The BIS in Basel & Nazi Germany

(2) The goal of the corporations is precisely the same today as it was at the end of the Great War. This is inevitable, inasmuch as inherent within the capitalist system is its obligation to the aggrandisement of profit.

(3) As a consequence, sovereignty - in the sense of a country's or organisation's political independence - can be ignored and overridden. This is happening today. The signs are there for all to see: Is America really in the Gulf Region for the benefit of its inhabitants ('ragheads' in American parlance)? Ask any oilman.

Are the two terms 'NATO' and the "International Community' really synonymous? Ask any country not in the Alliance.

Is the 'Cold War' really dead? Ask NATO why it is still in existence.

Is it not clear that NATO's primary role in Europe is to act as corporate America's anti-Marxist enforcer (even though the Marxism in question may be of a purely nominal nature)? Ask the head formulator of NATO, George Kennan (he may be dead, but his disclosure of the real reason for NATO's birth is on record in the BBC's Lord Reith Lecture of 1957).

Has not the UN's sovereignty been by-passed time-and-time again over the years? Ask its main debtor - America.

And finally, why is so little of the BIS in the public domain? Ask the owners/controllers of the means of communication - the media.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAVIES, Glyn "A History of Money" (University of Wales '94)

DEDMAN, Martin "The Origins & Development of the European Union - '45 to '95 (Routledge '96)

HIGHAM, Charles "Trading With The Enemy" (Robert Hale '83)

MARSHALL, Matt "The Bank" (Random House '99)

SAMPSON, Anthony "The Money Lenders" (Hodder & Stoughton '81)

BIS Précis '98

INTERNET (Membership lists, etc.)

Alfred Mendez <alfred.mendes@virgin.net>

http://www.spectrezine.org

The "big five" prime banks of Wall Street, the owners of the "Class A" stock of the NewYork Federal Reserve Bank, are: Chase-Manhattan, Citibank, Guaranty Trust, Chemical/Manufacturers-Hannover, and Bankers' Trust. The Class A stock of the Federal Reserve has not been sold or traded on the open market since it was hermetically sealed from the public at the end of the summer of 1914. It is the exclusive property of Wall Street and European prime banks, whose major stockholders are the trans-Atlantic Ruling Class. This pattern holds true of Central Banks throughout the nations of the advanced capitalist sector. The Big Five have interlocking directorates with the "Seven Sisters," the Anglo-Dutch-American oil cartels: Exxon, BP (British Petroleum), Dutch-Royal Shell, Texaco, Mobil, Gulf, and Standard Oil of California (SOCAL).

Several of these trans-Atlantic money and commodity cartels financed Mussolini and Hitler and actively maintained their connections with the Reich throughout World War II. They were also all actively involved in Stalin's Russia by the beginning of the first Five Year Plan in 1928. None of this is really secret-anyone can discover the facts by doing a little research. Nor should it be considered a "conspiracy" (either by those who promote or deny the essential facts of the matter) - bankers and businessmen have been "trading with the enemy" for centuries. It is just one more example of "the wise investment policy" of cartels like J.P. Morgan and Co. and Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Global Financial Centre - B.I.S.

The seat of first world finance capital is Basel, Switzerland, where the Central Banks of the Group of Seven (G-7) form the directorate of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The G-7 include Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the U.S., and Japan. The G-7 are called the "Hard Currency Countries" because their Central banks, corporations privately owned by the Prime Banks of these nations, have acquired most of the mined, milled, and ingotted gold of the world. Approximately 80 percent of this is in the vaults of Credit Suisse, under the Berghoff, the airport in Zurich. A somewhat larger formation, called the G-10, includes Belgium, Holland, and Sweden.

The U.S. has become the greatest debtor nation on earth because the Prime Banks of the other nations of the G-10 (especially Britain, Holland, and Japan) have purchased the U.S. government debt in the form of semi-annual and tax-exempt U.S. Treasury Securities through the operations of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's window on Wall Street.

