A couple excerpts of the book The Plot Against The Peace by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn
Dial Press, 1945 - hardcover
from pages 11 to 23
PART I CHAPTER ONE THE HIDDEN RESERVES "Au revoir, in twenty years!"
Colonel Hermann Kriebel of the German Armistice Commission, taking leave of the Allied representatives in 1919.
"One day we shall come back. Until then, à bientôt!"
The last words of an anonymous German military spokesman over the Nazi radio in Brussels on September 1, 1944.
I. The Secret Plan: 1915-1945
THE German General Staff has always regarded military defeat as merely a temporary phase of war. The war goes on. Battle strategy becomes underground conspiracy; artillery is replaced by propaganda; wartime espionage becomes post-war political intrigue, terror, assassination, and secret preparation for new military attack.
"Even the final decision of war is not to be regarded as absolute," wrote Germany's former military theorist, General Karl von Clausewitz, in his celebrated treatise Vom Kriege (On War). "The conquered nation often sees it only as a passing phase, to be repaired in after times by political combinations."
These words have been deeply pondered by the German General Staff–the cabal of army officers, Junkers, and industrialists who are the real rulers of Germany.* They provided the German General Staff with the basis of a secret plan by which it successfully operated after the First World War. Today Germany's rulers are again operating on the basis of this secret plan in Germany and throughout the world. . . .
*It should be remembered that throughout this book the phrase German General Staff does not mean the German military leadership alone, but describes the entire political, economic, and military leadership of imperialist Germany. For a detailed characterization of the German General Staff, see Part II, Chapter Five. The original form of this secret plan of the German General Staff was discovered in 1915 by William Seamen Bainbridge, an American representative in Berlin. After the First World War, seeking to warn America, Bainbridge wrote a detailed report on Germany for the United States Government. It appears as Document No. 26, Official Senate Documents, First Session of the 68th Congress of the United States. This little-known American document contains the most sensational forecast ever made regarding German policy.
Here is the five-point secret German General Staff plan as revealed to Bainbridge in 1915, three years before the end of the last war, by a German officer in a room in the Hotel Adlon, Berlin:"(1) An armistice will come before any hostile army crosses Germany's frontier.
(2) There will be no scars on the Fatherland after this war.
(3) The immediate competitors in the economic and commercial world will be so crippled that, when it is all over, the Germans will be outselling them in the markets of the world long before they can get on their feet.
(4) Following the war, there will be economic hell, industrial revolution. We will set class against class, individual against individual, until the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us.
(5) If need be, the Fatherland may dissemble into component parts and reassemble at the strategic time."In concluding this extraordinary revelation, the German officer turned to Bainbridge and said with deliberate emphasis:
"The greatest struggle will come after the war. The weapon will be propaganda, the value of which we know. The Allies will be torn asunder, each will be put at the others' throats like a lot of howling gnashing hounds. And when they are all separated from France, Germany will deal with her alone."
This German postwar plan was successfully carried out by the German General Staff after the First World War. The Armistice came before any hostile army could cross Germany's frontier. The war left Germany's economic might unimpaired, and Germany's plants, mills, and mines unscathed. In the years following the war, Germany was able the challenge America, Britain, and France for the markets of the world. German intrigue and propaganda set Britain against France, America against Europe, and all the countries against Soviet Russia. . . .
In the Second World War the German General Staff has been unable to prevent the invasion of Germany's home territory. But the German plan today is otherwise almost identical with the plan it carried out with such amazing success following the last German debacle. As Marshal Stalin pointed out in 1942, the German General Staff is methodical and efficient; but it is not very imaginative. Once it has conceived a plan, it follows it step by step, again and again and again, no matter what happens. Like burglars who continually leave their "signatures" behind them at the scene of their robberies, the German General Staff conducts its conspiracy today precisely as it did thirty years ago.
On February 26, 1945, one of the most remarkable exposés of the Second World War appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. It was an article revealing in full detail the plans of the German General Staff for converting the Nazi Party into an underground apparatus which would continue functioning after the military defeat of Nazi Germany and would carry on systematic preparations for a third world war.
