"There is a union now, between the two towers, Bârad-Dur, fortess of the Dark Lord Sauron, and Orthanc, stronghold of the wizard Saruman."
Farther Down The Rabbit Hole (09/21/2006) - Webster Tarpley on Adolf Hitler
Transcript
Paula Gloria: Hi, this is Paula Gloria and this show is Farther Down The Rabbit Hole. As part of this special morning edition, and going more into politics, because people who get up early in the morning and are often about their busy day, often have inquisitive minds about topics that maybe, later on in the day, you kind of accept more readily.
One topic that I'm very concerned about, as a German, is: who is Adolf Hitler and what was going on in Germany? And this disaster that came after World War II and during World War II - is it something that could have been averted? As a little girl, I often wondered: "If I was in Germany at that time, what was it that I could have done?". And to this day, I still believe that as soon as mischief is afoot, there is something that can be done, and I resonate with that knowledge that empowers me and helps me to bring justice and equality to all.
And I think, as inheritors of the great Constitution, and Independence Day is something we should be very grateful for, I think we can never stop asking deep and even painful questions. So today with me I have Webster Tarpley who's been on many of my shows, giving us information on the truth behind 9/11. And today, I want to avail myself with his knowledge of history and what was going on at the turn of the 20th century. Webster, thank you.
Webster Tarpley: Glad to be here, Paula. Where should we start?
PG: I want to know - what was going on in Germany after World War I? Or if you want to go before then...
WT: Let's sort of set the stage for the rise of Hitler, because we have to understand how this came about. It takes more than just a warped, insane personality. And naturally, Hitler is one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century. He is the protagonist of the Holocaust, with the 6 million Jewish victims, but also 20 to 25 million Soviet victims, several million Polish victims, German victims, really one of the main people of World War II, but of course not the only one.
And I would stress the idea that Hitler cannot really be understood as a truly German phenomenon - that he's also got to be seen in terms of his backers in the City of London and in Wall Street. And when we get to Wall Street, we're going to find Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the current tenant of the White House. And George Bush in the White House today has got Auschwitz money in his family fortune.
PG: I was so shocked, Webster, when I read your book, I had to put it down for two days. To find the Prescott Bush connection and the actual addresses on Broadway and Wall Street, where this money was rolling...
WT: It's George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. You can buy the reprint now on Amazon.com, or if you want to read it for free, go to the Internet: www.tarpley.net. [inaudible] We'll get to that book towards the end.
Germany, of course, was crushed in World War I, ultimately, by being encircled - by fighting a two-front war. And it's interesting that at the end of the war, there was the so-called theory of the 'stab in the back', which was one of the things that Hitler used to take power. The idea was that since the Germans had asked for an armistice while they were still fighting on French and Belgian soil, the reactionaries claim that the politicians had stabbed the army in the back - that the army was really undefeated in the field, but the politicians in Berlin decided to give up the war.
And that ought to be familiar to people as the typical neocon argument - that the US forces are undefeated in the field, but the so-called left-wing mass-media are stabbing them in the back by telling all the bad things and none of the good things. So the neo-con argument and the Nazi argument are highly similar - and we'll find that again and again and again - because the neocons, of course, are a descendant of Carl Schmitt, Hitler's lawyer, and Leo Strauss, the guru who was a protégé of Carl Schmitt.
But now, let's get into the scene. During World War I, Germany was subjected to a British sea blockade, which meant they had no food, no medicine, terrible hardship for the entire population. And that sea blockade was kept in place for a whole year after the armistice. Remember, the war ended November 11th, 1918 in the West - the British kept the sea blockade going for another year to force Germany to sign the dictat of Versailles. And that is of course the other big theme in Hitler's demagogy: the stab-in-the-back and the Versailles treaty, which of course was experienced as an absolute humiliation by Germans. Then you have the Spanish flu, which kills more people...
PG: Then the Versailles thing was true...!?
