Bavaria, the Thule Society, the SOSJ and the Making of a Revolutionary Faith Part II

Welcome to the second installment in my examination of the notorious Thule Society. In the first part of this series I sought to vaguely outline my objective as well recap some of the common misconceptions surrounding Thule. As was noted there, many popular accounts of the Society such as those that appear in Pauwels and Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians and Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny are largely fictitious. The reality of the Thule Society is both far stranger and more terrible than the popular perception created by such works and grafted onto popular culture by Hellboy and such like.

It is this reality that we shall begin to explore in this post. Before addressing Thule, however, I must first broadly outline the individuals and organizations that played a role in laying the groundwork for the creation of the society. The roots of Thule lay with a curious group of mystics who have had an extensive, if little acknowledged, influence upon metaphysical traditions for several decades now.

"The three godfathers of the Nazi Thule were Guido von List (1848-1919), Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), and Rudolf von Sebottendorff (1875-1945). It is significant that all three decided at some point to adorn their plain bourgeois names with the particle von (which in German suggests noble descent even when it is not further defined by Graf, Baron, etc.). One of the hallmarks of master-race philosophy is that no one is known to have embraced it who does not consider himself a member of that race. And what is more tempting, having once adopted the belief that one's own race is chosen by Nature or God for preeminence, than to put oneself at its aristocratic summit?

"The Viennese Jorg Lanz, a former religious of the Cistercian Order, was the founder in 1907 of the Order the New Templars (ONT), a chivalric, gnostic, and ritualistic order with the most extreme of racist ideals. There can be little doubt that the ONT, with its lodges in ruined castles, was the prototype for Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel (the notorious 'SS'), as it was transformed after 1930 to become the training- and breeding-ground for the masters of a New Age of Aryan supremacy. Lanz was a very copious writer on biblical exegesis, astrology, antifeminism, and many other topics. One of his earliest creations, in about 1900, was Theozoology: a new 'science' inspired by H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.

"Blavatsky had explain the origin of the anthropoid apes, not as remnants of the ancestors mankind, but as the descendants of bestiality committed by the Third Race (Lemurians) with monstrous animals. Lanz applied this principle in the most perverted way: the non-Aryan races, he said, were the result of bestiality on the part of the ancient Aryans, after their departure from the northern Garden of Eden. To deal with these peoples, thus regarded as only semi-human, Lanz recommended variously: enforced sterilization and castration; deportation to Madagascar; enslavement; incineration a sacrifice to God; and use as beasts of burden. As Goodrick-Clarke comments, 'Both the psychopathology of the Nazi holocaust and the subjugation of non-Aryans in the East were presaged by Lanz's grim speculations.'

"It is no surprise that Lanz had a theory about the original homeland of the Aryans: it was a vanished polar continent called Arktogaa (from the Greek: 'northern earth'). This was adopted by his older acquaintance Guido von List, another Viennese mythomaniac who, more than anyone else, laid the foundation for the romantic blend of ideas that links the proto-Nazis uncannily with the Greens and New-Agers of today: an interest in natural living, vegetarianism, anti-industrialism; an appreciation of prehistoric monuments and the wisdom of those who built them; a feeling for astrology, earth energies, and natural cycles; a religious outlook vaguely resembling that of Theosophy. The generic name given to this kind of thinking was volkisch, an untranslatable word on the borderlines between nationalistic and folkloric."

(Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, Joscelyn Godwin, pgs. 48-49)

German children from the World War I-era sporting Halloween costumes influenced by the Volkisch movement

Both List and Lanz would have an enormous influence on the Volkisch movement in pre-World War I Austria and Germany and would pioneer a mystical variation of the ideology that came to be known as Ariosophy (which was, roughly speaking, a strange brew of Volkisch ideology and H.P. Blavatsky's Theosophy system). An in depth examination of the philosophy of List and Lanz is far beyond the scope of this series, but I shall briefly touch upon it. Let us begin with List, whose work served as the basis for what would eventually become known as Ariosophy.

"Guido von List (1848-1919) had begun his career as a nature worshiper and lover of ancient German folk myths and culture, a man who believed in the reunification of his native Austria with Germany, and who came to despise both Jews and Christians as alien forces in Europe who had robbed Germans of their spiritual and territorial birthrights. He wrote a series of romantic novels about the ancient to Teutons, and dreamed of reestablishing the ancient priesthood of Wotan, an organization he called the Armanenschaft either after the Teutonic warrior Arminius, who defeated the Roman Legions under Varus at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (A.D. 9), or after a qabalist bowdlerization of the name of one of three Teutonic tribes mentioned by Tacitus in Germania, the Hermiones.