Pravda reported that the German General Staff had already taken the following measures:"(1) Creation of a powerful financial base for extensive subsidizing of underground work.
(2) Preservation of the main cadres of the party.
(3) Preservation of the economic base of the German war machine.
(4) The political preparation of revenge."The article in Pravda stated that these activities were being carried on "both within and outside Germany," and that within Germany the Nazis were preparing to conduct their underground work chiefly along three lines: organization of sabotage and terrorist bands; setting up of a widely ramified clandestine fascist organization; and sabotage of peace terms between Germany and the United Nations.
The article continued:"At the present time, the German General Staff feverishly prepares plans for the operations of the fascist underground army, which must be centered chiefly in the hilly and wooded terrain of East Prussia, southern and southwestern Germany, in Tyrol and in Austria."
A special secret staff had already been selected to direct the operations of the Nazi underground machine. Pravda revealed the names of the men on the staff:
"To direct these operations, a special headquarters has been set up in Munich under Wilhelm Schepmann–one of the organizers of anti-Allied sabotage in the Ruhr in 1923. The members of Schepmann's staff are Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Gestapo chief and chief of the Military Intelligence Service; Hitler's personal friend, Werner von Alwensleben; senior officers of the Security Service and Obergruppen Fuehrer Schellenberg* and Melle."
The terrorist detachments of the Nazi underground army, stated the Soviet newspaper, "will consist of picked fascist cutthroats from SS units," which "at present . . . are studying future theatres of operations in the areas assigned to them."
Pravda went on to give a detailed description of the vast and intricate apparatus that had already been organized by the German General Staff:"Simultaneously a ramified network of secret caches of arms, ammunition, clothing, provisions, secret signals, and communication lines is being laid out.
"Along with the preparation of terrorist bands, a huge underground apparatus is being set up to conduct various underground work and fascist propaganda–the so-called sixth column.
"The territory of Germany, divided into sectors and areas, is being covered with a dense network of clandestine Nazi party organizations, consisting of many thousands of secret cells. . . .
"This clandestine organization will serve to build up cadres for the future German Army."The overall postwar strategy and tactics of this elaborate Nazi underground organization, concluded Pravda, were to be supervised from abroad by a "special General Staff" residing "in one of the neutral countries."
*Obergruppen Fuehrer Schellenberg was previously active as a secret Nazi agent in the United States. See page 169.
II. Conspiracies and Confessions
In the spring of 1943 the German General Staff started its contemporary application of the secret German postwar plan. Nazi Germany was face to face with catastrophe. The entire German Sixth Army under General von Paulus had been surrounded and annihilated by the Red Army at Stalingrad. That was the historic turning point of the Second World War.
In November 1943 the French resistance weekly, Combat, published in Algiers, printed the text of a secret German General Staff memorandum which had fallen into Allied hands after the German debacle in North Africa. The author of the memorandum was General Otto von Stuelpnagel who ruled France for Hitler from 1940 to 1944.
This is what the German General wrote:"What does a provisional defeat matter to us if because of the destruction of manpower and material which we will have been able to inflict on our enemies and neighboring territories, we have obtained a margin of economic and demographic superiority greater than before 1939? The conquest of the world will require numerous stages, but the essential is that the end of each stage brings us an economic and industrial essential greater than that of our enemies. With war booty which we have accumulated, the enfeebling of two generations of the manpower, the destruction of the industries of our neighbors and that which we can save of our own, we shall be better placed to conquer in twenty-five years than we were in 1939. The interval of twenty-five years is a limited interval, for that is the time which will be required for Russia to repair the destruction we have visited on her."
The memorandum mentioned some of the elaborate devices by which the rulers of Germany would seek to evade a just peace:
"We do not have to fear peace conditions analogous to those which we would have imposed because our adversaries will always be divided and disunited. Our enemies recognize already that the 1919 formula, 'Germany will pay,' lacked sense and worth. We will furnish them some brigades of workers, we will restore some art objects or out-of-date machines, and we can always say that those which we do not restore were destroyed by enemy bombardments. We should immediately prepare as camouflage a list of such objects destroyed by Anglo-American bombs."
