard Montgomery who planned Market Garden and was unjustly criticised for its failure.

Monty's plan very nearly succeeded but for any one of three massive errors - or betrayals:

1. Former SS Officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was refused security clearance for the Admiraltybut, on the express orders of King George VI was included in the British Army's Whitehall warr planning team with Brian Horrocks, Monty etc. He looks also to have been involved in removing Sir Brian Urquhart from the staff who had come up with serious reservationsabout the operation. The plans of MG were supposedly found by Germans in a crashed glider, so the SS knew exactly what was planned. But was this a made-up story to cover for Prince Bernhard's spying in Whitehall? How else did several German generals in Arnhem & Nijmegen appear to have 'prior knowledge' of the attack?

2. Despite having up to 80 sherman tanks at their disposal - The 40 tanks each of the Irish Guards and the Grenadier Guards regiments, Welsh Guards (Eindhoven area) & Coldstream Guards (Groesbeek Heights SE of Nijmegen) were tied up elsewhere - Carrington, Adaire, Horrocks and the Guards Armoured division failed to advance after sucessfully securing the Nijmegen road bridge which the 10th SS panzer divsion commander had rigged to blow - but it did not blow up. Heinz Harmel was unprepared for the Nijmegen road bridge to fail to blow up so had to put together a blocking force in Elst that night, but before he had a chance to do that it looks almost certain that Carrington and the other tanks would have had almost no resistance, a clear run to Arnhem to reinforce Frost's 2nd Battalion just hanging on by their fingernails at Arnhem bridge. This is according to OC 10th SS Panzer division Heinz Harmel's German Artillery map for that evening which show there were virtually no German forces between Lent and Arnhem. Just a few infantry security pickets in Elst.

3. Brigadier Lathbury of 1st Airborne Division, acting under the command of the other Urquhart. failed to send several companies of 1st Airborne division troops to the Arnhem bridge despite being given a clear route (Lion Route) to the main objective of Market Garden over the radio by Major Tony Hibbert who was at the bridge.

Food for thought... Arnhem and Bernhard

by retired Marconi engineer Dave B.

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Admin

If you look at (From a Bridge Too Far):

http://inquiringminds.cc/food-for-thought-arnhem-and-bernhardt-dave-b

http://www.ohiomotorpool.oldmv.com/htm-files/arnhem.htm

and scan down to the fourth map, you will see that the German blocking force (Battalion Krafft) shown as black line, waiting ready for 1st Airborne on that sunny afternoon on Sunday 17th September. The battalion obviously has its HQ right there in the Bilderberg Hotel (Wolfheze Hotel).

If you look at the Drop Zones 9and landing zones) on proceeding map the line was abreast 1st Brigades route to Arnhem, at least some of the Brigade.

As you can see the Recce Squadron (yellow) ran straight into the line and had to double back quicktime. Only 2nd Battalion (Frost) and some of 1st Brigade HQ (with Brigade Major Hibbert, but without Lathbury, the Brigadier) made it through to Arnhem.

The 3rd Battalion (think they came from glider landing) got round the southern flank but failed to get anywhere near Arnhem and the 1st Battalion had to skirt round the block to the north and also failed to get to Arnhem.

How did this blocking force happen to be in the right place at the right time??? and just a short while after landing.

So you can see that Bilderberg Hotel was where the 1st Airborne (and MG) came unstuck (effectively) right after the Sunday drop  a good place to celebrate 10 years later with 1st Bilderberg meeting.

Top German Hermann Abs (Chairman of Deutsche Bank), Hitlers banker and IG Farben guy was there (he must have thought it very appropriate venue) along with another 8 or 9 Germans.

It would be good to know when name was changed and why (to disguise real name Wolfheze in case someone in the British contingent noticed?).

I wonder if the name (Bilderberg) has any particular meaning.

You say Bernhardt owned the hotel, did he acquire it after MG debacle?

