The Rise of the Fourth Reich

by Jim Marrs

  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, one-time 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 Loftus, 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, pai
d 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 England, 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 Loftus. “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.

  PART TWO

  THE REICH CONSOLIDATES

  CHAPTER 6

  THE RATLINES

  CONSIDERING THE VAST ECONOMIC RESOURCES AT THEIR DISPOSAL—especially if they held dark secre
ts concerning advanced technology such as tactical nukes, flying saucers, or a device for manipulating energy—it is now certain that the surviving Nazi leadership wielded enough power to misdirect investigations and silence foreign governments and news organizations.

  There remain long-standing controversies over the proclaimed deaths of prominent Nazis, including Martin Bormann; the notorious SS Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Extermination” at Auschwitz; and Gestapo chief, SS Gruppenfuehrer Heinrich “Gestapo” Mueller. According to various unsubstantiated reports, Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming, and drowned in Brazil in 1979 after hiding there, as well as in Argentina and Paraguay, for decades. Another ranking SS official, Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf Eichmann escaped to Argentina but was abducted to Israel in 1960, where he was convicted of war crimes and executed. Toward the end of the war, Mueller distanced himself from his boss Himmler and moved closer to Bormann. After he slipped away from Hitler’s bunker in the last days of the Reich, Mueller’s family declared him dead and erected a tombstone in a Berlin cemetery, with the inscription OUR DEAR DADDY. However, in 1963, a court-ordered exhumation revealed that the grave contained three skeletons, none of which matched Mueller’s height or bone structure.