The basic aim of the German plan, now as in 1918, is to secure a final peace settlement, no matter how severe it may appear on the surface, or how hard on the German people, which will leave German economic power intact.
With amazing consistency Germany's rulers are repeating the same strategy they employed in the past to obtain the kind of peace settlement suitable to their aims. In both instances, this strategy was mapped out long in advance. . . .In his war memoirs, General Erich Ludendorff revealed that as early as 1916 the German General Staff decided that it could not win the First World War and that it then began its campaign for a negotiated peace. The peace intrigues went on steadily throughout 1916, 1917, and were intensified after the failure of Ludendorff's spring offensive in 1918.
Ludendorff tells of the hopes he placed in the Vatican as an intermediary for a negotiated peace. "I also entertained some hopes," continued Ludendorff, "of the efforts being made by the representative of the Foreign Office in Brussels, Herr von der Lancken, who sought to get in touch with French statesmen. He went to Switzerland, but the gentlemen from France stayed away."
Ludendorff reveals that the German General Staff was confident it could divide the Allied nations, play one against the other, and so secure the kind of final peace settlement that Germany wanted.
In August 1918, Ludendorff told the Kaiser: "The war must be ended."
But the Kaiser, like Hitler twenty years later, was unwilling to surrender his power and demanded the continuation of the hostilities.
At this juncture, when the German General Staff was frantically seeking peace so as to forestall complete Allied victory, the famous German steel magnate, August Thyssen, published an extraordinary "Confession" for all the world to read. It was the most sensational document of the last war.
August Thyssen, stating that German industrialists were prepared to sacrifice the Kaiser in return for peace, wrote:"In 1912 the Hohenzollerns saw that the war had become a necessity to the preservation of the military system upon which their power depends . . . they, therefore, in 1912, decided to embark on a great war of conquest.
"But to do this they had to get the commercial community to support them in their aims. They did this by holding out to them hopes of great personal gain as a result of the war. . . .
"I was personally promised a free grant of 30,000 acres in Australia and a loan from a Deutsche Bank of £150,000 at 3 per cent . . . to enable me to develop my business in Australia. Several other firms were promised special trading facilities in India, which was to be conquered by Germany . . . a syndicate was formed for the exploitation of Canada. This syndicate consisted of the heads of twelve great firms; the working capital being fixed at £20,000,000, half of which was to be found by the German government.
"There were, I have heard, promises made of a more personal character . . . "This astonishing document reached the United States in the early spring of 1918. It was published as a pamphlet entitled The Hohenzollern Plot by August Thyssen. It was reprinted many times, quoted in newspapers, inserted into the Congressional Record, and publicized especially in American business circles. It did much towards convincing American public opinion that peace could be made with the "sound, business interests" in Germany.
Meanwhile, although Thyssen's "Confession" had openly called for the removal of the Kaiser and the conclusion of the war, nothing was done by the Kaiser's Government to arrest Thyssen or stop the publication of his document. The steel magnate continued to live in Germany, unmolested and in full control of his vast industrial interests.
After the war, August Thyssen died, and the famous "Confession" was forgotten.
But the German plan had worked. The peace left German industry intact and in the hands of Fritz Thyssen, Krupp, Kirdorff, Stinnes, and their associates, the industrial representatives of the German General staff.
Twenty years later, in the summer of 1940, another astonishing and sensational "Confession" was made public by a German industrialist. With Poland conquered and France in its last throes, the German General Staff was again ready for peace in the West, so that it could prepare the next stage of the war: the invasion of Soviet Russia. This time the German "Confession" denounced Hitler, and stated that German industry was prepared to sacrifice Hitler in return for a favorable peace with the nations of the West.
The 1940 "Confession" was written by Fritz Thyssen, son of August Thyssen, and inheritor of his father's steel trust.
Fritz Thyssen wrote:"I undertook to finance the N.S.D.A.P. (Nazi Party), together with von Papen, von Schroeder, Kirdorff, Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. We are, so to speak, the guarantors to Germany and the world for Hitler's good conduct . . .
