America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (9 page)

One evening Ashbell was at a dinner party with a number of old friends from OPC who were complaining about “that terrible book,
The Belarus Secret
.” A bit chagrined, Ashbell announced that he was the editor of that terrible book. The stunned silence was finally broken by the hostess who looked sternly at Ashbell and said: “You know the worst thing about that terrible book? It’s all true.”

Maybe this time around, Congress will listen.

John Loftus
St. Petersburg, Florida
July 2010

[
1
] There is a bit of irony here, since Muslim culture prohibits graphic depictions of the Prophet Mohammed.

[
2
] John Ashcroft, one of our more conservative Attorneys General draped the statue in what we laughingly called the Burkha. Apparently, he was discomfited to appear on television with a naked breast peeking over his shoulder. One wit suggested that the AG did not want to stand next to a boob bigger than he was.

[
3
] J. Loftus and M. Aarons,
The Secret War Against the Jews
, St. Martin’s Press, New York

[
4
] My source on this was Dan Benjamin of the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. He had worked up many of the treason investigations and was appalled when the Justice Department let them all go free. Dan introduced me to a select circle of intelligence officials who explained to me how the Justice Department really worked.

[
5
] According to 1973 Thyssen corporate documents, Chase Bank secretly owns nearly a third of the Thyssen-Krupp corporation, the wealthiest conglomerate in Europe. Both Thyssen and Krupp were convicted Nazi war criminals who were quietly released by John McCloy, the American High Commissioner of Germany (HICOG). McCloy then became head of the Chase Bank. When I asked McCloy why he pardoned so many convicted Nazi war criminals, he claimed that he was pressured by the Vatican. McCloy, it should be recalled, also wrote the infamous wartime memo forbidding the bombing of Auschwitz.

[
6
] The buildings at Camp Ashcan/Dustbin became part of the Gehlen organization, the postwar German spy service that employed many of the Nazi war criminals I was later assigned to prosecute.

[
7
] According to a book by former intelligence agent Ladislas Farago, he reviewed captured Nazi intelligence archives pertaining to American Nazi collaborators. In his book, Farago mentioned that these captured Nazi archives were not held in the US National Archives, but in the attic of the main Justice Department building. When I visited the attic in the late 1970s, not a single filing cabinet or box of records was left. There is no trace of what the Justice Department did with this valuable historical collection, and no explanation why the records were not declassified in accordance with the Congressional act mandating disclosure of Nazi records.

[
8
] The Treasury Department investigation was codenamed Operation Safehaven and is described in detail in J. Loftus and M. Aarons,
Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks
, St. Martin’s Press, New York.

[
9
] Records confirming the censorship should still be on file with the Publication Review Commission of the CIA. I hereby waive any Privacy Act restrictions for those seeking access.

[
10
] At the time my security clearances were upgraded above Top Secret (Q, SI, COSMIC), I had to agree never to go behind the Iron Curtain. My co-author had no such restrictions. His great-grandparents were Jews from London and Brooklyn who met in Australia and became founding members of the Communist Party of Australia, later led by his father. Mark’s father was a principled humanist and anti-Stalinist who condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and human rights abuses in Eastern Europe. His son, my friend and co-author, Mark Aarons, has just completed a family history (
The Family File
) based on the recently declassified holdings of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (the equivalent of the FBI). Between Mark Aarons and myself, we managed fairly decent journalistic coverage of the intelligence community on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

[
11
] For example, British SIS reported that Dulles’s American clients, including the Rockefellers, were helping the Nazis by laundering oil supplies through neutral countries. When FDR demanded that Justice indict the corporations, DOJ settled for a minor financial penalty. In defense of DOJ, it must be noted that Dulles’s corporate cartel did threaten to withhold oil supplies for D-Day unless all charges were dropped.

[
12
] The financial strangulation of post-war Nazi investigations has been well documented. Captain Nixon (no relation) wrote the first book about it. Charles Higham authored
Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi- American Money Plot 1933-1949
and
American Swastika
. Chris Simpson’s book
The Splendid Blonde Beast
also covers the many declassified files captured from the Third Reich.

[
13
] Later on, a furor erupted when the Vatican Bank tried to appoint Abs as their economic adviser. The Simon Wiesenthal Center finally exposed his record as a Nazi financier.

[
14
] According to Dan Benjamin, US intelligence had discovered voluminous correspondence between a member of the British royal family and the SS. The British intelligence officer sent to retrieve the dossier was rewarded by appointment as the Queen’s personal art advisor. He later confessed to having been a spy for the Russian intelligence service. He was, of course, never prosecuted, in order to protect the Queen.

[
15
]Hoover had a bit of a double standard. The FBI fully cooperated with OPC in protecting Nazis in the United States. His FBI would send one version of records denying knowledge of Nazis in America to the Attorney General when the Democrats were in power, and another admitting FBI surveillance when the Republicans were in control of the Justice Department. We jokingly referred to this selective forgetfulness as “Waldheimer’s disease,” a chronic amnesia about a Nazi past.

[
16
] Before Walter Rockler passed away, he told me that the document was hidden in his wartime file collection in the basement of his home. While I have never seen the list, I did discover the names of many of the banks.

[
17
] I found reference to Buchardt’s recruitment in a Top Secret Sensitive Document folder in the Department of Defense records collection. I saw a reference to a Buchardt manuscript in Dallin’s book, and correctly surmised that he was the man who recruited Buchardt for western intelligence. Dallin said he turned Buchardt over to the CIA, but their files have also been purged, presumably by Dulles’ OPC.