"In 1875, the same year that Blavatsky founded her Theosophical Society in New York, List was invoking Baldur, the Teutonic Sun God, on a hilltop outside Vienna. In Baldur's honor, he buried eight wine bottles there in the shape of the swastika and pledged himself to the worship of the Old Ones, Baldur and Wotan being prominent among them. At this time, the Armanenschaft – the priesthood of the sun – was but a gleam in his Aryan eye.

"He took of journalism after his family's fortunes went awry, and began daydreaming in print about the prehistoric Teutons, a hypothetically pure race free of the taint of spiritually retarded blood.

"However, during his convalescence after cataract surgery at the age of fifty-four – dwelling in a temporary but none the less unnerving state of blindness – he understood that his main preoccupations of politics and race were the two halves of a single coin. Always interested in the past more than the present..., List had developed an intense fascination with the signs and symbols of heraldry, as well as those of the proto-Aryan language he believed could be found in runes and ancient inscriptions..."

(Unholy Alliance, Peter Levenda, pgs. 55-56)

List

List was one of the first of these German Volkisch thinkers to appropriate the swastika and apply a mystical Aryan significance to it.

"List had been fascinated with swastika since his early youth, recognizing it as the Ur-symbol of the Teutonic (read: 'Aryan') peoples; a pagan sign equivalent in power and emotional meaning to the cross for Christians, or the Star of David for Jews. He first pointed this out in a series of articles published about 1905-1908, and thereafter the symbol began to take on more than just a cosmological or theosophical significance and would soon come to represent an entire body of ideas – both occult and political – that would eventually culminate in the formation of the Thule Gesellschaft nearly two decades later...

"While an educated perspective on the swastika reveals the symbol as an ancient Eastern symbol of good fortune, words themselves have their own intrinsic power. Thus, when a German calls the swastika by the term hakenkreuz he is calling it a 'hooked cross.' To a German of the twentieth century (as for a German of the thirteenth century), the word cross has decidedly Christian overtones; a hooked cross therefore imply some deviation from, or modified form of, Christianity. In this way, the link between the inherently amoral swastika and questionable religious beliefs is made by way of the mostly loaded term 'hooked cross.' When the various volkisch and German cultural societies began adopting the hakenkreuz as their emblem, then, they were just as conscious of its anti-Christian potential as they were of their own anti-Semitic intent. This was not paganism as a pure, Earth-Mother-worshiping cult (such as the modern Wicca phenomenon), but paganism as a movement set up in opposition to Judeo-Christianity as well as to Communism, Capitalism, and Democracy, which are all creatures of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy..."

(ibid, pgs. 58-59)

While List's ideas were largely shunned by academia, they found support among wealthy patrons of Austrian and German high society. To better spread List's idea, the Guido van List Society was officially founded in 1908 (though it had been in the making since at least 1905). The List Society, with its prominent individual members, would provide the financial backing as well as the legitimacy for the Austrian's ideas to receive a mass following.

List's ideology combined the study of symbolism, numerology, astrology, onomatology, toponymy, runology, megaliths, folklore, and so forth to rediscover the language and faith of the ancient Aryans. As such, List's work bares more than a few passing resemblances to the concept of "twilight language" pioneered by James Shelby Downard, William Grimstad, and (fascist sympathizer) Michael A. Hoffman II. The similarities between these two concepts is a fascinating topic that is unfortunately far beyond the scope of this present series. But I urge my readers to keep this topic in mind as I shall return to it at some point in the future.

Hoffman

Another point worth mentioning at this juncture is Ariosophy's rather schizophrenic view concerning Freemasonry. While attitudes were certainly not uniform across the board, the general perception among Ariosophists seem to have been that Masonry had begun as a part of the high Aryan tradition but had gradually been polluted by Jewish influences over the centuries to the point that it become a grave threat to the survival of the volk by the modern era.

"...The notion of an anti-Semitic group organized like a secret quasi-masonic lodge appears to arisen arisen among volkisch activists around 1910. Some anti-Semites were convinced that the powerful influence of Jews in German public life could be understood only as the result of a widespread Jewish secret conspiracy; it was supposed that such a conspiracy could best be combated by a similar anti-Semitic organization. In spring 1910 Philipp Stauff, a prominent volkisch journalist, mentioned in his correspondence the idea of an anti-Semitic lodge with the names of members kept secret to prevent enemy penetration. The following year Johannes Hering, who belong to the local Hammer group in Munich as well as the Alldeutscher Verband, and who was friendly with both List and Lanz von Liebenfels wrote to Stauff about Freemasonry. Hering stated that he had been a Freemason since 1894, but this 'ancient Germanic institution' had been polluted by Jewish and parvenu ideas; he concluded that a revived Aryan lodge would be a boon to anti-Semites."

