The Nuremberg Trials successfully buried the truth of The Fraternity connections. Schacht, who was more privy to the financial connections than most German leaders, gave an extraordinary performance, mocking, hectoring, and pouring contempt upon his chief prosecutor -- Biddle's predecessor, Robert H. Jackson. Charged with engineering the war when he had only wanted to serve the neutralist policies of Fraternity associates, he was understandably acquitted. Had he chosen to do so, he could have stripped bare the details of the conspiracy, but only once in his entire cross-examination, when he admitted to complicity in the shipment to Berlin of the Austrian gold,* did he indicate any knowledge of such matters. Never in those days on the witness stand was he asked about the Bank for International Settlements or Thomas H. McKittrick. Not even in his memoirs was there an inkling of what he knew.
Conveniently for The Fraternity, Goring and Himmler committed suicide, carrying with them the secrets that Charles Bedaux, William Rhodes Davis, William Weiss of Sterling, and William S. Farish had carried to their graves. James V. Forrestal also ended his life by suicide. In 1949 he hanged himself from the window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was suffering from advanced paranoid schizophrenia. Newspapers reported him screaming that the Jews and the communists were crawling on the floor of his room seeking to destroy him.
The rest of the conspirators lived out full life-spans.
When Germany fell, Hermann Schmitz fled from Frankfurt to a hiding place in a small house near Heidelberg. Shuffled around between the lines in a railroad carriage, this powerful man cowered in terror as bombs exploded about him. But he was softly handled when the U .S. Army moved in. He was imprisoned, but well treated, thanks to the influence of his great and powerful friends. Despite the fact that he and his colleagues had been responsible for the deaths of four million Jews at Auschwitz, they were not tried for mass murder as war criminals. Instead, they were tried for preparing and planning aggressive war, and other related counts. Since they had intended to form a world fascist state without war if possible, and since their whole purpose was simply to render Germany equal in a United States of Fascism, they were acquitted on the first charge. The lesser charges resulted in insignificant sentences.
Thinner now and equipped with a distinguished Vandyke beard, Schmitz cleverly decided not to give evidence at the trial. He claimed illness but in fact was seldom absent. His only statement came at the end of the hearings when he had the audacity to quote St. Augustine and, for good measure, Abraham Lincoln, to the judges. He spent only eight more months in prison.
Max Ilgner was equally cunning. He told the prosecutors he would become a priest after he left prison. He did.
Espionage was not an issue in the case; no summoning of transatlantic figures was considered. Dietrich Schmitz, now on a chicken farm in Connecticut, and Rudolph Ilgner went unpunished. In various court hearings of the 1940s, Schmitz and Ilgner had been indicted but the cases against them were never prosecuted.
On September 8, 1944, Roosevelt had sent a letter to Cordell Hull that was front page in many newspapers. It included the bold statement, "The history of the use of the I.G. Farben trust by the Nazis reads like a detective story. Defeat of the Nazi army will have to be followed by the eradication of those weapons of economic warfare."
The powers of the Allied Military Government who favored The Fraternity disagreed and insisted upon I.G. Farben being retained after light punishment for its leaders. Morgenthau protested to Roosevelt, who summoned him to a discussion at the Quebec Conference in September 1944.
Morgenthau laid out his idealistic and impractical Morgenthau Plan -- actually the creation of Harry Dexter White. Based upon his profound knowledge of collusion, White wanted a total elimination not only of I.G. Farben but of all German armaments and chemical and metallurgical industries. He wanted Germany to become a strictly agrarian economy; Roosevelt seemed to agree. In December 1944, Roosevelt, taking his cue from Morgenthau, made a statement via John G. Winant in which he called for an abolition of the Nazi industrial war machine. But already there were some compromises in the plan. Morgenthau came under a storm of abuse from the right wing, and the ailing President was now yielding to some minor pressures and starting to back away. In February 1945, at the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt, by now grievously ill, strove to follow Morgenthau's reasoning by making the much criticized arrangements to divide Germany down the middle into eastern and western zones.
When Truman became President, Eisenhower, as commander in chief of European forces, continued to follow Morgenthau's attitude with severe edicts, calling for disruption of any Nazi source of a possible World War III. But Truman disagreed. He was convinced that to render Germany agrarian was to leave an open path for Bolshevist conquest. General George S. Patton agreed with him and began to put Nazis back in office in Germany after the war.