I reckon Bernhardt (and Retinger) must have been laughing down his sleeve at getting all those Brits to gather at this notorious location.

dave

Credits: The Battle For Arnhem  A Bridge Quite Near

http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/58485

http://bcfm.org.uk/2012/03/16/17/friday-drivetime-62/15420

Recent revelations that show Field Marshal Montgomerys Operation Market Garden, in September 1944, aimed at severing German supply lines on the Western Front should have worked. It was early morning in Holland on Sunday 17th September 1944 and as the gliders and paratroopers poured down along a sixty mile corridor to hold the bridges. The furthest bridge from the front line at Arnhem became the focus of attention as and the biggest airborne operation in history unfolded. Was it really A Bridge Too Far as the title of Cornelius Ryans book and Robert E. Levines famous film imply? Or could the tanks and ground troops of XXX corps have gotten through to relieve the surrounded British paratroopers? With Arnhem only 10 kilometres, a 30 minute drive away and a virtually clear road ahead  General Horrocks M4 Sherman tanks inexplicably halted for 17 hours. By the time the tanks started rolling at lunchtime the next day British paratroopers had run out of ammunition, been forced to surrender and German Panzer 5 & Tiger tank reinforcements had arrived to block the way. The Nijmegen bridgehead was established around 19:00hrs, 3 hours later, at 22:00hrs that evening the British were forced to surrender at the Arnhem bridge. So paratroopers of the 1st Airborne division at Arnhem bridge may have been relieved in the nick of time and war in Europe could have been over six months earlier, by Christmas 1944. We look at Cornelius Ryans book A Bridge Too Far as well as Joseph E. Levines film of the same name. Interviews with: Captain T. Moffatt Burriss, author of Strike and Hold who was commander of i-company, 504th regiment, 82nd Airborne division during the legendary Waal river crossing; Robert Kershaw author of It Never Snows In September who interviewed 10th SS Panzer Division Brigadeführer Heinz Harmel, commander of the German defence of the Nijmegen and Arnhem bridges; Major Tony Hibbert who was a senior officer of 2nd batallion 1st brigade, British 1st Airborne division at the Arnhem bridge; Tim Lynch author of Operation Market Garden: The Legend of the Waal Crossing; Sir Brian Urquhart, army intelligence officer in the run-up to the operation he was critical of it and transferred before it began but later became Secretary General of the newly formed United Nations.

March 2012 - leaked audio clips from the 1954 first Bilderberg meeting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99ppJ2QI1nQ

18Mar12 - Operation Market Garden's curious Bilderberg connections

http://www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6765

1900 hrs Wed 20th Sept 1944, Nijmegen - Can XXX Corps make it to Arnhem? My scenarios for two Market Garden wargames

Friday's show about Operation Market Garden has several Bilderberg references. Here is a more comprehensive exposition of the three bizarre Bilderberg/Market Garden links: Sunday 17th September 1944's Operation Market Garden and Bilderberg

Horrocks and Monty with Bilderberg founder & former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands

1) Firstly Despite being a former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was actually with Field Marshal Montgomery, General Brian Horrocks etc. in Whitehall influencing planning intelligence at the highest level in the run up to Market Garden in September 1944. The Royal Navy and RAF did not trust Bernhard but it seems King George VI insisted he had to be trusted by the Army as he could liase with the Dutch resistance. Trouble with that was he knew very little about Holland, he was a German, brought up in Bavaria who married into the Dutch royal family in 1937. Sir Brian Urquhart makes reference to Bernhard's presence too in the second clip toward the end of the show. Bernhard was chair of the top secret Bilderberg conference from 1954 to 1975.

2) A later chairman of the Bilderberg Lord Peter Carrington was a young Grenadier Guards captain and radio operator in the second squadron of tanks to cross the Nijmegen road bridge. Because he would not go on to Arnhem after the bridge was taken at 18:30hrs on the evening of Wednesday 20th September he was threatened at gunpoint by Captain T. Moffat Burriss of 82nd Airborne who ordered Carrington to get moving. Confronted by Burriss' tommy gun pointing at his head Carrington pulled the lid down on his tank and stayed in there all night. Burriss had just lost half his company seizing the north end of the Nijmegen bridge and now the advance had ground to a halt right at the crucial moment.

At that point evidence suggests the road from Nijmegen to Arnhem was clear of any force that could stop a tank - this we know because of an artillery map passed to parachute regiment liason officer and historian Robert Kershaw by CO of the 10th SS Panzer Division Heinz Harmel before he died. Artillery maps are very reliable because they show exact dispositions of friendly forces so the German artillery does not fire on their own people.

There is also the fact that Harmel was expecting to be able to dramatically blow up the Nijmegen Road bridge that evening when the first British tanks crossed it. When he tried to do this around 18:30hrs the charges failed to go off and this necessitated bringing his forces down from Arnhem to contain the forces he expected to be pouring over the captured Nijmegen bridge at any moment. Trouble was the Arnhem bridge was still being denied to him by Colonel Frost's regiment who held the Arnhem bridge until their defences collapsed around 22:00hrs that evening.