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pg. 127) 

Thus, many of Ariosophy-centric organizations adopted the structure and trappings of Freemasonry despite frequently associating the Masons (as well as the communists) with an international Jewish conspiracy. More about the Hammer groups and Philipp Stauff shall be said in a moment. For now, let us consider the individual chiefly responsible for the spread of various anti-Semitic secret societies in Germany and Austria during the early twentieth century.

Guido von List's protege, the former Cistercian monk Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, would effectively craft a kind of Gnostic ideology out of List's theories. His really lasting effect on volkisch thinking and Ariosophy, however, was his obsession with Medieval military orders such as the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Hospitallers and especially the Knights Templar. Any number of nationalist and proto-fascist groups would attempt to create their own secretive orders based upon these Medieval predecessors both before and after World War I thanks to Lanz's writings. Lanz himself would found the Order of the New Templars (ONT), an organization that would have a considerable influence on both the Thule Society as well as the later SS.

"The Order of the New Templars was an occult lodge that met at a ruined castle high on a cliff over the Danube – the eerie Burg Werfenstein in Upper Austria, a few miles upriver from Hitler's childhood home – among other sites. The members were white, surplice-style robes emblazoned with the red cross of the Templars, a cross that von Liebenfels believed was formed of two, superimposed and counterrotating, swastikas...

"Von Liebenfels – in Ostara and in other publications, such as his weirdly entitled Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Aefflingen und dem Gotter-Elektron (1905), which we may translate as 'Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods' – prescribed sterilization and castration for inferior races. and, of course, denounced miscegenation owing to its pollution of the pure-blooded German Volk. He also sounded a theme that was to occupy all other racist ideologues, including Hitler, and that was the forced submission of women to Aryan men. To the Nazis and their ideological predecessors, feminism was an evil on the same level as Freemasonry, international Jewry, and Bolshevikism. In fact, the Nazis believed feminism (like Bolshevikism) to be the creation of international Jewry for the express purpose of finishing off the Aryan race. The irony has come full circle, of course, for the term 'feminazis' has has become a staple of Rush Limbaugh-style, talk radio agit-prop.

"But von Liebenfels did not stop at sweeping political indictments. He included occult biology in his repertoire, with a concentration on the pineal and pituitary glands. He believed – as did Blavatsky and as do many current mystics and theosphists – that a space between these glands in the hypothalamus of the brain was formally a supercharged area that gave Aryans the twin powers of telepathy and omniscience: the third Eye; but that – because of the pollution of Aryan blood with that of members of the inferior races – these two glands had so atrophied that the Aryan people had lost their psychic abilities. This is a somewhat liberal borrowing of the teachings of legitimate Eastern adepts who train their devotees in methods of awakening this innate potential (regardless of their racial background).

"According to Liebenfels, however, the solution to the problem of the incipient physical and spiritual degeneration of the Aryan race was not hatha yoga or Transcendental Meditation, but the creation of a new priesthood of the Holy Grail; a new Knights Templar of the German Blood (for that was, according to von Liebenfels, what the Grail represented). As for the inferior races? They were to be deported; or incinerated as a sacrifice to God; or simply used as slave labor."

(Unholy Alliance, Peter Levenda, pgs. 68-69)

Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels

Now that I've addressed List and Liebenfels somewhat, let us move along to the secret order that spawned the Thule Society: the Germanenorden. The chief figure behind the creation of the Germanenorden was publisher and anti-Semitic agitator Theodor Fritsch, one of the most revered Ariosopohists of the Nazi regime.

"The Reichhammerbund and the Germanenorden were established by one of the most important early racist and violently anti-Semitic publicists, Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933). A milling engineer by trade, Fritsch came to anti-Semitism by way of the Lebensreform movement in the 1870s. Echoing widespread anxiety in the Western world over the decline of artisans and the inability of small business to compete against larger concerns, Fritsch's first political foray was an attempt organize German millers into a guild to combat the influence of corporations. The cry for artisanship against mass production and smallholders against big capital had already found its most influential exponent in England's John Ruskin, who like many of his volkisch counterparts idolized medieval life. The sentiment was widespread. As far afield as the American Midwest, the Grange, a fraternal farmers guild organized on Masonic lines, fought the railroads over unfair freight charges. Neither was Fritsch unique in his view that corporate interests were pawns of the Jews. However, he soon took unreflective, resentful anti-Semitism into the emergent realm of quasi-Darwinian biology. In his 1881 book Leuchtkugeln (Flares), Fritsch anticipated Lanz's line of thought with the supposition that Jews were transitional beings between apes and humans. He followed Leuchtkugeln with a succession of pamphlets called Brennende Fragen (Burning Questions) before producing his Antisemiten-Katechismus (later retitled Handbuch der Jugenfrage).

