A TREASURE TROVE

IN MARCH 1944, THE CRAGGY PEAKS SURROUNDING THE ANCIENT Cathar fortress of Montségur in southern France reverberated with the grinding gears and revving engines of military machines. The trucks and command cars belonged to a battalion of Nazi SS troopers led by Adolf Hitler’s top commando, SS Standartenfuehrer Otto Skorzeny.

 

Standing six feet and four inches, Skorzeny was larger than life among his comrades, and his exploits during World War II only enhanced this reputation. An old dueling scar creased his face from the left cheekbone to his chin, earning him the nickname Scar.

Born in Vienna in 1908, Skorzeny had joined the Nazi Party in 1930 while studying in Germany. By 1939, he had been accepted as a member of Hitler’s personal bodyguards. Sent home from the Russian Front in 1942 due to wounds, Skorzeny soon was directing secret agents in other countries.

But worldwide attention became focused on Skorzeny in September 1943, when he led a glider assault by commandos on a mountaintop hotel where the dictator Benito Mussolini was being held captive following a coup in Italy. In a daring daylight operation, Skorzeny and his men liberated Mussolini, who had been contemplating suicide, and whisked him off to safety. Hitler declared Mussolini the rightful leader of Italy and the war there continued until Germany surrendered in May 1945.

Mussolini’s ouster followed by Allied landings in Italy prompted Hitler to send his troops into what had until then been called Vichy, France, to ostensibly protect the “soft underbelly of Europe.” The Nazis had gained freedom of movement in the historic Languedoc region, located in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains, which separate France from Spain.

But in early March 1944, something more than military victory was on Skorzeny’s mind as his troops entered the area encompassing Montsegur and the village of Rennes-le- Château, the site of a great mystery since the discovery of strange documents by a young priest in 1891.

SKORZENY’S THOUGHTS UNDOUBTEDLY were centered on the location of a fabulous treasure believed to have been located by a German author and occult researcher named Otto Rahn.

Little is known about Rahn’s early life except that he was born February 18, 1904, in Michelstadt and educated in literature and philology at the University of Berlin. During his time in school, Rahn had become fascinated with legends of the Holy Grail as well as the little-understood Cathars—“pure ones,” as they were called—who had opposed the Roman Church and thus suffered near annihilation in a papal military campaign in 1209, known as the Albigensian Crusade.

In the early 1930s, Rahn traveled widely in the Languedoc region of Southern France, even spelunking among the maze of cave systems in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains. Here he gained firsthand knowledge about the Cathars and their descendants, many of whom became members of the fabled Knights Templar.

Rahn’s book Crusade Against the Grail was published in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power. This and other books on the Cathars and Grail legends, as well as his many travel articles, brought him to the attention of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who, along with many other top-ranking Nazis, had a keen interest in occult artifacts and knowledge.

 

Rahn’s knowledge of both the Cathars and the Templars apparently intrigued Himmler, as Rahn was inducted into the SS as a lieutenant in 1936.

Himmler and his cronies must have been entranced with Rahn, who had drawn connections between the Cathar fortress of Montségur and a fabulous cave housing the Holy Grail called Montsavat, mentioned in Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach in the thirteenth century. Rahn believed he had discovered the final resting place of a great treasure of antiquity, which included the Tables of Testimony, the Grail Cup known as Emerald Cup, and perhaps even the long-lost Ark of the Covenant.

And by March 1944, the Nazis were free to move troops into Languedoc in search of this ancient wealth, known as King Solomon’s treasure.

It was much too late for Rahn.

 

By 1939, Rahn had become disenchanted with his Nazi superiors, writing,

 

“There is much sorrow in my country. [It is] impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in the nation that my native country has become.”

He resigned his commission in the SS in February 1939 and, barely a month later, reportedly died of exposure after having been caught in a snowstorm during a hiking expedition. Rumors circulated that he had been killed in a concentration camp. The National Socialist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg recorded that Rahn committed suicide by taking cyanide “for politico-mystical reasons as well as for personal ones.” However he died, Rahn’s knowledge was retained by Himmler.

THE FABLED TREASURE of King Solomon is the greatest cache of riches known to humankind. Its fascinating history serves as a timeline for the evolution of Western civilization as it can be traced from ancient Mesopotamia up to World War II.

Gold, silver, and precious gems—such as diamonds, pearls, emeralds, amber, amethyst, topaz, sapphires, rubies, turquoise, and others— comprised this priceless hoard of riches. But Solomon’s treasure also contained riches of quite a different sort. It included ancient scrolls, texts, and tablets upon which was inscribed some of the world’s most esoteric and occult knowledge. This knowledge had been handed down for thousands of years from the time of the world’s first recorded civilization in ancient Sumer—present- day Iraq.

Thousands of translated Sumerian tablets along with their inscribed cylinder seals are now available and they tell of astonishing technology apparently in use prior to Noah’s flood.

 

With recent scientific advancements—such as powered flight, the space program, DNA manipulation, and cloning—many experts are beginning to rethink the idea that today’s world is the apex of civilization’s evolution. It is now possible to consider that a technically advanced civilization was on the Earth in the far distant past, possessing knowledge that mankind is only just now relearning.

Bits and pieces of ancient knowledge that survived the Great Flood formed the essence of the riches that were transported to Egypt by Abraham, the inheritor of the secrets of Enoch and the biblical patriarch of both Arabs and the Jews. Abraham, a native of Sumer, known early on as Abram, by some traditions was said to possess a tablet of symbols representing all of the knowledge of humankind handed down from the time of Noah.

 

Known to the Sumerians as the Table of Destiny, it was this table of knowledge—known to the early Jews as the Book of Raziel—that reportedly provided King Solomon with his vast wisdom.

The Sumerian Table of Destiny is thought to be the same as the Tables of Testimony mentioned in Exodus 31:18. Other Bible verses—Exodus 24:12 and 25:16—make it clear that these tables are not the Ten Commandments.

British author Laurence Gardner believed this ancient archive was directly associated with the Emerald Table of Thoth-Hermes, and that its author was the biblical Ham.

 

“He was the essential founder of the esoteric and arcane ‘underground stream’ which flowed through the ages,” stated Gardner.

This table of knowledge was passed from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greek and Roman masters, such as Homer, Virgil, Pythagoras, Plato, and Ovid. In more recent times, it was passed through such secret societies as the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar and on to the Stuart Royal Society in England.

In Jewish history, the Cabala, also spelled as Kabbalah or Qabbalah, was supposed to contain hidden meanings.

 

Such cleverly coded knowledge was thought to be found within the Torah and other old Hebraic texts, such as the Sefer Yezirah (Book of Creation) and the Sefer Ha-Zohar (Book of Light). These books, which predate the Talmud, a compilation of early Jewish laws and traditions first written in the fifth century A.D., were produced centuries before the time of Jesus.

