THE PLOT AGAINST THE PEACE

OUR peace, that is. This book is the cornerstone of my library. I recall first eying it in a used bookstore in Los Angeles over 20 years ago, when I was just waking up to the fact that America was, in reality, a fascist enclave. The title immediately caught my attention. I read the first page and felt immediate horror, bought the book, took it home and struggled with what it was telling me. Since, I've only been building on the foundation this book in part provided.

Fascist horror has never left my life, btw, and out of the altruism in my heart I give you the key to it. - Big-Hearted AC

Dial Press, 1945 - hardcover
from pages 11 to 23

PART I

CHAPTER ONE
THE HIDDEN RESERVES

"Au revoir, in twenty years!" Colonel Hermann Kriebel of the German Armistice Commission, taking leave of the Allied representatives in 1919.

"One day we shall come back. Until then, à bientôt!" The last words of an anonymous German military spokesman over the Nazi radio in Brussels on September 1, 1944.

I. The Secret Plan: 1915-1945

THE German General Staff has always regarded military defeat as merely a temporary phase of war. The war goes on. Battle strategy becomes underground conspiracy; artillery is replaced by propaganda; wartime espionage becomes post-war political intrigue, terror, assassination, and secret preparation for new military attack.

"Even the final decision of war is not to be regarded as absolute," wrote Germany's former military theorist, General Karl von Clausewitz, in his celebrated treatise Vom Kriege (On War). "The conquered nation often sees it only as a passing phase, to be repaired in after times by political combinations."

These words have been deeply pondered by the German General Staff–the cabal of army officers, Junkers, and industrialists who are the real rulers of Germany.* They provided the German General Staff with the basis of a secret plan by which it successfully operated after the First World War. Today Germany's rulers are again operating on the basis of this secret plan in Germany and throughout the world. . . .

*It should be remembered that throughout this book the phrase German General Staff does not mean the German military leadership alone, but describes the entire political, economic, and military leadership of imperialist Germany. For a detailed characterization of the German General Staff, see Part II, Chapter Five.

The original form of this secret plan of the German General Staff was discovered in 1915 by William Seamen Bainbridge, an American representative in Berlin. After the First World War, seeking to warn America, Bainbridge wrote a detailed report on Germany for the United States Government. It appears as Document No. 26, Official Senate Documents, First Session of the 68th Congress of the United States. This little-known American document contains the most sensational forecast ever made regarding German policy.

Here is the five-point secret German General Staff plan as revealed to Bainbridge in 1915, three years before the end of the last war, by a German officer in a room in the Hotel Adlon, Berlin:

"(1) An armistice will come before any hostile army crosses Germany's frontier.

(2) There will be no scars on the Fatherland after this war.

(3) The immediate competitors in the economic and commercial world will be so crippled that, when it is all over, the Germans will be outselling them in the markets of the world long before they can get on their feet.

(4) Following the war, there will be economic hell, industrial revolution.
We will set class against class, individual against individual, until the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us.

(5) If need be, the Fatherland may dissemble into component parts and reassemble at the strategic time."

In concluding this extraordinary revelation, the German officer turned to Bainbridge and said with deliberate emphasis:

"The greatest struggle will come after the war. The weapon will be propaganda, the value of which we know. The Allies will be torn asunder, each will be put at the others' throats like a lot of howling gnashing hounds. And when they are all separated from France, Germany will deal with her alone."

This German postwar plan was successfully carried out by the German General Staff after the First World War. The Armistice came before any hostile army could cross Germany's frontier. The war left Germany's economic might unimpaired, and Germany's plants, mills, and mines unscathed. In the years following the war, Germany was able the challenge America, Britain, and France for the markets of the world. German intrigue and propaganda set Britain against France, America against Europe, and all the countries against Soviet Russia. . . .

In the Second World War the German General Staff has been unable to prevent the invasion of Germany's home territory. But the German plan today is otherwise almost identical with the plan it carried out with such amazing success following the last German debacle. As Marshal Stalin pointed out in 1942, the German General Staff is methodical and efficient; but it is not very imaginative. Once it has conceived a plan, it follows it step by step, again and again and again, no matter what happens. Like burglars who continually leave their "signatures" behind them at the scene of their robberies, the German General Staff conducts its conspiracy today precisely as it did thirty years ago.

On February 26, 1945, one of the most remarkable exposés of the Second World War appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. It was an article revealing in full detail the plans of the German General Staff for converting the Nazi Party into an underground apparatus which would continue functioning after the military defeat of Nazi Germany and would carry on systematic preparations for a third world war.

Pravda reported that the German General Staff had already taken the following measures:

"(1) Creation of a powerful financial base for extensive subsidizing of underground work.

(2) Preservation of the main cadres of the party.

(3) Preservation of the economic base of the German war machine.

(4) The political preparation of revenge."

The article in Pravda stated that these activities were being carried on "both within and outside Germany," and that within Germany the Nazis were preparing to conduct their underground work chiefly along three lines:

organization of sabotage and terrorist bands; setting up of a widely ramified clandestine fascist organization; and sabotage of peace terms between Germany and the United Nations.

The article continued:

"At the present time, the German General Staff feverishly prepares plans for the operations of the fascist underground army, which must be centered chiefly in the hilly and wooded terrain of East Prussia, southern and southwestern Germany, in Tyrol and in Austria."

A special secret staff had already been selected to direct the operations of the Nazi underground machine. Pravda revealed the names of the men on the staff:

"To direct these operations, a special headquarters has been set up in Munich under Wilhelm Schepmann–one of the organizers of anti-Allied sabotage in the Ruhr in 1923. The members of Schepmann's staff are Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Gestapo chief and chief of the Military Intelligence Service; Hitler's personal friend, Werner von Alwensleben; senior officers of the Security Service and Obergruppen Fuehrer Schellenberg* and Melle."

The terrorist detachments of the Nazi underground army, stated the Soviet newspaper, "will consist of picked fascist cutthroats from SS units," which "at present . . . are studying future theatres of operations in the areas assigned to them."

Pravda went on to give a detailed description of the vast and intricate apparatus that had already been organized by the German General Staff:

"Simultaneously a ramified network of secret caches of arms, ammunition, clothing, provisions, secret signals, and communication lines is being laid out.

"Along with the preparation of terrorist bands, a huge underground apparatus is being set up to conduct various underground work and fascist propaganda–the so-called sixth column.

"The territory of Germany, divided into sectors and areas, is being covered with a dense network of clandestine Nazi party organizations, consisting of many thousands of secret cells. . . .

"This clandestine organization will serve to build up cadres for the future German Army."

The overall postwar strategy and tactics of this elaborate Nazi underground organization, concluded Pravda, were to be supervised from abroad by a "special General Staff" residing "in one of the neutral countries."

*Obergruppen Fuehrer Schellenberg was previously active as a secret Nazi agent in the United States. See page 169.

II. Conspiracies and Confessions

In the spring of 1943 the German General Staff started its contemporary application of the secret German postwar plan. Nazi Germany was face to face with catastrophe. The entire German Sixth Army under General von Paulus had been surrounded and annihilated by the Red Army at Stalingrad. That was the historic turning point of the Second World War.

In November 1943 the French resistance weekly, Combat, published in Algiers, printed the text of a secret German General Staff memorandum which had fallen into Allied hands after the German debacle in North Africa.

The author of the memorandum was General Otto von Stuelpnagel who ruled France for Hitler from 1940 to 1944.

This is what the German General wrote:

"What does a provisional defeat matter to us if because of the destruction of manpower and material which we will have been able to inflict on our enemies and neighboring territories, we have obtained a margin of economic and demographic superiority greater than before 1939? The conquest of the world will require numerous stages, but the essential is that the end of each stage brings us an economic and industrial essential greater than that of our enemies. With war booty which we have accumulated, the enfeebling of two generations of the manpower, the destruction of the industries of our neighbors and that which we can save of our own, we shall be better placed to conquer in twenty-five years than we were in 1939. The interval of twenty-five years is a limited interval, for that is the time which will be required for Russia to repair the destruction we have visited on her."

The memorandum mentioned some of the elaborate devices by which the rulers of Germany would seek to evade a just peace:

"We do not have to fear peace conditions analogous to those which we would have imposed because our adversaries will always be divided and disunited. Our enemies recognize already that the 1919 formula, 'Germany will pay,' lacked sense and worth. We will furnish them some brigades of workers, we will restore some art objects or out-of-date machines, and we can always say that those which we do not restore were destroyed by enemy bombardments. We should immediately prepare as camouflage a list of such objects destroyed by Anglo-American bombs."

The basic aim of the German plan, now as in 1918, is to secure a final peace settlement, no matter how severe it may appear on the surface, or how hard on the German people, which will leave German economic power intact.

With amazing consistency Germany's rulers are repeating the same strategy they employed in the past to obtain the kind of peace settlement suitable to their aims. In both instances, this strategy was mapped out long in advance. . . .

