The extraordinary story of how an SS unit robbed the Reichsbank in Berlin during the last days of the furious battle in 1945 and escaped to Bavaria with over 130 million dollars of loot. All monetary figures are extrapolated from Nazi Gold by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, the best book on this subject.
- Banking With Hitler — Documentary
371 Swiss banks stand accused of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. This was suspected at the time by by U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who began investigating this collaboration. He found the Swiss were not alone. His archives reveal that both British and American bankers continued to do business with Hitler, even as Germany was invading Europe and bombing London.
This investigative film shows in detail the roles played by the Anglo-German banking clique. Key members of the Bank of England together with their German counterparts established the BIS, the Bank for International Settlement, which laundered the plundered gold of Europe. On its board were key Nazis such as Walther Funk and Hjalamar Schact The president of BIS was an American, Thomas McKittrick, who readily socialized with leading Nazis. Not only the BIS, but other allied banks worked hand in hand with the Nazis. One of the biggest American banks kept a branch open in Occupied Paris and, with full knowledge of the managers in the U.S., froze the accounts of French Jews. Deprived of money to escape France, many ended up in death camps.
When President Roosevelt died in April 1945, Morgenthau lost his protector and his crusade against the banks came to an end. He was further weakened when men in his department were accused of being Communists during the McCarthy era. This incredible story contains interviews with surviving members of banking families and Morgenthau’s investigative team as well as newly found archive material.
- Hitler’s American Business Partners – Documentary
This documentary uncovers the unholy alliance between Nazi Germany and some of the biggest corporations in the US — companies which were indispensable for Hitler to wage war. Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer; James D Mooney, the General Motors manager; and Thomas Watson, the IBM boss were all awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle — the Nazi’s highest distinction for foreigners for their services to the Third Reich. Of course, many American corporations were also actively engaged in building up the Soviet military-industrial complex during the interwar period. War is the health of the State (and its corporatist adjuncts).
- The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century — Book by Christopher Simpson
A disturbing report on how US bankers, lawyers, and diplomats responded to the Armenian massacres of WW I and the Holocaust. Simpson (Blowback, 1988) has double expertise for this comparative study, since he’s a member of the national advisory board of the Armenian Genocide Archive and also served as research director for Marcel Ophuls’s documentary of Klaus Barbie, Hotel Terminus. During WW I, Simpson tells us, America and its European allies saw the recently drafted Hague and Geneva Conventions fail when the Turkish government killed one million Armenians–and when, at the Versailles peace conference, the victors allowed Turkey to escape punishment in hope of obtaining Middle Eastern oil. Hitler cited the Armenian genocide as the prototype of his own larger, more systematically organized crimes–although Simpson, by using newly released documents, suggests that the Nazis could not have conducted their hideous slaughter without Western bungling: in one ease, through American concerns such as Ford Motor Co. and John Foster Dulles’s Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, whose European trading partners looted Jewish businesses in the Nazi “Aryanization” program; and, in another case, through State Department bureaucrats who buried intelligence reports on the Final Solution. Further, Simpson shows how prominent Nazis, such as oil chief Karl Blessing and SS general Karl Wolff, escaped judgment at Nuremberg with the assistance of these State Department functionaries and of John Foster Dulles’s brother Allen (then an OSS agent who helped clear German businessmen). The motive: to aid Nazi industrialists who had spied for the US during the war, or who might help rebuild Germany as an anti-communist bulwark in Europe. Except for its simplistic conclusion (that the lax US war-crimes posture contributed to the souring of American-Soviet relations): revelatory and shocking investigative scholarship of a high order.
I have an autographed copy of this book.
2:36 pm on February 14, 2021