"The catechism, whose impact on German anti-Semitism can be measured by its print run, numbered forty editions by 1936, condemned capitalism as a Jewish conspiracy and denied the Jews could create anything of culture and beauty. Hitler himself testified to the importance of Fritsch's catechism. 'I have thoroughly studied the Handbuch der Jugenfrage since my youth in Vienna. I'm convinced that it helped prepare the ground in a very special way for the national socialistic anti-Semitic movement.' Fritsch's familiar public persona as an anti-Semitic agitator may be the reason why he was accorded greater honor in the Third Reich than most figures associated with Ariosophy. To the Nazis, he was the Altmeister, the Old Master. Drawing from similar volkisch influences, Fritsch had developed his own perspective on Aryan racism and neopaganism independent of List, but he seems to have been drawn gradually into List's orbit through association with the Vienna Ariosophist's network of initiates and followers. His Utopian tendencies were expressed in his 1896 book, Stadt der Zukunft (City of the Future), which envisioned garden cities whose dwellers could live in harmony with nature."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, ps. 62-63)

Fritsch

Around the last decade of the nineteenth century Fritsch tried to organize a formal political party based around anti-Semitism. It was a colossal failure. Not only did the Deutsch-Soziale Reformpartei fail to gain widespread popular support, but it began to grow progressively more moderate as it entered the political field. This alarmed Fritsch to the point that he decided political reform was impossible. As a result, he began to focus on publishing as a way of changing the cultural landscape to the point that a fanatically anti-Semitic political party would be viable in general elections. It was this path that led him to the Reichshammerbund and, ultimately, the Germanenorden.

"Fritsch was in all events determined to work outside the system. Like List, he was more concerned with changing the cultural paradigm than with changing the government. Fritsch wrote that 'Anti-Smitism is a matter of Weltanschauung, which can be accepted by anyone, no matter what party he belongs to.... Our aim is to permeate all parties with the anti-Semitic idea.' In 1902 in Leipzig he founded the Hammer; a monthly and later fortnightly publication subtitled 'Blatter fur Deutschen Sinn' ('Bulletin for German Thought'). He railed in those periodicals against all symptoms of modernism: big department stores, motion pictures, women's fashions, mass media. He perceived the Jews behind every despised aspect of modern life. Lebensreform permeated the Hammer, including vegetarianism, a bias for agrarian over industrial life, and the call for a practical and nationalistic socialism. After the war, Hammer circulation increased to some eight thousand subscribers. Contributors to the Hammer included Lanz, Ernst Wachler, and other List Society members...

"Whatever Fritsch's influence as a publisher on shaping the intellectual landscape, his activity soon took concrete form in a new organization. In 1905 Hammer subscribers began organizing themselves into Hammer Gemeinden (Hammer groups), local circles that studied Fritsch's ideology and even discussed establishing a utopian community according to the master's principles.

"Growing from this modest soil where organizations that would enjoy greater influence. Stung by anti-Semitsm's failure in parliament, especially after the January 1912 elections, which left the Social Democrats as the largest party in the Reichstag, Fritsch called in March 1912 for a new anti-Jewish association, one that would remain 'above the parties.' Out of a meeting in his Leipzig home on May 24-25, 1912, with some twenty prominent Pan-Germans and List Society members came the Reichshammerbund. Headed by Karl August Hellwig, a retired colonel living in Kassel and a List Society member, the Bund consisted of activists from the Hammer groups. A fortnight earlier, on March 12, 1912, Fritsch approved the transformation of the Wodan Lodge, a secret society within the Magdeburg Hammer group, into the nucleus of the Germanenorden under the leadership of Herman Pohl, a sealer of weights and measures. The Germanenorden became the Reichshammerbund's secret parallel organization.