Those who, with ideals held high, arrived in Germany from the United States to try to disrupt the cartels were severely handicapped from the start. One of these was a promising young lawyer, Russell A. Nixon, a liberal member of the U.S. Military Government Cartel Unit. He was handicapped from the start. He came directly under Brigadier General William H. Draper, who was, along with James V. Forrestal, a vice-president of Dillon, Read, bankers who had financed Germany after World War I. Nixon quickly realized that Draper, director of the economics division, and Robert Murphy, who had moved from North Africa to become ambassador to the new Germany, were going to block his every move.
When he arrived in Germany in July 1945, Nixon found his position was virtually untenable. He had been asked to explore a tunnel that had already been bricked up.
He asked Colonel E. S. Pillsbury, Special Control Officer in charge of I.G. Farben, what had been done these several months after V-E day to carry out Eisenhower's directives on dismantling Farben. Pillsbury failed to give any information and seriously questioned whether Nixon had any jurisdiction to investigate the cartel. Nixon turned in desperation to several members of Draper's staff, only to discover that Draper had failed to give them written directives to close I.G. plants.
One man, Joseph Dodge, told Nixon he had instructed his team to dismantle an I.G. poison gas plant but that Draper had canceled the order. Again, Dodge tried to wreck the I.G. underground plant at Mannheim and again Draper intervened. Soon afterward, Dodge told Nixon, Draper arranged for both plants to obtain added business.
Frustrated, Nixon went over Draper's head. He reported to General Lucius D. Clay on December 17, 1945, that Eisenhower's orders had been deliberately violated. He charged that, contrary to Draper's statements in the press that every I.G. plant had been bombed or dismantled, none had been. He said that General Henry H. Arnold of the Army Air Force had protected I.G. and he added that despite the pleas of the Jewish councils the installations and communications systems of Auschwitz had not been destroyed.
Clay listened to Nixon's charges but did nothing about them. Nixon found that scientific and mechanical equipment in I.G. plants had been saved from removal on specific orders from Washington. Searching through files on January 15, 1946, Nixon found a letter written by Max Ilgner that gave the game away. Dated May 15, 1944, and addressed to the I.G. Central Finance Department, the letter instructed the staff to keep "in constant touch" in defeated Germany since the American authorities "would surely permit resumption of I.G. operations." Thus, the head of the N.W.7. I.G. espionage unit looked forward confidently to the future. He of all people knew the Americans he was dealing with.
Nixon was handicapped not only by the American military government, but by the British. The Labour government in England was in severe financial difficulties and wanted to make sure it had good industrial connections in Germany. Like the American government, it was busy reconstituting I.G. When Russell A. Nixon pleaded with Sir Percy Mills at meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to use his influence with Clay and Draper, Mills simply held matters up further. As a result, scarcely any Nazi industrial leader was in custody by 1946.
Nixon did manage to have a few people brought in. These included Paul Denker, I.G.'s chief accountant in the poison gas division; Carl von Heider, sales director of inorganic chemicals; Hans Kugler, director of dyestuff sales; Gunther Frank-Fahle and Kurt Kreuger of Ilgner's espionage group; and Gustave Kupper, head of the dyestuffs, legal division. None of these spent any time in custody. Nixon also wanted to bring in directors of the banks that had been deeply involved with I.G., including the Deutsche Bank, the Deutsche Landersbank, the Reichsbank, and the Dresdnerbank. He wanted to ask them about the whereabouts of German looted gold and cash including the Austrian and Czech gold transferred through the BIS. Again he was blocked: Draper told Counter-Intelligence not to make the arrests. Nixon pleaded directly to Washington, and after a considerable delay Draper was overruled. But no sooner had the bank officials been taken to Army headquarters than a Major General Adcock, representing Draper, brought orders for their release. Nixon was told he had been insubordinate in going over Draper's head and should be court-martialed as a radical.
Nixon later reported to the Senator Owen Brewster War Committee in Washington that by the spring of 1946 only 85,000 of 200,000 industrial and Gestapo leaders had been arrested. He was particularly annoyed by the exemption accorded to the major Nazi industrialist Richard Freudenberg, who had worked with Goring and Carl Krauch on the Four Year Plan and had been on the board of the Schroder Bank. When Nixon took the bold step of ordering Freudenberg arrested under mandatory arrest provision JCF 1067, the denazification board in Frankfurt voted four to one to exempt him from the provision, and Ambassador to Germany Robert Murphy ordered his release. Murphy made a statement that proved to be significant: "It is not in conformity with American standards to cut away the basis of private property." Apparently it was in conformity with American standards to restore high-ranking Nazis to their previous positions. With unconscious humor a member of the Industry Division of the Occupying Forces confirmed Murphy's position by saying, "This man Freudenberg is an extremely capable industrialist: a kind of Henry Ford." No one could quarrel with that.