WT: What do you mean? It happened - and of course, it's true... it was a Carteginian piece that could only lead to another war, as lots of people realized at the same time. Now, after 1918, after signing Versailles, Germany was not really an independent country anymore. It was under limited sovereignty. And you had, for example, representatives of JP Morgan sitting on the board of the Reichsbank - the central bank of Germany. Then, there were some people in Germany who were looking for a way out of this situation - Germany had become a tremendous pariah under this situation.
And they had a very intelligent Foreign Minister called Walther Rathenau, who was a Jewish public servant in Germany. And he got the idea of making a deal with Soviet Russia, and that is of course the Rapallo Agreement of 1922, which meant that Germany and Russia would work together for production and - generally - this is a peaceful exercise, although there were some military overtones. This is not the Hitler-Stalin pact, by any stretch of the imagination.
The British response to Rathenau was, first of all, to have him assassinated through a death squad known as Konsul.
PG: [interrupting to ask a question]...
WT: Because the British didn't want Russia and Germany to be together, because that was a winning combination. They wanted Germany isolated and set up for defeat. And of course, the goal is ultimately to play Germany against Russia, as we will see. So the first thing the British do is use this Konsul Organisation to kill Rathenau - again, one of the best people in post-war Germany - and then the British engage in massive currency warfare against Germany. This is the legendary hyperinflation of 1922 to 1923, which is a trillion-to-one. In other words, if you have a trillion marks at the beginning, you got one mark at the end. It's where you take the money to the store in a wheelbarrow and you bring back what you got in a tin bowl or in the palm of your hand. If you go to the restaurant, you've got to pay at the beginning, because if you wait to the end, it's going to be ten times more, and all the rest of this.
So, this is of course a very important, because hyperinflation essentially destroys the German middle class a second time. We've seen the middle class destroyed the first time in the war - the second time in the hyperinflation. The people who took it on the chin most were teachers, public servants, people like this. All the time, we get the Morgan people coming in - JP Morgan is really running a lot of Germany, in particular a guy called Hjalmar Schacht - becomes Hitler's Finance Minister. Hjalmar Schacht is born in Brooklyn, worked for the House of Morgan, was an agent of Morgan...
PG: [asking incredulously] House of Morgan!?
WT: House of Morgan - you've got to see this - the US finance tentacles are all over Germany after the defeat in World War I. Without this, you don't understand anything...
PG: [inaudible]
WT: Yeah, we'll get to him in a minute. OK, so Germany is very unstable after World War I - you've got a constant series of coups, putsches. You've got the Kapp Putsch by the Freikorps in 1920, which was stopped by a general strike of the SDP, the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions...
PG: [When] was the general strike...
WT: [answering] That was 1920. We've got the March Action by the Communists. We've got all kinds of putsches. We've got a Communist/Republican Bavaria where [Henry] Kissinger's father (Louis Kissinger) is somehow associated with it.
PG: [asking incredulously] Kissinger's father?!
WT: Kissinger's father - again, we can't stop for every little detail. With the Bavarians...
PG: This is all in your book?
WT: This is in various books. This is not all in my book - but these are things that people can look at.
Now, in the middle of this, we get Hitler.
Hitler is of course an Austrian - he's a Viennese, not a German.
He's a failed painter - he's somebody who gives himself airs of being an artist - and he is full of hatred and resentment.
This he expresses in his race theory.
He also has various senses of inadequacy because of what is generally described in the books as a "genital deficiency" that he had - he's only got one testicle and he's got other problems of this sort.
Remember the famous song: "Hitler only had one ball".
So that is Hitler - he's a failed painter.
So he - because of the fact that he feels so inadequate, and he's got so many sexual problems working - he's attracted by a guy called Lanz von Liebenfels, who is a defrocked priest who writes a magazine called 'Ostara' - which is the story of how you have to be blond, and if you're not blond, you're nothing.
Now, Hitler is not blond, but he embraces somehow this race science - and he follows this in any number of ways.