Of these U.S. Treasury Securities, 95% have been floated since the end of World War II to finance the Cold War against the "Evil Empire." Now Communism has been deflated as an enemy; nativist fascist movements are being pumped up all around the globe and the aggregate Debt is approaching the net worth of all the real estate and movables on the planet. Now, also, the U.S. and Russia are joining their military and space programs, the U.S. is becoming by degrees a full-blown totalitarian state, and the bankers are beginning to foreclose upon the bankrupted minions and dupes within their new global condominium.

The World Central Bankers' Bank

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the "first beast", was founded in 1930 and was the first entity to be called a "World Bank." Monetarist and gold-based, it functions as a clearing house for the balance of payments between nations. It operated throughout WWII as an interlocking directorate and a clearinghouse for joint Allied and Axis high finance.

The World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF), the "Second Beast," was founded in 1946, after being drafted at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, during the war in 1944. The IMF functions as the collection agency for the World Bank, much as the IRS functions as the collection agency for the Federal Reserve Bank. The Wall Street branch of the Federal Reserve is the "fiscal agent" for the IMF in the USA. The capital pool of the IMF consists of the Prime Banks of the First World, which interlock with the First World (G-7) military-industrial complexes and the oil conglomerates.

The IMF functions under the aegis of the United Nations, as a Keynesian paper credit-mill, extending credit in the form of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to the Second and Third World debtor nations, requiring that they purchase specified amounts of the currency of the G-7 nations, imposing "austerity terms" upon their internal economies, and looting them by means of "repayment schedules" of their natural resources and minerals. These are channeled through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the multinational cartels, also headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

With the implementation of NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of GATT, the real wages of blue and white collar workers in the U.S. will be leveled in time to near parity with the Third World. The last "Superpower," the United States, is not the primary head of the G-7 Beast, but is, owing to its debtor status, the last head, appropriately close to the horned tail, engaging disproportionately in UN Security Council "police actions" around the globe.

International Capital, having gone "global," will increasingly employ the blue-helmeted troops of the UN to enforce the hegemony of Capital in the future.

Mark EvansNorth Coast HOME

Electrons to the Editor

Urban Bäckström, Stockholm (Chairman of the Board of Directors, President of the Bank)

Lord Kingsdown, London (Vice-Chairman)

Vincenzo Desario, Rome;

David Dodge, Ottawa;

Antonio Fazio, Rome;

Sir Edward A J George, London;

Alan Greenspan, Washington;

Hervé Hannoun, Paris;

Masaru Hayami, Tokyo;

William J McDonough, New York;

Guy Quaden, Brussels;

Jean-Pierre Roth, Zürich;

Hans Tietmeyer, Frankfurt am Main;

Jean-Claude Trichet, Paris;

Alfons Vicomte Verplaetse, Brussels;

Nout H E M Wellink, Amsterdam;

Ernst Welteke, Frankfurt am Main

Alternates

Bruno Bianchi or Stefano Lo Faso, Rome;

Roger W Ferguson or Karen H Johnson, Washington;

Jean-Pierre Patat or Marc-Olivier Strauss-Kahn, Paris;

Ian Plenderleith or Clifford Smout, London;

Peter Praet or Jan Smets, Brussels;

Jürgen Stark or Stefan Schönberg, Frankfurt am Main

Senior Officials

Andrew Crockett, General Manager

André Icard, Deputy General Manager

Gunter D Baer, Secretary General, Head of Department

William R White, Economic Adviser, Head of Monetary and Economic Department

Robert D Sleeper, Head of Banking Department

Renato Filosa, Manager, Monetary and Economic Department

Mario Giovanoli, General Counsel, Manager

Günter Pleines, Deputy Head of Banking Department

Peter Dittus, Deputy Secretary General

Josef ToÆovský, Chairman, Financial Stability Institute

Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific

George Pickering, Chief Representative

Others

Carlo Azeglio Caiampi - Italian politician

Lamberto Dini - Italian politician and banker - board of directors BIS

Antonino Occhiuto Italian central banker - BIS 1975 - now

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa - Italian central banker - BIS 1993 - now