Draper sent an official to take charge of Nixon's operation in the winter of 1946. Carl Peters was in charge of Foreign Economic Administration under Leo Crowley. He was also a director of the Advanced Solvents Corporation, a subsidiary of General Aniline and Film. He had been indicted for dealing with the enemy but had pleaded nolle prosequi and had been awarded the position of colonel in the Pentagon. No sooner was he in charge of Nixon than he began securing the release of German industrialists and set up the old Norwegian plant Noramco as an I.G. subsidiary once more.
Nixon had had enough. He returned to the United States and condemned the entire protection of Nazis to Senator Kilgore's investigative committee. He charged that elements in the United States, British, and French foreign offices had consciously maneuvered to prevent the Allies from being involved in the search for Nazi assets in neutral countries, because that search would lay bare the fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, and Argentina "and would reveal all the elements of collaboration of certain industrialists in the Allied countries with these regimes."
The young, very sharp lawyer James Stewart Martin of the Department of Justice's investigative team came to Europe from Washington. He arrived at U.S. Military Command at Bushy Park, London, only to find that Graeme K. Howard of General Motors was colonel over him. Martin protested to G-2 about the General Motors-Nazi connection, and nothing was done. But he managed to find a copy of Howard's book America and a New World Order. Fearful of a public outcry, the Army shipped Howard home.
Martin investigated the whereabouts of Gerhardt Westrick. In the last year of the war Westrick had played an increasingly difficult and dangerous role in Germany. After Generals Fellgiebel and Thiele were hanged for treason, Westrick managed to hang on almost to the end of the conflict. He fled when Berlin was bombed and his home was destroyed. He hid out in a castle in southwest Germany. Behn, clearly afraid of the consequences if his association with Westrick became known, refused to answer his old friend's pleading letters. Instead, he arranged for Westrick to be brought by his Army associates to Paris to give a full report to ITT's Colonel Alexander Sanders at the Hotel Claridge on the status of the ITT companies in Germany.
Westrick was given a light prison sentence and released -- deeply embittered that Behn had let him be punished at all.
Martin found out that Leo T. Crowley and Ernest K. Halbach, those custodians of General Aniline and Film, when asked to supply the truth of GAF's actual ownership through I.G. Chemie, had simply referred the matter to Allen Dulles. The head of the OSS had failed to supply the required information.
At the I.G. headquarters in Frankfurt, Martin discovered files that confirmed earlier beliefs that Schmitz had laid out plans for a conquered world in which America would join in triumph. He began to understand why Schmitz and the others of I.G. had turned against Hitler. It was clear that Hitler wanted to attack the United States with Goring's bombers when sufficiently long-distance aircraft were developed. But Schmitz was loyal to his American colleagues, preferring to maintain the alliances in perpetuity. These alliances could be sustained if Himmler and/or the German generals ran the Third Reich. They would be content with Schmitz 's dream of a negotiated peace.
Further evidence came to light showing the continuing connection between Schmitz and the United States during the war. In 1943 a magazine article by R.T. Haslam of Standard Oil appeared in The Petroleum Times. It stated that the relationship with I.G. Farben had proved to be advantageous to the United States government. A special report of I.G. Farben emphatically denied this, pointing out the innumerable benefits that Germany had obtained from her American friends, including the use of tetraethyl, without which the war effort would have been impossible, and the supply of which had been approved by the U.S. War Department. The report said, "At the outbreak of war we were completely prepared from a technical point of view. We obtained standards not only from our own experiences but also from those of General Motors and other big manufacturers of automobiles." The report also revealed that Standard had sold $20 million worth of mineral oil products including airplane benzene to I.G. The report concluded: "The fact that we actually succeeded ... in buying these quantities demanded by the German government from Standard Oil Co. and the Royal Dutch Shell group and importing them into Germany was only because of the support of Standard Oil Company." Even more damning, Martin found that I.G. had placed a 50 million mark credit to Karl Lindemann's Standard subsidiary in Germany in the Deutsch Landersbank, wholly owned by I.G. with Hermann Schmitz as chairman, in 1944.