 

According to the Book of Light, “mysteries of wisdom” were given to Adam by God while still in the fabled Garden of Eden, generally believed to have been located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These elder secrets were then passed on through Adam’s sons to Noah and on to Abraham long before the Hebrews existed as a distinct people.

Much like our understanding of history and religion today, the information within the Cabala became both incomplete and garbled over the centuries through losses due to war and natural disasters as well as misinterpretations and foreign influences. But it was this ancient wisdom, taken from Egypt at the time of the Great Exodus, that formed the core of Cabalistic knowledge handed down through the centuries via several secret societies, some of which remain active among us even today.

But what of Solomon’s treasure itself? What happened to the wealth—in both riches and knowledge—that found a resting place on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with the construction of Solomon’s Temple nearly a one thousand years before the birth of Jesus?

Much of this treasure fell into the hands of the Romans when they sacked Jerusalem following the Jewish Revolt of 66 A.D. By the time of this looting, Solomon’s Temple had been built over to become the palace of King Herod. With the certain advance intelligence that the Romans would be sending troops to put down the Jewish rebellion, keepers of the knowledge buried away much of the treasure in the catacombs beneath Herod’s palace. Alcoves and passages were closed off and sealed with earth.

Thus, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem following revolts in both 66 A.D. and 132 A.D., they found only a portion of the treasure. To have hidden all the treasure would have prompted a strenuous search by the Roman authorities. As it was, they were content to move what they found to Rome as war booty. The best part of the treasure, including both wealth and knowledge, was safely buried under the Temple Mount and all but forgotten, as most religious leaders were killed or taken to Rome as prisoners.

In 410 A.D., Alaric, who had been commander of Visigoth auxiliaries under Roman emperor Theodosius, sacked Rome. Alaric had been proclaimed king over the Visigoths with the death of Theodosius, and he began his march on Rome after invading Greece and Northern Italy. It was the first successful attack on Rome in more than eight hundred years.

Alaric’s troops took the portion of Solomon’s treasure in Rome along with other prizes of war.

 

“When Alaric withdrew his forces, the treasures of Solomon’s Temple went with them,” wrote Colonel Howard Buechner, a former medical officer with the 45th Infantry Division.

This contention was supported by the work of Otto Rahn, who wrote in 1933 of four young men who discovered a casket in a Pyrenees cavern, “Was this reliquary casket part of ‘Solomon’s treasure,’ which was taken by the Visigoth king Alaric from Rome to Carcassonne in A.D. 410? According to [the last major ancient Greek philosopher, Proclus], it was filled with objects that once belonged to King Solomon, the king of the Hebrews.”

The Visigoths secured their booty in the Pyrenees foothills located in the Languedoc region of what was to become southern France. This area encompasses the Cathar stronghold at Montségur as well as the small village of Rennes-le-Château. The secrets of this treasure were handed from the Goths and the early Franks to the Cathars, the “pure ones” of southern France.

 

They considered their Christian beliefs more pure than those of the Church of Rome, probably because they had access to original documents and were not dependent on the Church hierarchy to translate and interpret the Bible. In fact, according to Otto Rahn, Cathar beliefs were greatly influenced by Druids, priests, and soothsayers who had spread from Mesopotamia through eastern and western Europe to the British Isles.

 

Catharism was an odd blending of ancient Earth worship, Eastern mysticism, Gnosis, and basic Christianity.

The Cathar faith, sometimes described as “Western Buddhism,” might have spread to all the corners of Europe but for the blood and fire of the Albigensian Crusade begun in 1209, which may well have been more of a French civil war than a religious campaign. It was fought between the tightly controlled and austere northerners and the cultured, freedom-loving peoples of the south.

Rahn noted the exotic ethnic mixture of the Languedoc region.

 

“In the third century B.C., an immigration of peoples from the Caucasus to the West took place: Phoenicians, Persians, Medeans, Getules (actually Berbers of North Africa), Armenians, Chaldeans [Sumerians], and Iberians,” he wrote.

Prior to the Vatican-approved bloodletting, the provinces of southern France were virtually indepen dent republics that allowed extraordinary freedom of education, culture, and diversity. Jews were accorded the same rights as the rest of the citizenry. Both agriculture and the arts were flourishing. Many of the Cathars, while Christians, nevertheless still worshipped the feminine goddesses—Isis and Athena—as had their Gothic and Frankish ancestors.

It is not known but strongly suspected by researchers that this hidden treasure guarded by the Cathars included a copper scroll similar to an etched scroll of copper found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 at Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.

 

When translated in the mid-1950s at Manchester University, this scroll proved to be an inventory of a great treasure. It apparently was one of several copies. With its detailed directions to hidden Hebrew valuables, the Copper Scroll was literally a treasure map. Such an inventory in the hidden Visigoth cache would explain why certain French aristocrats, descendants of the Goths and the Cathars, who had access to the treasure, fomented the First Crusade, resulting in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 A.D.

Less than twenty years after the crusaders took Jerusalem and placed King Baldwin II of Le Bourg in charge of the occupied territories, nine knights were granted a military order called the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. This title was soon shortened to the Knights of the Temple, or Knights Templar. They were allowed to be billeted in Herod’s palace, the exact location of the hidden treasure as described in the Copper Scroll.

These knights were led by Hugh de Payens, a nobleman in the service of his cousin, Hughes, count of Champagne, and Andre de Montbard, the uncle of Bernard of Clairvaux, later known as the Cistercian Saint Bernard. Montbard also was a vassal of the count of Champagne. At least two of the original knights, Rosal and Gondemare, were Cistercian monks prior to their departure for Jerusalem. In fact, the entire group was closely related both by family ties and by connections to the Cistercian monks and Flemish royalty descended from the Cathars. They journeyed to the Holy Land with an agenda: to recover the remainder of the treasure.

Ostensibly, this order of knights was to protect the roads to Jerusalem, but their actions were of a very different nature. Rather than guard roads, the Templar knights spent years excavating under Herod’s palace, the old Temple of Solomon. The digging was extensive.

 

British Royal Engineers led by a Lieutenant Charles Wilson discovered evidence of the Templars while mapping vaults under Mount Moriah in 1894. They found vaulted passageways with keystone arches, typical of Templar handiwork. They also found artifacts consisting of a spur, parts of a sword and lance, and a small Templar cross, which are still on display in Scotland.

It was during their excavations, according to several accounts, that the Templars acquired material wealth as well as texts of hidden knowledge, most probably including some dealing with the life of Jesus and his associations with the Essenes and Gnostics. They also reportedly acquired the legendary Tables of Testimony given to Moses as well as other holy relics— perhaps even the legendary Ark of the Covenant and the Spear of Longinus—which could have been used to validate their later position as an alternative religious authority to the Roman Church.

When the Knights Templar transported the remainder of Solomon’s treasure back to the Languedoc region of southern France, it was reunited with the portion the Goths had brought from Rome more than seven hundred years earlier.

