by Jim Marrs
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 Stalingrad. 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 Stalingrad, 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 England 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 tr
anscripts 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 “gre
atest 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.”