The Third Reich had a lot of gold aside from that stored in the vaults of the Berlin Reichsbank, however. The story of this further missing Nazi gold is yet more sordid still.
In 1997 the US Department of Commerce published “US and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany during WWII”, a document more generally called the Eizenstat Report after its director, Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart E. Eizenstat. The report was harshly critical of Switzerland’s wartime dealings with the Third Reich, saying that “in the unique circumstances of World War II neutrality collided with morality”. Not to put too polite a point on it, the Swiss Bank for International Settlements and National Bank had laundered gold bullion from Nazi Germany, enabling the Third Reich to secure trade goods from other countries. Swiss banks, Eizenstat’s report concluded, still clung obstinately to around $20 billion of Nazi gold deposits looted from the banks of occupied Europe and the victims of the Holocaust.
In response, the seven-page “Declaration of the Swiss Federal Council” asserted that the conclusions of the Eizenstat report were “unsupported” and its assessments “one-sided”. The holier-than-thou demeanour of the “Gnomes of Zurich”, however, was dented by the Swiss government’s admission in 1998 that the national bank had not bothered to enquire until late in the war (that is, when the Allies were clearly winning) whether the gold paid in by the Nazis was from Holocaust victims—and much of it was, having been melted down from jewellery, gold coins and even dental fillings seized from Jewish victims. Faced with Eizenstat’s report, class actions by US-based Holocaust survivors and the US government’s threat to freeze Swiss assets, the Swiss government suddenly found $5 billion annually to compensate the victims of the Holocaust and other human tragedies.
Following the declassification of a 1946 US Army document, representatives of Holocaust victims also brought, in 2000, a civil action against the Vatican, alleging that it too held Nazi-era loot. The declassified document was an intelligence memo from treasury agent Emerson Bigelow asserting that, at the time of the collapse of Ustasha, the Nazi puppet state in Croatia, 200 million Swiss francs, together with gold looted from Serbs, gypsies and Jews, was lodged in the Vatican “for safekeeping”, with the connivance of the Roman Catholic clergy and the Franciscan Order. Holocaust researchers further accused the Vatican of using this Nazi loot to set up “gold lines” to smuggle Nazi and SS officials to South America.
The Vatican strenuously denied handling the Nazis’ stolen gold, and opened its Second World War archive to historians. There is no doubt that one pro-Nazi office of the Vatican, the German College of Santa Maria dell’Anima under Bishop Alois Hudal, was running a ratline for SS war criminals (including SS commando Otto Skorzeny), but whether this was funded by stolen gold held in the Vatican Bank is unclear.
The Vatican is a frequent target for conspiracy theories—not without cause, as the Roberto Calvi case proves—but during the Nazi era it tended to side with the angels. Any reckoning of the Vatican has to weigh in the 700,000 Jews Pope Pius XII saved from the Holocaust by providing them with sanctuary and false baptismal certificates.
Kenneth Alford and T. P. Savas,
Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting,
Nazi Moon Base
Towards the end of the Second World War, Allied airmen in Europe were astonished to encounter strange craft that flew at speeds far in advance of their propeller-driven planes. The high-speed craft turned out to be the Nazis’ jet-engined Me262 fighter or, on rare occasions, the Me163 rocket plane. With the subsequent Allied takeover of Germany’s military research facilities, the superiority of Nazi aeronautics and rocketry was confirmed. But was Nazi science sufficiently far advanced to have sent men to the moon?
Precisely where the idea came from that the Nazis had mounted a moon mission is unclear, but in 1993 the president of the American Academy of Dissident Sciences, Vladimir Terziski, published an article entitled “Half a Century of the German Moon Base”. According to Terziski:
The Germans landed on the Moon as early as probably 1942, utilizing their larger exoatmospheric rocket saucers of the Miethe and Schriever type. The Miethe rocket craft was built in diameters of 15 and 50 meters [49ft and 164ft], and the Schriever Walter turbine-powered craft was designed as an interplanetary exploration vehicle. It had a diameter of 60 meters [197ft], had 10 stories of crew compartments, and stood 45 meters [148ft] high. Welcome to Alice in Saucerland. In my extensive research of dissident American theories about the physical conditions on the Moon I have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is atmosphere, water and vegetation on the Moon, and that man does not need a space suit to walk on the Moon. A pair of jeans, a pullover and sneakers are just about enough.
According to Terziski, members of the occult pan-German Vril and Thule societies made contact with aliens during the inter-war period and were able to pass on alien technology to the Nazis, notably the SS Military Technical Branch E-IV. Aside from landing on the moon, the Nazis bored under the surface to create a lunar station, staffed by some 40,000 people, which in the 1950s was used by both the Russians and the Americans.
Oh, and the Nazis managed to reach Mars too. On earth, despite their defeat in the war, the Nazis continued space exploration from a secret underground base in New Swabia (Antarctica), where Hitler resided after his escape from the Berlin bunker.
There is no way of proving that aliens cooperated with the Third Reich in aviation design and technology, and the supersonic speeds of Luftwaffe aircraft can be explained in entirely mundane terms. By the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War, Germany was forbidden to build aircraft for military use. Frustrated aeronautical designers such as Reimar and Walter Horten turned instead to improving aerodynamics and wing- design in sporting gliders, perfecting both delta and disc wings. When Germany rearmed under Hitler, these gains in aviation technology were fed directly into the warplane industry. The apex of Nazi aeronautics, the Mel63, was delta-winged.
Vladimir Terziski, “Half a Century of the German Moon Base”, http://greyfalcon.us/restored/German%20Moon%20Base%20Alpha.htm
New World Order
During the Persian Gulf War, US President George H. W. Bush sent right-wing conspiracists into paroxysms of excitement when, in a September 1990 speech to Congress, he announced: “Out of these troubled times… a new world order—can emerge.”
Here finally the fears of the John Birch Society were confirmed: George Bush was bent on the introduction of a one-world government controlled by a small cabal of capitalists. To rub the noses of the Birch boys in the dirt, Poppy Bush just kept on repeating the NWO phrase at every public opportunity.
The John Birch Society based much of its analysis of the New World Order menace on a 1,300-page pioneering history of the 20th century by Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University. In his
