In 1938, Nazi diplomat Fritz Wiedemann appointed the American millionaire industrial systems inventor, Charles Bedaux, as head of I.G. commercial operations on behalf of The Fraternity in Europe. Bedaux had supplied industrial systems of time and motion study to I.G., ITT, Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford, Sterling Products, and the other Fraternity members. He had introduced brutal methods of production that brought about frequent strikes in the 1930s. He was working in Paris with Torkild Rieber's Texas Corporation Nazi contact Nikolaus Bensmann.
It was Bedaux who delegated himself to inveigle the Duke and Duchess of Windsor into the Fraternity's plans for a negotiated peace. Since Hitler's rise, the Windsors had been fascinated by the Fuhrer and his New Order in Europe.
In February 1941 the right-wing journalist Fulton Oursler interviewed Windsor at Government House in the Bahamas, publishing the results in Liberty magazine. The Duke declared his approval of negotiated peace to Oursler. He said, "It [the peace] cannot be another Versailles." He went on to express views that were hardcore expressions of Fraternity thinking, with their emphasis on gold as currency, Himmler's police, and the German system: "Whatever happens, whatever the outcome, a New Order is going to come into the world. ... It will be buttressed with police power. ... When peace comes this time, there is going to be a New Order of Social Justice * -- don't make any mistake about that -- and when that time comes, what is your country going to do with its gold?"
During his brief period as monarch, Windsor made every effort to overcome British prejudice against the Nazis. He became an inspiration for The Link, the British organization of highly placed Nazi sympathizers, which included in its membership some of the most prominent aristocrats in England.
The Fraternity wanted the Duke tied in more completely with them. Charles Bedaux was selected by Himmler to insure the Duke's political and economic commitment.
Sprightly, stocky and squat, with slicked-back black hair, jug ears, and the bow legs of a jockey, Bedaux first came to the United States in 1907 from his native France and became a citizen in 1916. He had served a stretch in the Foreign Legion before he arrived. He obtained a job digging his way as a sandhog through the construction of the East River subway tunnel. He scraped together what money he could and began developing a system of speeding up labor, cutting out wasted motion, and improving efficiency. In his scheme an expert would time the workers with a stopwatch. Each hour was divided into sixty Bedaux units instead of minutes. Workers who exceeded the average would be paid more and those who fell below it would be demoted or fired. By circulating booklets containing his philosophy of labor, he succeeded in becoming very rich very fast.
Bedaux's office on the fifty-third floor of the Chrysler Building in New York was designed like the refectory of a medieval monastery. He often met with his friends Lammot du Pont, and Walter Teagle, and Hermann Schmitz there -- in the Chrysler's Cloud Room for lunch. He had an apartment in Greenwich Village in which he entertained his mistresses, redecorating the rooms according to the lady's background or nationality.
He married a Daughter of the American Revolution, Fern Lombard, and thereby obtained a place in the New York Social Register. He bought a chateau in Touraine, France, for three quarters of a million dollars. It was a former abbey, with catacombs under the golf course. He snapped up an estate in North Carolina, a hunting lodge in Scotland next to Walter Teagle's, and property in North Africa. An automobile buff, he crossed the Rockies by car in July 1934, and took a caravan of six cars over 9,500 miles of the Algerian and Tunisian deserts the following year.
He insinuated himself with the Windsors, offering his chateau to them for their wedding. Bedaux's wedding present was a statue entitled "Love," the work of Anny Hoefken-Rempel, the lover of Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht had introduced Bedaux to Fritz Wiedemann, who appointed Bedaux industrial espionage agent for the Nazi government.
As the German government's chief overseas contact for The Fraternity next to Wiedemann, Bedaux was ideally placed to snare the Windsors. He was helped by the Windsors' friend Ambassador William Bullitt, who moved the U.S. Embassy into the Bedaux chateau just before the fall of France.
Bedaux wanted to involve the Windsors in his international schemes. First, arrangements must be made for them to meet with Hitler and be given a tour of Nazi Germany. In the summer of 1937, according to MI-6 files in the Ministry of Defence, London, Bedaux met with the Duke of Windsor, Bedaux's close friend Errol Flynn, Rudolf Hess, and Martin Bormann in a secret encounter at the Hotel Meurice in Paris. At the meeting the Duke promised to help Hess contact the Duke of Hamilton, who had a direct link with Himmler and Kurt von Schroder to the Schroder Bank and the Worms Bank through their common membership in Frank Buchman's Moral Rearmament Movement. Hess was determined to insure an alliance with Great Britain that would continue despite Hitler's conquest. Bedaux was the instrument and Errol Flynn the glamorous accomplice. The plan was postponed; efforts were made by Hess to meet with Hamilton on several further occasions, which finally led to Hess's dramatic landing on the Hamilton estate in 1941.