"Along with Hellwig and Fritsch, authority over the Reichshammerbund was vested in a twelve-member Armanen Rat, a council whose name derived from List's imaginary ancient Aryan priesthood. Members had to prove that they and their spouses were of unimpeachable Aryan stock. The Reichshammerbund canvassed actively for members. Fritsch and Hellwig were interested in making common cause with Roman Catholics and reaching out to farmers and workers, teachers and civil servants, the military and the universities. However, the atmosphere of Wilhelmine Germany was not conducted for a mass volkisch movement with occult undertones. The Hammerbund recruited no more than a few hundred members scattered along nineteen chapters. Its most active branch, in Nuremberg, numbered only twenty-three members by the end of 1912. In spring of 1914 a Reichshammerbund chapter was established in the Thule Society's future home, Munich. It was founded by Wilhelm Rohmeder, who later joined Thule."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pgs. 64-66)

As one can imagine, the aims and rituals of the Germanenorden were quite bizarre.

"This history of the early Germanenorden must be supplemented by an account of its aims, rules, and rituals. According to circular of the Franconian province, the principal aim of the Germanenorden was the monitoring of the Jews and their activities by the creation of a centre to which all anti-Semitic material would flow for distribution. Subsidiary aims included the mutual aid of brothers in respect of business introductions, contracts, and finance. Lastly, all brothers were committed to the circulation of volkisch journals, especially the Hammer, their 'sharpest weapon against Jewry and other enemies of the people.' The articles of the Germanenorden betray an overt ariosophical influence. All nationals, male or female, of flawless Germanic descent were eligible for admission to the Order. Application forms requested details about the colour of the applicant's hair, eyes, and skin. The ideal coloration was blond to dark blond hair, blue to light brown eyes, and pale skin. Further details regarding the personal particulars of the applicant's parents and grandparents, and in the case of married applicants, those of the spouse were also required...

"The emblems of the Germanenorden indicate a further source of ariosophical inspiration. From the middle of 1916 the official Order newsletter, the Allgemeine Ordens-Nachrichten, began to display on its front cover a curved-armed swastika superimposed upon a cross... In due course advertisements for volkisch jewelry, rings, pendants and tie-pins, incorporating various runes and the swastika, appeared in this publication. The supplying firm, Haus Eckloh of Ludenscheid in Westphalia, worked from designs submitted by members of the List Society during the war. Although the swastika was current among several contemporary volkisch associations in Germany, it was through the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, its successor organization in post-war Munich, that this device came to be adopted by the National Socialists.

"The ceremony and ritual of the Germanenorden demonstrate its strange synthesis of racist, masonic, and Wagnerian inspiration. A summons to an initiation ceremony of the Berlin province on 11 January 1914 informed brothers that this was a frock-coat and white-tie affair and that any new candidates would have to submit to racial tests by the Berlin phrenologist, Robert Burger-Villingen, who had devised the 'plastometer', his own instrument for determining the relative Aryan purity of the subject by means of cranial measurements. A surviving ritual document of c. 1912 describes the initiation of novices into the lowest grade of the Order. While the novices waited in an adjoining room, the brothers assembled in the ceremonial room at the lodge. The Master took his place at the front of the room beneath the baldachin flanked on either side by two Knights wearing white robes and helmets adorned with horns and leaning on their swords. In front of these sat the Treasurer and Secretary wearing white masonic sashes, while the Herald took up his position in the centre of the room. At the back of the room in the grove of the Grail stood the Bard in a white gown, before him the Master of Ceremonies in a blue gown, while the other lodge brothers stood in a semicircle around him as far as the tables of the Treasurer and Secretary. Behind the grove of the Grail was a music room where a harmonium and piano were accompanied by a small choir of 'forest elves.'

"The ceremony began with soft harmonium music, while the brother sang the Pilgrims' Chorus from Wagner's Tannhauser. The ritual commenced in candlelight with brothers making the sign of the swastika... and the Master reciprocating. Then the blindfolded novices, clad in pilgrimage mantles, were ushered by the Master of Ceremonies into the room. Here, the Master told them of the Order's Ario-Germanic and aristocratic Weltanschauung, before the Bard lit the sacred flame in the grove and the novices were divested of their mantles and blindfolds. At this point the Master seized Wotan's spear and held it before him, while the two Knights crossed their swords upon it. A series of calls and responses, accompanied by music from Lohengrin, completed the oath of the novices. Their consecration followed with cries from the 'forest elves' as the new brothers were led into the grove of the Grail around the Bard's sacred flame. With the ritual personifying lodge officer as archetypal figures in Germanic mythology, the ceremonial must have exercised a potent influence on the candidates."

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ps. 128-130)

an image inspired by Wagner's Tannhauser, an influence on the Germanenorden's rituals

With the onset of World War I, a schism developed with the Germanenorden.