 

The material wealth—King Solomon’s diamonds, precious gems, gold, and silver—formed the base of the Templars’ legendary fortune. Much of this was transported to their temple in Paris. Th e esoteric treasure—scrolls and tablets of ancient knowledge—were kept hidden from the Roman Church in the elaborate cave systems of the Pyrenees.

On Friday, October 13, 1307, the greedy French king Philip, in debt to the Templars, moved against the Templars with the blessing of Pope Clement V.

 

Like their Cathar forebears, the Templars were charged with all forms of heresy. Templars throughout Europe were hunted down, killed, and tortured. The last Templar grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in 1314. But many Templars simply cast off their distinctive surcoats, identifiable by the red Maltese cross, and blended into the local populations only to emerge in later years as Freemasons.

When authorities broke into the Paris temple, they found nothing. The treasure had been removed by the Templars, who apparently dispersed it to several different locations. Some went to Scotland, where Robert the Bruce provided the Templars sanctuary, some went to pre-Columbus America, and some returned to the caverns of Languedoc.

Centuries passed while the devout in southern France kept the secret of the hidden treasure from both church and state authorities. Th is secret briefl y broke into public view in the late 1890s, when the young priest of the small village of Rennes-le-Château discovered some documents hidden in the alter of his church, which had been consecrated to Mary Magdalene in 1059 and stood on Visigoth ruins dating to the sixth century.

In 1891, Father Francois Berenger Sauniere discovered two genealogies dating from 1244 and 1644, along with two texts written in the 1780s by a former parish priest, Abbot Antoine Bigou. The Bigou texts were unusual and appeared to be written in different and indecipherable codes. Sauniere took his discovery to his superior, the bishop of nearby Carcassonne, who sent him on to Paris to meet with the director general of the Saint-Sulpice Seminary, reportedly a center for an unorthodox society called the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, reputed to be a front for the Priory of Sion.

 

This priory is thought to include members committed to keeping secret the Templar treasure and knowledge.

Whatever was in the documents changed Sauniere’s life. He journeyed to Paris, where he mingled with the Parisian cultural elite and soon came into great wealth. Before his sudden death in 1917, researchers estimated he had spent several million dollars on construction and renovations in the town. He also had the town’s road and water supply upgraded, assembled a massive library, and built a zoological garden, a lavish country house named Villa Bethania, and a round tower named Tour Magdala, or Tower of Magdalene.

 

Within the renovated church, Sauniere erected a strange statue of the demon Asmodeus—“custodian of secrets, guardian of hidden treasures, and, according to ancient Judaic legend, builder of Solomon’s temple.”

Sauniere began to exhibit a defiant independence toward his Church superiors, refusing to disclose the source of his newfound wealth or accept a transfer from Rennes-le-Château, where he and his house keeper were seen digging incessantly in the graveyard around the church. Yet, when push came to shove, the Vatican supported Sauniere, a good indication of the significance of his discoveries.

On January 17, 1917, Sauniere suffered a sudden stroke. A nearby priest was called to administer last rites but, “visibly shaken,” refused to do so after hearing Sauniere’s confession, which has never been made public.

 

His house keeper and companion, Marie Denarnaud, kept her silence about Sauniere’s activities, living quietly in the Villa Bethania. Toward the end of her life, she sold the villa to a man whom she promised she would tell a secret that would make him both wealthy and powerful. Unfortunately, she too died of a stroke before passing along this secret.

Thus began the mystery of Rennes-le-Château.

 

“Speculation has varied over the years as to the true nature of Sauniere’s discovery,” wrote Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince; “most prosaically it has been suggested that he found a hoard of treasure, while others believe it was something considerably more stupendous, such as the Ark of the Covenant, the treasure of the Jerusalem Temple, the Holy Grail—or even the tomb of Christ.... The Priory claim that what Sauniere had discovered were parchments containing genealogical information that proves the survival of the [Franks] Merovingian dynasty.”

Whatever Sauniere found, it seems to have been linked to Solomon’s treasure long hidden in the nearby cave systems by first the Goths and later the Templars.

In review of what is known about the Father Sauniere affair, it appears doubtful that the priest actually found the lost treasure. It is more likely that his find was some ancient genealogies inimical to the Catholic Church and perhaps some clues to the location of the treasure. Such clues were expanded upon by the work of Otto Rahn with further expeditions to Languedoc financed by SS chief Himmler.

 

Rahn’s work was getting him closer to the location of the treasure. “In a letter written to [Rahn’s close friend Karl Maria Wiligut-Weisthor] in September 1935, Otto Rahn informed his friend that he was at a place where he had reason to believe the Grail might be found, and that Weisthor should keep the matter secret with the exception of mentioning it to Himmler,” reported British authors David Wood and Ian Campbell.

By the start of the war, Rahn was dead but his knowledge was kept alive by Himmler. According to author Angebert, as early as June 1943, a group of German geologists, historians, and ethnologists camped near Montségur and began excavations that lasted into November. This expedition failed to produce the treasure.

BUT OTTO SKORZENY, dispatched by Himmler in early 1944, apparently had better luck.

 

“The commando force reached Languedoc in early March 1944, and set up headquarters at the base of Montségur. They spent a few days exploring the Cathar fortress and in reconnaissance of the surrounding mountains. They discovered remnants of what had once been a 3,000-step stairway which led from the castle to an exit in the valley below,” wrote Colonel Howard Buechner.

Skorzeny, disdaining intellectual study of the problem over the treasure’s location, set about his work from the standpoint of a tactician. He quickly surmised that Rahn and the members of the 1943 expedition had looked in the obvious—and wrong—locations.

The Germans promptly found a secret path used as an escape route for the Cathars during the siege of Montségur, which ended in March 1244, exactly seven hundred years earlier.

 

“Skorzeny and his men scouted along this path and soon discovered what appeared to be an ancient trail leading into the higher mountains,” related Colonel Buechner.

 

“At an undisclosed distance from Montségur they found a fortified entrance to a large grotto. Perhaps it was the grotto of Bouan, which was the last refuge of the Cathars after the fall of Montségur. Not far from this grotto was the mountain called La Peyre. Near the crest of this mountain was another grotto and in this cavern, it is said, they found the treasure.”

On March 15, 1944, Skorzeny sent a one-word telegram to Berlin. It read:

 

“Ureka [Eureka, or I have found it!].”

It was signed with Skorzeny’s nickname, “Scar.”

His message was soon answered with a cryptic note:

 

“Well done. Congratulations. Watch the sky tomorrow at noon. Await our arrival.”

This was signed “Reichsfuehrer SS.”

According to Colonel Buechner, there followed an amazing coincidence of events. Each March 16, local descendants of the Cathars gathered at Montségur to pay homage to their ancestors who had died there seven hundred years earlier.

