by J. W Lateer
The most controversial part of the story of GAF was the collaboration of Standard Oil of New Jersey (now known as Exxon) with Hitler’s Nazi government during World War II. The entire issue of the Trading With The Enemy Act and the very existence of the Alien Property Custodian has essentially been suppressed in American history. There were many obvious conflicts surrounding it and it made the leaders of American industry such as du Pont and Standard Oil look very bad. The father of George H.W. Bush owned the Union Banking Corporation which was seized by the government under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
The alien property was being held in order to sell it and use the money to settle claims against Germany by those who had grievances against Nazi Germany. In 1954, Senator Everett Dirksen, introduced a bill which would demand return of the alien property to the former owners. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles testified in support of the Dirksen Amendment. This testimony and the position of Dulles on this issue shocked the world. Many other countries were still holding on to German assets seized during and after the War.
But with backing from Ike’s Department of Justice, the Dirksen Amendment was defeated.
When John F. Kennedy was elected, negotiations to return the GAF ownership to Interhandel and thus IG Farben continued. There was a secret meeting involving the negotiators for Interhandel. These negotiators were Robert A. Schmitz and Charles E. Wilson. Schmitz had worked on the GAF-Interhandel case most of his life and Wilson was thought to have the inside track with the Eisenhower Administration.
Significantly, this secret meeting involved JFK’s father Joseph P. Kennedy and his new Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon and it took place in Palm Beach, Florida. Nothing came from the meeting.
In 1961, the attorney for Charles E. Wilson, Charles Spofford, met with the Assistant Attorney General in charge of Alien Property, William H. Orrick. By this time, the Union Bank of Switzerland was the nominal owner of the majority of Interhandel and Union Banks representative Alfred Schaefer became the CEO of Interhandel. Shaefer was at the meeting with Wilson, Spofford and Orrick. According to Orrick, Schaefer launched a verbal attack against the U.S. Government and its role in the case. As a result, Orrick ordered Schaefer to leave his office.
The next move was made by Alfred Schaefer. Returning to Europe, Schaefer hired Prince Stanislaw Radziwill to represent the interests of Interhandel with the administration of John F. Kennedy. Of course, Prince Radziwill was married to the sister of the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy and Radziwill was not a lawyer.
Prince Radziwill sent a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy requesting a meeting between RFK and the abrasive Albert Schaefer. The letter was enclosed in an elaborate set of envelopes bearing the royal Radziwill family coat-of-arms or seal. RFK responded, mentioning that his staff was totally set against the proposed settlement for the sale of GAF to its former owners or to allow them to share in the proceeds of a possible sale of the GAF company.
In late 1961 and early 1962, RFK was getting closer to a deal in the GAF case, which would provide for sharing the proceeds of sale with the U.S. government. The role of Prince Radziwill was kept almost totally secret and away from the press due to a fear of public outrage and criticism which would follow.
The negotiations dragged on into 1962. In mid-1962, Orrick left the Justice Department for the Department of State. Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach then took charge of the GAF negotiations. Katzenbach immediately decided that if GAF could be sold at public auction, that would blunt much of the criticism which would come with a settlement.
In order to sell GAF at public auction, an amendment was necessary to the Trading With The Enemy Act. Kenneth Keating, the Republican Senator from New York, had introduced such an amendment in 1962, but Interhandel had succeeded in blocking it. In fact, the Justice Department had been trying for decades to get such an amendment passed. Katzenbach persuaded Interhandel to stop blocking the Keating amendment and the bill then passed, which allowed a sale without court approval. President Kennedy signed it on October 22, 1962.
The New York Times predicted that the bill would only open a new and tangled chapter in the GAF case. One problem was that there were tax claims of $24 M against GAF. Katzenbach insisted that the tax claims be counted against the cash that was being received from the sale by Interhandel. If there were a sale as allowed by the new law without court approval, Interhandel would have fought the new law on Constitutional grounds in the U.S., then appealed to the international court in the Hague. When the settlement and sale agreement was announced, JFK was grilled about it at a press conference. A questioner asked whether the U.S. Government theory that I G Farben owned Interhandel and thus also GAF was erroneous. Or, it was asked, was JFK giving in to pressure from the Swiss Government?
In Congress, Democratic Representative John Dingell, a high-ranking member of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Subcommittee railed that Interhandel did not have a nickel coming to it. Republican Willard S. Curtin of the same subcommittee said that “splitting the baby” was just wrong.
On December 20, 1963, a stipulation of settlement was signed by the Department of Justice and also Interhandel which provided for the sale of GAF to the public and the splitting of the proceeds per the prior agreed percentages. In April 1964, the Federal U.S. District Court was asked to approve the settlement, which it did, and the Court authorized the sale.
Criticism of the agreement mounted. Columnist Drew Pearson pointed to the clandestine visit of the Interhandel representative to the Joseph P. Kennedy home in Palm Beach right after the 1960 election. The rank and file lawyers at the Department of Justice who had worked on the case were unanimously opposed to the settlement. Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, had appointed William Payton Marin as Vice-Chairman of the GAF board. Marin was the principal legal counsel for Joseph P. Kennedy. Marin quickly became the dominant figure on the board of GAF. Drew Pearson then dropped the bombshell—a memo in Justice Department files which referred to the involvement of Prince Radziwill.