"With the outbreak of World War I, many Orden brothers volunteered for service and lost their lives at the front. Lodge activity became relatively dormant. Towards the end of 1916, the remnant of the Orden underwent a schism after a power struggle between Pohl and the Berlin lodge. Chief among the anti-Pohl faction was Philipp Stauff, an anti-Semitic journalist who had risen to high station in the List Society before the war, in part on his claims of having spoken in séances to members of the long-dead priesthood of pagan Germany. Stauff embellished List's ideas on the esoteric significance of runes in his book Runenhauser (1913), which discovered the secret runic language of the wooden beams of medieval buildings."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pg. 67)

Philipp Stauff and his wife

It was from the faction of the Germanenorden that continued to follow Herman Pohl that the Thule Society would emerge. Before getting to Thule, however, a bit should be said about the "anti-Pohl" faction of the Germanenorden that followed Philipp Stauff as it will have some bearing on this narrative in future installments. The Stauff faction would become mixed up with some very curious company in post-World War I Germany.

"After the armistice in November 1918 former brothers of the loyalist Germanenorden set about its revival. The Grand Master, Eberhard von Brockhusen (1869-1939), was a Brandenburg landowner and a generous List Society patron. He was rather preoccupied with the revolt of Polish laborers on his estates, and complained that Order administration was chaotic owing to the lack of a constitution; in early 1919 he asked Erwin von Heimerdinger or to relieve him of his office. Although Stauff informed Brockhusen that his resignation had been accepted at the beginning of March, the affair seemed to drag on as Brockhusen was still pleading for a constitutional reform in the summer, and accusing Stauff of slander. Brockhusen's correspondence reveals a deep dismay at post-work conditions and a hatred of the Poles. In the late summer Heimerdinger abdicated the Chancellorship in favor of the Grand Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg, who was very enthusiastic about the Order and the Free Corps expedition to the Baltic countries in 1919. The Order soon lost this prominent patron when he died of a heart attack on 6 February 1920. Brockhusen remained in office and finally got his constitution accepted in 1921, which provided for an extraordinarily complex organization of grades, rings, and provincial 'citadels' (Burgen) supposed to generate secrecy for a nationwide system of local groups having many links with militant volkisch associations, including the Deutschvolkischer Schult- und Trutzbund.

"Despite the petty and futile debates of its senior officers in Berlin, the Germanenorden provinces initiated clandestine activities involving the assassination of public figures associated with the new German Republic, the loathsome symbol of defeat and disgrace to radical nationalists. The Germanenorden was used as a cover-organization for the recruitment of political assassins in 1921. The murderers of Matthias Erzberger, the former Reich Finance Minister and the hated signatory of the armistice, were Heinrich Schultz and Heinrich Tillessen, who had been strongly influenced by volkisch propaganda after demobilization at the end of the war. They had settled in June 1920 in Regensburg, where they met Lorenz Mesch, the local leader of the Germanenorden. In May 1921 Schultz and Tillessen went to Munich, where they received their orders to kill Erzberger from a person who claimed to have the authority of the Germanenorden. The attempted assassination of Maximilian Harden, the republican author, was also traced to the Order. The impressive secrecy and ideology of the Order thus inspired volkisch fanatics to murder the Jewish and republican enemies of the German nation in a modern 'Vehm.'"

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pg. 132-133)

That Germanenorden patron and Chancellor Grand Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg was involved with the Baltic Campaign, a now largely forgotten military expedition launched by various Freecorps with tentative approval of the Weimer Republic and the British that nonetheless captivated German nationalists in the interwar years, will be highly significant point as this series unfolds, so do keep it in mind dear reader.

It is also significant that the broader Germanenorden, from which the Thule Society began as a lodge of, was involved in the Freecorps movement and latter manifestations, such as the Deutschvolkischer Schult- und Trutzbund. The Thule Society was of course famously involved with the Freecorps movement as well. Many mainstream historians, if they mention Thule at all, depict its affiliation with several of the Bavarian Freecorps as an isolated incident. But in point of fact, more than a few of those Ariosophical-centric occult lodges were actively involved in the Freecorps movement as the above cited passage makes clear. Mainstream accounts of the Freecorps and affiliated organizations such as the Deutschvolkischer Schult- und Trutzbund (of which virtually all leading members of the Freecorps movement had been members of at one time or another, according to Robert G.L. Waite's Vanguard of Nazism [pg. 206 n. 87]) have on occasion subtly acknowledged this connection.

