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The Role of Anglo-American Financiers ( In World
War II)
Valentin Katasonov
This article was originally published in 2015 by Strategic Culture
Foundation and also reproduced by TML Weekly at that time. TML Weekly
is republishing it today to enlighten readers on the role played by
international financiers in World War II and debunk the Anglo-American
falsification which blames the Soviet Union for that tragedy so as to
exonerate themselves.
The article also clearly examines the origins of the international
financial institutions at a time the Trudeau government and provincial
governments are once again indebting the country to private interests
to unprecedented levels based on the fraudulent claim that this is how
to achieve economic recovery. Not only that, the Trudeau government
likes to claim that Canada's adherence to these international financial
institutions makes it democratic and provides proof of its
multilateralism. The material in this article provides ample
information which shows that there are obviously various kinds of
multilateralism with various kinds of aims and not all of them serve
Canada. This the Trudeau and other governments in Canada do not want
discussed.
Part One
The war was not unleashed by a frenzied Führer who happened to be
ruling Germany at the time. World War II was a project created by the
world oligarchy or Anglo-American financiers. Using such instruments as
the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the Bank of England they started to
prepare for the next global conflict right after World War I. The USSR
was the target.
The Dawes and Young Plans; the creation of the Bank for International
Settlements; Germany's suspension of reparations payments it had to pay
according to the Paris Peace Treaty and the acquiescence of Russia's
former allies in this decision; large-scale foreign investments in the
economy of the Third Reich; the militarization of the German economy
and the breaches of the Paris Treaty provisions -- these all were
important milestones on the way to preparing the war.
There were key figures behind the plot: the Rockefellers, the Morgans,
Lord Montagu Norman (the Governor of the Bank of England) and Hjalmar
Schacht (President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics in
Hitler's government). The strategic plan of the Rockefellers and
Morgans was to subjugate Europe economically, saturate Germany with
foreign investment and credits and make it deliver a crushing blow
against Soviet Russia so that it would return to the world capitalist
system as a colony.
Montagu Norman (1871-1950) played an important role of go-between to
keep up a dialogue between American financial circles and Germany's
business leaders. Hjalmar Schacht organized the revival of Germany's
defence sector. This operation conducted by the Anglo-American
financiers was covered up by politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt,
Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. In Germany the plans were
carried out by Hitler and Hjalmar Schacht. Some historians say Hjalmar
Schacht played a more important role than Hitler, but Schacht simply
kept out of the spotlight.
The Dawes Plan was an attempt following World War I for the Triple
Entente to compromise and collect war reparations from Germany. The
Dawes Plan (as proposed by the Dawes Committee, chaired by Charles G.
Dawes) was an attempt in 1924 to solve the reparations problem, which
had bedeviled international politics following World War I and the
Treaty of Versailles (France was reluctant to accept it got over 50 per
cent of reparations). In 1924-1929 Germany received $2.5 billion from
the United States and $1.5 billion from Great Britain, according to the
Dawes Plan. In today's currency it is a huge sum, equal to U.S.$1
trillion. Hjalmar Schacht played an active role in the implementation
of the Dawes Plan. In 1929 he summed up the results, saying that in
five years Germany got more foreign loans than the United States in the
40 years preceding World War I. As a result, by 1929 Germany had become
the world's second largest industrial nation leaving Great Britain
behind.
In the 1930s, the process of feeding Germany with investments and
credits continued. The Young Plan was a program for settling German
reparation debts after World War I, written in 1929 and formally
adopted in 1930. It was presented by the committee headed (1929-30) by
American industrialist Owen D. Young, founder and former first chairman
of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). At the time, Young also
served concurrently on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller
Foundation, and also had been one of the representatives involved in
the previous war reparations restructuring arrangement -- the Dawes
Plan of 1924. According to the plan, the Bank for International
Settlements (BIS) was created in 1930 to make Germany pay reparations
to the victors. In reality the flow of money went in quite a different
direction -- from the United States and Great Britain to Germany. The
majority of strategically important German companies belonged to
American capital or were partly under its control. Some of them
belonged to British investors. German oil refining and coal
liquefaction sectors of the economy belonged to Standard Oil (the
Rockefellers). The major chemical company I.G. Farbenindustrie AG was
put under the control of the Morgan Group. Forty per cent of the
telephone network and 30 per cent of aircraft manufacturer Focke Wulf
shares belonged to American company ITT Corporation. Major industrial
concerns Radio and AEG, Siemens and Osram were put under the control of
General Electric. ITT and General Electric were part of the Morgan
empire. One hundred per cent of Volkswagen shares belonged to the Ford
Motor Company. By the time Hitler came to power, U.S. finance capital
practically controlled all the strategically important sectors of
German industry: oil refining, synthetic fuel production, chemical
production, auto production, aviation, electrical engineering, the
radio industry, and a large part of the machine manufacturing sector (a
total of 278 companies). The leading German banks -- Deutsche Bank,
Dresdner Bank, Donat Bank and some others -- were also under U.S.
control.