Now, later on, when Hitler has already seized power, he has a chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg. And Rosenberg says that the basis of Hitler's ideology are for people:
- one is Lagarde, who is a notorious anti-semite - a guy who influences Emperor William II - Kaiser Wilhelm
- Nietzsche - and this of course is accurate. Nietzsche is the proto-Nazi, proto-fascist par excellence.
- Wagner, with those interminable operas, right - this world of Siegfried and Brünhilder. Basically, the world of the Lord Of The Rings - if you've ever seen that. There's another disturbing parallel - living in a myth in Germany before World War I and then the 1920s and living in a myth today with Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings and all the rest of this stuff.
- And a guy called Houston Stewart Stewart Chamberlain, who is a relative of Lord Chamberlain - the guy who went to Munich with the umbrella and came back with 'Peace in our time'. He's another race theorist - another racist.
So, between the race concepts of in particular Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Lagarde, the two competing anti-semites - plus Lanz von Liebenfels - we get this Hitler ideology.
Now, in terms of who Hitler was - the other thing you have to know about him is that he starts after World War I in Munich, Bavaria as an agent of German military intelligence.
Take, for example, the Beer-Hall Putsch of 1923 with Hitler. This is again - this is downtown Munich - Hitler and a bunch of these crazies - unemployed war veterans - are out there attempting to seize the government of Munich, Bavaria. But who do they have with him?
They have Field-Marshal von Ludendorff. Now, that just means - the number two military guy in the entire German armed forces after - during and after - World War I - von Ludendorff along with Hindenburg - those were essentially the two military dictators of Germany towards the end of the war.
So, this is not just anybody - this is Hitler's Beer-Hall Putsch with the most prominent General anywhere around. And, of course, that Putzsch comes right around at the end of the hyperinflation.
The other people that Hitler has behind him is something called the Thule Society.
That is a group of raving irrationalists who live in this Norse mythology world of Valhalla, and Siegfried, and Wotan, the Wagnarian opera, again, the Lord Of The Rings.
And something else called Herrenklub - that is a group of titled aristocrats who support him and pay him. And of course, we have the famous meeting where a number of bankers and industrialists are called in by Schacht, and they hear a raving speech by Hitler, and Schacht says to them: "Und nun, meine Herren, an die Kassel". [which translates to]: "Now, gentlemen, get out your checkbooks and get ready to pay Hitler to finance his seizure of power".
But it's not just a German phenomenon - let's look at Prescott Bush. In Lower Manhattan, we got Brown Brothers Harriman, down there on lower Broadway - you find all this stuff in my book.
PG: [mulling about the Broadway address]...
WT: Exactly. Whatever the address is. Prescott Bush is the managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. It just happens to be the largest investment bank in the world between the two World Wars, and he's also on the board of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), which is an extension of the Thyssen - Fritz Thyssen - financial empire.
PG: [interjecting] steel investor?
WT: It's not - it's a bank. Above all, it's finance capital - and then it goes out into steel and just about anything else.
Now remember, in October 1942, Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current usurper, is gonna be expropriated by the Enemy Alien Custodian under the Trading With The Enemy Act, because Prescott Bush is a Director of and shareholder in a Nazi financial entity called Union Banking Corporation, where Fritz Thyssen had 3 million dollars in the summer of 1941, and it's well known that Thyssen helped to finance - at the urging of Schacht and Morgan - the seizure of power by Hitler.
And Thyssen has a book - 'I Paid Hitler' - so there's no doubt he did it - that's the name of his autobiography, I Paid Hitler' by Fritz Thyssen.
PG: He was proud of this..!?
WT: Yes, well... he was trying to get off at that point, he was trying to avoid war crimes prosecution later on, because he could see what was coming. Brown-Shipley is the mother of Brown Brothers Harriman. In other words, Brown Brothers Harrimanis the US branch of a British entity. Brown-Shipley is the mother of it - a guy called Thatcher Brown came to Wall Street to set this up.