"The Schultz-und-Trutzbund was organized in October 1919 by Alfred Roth, man who had been active in prewar racist groups such as the Reichshammer-Bund. The purpose of the S-u-T is stated in its constitution:

"'The Bund fights for the moral rebirth of the German Volk... It considers the pernicious and destructive influence of Jewry to be the main cause of defeat [in World War I] and the removal of this influence to be necessary for the political and economic recovery of Germany, and for the salvation of German Kultur.'

"Well before Hitler became a dominating influence in the struggling German Workers Party, the Schultz-und-Trutzbund had establish its own printing presses and was flooding the country with the most violent and scurrilous anti-Semitic propaganda. 'In the year 1920 alone,' declares its founder, 'we distributed over 7,642,000 pieces [of propaganda material].' The Bund had its own newspaper, the Deutschvolkischen Blatter, and its own psuedoscientific magazine, the Politische-Anthropologische; both publications carried the swastika on their mastheads. This was long before Hitler adopted the crooked cross as the symbol of mystic Aryan racism and the official sign of his party. Before it was ostensibly dissolved in January 1923, the Bund had a total membership of almost a quarter of a million men.

"The Schultz-und-Trutzbund did important work in preparing Germany for Nazi racism, but it made a more specific contribution than that. A list of only its most distinguished graduates who figured prominently in Nazi Germany would include the following Julius Steicher, Gauleiter of Nuremberg, editor of the unspeakable Sturmer; Dietrich Eckart, with Alfred Rosenberg co-editor of the Volkischer Beobachter, also a charter member of the Thule Society; Reinhard Heydrich, SS Grupenfuhrer, Chief of the Security Service of the Gestapo; the Duke of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha, President of the German Red Cross; Wilhelm Murr, Federal Governor of Wurtemberg; Walter Buch, Reichsleiter and President of the Party Court; and Fritz Sauckel, Federal Governor of Thuringia, notorious Chief Administrator of the Labor Draft Law."

(Vanguard of Nazism, Robert G.L. Waite, pgs. 206-207)

As was noted above, the Reichshammer-Bund was the organization that had spawned the Germanenorden, making it entirely possible that Orden members were the controlling force behind the Schultz-und-Tutzbund. Reportedly Theodor Fritsch himself, the chief figure behind the Germanenorden, played a leading role in the Schultz-und-Tutzbund, as did several individuals associated with the Thule Society.

"... The tireless Fritsch was one of the national leaders of the Schultz-und-Trutzbund, which grew from 25,000 members in 1919 to 110,000 by the following year. Among the leaders of the Schultz-und-Trutzbund's Munich chapter were such familiar associates of the Thule society as Dietrich Eckart, Julius Lehmann, and Gottfried Feder, along with Max Sesselmann, an editor of the Munchener Beobachter who later marched with Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch. Like the Thule Society, the Munich Schultz-und-Trutzbund met at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pg. 240 n. 113)

Dietrich Eckart, of whom much more will be said later

All of this would seem to indicate that, despite the schism, some type of link remained between the anti- and pro-Pohl (from which the Thule Society derived) factions of the scattered post-WWI Germanenorden. Another indication of this link is that the above mentioned Schultz-und-Trtuzbund assassins, Heinrich Schultz and Heinrich Tillessen, had previously served in the Oberland Freecorp of Bavaria before joining the secret order. The Oberland Freecorp was in turn one of the Freecorps that the Thule Society played a role in founding.

Its also interesting to note that Schultz and Tillessen were also said to be members of the Organisational Council (O.C.), a clandestine organization founded by leading figures of the Freecorps. They may in fact have been operating under the orders of the O.C. when they assassinated Matthias Erzberger. The O.C., which was effectively a kind of nationalist Murder Inc., claimed to be carrying on the work of the notorious Vehmic courts of Medieval Germany. The Holy Vehm have of course long fascinated the conspiratorial right and this modern manifestation of the Vehm is most significant in that regard. It shall be addressed at length in a future installment.

Next's weeks blog, however, will begin an examination of the Thule Society in earnest. Stay tuned.

A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: The Secret Origins of the Patriot Movement Part III

Welcome to the third installment in my examination of the sinister roots of the Patriot movement. In the first installment of this series I considered the original links between patriot groups and the US intelligence community that dates back to the First World War as well several former military men who played a major role in establishing the modern Patriot movement's ideology. In the second installment I began to focus in on the three distinct strands behind the modern day Patriot movement, namely the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby and the Posse Comitatus.

As part two unfolded I broke down the backers of Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, including figures such as Roger Pearson, Francis Parker Yockey and Francois Genoud, all of whom having had ties to the post-WWII European fascist underground. I argued that Carto was affiliated with what researcher Kevin Coogan referred to as "the Order," a network established by the SS before the end of WWII and which occultist and SD (the SS's chief intelligence arm) asset Julius Evola played a major role in. From here on out "the Order" shall be referred to as the "Evola network" to avoid confusion with another Order that we shall soon consider (though the two may well have been closely linked).