You may have noticed from the timings here that the mighty British Guards Armoured division had precisely 3 hours to make the 9km drive to Arnhem where Frost's men were hanging on by their fingernails. That would have taken Lord Carrington's M4 Sherman about 30 minutes to get there. By 22:00hrs Frost's position was being overrun so why did Peter Carrington, Allan Adair and Brian Horrocks not send one or two battle-groups of tanks through the security pickets which were half way to Arnhem in Elst to relieve the beleagured paratroopers in the nick of time?

Harmel was later to say "The four tanks who crossed the bridge made a mistake when they stayed in Lent. If they had carried on their advance, it would have been all over for us. ... Why did they not drive on to Elst instead of staying in Lent? ... At this instant there were no German armored forces available to block Elst. This gave us time to get Kampfgruppe Knaust down there." The time Horrocks gave them was in fact over seventeen hours, XXX corps did not move out until 12:30hrs the next day by which time the road was utterly impassable, it had been heavily fortified with anti-tank guns, dug-in tank destroyers and of course the notorious Tiger tanks.

3) Then there is the little town of Oosterbeek, which was where the Bristish 1st Airborne division were headquartered in the Hartenstein hotel, surrounded by Germans. The SS called the allied pocket "Der Hexenkessel" which means "Witches Cauldron" because, the lightly armed paratroopers in Oosterbeek who were short of ammunition were facing rockets, flamethrower tanks, Tiger and other heavy tanks as well as anti-aircraft guns. Only a tiny proportion of the British Paras. managed to get back to the allied lines alive. This Oosterbeek 'witches' cauldron' was the venue, ten years later, for the first ever secret Bilderberg meeting at Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg hotel in Oosterbeek.

http://groups.google.com/group/pepis/browse_thread/thread/a5c75e4760cba030

http://bcfm.org.uk/2012/03/16/17/friday-drivetime-62/15420

http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/58485

Martin Bormann, Nazi In Exile by Paul Manning (1981)

Nazi finance & continuity network - rare book about Hitler's No. 2 whose death was faked in 1972

Download the eBook for free below

A decisively powerful network of corporate entities run by hardened SS veterans, the Bormann group constitutes what one veteran banker termed the greatest concentration of money power under a single control in history. The foundation of the organizations clout is moneylots and lots of money. Controlling German big business and, through investments, much of the rest of the worlds economy, the organization was the repository for the stolen wealth of Europe, estimated by British intelligence to have totaled more than $180 billion by the end of 1943 (not including the money taken from Greece and the former Soviet Union, nor that taken after 1943.) [For more on the global economic significance of the Bormann group, seeamong other programsFTR#99.] This organization literally constitutes a postwar Underground Reich with (as discussed in FTR#155) a governing hierarchy composed of the sons and daughters of SS men, holding military ranks and titles from the Third Reich.

http://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/

Read the book here

Download or read it here in Word document - PDF - or Rich Text formats

Red House Meeting, Thursday August 10th 1944

RED HOUSE MEETING AUGUST 10TH 1944

Extracted from 'Martin Bormann, Nazi In Exile' by Paul Manning

IT WAS EARLY MORNING AND THE HAZE COVERING the broad Alsatian plain was lifting to reveal glistening mountainside acres of wine grapes and the string of fortresses that dominate the hillsides and vineyard villages on the road from Colmar­fortresses old when Joan of Arc was young. A Mercedes- Benz, flying Nazi swastika and SS flags from the front bumpers, was moving at high speed through columns of German infantry marching toward Colmar from where the command car had come. A mountainous region, some of World War IIs bitterest fighting was to take place there as winter approached, once American divisions had bypassed Paris and moved through Metz into the Colmar Gap.

The staff car had left Colmar at first light for Strasbourg, carrying SS Obergruppenfuehrer Scheid, who held the rank of lieutenant general in the Waffen SS, as well as the title of Dr. Scheid, director of the industrial firm of Hermadorff & Schenburg Company. While the beauty of the rolling countryside was not lost on Dr. Scheid, his thoughts were on the meeting of important German businessmen to take place on his arrival at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann himself had ordered the conference, and although he would not physically be present he had confided to Dr. Scheid, who was to preside, The steps to be taken as a result of this meeting will determine the postwar future of Germany. The Reichsleiter had added, German industry must realize that the war cannot now be won, and must take steps to prepare for a postwar commercial campaign which will in time insure the economic resurgence of Germany. It was August 10, 1944. The Mercedes-Benz bearing SS Obergruppenfuehrer Scheid moved slowly now through the narrow streets of Strasbourg. Dr. Scheid noticed that this was a most agreeable city, one to return to after the war. It was the city where in 1792 the stirring Marsellaise was composed by Rouget de Lisle, ostensibly for the mayors banquet. The street signs all in French, the names of the shops all in German, were characteristic of bilingual Alsace, a land that has been disputed throughout known history, particularly since the formation of the two nations, Germany and France. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles restored Alsace-Lorraine to France, but after the fall of France in World War II the Germans reannexed these 5,600 square miles of territory, and life went on as usual, except for the 18,000 Alsatians who had volunteered to fight for the Third Reich on the Eastern Front.