In July, 1964, when RFK was going to run for the Senate from New York, the Jewish War Veteran’s organization asked an official of the Justice Department whether any of the proceeds of the GAF sale would wind up in the pocket of any former Nazis. The reply was no.
On March 9, 1965 the General Aniline and Film stock was sold at the largest competitive auction in Wall Street up to that date. The winning bid was over $320 M, or $2.5 B in 2016 dollars.
On December 13, 1974, GAF which was now legitimately owned by Americans, together with BASF, Bayer, DuPont and five other companies pled guilty to a criminal conspiracy to fix the prices of dyestuffs in the United States. On Apri1 1, 1978, the public was told that the GAF dyestuff plant at Rensselaer, New York, originally built by German Darl Duisberg, was sold to BASF a German company and the world’s largest chemical company. The plant had been seized by the Alien Property Custodian in both World War I and World War II.
Only time will tell if history will repeat itself a third time. The question for our analysis here is whether the GAF case factored into the JFK assassination. Part of the arrangements for the sale of GAF involved the appointment of an advisory committee which was made up of seven persons. Three were officers of GAF. The chairman of the committee was Donald C. Cook of New York, who was President of American Electric Power Company. On November 30, 1963, Lyndon Johnson and Donald C. Cook participated in a lengthy phone call. During the call, Johnson discussed such personal issues as whether Cook’s son would want to date one of LBJ’s daughters. Cook also informed LBJ that he would like LBJ to meet with a group of men to discuss some issues which were not explicitly mentioned. LBJ agreed to a very hasty meeting which would take place within a week.
He may have appointed Don Cook to the advisory board for the GAF sale because of a prior friendship. Or Cook may have been calling to pressure LBJ to finalize the GAF deal where JFK and RFK had balked. Circumstantial evidence can be found in the fact that th
e sale was approved in December, 1963. This was less than four weeks after JFK was assassinated. It would seem like Cook was calling for the same purpose others were calling LBJ immediately after the assassination: he may well have wanted an affirmation to confirm that he would see the desired result for one of his (German) friends’ efforts in helping to further the assassination.
One theory which could be suggested is this: as long as GAF was owned by the U.S. Government, it would be very difficult to involve GAF in price-fixing with DuPont, BASF and Bayer in the sale of chemicals in the U.S. When GAF was sold at auction, it brought $2.6 billion in 2016 dollars. But there would be additional profits that would accrue if the old German theory of cartelization and price fixing were to include GAF. Those extra profits could have far eclipsed the $2.6 B from the GAF sale. Those illicit profits could have mounted into the $50 billion range. The greater the financial stakes involved in the case of GAF, the larger role the GAF case would have played in the JFK assassination. If great enough, GAF could have been the actual proximate cause of the assassination itself.
The most important takeaway from the General Aniline and Film case is the degree that the Old World values and personages had penetrated into the JFK administration. Prince Radziwill had been paid off to insert himself into the biggest case involving ex-Nazis and German industrialists. No other president had invited the Old World into his administration like JFK did.
In the 1930’s, JFK along with his father Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy was over in Europe literally slow-dancing with the future Queen Elizabeth. The mother of Jackie Kennedy had an affair with the ridiculous pretender George de Mohrenschildt. Jackie’s sister married Prince Stanislaus Radziwill. De Mohrenschildt was the person in Dallas in closest association to the assassination aside from Oswald. Baron George de Mohrenschildt and Prince Radziwill had almost identical resumes.
Old World “nobility” would mean nothing to Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford or Carter. It was not until President Ronald Reagan paid his famous visit to an SS cemetery in Germany when these Old World issues next penetrated into the life of a President in a personal way. It was JFK’s (and his family’s) perverse fascination with this Old World junk that left the door wide open to his own assassination. Shame on him!
Kennedy,
Adenauer and U. S.-West German Relations
The relations between West Germany and the United States were not the best in 1963. There were several issues that were front and center in this regard. First, the U.S. needed German soldiers to be a part of the plan to resist a possible Soviet attack or takeover of the remainder of Europe. Second, the borders of post-World War II Germany had not been made final. There were 10 million refugees in Germany who had been displaced from the lost eastern territories. They were hateful about this issue of Germany’s eastern boundaries. It was these refugees, through their leaders, who were very high up on the list of facilitators of the JFK assassination.
There is an excellent book covering this topic. It is called Adenauer and Kennedy: A Study in German-American Relations 1961-1963 by Frank A. Mayer. In his book he describes how Eisenhower set forth the U.S. policy toward Germany in 1953. It was:
An integrated European Union.
Working to reduce Soviet policy influence throughout all of Germany.
A peaceful road to a united Germany.
A healthy economy for Germany within the EU.
Maintenance of Western control of West Berlin.
In return for West Germany joining NATO, the western allies promised a reunification of Germany by peaceful means. But despite the above policies, West Berlin was still not under the control of the West German Government in Bonn.
