As we commemorate a century from the end of one of the most devastating wars, it is sobering to remember that, according to a 2011 report by the Robert Schumann Centre For Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, a staggering 40 million people died in World War I, no fewer than half of them civilians. These included the victims of the Armenian genocide, but not of the  Spanish flu that sprang out of the trenches. The flu claimed over 60 million lives, the deadliest “natural” disaster in human history.

Then we had the Bolshevik coup d’etat, which the Bolsheviks called a revolution, but was actually an overthrow of the revolutionaries who had already seized power in March 1917 upon the Tsar’s abdication. This led to the Russian civil war that claimed another eight million lives.

The Bolsheviks from New York led by Leon Trotsky were financed by New York bankers Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg, who were of German origin, and had both married into the Loeb family of Kuhn Loeb. The Bolsheviks were given US passports upon their departure.

And all for what? Power and greed.

It was supposed to be the “war to end all wars”. Yeah, right. Where have we heard that before?

This is one of the biggest lies propagated by war mongers. No war could ever end wars, because it is a universal law that violence always begets more violence.

Historians argue that WWII would most probably never have taken place were it not for WWI, which had ended not with any surrender from either side, but with an armistice, that is a ceasing of hostilities. But then a treaty was forced upon the central powers of the German, Austrian and Ottoman empires which were broken up at Versailles, laying the seeds for future conflict.

The indomitable Bob Dylan once wrote a song that started:

“Come you masters of war, you that build all the guns, you that build the death planes, you that build the big bombs… You hide in your mansion as young people’s blood flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud.”

But in total war, apart from the gun and bomb makers, the masters include those making a “killing” from the banks, the steel, motor vehicles, electronics, informatics, chemicals and oil industries that step up a few gears to produce material for the war effort.  

By the dawn of the 20th century and the rise of extreme nationalism, it was already impossible to put a national label on these great production houses and financial institutions.

Take the Warburgs, for example. Paul Warburg was part of an old banking firm Warburg & Co set up in Germany in 1798. He moved to New York and became the prime mover and architect behind the setting up of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) in 1913. He drafted its regulations in absolute secrecy on Jekyll Island along with other private bankers. The FRB was instrumental in financing the American involvement in WWI.

His brother Max, however, remained in Germany running Warburg & Co. He was chief financial adviser to the Kaiser and helped bankroll the German war effort. 

So both sides of the war were partly financed by the same family whose name ironically was Warburg, which could mean “city of war”.

The Rockefellers, with their large holdings in Standard Oil, the largest US oil company with 84 per cent of the American market, had substantial dealings with German industrialists both before and during WWII. They also set up Chase Bank in partnership with the German Kuhn Loeb. But the Rockefellers’ partner and second largest shareholder in Standard Oil was none other than the notorious German industrial powerhouse IG Farben, a major supporter of the Nazis and vital to the entire war effort.

Let me say that again, lest it fails to sink in. IG Farben was a large shareholder in Standard Oil!

During the war, Standard Oil registered its tanker fleet under the Panama flag, with the assistance of James Forrestal, Under Secretary of the Navy and later Secretary of War. Forrestal was also vice president of General Aniline, a subsidiary of Standard Industries. General Aniline was originally called American IG, a subsidiary of Germany’s IG Farben.

Next time we see our countries, lives and loved ones torn to shreds in another war to defeat the ‘enemy at the gates’, we may wish to pause and ask one question

With its Panamanian tanker fleet, Standard Oil shipped its petrochemicals to fascist Spain, paid for by German funds unblocked by the Federal Reserve Bank that had been controlled by Warburg. The ships set sail for Hamburg where they unloaded their cargo.

It was impossible to wage modern warfare without oil. Did any of the Rockefellers or Standard Oil’s directors get jailed for trading with the enemy? Of course not.

Henry Ford is actually mentioned twice by Hitler in his Mein Kampf. Hitler had described him to a Detroit News reporter in 1931 as “my inspiration”. Hitler awarded Ford the grand cross of the German eagle, Germany’s highest award bestowed upon a foreigner.

In his book The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich, Max Wallace quotes de-classified documents showing that Ford Motors’s German plant Ford-Werke in Cologne  turned to producing army trucks for the Nazis during the war, and turbines for the V-2 rockets.

In breach of the Geneva Conventions his Ford-Werke used between a hundred and two hundred French POWs in 1940, while his Detroit plant was turning out war armaments for the US government.

“Miraculously”, Ford’s Cologne factory was not bombed throughout the whole war, despite the destruction of the city.

In his book IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black reveals how IBM traded with Germany through its German subsidiary Dehomag. It retained ardent Nazi supporter Willy Heidinger as its CEO. During the war years IBM provided Germany with all the punch card-based machines required to run the train schedules throughout Europe.

It also provided punch cards for the census that allowed the SS to trace all Europeans with Jewish roots, who were then boarded onto those same trains with clockwork efficiency, bound for the concentration camps. IBM’s Dehomag leased and operated all machines, so the company knew exactly how they were being used.

The Harrimans, railroad and banking moguls, founded the Eugenics Record Office and financed white supremacist campaigns in the US to shut the door to East and Southern Europeans, including the 900 Jewish refugees aboard the St Louis, who had to return to Europe in 1939.

President George Bush senior’s father and grandfather Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker were senior partners, shareholders and directors in the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) and with the Harrimans, who took control of the German shipping line Hamburg-Amerika Line.

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) was a US base for German industrialist magnet Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance and arm the Nazis. UBC’s major shareholder was a Thyssen-controlled bank in Holland, and represented Thyssen’s American interests. Bush was connected to his Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, which also used slave labour from Auschwitz.

Had all this been known publicly, the Bushes would never have become presidents and vice president.

By the late 1930s BBH used its Hamburg-Amerika Line to purchase and ship millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, thus both feeding and financing Hitler’s build-up to war. Assets of UBC, the Hamburg-Amerika line and others held by BBH were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

In her book Dark Money, Jane Mayer revealed how Fred Koch, father of the Koch Brothers, set up a German company, Winkler-Koch Engineering, that built a large oil refinery in Hamburg, approved by Hitler.

So the next time we see our countries, lives and loved ones torn to shreds in another war to defeat the ‘enemy at the gates’, we may wish to pause and askone question.

Whether maybe, just maybe, the most pernicious, insidious, deceitful  and despicable  enemy might actually be scurrying like rats within our own walls – those masters of war, feeding the enemy’s war machines as well as our own, while lining their pockets with gold. 

Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in history and international affairs.

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

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