The staff car drew up before the Hotel Maison Rouge on the rue des France-Bourgeois. Dr. Scheid, briefcase in hand, entered the lobby and ascended in the elevator to the conference suite reserved for his meeting. Methodically he circled the room, greeting each of the twelve present, then took his place at the head of the conference table. Even the pads and pencils before each man had been checked; Waffen SS technicians had swept the entire room, inspecting for hidden microphones and miniature transmitters. As an additional precaution, all suites flanking the conference suite had been held unfilled, as had the floors above and below, out of bounds for the day. Lunch was to be served in the conference suite by trusted Waffen SS stewards. Those present, all thirteen of them, could be assured that the thorough precautions would safeguard them all, even the secretary who was to take the minutes, later to be typed with a copy sent by SS courier to Bormann.

A transcript of that meeting is in my possession. It is a captured German document from the files of the U.S. Treasury Department, and states who was present and what was said, as the economy of the Third Reich was projected onto a postwar profit-seeking track.

Present were Dr. Kaspar representing Krupp, Dr. Tolle representing Röchling, Dr. Sinceren representing Messerschmitt, Drs. Kopp, Vier, and Beerwanger representing Rheinmetall, Captain Haberkorn and Dr. Ruhe representing Bussing, Drs. Ellenmayer and Kardos representing Volkswagenwerk, engineers Drose, Yanchew, and Koppshem representing various factories in Posen, Poland (Drose, Yanchew, & Co., Brown-Boveri, Herkuleswerke, Buschwerke, and Stadtwerke); Dr. Meyer, an official of the German Naval Ministry in Paris; and Dr. Strossner of the Ministry of Armament, Paris.

Dr. Scheid, papers from his briefcase arranged neatly on the table before him, stated that all industrial matériel in France was to be evacuated to Germany immediately. The battle of France is lost to Germany, he admitted, quoting Reichsleiter Bormann as his authority, and now the defense of the Siegfried Line (and Germany itself) is the main problem. . . . From now on, German industry must take steps in preparation for a postwar commercial campaign, with each industrial firm making new contacts and alliances with foreign firms. This must be done individually and without attracting any suspicion. However, the party and the Third Reich will stand behind every firm with permissive and financial support. He assured those present that the frightening law of 1933 known as Treason Against the Nation, which mandated the death penalty for violation of foreign exchange regulations or concealing of foreign currency, was now null and void, on direct order of Reichsleiter Bormann.

Dr. Scheid also affirmed, The ground must now be laid on the financial level for borrowing considerable sums from foreign countries after the war. As an example of the kind of support that had been most useful to Germany in the past, Dr. Scheid cited the fact that patents for stainless steel belonged to the Chemical Foundation, Inc., New York, and the Krupp Company of Germany, jointly, and that of the United States Steel Corporation, Carnegie, Illinois, American Steel & Wire, National Tube, etc., were thereby under an obligation to work with the Krupp concern. He also cited the Zeiss Company, the Leica Company, and the Hamburg-Amerika Line as typical firms that had been especially effective in protecting German interests abroad. He gave New York addresses to the twelve men. Glancing at his watch, Dr. Scheid asked for comments from each of the twelve around the table. Then he adjourned the morning session for lunch.

At his signal, soldier stewards brought in a real Strasbourg lunch. On a long side table they placed plates of pâté de foie gras, matelote, noodles, sauerkraut, knuckles of ham, sausages, and onion tarts, along with bottles of Coq au Riesling from nearby wineries. Brandy and cigars were also set out and the stewards left the room, closing the doors quietly as guards stood at attention.

Following lunch, several, including Dr. Scheid, left for the Rhine and Germany, where they would spread the word among their peers in industry about the new industrial goals for the postwar years.