"Hitler promised us the things we most wanted: to von Papen, power and honor; to Krupp, commissions and money, mountains of money; and to me, in particular, a peaceful period of German politics at home and abroad; and understanding with England; and understanding with the working classes who, through far-reaching social reforms, should be compensated for the loss of all political rights; the abolition of trade unions and the appropriation of their property. He promised us a sort of Christian state whose authority should be supported by the Church. . . ."This second Thyssen "Confession" which burst like a bombshell in the summer of 1940 was immediately circulated throughout Europe and America, just as the first Thyssen "Confession" had been in 1918. The words of Fritz Thyssen were printed in various forms in the United States by Life, the New York Times, the American magazine, Time, Newsweek, were quoted on the radio, referred to in Congress, and, in general, given the widest possible publicity. Fritz Thyssen was reported to be a fugitive from the Gestapo, hiding somewhere as a miserable refugee in southern France.
Thyssen was actually living in a luxurious private villa at Cannes. On one side of his villa was the home of Pierre Etienne Flandin, the notorious French pro-Nazi politician and advocate of a Franco-German alliance against Soviet Russia. Flanking Thyssen's villa on the other side was the prewar residence of Sir Neville Henderson, former British Ambassador to Berlin, one-time friend of Goering and Ribbentrop, and ardent member of the British Cliveden Set.
After the Nazi occupation of France, Fritz Thyssen continued to live in his luxurious villa at Cannes surrounded on all sides by Nazi officials and high-ranking Nazi generals.
In 1943, as Hitler's armies faced disaster in Russia, Fritz Thyssen returned to Germany. He was last seen by a Swedish correspondent early in 1944 residing at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, still ready to make peace with Britain and America "to save Europe from Bolshevism."
Fritz Thyssen wrote in his famous "Confession":"Peace is to be had. The price is not high. It is easy to arrange. . . . We still have men who hold the reins."
In January 1945, when the Red Army smashed through the crucial German defenses east of Berlin, German peace emissaries rushed frantically into Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal. Edmund Hugo Stinnes showed up in Stockholm. Franz von Papen appeared in Madrid. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht was in Switzerland. The Vatican was besieged by German couriers. In every case the reported peace offers were identical: Germany would get rid of Hitler; Germany would repay what she had stolen; Germany would disarm; Germany would disband the Nazi organizations and abolish the Nazi laws; Germany would transform herself, just as Thyssen had promised in 1940, into a "Christian state." So long as Germany could keep her economic power intact, Germany's rulers were ready to come to almost any terms with their enemies.
But precautionary steps had already been taken by the German General Staff and its Nazi and industrialist representatives to build hidden reserves of capital, cash, and investments in foreign countries.III. Camouflaged Capital
In the fall of 1918, within a few months of the General Staff's decision to sue for peace, billions of marks had been smuggled out of Germany to Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and other foreign centers of German commercial activity. The Neue Zuercher Zeitung in June 1919, estimated the figure of "emigrated capital" which German interests had cached in Switzerland at 35 billion marks. The Dutch aviation designer, Fokker, describes in his memoirs The Flying Dutchman how an entire military aviation plant in Germany was dismembered and secretly transported to Holland. The Dornier Airplane Company, with headquarters in Friedrichshafen, was moved across Lake Constance to Switzerland. The Rohrbach plant was transferred to Denmark; Heinkel and Junkers established themselves in Sweden. All these transfers were done at the request of the General Staff and accomplished with the aid of the German Army.
Admiral Canaris, of the Imperial Naval Intelligence, and subsequently of the Nazi Naval Intelligence, went to Spain to supervise German-controlled shipyards and submarine plants at Vigo.
Baron Manfred von Killinger, Imperial Army officer and subsequent Nazi Consul in the United States, established a company in Echevarria, Spain, to experiment with new types of submarines for Krupp.
The same thing is happening today.