In his war memoirs, General Erich Ludendorff revealed that as early as 1916 the German General Staff decided that it could not win the First World War and that it then began its campaign for a negotiated peace. The peace intrigues went on steadily throughout 1916, 1917, and were intensified after the failure of Ludendorff's spring offensive in 1918.

Ludendorff tells of the hopes he placed in the Vatican as an intermediary for a negotiated peace. "I also entertained some hopes," continued Ludendorff, "of the efforts being made by the representative of the Foreign Office in Brussels, Herr von der Lancken, who sought to get in touch with French statesmen. He went to Switzerland, but the gentlemen from France stayed away."

Ludendorff reveals that the German General Staff was confident it could divide the Allied nations, play one against the other, and so secure the kind of final peace settlement that Germany wanted.

In August 1918, Ludendorff told the Kaiser: "The war must be ended."
But the Kaiser, like Hitler twenty years later, was unwilling to surrender his power and demanded the continuation of the hostilities.

At this juncture, when the German General Staff was frantically seeking peace so as to forestall complete Allied victory, the famous German steel magnate, August Thyssen, published an extraordinary "Confession" for all the world to read. It was the most sensational document of the last war.

August Thyssen, stating that German industrialists were prepared to sacrifice the Kaiser in return for peace, wrote:

"In 1912 the Hohenzollerns saw that the war had become a necessity to the preservation of the military system upon which their power depends . . . they, therefore, in 1912, decided to embark on a great war of conquest.

"But to do this they had to get the commercial community to support them in their aims. They did this by holding out to them hopes of great personal gain as a result of the war. . . .

"I was personally promised a free grant of 30,000 acres in Australia and a loan from a Deutsche Bank of £150,000 at 3 per cent . . . to enable me to develop my business in Australia. Several other firms were promised special trading facilities in India, which was to be conquered by Germany . . . a syndicate was formed for the exploitation of Canada. This syndicate consisted of the heads of twelve great firms; the working capital being fixed at £20,000,000, half of which was to be found by the German government.

"There were, I have heard, promises made of a more personal character . . . "

This astonishing document reached the United States in the early spring of 1918. It was published as a pamphlet entitled The Hohenzollern Plot by August Thyssen. It was reprinted many times, quoted in newspapers, inserted into the Congressional Record, and publicized especially in American business circles. It did much towards convincing American public opinion that peace could be made with the "sound, business interests" in Germany.

Meanwhile, although Thyssen's "Confession" had openly called for the removal of the Kaiser and the conclusion of the war, nothing was done by the Kaiser's Government to arrest Thyssen or stop the publication of his document. The steel magnate continued to live in Germany, unmolested and in full control of his vast industrial interests.

After the war, August Thyssen died, and the famous "Confession" was forgotten.

But the German plan had worked. The peace left German industry intact and in the hands of Fritz Thyssen, Krupp, Kirdorff, Stinnes, and their associates, the industrial representatives of the German General staff.

Twenty years later, in the summer of 1940, another astonishing and sensational "Confession" was made public by a German industrialist. With Poland conquered and France in its last throes, the German General Staff was again ready for peace in the West, so that it could prepare the next stage of the war: the invasion of Soviet Russia. This time the German "Confession" denounced Hitler, and stated that German industry was prepared to sacrifice Hitler in return for a favorable peace with the nations of the West.

The 1940 "Confession" was written by Fritz Thyssen, son of August Thyssen, and inheritor of his father's steel trust.

Fritz Thyssen wrote:

"I undertook to finance the N.S.D.A.P. (Nazi Party), together with von Papen, von Schroeder, Kirdorff, Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. We are, so to speak, the guarantors to Germany and the world for Hitler's good conduct . . .
"Hitler promised us the things we most wanted: to von Papen, power and honor; to Krupp, commissions and money, mountains of money; and to me, in particular, a peaceful period of German politics at home and abroad; and understanding with England; and understanding with the working classes who, through far-reaching social reforms, should be compensated for the loss of all political rights; the abolition of trade unions and the appropriation of their property. He promised us a sort of Christian state whose authority should be supported by the Church. . . . "

This second Thyssen "Confession" which burst like a bombshell in the summer of 1940 was immediately circulated throughout Europe and America, just as the first Thyssen "Confession" had been in 1918. The words of Fritz Thyssen were printed in various forms in the United States by Life, the New York Times, the American magazine, Time, Newsweek, were quoted on the radio, referred to in Congress, and, in general, given the widest possible publicity. Fritz Thyssen was reported to be a fugitive from the Gestapo, hiding somewhere as a miserable refugee in southern France.
Thyssen was actually living in a luxurious private villa at Cannes. On one side of his villa was the home of Pierre Etienne Flandin, the notorious French pro-Nazi politician and advocate of a Franco-German alliance against Soviet Russia. Flanking Thyssen's villa on the other side was the prewar residence of Sir Neville Henderson, former British Ambassador to Berlin, one-time friend of Goering and Ribbentrop, and ardent member of the British Cliveden Set.

After the Nazi occupation of France, Fritz Thyssen continued to live in his luxurious villa at Cannes surrounded on all sides by Nazi officials and high-ranking Nazi generals.

In 1943, as Hitler's armies faced disaster in Russia, Fritz Thyssen returned to Germany. He was last seen by a Swedish correspondent early in 1944 residing at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, still ready to make peace with Britain and America "to save Europe from Bolshevism."

Fritz Thyssen wrote in his famous "Confession":

"Peace is to be had. The price is not high. It is easy to arrange. . . . We still have men who hold the reins."

In January 1945, when the Red Army smashed through the crucial German defenses east of Berlin, German peace emissaries rushed frantically into Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal. Edmund Hugo Stinnes showed up in Stockholm. Franz von Papen appeared in Madrid. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht was in Switzerland. The Vatican was besieged by German couriers. In every case the reported peace offers were identical: Germany would get rid of Hitler; Germany would repay what she had stolen; Germany would disarm; Germany would disband the Nazi organizations and abolish the Nazi laws; Germany would transform herself, just as Thyssen had promised in 1940, into a "Christian state." So long as Germany could keep her economic power intact, Germany's rulers were ready to come to almost any terms with their enemies.

But precautionary steps had already been taken by the German General Staff and its Nazi and industrialist representatives to build hidden reserves of capital, cash, and investments in foreign countries.

III. Camouflaged Capital

In the fall of 1918, within a few months of the General Staff's decision to sue for peace, billions of marks had been smuggled out of Germany to Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and other foreign centers of German commercial activity. The Neue Zuercher Zeitung in June 1919, estimated the figure of "emigrated capital" which German interests had cached in Switzerland at 35 billion marks. The Dutch aviation designer, Fokker, describes in his memoirs The Flying Dutchman how an entire military aviation plant in Germany was dismembered and secretly transported to Holland. The Dornier Airplane Company, with headquarters in Friedrichshafen, was moved across Lake Constance to Switzerland. The Rohrbach plant was transferred to Denmark; Heinkel and Junkers established themselves in Sweden. All these transfers were done at the request of the General Staff and accomplished with the aid of the German Army.

Admiral Canaris, of the Imperial Naval Intelligence, and subsequently of the Nazi Naval Intelligence, went to Spain to supervise German-controlled shipyards and submarine plants at Vigo.

Baron Manfred von Killinger, Imperial Army officer and subsequent Nazi Consul in the United States, established a company in Echevarria, Spain, to experiment with new types of submarines for Krupp.

The same thing is happening today.

A dispatch from Stockholm, Sweden, to the New York Times, January 30, 1945, revealed that German industrialists were placing huge capital foundations in Sweden by registering their patents at the Swedish State Patent Office to elude seizure by the United Nations. The Times dispatch read:

"A perusal of patent applications, which must be recorded in the Swedish Official Journal, reveals that a good 50 per cent of all patent applications hail from German firms. The latest ones come from such major German concerns as I.G. Farben, Zeiss-Ikon, Boch, and the Daimler-Bainz companies, besides the A.E.G. and Siemens."

This flight of German capital into neutral Sweden represents only a fraction of the capital investments which Germany had already secreted abroad.

As of February 1945 there were no less than 987 joint stock companies in Spain controlled completely by German capital. Two thousand Spanish companies, many of them with branches and affiliates in North and South America, have German directors on their boards.

As late as the summer of 1944, as the American journalist Ted Allan revealed in Collier's Magazine on February 3, 1945, the international German trust, I.G. Farben, built four new chemical plants in Madrid. In March 1944, I.G. Farben completed a synthetic oil plant in Pueblonuevo del Terrible near Córdoba. This plant had a Spanish name, Calvo Sotelo, and was supposedly controlled by Spaniards. It was owned completely by I.G. Farben. Also in the summer of 1944, I.G. Farben built a magnesium plant in Santander, Spanish northern port. Other German plants, steel, textile, munitions, and mines, exist in Catalonia, the Asturias, the Basque country, and in Galicia.

The Spanish multi-millionaire Juan March, who financed Franco's Fascist Falange to the tune of $60,000,000, was a German spy in the First World War, a Krupp agent and collaborator with Admiral Canaris, chief of the German Naval Intelligence. Today, March is providing commercial fronts for German capital smuggled into Spain and, through Spanish outlets, into South America.