Thus, it was clear that Standard's business in Nazi Germany was open as usual and that its German subsidiary was being paid handsomely for prewar agreements.
Martin and his team were hampered at every turn. He wrote in his book All Honorable Men:
We had not been stopped in Germany by German business. We had been stopped in Germany by American business. The forces that stopped us had operated from the United States but had not operated in the open. We were not stopped by a law of Congress, by an Executive Order of the President, or even by a change of policy approved by the President ... in short, whatever it was that had stopped us was not "the government." But it clearly had command of channels through which the government normally operates. The relative powerlessness of governments in the growing economic power is of course not new ... national governments stood on the sidelines while bigger operators arranged the world's affairs.
These operators were among the obstacles faced by James Stewart Martin and his team as they began work in the fall of 1945. A year after they began rummaging through documents, many of the Nazis in Schmitz's and Hitler's immediate circle were untouched by defeat. Schmitz's fellow director of the Deutsche Bank, Hermann Abs, was now financial advisor in the British zone. Heinrich Dinkelbach, also a partner of Schmitz, was in charge of the administration of all iron and steel industries in the British zone. Yet another director of the Steel Union, Werner Carp, the closest friend of Baron von Schroder's, was released from detention and became Dinkelbach's partner.
So much for Eisenhower's orders to denazify industry. Schmitz in his prison could afford to smile. "The Nazi chieftains," Raymond Daniell wrote in The New York Times on September 20, 1945, "[are] in positions where they can continue to control to a large degree the machinery whereby Germany made war." Daniell continued,
The effect of the breakdown of the denazification program ... preserves the power of men whose nationalistic and militaristic ideas were the very antithesis of democracy ... in industry, in the fields of transportation and communication, the flouting of General Eisenhower's order is particularly flagrant ... in avoiding compliance with [that] order, Army and Military government officials have shown considerable versatility. Where they have not ignored the order completely, they have got around it by reclassifying important jobs under other names and leaving the Nazi incumbent alone.
Daniell continued:
Nor has there been any known development on the plan for the disposition of the property of active Nazis, as must have been contemplated when their accounts were blocked. At present a proposal is being circulated to provide for the payment of their old salaries to executives who have been arrested and who are giving evidence to the Occupation authorities. In other words, it is proposed that those who helped the Nazis be treated as employees whose services are worth to us approximately what the Nazis paid them.
Martin made a serious discovery in October 1945. He reported that General Patton literally had sabotaged the Potsdam Agreement calling for a destruction of I.G. and that in fact it was simply being split into components and allowed to continue with several of Schmitz's minor executives continuing in higher positions. Simultaneously, the Kilgore Committee reported in Washington on November 15, 1945, that the Swiss banks led by the BIS and its member bank, the Swiss National Bank (which shared directors and staff members), had violated agreements made at the end of the war not to permit financial transactions that would help the Nazis dispose of their loot. Senator Harley Kilgore stated, "Despite ... the assurances of the Swiss government that German accounts would be blocked, the Germans maneuvered themselves back into a position where they could utilize their assets in Switzerland, could acquire desperately needed foreign exchange by the sale of looted gold and could conceal economic reserves for another war. These moves were made possible by the willingness of the Swiss government and banking officials, in violation of their agreement with the Allied Powers, to make a secret deal with the Nazis." Martin's team, working with a special Treasury group of T-men, unraveled much of this information for Kilgore. They found a letter from Emil Puhl to Dr. Walther Funk dated March 30, 1945, which said: "Above all I have insisted [to the National Bank] on our receiving Swiss francs in return for Reichsmarks which the Reichsbank might release for any reason. That is important as it will enable us to use these francs to transfer funds into a third country."
It was agreed by the mission to Switzerland headed by U.S. economics advisor Lauchlin Currie in 1945 that gold might be used for embassy expenses. Puhl made the Swiss buy the German gold. A further letter, dated April 6, 1945, from Puhl to Funk read: "All in all, I believe that we can be satisfied that we have succeeded in obtaining ... arrangements for German-Swiss payments. Whatever form events will take, such connections will always exist between our countries, and the fact that there exists a contract agreement may be of considerable importance in the future. Anyway, the contrary, the breaking off of the innumerable connections, would have been a rubble pile which would have presented immense difficulties."