 

In 1944, the local German military governor refused to grant permission, claiming Hitler’s Third Reich had “historic rights” to Montségur. In defiance of this prohibition, a group of pilgrims traveled to Montségur anyway and there encountered Skorzeny and his men. The giant commander chief, who had a reputation for defying bureaucracy, granted their request, since he had control of the treasure.

The pilgrims placed special significance on the date March 16, 1944, because of an ancient prophecy that stated,

 

“At the end of seven hundred years, the laurel will be green once more.”

Many assumed this meant the beginning of a revival of Catharism. That year’s seven hundredth anniversary delegation of pilgrims was much larger than usual.

 

“Thus it was that the worshippers were on top of the mountain [Montségur] at precisely the time when Skorzeny had been instructed to ‘watch the sky,’” noted Colonel Buechner.

Near noon, a Fieseler Storch, or Stork, light airplane bearing German markings approached and created a giant spectacle for the gathered crowd.

 

The airplane, which may have carried either Himmler, Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, or both, used skywriting equipment to produce a huge Celtic cross across the sky over Montségur.

“The pilgrims on the mountaintop were awestruck and reacted as if a miracle had occurred,” said Colonel Buechner.

 

“They had no idea that the fabulous treasure of the Cathars had been discovered only a short time before and that the plane was saluting the victorious expedition.”

The next afternoon, an official delegation arrived and congratulations and medals were handed out. This delegation was headed by Rosenberg and Oberst, or colonel, Wolfram Sievers, a ranking member of the Ahnenerbe SS, the organization dealing with esoteric and occult matters for Himmler’s Black Shirts.

 

According to Colonel Buechner’s sources, the treasure was carried out of the Pyrenees by pack-mule train to the village of Lavelanet, where it was loaded onto trucks for the journey to a rail head.

 

Guarded rail cars carried the treasure to the small town of Merkers, located about forty miles from Berlin, where it was catalogued by hand-picked members of the Ahnenerbe SS and then moved to other locations, including Hitler’s redoubt at Berchtesgaden, where some of the treasure was carried into the extensive tunnel system, large parts of which remain inaccessible today.

 

“During its initial days at Merkers, the ‘Treasure of the Ages’ was intact for the last time,” stated Colonel Buechner. The Nazis apparently had secured the world’s greatest treasure trove—both of wealth and of lost secrets.

According to Colonel Buechner, the treasure consisted of:

• Thousands of gold coins, some of which dated back to the early days of the Roman Empire and earlier.

• Items believed to have come from the Temple of Solomon, which included gold plates and fragments of wood that provided strong evidence that the partially decomposed relic was the fabled Ark of the Covenant.

• Twelve stone tablets bearing pre-runic inscriptions, which none of the experts were able to read. These items comprised the stone grail of the Germans and of Otto Rahn.

• A beautiful silvery cup with an emerald-like base made of what appeared to be jasper. Three gold plaques on the cup were inscribed with cuneiform script in an ancient language.

• A large number of religious objects of various types, which were unidentifiable as to time and significance. However, there were many crosses from different periods, made of gold or silver and adorned with pearls and precious stones.

• An abundance of precious stones in all sizes and shapes.

By the time the Allies occupied Germany, much of the treasure had been melted down into bars and shipped out of the country.

 

A vast amount of gold and silver, as well as pieces of art and religious artifacts, were taken into Allied hands in the town of Merkers, but the most rare and valuable items dropped from public view.

 

“When Martin Bormann’s wife—Frau Gerda Buch Bormann—was captured at a small hotel in northern Italy, she had 2,200 antique gold coins in her possession,” wrote Buechner.

 

“These priceless coins were almost certainly a part of Hitler’s personal share of the Treasure of Solomon.... Bormann himself sent gold coins to Argentina by submarine, where on arrival, his treasure was placed under the personal protection of Evita Peron.”

Bormann’s wife suffered from cancer and was released by the Allied authorities. She died of mercury poisoning on March 23, 1946.

Lest anyone consider Colonel Buechner’s account of Otto Rahn and the taking of Solomon’s treasure some personal fantasy, they would do well to consider his credentials. A native of New Orleans, Howard A. Buechner earned a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and a medical degree from Louisiana State University.

 

During World War II, Dr. Buechner was a medical officer with the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division, the unit that arrived first at Dachau concentration camp. Dr. Buechner was the first American physician to enter the camp upon its liberation. He was later promoted to colonel while serving in the postwar reserves. It was during his wartime experiences, on the scene, that Colonel Buechner first learned of the loss of Solomon’s treasure.

 

Buechner’s awards included the Medical Combat Badge, the Bronze Star, three battle stars, the Army Commendation Medal, the War Cross, and the Distinguished Service Cross of Louisiana. He also became a professor of medicine at Tulane and served as emeritus professor of medicine at LSU, where an honorary professorship was established in his name. His papers on tuberculosis and other lung diseases made him an internationally recognized expert.

Colonel Buechner and other researchers have estimated the treasure trove recovered by Skorzeny in southern France in excess of $60 billion, based on the current price of gold.

 

This, added to the other loot from Europe, gave the Nazis more than enough economic clout to continue their plans for world conquest long after the end of World War II. Such wealth made it possible for Bormann and other Nazis to misdirect West German investigations and silence foreign governments and news organizations. And it provided the means to infiltrate and buy out numerous companies and corporations, both outside the United States and within.

To understand how a shadowy Nazi empire was created, one must return to German business history and take note of Bormann’s activities beginning in mid-1944.

 

 

 

 

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

IN THE FALL OF 1942, THE GERMAN SIXTH ARMY WAS RAMPAGING virtually unhindered through the Ukraine in Russia. Its objectives were Baku and the rich Caucasian oil fields. With these oil reserves in hand, Hitler planned to turn south and capture the oil of the Middle East in a combined operation with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps’ assault from North Africa.

 

This scheme was thwarted by Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein—made possible by the now-known decoding of German Enigma messages—and the eventual destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalin grad, a city on the Volga River.

Stalin grad, which the Germans had entered in strength by late September of that year, soon turned into a cauldron of death and destruction. Even breathing became a chore due to the constant shelling and bombing. Though of dubious strategic value, both Hitler and Stalin insisted there be no withdrawal from the fiercely defended city, the namesake of the Soviet leader.

 

Russian pincer attacks isolated the Sixth Army in late November, but organized resistance did not end until February 2, 1943, with the surrender of more than ninety thousand German soldiers—most of them reduced to skin and bones through lack of supplies. With the loss of the Sixth Army, ranking Nazis recognized that the war’s momentum had turned against them on the Eastern Front. It was never to be regained.

Six months later, after the disastrous Battle of Kursk, in which the Nazi war machine lost nearly three-fourths of its entire mechanized force, it became clear that the defeat of Germany was more than a possibility, it was a probability. Top Nazis began to draw up plans for escape and the continuation of their goals.