Portugal is another center of German financial and industrial activity. An uncensored report printed in the New York Times on January 12, 1944, disclosed: "Like Spain, Portugal teems with German agents and in Lisbon they are as ubiquitous as bootleggers were during prohibition in America. Their red necks gleam in every bar and fine restaurant . . ." Through Portuguese commercial fronts, the Germans have also been able to penetrate South America.

Throughout the Americas, especially in Argentina, German agents have built important new plants, and gained control of mines, banks, railroads, aviation lines, chemicals, and steel works. Fritz Mandl virtually controlled the munitions industry in Argentina on behalf of I.G. Farben. Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish multi-millionaire adventurer, and intimate friend of Marshal Hermann Goering, has set up Krupp and I.G. Farben fronts throughout South America, and especially in Argentina. Alfredo Moll, who has been described as the "gray eminence" of the Nazis in Buenos Aires, is the son-in-law of the president of the Central Bank of Argentina. Moll is director of the firm of Anilinas Alemenas, branch of the I.G. Garben trust in Argentina.

Testifying before the Kilgore Committee on September 12, 1944, Sims Carter, Assistant Chief of the Economic Warfare Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, revealed:

"When the German guns are silenced in Europe, the principal German industrial combines plan renewed activity from bases in Argentina. Organizations and outlets of distribution have been maintained. Profits from sales at wartime prices made ample means available. All the machinery is ready for safeguarding German supremacy in the steadily expanding South American market."

The plan by which the German General Staff has operated in South America was drawn up many years before Hitler took power in Germany. If the German plan prevails, it will continue to operate many years after the smashing of the Hitler regime. This plan is directly aimed at the eventual German conquest of the United States.


Immediately after the First World War, the German secret infiltration of the Latin American countries by economic, political, and military agents went into high gear in preparation for the Second World War. Captain Ernst Roehm, organizer of the Nazi Storm Troops, showed up in Bolivia in 1925 as "special advisor" to the Bolivian Army. The German aviation officer Fritz Hammer went to Colombia, where he later organized Nazi espionage and economic infiltration under cover of Nazi aviation concerns. General Bohnstedt became head of the military academy in Salvador and official instructor to the Salvadorean Army. General Reinecke, General Kundt, and many other officer-agents of the German General Staff became active in Chile, Paraguay, and Peru, where they sought to influence the officers' corps and spread hatred of the United States.

from pages 35 to 42

CHAPTER TWO
THE NAZI UNDERGROUND

I. "Universal Chaos"

THE Nazi Party, as the chief political instrument of the German General Staff, has the task of fulfilling the political phase of the secret German postwar plan to sabotage United Nations' victory and peace.

In 1915, Point Four of the German General Staff's secret plan called for the stirring up of postwar international political and economic "hell," so that "the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us."

On January 30, 1945, in his speech commemorating the twelfth anniversary of the Nazi power, Adolf Hitler prophesied that after the Second World War "universal chaos" will consume the world.

The Nazi task is to set individual against individual, class against class, nation against nation, and thus to make impossible the consolidation of Allied victory and give the German General Staff an opportunity to rise again as a military threat to the world for a third time in this century.

On November 6, 1944 Marshal Josef Stalin warned the Soviet people and the world:

"After the defeat of Germany she will, of course, be disarmed, both in the economic and military-political respects. However, it would be naive to think that she will not attempt to restore her power and develop new aggression. It is known to all that the German leaders are already now preparing for a new war . . ."

Like German industry, the Nazi Party also has its hidden economic and political reserves for the postwar struggle against the peace. Statistics recently issued by the British Ministry of Economic Warfare estimate that the Nazis looted close to $27,000,000,000 from the conquered European nations. Most of this loot was appropriated by the Nazi Party, providing a massive secret fund for the financing of international Nazi underground activities for years to come. Besides this, the Nazi leaders have their personal financial caches. Since 1943, Nazi money, jewels, and other valuables have been streaming across the Reich frontiers and finding their way by clandestine channels into Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and North and South America. In Switzerland alone, more than 300,000,000 gold francs, or approximately sixty million dollars, are known to have been banked to the private accounts of Nazi leaders. . . .

With these vast hidden sums at their disposal, the Nazis have already reconstituted and reorganized their wartime international Fifth Columns and set up new propaganda agencies and terrorist leagues for the postwar period. Already, in all countries of the United Nations, Nazi-financed and Nazi-inspired agitators are at work seeking to create the "chaos" which Hitler called for in January 1945. Terrorist attempts have been made on the lives of General de Gaulle of France, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, and other United Nations leaders. Race riots, separatist movements, wildcat strikes, putsches and political disorders of every kind are being deliberately incited by Nazi Fifth Column agents in an attempt to break the national and world unity of the United Nations.

In France, Paul Ghali revealed in a European dispatch to the Chicago Daily News on September 28, 1944, Joseph Darnand's notorious Militia and other French fascist organizations have been "reconstructed and rearmed" under the personal supervision of Heinrich Himmler to carry on underground "terrorism and fifth column activities in France after the war."

In Italy, former agents of the Fascist OVRA, trained by the Nazis, have been smuggled back into the liberated areas to build propaganda and terrorist agencies, to plot assassinations of anti-fascist Italian leaders and to spread anti-United Nations and other Nazi propaganda. A Rome dispatch to the New York Herald Tribune on February 10, 1945, by John Chabot Smith, warned of "the alarming degree of Fascist sympathy and Fascist underground which still exists in liberated Rome."

In Greece, Leland Stowe reported in February 1945, certain Nazi agents and Greek Fifth Columnists posing as "anti-Communists" and Greek "nationalists" had taken advantage of the confusion following the campaign against the Elas resistance movements to penetrate the Intelligence services, special police units, and even Greek government offices, and to carry on widespread terrorism and Nazi-fascist agitation.

In Finland, a few weeks after the German Army withdrew and the Finnish government signed peace with Soviet Russia, two Red Army officers were assassinated in a Helsinki park. Investigation by the Allied Control Commission revealed, according to a statement by Soviet officials in January 1945, that Nazi agents and Finnish Lappo fascists were spreading their propaganda throughout Finland and fomenting widespread underground "opposition to the United Nations and particularly the Soviet Union."

In Norway, in February 1945, Nazi leaders and Quislingites prepared for future underground struggle by destroying all records of their past activities and concealing their identities with false birth certificates. Lord Vansittart, spokesman for the British Intelligence Service, told the House of Lords on February 7, 1945, that he knew "the names of a good few of the worst Gestapo butchers and torturers in Norway who have their false papers ready," and who were planning to go underground in Norway after the Allied armies liberated that country "to organize sabotage and political assassination."

Similar Nazi-fascist terrorist and propaganda activities, or preparations for underground struggle, were going on in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere.
On February 24, 1945, at a session of the Egyptian Chamber of Deputies, during which Egypt declared war on the Axis, four fascist terrorists fired ten shots at Premier Ahmed Maher Pasha, fatally wounding the Egyptian leader. One of the assassins, Mahmond Essawy, had been previously interned for pro-Nazi activities.

In Spain, the Soviet newspaper Red Fleet revealed on February 7, 1945, German planes from Stuttgart and other German airports were arriving "every day in Barcelona with Hitlerites." From Spain, the Nazi agents were moving on to other countries in Europe and especially to South America, bringing with them funds and instructions for the potent Nazi Fifth Columns already operating in the Western Hemisphere.

In January 1945, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, sent out a nationwide alarm for three key German agents believed to have been secretly landed in the United States to make contacts with other agents already operating in the country. Each of these three German agents had previously been active in South America. Here are their records:

Max Christian Johannes Schneeman: forty-four years old; former resident of Pereira, Colombia, South America, born in Hoeehst, Germany; expert linguist, fluent in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and German; agent of the Nazi SS (Schutz Staffel or Elite Guards).

Hans Rudolf Zuehlsdorff: twenty-five years old; former resident of Bogotá, Columbia, where he was a commercial advertiser and sales representative for a German firm; born in Guestrov, Meke, Germany; expert linguist, fluent in German, English, and Spanish; described by the FBI as being "more American than German in his mannerisms"; agent of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.

Oscar Max Wilms: thirty-seven years old; former resident of Managua, Nicaragua; fluent in Spanish, German, and English; born in Hamburg, Germany; former partner in a German export-import firm at Managua; agent of Nazi Propaganda Ministry.

The most important of all the German agents in South America has been General Wilhelm von Faupel, the German General Staff's leading expert on Argentina.

Faupel's work in the Americas has not been interrupted as a result of the defeat of the German Army in Europe. In fact, Faupel's work was specially designed by the General Staff to continue long after the end of the present war. Faupel's task has been to prepare the ground in South America for a third world war. If Germany's plans succeed, next time the United States will not be able to fight Germany in Europe; it will be fighting for its own existence in the Western Hemisphere.