On a bright May morning in 1944, while young Americans were dying on the Italian beachheads, Thomas Harrington McKittrick, American president of the Nazi-controlled Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, arrived at his office to preside over a fourth annual meeting in time of war. This polished American gentleman sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British, and American executive staff to discuss such important matters as the $378 million in gold that had been sent to the Bank by the Nazi government after Pearl Harbor for use by its leaders after the war. Gold that had been looted from the national banks of Austria, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, or melted down from the Reichsbank holding of the teeth fillings, spectacle frames, cigarette cases and lighters, and wedding rings of the murdered Jews.

The Bank for International Settlements was a joint creation in 1930 of the world's central banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Its existence was inspired by Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, Nazi Minister of Economics and president of the Reichsbank, part of whose early upbringing was in Brooklyn, and who had powerful Wall Street connections. He was seconded by the all important banker Emil Puhl, who continued under the regime of Schacht's successor, Dr. Walther Funk.

Sensing Adolf Hitler's lust for war and conquest, Schacht, even before Hitler rose to power in the Reichstag, pushed for an institution that would retain channels of communication and collusion between the world's financial leaders even in the event of an international conflict. It was written into the Bank's charter, concurred in by the respective governments, that the BIS should be immune from seizure, closure or censure, whether or not its owners were at war. These owners included the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York (among whose directors were Harold S. Vanderbilt and Wendell Willkie), the Bank of England, the Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other central banks. Established under the Morgan banker Owen D. Young's so-called Young Plan, the BIS's ostensible purpose was to provide the Allies with reparations to be paid by Germany for World War I. The Bank soon turned out to be the instrument of an opposite function. It was to be a money funnel for American and British funds to flow into Hitler's coffers and to help Hitler build up his machine.

The BIS was completely under Hitler's control by the outbreak of World War II. Among the directors under Thomas H. McKittrick were Hermann Shmitz, head of the colossal Nazi industrial trust I.G. Farben, Baron Kurt von Schroder, head of the J.H. Stein Bank of Cologne and a leading officer and financier of the Gestapo; Dr. Walther Funk of the Reichsbank, and, of course, Emil Puhl. These last two figures were Hitler's personal appointees to the board.

The BIS's first president was the smooth old Rockefeller banker, Gates W. McGarrah, formerly of the Chase National Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank, who retired in 1933. His successor was the forty-three-year-old Leon Fraser, a colorful former newspaper reporter on the muckraking NewYork World, a street-corner soapbox orator, straw-hat company director, and performer in drag in stage comedies. Fraser had little or no background in finance or economics, but he had numerous contacts in high business circles and a passionate dedication to the world of money that acknowledged no loyalties or frontiers. In the first two years of Hitler's assumption of power, Fraser was influential in financing the Nazis through the BIS. When he took over the position of president of the First National Bank at its Manhattan headquarters in 1935, he continued to exercise a subtle influence over the BIS's activities that continued until the 1940s.

Other directors of the Bank added to the powerful financial group. Vincenzo Azzolini was the accomplished governor of the Bank of Italy. Yves Breart de Boisanger was the ruthlessly ambitious governor of the Bank of France; Alexandre Galopin of the Belgian banking fraternity was to be murdered in 1944 by the Underground as a Nazi collaborator.