Curt Reiss, a noted news correspondent of the time, who traveled extensively in Europe, wrote in detail about the Nazis’ plans for survival, in his book The Nazis Go Underground. Astonishingly, this was published in the spring of 1944, prior to the Allied D-Day landings in France that June.

 

Reiss wrote,

 

“They had better means for preparing to go underground than any other potential underground movement in the entire previous history of the world. They had all the machinery of the well- organized Nazi state. And they had a great deal of time to prepare everything. They worked very hard, but they did nothing hastily, left nothing to chance. Everything was thought through logically and organized to the last detail. Himmler [along with Bormann] planned with the utmost coolness. He chose for the work only the best-qualified experts—the best qualified, that is, in matters of underground work.”

Reiss pointed out that when the Nazi Party gained control in Germany, the apparatus of the party was simply transferred over to the apparatus of the state.

 

“Now, when the party wished to go underground and still retain its organization, all it had to do was simply to act in reverse order; that is, to transfer—or, more accurately perhaps, retransfer—the apparatus of the state into the party apparatus—a not-too-difficult enterprise, since both apparatuses were still organized along parallel lines,” he explained.

According to Reiss, some misgivings about the fate of Germany arose even before the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalin grad. He reported on a private meeting on November 7, 1942, in Munich, between SS chief Heinrich Himmler and Hitler’s top lieutenant Martin Bormann.

 

This meeting occurred only two days after Allied armies had landed in North Africa. Himmler later confided the topic of discussion, telling his most trusted associates,

 

“It is possible that Germany will be defeated on the military front. It is even possible that she may have to capitulate. But never must the National Socialist German Workers’ Party capitulate. That is what we have to work for from now on.”

In May 1943, in the wake of the defeat at Stalin grad, Reiss said German industrialists met in Chateau Huegel near Essen, home of the Krupps, and reviewed the situation of their nation.

 

The decision was to distance German commerce from the Nazi regime, Reiss wrote, adding:

 

“All future changes discussed at the meeting centered around the idea of divorcing German industry as far as possible from Nazism as such. Krupp [von Bohlen und Halbach] and [I.G. Farben Director Georg von] Schnitzler declared that it would be much easier for them to work after the war if the world were certain that German industry was not owned and run by the Nazis. He said that Goering as well as other influential party men saw eye to eye with him on this, and would consent to any arrangement that did not involve the prestige of the party.”

Reiss explained why these captains of industry faked a divorce from Nazism rather than mounting genuine opposition—because they had prospered under Hitler.

 

He had “liberated” them from the threat of worker unions and strikes, kept taxes much lower than other industrialized nations, and brought them unprecedented profits through his rearmament program.

 

“But all these are only symptoms,” wrote Reiss. “More important than these symptoms is the fact that the Nazis as a dynamic movement had assured German big businessmen of basic conditions far more favorable than those they enjoyed under the republic or even under the Kaiser. Could they wish for anything better than a world constantly on the brink of new wars?”

As noted previously, it was not only German businessmen who profited from the war. Their counterparts in En gland and America were all capitalizing on the worldwide conflict.

 

Reiss pointed out that only days after the meeting of industrialists, Farben’s von Schnitzler flew to Madrid and declared he had escaped Germany just ahead of the Gestapo.

 

“Spain scarcely seemed a logical asylum. Switzerland or Sweden would have been much healthier places to repair to,” noted Reiss. “And anyway, why should Herr von Schnitzler have had to fear the Gestapo, since his son-in-law, Herbert Scholz, was one of its leading officials? No, there is no reason to believe a word of what Baron Schnitzler said in those first interviews.”

Reiss said Schnitzler’s “flight” was nothing but an elaborate ruse, similar to that of Germany’s steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, who moved to France in 1940, reportedly to escape the Nazis, but ended the war in Germany’s prestigious hotel Adion, where he remained in contact with his old friend, banker Kurt Freiherr von Schroeder.

By the end of 1943, another ranking Nazi had left the Fatherland.

 

Reichsbank president Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht had left the Fatherland for Switzerland, ostensibly for health reasons. During his stay, accounts of his “Schlacht Plan” began to circulate. It was similar to that of Schnitzler—a collaboration between German and Allied corporate business with the major German banks acting as clearinghouses for such transactions.

 

Naturally, Schacht was to direct this effort. Despite his activities as one of the Reich’s principal money men, Schacht suffered no real penalties after the war. He was acquitted by the Nuremberg war crimes court, which stated that rearmament was not itself a criminal act. He was convicted in a German court and sentenced to eight years in prison, but this was overturned on appeal.

 

Four more efforts to convict Schacht in court came to no avail.

By late August 1944, following the D-Day invasion of Europe and despite the advent of the V-1 wonder weapon, many in the Nazi leadership were beginning to see the writing on the wall. When the French town of Saint-Lô, center of the German defense line facing the Allied beachhead in Normandy, fell on July 18, opening all of southern France to Allied armor and infantry, they knew the end of the war was only a matter of time.

According to captured medical records, Hitler was on a roller- coaster ride of euphoria and depression due to large daily doses of amphetamines, and had increasingly lost contact with reality. However, the second most powerful man in the Reich, Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann, was not so incapacitated.

Bormann, a stocky, nondescript man with thinning brown hair, was born in 1900 in Halberstadt in central Germany. He was the son of a cavalry sergeant who later became a civil servant. Young Bormann dropped out of high school after one year and was later drafted into the army during World War I, where he served with the field artillery.

 

Returning from the war, Bormann joined the right-wing Freikorps and served a year in prison in 1924 for his part in the murder of his former elementary school teacher, who had been accused of betraying a Nazi leader when the Ruhr was under French occupation. Following his release from a Leipzig prison, Bormann joined the Nazi Party and rose steadily through the ranks.

Shortly after Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, Bormann was appointed chief of staff to Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess. After Hess’s ill-fated flight to Scotland in 1941, Bormann assumed his duties as well as becoming secretary to Hitler. Nazi leaders dubbed Bormann the “brown eminence” and “the Machiavelli behind the office desk,” as he soon became the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. No one got to Hitler but through Bormann.

In 1943, Bormann gained total control over both the Nazi Party and the German economy, including all top-secret technology. Already named to replace Hess as head of the Nazi Party, Bormann wrested economic and political control from Himmler by having Hitler prohibit the SS chief from issuing orders to the Gauleiters, or district leaders, through his SS commanders.

 

According to Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s personal photographer and the man who introduced him to his mistress Eva Braun, Hitler once said of Bormann,

 

“I know he is brutal, but what he undertakes he finishes. I can rely absolutely on that. With his ruthlessness and brutality he always sees that my orders are carried out.”

Bormann reigned supreme.

 

On August 10, 1944, Bormann called top German business leaders and Nazi Party officials to the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. According to captured transcripts of the meeting, its purpose was to see that “the economy of the Third Reich was projected onto a postwar profit-seeking track.”