Faupel's entire career as an agent of the German General Staff is in itself a revelation of the long-range planning of Germany's rulers. Before the First World War, from 1911-1913, Faupel was active in Argentina as a "professor" at the Military Academy in Buenos Aires. Thoroughly familiar with Latin American and Spanish affairs, he was recalled at the outbreak of war and sent into Spain to become chief of the German espionage and sabotage activities in the Mediterranean area. Then, immediately after Germany's defeat in 1918, Faupel was sent back to Argentina. Until 1927, he held the post of "chief adviser" to the Argentine General Staff. On the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, Faupel returned to Germany. He next appeared to public view as Director of the Nazi Ibero-American Institute, central clearing-house for German espionage and conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.

Under Faupel's command, at the headquarters of the Ibero-American Institute, which Hitler housed in an imposing mansion at Number 7 Fuerenstrasse, Zehlendorff, Berlin, hundreds of German agents and American, Canadian, and South American fifth columnists were trained for work. The Spanish Fascist Falange was born in Faupel's headquarters, and Faupel personally organized the Nazi Condor Division which invaded Spain to suppress the Republican Government and help put Generalissimo Franco in power. In 1938, with Falangist Spain as a springboard, Faupel began his final preparations for the German conquest of South America.

The plan by which Faupel operated was not new. It had been the dream of the General Staff for generations to establish Pan-German hegemony over the South American republics as a prelude to the invasion and conquest of the United States. As far back as 1904, Ernst Hasse, precursor of Hitler, and President of the notorious Pan-German League in Berlin, wrote in a widely-publicized article:

"The Argentine and Brazilian republics and all the other seedy South American states will accept our advice and listen to reason, voluntarily or under coercion. In a hundred years, both South and North America will be conquered by the German Geist, and the German Emperor will perhaps transfer his residence to New York."

Like his successor, Hitler, Hasse was at first regarded outside of Germany as a crackpot. But the German General Staff, whose agent he was, considered Hasse a leading authority on German world policy, and soon acted directly on his advice regarding South America. At the outbreak of the First World War, all of Central and South America was infiltrated by German agents inciting hatred against the United States. German activities in the United States were chiefly designed to keep America out of the war, but in the event that effort failed the German General Staff had another plan.

In 1917 the German General Staff sought to involve Latin America, especially Mexico, in a secret military pact with Germany and Japan aimed at the invasion and conquest of the United States. At 3 A.M., Berlin time, on January 19, 1917, the following secret message was sent by wireless to Count von Bernstorff, German Ambassador in Washington, from the German Foreign Office in Berlin:

Berlin, January 19, 1917

"On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this it is our endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this is not successful we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together shall make peace. We shall give general financial support and it is understood that Mexico is to recover the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement. You are also instructed to inform the President of Mexico of the above in the greatest confidence as soon as it is certain that there will be an outbreak of war with the United States and suggest that the President of Mexico on his own initiative should communicate with Japan suggesting adherence at once to this plan; at the same time offer to mediate between Germany and Japan.
"Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months.

"(signed) Zimmerman."

Today, the German intrigue in Mexico goes on under cover of the Nazi-inspired Sinarquist movement which, intimately related to the Falange, has been devised by the German General Staff as a means of continuing German political influence in Mexico after this war. But the chief focus of German intrigue in South America today is in Argentina. Under German influence, Argentina has become a source of continuous unrest and anti-United States conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.

In concentrating on Argentina, the German General Staff has again followed a plan which it elaborated many years ago. Before the First World War, Otto Tannenberg, the famous Pan-German propagandist and agent of the General Staff, wrote:

"Germany will take under its protection the republics of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay; furthermore, the southern third of Bolivia and the southern portion of Brazil."

On March 26, 1944, in his personal publication Das Reich, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels wrote:

"Argentina will one day be at the head of a tariff union comprising the nations in the southern half of South America. Such a focus of opposition against the United States of America will, together with Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, form a powerful economic bloc; and eventually, by way of Peru, it will spread northward to place the dollar colony of Brazil in a difficult position."

On June 10, 1944, ten weeks after Goebbel's pronouncement, Colonel Juan Peron, Vice-President and War Minister of Argentina, delivered his pro-Nazi speech which led to the breaking off of relations between the United States and Argentina. Here is what the Argentine War Minister said:

"In South America, it is our mission to make the leadership of Argentina not only possible but indisputable. . . . Hitler's fight in peace and war will guide us. Alliances will be the next step. We will get Bolivia and Chile. Then it will be easy to exert pressure on Uruguay. These five nations will attract Brazil, due to its type of government and its important group of Germans. Once Brazil has fallen, the South American continent will be ours. Following the German example, we will inculcate the masses with the necessary military spirit. . . ."

The voice was the voice of Colonel Peron, but the plan was that of the German General Staff. . . .

"Everywhere, in both Americas," reported the well-known American foreign correspondent, Sigrid Schultz, in 1944 in her significantly titled book Germany Will Try It Again, "they [the Nazis] have incited racial groups, anti-Semitic groups, university professors and students, and the numberless, formless, frustrated people who hope for advancement with Nazi help.

American newspapers have recorded case after case of arrests of Nazi and Japanese sympathizers in this country–air-raid wardens, professors' wives, heads of manufacturing concerns. But these were simply the individuals who were careless or reckless. We must anticipate that they are only a small part of the big whole. The Germans confidently count on their political influence increasing in the United States . . . Thus, the total-war strategists of Germany [and America] plan ahead not only for tomorrow but for generations to come.

The Nazi Fifth Column in the Americas remains a powerful, active, and lavishly financed instrument of the German General Staff's postwar conspiracy against the peace.

http://www.maebrussell.com/Plot%20Against%20The%20Peace/Plot%20Against%20The%20Peace.html

The Killer Countess: Baron Heinrich Thyssen's Daughter

ALSO SEE: "New York Gallery Owner Andrew Crispo and the Death Mask Murder"

Baron Hans Heinrich "Heini" Thyssen-Bornemisza with his fifth and final wife, Carmen, the former Miss Spain:

" ... in the last days of the Second World War, Margit hosted a party for SS officers, Gestapo leaders and local collaborators during which 200 Jews were slaughtered, as entertainment. ... "
••••••••••••••
The killer countess: The dark past of Baron Heinrich Thyssen's daughter

She was born into one of Europe's most powerful dynasties. And involved in a wartime atrocity so shocking that it remains shrouded in secrecy to this day. David Litchfield investigates the dark past of Baron Heinrich Thyssen's daughter Margit

Independent
07 October 2007

When I was researching my book about his family, Baron "Heini" Thyssen-Bornemisza, self-styled "Swiss" industrialist and legendary art collector, always insisted that Margit, his vivacious older sister, was in fact shy and retiring, while his family's castle at Rechnitz had been entirely destroyed by the Russians during the war.

I first suspected he may have been lying when Josi Groh, his Hungarian lawyer, told me that far from being shy and retiring Margit had a "voracious sexual appetite" and that she had remained in residence at the Thyssens' castle throughout the war, enjoying the attention of the SS officers sent there for rest and recreation. But it was his insistence that the castle, or what remained of it, hid a terrible secret that encouraged me to visit Rechnitz.

In this quiet castle town in the foothills of the Alps, I learnt that in the last days of the Second World War, Margit hosted a party for SS officers, Gestapo leaders and local collaborators during which 200 Jews were slaughtered, as entertainment. Ever since, the Thyssens have not accepted involvement and have played down their Nazi past. '

The story begins with Heini's German father, Heinrich, heir to one of the world's largest industrial fortunes. Having profited from the First World War, but lacking an "appropriate" social position, he acquired Hungarian nationality and the dubious title of baron. To complete his reinvention as a Hungarian aristocrat, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon bought himself a castle at Rechnitz, 150km south of Vienna, on the Austro-Hungarian border. But in 1938, when it became obvious that another war was looming, the "Baron" transferred ownership of the castle to his daughter and slipped across the border to the safety of Switzerland.

From Villa Favorita on the shores of Lake Lugano, Heinrich controlled his German mines and factories throughout the war; supplying the Third Reich with coal, steel and U-boats. He also provided his close friend Hermann Goering and the Nazi secret service with international banking facilities, while in 1941 his August Thyssen Bank in Berlin contributed 400,000 Reichmarks towards the upkeep of the castle, which had by then been requisitioned by the SS.

Meanwhile Margit remained at the castle, where she was provided with a generous allowance from Thyssengas, one of her father's German companies. A Thyssengas employee and Nazi Party member, Joachim Oldenburg, was seconded to assist in managing the estate. Locals employed at Rechnitz report that the "young, dashing and virile" Oldenburg quickly accepted responsibility for accompanying Margit on hunting trips – and was soon sharing her bed.

This despite the fact that, in 1933, Margit had enhanced her social position by marrying the impoverished Count Ivan Batthyany, whose family had originally owned the town of Rechnitz and a large slice of Hungary. In a bizarre arrangement, while "the countess" shared the castle with her SS guests and her bed with Joachim Oldenburg, her estranged husband continued to enjoy his wife's money and breed horses on one of the Batthyanys' adjoining Hungarian estates.