The day after the Kilgore Committee made these disclosures, the Treasury team along with Martin's was drastically restricted from further activities. Raymond Daniell wrote in The New York Times on November 16 that the experts who came to hunt down the Reich's hidden assets were suddenly relegated to obscure roles. "As a result," Daniell wrote, "140 Treasury employees are wondering tonight whether they are going to be recalled or ordered to stay on here compiling reports and making recommendations that other departments can use or ignore as they choose. Many of them feel that their usefulness here has been ended."
All through those difficult weeks Martin, his team, and the T-men clashed with Brigadier General Draper and Charles Fahey of Draper's legal division, both of whom flagrantly ignored Eisenhower's policy and the mandatory terms of the Potsdam Agreement. Russell Nixon sympathized with their largely hopeless efforts to smash Nazi economic power in Germany and overseas. He said, "Treasury experts are in the doghouse at the office of Military government." Most devastating of all, he stated that Draper had flatly refused to denazify any financial institution in Germany.
In Washington, Colonel Bernard Bernstein of the Treasury squad was delivering a powerful series of blows to I.G. before the Kilgore Committee. He denounced Standard's synthetic rubber agreements, its $20 million contract for aviation gasoline, its $1 million supply of tetraethyl. He named Ernest K. Halbach and Hugh Williamson of GAP as organizers of direct deliveries to I.G.'s South American subsidiaries after Pearl Harbor. He charged that Du Pont owned 6 percent of I.G.'s common stock throughout World War II and that Swiss banks had uniformly refused to yield up details of I.G. Chemie. Kilgore, commenting on these statements, said, "I am profoundly disturbed by a number of recent events pointing to an attitude on the part of some of our key officials which countenances and even bolsters Nazism in the economic and political life of Germany." He said that Draper had ignored directives of six months earlier to destroy I.G.'s plants. He added that the State Department blatantly supported Draper's policy. Kilgore made clear that State Department policy did not have President Truman's concurrence.
A U.S. Military Government spokesman, who was not named, denied Kilgore's charges in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1945. He said it was untrue that the I.G. organization had not been broken up: that in fact "the entire I.G. question has been placed on a four-power level." He was pointing to the fact that the United States, Britain, France, and Russia all had parts of Farben because of its diffuse character; he neglected to point out that only Russia of the four powers had tried to shatter I.G.'s structure.
In July 1946, James Stewart Martin was still struggling to expose the full truth of Nazi-American business arrangements. He was not helped by the fact that Brigadier General Draper hired the adventurous Alexander Kreuter, Charles Bedaux's partner in the Worms Bank, as his economic aide.
Gordon Kern of ITT also turned up on the scene. Kern, ostensibly there to be in an advisory capacity, spent most of his time transferring the Focke Wulf factories from the Russian to the American zone. He also arranged for ITT's Nazi factory to be used by the Army Signal Corps, which prevented its dissolution, and had Westrick brought to Switzerland to disentangle ITT's Nazi patents held in Swiss banks.
In October 1946, Senator Kilgore arrived in Germany with the Senate War Investigating Committee to try to determine why attempts to decartelize the Nazis were being obstructed at every turn. George Meader, counsel for the committee, prepared a thousand pages of testimony from scores of U.S. Army officers. A few weeks later, when the investigations were continuing, Averell Harriman (of Brown Brothers, Harriman), Jesse Jones's successor as Secretary of Commerce, sent Philip D. Reed, head of General Electric, which had suppressed tungsten carbide in favor of Krupp and financed Hitler, on an urgent mission to Berlin to confer with Draper. Simultaneously, General Lucius Clay was questioned for two hours secretly by Kilgore in Washington. The results of the questionnaire were never disclosed.
In December, Clay was back in Germany, smarting at criticisms of his activities. He arranged a meeting between Draper and Philip D. Reed at the office of his finance chief, Jack Bennett. At the meeting Richard Spencer of Clay's legal division attacked President Truman's policy on denazification and breaking up I.G. Reed reported to Harriman that the investigation of I.G. and the Americans, which was still struggling feebly along under Martin's guidance, was a symptom of Martin's "extremism" and should be brought to an immediate end.
Meader's detailed report, damning in detail and forceful in execution, was too strong even for Kilgore. He said, inter alia, "I will put it this way: that men, some men, if the Germans had ever invaded this country and conquered us, would have been the first to collaborate with the conquerors, and have been influential in decisions being made in Germany."