 

This “track” came to be known as Aktion Adlerflug, or Operation Eagle Flight. It was nothing less than the perpetuation of National Socialism through the massive flight of money, gold, stocks, bonds, patents, copyrights, and even technical specialists from Germany.

An emissary for Bormann, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Dr. Scheid, a director of the industrial firm of Hermadorff & Schenburg Company, explained the purpose of the meeting to one attendee:

 

“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 ensure the economic resurgence of Germany.”

Scheid told attendees,

 

“[A]fter 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.”

As part of this plan, Bormann, aided by the black-clad SS, the central Deutsche Bank, the steel empire of Fritz Thyssen, and the powerful I.G. Farben combine, created 750 foreign front corporations—58 in Portugal, 112 in Spain, 233 in Sweden, 214 in Switzerland, 35 in Turkey, and 98 in Argentina.

According to Paul Manning, a CBS Radio journalist during World War II and the author of Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, Bormann “dwelled” on control of the 750 corporations.

 

He wrote:

 

“[Bormann] utilized every known device to disguise their ownership and their patterns of operations: use of nominees, option agreements, pool agreements, endorsements in blank, escrow deposits, pledges, collateral loans, rights of first refusal, management contracts, service contracts, patent agreements, cartels, and withholding procedures.”

Copies of all transactions and even field reports were maintained and later shipped to Bormann’s archives in South America.

Bormann followed strategies perfected by I.G. Farben chairman Hermann Schmitz.

 

The names of various companies and corporations would be changed and interchanged to create confusion as to ownership. For example, I.G. Chemie became Societe Internationale pour Participations Industrielles et Commerciales SA, while in Switzerland, the same organization was known as International Industrie und Handelsbeteiligungen AG, or Interhandel.

Another tactic was to name a compliant citizen from each country as the nominal head of a given corporation. Meanwhile, the directors would be a blend of German administrators and bank officials. Officers at senior and management levels would be German scientists and technicians. The real ownership of the corporation would be Nazis holding bearer bonds as proof of stock ownership.

 

These individuals, all part of the Bormann operation, would remain in the shadows. The targeted nations generally were appreciative of Bormann’s scheme, as it meant increased employment and a more favorable balance of trade.

In 1941, 171 American corporations had more than $420 million invested in German companies.

 

After war was declared, Bormann merely had operatives in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Argentina buy American stocks using foreign exchange funds in the Buenos Aires branch of Deutsche Bank and Swiss banks. Large demand deposits were also placed with major banks in New York City to include National City Bank (now Citibank), Chase (now JP Morgan Chase), Manufacturers and Hanover (now part of JP Morgan Chase), Morgan Guaranty, and Irving Trust (now part of the Bank of New York).

At the Strasbourg meeting, Scheid cited several prominent American companies that had been useful to Germany in the past. Due to patent obligations, United States Steel, American Steel and Wire, and National Tube had to work in conjunction with the Krupp empire. He also mentioned Zeiss Company, the Leica Company, and the Hamburg-Amerika line as firms that were especially effective in protecting Nazi interests.

Bormann’s complex, yet well organized, flight capital operation confounded Orvis A. Schmidt, the U.S. Treasury Department’s director of foreign funds control.

 

In 1945, Schmidt stated,

 

“The network of trade, industrial, and cartel organizations has been streamlined and intermeshed, not only organizationally but also by what has officially been described as ‘personnel union.’ Legal authority to operate this organizational machinery has been vested in the concerns that have majority capacity in the key industries, such as those producing iron and steel, coal and basic chemicals. These concerns have been deliberately welded together by exchanges of stock to the point where a handful of men can make policy and other decisions that affect us all.”

AT THE HEART of this flight capital program lay the huge I.G. Farben conglomerate.

 

The Farben complex already had produced many scientific breakthroughs for the Third Reich.

 

“Its experts developed the noted Buna Process for the manufacture of synthetic rubber, freeing Germany from dependence on natural rubber,” explained Paul Manning.

 

“It developed the hydrogenation process for making motor fuels and lubricating oils from coal. Germany’s shortage of bauxite, the raw material essential to manufacture aluminum, was surmounted by its developments in utilizing the element magnesium.”

Schmidt said Treasury investigations discovered Farben documents that showed the firm maintained an interest in more than 700 companies around the world. This number did not include Farben’s normal corporate structure, which covered ninety-three countries, nor the 750 corporations created under Bormann’s flight capital program.

I.G. Farben also was at the hub of money transfers out of Nazi Germany. Even before the end of the war, for example,

 

“I.G. Latin American firms all maintained, unrecorded, in their books, secret cash accounts in banks in the names of their top officials,” wrote Manning. “These were used to receive and to disburse confidential payments; firms dealing with Farben wanted this business but certainly did not wish it known to British and United States economic authorities.”

“The great German combines were the spearheads of economic penetration in the other American republics [South and Central American nations],” stated U.S. Treasury official Schmidt. “In the field of drugs and pharmaceuticals the Bayer, Merck, and Schering companies enjoyed a virtual monopoly. I.G. Farben subsidiaries had a firm hold on the dye and chemical market. German enterprises such as Tubos Mannesmann, Ferrostaal, AEG, and Siemens-Schuckert played a dominant role in the construction, electrical, and engineering fields. Shipping companies and, in some areas, German airlines, were well entrenched.”

The foundation for a multinational German business empire was in place.

AS IN THE 1930s, the largest banking enterprises provided the underlying financial foundation for the resurgence of National Socialism.

The chairman of Deutsche Bank, Dr. Hermann Josef Abs, was particularly important to the Nazi flight capital program. Abs was also a director of I.G. Farben, Daimler-Benz, and Siemens.

 

Martin Bormann maintained a cordial relationship with the Berlin banker. Manning noted:

 

“[Bormann] knew in 1943... he had the means to ultimately take the reins of finance unto himself.... He could set a new Nazi state policy, when the time was ripe for the general transfer of capital, gold, stocks, and bearer bonds to safety in neutral countries.”

Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, and Commerzbank constituted the three major German banks, but it was Abs’s Deutsche Bank that took the lead in establishing economic authority over the banks and corporations of the occupied countries.

During the war, Deutsche Bank coordinated Nazi gold transactions, purchasing 4,446 kilograms of gold from the Reichsbank and selling it in Turkey. Much of this gold came from victims of Nazi persecution. It arrived at the Reichsbank in crates and suitcases, sometimes marked with their place of origin, such as Auschwitz or Lublin. This wealth was greatly expanded by the loot of occupied Europe.

 

According to author Ladislas Farago, this included “millions in gold marks, pound sterling, dollars, and Swiss francs, 3,500 ounces of platinum, over 550,000 ounces of gold, and 4,639 carats in diamonds and other precious stones, as well as hundreds of pieces of works of art.”

According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the “greatest unsolved bank robbery” in world history was the disappearance of the entire German treasury at the end of the war. But was it truly unsolved or merely covered up at the highest levels?