Adenauer placed German reunification as a requirement before he would agree to accept the new post-war German borders, i.e. the Oder-Neise Line. In 1957, there was a joint declaration by France, the U.K., the U.S. and West Germany affirming the policy of a peaceful re-unification of Germany.
As mentioned elsewhere in our study, the U.S. elections of 1958 brought about a revolution in power in Washington, D.C. The Northeastern Democratic liberals gained much more control in the Senate. As a consequence, J. William Fulbright became the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Mike Mansfield of Montana became the Majority Leader of the Senate. Both Fulbright and Mansfield favored a dialogue with Moscow on security issues. To these liberals, the unification demands of West Germany were a barrier to direct disarmament talks with Moscow.
Another issue was the policy of the U.S. military strategy. Eisenhower believed in “massive retaliation.” In other words, if the Soviets attacked in Europe, there would immediately be a nuclear war. This was much less expensive than maintaining a huge standing army in Europe to battle the Soviets using conventional military means.
On March 15, 1960 Eisenhower re-affirmed the primacy of German re-unification. The big question for that year was whether a newly-elected JFK would also recognize such a priority. Mayer quotes historian Richard Reeves who wrote about JFK as “a professional politician who reacted to events…careless and dangerously disorganized…living in a race against boredom.” While a Senator, JFK had dismissed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as “a shadow of the past.” He also said that German re-unification was “many years away.”
Importantly for our prior discussion of the National Security Council, Mayer reports that Walt W. Rostow as a powerful figure in JFK’s National Security Council tried to persuade JFK to set up an explicit formalized policy system. Instead, JFK abolished Ike’s Operations Co-ordinating Board and started using ad hoc committees drawn from the White House team. This was no small matter.
The National Security Council as well as its Operations Co-ordinating Board had been foisted on the Presidency by villainous types like interfering Wall Street bankers and ex-President Herbert Hoover. In this study you will find that Herbert Hoover was not content to stop his political activities after having wrecked the U.S. economy during his Presidency and drastically worsening the cataclysmic Great Depression. In the 1950’s, he set about to wreck the Office of the President through the Hoover Committee. Most people regarded Hoover as a sort of genius. A student of the JFK assassination only finds Hoover to be a genius at trying to wreck things; like for instance the Presidency, both while in the office and later, right up until his death in 1964 at age 90.
So in 1961, JFK began struggling with the bizarre product of the Hoover Commission, the National Security State. Ike had called it “the military-industrial complex.” That complex included the Secretary of Defense who was a statutory mandated member of the four- or five-person National Security Council. Mayer reports at page 9 that under JFK, all cables to the Secretaries of Defense, State and the CIA Director were read first by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and his Deputy W.W. Rostow. This presumably meant that the cables could be put by them on an indefinite hold or bounced back to the sender. That point is not entirely clear.
As a judgment which literally had fatal consequences, Mayer reports (at p. 8) that the Administration of JFK was more inclined toward West Berlin Mayor Willi Brandt of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, than to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. JFK snubbed Adenauer by inviting Willi Brandt to visit the White House before the first visit of Dr. Adenauer in 1961. JFK and Pope John XXIII both believed in dialogue with the East. Senator Thomas Dodd declared that his President JFK and his Pope John XXIII “had each inflicted 50 years’ worth of damage.” Just try to figure that one out.
Early on, the JFK White House decided that the phrase “German re-unification” should never be used by JFK. Dean Rusk felt that a conventional military response to Soviet aggression should be tried before a nuclear exchange. This went against Ike’s belief in “massive retaliation.” This went against the wishes of Germany which felt it would be sacrificed in a conventional war and, further, it was unable to possess nuclear weapons to threaten its own “massive retaliation.”
JFK felt Adenauer was pro-Nixon in the 1960 elect
ion. Dean Rusk felt that Adenauer’s desire for German re-unification was unrealistic and that Adenauer was diplomatically inept. Former Secretary of State and diplomatic elder statesman Dean Acheson thought that the Bay of Pigs fiasco destroyed all faith in the Kennedy Administration on the part of the European Allies because of its disastrous results.
Meanwhile, Chairman J. William Fulbright of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield were promoting the idea of Berlin as a “Free City,” i.e. 50% Communist. JFK’s White House thought that Adenauer had too much influence on U.S. foreign policy. Noteworthy for our JFK assassination analysis, a committee on Berlin and Germany was formed which included both Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon and Paul Nitze. Both of these men were under the total financial control of their sometime boss, Clarence Dillon, owner of Dillon, Read investment bank. Dillon controlled how much money, if any, they would ever get from the accumulated profits and partnership interest in Dillon, Read. Clarence Dillon very likely played a role in the assassination, mostly because he had the motive, means and opportunity, as this situation amply demonstrates.
Author Mayer quotes historian Ernest May, who said that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was one of the most influential people inside the American Government. Due to the power and position of Germany in the Cold War, that scarcely needed saying. Of course, West Germany and Adenauer gained effective military control of NATO around this time by placing NATO under the control of former Hitler general staffers. In 1961, Adenauer disavowed a new list of American positions on re-unification and treatment of the East German government in European negotiations.