-Caveat Lector- An excerpt from: The Devil's Chemists - 24 CONSPIRATORS OF THE INTERNATIONAL FARBEN CARTEL WHO MANUFACTURE WARS Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. & Edward Johnson (collaborator) ©THE BEACON PRESS 1952 BOSTON First Edition - 374pps - Only edition ----- 3. Before Armies March A FEW DAYS BEFORE THAT CHRISTMAS Of 1946, I caught the Washingtonian out of Philadelphia. That was the week the United States called on the United Nations to urge the Spanish people to get rid of Franco, and a Senate committee had gone down to Jackson, Mississippi, to look into the campaign practices of Senator Bilbo. Some time during that week I must have wondered wearily why the State Department had abetted Franco to power in the first place, and why the upper chamber had ever seated the Senator from Mississippi. Throwing the New York Times onto the rack above my seat, I zipped open my briefcase and pulled out my file on the tax matter. No use trying to concentrate! Frost bit the window, designing it into two uneven panes. Winter in Washington was usually a comfortable prospect, after the miserably humid summers; but this time I would feel alone even if comfortable. The man who had introduced me to I.G. Farbenindustrie would not be there. He was Bernard Bernstein, Assistant General Counsel of the Treasury Department during the years before Pearl Harbor. Early in 1941 Bernstein had wired me in Camden to come down and help out for the "short while" that had lasted over six years. As Bernstein's Chief Counsel of Foreign Funds Control, I had helped to freeze I.G. Farben's assets in the Western Hemisphere. Bernstein and I had worked on the executive order which placed under the vigilant eye of the Treasury Department Farben's main holdings in the United States � the companies of the old American I. G. Chemical Corporation, which was renamed "General Aniline and Film Corporation." Then the Treasury had sent me on a journey through a dozen Latin American countries, to try to get their co-operation in defending the whole hemisphere economically. I found that I.G. Farben dominated the political and economic life of many small countries. Guatemala was practically a Farben subsidiary. In June 1942 I was secretary of a conference in which twenty American republics finally agreed to do battle against Farben, the Japanese Zaibatsu, and similar interrelated interests. According to the exact words of the conference, as I remembered them, these interests had "been plotting the downfall of the free peoples who gave them an opportunity to prosper and grow rich by honest trade. " This agreement had not been easily reached. To an extent unknown even by the presidents of the Latin American republics, Farben had so extended its influence in synthetics, and had gained control of so many banks, that to close down or boycott their interests would have led to serious economic depressions. The United States had urged the taking over of General Aniline as an example to the other American governments; we offered to start a school to show them how to do it. But the Latin American representatives had tactfully pointed out how naive the United States was. "A school! It's all right for you in the United States to close down one big company. That has perhaps a small effect on your economy. But a move like this would wreck us. Can you tell us how to replace the employees that I.G. Farben would take out of the country? Can you replace their scientific knowledge? Have you got the people to send us from the United States?" But now, on the eve of 1947, although the current activities of General Aniline and Film were still extremely important, few people in Washington cared any longer what General Aniline did. After taking care of my tax case at the Treasury, I wandered around to F Street, where the Capitol Theater was playing "The Best Years of Our Lives." Remembering the picture, I envied the veterans � not the wounds of battle, nor, later, their trying to find homes and jobs, but the fact that they had won somethingWhen a battalion captures a town, foreign policy cannot take away the victory. When the Allied troops were splashing onto the Normandy beachhead, I was preparing to go to London to work out France's makeshift money system. Already we had closed down factories by financial blockade, had frozen the enemies' assets. These measures, as well as tactics and medicines, had saved some lives. But our battle was now a stalemate, and the men who believed that economic warfare never ended had left the government, feeling so out of line with the new policy that it would be useless to stay. Again I thought of Bernard Bernstein. General Eisenhower had appointed him his financial advisor, on recommendation of Secretary Morgenthau, when the prospective invasion of Africa was still a well-guarded secret. Although Bernstein was a colonel, he carried the war of money personally to the front lines. The North African invasion took place in November 1942, and I joined Bernstein there in December. Together we worked out the system to block enemy assets in Algiers, Tunis, and Casablanca and to set up a sound currency. There was no thought then of bringing to trial any businessmen. After I left North Africa to go back to my desk in the Treasury, Bernstein had traveled with the invading troops, into Sicily and Italy and France. Then, just before the Allies invaded Germany, he