Both Abs and Schmitz taught Bormann how to protect his wealth by depositing it in Swiss banks. Bormann saw to it that while the Reich allowed occupied countries to continue printing their own currency, the major commercial banks of Germany dealt in gold. Manning wrote,

 

“The gold, whatever its origin, would be stamped with Third Reich seals and periodically sold to leading Swiss banks, as well as to the Swiss National Bank.... The money [from the gold sales] was then left on deposit in various numbered accounts to be invested in Switzerland and in other neutral countries, and ultimately to maintain the Bormann party apparatus abroad.”

Ironically, it was a 1934 law passed in Switzerland that preserved Nazi loot. The law that prohibited the disclosure of the owners of private bank accounts was initially meant to keep the Gestapo from locating the savings of German Jews. To this day, it has been used to hide Nazi wealth. Today many American corporations have followed Bormann’s lead by depositing their money in Swiss banks.

Swiss officials claim that their policies toward the Allied and Axis powers were those of balanced neutrality, but the scales were heavily tipped in favor of the Nazis, at least on economic matters.

 

“Declassified intelligence reports reveal that Swiss banks, particularly the Swiss National Bank, accepted gold looted from the national treasuries of Nazi- occupied countries and from dead Jews alike, gold they either bought outright or laundered for the Nazis before sending it on to other neutral countries,” wrote Adam LeBor, author of Hitler’s Secret Bankers: The Myth of Swiss Neutrality During the Holocaust.

According to LeBor,

“Swiss banks supplied the foreign currency that the Third Reich needed to buy vital war material. Swiss banks were the vital financial conduit that allowed Nazi economic officials to channel their loot to a safe haven in Switzerland. Swiss banks financed Nazi foreign intelligence operations by providing funds for German front companies in Spain and Portugal.”

Bormann had a personal account at the Reichsbank under the fictitious name “Max Heiliger,” into which he siphoned a substantial portion of the Reich’s wealth. Utilizing both gold and “treasure,” Bormann, through his chief of economics, Dr. Helmut von Hummel, sent these riches out of the country for later use.

Abs presents a classic example of the survivability of high-level bankers. He not only survived the war but was instrumental in Germany’s postwar revival, becoming a financial adviser to West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. He maintained his positions on the boards of Deutsche Bank, Daimler-Benz, and Siemens.

 

In 1978, Abs headed a West German consortium that managed to buy and return nearly $20 million worth of artwork taken from Germany in the 1930s by the Jewish Baron Robert von Hirsch.

 

Later that same year, Abs addressed American business leaders at a meeting chaired by fellow banker John J. McCloy, onetime chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

McCloy served as a member of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Warren Commission and was a legal adviser to the Rockefeller family.

It was Abs who had prevented two American banks in France—Morgan et Cie and Chase of New York—from being closed or controlled by the German occupation authorities. According to U.S. Treasury reports cited by Manning, this exemption came through an “unspoken understanding among international bankers that wars may come and go but the flux of wealth goes on forever.”

This “understanding” was principally between Abs and Lord Hartley Shawcross, a leader in the City of London financial center and a board member of many international companies. Shawcross, a lawyer who was a special adviser to Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York as well as the two American banks in France, was later named chief prosecutor for Britain in the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

 

In the 1950s, Shawcross, along with his friend Dr. Abs, formed the Society for the Protection of Foreign Investments of World War II, headquartered in Cologne, West Germany.

Bormann’s Operation Eagle Flight was substantially helped by the close connections with foreign banks and businesses begun long before the war. According to former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor John Loft us, much of the wealth was passed out of Germany by German banker Fritz Thyssen through his bank in Holland, which, in turn, owned the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) in New York City.

 

Loftus is president of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the author of several books on CIA-Nazi connections, including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews.

Two prominent U.S. business leaders who supported Hitler and served on the board of directors of the Union Banking Corporation were George Herbert Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Bush, father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush.

 

The attorneys for these dealings were John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen. John later became secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower while Allen became one of the longest-serving CIA directors before being fired by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Both were original members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

On October 20, 1942, the office of U.S. Alien Property Custodian, operating under the “Trading With the Enemy Act” (U.S. Government Vesting Order No. 248), seized the shares of UBC on the grounds that the bank was financing Hitler.

 

Also seized were Bush’s holdings in the Hamburg-America ship line that had been used to ferry Nazi propagandists and arms.

 

Another company essential to the passing of Nazi money was the Holland American Trading Company, a subsidiary of UBC. It was through Fritz Thyssen’s Dutch Bank, originally founded by Thyssen’s father in 1916, that Nazi money was passed.

 

This Dutch connection tied the Bush and Nazi money directly to former SS officer and founder of the Bilderberg Group, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who was once secretary to the board of directors of I.G. Farben, with close connections to the Dutch Bank.

 

Loftus noted,

 

“Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents—stocks, bonds, deeds, and trusts—from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen’s partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future president of the United States.”

The leading shareholder in UBC was E. Roland Harriman, son of Edward H. Harriman, who had been an early and important mentor to Prescott Bush. Another son, Averell Harriman, also held ownership in UBC. He was named ambassador to the Soviet Union by President Roosevelt in 1943 and participated in all major wartime conferences.

 

Averell later became ambassador to Great Britain, U.S. secretary of commerce, and governor of New York State. Both Harrimans had been members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones and were closely connected to the globalists at the Council on Foreign Relations. Averell also was a close advisor to President Lyndon Johnson.

On November 17, 1942, U.S. authorities also seized the Silesian- American Corporation, managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, and charged the firm with being a Nazi front company that was supplying vital coal to Germany.

 

But according to government documents that have recently come to light and were published by the New Hampshire Gazette in 2003,

 

“the grandfather of President George W. Bush failed to divest himself of more than a dozen ‘enemy national’ relationships that continued as late as 1951.”

The newly released documents also showed that Bush and his associates routinely tried to conceal their business activities from government investigators and that such dealings were conducted through the New York private banking firm of Brown Brothers Harriman. Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest privately owned bank in America, was formed in 1931 when the Brown brothers, originally importers of Irish linen, merged with railroad tycoon Edward H. Harriman.

 

“After the war,” according to the Gazette report, “a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures. The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil—all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany’s surrender in 1945.”

Why was Prescott Bush not more openly and aggressively prosecuted for his Nazi dealings? This may be due to the fact that the patriarch Bush was “instrumental in the creation of the USO in late 1941,” according to a news release from the United Service Organization in 2002.

 

After all, it would have looked very bad during wartime to publicly prosecute as a Nazi asset the man who helped create the USO, so beloved by U.S. servicemen in all subsequent wars.

 

“The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country,” said publisher and historian Edward Boswell.

 

“It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day.”

It was rumored that the trial transcripts of the 1942 prosecution of Prescott Bush were destroyed in the September 11, 2001, collapse of World Trade Center 7, which housed offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC admitted that more than seven thousand prosecution files were lost with the building, including files on Enron and World .com.