A dispatch from Stockholm, Sweden, to the New York Times, January 30, 1945, revealed that German industrialists were placing huge capital foundations in Sweden by registering their patents at the Swedish State Patent Office to elude seizure by the United Nations. The Times dispatch read:"A perusal of patent applications, which must be recorded in the Swedish Official Journal, reveals that a good 50 per cent of all patent applications hail from German firms. The latest ones come from such major German concerns as I.G. Farben, Zeiss-Ikon, Boch, and the Daimler-Bainz companies, besides the A.E.G. and Siemens."
This flight of German capital into neutral Sweden represents only a fraction of the capital investments which Germany had already secreted abroad.
As of February 1945 there were no less than 987 joint stock companies in Spain controlled completely by German capital. Two thousand Spanish companies, many of them with branches and affiliates in North and South America, have German directors on their boards.
As late as the summer of 1944, as the American journalist Ted Allan revealed in Collier's Magazine on February 3, 1945, the international German trust, I.G. Farben, built four new chemical plants in Madrid. In March 1944, I.G. Farben completed a synthetic oil plant in Pueblonuevo del Terrible near Córdoba. This plant had a Spanish name, Calvo Sotelo, and was supposedly controlled by Spaniards. It was owned completely by I.G. Farben. Also in the summer of 1944, I.G. Farben built a magnesium plant in Santander, Spanish northern port. Other German plants, steel, textile, munitions, and mines, exist in Catalonia, the Asturias, the Basque country, and in Galicia.
The Spanish multi-millionaire Juan March, who financed Franco's Fascist Falange to the tune of $60,000,000, was a German spy in the First World War, a Krupp agent and collaborator with Admiral Canaris, chief of the German Naval Intelligence. Today, March is providing commercial fronts for German capital smuggled into Spain and, through Spanish outlets, into South America.
Portugal is another center of German financial and industrial activity. An uncensored report printed in the New York Times on January 12, 1944, disclosed: "Like Spain, Portugal teems with German agents and in Lisbon they are as ubiquitous as bootleggers were during prohibition in America. Their red necks gleam in every bar and fine restaurant . . ." Through Portuguese commercial fronts, the Germans have also been able to penetrate South America.
Throughout the Americas, especially in Argentina, German agents have built important new plants, and gained control of mines, banks, railroads, aviation lines, chemicals, and steel works. Fritz Mandl virtually controlled the munitions industry in Argentina on behalf of I.G. Farben. Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish multi-millionaire adventurer, and intimate friend of Marshal Hermann Goering, has set up Krupp and I.G. Farben fronts throughout South America, and especially in Argentina. Alfredo Moll, who has been described as the "gray eminence" of the Nazis in Buenos Aires, is the son-in-law of the president of the Central Bank of Argentina. Moll is director of the firm of Anilinas Alemenas, branch of the I.G. Garben trust in Argentina.
Testifying before the Kilgore Committee on September 12, 1944, Sims Carter, Assistant Chief of the Economic Warfare Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, revealed:"When the German guns are silenced in Europe, the principal German industrial combines plan renewed activity from bases in Argentina. Organizations and outlets of distribution have been maintained. Profits from sales at wartime prices made ample means available. All the machinery is ready for safeguarding German supremacy in the steadily expanding South American market."
The plan by which the German General Staff has operated in South America was drawn up many years before Hitler took power in Germany. If the German plan prevails, it will continue to operate many years after the smashing of the Hitler regime. This plan is directly aimed at the eventual German conquest of the United States.
Immediately after the First World War, the German secret infiltration of the Latin American countries by economic, political, and military agents went into high gear in preparation for the Second World War. Captain Ernst Roehm, organizer of the Nazi Storm Troops, showed up in Bolivia in 1925 as "special advisor" to the Bolivian Army. The German aviation officer Fritz Hammer went to Colombia, where he later organized Nazi espionage and economic infiltration under cover of Nazi aviation concerns. General Bohnstedt became head of the military academy in Salvador and official instructor to the Salvadorean Army. General Reinecke, General Kundt, and many other officer-agents of the German General Staff became active in Chile, Paraguay, and Peru, where they sought to influence the officers' corps and spread hatred of the United States.from pages 35 to 42
CHAPTER TWO THE NAZI UNDERGROUND I. "Universal Chaos"
THE Nazi Party, as the chief political instrument of the German General Staff, has the task of fulfilling the political phase of the secret German postwar plan to sabotage United Nations' victory and peace.
