"Before the Bolshevik revolt, Russia had succeeded the US as the world's number one oil producer. The chaos and destruction of the revolution effectively eliminated Standard Oil's competition from Russia for several years until Standard could move in and get a piece of the Russian oil business.
In 1926, Standard Oil of New York and its subsidiary, Vacuum Oil Company, concluded a deal to market Soviet oil in European countries. Part of the price for the arrangement, it was reported at the time, was a loan of $75,000,000 to the Bolsheviks. In 1927, Russia's secret partner, Standard Oil of New York, built an oil refinery in Russia. The refinery helped immeasurably in putting the Bolshevik economy back on its feet. According to Professor Sutton," This was the first United States investment in Russia since the Revolution." (We have been unable to find out if Standard Oil was even theoretically expropriated by the Communists.) " http://www.whale.to/b/allen_b.html#Chapter_Four_
Saturday, November 12, 2011
While many biographers have told of their fabulous wealth and virtually unlimited economic and political power, few have dealt with the most remarkable aspect of the Rockefeller family - its close relationship over many generations with its supposed arch-enemies, the Communists. Of course, there is much about this strange relationship that we do not know. But what is already a matter of public record is astounding. To say that things are not always what they seem is a hackneyed cliché, but there has never been a, mystery to match that of the world Communist movement and the identity of its ultimate backers.
Trotsky was allowed to return to Russia with an American passport; Lenin was spirited across Europe in the famous sealed train. They joined forces and by November, through bribery, cunning, brutality and deception, were able to hire enough thugs and make enough deals to seize control of Petrograd.
The Bolsheviks came to power not because the downtrodden masses of Russia called them back, but because very powerful men in Europe and the United States, including members of the Rockefeller family, sent them in.
But while these facts have been somewhat suppressed, the biggest secret of all is that throughout this period, the financing for the revolution came from super capitalists in the West, and primarily from the United States.
A meticulously documented book on this subject was written by Antony Sutton, a research fellow for the prestigious Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, ttitled Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution.
The Bolshevik Revolution took place in November 1917, few would recall that the Czar actually abdicated seven months earlier. With the collapse of Czar Nicholas II's monarchy, a provisional government was established by Prince Lvo.
At the time the Czar abdicated and for the next several months, the eventual leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky, were not even in Russia.
Lenin was in Switzerland and had been living in exile since 1905. Trotsky also was in exile, working as a reporter for a Communist newspaper in -would you believe -New York City.
The Bolsheviks came to power not because the downtrodden masses of Russia called them back, but because very powerful men in Europe and the United States, including members of the Rockefeller family, sent them in.
But while these facts have been somewhat suppressed, the biggest secret of all is that throughout this period, the financing for the revolution came from super capitalists in the West, and primarily from the United States.
A meticulously documented book on this subject was written by Antony Sutton, a research fellow for the prestigious Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, ttitled Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution.
Having the foundations as a tax-free piggy bank is only one of the advantages for one. As Business Week has observed: -"The real motive behind most private foundations is keeping control of wealth. "In the foundation world, where - not for profit- really means not-for- taxation,- one exchanges ownership for control.
Swiss banks and Nazi gold
Jul 2nd 1998 | from the print edition
AS THEIR lives draw to a close, Edward Fagan’s 30,000 clients are trying to recover property they lost in the cataclysm of the second world war. “I lose five to ten clients a day,” says Mr Fagan, who thinks European banks and insurers owe up to $54 billion to survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, though they or their families are unlikely to get more than a fraction of that.
On July 1st another clock started ticking: American state and local officials lifted a moratorium on sanctions against Switzerland’s two biggest banks after negotiations on a settlement with Holocaust victims broke down. The longer the dispute drags on, the tougher the sanctions are likely to get.
The decision boosts Mr Fagan and others demanding full restitution for the Nazis’ chief victims. Whether it makes a settlement more likely is less clear. The Clinton administration was desperate to avoid turning a dispute about history into an international trade row by penalising the banks. The Swiss government may file a complaint with the World Trade Organisation. Most ordinary Swiss, who point out that their country has already set up one fund for Holocaust victims and is proposing another, think the lawyers are more interested in cash than in justice.
The gap between what the banks have offered and what the victims’ lawyers would accept is not vast, but the gulf in perceptions is. The banks reckon their offer—$600m plus whatever a special team of accountants uncovers in assets that were unclaimed or wrongly paid out—is at least ten times what their true liability would be. Recent reports by a Swiss historical commission and the American State Department suggest that most of the gold looted by the Nazis was handled by Switzerland’s central bank, which became the target of a new lawsuit this week, not by commercial banks. And most of that gold was stolen from central banks in occupied countries, not from individuals. Banks have threatened to withdraw their offer if sanctions are imposed. They may sue American states or cities who boycott them.
The victims’ lawyers, who have no illusions about collecting tens of billions of dollars and would probably accept $1.5 billion, look at wartime money flows into Switzerland and conclude that the banks received much bigger sums from Jews or their persecutors. Gold was only part of it. One lawyer cites a 1945 document in which a Swiss official states that the banks held $40m-50m in dormant accounts, worth $400m-500m today. That is ten times what the banks have so far uncovered in unclaimed accounts. The banks are said to have handled even bigger sums in looted assets.
A deal, which may yet be struck as sanctions bite, would not end the saga of lost Jewish wealth. The World Jewish Congress estimates that $9 billion-14 billion, worth ten times that much now, was stolen from Jews. Much of that never reached Switzerland. Mr Fagan recently sued Germany’s two biggest banks, which, he says, acted as receivers of stolen Jewish property. Life-insurance policies were “the poor man’s Swiss bank account”, says a Jewish activist; 16 European insurers are targets of another lawsuit.