Secretary of War Robert B. Patterson said that he was of the opinion that Meader's statement "gave a distorted and frequently erroneous picture of the American Zone." Lieutenant General Dan I. Sultan, Inspector General of the Army, also denounced Meader, saying his charges were "unverified." Yet Meader had based his report on thoroughly reliable sources. Military officer after officer was disclosed as corrupt, unsavory, and in collusion with the Nazis.
Among the testimonies was that of Colonel Francis P. Miller who had been executive officer of Army Intelligence under Clay and had formerly been with the OSS. He charged that "Officials selected for influential economic positions in the military government had business connections at home that might influence their outlook and acts." He called for an intensified use of Army Intelligence to expose malfeasances in high office.
That December the Kilgore Committee uncovered more and more scandals. Meader introduced documents showing how Draper had told a visiting party of newspaper editors that the program of purging Nazis was holding back economic development.
There were efforts made to obtain a reversal of Truman's policy of removing patents from German hands. The leader of this attempted reversal was an executive of the U.S. Steel Corporation, who remained unnamed because of the connections to the Schmitz and Krupp steel empire. This personage called for a reopening of the German Patent Office immediately and charged that the President had jeopardized it by his policy declarations. The steel executive also wanted an outright prohibition of inspections of German plants. Phillips Hawkins pointed out that the reestablishment of patent systems and prohibition of search would be disastrous for decartelization.
General Clay had, the committee revealed, sent a stern memorandum to Draper telling him that denazification was beneficial and that the failure to denazify industry would have created major labor-management problems. He rebuked Draper loudly and clearly for opposing the removal of Nazis.
Several letters were read from James Stewart Martin showing how he had been forced into retreat. He named -- but the name was not made public -- an American industrialist who was trying to obtain a penicillin monopoly in Germany by buying up one American corporation after another with Nazi links, including I.G. He also charged that lobbying in Washington was allowing ITT, National Cash Register, and Singer sewing machine company to enter Germany on special licenses in defiance of presidential orders.
Kilgore was infuriated by Meader's charges and denounced him to the press.
James Stewart Martin resigned his position in frustration. His replacement, Phillips Hawkins, married General Draper's daughter.
In February 1947, Richardson Bronson, formerly Martin's deputy control officer, fired one quarter of his staff and announced that there would no longer be any decartelization of I.G. or any other heavy industry in Germany. Only small consumer-goods firms would be affected. The decision was approved by former President Herbert Hoover, who had received Hermann Schmitz at the White House in 1931. Hoover's report at the end of an investigative trip urged that I.G. and Krupp should be enabled to rebuild Germany.
Those few who raised voices against such goings-on were dismissed by the military arm as "commies." Draper still had some critics. Alexander Sacks, formerly of James Stewart Martin's staff, charged before the Ferguson Commission on decartelization in 1948 that in every way "the policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations have been flagrantly disregarded by the very individuals who were charged with the highest responsibility for carrying them out." Sacks was dismissed.
As for General Aniline and Film, that indestructible organ of The Fraternity, all efforts against it by Morgenthau and his successors in the Treasury proved futile. Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General protected the company from dissolution -- in his father's tradition. On March 9, 1965, GAF was sold in the largest competitive auction in Wall Street history. The buyer, offering $340 million, was an affiliate of I.G. Farben in Germany.
Those who had opposed The Fraternity were not so fortunate. In 1948 the House Un-American Activities Committee, in one of its unbridled smear campaigns, named Morgenthau's trusted associates Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie as communist agents. Based on the uncorroborated testimony of one Elizabeth Bentley, a self-confessed Soviet spy who was turning state's evidence, the Morgenthau Treasury administration was smeared in the eyes of the public. White and Currie, those deeply loyal enemies of fascism, those investigators of the Bank for International Settlements, of Standard, the Chase, the National City Bank, the Morgans, William Rhodes Davis, the Texas Company, ITT, RCA, SKF, GAF, Ford, and General Motors, were effectively destroyed by the hearings. Currie disappeared into Colombia, his U.S. citizenship canceled in 1956, and White died of a heart attack on August 16, 1948, aged fifty-six, after returning home from an investigative session. While the surviving Fraternity figures flourished again, helping to form the texture of postwar technology, those who had dared to expose them were finished. The Fraternity leaders who had died could sleep comfortably in their graves -- their dark purpose accomplished.
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Notes:
* But not the Czech, Belgian, or Dutch.