The BIS became a bête noire of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, a deliberate, thorough, slow-speaking Jewish farmer who, despite, his origins of wealth, mistrusted big money and power. A model of integrity obsessed with work, Morgenthau considered it his duty to expose corruption wherever he found it. Tall and a trifle ungainly, with a balding high-domed head, a high-pitched, intense voice, small, probing eyes, pince-nez, and a nervous, hesitant smile, Morgenthau was the son of Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to Turkey in World War I. He learned early in life that the land was his answer to the quest for a decent life in a corrupt society. He became obsessed with farming and, at the age of twenty-two, in 1913, borrowed money form his father to buy a thousand acres at East Fishkill, Dutchess County, New York, in the Hudson Valley, where he became Franklin D. Rossevelt's neighbor. During World War I he and Roosevelt formed an intimate friendship. Elinor Morgenthau became very close to her near namesake, Eleanor Roosevelt. While Roosevelt soared in the political stratosphere, Morgenthau remained rooted in his property. In the early 1920s he published a newspaper called The American Agriculturist that pushed for government credits for farmers. When Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1928, he appointed Morgenthau chairman of the Agricultural Advisory Commission. Morgenthau showed great flair and a passionate commitment to the cause of the sharecropper.

Legend has it that on a freezing winter day in 1933, FDR and Morgenthau met and talked on the borderline of their two farms. Morgenthau is supposed to have said to Roosevelt, "Life is getting slow around here". And FDR replied, "Henry, how would you like to be Secretary of the Treasury?"

What he lacked in knowledge of economics, Morgenthau rapidly made up in his Jeffersonian principles and role as keeper of the public conscience. Close to a thousand volumes of his official diaries in the Roosevelt Memorial Library at Hyde Park give a vivid portrait of his inspired conducting of his high office. He was aided by an able staff, which he ran with benign but military precision. His most trusted aide was his Assistant Secretary, Harry Dexter White. Unlike Morgenthau, White came form humble origins. Jewish also, he was the child of penniless Russian immigrant parents who were consumed with a hatred of the czarist regime. White's early life was a struggle: this short, energetic, keen-faced man fought to help his father's hardware business succeed, finally forging as an economist with the aid of a Harvard scholarship and a professorship at Lawrence College, Wisconsin. He was opinionated and self-confident to a degree. Although he was frequently accused of being a communist sympathizer, he was in fact simply an old-fashioned liberal driven by his ancestral memories of Russian imperialism.

It is unfortunate that Morgenthau did not appoint White as his representative at BIS meetings, but White was too valuable in Washington. Instead, Morgenthau sent the more questionable Merle Cochran to investigate the BIS. Cochran was on loan to Treasury from the State Department; he represented the State Department's sophisticated neutralism before (and during) the war. Cochran became Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, working directly under Roosevelt's friend the duplicitous, Talleyrand-like Ambassador William Bullitt. Cochran spent most of his time in Basle conveying to both Morgenthau and Cordell Hull details of what the BIS was up. Very much opposed to White- indeed, violently so- Cochran was sympathetic with the BIS and to the Nazis, as his various memoranda made clear. Morgenthau took Cochran's political judgements with a degree of skepticism, but continued to use him over White's objections because he knew the Germans would trust Cochran and confide much in him. Day after day, Cochran lunched with Schmitz, Shroder, Funk, Emil Puhl, and the other Germans on the BIS board, obtaining a clear picture of the BIS's plans for the future.

In March 1938, when the Nazis marched into Vienna, much of the gold of Austria was looted and packed into vaults controlled by the Bank for International Settlements. The Nazi board members forbade any discussion of the transaction at the BIS summit meetings in Basle. Cochran, in his memoranda to Morgenthau, failed to score this outrageous act of theft. The gold flowed into the Reichsbank under Funk, in the special charge of Reichsbank vice-president and BIS director, Emil Puhl. On March 14, 1939, Cochran wrote to Morgenthau, "I have known Puhl for several years, and he is a veteran and efficient officer." He also praised Walther Funk.

His timing was not good. One day later, Hitler followed his forces into Prague. The storm troops arrested the directors of the Czech National Bank and held them gunpoint, demanding that they yield up $48 million gold reserve that represented the national treasure nounced that they had already shifted the gold to the BIS with instructions that it be forwarded to the Bank of England. This was an act of great naiveté. Montagu Norma, the eccentric, Vandykebearded governor of the Bank of England, who liked to travel the world disguised as Professor Skinner in a black opera cloak, was a rabid supporter of Hitler.