PG: What year?
WT: It's not important when. Montagu Norman - before all this, well before - Montagu Norman, the head of the Bank of England, is a member of the Brown Shipley organisation, OK. So we're going to see how the British also get into the act.
But suffice to say that Hitler's seizure of power is helped by money, managed by Prescott Bush, sent to a bank in Holland, and then sent into the coffers of the Nazi party. At the same time, Prescott Bush is also part of the administration camp administrations, in the sense that Auschwitz, of course, was a concentration camp - [ it was a death camp and an extermination camp ], but it's also a slave labor camp, where people are literally worked to death [ before they are exterminated ].
And those companies around that are largely owned by Thyssen, and therefore, by extension, Prescott Bush is a part of that. Prescott Bush is also a part of the German military industrial complex, which is killing GIs when they get there.
Now, in terms of the way that Hitler came to power... In 1928, you had the fall of the last Social Democratic government, and it's sort of the last government that had a real majority in the Parliament - in the Reichstag - in the Weimar Republic. After 1928, all the governments are emergency governments - they're all ruling by decree using powers granted by Hindenburg as the President - he's the President of the Reich and Brüning is the Prime Minister.
And these are the so-called 'Notverordnung' - decree laws.
They're always extremely drastic austerity - and this is the process by which people are essentially...
PG: Drastic austerity.. reminds me of yesterday's talk....
WT: It's what we got going on in the US. And of course, Al Gore is trying to bring another round - and Hillary Clinton and Bush - they all agree - all the bankers have agreed - that in response to the death agony of the dollar - we've got to have another round of extreme austerity. Watch the Puerto Rican examples for what they mean by that. [Paula interjecting something] Absolutely. We're now in a similar slide.
The SPD - the Social Democrats - essentially.
PG: [interrupting] Hope we make a different choice.
WT: I hope so. That's why we're trying to talk about this. The SPD - the Social Democratic, the left party, the trade union-based party - committed suicide by supporting Brüning pretty much in the way Democrats are committing suicide by supporting Bush on 9/11 and all the related stuff that comes out of that.
Now Harriman and the British - looking at Stalin and then looking at Hitler - Stalin is in power, Hitler is trying to seize power, or has seized power in 1933.
The British decided that they're supporting Hitler, and they see Hitler as two things :
Firstly : - if Communists come to power, the Communists exterminate the existing elite and make themselves the elite.
The Nazis - the fascists, Mussolini - don't do anything like that. They leave the elite in place and they put themselves on top. So under - if Stalin gets you, you'll be shot. If Hitler gets you, you'll have to go through the inconvenience and humiliation of having some Nazi coming into your office and telling you what to do. But that' s probably better in their point of view.
But,
Secondly : - the British also believe - Hitler is a one-way gun. A One-Way Gun pointed East.
They look at Hitler's demagogy and they say - 'My god, he's anti-Bolshevik, he wants to kill the Russians - this is perfect. We'll play Hitler against Stalin and get rid of both of them".
Now, Stalin is also looking at Hitler and says: "Well, he's anti-Western - he's talking about Versailles, he's attacking the Western powers - Britain, France, the US". And of course, that's his conclusion.
The result is - that both groups support Hitler - that's the big, dirty secret of Hitler's rise to power. The British are supporting him and Stalin supports him. Let's look into how:
The German Communist Party never really opposed Hitler - they said the SPD were the bad guys. The SPD were the social fascists - you've gotta get rid of them.
Trotsky, who was alive at the time, wrote a lot of pamphlets about this - and he said: "Look, Stalin has betrayed the working class by attacking the Social Democrats and failing to really oppose Hitler". And that's true - but the secret is - Stalin wanted Hitler to come to power.
There's a famous quote from Stalin where he states: "Hitler is the icebreaker of the revolution". In other words: Hitler will wreck Western Europe, to the point where the Red Army can come in, and bring the Revolution, and bring Communism.