***
On January 30, 1933 Hitler was named the Chancellor of Germany. Before
that his candidacy had been thoroughly studied by American bankers.
Hjalmar Schacht went to the United States in the autumn of 1930 to
discuss the nomination with American colleagues. Hitler's appointment
was finally approved at a secret meeting of financiers in the United
States. Hjalmar Schacht spent all of 1932 trying to convince the German
bankers that Hitler was the right person for the position. He achieved
the goal. In mid-November 1932, 17 of Germany's biggest bankers and
industrialists sent a letter to President Hindenburg expressing their
demand to make Hitler the Chancellor of Germany. The last working
meeting of the German financiers before the election was held on
January 4, 1933 in Kölnat, the home of banker Kurt von Schröder. After
that the National Socialist Party came to power. As a result, Germany's
financial and economic ties with the Anglo-Americans were elevated to a
higher level.
Hitler immediately made an announcement that he refused to pay the
post-war reparations. It put into doubt the ability of England and
France to pay off World War I debts to the United States. Washington
did not object to Hitler's announcement. In May 1933 Hjalmar Schacht
paid another visit to the United States. There he met with President
Franklin Roosevelt and big bankers to reach a $1 billion credit deal.
In June the same year Hjalmar Schacht visited London to hold talks with
Montagu Norman. It all went down smoothly. The British agreed to grant
a $2 billion loan. The British offered no objections related to
Germany's decision to suspend debt payments.
Some historians say that the American and British bankers were
accommodating because by 1932 the Soviet Union had fulfilled its
five-year economic development plan to achieve new heights as an
industrial power. A few thousand enterprises had been built, especially
in the field of heavy industry. The USSR's dependence on imported
mechanical engineering expertise was greatly reduced. The chances of
strangling the Soviet Union economically were practically reduced to
zero. They decided to rely on war and launched the runaway
militarization of Germany.
It was easy for Germany to get American credits. By and large, Hitler
came to power in his country at the same time as Franklin Roosevelt
took office in the United States. The very same bankers who supported
Hitler in 1931 supported Roosevelt in the presidential election. The
newly elected President could not but endorse large credits to Germany.
By the way, many noticed that there was a big similarity between
Roosevelt's "New Deal Policy" and the economic policy of the German
Third Reich. No wonder. The very same people worked out both policies
and consulted with both governments at the time. They mainly
represented U.S. financial circles.
Roosevelt's New Deal soon started to stumble. In 1937 America plunged
into the quagmire of economic crisis. In 1939 the U.S. economy operated
at 33 per cent of its industrial capacity (it was 19 per cent at the
worst of the 1929-1933 crisis).
Rexford G. Tugwell, an economist who became part of Franklin
Roosevelt's first "Brain Trust," a group of Columbia University
academics who helped develop policy recommendations leading up to
Roosevelt's New Deal, wrote that in 1939 the government failed to
achieve any success. There was an open sea until the day Hitler invaded
Poland. Only the mighty wind of war could dissipate the fog. Any other
measures Roosevelt could take were doomed to failure.[1] Only a world
war could save U.S. capitalism. In 1939 the financiers used all the
leverage at their disposal to put pressure on Hitler to make him
unleash a big war in the east.
Part Two
The BIS played an important role during World War II. It was created as
an outpost of American interests in Europe and a link between
Anglo-American and German businesses, a kind of offshore zone for
cosmopolitan capital, providing shelter from political processes, wars,
sanctions and other things. The BIS was created as a public commercial
entity, its immunity from government interference and such things as
taxation was guaranteed by an international agreement signed in the
Hague in 1930.
The bankers of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were close to the
Morgans, and the Governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman, as
well as the German financiers: Hjalmar Schacht (President of the
Reichsbank and Minister of Economics in the Hitler government), Walther
Funk (who later replaced Hjalmar Schacht as President of the
Reichsbank) and Emil Puhl. All of them played an important role in the
efforts to establish the BIS. The central banks of Great Britain,
France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium and some private banks were among
the founders of the BIS. The Federal Bank of New York did its best to
establish the BIS, but it was not listed as a founder. The U.S. was
represented by the private First National Bank of New York, J.P. Morgan
and Company, and the First National Bank of Chicago -- all parts of the
Morgan empire. Japan was also represented by private banks. In
1931-1932, 19 European central banks joined the BIS. Gates W. McGarrah,
a banker of Rockefeller's clan, was the first BIS chairman of the
board. He was replaced by Leon Fraser, who represented the Morgans.