Further complicating her domestic arrangements, Margit was also enjoying a dalliance with the sexually ambitious Franz Podezin, a Gestapo administrator and leader of the Rechnitz Nazi Party.

But SS officers were not Margit's only guests at Rechnitz. At the end of 1944, 10,000 Hungarian Jews and gypsies had joined the 100,000 forced labourers building fortifications along the Austro-Hungarian border, which were designed to stop the advancing Red Army. During the 200km westward march from Budapest they were subjected to atrocities at the hands of their guards while local inhabitants felt free to shoot at them as they passed by – thousands died.

Six hundred Jews, assigned to strengthen the Rechnitz defences, were housed in the cellars of the castle, living in appalling conditions. Many were arbitrarily beaten and shot, particularly by Podezin, while local people reported the countess derived obvious sadistic pleasure from observing these barbaric acts: "She always stood right at the front when anything like that was going on," said one witness.

By the spring of 1945, it had become obvious that it was only a matter of time before the advancing Russians would overrun the area but Margit appeared determined to remain at the castle until the last possible minute.

Finally, with the Red Army only 15km away, the countess hosted a party at the castle on the 24 March, the eve of Palm Sunday, inviting up to 40 people including leading Nazi Party, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth members. The party started at 9pm and lasted until dawn, with a great deal of drinking and dancing. But traditional party entertainment was not enough, and at around midnight some 200 half-starved Jews, pronounced unfit for further work, were delivered by lorry to "Kreuzstadel", a barn within walking distance of the castle. Podezin then ushered Margit and 15 of the more senior guests to a store room, gave them weapons and ammunition and invited them to "kill some Jews".

The prisoners were then forced to strip naked before being shot by drunken guests, who returned to the castle to continue to drink and dance until dawn. The following morning, they were heard bragging about the previous night's atrocity: one Stefan Beiglboeck even claiming that he had "slain" six or seven Jews with his own hands.

The bodies of the victims were buried by 15 of the prisoners saved for the purpose. The burial party were kept in the local abattoir before being shot the following evening by Oldenburg and Podezin.

Many years later, Heini admitted his family's industrial and financial support of Hitler and the Third Reich, but he avoided providing any details concerning the Rechnitz massacre.

But within hours of arriving at Rechnitz, my research partner Caroline Schmitz and I had been quizzed by the local innkeeper as to why we were there. He introduced us to sons of the castle's wartime staff and to a retired teacher and the town's official historian, Doctor Josef Hotwagner – a charming man whose ill health does nothing to diminish his wit or his academic skills. Known locally as "the Professor", he is regarded with affection in the town, despite the occasional accusation of being a trouble maker. But Hotwagner has a better reason than most for remaining determined that the Rechnitz massacre should never be forgotten.

The people who committed the barbaric execution were the same people who, in 1941, effectively killed his father by charging him with high treason and sentencing him to 10 years' hard labour at Dachau. Hotwagner senior had been among a small group of townspeople discovered to be supporting the starving women and children left behind when their persecuted men-folk had been shot or forced into slave labour. Dachau was liberated by the Americans in 1945, but Hotwagner's father died in hospital before he was able to return to his family. Josef still displays obvious emotion when recalling the terrible story of both his father and his town.

He remembers the terrible dilemma at eight years of age of he and his mother being forced to leave his grandparents as the battle front drew closer, fleeing into the countryside to take shelter in a wine cellar.

But when the Russian attack finally took place during the night of 29 March 1945, the Red Army, facing very little opposition, soon overran the town and the surrounding vineyards. After being shot at by a drunken Russian soldier, Josef and his mother decided to return to the town, where more sober soldiers shook their hands in greeting. But the castle was already alight, and he remembered "the sky was blood red from the flames for three whole days". Although the Russians were blamed for setting it alight, Hotwagner and many of the townspeople believe it was the German forces who torched it, in compliance with Hitler's "Nero Command", or scorched earth policy.

After a brief counterattack by the SS and the loss of more than 1,000 lives, the Germans eventually admitted defeat, leaving the Russians to occupy Rechnitz and Eastern Austria for the next 10 years.

According to Hotwagner, the victorious Russians soon discovered that, 12 days earlier, a large number of Jews had been murdered, and following further investigation issued a protocol which read: "We, the undersigned have written down the following in order to bear witness of the Fascists' bestiality. On 5th April, a number of graves were excavated, where Jews were buried who had been killed in a bestial manner. In all, 21 graves were found, each one being 4m to 5m long and 1m wide. Each grave contains 10 to 12 people, victims of shots in the neck using firearms or machine ' pistols. The murdered people were very emaciated. An examination of their bodies revealed many bloodshot and blue areas on their skins. Apparently, they had been hit with sticks and rubber clubs prior to being shot. The inhabitants say that on 24 March these people had to dig their own graves and were shot immediately afterwards."

This protocol was published on 12 April 1945 in the Soviet national newspaper, The Red Star, but was subsequently dismissed as propaganda by many Austrians. During the resulting legal proceedings which took place in 1946 before the "people's court", the graves were again opened and an exact location plan was compiled and placed with the Austrian District Court in Oberwart. However, shortly afterwards this plan disappeared. It was only the first of a number of such conspiratorial occurrences.

In the years 1946 to 48, several further legal proceedings took place. But in 1946 the two main witnesses were murdered and one also had his house burnt down to destroy any incriminating evidence. Fear spread, and as a result, most of the witnesses revoked their testimonials during the main proceedings, or toned them down, or failed to appear at court. The few sentences that were awarded to those who hadn't already fled were very lenient and after a few years they were freed on appeal.

The court also uncovered evidence that suggested further murderous acts had been committed in Rechnitz. This was supported by one Paul Szomogyi, who said in his witness statement that on 26 March 1945, 400 Jews from his group of forced labourers had also been killed in a similar fashion. But due to intimidation, he failed to appear in front of the court, which claimed his testimonial could not be investigated any further.

Margit, along with Podezin and Oldenburg, also avoided prosecution, having fled Rechnitz ahead of the advancing Russians and escaped to Switzerland where, having facilitated the latter's return to Germany, Margit housed Podezin in a small apartment above a bar in Lugano, from where he continued to fulfil his role as her lover. But eventually, Podezin's presence became embarrassing and he was forced to leave. Under threat from the criminal proceedings, he demanded financial assistance from Oldenburg and Margit to enable him to escape to South Africa, threatening to "drag Oldenburg and the countess through the mud" if ignored. Funds were forthcoming and Podezin was last seen in Pretoria, while Oldenburg fled to Argentina.

It was not until 1987 that the Refugius (Rechnitz Refugee and Commemorative Initiative and Foundation) was founded and began to organise the erection of a monument to commemorate the massacre. The association also bought the land on which the Kreuzstadel stood, presenting it to the Vienna-based Israelitische Kultusgemeinde organisation. Every year a small commemorative service takes place at the site, although only one of the victims, Laszlo Blum, has ever been identified.

In the local park, a memorial to four murdered resistance fighters, including Dr Josef Hotwagner senior and the "200 Jewish forced labourers from Hungary, who were murdered on 24 March 1945", was finally unveiled – on the opposite side of the park to the monument honouring the names, and photographs, of the 177 local soldiers who lost their lives in the war, fighting for the Reich.

The atmosphere during the unveiling of the memorial to the Jews and members of the resistance was overshadowed by the knowledge that a meeting of the Rechnitz Comrade Club, whose leader was Tobias Portschy, ex-SS, Wehrmacht member and Nazi Gauleiter, was to take place on the local Geschriebenstein mountain the following day. This was not to commemorate the liberation of Austria from the Nazis, but the noble defence of the homeland by the Wehrmacht.

Tobias Portschy died of natural causes in 1996 but a disturbing number of local people still share his beliefs. As recently as 1985 the journalist who wrote a series of articles in the Austrian newspaper Oberwarter Zeitung on the murders under the headlines, "The Rechnitz Murder", "Orgy Ball" and "Dance Macabre" decided to curtail the series after his life was threatened. Meanwhile, a recording of an old woman's eye-witness report, sent to the Austrian television channel ORF by Josef Hotwagner, was permanently "mislaid".

According to local legend, the landlady of the local Gasthaus Rose and widow of Tobias Portschy believed that trying to locate the exact burial site, so that the remains of the victims could be reburied in a Jewish cemetery, was completely unnecessary. She is quoted as saying: "Don't look for the Jews' bones. Look for the gold that they buried."

She and her husband also openly expressed their hatred of gypsies, and a number of the townspeople appreciated the irony when, many years later, they accepted money for housing refugee gypsies in their hotel.

While reactions to the memory of the terrible atrocity remain mixed, there are few members of the community who forgive the Thyssens for failing to repair the castle which had, since the 13th century, been both their town's soul and the reason for its existence. Instead, the remaining building suffered the ignominy of being converted into apartments and the Thyssens' private chapel into a bar.