The Windsors were enchanted with their visit with Hitter and their tour of Germany, and the Duchess was seen handing a bagful of money to a Nazi officer on the border of Austria.
In November 1937, Bedaux tried to arrange a state visit for the Windsors to the United States. He bombarded Washington high-ranking officials with telegrams. He wanted the Duke of Windsor to be received at the White House along with the Duchess; State Department officials planned that the Duke and the President should enjoy a Gridiron Club dinner while the Duchess appeared separately at the Women's National Press Club. Thousands of letters poured into the White House and the government departments, criticizing Roosevelt for snubbing the couple.
Bedaux and his wife arrived on the Europa in November to see what they could do. He had already talked with British Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay about the matter. The biggest blow was that Mrs. Roosevelt was "away on a lecture tour" and would be unable to receive the Windsors. Finally, it was decided by the government not to go ahead with the visit; the reasons were not officially disclosed, but Bedaux's fascist connections may have had a great deal to do with it. Appeal after appeal proved useless. Unions made clear they would picket the Duke's ship. Francis J. Gorman of the CIO Textile Workers condemned Bedaux outright for his inhuman systems. Bedaux and the Windsors were very upset.
By 1940, while Bedaux was busy undermining France in preparation for Vichy and the establishment of full- scale collaboration with Hitler, Windsor had become a member of the British Military Mission with the French Army Command. Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill were aware that Windsor's Nazi connections were far more serious than a mere confused sympathy would indicate.
On May 3, 1941, J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to Roosevelt's secretary, Major General Watson, which read as follows:
Information has been received at this Bureau from a source that is socially prominent and known to be in touch with some of the people involved, but for whom we cannot vouch, to the effect that Joseph P. Kennedy, the former Ambassador to England, and Ben Smith, the Wall Street operator, sometime in the past had a meeting with Goring in Vichy, France, and that thereafter Kennedy and Smith had donated a considerable amount of money to the German cause. They are both described as being very anti-British and pro-German.
This same source of information advised that it was reported that the Duke of Windsor entered into an agreement which in substance was to the effect that if Germany was victorious in the war, Hermann Goring through his control of the army would overthrow Hitler and would thereafter install the Duke of Windsor as the King of England. This information concerning the Windsors is said to have originated with Allen McIntosh, a personal friend of the Duke of Windsor, who made the arrangements for the entertainment of the Windsors when they were in Miami recently. It is further reported that it is the intention of the Windsors to visit in Newport, Rhode Island, and also in Canada during the coming summer.
When Windsor asked Chamberlain for a more important job, the Duke was frozen out. Mortified, he committed himself to the appeasement group in England which remained part of The Link and still included Montagu Norman of the Bank of England and the BIS, and Sir Harry McGowan of ICI.** In January 1940, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, Nazi minister to The Hague, sent a special emissary to London to ask Windsor to tell the British government that it was useless to change Germany politically and that Windsor should help bring about a negotiated peace. Windsor was fascinated.
On February 18, according to German foreign office records, Windsor actually disclosed to Zech's emissary the details of a secret meeting of the Allied War Council. Windsor revealed that the Council had discussed in detail the situation that would arise if Germany invaded Belgium. The Council members had discussed the discovery of a German invasion plan found in an airplane that had made a forced landing in Belgium. The Council had decided that the best scheme was to set up a resistance effort behind the Belgian-French border. Some members of the Council were unwilling to surrender Belgium and the Netherlands after the humiliation of the defeat of Poland. They did not feel that a resistance plan was sufficient, and they urged the other members to defend Belgium to the last. The entire message was of such importance to the German government that it was shown to Hitler in person. Baron Ernst von Weizsacker of the Foreign Office in Berlin wrote to Count Julius on March 2, 1940, that the report supplied by the Duke had been of interest to the Fuhrer. He added, "If you can without inconvenience obtain further information of this nature, I should be grateful if you would pass it on to me; please do so preferably in the form of a report ... directing it to me personally."
Had these letters slipped into the hands of British Intelligence, there is no question that the Duke of Windsor would have been arrested and subjected to a court-martial by Churchill. As it was, he proceeded to France at the time of the German take-over, with British Intelligence agents following him. By now it was much too dangerous for him to be seen with Charles Bedaux, who was busy setting up the Vichy take-over and having daily meetings at the Worms Bank. The Windsors proceeded into Spain via Port Bou, that favorite crossing place of people under suspicion.
After a desperate effort by Walter Schellenberg to have them returned to Germany prior to their taking over the British throne, the couple yielded to pressure from Churchill via their old friend Sir Walter Monckton and sailed to the Bahamas, where Windsor was made governor.