Meanwhile governments, even of countries that did not belong to Germany’s wartime axis, are beginning to make amends. Last week Norway’s government approved a fund of 450m kroner ($58.6m) for Holocaust survivors and their families, the first government of a Nazi-occupied country to offer compensation. Britain recently agreed to let 25,000 people, mostly Jews, reclaim deposits in British banks that were confiscated because they were citizens of enemy countries. A score of other countries have started investigations, established funds or returned assets, according to the Holocaust Education Trust in London. Many of these fall short of delivering full restitution and unvarnished truth. It has yet to be proven that the battling of New York lawyers will deliver more to wartime victims.
http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/swiss-kept-billions.html Subject: Swiss kept billions in looted Nazi gold - report
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 19:11:45 PDT
NEW YORK (Reuter) - A long-awaited U.S. government report will state there is conclusive evidence that the Nazis sold Switzerland gold stolen from individual Holocaust victims, sources close to the State Department said Friday.Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 19:11:45 PDT
The sources said the 11-agency report will also show that after the war, Switzerland failed to return billions of dollars worth of looted Nazi gold it received during the war.
The sources' comments were denounced by the U.S. official preparing the report. Under Secretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat, in a statement issued by the Embassy of Switzerland in Washington, said the sources' comments reported earlier Friday by Reuters were inaccurate.
The sources contacted by Reuters said they stood by their account.
``The Reuters story is based on pure speculation, contains inaccuracies and should be given no credence,'' the statement by Eizenstat to the Embassy said.
Eizenstat did not specify what the inaccuracies were but he cautioned that in the coming days interested parties would attempt to put their own slant on the report.
The Swiss Embassy declined comment.
The more than 200-page report, based on 14 million pages of U.S. government documents, was prepared under Eizenstat's direction. It is expected to be released next Wednesday, and the sources said it will be very harsh on the Swiss role in the war as bankers and even money-launderers for the Third Reich.
The report, however, will not make any recommendations as to whether the United States should reopen a 1946 treaty with Switzerland in which the Swiss agreed to return $58 million of the Nazi gold received during the war. Documents in the report will show that the Swiss took in $425 million in looted gold -- worth more than $4.25 billion by today's prices.
Sources who have read the report told Reuters it will contain proof that Germany not only sent Switzerland gold looted from the national treasuries of the countries it occupied, but also gold taken by the Nazi SS as loot from individual victims, something that the Swiss National Bank has previously denied as late as a month ago.
The SS looted personal jewelry, watches, rings and even the gold dental fillings of their victims, many of them Jews herded into notorious death camps like Auschwitz.
The gold from the camps was then sent to the German central bank where it was resmelted. Some of the items arriving at the Reichsbank bore the stamp Auschwitz as well as the names of other concentration camps, U.S. archival documents said.
The sources told Reuters that investigators had found the smelting records of gold sold to Switzerland by the Nazis and it showed conclusively that victim gold was mixed in with bank gold.
Documents to be appended to the report show that after the war, Switzerland returned to the Allies only about 15 percent of the looted gold it bought from Germany in return for Swiss francs, which were used to buy war materials and food.
According to documents, including some previously released ones, Switzerland knowingly received looted gold and in certain cases even asked the Germans to obtain it for them.
Documents also showed that Swiss commercial banks as well as the National Bank received the looted gold.
A World Jewish Congress official said that while he had not seen the report, he could confirm that documents the group had submitted to the U.S. government also showed that victim gold was sent for processing to the Reichsbank.
``One document revealed that 76 shipments of looted gold, including dental gold, were sent to the German Central Bank valued at more than $150 million today and some of the items even bore the stamp Auschwitz,'' Elan Steinberg, WJC executive director, said.
Meanwhile, sources close to the U.S. State Department said other documents showed that victim gold wound up in the gold pool of the commission set up by the Allies after the war to return the looted metal to its rightful owners.
The Allied-established Tripartite Gold Commission also has long maintained that all the captured Nazi gold in its holdings were from the banks of Europe and none came from individuals.
The distinction is important because all of the $4 billion worth of gold it has distributed went to central banks and not one ounce went to Holocaust survivors.
The commission has distributed all but 5.5 tons of some 377 tons it received from Britain, France and the United States.
Most of the captured gold was located in hiding places in Germany and Austria while some of it was handed over by the Swiss and the other neutral countries who did business with the Nazis during the war. The WJC has called on the commission to use the remaining gold for the benefit of Holocaust victims.
The sources said the report will also document that other neutral countries during the war -- Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Turkey -- received looted Nazi gold but returned only a tiny fraction after the war.
Nazi gold (German: Raubgold, "stolen gold") is the gold transferred by Nazi Germany to overseas banks during the Second World War. The regime executed a policy of looting the assets of its victims to finance the war, collecting the looted assets in central depositories. The occasional transfer of gold in return for currency took place in collusion with many individual collaborative institutions. The precise identities of those institutions, as well as the exact extent of the transactions, remain unclear.
The present whereabouts of Nazi gold that disappeared into European banking institutions in 1945 has been the subject of several books, conspiracy theories, and a civil suit brought in January 2000 against the Vatican Bank, the Franciscan Order, and other defendants.
During the war, Portugal was the second largest recipient of Nazi gold, after Switzerland and this came through the sale of Wolfram (as tungsten was called), with the German armaments industry nearly entirely dependent on the supplies from Spain and Portugal.[15] Initially the Nazi trade with Portugal was in hard currency, but in 1941 the central Bank of Portugal established that much of this was counterfeit and Portuguese leader António de Oliveira Salazar demanded all further payments in gold.[16]
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