[
18
] I was the secret source for Seymour Hersh’s book,
The Price of Power
. Kissinger threatened to sue Hersh for libel until he found out that I was the source. Kissinger knew that I had read his files.

[
19
] Walter Rockler called the OSI Attorneys together in 1980 and told us that one of his Deputies, Martin Mendelsohn, had leaked damaging information to a news service for the Washington legal community which denounced his other OSI deputy, Allan Ryan. Apparently Ryan had once written a memo questioning the allocation of scarce Justice Department resources to hunt Nazis. Rockler fired Mendelsohn, who then led a campaign to oust Rockler saying he had misspent travel funds. Rockler laughed. He was a senior partner at a major law firm and had made huge financial sacrifices to help get OSI off the ground. Rockler had had enough of these games. He told us that he was leaving OSI in the hope that would end all the controversy, which was threatening OSI’s continued Congressional funding. Congressman Barney Frank confirmed to me that the funding was indeed in jeopardy, but he had held the votes together, warning his Republican colleagues that they would otherwise be embarrassed because something was about to happen. Frank was one of the few who knew about an upcoming
60 Minutes
program.

[
20
] Because Roosevelt did not trust either his State Department or Justice Department, he entrusted the post-war probe of American financial collaboration with the Nazis to Henry Morgenthau, his Secretary of the Treasury. Morgenthau initiated Operation Safehaven, a program to trace Nazi flight-capital back to the western investors. After Roosevelt’s death, Morgenthau was discredited for an anti-German bias at a time when America allegedly needed to rebuild Germany as a bulwark against Russian encroachment. Dulles took over Operation Safehaven, and used it as a cover for OPC’s Nazi recruitment. Although Dulles destroyed the Safehaven index, a few of Morgenthau’s original files escaped Dulles’s shredder, and can be found in the wartime State Department Post Files. For example, in the Switzerland Post files I discovered the Operation Safehaven investigation of Dulles himself, where he was accused of laundering money for the Nazis. My historical novel, The Witness Tree, goes into this episode in some detail. The dialogue is fiction, but the story is fact. The Safehaven files were stolen by Eleanor Dulles and given to the Zionist intelligence service. They then blackmailed Nelson Rockefeller into pressuring the Latin American nations to supply the extra votes in the UN to create the State of Israel.

[
21
] British SIS also wiretapped Joe Kennedy, and even indicted his code clerk as a Nazi spy when Kennedy served as Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

[
22
] Perhaps the organization survived because the Muslim Brotherhood came under the immediate protection of Kim Philby, the Communist double agent inside British intelligence. Russian intelligence ordered all their new Arab Communist recruits to pretend to be fascists and join the Muslim Brotherhood. Neo-Nazi web sites reluctantly admit that even Hassan Al Banna’s right-hand man was a Communist plant.

[
23
] Islamic scholars declared Wahhabism as a heresy against Islam more than sixty times before the Saudis obtained their oil wealth. Now that the Saudis control the mortgages for a majority of the Sunni mosques in the United States and around the world, such criticism is muted.

[
24
] Throughout this section, the term “Arab Nazi” is used frequently, but the Muslim Brotherhood has included (non-Arab) Persians and Afghanis, as well as other non-Arab nationalities. The common element of fascism seems to have come from the distortion of Islamic texts.

[
25
] There have been persistent allegations that it was George H.W. Bush who negotiated the Iranian delay in the release of American hostages in order to elect Ronald Reagan. Similarly, Vice President Bush’s role in the Iran-Contra arms deal has largely escaped Congressional scrutiny.

[
26
]CIA officials testified under oath before Congress that only the Saudis and Pakistanis were aware of the identities of the Mujahideen recruits. It is entirely possible that only a handful of Reagan officials knew of the role played by the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama Bin Laden.

[
27
] Because the Iranians are Shiite, few realize that they are supporters of the Sunni-dominated Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, Moosavi Khomeini was an enthusiastic supporter of Qutb’s puritanical heresies.

[
28
] The conference was called off only because of the outbreak of war.

[
29
] Nelson Rockefeller and Averell Harriman were both heavily invested in Brown Brothers Harriman, which in turn owned several subordinate corporations run by Prescott Bush. These corporations were later seized by the wartime US government as Nazi fronts, but were quietly returned to their American owners in the 1950’s. The last of the seized Nazi corporations, the film giant GAF, was released back to its owners during the Kennedy administration.

[
30
] The Union Banking Corporation was seized as a Nazi front by the Alien Property Custodian during WWII, but was quietly returned to its owners in 1951. The overwhelming majority of the UBC stock was held by Roland Harriman, Averell’s brother. However, Prescott Bush and his father in law, Herbert Walker also held a few shares which apparently became the source of the Bush family fortune.

[
31
] Former Army intelligence officer William E. Gowen of New York City recently tracked down a retired Dutch Intelligence officer who told him how the scam operated. At the end of WWII, Prince Bernhardt sent a Dutch intelligence unit into the Russian zone of Berlin ostensibly to retrieve the crown jewels, which were buried in the vault of the bombed-out Thyssen Bank. In reality, Operation Wilhemina was merely a cover for retrieving several truckloads of corporate stock and ownership papers which were returned to the Netherlands. The Netherlands bank manager quickly recognized that his “neutral” bank was being compromised. He flew to New York City to inform his American counterpart, Prescott Bush, that both their banks were fronts for Nazi money. The bank manager’s body was discovered soon afterwards. The Dutch intelligence agent was his son.