In 1915, Point Four of the German General Staff's secret plan called for the stirring up of postwar international political and economic "hell," so that "the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us."
On January 30, 1945, in his speech commemorating the twelfth anniversary of the Nazi power, Adolf Hitler prophesied that after the Second World War "universal chaos" will consume the world.
The Nazi task is to set individual against individual, class against class, nation against nation, and thus to make impossible the consolidation of Allied victory and give the German General Staff an opportunity to rise again as a military threat to the world for a third time in this century.
On November 6, 1944 Marshal Josef Stalin warned the Soviet people and the world:"After the defeat of Germany she will, of course, be disarmed, both in the economic and military-political respects. However, it would be naive to think that she will not attempt to restore her power and develop new aggression. It is known to all that the German leaders are already now preparing for a new war . . ."
Like German industry, the Nazi Party also has its hidden economic and political reserves for the postwar struggle against the peace. Statistics recently issued by the British Ministry of Economic Warfare estimate that the Nazis looted close to $27,000,000,000 from the conquered European nations. Most of this loot was appropriated by the Nazi Party, providing a massive secret fund for the financing of international Nazi underground activities for years to come. Besides this, the Nazi leaders have their personal financial caches. Since 1943, Nazi money, jewels, and other valuables have been streaming across the Reich frontiers and finding their way by clandestine channels into Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and North and South America. In Switzerland alone, more than 300,000,000 gold francs, or approximately sixty million dollars, are known to have been banked to the private accounts of Nazi leaders. . . .
With these vast hidden sums at their disposal, the Nazis have already reconstituted and reorganized their wartime international Fifth Columns and set up new propaganda agencies and terrorist leagues for the postwar period. Already, in all countries of the United Nations, Nazi-financed and Nazi-inspired agitators are at work seeking to create the "chaos" which Hitler called for in January 1945. Terrorist attempts have been made on the lives of General de Gaulle of France, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, and other United Nations leaders. Race riots, separatist movements, wildcat strikes, putsches and political disorders of every kind are being deliberately incited by Nazi Fifth Column agents in an attempt to break the national and world unity of the United Nations.
In France, Paul Ghali revealed in a European dispatch to the Chicago Daily News on September 28, 1944, Joseph Darnand's notorious Militia and other French fascist organizations have been "reconstructed and rearmed" under the personal supervision of Heinrich Himmler to carry on underground "terrorism and fifth column activities in France after the war."
In Italy, former agents of the Fascist OVRA, trained by the Nazis, have been smuggled back into the liberated areas to build propaganda and terrorist agencies, to plot assassinations of anti-fascist Italian leaders and to spread anti-United Nations and other Nazi propaganda. A Rome dispatch to the New York Herald Tribune on February 10, 1945, by John Chabot Smith, warned of "the alarming degree of Fascist sympathy and Fascist underground which still exists in liberated Rome."
In Greece, Leland Stowe reported in February 1945, certain Nazi agents and Greek Fifth Columnists posing as "anti-Communists" and Greek "nationalists" had taken advantage of the confusion following the campaign against the Elas resistance movements to penetrate the Intelligence services, special police units, and even Greek government offices, and to carry on widespread terrorism and Nazi-fascist agitation.
In Finland, a few weeks after the German Army withdrew and the Finnish government signed peace with Soviet Russia, two Red Army officers were assassinated in a Helsinki park. Investigation by the Allied Control Commission revealed, according to a statement by Soviet officials in January 1945, that Nazi agents and Finnish Lappo fascists were spreading their propaganda throughout Finland and fomenting widespread underground "opposition to the United Nations and particularly the Soviet Union."
In Norway, in February 1945, Nazi leaders and Quislingites prepared for future underground struggle by destroying all records of their past activities and concealing their identities with false birth certificates. Lord Vansittart, spokesman for the British Intelligence Service, told the House of Lords on February 7, 1945, that he knew "the names of a good few of the worst Gestapo butchers and torturers in Norway who have their false papers ready," and who were planning to go underground in Norway after the Allied armies liberated that country "to organize sabotage and political assassination."