gathered under his command a group of infantrymen who had been Treasury investigators, to search for the business records and the history of every important firm on the continent. My brother Herb, who had marched into Germany as an infantryman, had been requisitioned by Bernstein to find the gold which the Nazis had hidden in salt mines, in chicken yards, and in the Bavarian mountains. The gold-hunters unearthed 99 per cent of all the gold bars in Germany, most of which had previously been stolen by Germany from the countries it overran. Again, I.G. Farbenindustrie had been only one objective; the mission's purpose was to discover what influence industry and investments had played in the coming of war. They would still play their part in future wars. I couldn't get up the courage to go over to the War Department without first phoning Bernstein. I went into a comer store and called Bernstein's New York office. His deep voice greeted me without preliminaries. "Hello, Joe. I understand you're in Washington. Are you thinking of going to Nurnberg?" "No," I said. "The news travels fast. I did want to ask you what you thought about it. Why don't you take the job?" "No, thanks." "I didn't expect you would, after just getting back into practice." "There's that and-well, I don't believe it would be a good idea, under the circumstances, for me to head up any prosecution of German industrialists." We chatted for a few minutes. I waited for him to say, "Go ahead, you take it, it's an opportunity." But he didn't. He laughed. "If you do go, Joe, get Abe Weissbrodt to go with you. He's always good for a laugh." "You're kidding. You really don't think he'd go?" "No � just a joke." We said good-by, and that was that. Bernstein's final report on Farben had gone to the Kilgore subcommittee. Much of it was still secret. It was not like him to make a joke of anything involving his service with the government. Stories of his bravery had become legendary, but he'd been so implacably serious that some of the boys who had worked for him asserted that his bravery was unconscious � that to him bullets were mere annoyances in an economic war. Get Weissbrodt? Weissbrodt was a very capable man; it was surprising that Bernstein had recommended his prankishness rather than his ability. Weissbrodt, who had tracked down some of the first evidences of Farben's influence on the Continent, had been an infantry corporal ready for discharge by the time he got the call from SHAEF. Three times he ignored orders to leave his company and proceed to SHAEF headquarters in London. Then he was given a choice: investigate or take a court-martial. By this time Colonel Bernstein was in North Africa. "But where in North Africa, sir?" he asked his commanding officer. "Somewhere in North Africa. Go find him and report." Some days later the corporal found him in Palermo. Sicily. A raid was going on. The Allied command area was deserted except for Colonel Bernstein, who was striding down the headquarters street with two briefcases under each arm, looking neither right nor left, apparently oblivious to the enemy bombs falling all around him. The corporal caught up with him and saluted. The colonel answered by raising two of the briefcases in the general direction of his face, and smiled faintly to acknowledge their past association in the Treasury. Then the corporal started to run, and the colonel called him back. "Weissbrodt, where are you going?" "To find a shelter, Colonel." "Weissbrodt, I have a nice job for you. You go find the Banca d'Italia and close it. Shut her up tight." "But, sir, I haven't got time to close any banks." Bernstein was offended. It was reported later that he honestly felt he was giving the corporal an opportunity to distinguish himself. "Weissbrodt!" he exclaimed. "Where did you ever get a chance in your lifetime before either to open or close a bank?" I found myself in the Statler Hotel, phoning another of the first Farben investigators who had stayed on in the government. What was I doing in town? I told him. Deftly he shifted the talk to the Washington weather-it was warm for December. Had I got mixed up in something that had lately turned subversive? . . . This very week the President had established a Temporary Loyafty Commission, and that had scared many of the absolutely loyal, along with a few who were presumably disloyal. I thought: Whatever else you might say about the Roosevelt administration, at times a genial friendliness rose above even the most unutterable confusions; people stopped to ask you the time. In its place was a wary watchfulness. I stayed at the Statler longer than I should have, listening to three men at a table near the bar. Their politics were not disclosed. Discussing the last war, they were turning their backs on it, looking forward to the next. Between the two wars they found not even a psychological connection. They agreed vociferously and bitterly that the last war had been unnecessary, whereas the next was inevitable. We had fought the wrong enemies, apparently by our own choice and without a single righteous reason. But the next war would have an honest moral basis. Everyone was afraid these days, I told myself. In 1932 the American people had been afraid too; but their fear had sunk to a warmly communicable despair that often yielded positive action and a defiant release from the thing Franklin Roosevelt called "fear itself." Now