In their absence Winston Churchill personally made the curious move on April 7, 1941, of having U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt pay the Nazi government 55 thousand francs' annual rental on their property in Occupied Paris and 10 thousand francs' insurance plus payment to their servants and 15 thousand francs for the rent of the strong room at the Bank of France, despite the fact that the bank was directly under Hitler's control. Bedaux acted as a go-between in the arrangements since he was close to Bullitt and Nazi Ambassador Otto Abetz.
The Windsors stayed in touch with Bedaux until 1943, a fact that infuriated Morgenthau, Ickes, and Adolf Berle as well as the liberals in Congress headed by John M. Coffee and Jerry Voorhis. Bedaux schemed with Admiral Jean Darlan in North Africa in planning to destroy the British Empire; he helped to pledge Syria as a Nazi supply base for a prospective battle of Suez; and he collaborated with the Nazis in Spain, working with the Vichy leader Marshal Petain in securing 300,000 tons of steel for Germany. Ambassador Bullitt rewarded him by making him a special attache at a time when Bullitt was already publicly criticizing the Nazi government. Bedaux was put in charge of American property in Occupied France as a special economic advisor to Abetz and German Administrator H-J Caesar. Thus, he enabled The Fraternity to function more easily and was instrumental in approving the establishment of the Chase and Morgan banks and the Ford Motor Company in Occupied France even after Pearl Harbor.
In October 1940 he went to Africa at Petain's request to undertake developments including railroads, power plants, water and coal production, in alliance with the Vichy General Maxime Weygand, then governor general of Africa. Bedaux presented to the German government his plans for camouflaging refineries at Abadan against Allied bombing; in return for his services he arranged for the transference of his confiscated Dutch corporation to Paris just before Pearl Harbor.
After Pearl Harbor, Bedaux was automatically arrested as an American citizen, but he was released after a month through the intercession of Abetz and the Gestapo. Because of pressure from those Germans who, like Postminister Ohnesorge, objected to dealings with the enemy, Bedaux was arrested again, on September 27, 1942. The elegant American traitor was surprised to find himself, along with his attractive wife, in the Paris Zoo, where he languished for one night in a cage normally used by monkeys.
Bedaux and his wife were released from imprisonment on the basis that he persuaded General Otto von Stulpnagel, who was in command of the German forces in Occupied France, of the necessity for France to build a strong French Africa. He was given full governmental powers to execute his plan for the construction of a pipeline from Colomb-Bechar in southern Algeria to Bourem on the Niger River in the French Sudan in French West Africa. The purpose was two-fold: The pipeline would carry 200,000 tons of water annually to different points in the Sahara for use by Rommel's army, and it would convey 200,000 tons of peanut oil from French West Africa to Colomb-Bechar for shipping by rail for reshipment by boat to Vichy. Fifty-five thousand tons of steel had been assigned by the German authorities for the construction of the pipeline, and the financing was undertaken by the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas.
Bedaux was authorized to hire 240 people initially, many of them from the crews engaged in the construction of the ill-fated Trans-Saharan Railway. The whole culture of peanuts in French West Africa was to be reorganized and the center of industry transferred from Dakar to Ouagadougou; and the vast and fertile area in the bend of the Niger River including parts of the Ivory Coast, French Sudan, and the Niger Colony, were to be exploited on a vast scale. Rafts constructed in French Guinea would carry hundreds of thousands of tons of peanuts a year from western Sudan via the Niger to Bourem, where presses would be erected for the extraction of the oil.
On July 22, 1942, Bedaux went to see S. Pinkney Tuck, charge d'affaires for the United States government in Vichy. He had just had lunch with Pierre Laval. He left with the embassy a photostatic copy of the release order of the German authorities in Paris, designating him the leading expert in economic matters in France. He said he had just returned from a survey of the coal mines in the Sahara Desert, which he expected to yield 1,200 tons of coal a day; he said that the present output was 800 tons a day and that he was responsible for all the cities in North Africa having electric power. He said he was concerned with building a New Europe that would end the misery of the world; when Tuck asked him about the German attitude toward the war's future, he supplied intelligence on German problems. He said he had assisted as a technical advisor at a number of gatherings in which French and German technicians gathered. He talked of the strides the Gestapo was making in France, Major General Karl Oberg's treatment of the Jews, and execution of hostages. He suggested that the United States should trade more with Laval, pretending that Laval was unhappy with the German government. He said to Tuck, "If the American press and public opinion could be persuaded to modify their present critical attitude towards Laval, it might be possible for our Government to make good use of him."
Tuck concluded,
I believe that this astonishing person can be classified as mentally unmoral. He apparently lacks the tradition and background which should make him realize that there is anything wrong, as an American citizen, in his open association with our declared enemies. ... By such opportunistic tactics -- which are not unmindful of Laval's -- he may be attempting to find for himself a safe place in the New Order. Should this New Order fail to materialize, he evidently imagines that he will be able to justify his association with the Germans by his refusal to accept their pay.