When the Russian occupation ended, Margit arrogantly returned to Rechnitz as a guest at the Batthyanys' newly built hunting lodge, shooting deer and wild boar in the surrounding forests. Otherwise, she occupied herself by breeding horses at the Thyssens' Erlenhof stud farm, near Bad Homburg in Germany. The original owner of Erlenhof, the Jewish paper manufacturer Moritz James Oppenheimer, was arrested by the Nazis in 1933 and forced to sign a declaration of bankruptcy prior to his death, which the authorities claimed to have been the result of his suicide. Heinrich then bought the stud from the liquidators for a fraction of its true value before leaving it to Heini. He then leased it to his sister who successfully rejected all post-war claims for restitution.

Without ever being implicated in the atrocity, Ivan and Margit died of old age in 1985 and 1989 respectively. But the Count Batthyany of Güssing, near Rechnitz, appeared to be unwilling to permit their burial in the family crypt at their Franciscan chapel, despite or because of the fact that Count Ivan's father, Count Ladislaus Batthyany, eye surgeon and benefactor, was in the process of being beatified; the third stage of the sainthood process that had started in 1944 and was finally carried out by Pope John Paul II in 2003.

What is remarkable about Margit's complicity in the Rechnitz massacre, is the fact that Germany, despite claims to the contrary, still suffers from a selective memory: only publishing carefully edited versions of the history of the Thyssens, which avoid reference to the family's anti-Semitism.

In 2003, an authorised history of the Thyssens, Fritz Thyssen – Hitler's Benefactor and Hostage was published in Germany, which quoted from a letter illustrating Fritz Thyssen's (Heinrich's brother) refusal to do business with Jewish industrialists, because of their criminal record rather than his anti-Semitic views, which are contained in the same letter. None of the previously published histories of the Thyssens, either social or industrial, in books or periodicals, have mentioned the Rechnitz story or the full extent of the family's involvement with the Third Reich.

The fact that ThyssenKrupp AG refused to grant me access to its archives during my research, and 23 prominent German publishers rejected The Thyssen Art Macabre prior to its UK publication, may not immediately signify a cover-up, but when, at the last minute the Bertelsmann-owned Spanish publisher demanded that I remove all references to the Nazis before they would publish, it was difficult not to suspect a degree of conspiracy. Having been published in the UK by Quartet, The Thyssen Art Macabre will now be published in Spain, home of the Thyssen-Bornemisza art collection, by Temas de Hoy, a Spanish-owned publisher who made no such demands. Meanwhile, German publishers still appear to ignore the book. *

'The Thyssen Art Macabre' is published by Quartet Books

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article3028644.ece
•••••••••••
Re: Georg Heinrich Thyssen, Son of Heinrich

The Son of a Baron's Windfall

Today's IPO by the technical publishing group IHS brought to light the fact that the company is controlled by Georg Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the eldest son of Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon, a Swiss citizen with a Hungarian title and resident of Spain who was the heir to the Thyssen Steel and armaments fortune. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because of the world-famous Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.

In February 2002, Georg and his father settled out of court after a year long legal battle over the $2.7B Thyssen industrial empire. The feud, played out in a court in Bermuda, cost an estimated $100M in legal fees.

With IHS, Thyssen-Bornemisza owns 62% of the company that is now worth well over $1B and he was able to cash out several hundred milliion dollars. The IPO was his opportunity to gain liquidity and perhaps live the life of opulent splendor that his family is accustomed to.

http://images.google.com/imgres?

imgurl=http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/thyssenportrait1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2005/11/the_barons_wind.html&h=327&w=250&sz=20&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=4d17vMPEFqpMDM:&tbnh=118&tbnw=90&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dheinrich%2Bthyssen%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

Re The Tainted Thyssen Dynasty

Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush's business partner and key Hitler industrial benefactor

Dear Mr Constantine: Thank you for your continuing support in mentioning my book on the Thyssens. I now have a website (www.davidrllitchfield.com), which you may also find of interest. You may also be interested in the fact that the Nobel Prize winning playwright, Elfriede Jelinek, created a play based upon my book, called 'Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)', which has played 25 times in Munich and received the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis in the Ruhr. However, to a large extent, the book remains ignored in Germany, although a number of organisations, including ThyssenKrupp, have altered their historical details as a result of its publication. Thank you once again for your support.

Kind regards,
David R L Litchfield

The Tainted Thyssen Dynasty

Also see: "The Killer Countess: Baron Heinrich Thyssen's Daughter"
http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/10/killer-countess-baron-heinrich-thyssens.html

Fritz Thyssen with Hitler

By Angus Trumble

David R. L. Litchfield in collaboration with Caroline Schmitz
THE THYSSEN ART MACABRE
450pp. Quartet Books. £25.
978 0 7043 7119 4

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, in a province about to be transformed by heavy industry, with much shrewd talent for business and sheer hard work, the sons of the sober proprietor of a minor local bank devote their life to building a huge industrial conglomerate. Buoyed by an unlimited international demand for coal and steel, and by the absence, up to a certain point, of income tax, company, or wealth tax, or planning regulations of any kind, or effective unionization of the labour force; supported by equally ambitious joint venturers; barely interrupted by the slump of the 1890s (and not even particularly incommoded by the First World War, which on the contrary was a great boon for the banking and steel branches of the family business), they create a mesh of intertwining companies that generates profit on a scale hitherto unknown, such that the shareholders’ vast wealth is almost impossible to calculate. Their banking, steel, coal, gas, oil and transport interests continually refinance and stoke one another, bringing about unstoppable expansion and causing the whole region to become one of the industrial powerhouses of the Continent.

One brother, short, thin-voiced, frugal in his personal life, emerges early as the dominant personality; his knowledge of and hold over the concern is total. His marriage collapses, at a time when divorce was wholly scandalous. In old age, he becomes interested in art. Dutch paintings hang in the small but comfortable apartment he keeps in the nation’s capital; a large but cold principal residence remains within walking distance of the office, not far from the belching factories. His handsome, well-educated son and heir, Heinrich, inherits his interest in fine art, but disappoints the father by not inheriting his single-minded passion for business above all else. After the old man dies in 1925, universally regarded as one of the greatest industrialists of the age, the son’s art collecting activities accelerate and become exceedingly ambitious.

In these respects, the remarkable life led by August Thyssen of the Ruhr runs eerily parallel to that led on the other side of the Atlantic by Andrew W. Mellon of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania, and suggests that, given a bit of luck, for the capable, single-minded man of business in the fifty years between 1870 and 1920 anything was possible. This, however, is where the resemblances end. As David Cannadine has shown in his magisterial study Mellon: An American life (reviewed in the TLS, November 24, 2006), Andrew Mellon’s life was big in precisely the ways that August Thyssen’s (or so David R. L. Litchfield would have us believe) was severely limited. In addition to the vast enterprise which he continued to run until the end of his life, it was said of Mellon that he was the most distinguished, certainly the longest-lasting, Secretary of the Treasury under whom three Presidents of the United States (Warren G. Harding, J. Calvin Coolidge, Jr, and Herbert C. Hoover) had yet served. Thyssen showed no interest in public office; at his birth the unified Germany from which his family would in future extract such dizzying wealth did not yet exist, and it remained for him merely a marketing opportunity; nobody could have hoped for a better customer than the Kaiser. Near the end of his life, on New Year’s Eve, 1936, Mellon presented to the nation his core collection of Old Master paintings and a great building on the Mall in Washington, DC, to house a new National Gallery of Art, an act of astounding generosity, given that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had done his very best to bring Mellon down. Thyssen’s philanthropies were meagre.

Mellon was slight, and well-dressed; Thyssen was nuggety and more at home at the pit. Mellon was scrupulous in paying his taxes; Thyssen and his heirs and their lawyers did their best to evade them. By his hold over the Pennsylvanian Republican Party machine, Mellon engineered state legislation by which he minimized the damage brought about by his divorce in 1912; Thyssen’s divorce, in 1885, nearly wrecked the company, because Frau Thyssen’s family had put up the capital for the first iron smelting and rolling mill. Where possible, Mellon, a Scots Presbyterian, avoided hiring Catholics; Thyssen was a Roman Catholic, and determinedly anti-Semitic – his children even more so. Andrew Mellon’s greatest art coup – a reflection of his brilliant business philosophy in that he took advantage of never-to-be-repeated opportunities and bought for the lowest possible price – was the secret acquisition, through Knoedler in 1930–31, from a Soviet Government desperate for hard currency, of major pictures in the Hermitage. The central episode of August Thyssen’s far more limited art-collecting life was the highly public, excruciatingly slow purchase of six marble sculptures by Auguste Rodin for 145,000 francs, spread over the years 1905–11, during which time he haggled pettily with the sculptor’s secretary, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, going so far as to seek a hefty, contractually enforceable discount in case Rodin died before the works were complete.