On orders from their German captors, the Czech directors asked the Dutch BIS president, J.W. Beyen, to return the gold to Basle. Beyen held an anxious discussion with BIS general manager Roger Auboin of the Bank of France. The result was that Beyen called London and instructed Norman to return the gold. Norman instantly obliged. The gold flowed into Berlin for use in buying essential strategic materials toward a future war.

There the matter might have been buried had it not been for a young , very bright, and idealistic London journalist and economist named Paul Einzig, who had been tipped off to the transaction by a contact at the Bank of England. He published the story in the Financial News. The story caused a sensation in London. Einzig held a hasty meeting with maverick Labour Member of Parliament George Strauss. Strauss through Einzing began investigating the matter.

Henry Morgenthau telephoned Sir John Simon, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, on a Sunday night in an effort to determine what was going on. Merle Cochran had telegraphed him with a characteristic whitewash of the BIS and an outright dismissal of Einzig's charges that the BIS was a Nazi outfit. Sir John said icily on the transatlantic wire, "I'm in the country, Mr. Secretary. We are enjoying our dinner. It is not our custom to do business by telephone."

"Well, Sir John," Morgenthau replied, "we've been doing business by telephone over here for almost forty year!"

Sir John Simon continued to dodge Morgenthau's questions. On May 15, George Strauss asked Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, "It is true, sir, that the nation treasure of Czechoslovakia is being given to Germany?" "It is not," the Prime Minister replied. Chamberlain was a major shareholder in Imperial Chemical Industries, partner of I.G. Farben whose Hermann Shcmitz was on the board of the BIS. Chamberlain's reply threw the Commons into an uproar Einzig refused to let go. He was convinced that Norman had transferred the money illegally in collusion with Sir John Simon. Simon, in answer to a question from Strauss, denied any knowledge of the matter.

Next day, Einzing tackled Sir Henry Strakosch, a prominent political figure. Strakosch refused to disclose the details of the conversation he had had with Simon. But Strakosch finally cracked and admitted that Simon had discussed the transfer of the Czech gold.

Einzig was jubilant. He called Strauss with the news. Strauss put a further question to Sir John Simon in a debate on May 26. Once again, Simon hedged. Winston Churchill was the leader of a violent onslaught on the unfortunate Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Morgenthau demanded to know more. Cochran's letter from Basle dated May 9 and received May 17 brushed over the issue once more. Cochran wrote,

There is an entirely cordial atmosphere at Basle; most of the central bankers have known each other for many years, and these reunions are enjoyable as well as profitable to them. I have had talks with all of them. The wish was expressed by some of them that their respective statesmen might quit hurling invectives at each other, get together on a fishing trip with President Roosevelt or to the World's Fair, overcome their various prides and complexes, and enter into a mood that would make comparatively simple the solution of many of the present political problems.

This picture of good cheer scarcely convinced Morgenthau. On May 31, Associated Press reported from Switzerland that transactions were completed between the BIS and the Bank of England and the Czech gold was now firmly in Berlin.

During World War II, Einzig, who had never forgotten the Czech gold affair, ran into J.W. Beyen in London and asked him if he would now admit what had taken place. Beyen said smoothly, "It is all technical. The gold never left London." Einzig was amazed. He wrote an apology to Beyen in his book of memoirs, In the Center of the Things.

The truth was that the gold had not had to leave London in order to be available in Berlin. The arrangement between the BIS an its member banks was that transactions were not normally made by shipments would show up counts. Thus, all Montagu Norman had to do was to authorize Beven and replace the same amount from the Czech National Bank holdings in London.

By 1939, the BIS had invested millions in Germany, while Kurt von Schroder and Emil Puhl deposited large sums in looted gold in the Bank. The BIS was an instrument of Hitler, but its continuing existence was approved by Great Britain even after that country went to war with Germany, and the British director Sir Otto Niemeyer, and chairman Montagu Norman, remained in office throughout the war.