This curious document indicates a very peculiar attitude on the part of Pinkney Tuck. Knowing full well that Bedaux was American and that he was collaborating with the enemy, Tuck nevertheless made no attempt whatsoever as charge d 'affaires to have him arrested.
On October 29, 1942, Charles Bedaux arrived at the American Consulate General in Algiers and told Minister Robert Murphy that he was bent on his mission to aid the German government. This was almost a year after the United States was at war with Germany. It might well be asked whether a traitor would volunteer such information to an American representative if he were not assured of immunity from arrest.
In a memorandum to Cordell Hull dated October 30, 1942, Murphy gave a remarkable account of the visit. Bedaux said that he had been granted freedom to perform his mission in French Africa and "it was in that connection that he called upon me in Algiers." Unhesitatingly, Bedaux handed Murphy his German authorizations and a special set of instructions signed by Pierre Laval.
On April 12, 1943, Hoover wrote to Harry Hopkins telling him of Bedaux's arrest. Hoover revealed that Eisenhower had specifically asked the two FBI men to go to North Africa to conduct the investigation into Bedaux's activities. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation had no authorization to handle North Africa, since its provenance was restricted to the American continent, Biddle conferred with Hoover, and as a result two prominent FBI agents were sent to Algiers by plane to interrogate Bedaux. The plane carrying them crashed. Two other agents were flown over in their place.
Acting on instructions from Hoover and Biddle, the agents, again acting entirely outside their legal and authorized provenance, showed themselves anxious to protect Bedaux from Army Intelligence. It was painfully obvious that strings had been pulled with Biddle once again. The agents went to see the officers of the French police, who produced the critical evidence of the Bedaux-Schroder Nazi conspiracy. Instead of accepting this material as evidence of treason, the FBI men accused the French detectives of planting the evidence, and they tried to have the charges against Bedaux officially withdrawn. Yet that same evidence can today be seen in U.S. Military Intelligence files.
The U.S. Army under Eisenhower was keen on having action taken, but an Executive Order of the Army Intelligence dated January 4, 1943, shows that pressure from high places was such on the Army that all plans for a tribunal were suspended. The excuse given was that the case against Bedaux "had to be watertight," while in fact it was already conclusive.
Bedaux was held for a full year in prison while nothing whatsoever was done about him. He continually protested that he had aided and abetted American businesses in Occupied Europe, a mistake since this was the last fact that anybody in high command wanted to have made public. At long last, on December 16, 1943, Bedaux was turned over to Lieutenant Colonel Herndon for military escort to the United States, arriving on December 23 at Miami, Florida. The same day, Lieutenant Colonel Crabtree of the Army Air Force suddenly released Bedaux from Herndon's custody, gave Bedaux twenty-seven hundred confiscated dollars and took all of the Bedaux papers to Washington. Army officials ordered the Customs officials (who were not normally under their provenance) to pass papers without examination by censors or Customs, then took Bedaux to the Colonial Hotel in Miami. From there, instead of going to a state prison, he was placed in a comfortable detention home in charge of Immigration, with special consideration from the authorities.
On December 28, one of Biddle's agents suddenly turned up at the Immigration station and asked the authorities to lighten what minimal restrictions Bedaux was experiencing. On December 29, Biddle ordered the War Department to withdraw completely from the case.
The cover-up continued. Bedaux gave FBI men a list of very prominent figures of commerce who could be expected to testify in his behalf in the event that he should ever come to trial. Biddle immediately suppressed the list. However, it fell into the hands of the liberal weekly, The Nation, which revealed the names on the list as those of "industrialists who had recently been involved in anti-Trust cases"! That meant, of course, the American figures of The Fraternity.
On February 14, 1944, Bedaux was advised by an Immigration agent that a board of special inquiry of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had "concluded that he was a citizen of the United States" and had never surrendered that citizenship. Further, the INS would order his admission into the United States as soon as certain minor formalities had been complied with. The INS man also told Bedaux that "a grand jury would be convened to inquire into his relations with high officials of the German government and the Vichy French government, and that the grand jury would consider whether he should be indicted for treason and for communicating with the enemy."
Major Lemuel Schofield had only recently stepped down as head of Immigration and members of his immediate staff were still in office, so it was unlikely that anything would have come of the grand jury hearing. However, Bedaux had become distinctly inconvenient to The Fraternity. There was a strict rule in the Immigration station that sleeping pills must not be given to prisoners, but Bedaux was allowed the special privilege of using them. On February 14, 1944, Bedaux retired to bed and swallowed all of the pills he had hoarded since his arrival on December 23. Max Lerner and I. F. Stone disclosed in PM and in The Nation that they were convinced that Bedaux was encouraged to take the easy way out. It is impossible to differ with that opinion.
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Notes:
*Social Justice was the title of an inflammatory fascist magazine then in circulation in the United States.
** Later, Lord McGowan.