And the night before Hitler seized power, Ernst Thälmann, the head of the German Communist Party, went bowling. And there's a famous quote by Stalin where he says: "I think Hitler will probably concentrate on domestic reforms and leave us to build Socialism here in the Soviet Union". So, there's this pattern.
Now, between 1929 and 1933, you've got a series of governments. We mentioned Brüning, then comes von Papen, a real nasty, proto-Nazi reactionary. And then you have this guy von Schleicher, and Schleicher is the interesting one.
He's a General, but he's a Left-wing General. And his program - if you take it as a whole - looks pretty much like the New Deal, which is coming in the United States a couple of months after these events.
We're now in December of 1932 and beginning of 1933, and Schleicher comes in and says: "The big task is to create jobs. We need make-work programs, we need jobs. And what he wanted to do.."
PG: Because of Pound-sterling that just...
WT: We're gonna get into all that. Yes, exactly. What Schleicher does is to say: "I'm going to seize the credit-making capabilities of the central bank, and I'm going to issue credit for production. If you want to have productive capability - agriculture, mining, manufacture - I give you low interest towards zero interest credit so that we can restart production. And I'm going to build infrastructure like mad." Very much like the New Deal.
And of course, what happens is that the US - at this point - is not against them, but the British are - the British want him out. Because Schleicher is talking about a friendship treaty with Poland - and the British see that as the ruining of their plans. Because the British want Germany to attack Poland as a prelude to attacking the Soviets.
So Schleicher comes in and he says: "I'm going to create jobs, and I'm going to have friendships with our neighbors, especially Poland".
So the British do everything they can - they also blackmail Hindenburg, who is the President of the Reich, because he's got a son who's got all these gambling debts.
So they use the scandal of Hindenburg's son to blackmail Hindenburg - to kicking out Shleicher - and with the help of Van Pappen, they bring in Hitler.
So that's the seizure of power in January 1933. So again, if Shleicher had stayed in power, and Roosevelt had taken power in the US a little bit later, which he did, you might have had a peaceful outcome without the horrors of Nazism - but the British insisted on Hitler.
And the other thing is - the British look at it and they welcomed Hitler's racism - this is hard for people to understand. If you look at Bin Laden - the myth of Bin Laden today - one of the reasons the CIA supports Bin Laden so much, is because he auto-isolates himself. Bin Laden's line is: "If you're a Muslim, you meet a non-believer, you've gotta kill him". So it means - if you're a Muslim, you're gonna be isolated. You won't have any friends in Europe, or Russia, or China, or Japan, or India, South Africa, Brazil - nothing, nothing.
And similarly with Hitler - Hitler's race doctrine obviously leads him to the genocide of the Jews, the gypsies, the Slavs, the Communists, the trade unionists, the Catholics - he isolates the Germans. And the big moment of course is Ukraine. When the Nazi armies get into Ukraine, there's a big moment - what's he going to do? And Poland too - same story - but Ukraine is where it's really important. If Hitler had said: "Let's have an independent Ukraine as a sovereign state," he would have the Ukrainians at his side, and he probably would have won the war. But his racist insanity prevents him from doing what would be militarily and politically advantageous. So the British profile of Hitler turns out to be the trump. Stalin is also right in his sense, that Hitler does well....
PG: They banked on a fanatic.
WT: They banked on a fanatic who would isolate himself based on his racist insanity. And that's why you have to see - when these puppets are chosen by the British bankers, you've got to look at their characteristics, because they've profiled them. Now the other thing, of course - the big group supporting Hitler is Lady Astor and the Cliveden set. Lady Astor and the Cliveden set - this is the main group of the British aristocracy. There's Lord Astor, her husband, Lord John Jacob Astor, Lord Brand, Lord Lothian, Lord Halifax, and this is the social milieu of Lord Chamberlain - of Neville Chamberlain. And they make sure - at every turn in this situation - the re-militarization of the Rhineland, the 'anschluss' with Austria, above all, the Munich crisis of 1938. They make sure that the British government under Chamberlainsupports Hitler. Chamberlain's job is to build Hitler up, so he can get ready and attack Stalin. This is the whole point of the thing.