Similar Nazi-fascist terrorist and propaganda activities, or preparations for underground struggle, were going on in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere.
On February 24, 1945, at a session of the Egyptian Chamber of Deputies, during which Egypt declared war on the Axis, four fascist terrorists fired ten shots at Premier Ahmed Maher Pasha, fatally wounding the Egyptian leader. One of the assassins, Mahmond Essawy, had been previously interned for pro-Nazi activities.
In Spain, the Soviet newspaper Red Fleet revealed on February 7, 1945, German planes from Stuttgart and other German airports were arriving "every day in Barcelona with Hitlerites." From Spain, the Nazi agents were moving on to other countries in Europe and especially to South America, bringing with them funds and instructions for the potent Nazi Fifth Columns already operating in the Western Hemisphere.In January 1945, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, sent out a nationwide alarm for three key German agents believed to have been secretly landed in the United States to make contacts with other agents already operating in the country. Each of these three German agents had previously been active in South America. Here are their records:
Max Christian Johannes Schneeman: forty-four years old; former resident of Pereira, Colombia, South America, born in Hoeehst, Germany; expert linguist, fluent in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and German; agent of the Nazi SS (Schutz Staffel or Elite Guards).
Hans Rudolf Zuehlsdorff: twenty-five years old; former resident of Bogotá, Columbia, where he was a commercial advertiser and sales representative for a German firm; born in Guestrov, Meke, Germany; expert linguist, fluent in German, English, and Spanish; described by the FBI as being "more American than German in his mannerisms"; agent of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.
Oscar Max Wilms: thirty-seven years old; former resident of Managua, Nicaragua; fluent in Spanish, German, and English; born in Hamburg, Germany; former partner in a German export-import firm at Managua; agent of Nazi Propaganda Ministry.
The most important of all the German agents in South America has been General Wilhelm von Faupel, the German General Staff's leading expert on Argentina.
Faupel's work in the Americas has not been interrupted as a result of the defeat of the German Army in Europe. In fact, Faupel's work was specially designed by the General Staff to continue long after the end of the present war. Faupel's task has been to prepare the ground in South America for a third world war. If Germany's plans succeed, next time the United States will not be able to fight Germany in Europe; it will be fighting for its own existence in the Western Hemisphere.
Faupel's entire career as an agent of the German General Staff is in itself a revelation of the long-range planning of Germany's rulers. Before the First World War, from 1911-1913, Faupel was active in Argentina as a "professor" at the Military Academy in Buenos Aires. Thoroughly familiar with Latin American and Spanish affairs, he was recalled at the outbreak of war and sent into Spain to become chief of the German espionage and sabotage activities in the Mediterranean area. Then, immediately after Germany's defeat in 1918, Faupel was sent back to Argentina. Until 1927, he held the post of "chief adviser" to the Argentine General Staff. On the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, Faupel returned to Germany. He next appeared to public view as Director of the Nazi Ibero-American Institute, central clearing-house for German espionage and conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.
Under Faupel's command, at the headquarters of the Ibero-American Institute, which Hitler housed in an imposing mansion at Number 7 Fuerenstrasse, Zehlendorff, Berlin, hundreds of German agents and American, Canadian, and South American fifth columnists were trained for work. The Spanish Fascist Falange was born in Faupel's headquarters, and Faupel personally organized the Nazi Condor Division which invaded Spain to suppress the Republican Government and help put Generalissimo Franco in power. In 1938, with Falangist Spain as a springboard, Faupel began his final preparations for the German conquest of South America.
The plan by which Faupel operated was not new. It had been the dream of the General Staff for generations to establish Pan-German hegemony over the South American republics as a prelude to the invasion and conquest of the United States. As far back as 1904, Ernst Hasse, precursor of Hitler, and President of the notorious Pan-German League in Berlin, wrote in a widely-publicized article:"The Argentine and Brazilian republics and all the other seedy South American states will accept our advice and listen to reason, voluntarily or under coercion. In a hundred years, both South and North America will be conquered by the German Geist, and the German Emperor will perhaps transfer his residence to New York."