A smaller conference in the afternoon was presided over by Dr. Bosse of the German Armaments Ministry. It was attended only by representatives of Hecko, Krupp, and Röchling. Dr. Bosse restated Bormanns belief that the war was all but lost, but that it would be continued by Germany until certain goals to insure the economic resurgence of Germany after the war had been achieved. He added that German industrialists must be prepared to finance the continuation of the Nazi Party, which would be forced to go underground, just as had the Maquis in France.

From now on, the government in Berlin will allocate large sums to industrialists so that each can establish a secure postwar foundation in foreign countries. Existing financial reserves in foreign countries must be placed at the disposal of the party in order that a strong German empire can be created after defeat. It is almost immediately required, he continued, that the large factories in Germany establish small technical offices or research bureaus which will be absolutely independent and have no connection with the factory. These bureaus will receive plans and drawings of new weapons, as well as documents which they will need to continue their research. These special offices are to be established in large cities where security is better, although some might be formed in small villages near sources of hydroelectric power, where these party members can pretend to be studying the development of water resources for benefit of any Allied investigators.

Dr. Bosse stressed that knowledge of these technical bureaus would be held only by a very few persons in each industry and by chiefs of the Nazi Party. Each office would have a liaison agent representing the party and its leader, Reichsleiter Bormann. As soon as the party becomes strong enough to reestablish its control over Germany, the industrialists will be paid for their effort and cooperation by concessions and orders.

At both morning and afternoon conferences, it was emphasized that the existing prohibition against the export of capital is now completely withdrawn and replaced by a new Nazi policy, in which industrialists with government assistance (Bormann to be the guiding leader) will export as much of their capital as possible, capital meaning money, bonds, patents, scientists, and administrators.

Bosse urged the industrialists to proceed immediately to get their capital outside Germany. The freedom thus given to German industrialists further cements their relations with the party by giving them a measure of protection in future efforts at home and overseas.

From this day, German industrial firms of all rank were to begin placing their funds­and, wherever possible, key manpower­ abroad, especially in neutral countries. Dr. Bosse advised that two main banks can be used for the export of funds for firms who have made no prior arrangements: the Basler Handelsbank and the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt of Zurich. He also stated, There are a number of agencies in Switzerland which for a five percent commission will buy property in Switzerland for German firms, using Swiss cloaks.

Dr. Bosse closed the meeting, observing that after the defeat of Germany, the Nazi Party recognizes that certain of its best known leaders will be condemned as war criminals. However, in cooperation with the industrialists, it is arranging to place its less conspicuous but most important members with various German factories as technical experts or members of its research and designing offices.

The meeting adjourned late. As the participants left, Dr. Bosse placed a call to Martin Bormann in Berlin over SS lines. The conversation was cryptic, merely a report that all industrialists at the one-day Strasbourg conference had agreed to the new policy of flight capital as initiated by the Reichsleiter. With the report completed, Bormann then placed a call, to Dr. Georg von Schnitzler, member of the central committee of the I.G. Farben board of directors.

I.G. Farben had been the largest single earner of foreign exchange for Germany during the years of the Third Reich. Its operations in Germany included control of 380 companies with factories, power installations, and mines, as well as vast chemical establishments. It operated in 93 countries and the sun never set on I.G. Farben, which had a participation, both acknowledged and concealed, in over 500 firms outside Germany. They grew as the Third Reich did, and as German armies occupied each country in Europe they were followed by Farben technicians who built further factories and expanded the I.G. investment to RM (Reichsmarks) 7 billion. The Farben cartel agreements involving trade and the related use of its chemical patents also numbered over 2,000, including such major industrial concerns as Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), the Aluminum Company of America, E.I. du Font de Nemours, Ethyl Export Corporation, Imperial Chemical Industries (Great Britain), Dow Chemical Company, Rohm & Haas, Etablissments Kuhlman (France), and the Mitsui interests of Japan.

I.G. Farben was a formidable ally for Reichsleiter Bormann in his plans for the postwar economic rebirth of Germany. In a telephone conversation with Dr. von Schnitzler, Bormann asked what would the loss of factories in France and the other occupied countries mean to German industry in general and to I.G. in particular. Dr. von Schnitzler said he believed the technical dependence of these countries on I.G. would be so great that despite German defeat I.G., in one way or another, could regain its position of control of the European chemical business. They will need the constant technical help of I.G.s scientific laboratories as they do not own appropriate installations within themselves, he further told Bormann, adding that he and other industrialists such as Hermann Röchling do not think much of Hitlers recent declaration of a scorc