the fear which the government should be meeting with vigorous courage expressed itself in an apathy and cynicism more disturbing than bonus marchers or farmers standing on their front steps with pitchforks in their hands. These men in the Statler bar � their views were exceptional, maybe. But how many normal voices were heard in Washington? How many others, fearing the evil prospect, would greet the future world with solutions that stood upon the worst features of an equally evil past? Fear may come to the mind long before physical danger. Footsteps may march up and down the hallway time and again before the knock comes on the door. Then a sudden terror, as if your mind, loosely planted, has been uprooted before it can reach down to the soil or up to the sunlight. . . . Colonel Mickey Marcus, who was later killed in Palestine, headed the War Crimes Division of the War Department. In the labyrinthine Pentagon Building, his office was distinguished from hundreds of others only by the name plate beside his door. He! and I had got to know each other while drawing up the Army laws for invasion-and- occupation currencies. Having served at one time as Commissioner of Correction in New York City, and having helped to draft the Italian, German, and Japanese surrender terms, he could be tough and gentle by turns � although it never seemed to me that he enjoyed the tough role. He had my letter, before him. "As I get it, you're interested enough to discuss it seriously." "That's right," I said. "Do you think there is enough evidence to connect them with the war plans?" "I haven't seen the evidence. But I doubt it." Mickey began to pace, occasionally stopping abruptly, frowning back at me. Now he came back and sat down. "Certainly a trial would have great military value if we could get all the proofs together. Right here in Alexandria there is a warehouse full of Farben records that no agency has studied. Other countries went digging for Farben documents, too. In the heat of victory they wanted them; then they stuck them away in corners." "Why couldn't the prosecution staff be increased?" He ignored my question. "Maybe the Farben leaders were masters of economic warfare, but if I were a judge, I would want to know how you blame a war on men who weren't even in the Army or the foreign office. I'd want to know what made Farben any different from, say, DuPont in this country." "Don't you think the Farben leaders were different?" "Yes, I do. Still, they didn't pull any triggers." I agreed. What puzzled me most was that a staff had been over in Nurnberg for months, and a lot of accusations against the Farben directors had been flung around, but no single idea had been presented to show why these men, above all industrialists in the world, were the kind of men who would deliberately bring on a war. "Yet I don't think we have to show that these directors lusted for blood," I said. "We don't have to show that they enjoyed pushing pins around on a map. But suppose we could show that they bad power far greater than any general in the field. Then how would the War Department feel?" He was slouching in his chair, swiveling slowly. "In this Department, we're thinking about two things: Russia and the atom. God knows these things are important, but I think myself -just my own opinion -that we may have a lot more to fear from the Russians if we don't consider some other facts, too. Many of these Farben men were chemists. Chemistry played its part in the atom bomb � right? There are also other deadly chemical weapons that a country can make in secret. These men made some of these weapons, we know that. A country cannot very easily test an atom bomb in secret, but for ten years these guys did make secret weapons that are still important strategically. How did they do it? There's a question a trial might answer. Chemistry today is still the greatest secret weapon." He loosened his tie, climbed out of the chair, and walked around the office with his hands in his pockets, as he explained that chemistry was the sperm of World War II. "I know, I know: you're going to say I'm reversing myself. But it's true. In this war, in Germany at least, chemical production was not just production. It was strategy. It takes a long time to make an atom bomb. But without retooling any machines, without changing anything but the label and the size of the can, in a few months the great chemists of Germany made enough Prussic acid to kill millions. And in Germany, chemistry was I.G. Farben, wasn't it? These men could make a kind of war people 'don't even know about. Let them go free, and they alone, working for the Russians, might have the decisive influence on whether there's to be a war." "Or working for us?" "Or for us, yes. They might also place Germany in a position to play the game both ways, for or against the Russians. We know that they can make a rocket tomorrow out of the nitrogen that would dye your wife's old dress today. When the war ended Farben was working on a rocket that would make the destruction of Hiroshima look like a small auto accident." His knowledge of Farben chemical power made an almost unbelievable tale, much of which I had never heard. I had heard of Tabun, the Farben poison gas so deadly it could penetrate any gas mask in existence. But Farben had deve <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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