Like his successor, Hitler, Hasse was at first regarded outside of Germany as a crackpot. But the German General Staff, whose agent he was, considered Hasse a leading authority on German world policy, and soon acted directly on his advice regarding South America. At the outbreak of the First World War, all of Central and South America was infiltrated by German agents inciting hatred against the United States. German activities in the United States were chiefly designed to keep America out of the war, but in the event that effort failed the German General Staff had another plan.
In 1917 the German General Staff sought to involve Latin America, especially Mexico, in a secret military pact with Germany and Japan aimed at the invasion and conquest of the United States. At 3 A.M., Berlin time, on January 19, 1917, the following secret message was sent by wireless to Count von Bernstorff, German Ambassador in Washington, from the German Foreign Office in Berlin:Berlin, January 19, 1917
"On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this it is our endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this is not successful we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together shall make peace. We shall give general financial support and it is understood that Mexico is to recover the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement. You are also instructed to inform the President of Mexico of the above in the greatest confidence as soon as it is certain that there will be an outbreak of war with the United States and suggest that the President of Mexico on his own initiative should communicate with Japan suggesting adherence at once to this plan; at the same time offer to mediate between Germany and Japan.
"Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months."(signed) Zimmerman."
Today, the German intrigue in Mexico goes on under cover of the Nazi-inspired Sinarquist movement which, intimately related to the Falange, has been devised by the German General Staff as a means of continuing German political influence in Mexico after this war. But the chief focus of German intrigue in South America today is in Argentina. Under German influence, Argentina has become a source of continuous unrest and anti-United States conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.
In concentrating on Argentina, the German General Staff has again followed a plan which it elaborated many years ago. Before the First World War, Otto Tannenberg, the famous Pan-German propagandist and agent of the General Staff, wrote:"Germany will take under its protection the republics of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay; furthermore, the southern third of Bolivia and the southern portion of Brazil."
On March 26, 1944, in his personal publication Das Reich, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels wrote:
"Argentina will one day be at the head of a tariff union comprising the nations in the southern half of South America. Such a focus of opposition against the United States of America will, together with Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, form a powerful economic bloc; and eventually, by way of Peru, it will spread northward to place the dollar colony of Brazil in a difficult position."
On June 10, 1944, ten weeks after Goebbel's pronouncement, Colonel Juan Peron, Vice-President and War Minister of Argentina, delivered his pro-Nazi speech which led to the breaking off of relations between the United States and Argentina. Here is what the Argentine War Minister said:
"In South America, it is our mission to make the leadership of Argentina not only possible but indisputable. . . . Hitler's fight in peace and war will guide us. Alliances will be the next step. We will get Bolivia and Chile. Then it will be easy to exert pressure on Uruguay. These five nations will attract Brazil, due to its type of government and its important group of Germans. Once Brazil has fallen, the South American continent will be ours. Following the German example, we will inculcate the masses with the necessary military spirit. . . ."
The voice was the voice of Colonel Peron, but the plan was that of the German General Staff. . . .
"Everywhere, in both Americas," reported the well-known American foreign correspondent, Sigrid Schultz, in 1944 in her significantly titled book Germany Will Try It Again, "they [the Nazis] have incited racial groups, anti-Semitic groups, university professors and students, and the numberless, formless, frustrated people who hope for advancement with Nazi help. American newspapers have recorded case after case of arrests of Nazi and Japanese sympathizers in this country–air-raid wardens, professors' wives, heads of manufacturing concerns. But these were simply the individuals who were careless or reckless. We must anticipate that they are only a small part of the big whole. The Germans confidently count on their political influence increasing in the United States . . . Thus, the total-war strategists of Germany plan ahead not only for tomorrow but for generations to come."
The Nazi Fifth Column in the Americas remains a powerful, active, and lavishly financed instrument of the German General Staff's postwar conspiracy against the peace.*
*See Part III of this book for details concerning the operations of the Nazi Fifth Column in the United States.
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