The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Tod (“Mozart’s Death”, 1971), by Drs Dalchow, Duda and Kerner, which found evidence of the Masonic conspiracy to murder Mozart in the eight allegories of Mercury on the frontispiece of the first libretto of The Magic Flute. Since mercury can be a poison as well as a winged messenger it is evident—to the learned doctors at least—that Mozart’s life was brought to a premature end by ingestion of this toxin at the instigation of Freemasons. Why, if the Masons wanted to assassinate Mozart for his crimes against the Order, they simultaneously requested he compose a cantata for them and, after his death, published a fulsome eulogy to him is unclear.

The postulations that Mozart was assassinated, whether by Salieri or the Freemasons, fail finally on the forensic evidence. Although there was no official autopsy, Eduard Guldener von Lobes, the physician who examined the composer’s corpse, found no evidence of foul play. In the numerous accounts of Mozart’s symptoms pre-death, by those who attended and nursed him, there are no mentions of the conditions which would have occurred had he been poisoned by either mercury or arsenic. Mozart’s handwriting on the final Requiem script evidenced no sign of the shakes, which commonly indicates mercury poisoning; and the tell-tale cyanosis of arsenic poisoning was absent from his body. All things considered, Mozart near certainly died of disease. Many diseases have been proposed, from rheumatic fever to uraemia, from syphilis to tuberculosis, although the deadly agent cannot have been communicable since Constanze, who crawled into her husband’s bed hoping to catch his illness and perish too, would have succumbed.

In 2001 Dr Jan V. Hirschmann, an infectious disease specialist, posited an entirely new killer of Mozart—pork chops. Hirschmann noted that Mozart had written to Constanze on 7–8 October, 1791:

What do I smell? Why, here is Don Primus with the pork cutlets! Che gustol Now I am eating to your health!

Improperly cooked tainted pork can harbour a parasitic burrowing worm called Trichinella. The typical incubation period for trichinosis is 50 days; the letter above was written 44 days before Mozart’s death. The symptoms of Mozart’s final illness—extreme swelling of the extremities, vomiting, fever, rashes and severe pain—are typical of trichinosis.

And no, General and Frau Ludendorff, the Jews didn’t use pork chops to poison Mozart. They wouldn’t have known to do so. Trichonisis was not clinically identified until 1860.

SALIERI MURDERED MOZART: ALERT LEVEL 4

Further Reading

Albert Borowitz, “Salieri and the ‘Murder of Mozart’”, Legal Studies Forum, vol. 29, No. 2, 2001

Jan V. Hirschmann, MD, “What killed Mozart?”, Archives of Internal Medicine, vol. 161, 2001

David Weiss, The Assassination of Mozart, 1970

Hilda Murrell

In March 1984 an intruder broke into the Shropshire home of Hilda Murrell and abducted her. Her body was found three days later in a nearby wood, where she had died of hypothermia, although she had also been repeatedly stabbed. Because a little cash had been stolen from Murrell’s home the police dismissed the case as a “bungled burglary”. No fewer than seven books plus three police investigations and countless TV documentaries and newspaper articles have sought to show instead that Murrell was assassinated by the British state, namely MI5. For Hilda Murrell was not merely a harmless gardener; she was a prominent opponent of nuclear power and was scheduled to present her paper An Ordinary Citizen’s View of Radioactive Waste Management at the Sizewell Inquiry. Murrell was also the aunt of Commander Robert Green RN, a staff naval intelligence officer during the 1982 Falklands War, who was suspected of having passed proof to her that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the sinking of the Argentine ship Belgrano to provoke open war with Argentina.

Conspiracists are convinced that Murrell’s anti-nuclear campaigning secured her state-sponsored death. Or perhaps MI5 raided her home to seize the top-secret Belgrano information but were discovered in flagrante by Murrell, necessitating her elimination (this was the favoured view of ex-Labour MP Tarn Dalyell).

A two-year cold-case police reinvestigation of the Murrell case uncovered DNA evidence which linked labourer Andrew George to Murrell’s killing, and in May 2005 George was found guilty of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering the 78–year-old. A year later the Court of Appeal upheld the murder conviction.

Among those the police and judiciary have failed to convince is Commander Robert Green RN (Retd), who is on record as saying that George’s conviction is “unsafe” and that “many unanswered questions” remain about Murrell’s death.

MI5 killed campaigner Hilda Murrell after botching robbery of her house: ALERT LEVEL 6

Further Reading

Judith Cook, Unlawful Killing, 1994

Graham Smith, Death of a Rose Grower, 1985

Nazi Gold

In the dying days of the Second World War in Europe, there was a desperate scramble by Allied forces to fight their way into Germany. There were concentration camps to liberate, last-ditch SS fanatics to quell, regions to seize from rivals (US/UK versus the USSR), war criminals to apprehend, technological secrets to appropriate… and Nazi gold to grab.

Around $238 million of the Third Reich’s gold reserves was sent from the Reichsbank to a mine at Merkers, 200 miles (320km) south-west of Berlin, after the Berlin Reichsbank was partially destroyed in a B-17 raid on 3 February 1945. With Berlin nearly encircled by the Red Army in early April, Reichsbank director Walter Funk removed the remaining gold reserves, together with large amounts of foreign currency, to Oberbayern in southern Bavaria, where the Nazis intended to create a redoubt. This gold was unloaded under cover of night by German Alpine troops commanded by Colonel Franz Pfeiffer, and hidden in the mountains above Lake Walchensee. Despite the last best hopes of the Nazis, neither the Merkers mine nor the Walchensee stash escaped seizure by the Allies. The mine was captured by Patton’s Third Army and the Oberbayern occupied by the 10th Armoured Division. During April and May 1945 the Allies dug up the Nazi gold and placed it under military authority.

Or did they? Even by the estimates of the US Army, 2 per cent of the closing balance of the Reichsbank went missing, amounting to several million dollars (at 1945 values), and the true value of the disappeared gold was probably more. Additionally, jewellery and artworks hidden by the Nazis at Merkers were also “lost”. Small wonder, then, that the Guinness Book of Records has called the disappearance of the Nazi gold from Merkers and Oberbayern “the largest robbery on record”. Some conspiracy researchers suggest the missing gold was appropriated by the clandestine SS escape network ODESSA. Trenton Parker, an ex-Marine colonel with CIA connections, told Radio Free America on 29 July 1993 that the missing Nazi gold had been siphoned into Spain by ODESSA, where General Franco had kindly looked after it—with the help of the Third Reich’s Martin Bormann. “I can assure you that Martin Bormann did not die in Berlin,” Parker informed the audience. “He looked very much alive, in March of 1975, in a villa outside of Madrid, Spain, where I went to negotiate the liquidation of various tons of gold which were turned into perfect Krugerrands.”

How does Parker know all this? Aside from his own meeting with Bormann, Franco’s physician’s sister passed the information on to her sister, who married one Ortega-Perez who served as a staff interpreter for General Eisenhower.

Ian Sayer, author of Nazi Gold, has a less convoluted explanation for the missing gold, the bulk of which was “lost” at Walchensee: it was heisted in bits by just about every GI and