Mellon’s son, Paul Mellon, fought in the US Cavalry during the Second World War, studied Jung, bred champion racehorses, and dedicated the rest of his life to philanthropy on a scale rarely if ever matched in the United States. By courtesy of an absurdly late decree of the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, August Thyssen’s son Heinrich bought into the Hungarian aristocracy and, as Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszón, helped his father profit from the production of steel and electricity during the First World War. With barely concealed distaste, Thyssen père’s obituarist in The Times remarked that “during the Great War the firm of Thyssen was exceedingly busy, and prospered greatly”. Heinrich and his brothers evidently underwrote and profited vastly from the Nazis. They exploited forced labour, acquired confiscated Jewish racing stables, and, when the Second World War looked like being lost, escaped to Switzerland.

Thereafter, as far as possible the family hid behind fake Hungarian nationality, Dutch and Argentine residency, and, later, Swiss citizenship. Meanwhile Baron Heinrich continued to maintain a permanent suite at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. Assets were routinely hidden offshore; funds at first poured into the Netherlands for safekeeping, then, through the Union Banking Corporation of New York, to South America. (The Union Bank was incorporated in the State of New York in 1924 with the assistance of the railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman, a future Secretary of Commerce under President Truman, and on its board sat the future Senator Prescott S. Bush, grandfather of the current President.) Well ahead of D-Day, assets and share certificates were rushed from Rotterdam back to Berlin, again for safekeeping. With the aid of the Allied occupying forces, Thyssen industries in the Ruhr were permitted to restart almost immediately – occasionally, at a few undamaged plants, without losing more than a single day of production; assets were easily salvaged; incriminating documents were illegally removed from Germany back to Holland under Russian noses, then destroyed.

David Litchfield’s somewhat breathless, bafflingly titled book The Thyssen Art Macabre is not nearly as thorough or as measured as Cannadine’s Mellon: Litchfield’s style tends to the sensational, which sometimes renders the unpleasantness of the family portrait it paints almost beyond belief. But the facts as Litchfield presents them are unpleasant enough. He brings out the cynicism and the scale of the duplicity with which the Thyssen family’s third billionaire, Heinrich’s alcoholic son and heir, Hans Heinrich (“Heini”), carried forward the Konzern in the decades following the Second World War, and the extraordinary degree to which the Allies and, perhaps worse, the Swiss (who knew exactly what was going on), found it curiously difficult or impolitic to pin more than a few charges on the Barons Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszón, or even adequately to investigate their activities. Why, for example, were the Thyssens’ pre-war gold deposits in London never confiscated? And why were they eventually returned (incidentally, at Harold Macmillan’s urging), when military intelligence and the Foreign Office certainly knew how thoroughly the family had been mixed up in the Nazi regime? It would be interesting to learn how much Commerce Secretary Harriman and Senator Bush knew about the financial services apparently provided for years to the Thyssen businesses (and through them, let us hope unwittingly, to the Nazis) via the Manhattan boardroom of the Union Bank. Why also did a single truck laden with share certificates, safety deposit boxes and other valuables manage to find its way unmolested from the Russian sector of Berlin all the way across Europe to Rotterdam – making the trek for the second time – thus partly shoring up Thyssen banking interests, a daring coup that was referred to as “Operation Juliana” (presumably because Queen Wilhelmina’s own Thyssen share certificates were on this occasion rescued)?

More perplexing even than these is the question why, during the war, did thousands of loyal, hard-working German lawyers, company directors, middle managers, and other employees, all the way down to factory foremen, risk life and limb to protect the assets of the Konzern from the Americans, British and French, and then the Russians, when their proprietors – who by their status as a wholly owned private family company were relieved of the basic obligation even to publish a simple balance sheet – reclined in comfort in the Villa Favorita on the shore of Lake Lugano, surrounded by Baron Heinrich’s conveniently portable art collection, which he regarded with total frankness as an excellent way of disguising his wealth from the tax authorities? In fact, Uncle Fritz was charged as a “major offender” in 1948 before the Denazification Court at Bad Königstein, having, in 1939, published an ill-judged but cheerful book entitled I Paid Hitler, in which he boasted about financing the putsch of November 9, 1923.

He retired to Argentina. But big brother Stephan, who worked on the V2 rocket project and shot his girlfriend in Hungary, lived unmolested in Monte Carlo, producing a bizarre tract entitled The Explanation of Life, which carries a somewhat embarrassing dedication to Max Planck. Meanwhile, big sister Margit and her husband, Count Batthyány de Németújvár, who throughout the war ran a stud farm at the huge, depressing Bornemisza castle of Rohoncz, by then in Austrian territory, shared the premises with the SS. In March 1945, they apparently turned a blind eye to an appalling massacre of 200 Hungarian Jews in the castle grounds, calmly packed their bags, got in the car and, in the path of the Red Army, drove unimpeded all the way across Austria, and trundled safely over the frontier into Switzerland. There, with two other disgruntled siblings, they contested Baron Heinrich’s shockingly inequitable will, which cursed his four children with just about the most corrosive division of assets as it is possible for a parent to devise: one-eighth, one-eighth, one-eighth, five-eighths, giving total control to the youngest, Heini, who, aged twenty at the height of the war, had amused himself with an Argentine lover: “I am trying to find out what it is I like so much in you”, he wrote to her, charmingly; “the sensual mouth, the wolf’s teeth, the laughing eyes?”. The Thyssens make the House of Atreus look cosy.

Such, anyway, is the picture Litchfield presents. But how much of it is true? Certainly the German habit of meticulous record-keeping, which has proven so valuable to Nazi-hunters and later researchers of every description, provides him with ample well-documented evidence that the big picture is correct. He was initially commissioned by Heini and his fifth wife to produce a friendly account of the Thyssen dynasty, largely to contradict the lies they claimed had been spread by the (four) earlier ones. One can see how difficult that task must have been, enjoyable though it was, no doubt, to act for a time as Heini’s confessor.

Not surprisingly that book foundered. This one is unfriendly, but contains enough evidence to persuade one that the sharpened hatchet was possibly presented to the author by its own subject. One of the most chilling photographic reproductions in The Thyssen Art Macabre shows a certificate dated June 4, 1941, in which Judge John P. Nields of the United States District Court states that Baron Heinrich’s ghastly Bornemisza mother-in-law (née Matilda Louisa Price of Wilmington, Delaware) “has no trace of Jewish blood in her veins”. Above all, the discussion of Baron Heinrich and his youngest son’s scattergun art-collecting activities, which drags the reader kicking, if not screaming, through a series of ownership disputes and legal settlements among heirs and ex-wives, fails to persuade one that the purchase by the Spanish state of one half of the collection for (in theory) $600 million in 1993 was, on the Thyssens’ part, more than a shabby, expedient fire sale. The claim that it was intended to complement the holdings of the Prado, one of the greatest art museums in the world, is plucky, certainly, but by any measure insulting.

Unfortunately, Litchfield does little more than pour scorn on Baron Heinrich’s “generally appalling collection of over-restored paintings, many of which suffered from questionable provenance and very few of which were masterpieces”. His account of the crucial role played by the Thyssens’ principal adviser, the dealer Rudolf Heinemann, and his association with Bernard Berenson, Max Friedländer and others is inadequate. For example, the author claims, weirdly, that Berenson “introduced such phrases as ‘the work of an anonymous German master’, ‘attributed to’ and ‘from the studio of’”, as if these were in any case inherently deceptive, while early acquisitions of rare fifteenth-century Netherlandish and German paintings are dismissed as “inconsequential” merely for lack of a firm attribution. It is all very unfortunate.

But what Litchfield’s cursory tour d’horizon makes clear is that a lowering black cloud hangs over many Thyssen paintings, which lack documented provenance in the Nazi period. This ought to be a matter of grave concern for their present owners, as it is for the rest of us who routinely face this moral problem. Just when Heini thought that by investing in German Expressionism and other twentieth-century masterpieces, which Baron Heinrich shunned at around the time much of it was despised as entartete, he was making the right sort of gesture – and, with the benefit of hindsight, for the prices he paid, a series of dazzlingly good investments as well – he may merely have compounded the larger evil created by the orchestrated Nazi spoliation of cultural property.

He was certainly aware of the problem. In May 1969, Heini was accused by the Italian authorities of “illegally exporting Italian art” in relation to his purchase of the exquisite Sienese “Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist” by Ugolino di Nerio (now in Madrid) and the not quite as good “Madonna and Child with Angels and St Catherine” by Francesco di Giorgio Martini (now in the Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, Pedralbes). After he was, with others, charged with smuggling, he told the New York Times, in 1972: “I buy the stuff in Switzerland and the United States, but how it gets there I don’t know. I can’t check all that”. It seems the case was suspended. The paintings had been taken out of Italy before the sale, and it is now left for someone else to check all that for him.
_________________________________________________________

Angus Trumble, sometime winner of the Barry Humphries Prize for the Liberal Arts, is curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25335-2634491,00.html

New York Gallery Owner Andrew Crispo and the Death Mask Murder

Ultimate Evil: New York art gallery owner Andrew Crispo, a well-connected socialite linked by author Maury Terry to the Son of Sam cult (Ultimate Evil), was the prodigy of steel heir Heinrich Thyssen. For more on Crispo's fascinating patrons, see David France's Bag of Toys (review below). – AC

Re: Andrew Crispo

"A dazzling opening show, Pioneers of American Abstraction, pegged Andrew Crispo as a dealer to watch. Major clients began to drop by, among them the Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (called "Heini"), the Swiss steel heir whose collection is one of the world's greatest. Mr. Crispo's career really took off, according to Mr. France, when in 1975 a nasty incident occurred that involved the baron. His fourth wife, Denise, and her lover, Franco Rappetti (who was also the baron's dealer and whose relationship with his wife the baron apparently tolerated), tried to shake Mr. Crispo down for "commissions" on the Thyssen purchases. But Mr. Crispo said no. Three years later, Rappetti went out the window of a midtown apartment building. ... "

There Was Something Creepy About the Gallery
By Grace Glueck;
June 21, 1992

BAG OF TOYS Sex, Scandal, and the Death Mask Murder. By David France. Illustrated. 350 pp. New York: Warner Books. $21.95.