U.S. citizen Thomas Huntington McKittrick was President of the BIS
during the war years.
A lot has already been written about the BIS' activities serving the
interests of the Third Reich. The bank was involved in deals with
different countries, including those Germany was at war with. Ever
since Pearl Harbour, the BIS has been a correspondent bank for the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Despite the bank being under Nazi
control during the war years, the American McKittrick was the bank's
President. Soldiers were dying on the battlefields while the BIS
leadership held meetings in Basel with the bankers of Germany, Japan,
Italy, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States. There, in the
Swiss offshore zone, all was peaceful; the representatives of the
belligerents quietly worked in the atmosphere of mutual understanding.
Switzerland became the place where gold seized by Germany in different
corners of Europe was transported to for storage. In March 1938 when
Hitler captured Vienna, part of Austria's gold was transferred to the
BIS vaults. The same thing happened with the gold from the Czech
National Bank (U.S.$48 million). As the war started, gold poured into
the BIS. Germany obtained it from concentration camps and by plundering
the occupied countries (including civilian property: jewels, gold
crowns, cigarette cases, utensils). It was called the Nazi Gold. The
metal was processed into ingots to be stored in the BIS, Switzerland or
outside of Europe. Charles Higham in his book Trading With The Enemy:
An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949 wrote that during
the war, the Nazis transferred $378 million into BIS accounts.
A few words about the Czech gold, about which details surfaced after
the Bank of England's archives were declassified in 2012.[2] In March
1939, Germany captured Prague. The Nazis demanded U.S.$48 million from
Czechoslovakia's national gold reserves. They were told that the sum
had already been transferred to the BIS. It later became known that the
gold was transferred from Basel to the Bank of England. At the command
from Berlin, the gold was transferred to the Reichsbank's BIS account.
Then the Bank of England was involved in transactions done on the
orders of the Reichsbank given to the BIS. The commands were
retransmitted to London. There was collusion between Germany's
Reichsbank, the BIS and the Bank of England. In 1939 a scandal broke
out in Great Britain because the Bank of England executed the transfer
of Czech gold on the commands from Berlin and Basel, not the Czech
government. For instance, in June 1939, three months before the war
between Great Britain and Germany started, the Bank of England helped
the Germans stuff their accounts with 440,000 pounds sterling worth of
gold and transfer some gold to New York (Germany was sure that in the
case of a German intervention in Poland, the United States would not
declare war).
The illegal transactions with Czech gold were implemented with tacit
approval of the government of Great Britain which was aware of what was
going on. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the
Exchequer Sir John Simon and other top officials did their best to hide
the truth, including telling outright lies (that the gold had been
returned to its lawful owners or had never been transferred to the
Reichsbank). Recently declassified materials from the Bank of England
reveal the truth that the government officials lied to provide cover
for themselves and the activities of the Bank of England and the BIS.
It was easy to coordinate the joint criminal activities because Montagu
Norman, the head of the Bank of England, served as the chairman of the
board of the BIS. He never made a secret of his sympathy for the
fascists.
The Bretton Woods Conference, formally known as the United Nations
Monetary and Financial Conference, was a gathering of 730 delegates
from all 44 allied nations at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton
Woods, New Hampshire, to regulate the international monetary and
financial order after the conclusion of World War II. The conference
was held from July 1 to 22, 1944. Suddenly the issue of the BIS hit the
agenda. It was reported that the bank had collaborated with fascist
Germany. Leaving many details aside, it was with great difficulty that
the delegates reached an agreement to close the BIS (some U.S.
delegates opposed the motion). The decision of the international
conference has never been enacted. All the discreditable information
related to the BIS' wartime activities was classified. Today it helps
to falsify the history of World War II.
Finally, a few words about Hjalmar Schacht (1877-1970). He was a key
figure controlling the economic machine of the Third Reich, an
extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador representing
Anglo-American capital in Germany. In 1945, Schacht was tried at
Nuremberg and was acquitted on October 1, 1946. He got away with
murder. [...] For some unexplained reasons he was not on the 1945
leading wartime criminals list. Moreover, Schacht returned to his
profession as if nothing had happened and founded Schacht GmbH in
Düsseldorf. This detail may go unnoticed, though it serves as further
testimony to the fact that Anglo-American financiers and their
plenipotentiary representatives in Germany prepared and, to some
extent, influenced the outcome of World War II. The financiers want to
rewrite the history of the war and change its results.
Notes
1. P. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt, A Biography of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, New York, 1957, p. 477.
2. See here.
(Strategic Culture Foundation, May 4-5, 2015. Edited for style and
grammar by TML.)