PG: We have four minutes.
WT: OK, let's see what we can try to get to.
PG: Just one second. People, stay posted - in one hour, after Amy Goodman, switch to Channel 67, and you can watch ??? Chesher ??? show, and she'll be interviewing Webster Tarpley. So you can pick up anything there.
WT: The other thing, I guess, is - if you look at the period of Nazi expansion - from 1939 to 1943 - the German capital structures of course have collapsed, and the banks are all bankrupt. So what they do is a policy of extensive looting. You can see this, for example - Hitler when he talks to his inner group - you can read this in William L. Shirer's 'Google Books: Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich'. Hitler says: "We are facing a financial collapse - therefore, we have to attack Poland and add them to our looting base." In other words -what can you sack, what can you exploit, what can you loot, what can you seize, what can you rob?
PG: 1939?
WT: September 1939. So, from 1939 to 1943 - you've got extensive looting. Expand the looting base to include most of Europe. 1943 - after Stalingrad and El Alamein in North Africa - the extensive part doesn't work anymore. Now it's gotta go to an intensive part - and this is where the concentration camps come into their own as extermination camps, death camps, but also, slave labor camps. There is a certain economic purpose in this, which I think we have to see today. For example: under the Republican bill on Immigration, if you say twelve million or twenty million illegal aliens or felons, you're going to put them into jail, you're really going to put them into a concentration camp - you're going to put them into forced labor. So if the Republican bill went through, we would be close to a slave labor economy here on the model of Germany, 1943 to 1945. And I think the parallel is this - under globalization - globalony, as I like to call it - all during the '90s, the US looting base expanded until it reached its limits.
Now, the limits now seem to be: Russia, China, Iran, a series of countries that are saying: 'No'. Syria 'no', also 'no'. And as various countries dump the dollar, the US looting base is gonna shrink - and that will means a shift over to intensive looting. And they will try to have austerity under the banner of peak oil, under the banner of global warming - and a whole series of other things. But it will be genocidal austerity. So we are facing something like the threat of what amounts to a concentration camp system in this country.
PG: So, in our last minute, what kind of New Deal can we look forward to?
WT: Well, if you want a New Deal, you better fight for it. That's what I would say: "If you want the New Deal, you better study it". I would say the New Deal is essentially the repertoire from which we can draw everything that we need now. Some parts of the New Deal were failures - we don't want to commit to those. But I think about two thirds of three quarters of it was an astounding, stunning success. So we need a party re-alignment to get back to a Franklin D. Rooselvelt-style national coalition, and the program of that has got to be - I would say - Constitutional government, territorial integrity, but above all, economic recovery. In other words: government measures to promote economic recovery - no austerity, austerity for the bankers. Tax the banks, tax speculative income - that would be the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
PG: Webster, thank you so much for joining us.
WT: Thank you, my pleasure.
PG: Thank you for joining at Farther Down The Rabbit. Stay tuned - in one hour, switch to Station, call 'Mollie Chester' ??? and she'll be continuing with Webster Tarpley. Thank you for joining me.
PG: [off-air] Just one last point: before you can solve a problem, you have to identify it. And I thank you for helping me to identify this problem.
WT: And if you want to know the lineage of the neocons today, it goes right back to Leo Strauss - the protege of Carl Schmitt, Hitler's lawyer. Carl Schmitt was Hitler's lawyer. He was a Rockefeller man - he got Leo Strauss' Rockefeller grants. The neocons all go back to Leo Strauss. The neocons are neo-fascists and neo-Nazis - that's pretty evident.
PG: So now that we're seeing clear, we can...
WT: The glorification of violence, the glorification of war, racism in this case against Arabs and Muslims, nothing changes...
PG: Thank you.
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Video: Webster Tarpley on Adolf Hitler
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