Patterns of Force

There's a black Mercedes rollin' through the combat zone - Bob Dylan

This isn't the post I'd hoped for today, but a bunch of loose threads still haven't quite knotted together for me. So I guess I'll have to live with that a little longer.

Until I sort it out, here's a bit of something else to chew on.

I've been dipping into Charles Higham's out-of-print American Swastika ("The Shocking Story of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst from 1933 to the Present Day"), and the chapter on the negotiations mid-war between future CIA Director Allen Dulles and the SS just jumped up and said Yup, you got me.

Higham writes:

SS officers came from the right-wing elite, those with money and commercial interests that lay outside the German border. Thus, the fact that it was the SD [the SS intelligence service of the SS]which specialized in every kind of subversion, intrigue, and ruination appealed directly to Allied connections more than any other service. Its leaders belonged to the community of world money; their allegiance was not to the upstart, working-class Hitler, but to the memory of SS leader Heinrich Himmler's idol, King Henry I of Saxony, and to the Stein bank of Cologne, which financed Himmler's inner circle under the aegis of the international banker Kurt von Schroeder.

In 1942 Dulles became the OSS station chief in Switzerland, while continuing to serve as director and legal advisor to the New York branch of the same Schroeder bank. Early the following year, acting without the authority of Franklin Roosevelt (though he made false assertion to the contrary), Dulles opened a channel of appeasement with SS nobility, mostly Prussian elite, acting without the knowledge of Adolph Hitler. Dulles met three times with Prince Max von Hohenlohe, whom he knew from Vienna in 1916 and New York in the '20s. Higham examined the original SS records of the meetings and had no doubt to their authenticity, despite post-war attempts to discredit them because their translation had first appeared in the communist journal New Times.

Dulles opened the first meeting cordially, saying he was "sick and tired of listening to stories of ruined politicians, emigrants, and prejudiced Jews." He said that Germany needed to remain in existence to "maintain order," that the question of Czech sovereignty was inconsequential, and that most important was the establishment of a bulwark in the East against Bolshevism.

Dulles pressed ahead. He said that it would be unbearable for any decent European to think that the Jews might return someday, and that there must be no toleration of a return of the Jewish power positions. He reiterated his desire for a greater European political federation - and foresaw the federal Germany that in fact took place. He said that Hitler would not be accepted as the leader of a restored Germany. He made the curious assertion that the Americans were only continuing the war to get ride of the Jews and that there were people in America who were intending to send the Jews to Africa. This was Hitler's dream of course: that the Jews would go to Madagascar and stay there. Dulles seems to have confused the clubland view of blacks and Jews.

Dulles now proceeded to supply Hohenlohe with dollops of secret intelligence, announcing that the US Army would not land in Spain but, after conquering Tunisia, would advance from Africa toward the Ploesti oil fields to cut off the German oil supplies. He said that it was likely the Allies would land in Sicily to cut off Rommel and control Italy from there, and thus secure the advance in the Balkans.

Having given virtually the entire battle plan for Europe, top secret at the time, to one of Germany's agents, Allen Dulles proceeded to the almost unneccessary rider that he had very good relations with the Vatican. He said American Catholics had a decisive voice in such matters.

The negotiations faltered in the Spring of '43 because the White House lacked Dulles's empathy towards aristocratic Nazis and his bond to supra-national capital saddled with the boorish and doomed Hitler (associations which appear to have led Dulles to commit untroubled acts of treason). But a few years later another of Dulles's plans, Project Paperclip, found far greater success, so that even as Germany underwent "denazification" the Nazi occult sciences were Americanized.

Let's remember the worlds that the word Nazi can hold. The street-brawling thugs are always dispensable; even Hitler, who came up from the streets, dispensed with them. And to the SS conniving behind his back, Hitler could be done away with, too. It's such quiet and refined elite, whose members belong to the community of international money, that can smash more than our windows. Those are the Nazis to whom Allen Dulles delivered the keys to America. They were not the alien other, like European Jewry or the Communists. They were blutsbrüder.