Prescott Bush’s banking connection to Nazis was not the only object of

U.S. investigations during the war. Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil also came under scrutiny for a series of complex business deals that resulted in desperately needed gasoline reaching Nazi Germany.

 

“None of these transactions was ever made public,” reported journalist Charles Higham. “The details of them remained buried in classified files for over forty years.”

However, it was established that Standard Oil shipped oil to fascist Spain throughout World War II, paid for by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco from funds that had been unblocked by the Federal Reserve Bank and passed to Nazi Germany from the vaults of the Bank of En gland, the Bank of France, and the Bank for International Settlements.

 

Such shipments through Spain to Hamburg indirectly but materially assisted the Axis.

 

“While American civilians and the armed services suffered alike from restrictions, more gasoline went to Spain than it did to domestic customers,” noted Higham.

Questioned about this by the New York Times, a spokesman for U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull explained that the oil was coming from the Caribbean, not the United States.

 

What was not explained was that Standard Oil, under the leadership of William Stamps Farish, had early on changed the country of registration for Standard’s tanker fleet to Panama. Higham claimed that both Standard chiefs, Farish and Teagle, were “mesmerized by Germany” and were close associates of I.G. Farben’s president Hermann Schmitz.

 

The person who authorized the masking of Standard’s shipping through Panamanian registry was then-undersecretary of the navy James V. Forrestal, also a vice president of General Aniline and Film (GAF).

Another aspect of Bormann’s flight capital program concerned Hermann Schmitz, who, as a director of Thyssen’s steel empire, owned companies in neutral Sweden, along with other German firms.

 

Schmitz’s Swedish firms built ships and transported coal and coke.

 

“A further example of masked investment was the money paid into the Swedish shipping firm of Rederi A/B Skeppsbron, which received a German-guaranteed loan of $3 million... in which the vessels were mortgaged to the lender,” explained Paul Manning.

“Although the Swedish company remained officially the owner of the vessels, the Hamburg-Amerika line [part of Prescott Bush’s holdings] was the real owner.”

“It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason,” declared Nazi prosecutor Loft us.

 

“The Bush’s bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed Allied soldiers. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen’s coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family complicity.”

ALONG WITH THE desire to create a Nazi-directed European economy, Martin Bormann and his henchmen also drew up plans to create a new generation of National Socialists, beginning in Germany but with an eye toward other nations.

Heimschulen, or home schools, were created within Germany to train youngsters in the techniques of explosives and sabotage as well as how to live and act in foreign countries.

 

“In the spring of 1943, the curriculum of these schools was changed slightly,” stated Curt Reiss. “This was logical, for since the leaders of the Third Reich no longer expected to win this war, they now began to put the accent on the work that would have to be done after the war. Instead of developing spies and saboteurs, these schools were put to the task of developing workers for the coming underground.”

In a move that has been duplicated within the modern U.S. intelligence community, many SS members seemingly resigned from the Black Shirts but secretly retained their loyalty and affiliation.

 

In today’s intelligence parlance, this is called “sheep dipping.”

 

“These men will leave the SS for good. Some of them will even leave the party, so as to be completely neutralized. These latter may officially disavow the party before public witnesses, who can be used later to testify how anti-Nazi they have been for a long time,” wrote Reiss.

“Several intelligence services have commented on the sudden disappearance of important personalities from [Germany’s] political and party life,” wrote Reiss in 1944. “And it has become quite the accepted thing to everybody in Germany. But what has not yet become known is that all this also applies to a much greater number of anonymous persons all over Germany, those on the second and third levels of the Nazi strata.

“These unknown personalities may be used later by the underground. Party functionaries who may be known locally, but certainly not nationally, can easily be transferred to another city or town, where they will suddenly appear as anti-Nazis. The party helps in their masquerades. These men get new documents which ‘prove’ that they have always been anti-Nazi.

 

Notes are inserted in their personal files saying they must be watched on account of their anti-Hitler attitudes and ‘unworthy’ behavior. Some of them will undoubtedly be sent to concentration camps for crimes which they have never committed, but which will make them look dependable in the eyes of the Allies; some have perhaps already succeeded in joining anti-Nazi circles and are pretending to conspire against Hitler.

 

Later on they will be able to use such activities as alibis.”

Nazi sympathizers across the world were brought into the plan for resurrecting National Socialism through the Auslandsorganisation (AO), or the League of Germans Abroad.

 

Various forms of this organization had been in existence since the 1800s and have manipulated thousands of persons in many different countries.

 

In Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, and Norway, members aided the Nazi invasions, becoming known as “fifth columnists.”

 

“[T]he Nazis, long before they came to power, put their men or men they trusted into these leagues. At a party meeting in Hamburg it was decided to set up Nazi cells within all these organizations. That was in 1930. One year later Rudolf Hess formed a special Foreign Department of the [Reich Leadership] of the National Socialist Party, which established card files on every member who lived abroad or traveled abroad. This was the basis of the gigantic files which the AO was to organize later,” stated Reiss.

In 1944, Reiss pondered when the flight capital program might bear fruit.

 

“How long it will take for the Nazis to come back, to emerge on the surface—if they succeed in their aims—is a question which cannot be answered at all. Even under the most favorable circumstances—that is, most favorable for them—it will take ten or fifteen years. Even then it would be a blitzkrieg, an underground blitzkrieg with somewhat different conceptions of time,” he wrote.

 

“The Italian underground needed a half century to achieve its goal, the Irish a whole century, the Bonapartists thirty-five years, and the Russian Socialists twenty-five. The Russians needed two lost wars to bring about their revolution. The Nazis cannot wait for another lost war. They want to come to power so that they can start World War III.”

Reiss, with his accumulated knowledge of the Nazis and their methods, issued this warning in 1944:

 

It is not the relative strengths of the different powers that must change, but the relations of the human beings within all the countries of this world. Some call it revolution. Some call it a new order. Whatever we call it, it must come about. If it does not, the Nazi underground will live and flourish. In due time, it will make itself felt far beyond the borders of Germany. It will certainly make itself felt in this country—and no ocean will be broad enough to stop it.

For Nazism or Fascism is by no means an Italian or German specialty. It is as international as murder, as greed for power, as injustice, as madness. In our time these horrors were translated into political and cultural actuality in Italy and in Germany first.

. . . If we don’t stamp out the Nazi underground, it will make itself felt all over the world; in this country too. We may not have to wait ten years, perhaps not even five.

For many years in the past we closed our eyes to the Nazi threat. We must never allow ourselves to close them again. The danger to the world, to this country will not diminish. But it is possible to fight this danger if we know it, if we remain aware of its existence.

Armed with super-science and technology, plus the loot of Europe—to include perhaps Solomon’s treasure—the Nazis and their ideology were well placed to begin their Fourth Reich.
 

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