ALONG with high prices, drugs and laundered money, the excessive 80's brought genuine tabloid scandal to the New York art world. In 1985, Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist, jumped, fell or was thrown to her death from a 34th-story window. Her husband, the well-known Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was later tried and acquitted. And in the same year, there was the sadomasochistic "death mask murder" case, involving the 57th Street art dealer Andrew Crispo and his assistant, Bernard LeGeros. Mr. Crispo was never indicted (he later went to prison on quite another ground: income tax evasion). But Mr. LeGeros currently is serving a prison sentence of 25 years to life.

However horrible murder may be for its victims and their loved ones, it does create employment -- at least the more sensational murders do -- for writers of what Truman Capote called the "nonfiction novel." We've already had Robert Katz's trashily titled "Naked by the Window," a 1990 account of the Andre case, and now there is "Bag of Toys," David France's exploration -- or should we say exploitation? -- of the Crispo affair. (The title refers to Mr. Crispo's name for the collection of sexual devices that he kept at the ready.) Although "Bag of Toys" is plenty titillating, let the reader beware. It may be a page-turner, but it's a stomach-turner, too. Mr. France doesn't stint on gruesome detail.

The "death mask murder" case began in March 1985, when some young boys found a charred and mutilated corpse in a smokehouse on the Rockland County property of a family named LeGeros. The victim -- wearing a black leather hood used in sadomasochistic rituals -- turned out to be Eigil Dag Vesti, a handsome young fashion student from Norway who had been missing from his downtown Manhattan haunts for several weeks. It soon developed, according to Mr. France, that Vesti had been murdered in a bizarre sadomasochistic scenario created by Mr. Crispo and Mr. LeGeros, a son of the couple who owned the estate. Mr. LeGeros confessed that he had fired the gun that killed Vesti, but said that he had done so at Mr. Crispo's behest.

As background to his account of the murder, Mr. France takes off on a voyeuristic tour of Mr. Crispo's life. The author admits that, lacking his subject's cooperation, he has ascribed to him -- and to others -- dialogue reconstructed from police notes, court depositions, published sources and so forth, which certainly makes the book vivid, if journalistically less than sound. Along the way the reader learns more than he -- or she -- may want to know about such matters as the action at sadomasochistic bars, the condition of Vesti's body when it was found and the sleazy client-attorney relationship between Mr. Crispo and Roy Cohn.

Mr. Crispo, Mr. France writes, "saw in the world a Procrustean conspiracy -- immutably rigid rules of expected conduct that required a rote response. Wherever possible, he rebelled." The son of an Italian mother -- and her French lover -- who deposited him newborn at an orphanage in southwest Philadelphia, Mr. Crispo grew up homosexual and street-smart, the author says. He started out turning tricks in Rittenhouse Square, Mr. France writes, but later his brashness and ingenuity led to more glamorous conquests, including the pianist Liberace and Henry McIlhenny, chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. According to Mr. France, Mr. Crispo also engaged in other less-than-wholesome enterprises, and in 1964, when Philadelphia got too hot, he migrated to New York.

Manhattan and its hustling art world were waiting. Mr. Crispo began as a runner, a lowly go-between who turns over paintings at an often minimal profit. But his boyish charm and good looks landed him a job with a respectable dealer. He worked there for five years before finding the backing that would enable him to open the Andrew Crispo Gallery, an expensive suite in the Fuller Building on East 57th Street, the aorta of the uptown art world. His lover, the decorator Arthur Smith, Mr. France says, made the gallery into a sumptuous showcase, attracting name talents to Mr. Crispo's stable of artists: Richard Pousette-Dart, Arman, Lowell Nesbitt. He built up a lucrative back-room operation -- reselling works by well-known artists of major movements -- in 19th- and 20th-century art.

A dazzling opening show, "Pioneers of American Abstraction," pegged Andrew Crispo as a dealer to watch. Major clients began to drop by, among them the Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (called "Heini"), the Swiss steel heir whose collection is one of the world's greatest. Mr. Crispo's career really took off, according to Mr. France, when in 1975 a nasty incident occurred that involved the baron. His fourth wife, Denise, and her lover, Franco Rappetti (who was also the baron's dealer and whose relationship with his wife the baron apparently tolerated), tried to shake Mr. Crispo down for "commissions" on the Thyssen purchases. But Mr. Crispo said no. Three years later, Rappetti went out the window of a midtown apartment building.

Mr. France takes a reasoned view of Rappetti's demise as a suicide. But in any case, Mr. Crispo's help with the funeral arrangements -- the baron reportedly said that the $150,000 it cost him to fly the body home by special jet was "a bargain" -- so endeared him to Baron Thyssen that he instantly replaced Rappetti with Mr. Crispo. Within a few years, Mr. France reports, the baron had bought "an estimated 400 19th-century paintings from the Crispo Gallery, totaling more than $90 million in gross receipts." (He also maintains that Mr. Crispo and his staff "cleaned up" the provenances of the paintings, that is, attached phony documentation to disguise their true origins, not only to make Mr. Crispo seem like a discoverer but also to keep the baron from learning the names of -- and possibly patronizing -- the dealers who sent them on consignment.) According to Mr. France, the baron "knew Crispo used his name to open doors and to pry loose paintings," but he found the dealer "convenient" and "helpful."

Then Mr. Crispo's success began to sour. Even at its best, there always was something creepy about the gallery; rumors about its proprietor's increasing involvement with drugs and sexual intimidation did not help its reputation. Mr. Crispo, according to Mr. France, developed an addiction to cocaine. He cheated on taxes. He refused to pay bills. He surrounded himself with thuggish young men, taking on Mr. LeGeros, the troubled son of an upscale family, as his "bodyguard" and "executioner." Mr. LeGeros played bad cop to Mr. Crispo's good one, bullying hapless participants in the sexual dramas staged by the older man, the author writes. In one setup related by Mr. France, some youthful graffiti artists, bribed by money and drugs, helped Mr. Crispo and Mr. LeGeros torture a victim -- pseudonymously referred to as Paul Jeffries -- who had answered a pay telephone on the street outside a bar. On the line was Mr. Crispo, who seduced Jeffries up to his apartment for a coke fest.

Like Jeffries, the murdered Vesti was apparently a willing victim who got more than he bargained for. Meeting Mr. Crispo at a bar, Mr. France writes, Vesti went home with him, where he was savaged in the way he seemed to crave. But then, flying high on cocaine, Mr. Crispo began to talk of killing him, according to Mr. LeGeros's testimony. The two, taking along a rifle, drove Vesti up to the Rockland County home of Mr. LeGeros's family, and after some more wild action, according to Mr. LeGeros, Mr. Crispo gave the order to shoot. And Mr. LeGeros obeyed. "He snapped," Mr. Cris po later said, according to Mr. France.

Mr. Crispo was not charged in the case. Apart from Mr. LeGeros's testimony there was no corroborating evidence, so Mr. Crispo went scot-free. Subpoenaed for Mr. LeGeros's trial, he took the 5th and 14th Amendments, which protected him from being forced to testify against himself. However, soon afterward, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for income tax evasion -- he owed almost $4 million on income of $10 million -- a sentence later reduced to five years, of which he served three. And his luck held. In a later trial, in 1988, he was found not guilty -- although Mr. LeGeros had four years added to his prison sentence after pleading guilty to attempted kidnapping -- for the brutal treatment of Paul Jeffries.

Soon after his release from prison in 1989, a massive explosion leveled Mr. Crispo's cherished house in Southampton, where he had hung some of his most prized works of art. (Before his imprisonment, sales of part of his collection at Sotheby's and Christie's netted Mr. Crispo and his creditors nearly $20 million.) But -- wouldn't you know? -- in 1991 a jury awarded him $8.6 million from the Long Island Lighting Company -- which admitted that an accident in the form of a gas leak under the house had been the cause.

To say that Mr. France, a New York City journalist, is obsessed with the Crispo case is to put it mildly. But despite his lurid, tabloid presentation, his demon research goes a long way to persuade us that justice has miscarried, that Andrew Crispo should not be a free man today. Although, of course, Mr. Crispo has no voice here to convince us otherwise.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/21/books/there-was-something-creepy-about-the-gallery.html