Evola

The Evola network established ties with powerful figures in the US intelligence community such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton. Roger Pearson, a long time associate of Willis Carto's, would go on to collaborate with men such as Angleton and Ray S. Cline (another powerful former CIA man) when he later became involved with the American Security Council (ASC) and the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), two organizations with longstanding ties to international fascism as well as the conspiratorial right. For more information on the ASC check here, here, here and here; for the WACL, here, here, here and here.

Before leaving the Liberty Lobby I would like to consider one other individual who likely was a major financial backer of Carto's: Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper.

Draper, like many individuals we've already encountered thus far, also had ties to the US intelligence community: a WWI veteran, he was assigned to military intelligence (officially) after the outbreak of WWII. Beyond this, he was a member of one of the wealthiest and most powerful American families originating from New England. He possessed ample pedigree beyond the Draper line, however.

"Burdened with three last names as a constant reminder of his illustrious ancestry, Wickliffe Preston Draper was raised in a family where being 'well bred' was not just a figurative expression for good manners. His given names were indications of the Southern aristocracy on his mother's side. Draper's maternal grandfather, General William Preston, could trace his family's history back to ownership of Craigmillar Castle outside Edinburgh, where James V and his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, were frequent visitors. Educated at Harvard and Yale Law School, General Preston had fought in the Mexican War and had been a member of the Kentucky legislature and the U.S. Congress before being appointed ambassador to Spain by President James Buchanan; when Lincoln came to office, he returned to Kentucky to assist the rebel effort, serving first as a command officer in the Confederate Army and then, after being appointed the Confederacy's ambassador to Mexico, as a diplomat. Draper's maternal grandmother, Margaret Wickliffe, also came from a prominent Kentucky family that lived in antebellum splendor on their Lexington estate, owned by Margaret's father, 'Old Duke' Robert Wickliffe, the wealthiest planter and largest slaveholder in the state. And in one leading eugenics texts, both the Prestons and Wickliffes were named as examples of 'the Kentucky Aristocracy,' families of statesmen and generals, in which 'the men were brave and gallant, the women accomplished and fascinating and incomparably beautiful.' 

 "But just as illustrious, and even more important in determining the material advantages of Draper's life, was the New England Puritan background on his father's side. In the community of Hopedale, Massachusetts, in which he was raised, being a Draper was synonymous with wealth, privilege, and power. Indeed, according to one nineteenth-century observer, if not for an accident of history, the town would have been called Draperville.

"Wickliffe Preston Draper arrived in the world on August 9, 1891, just in time to receive his own entry in The Drapers in America, a hagiographic genealogy published the following year by a member of the family whose work had been subsidized by Wickliffe's paternal uncle. Proud of their colonial roots dating back to James 'the Puritan' Draper, who had left the village of Heptonstall in Yorkshire, England and settled in the New World in 1648, the 'Draper men,' according to the genealogy, 'have ever been to the front in all emergencies... have held offices of all kinds in the village, town, city, county, or country... have been soldiers, sailors, statesmen, lawyers, doctors, engineers, authors, merchants, farmers, manufacturers, in the church and school, and have brought to each and every one of these occupations an earnestness and steadfastness of purpose and success of the highest order.' Nine towns or counties in the United States, and one in the United Kingdom, had been named after the family. 

"The line leading directly to Wickliffe Draper was particularly distinguished. His great-great-grandfather Abijah Draper had fought at Lexington and Concord and commanded a company of minutemen under Washington at Roxbury. Abijah's son Ira invented the rotary temple, a device for keeping the cloth extended in weaving that doubled output by allowing a single weaver to attend two looms; by the time Wickliffe was a teenager, the business built around his great-grandfather's invention was the largest manufacturer of textile machinery in the world." 

(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William H. Tucker, pgs. 16-17)

General William Preston (top) and General William F. Draper (bottom), just two of the Colonel's illustrations relations

The Draper textile empire was originally based out of Hopedale, Massachusetts, a community considered by some as being one of the pioneering "company towns" in America. Given his family pedigree, their collective backgrounds in company towns and slavery, as well as his reputedly intimidating physical appearance (all accounts I've read of the Colonel describe him as being well over six feet tall; John Bevilaqua places him at 6'6), it should not be surprising that the Colonel became enamored with eugenics. In the 1930s, with the assistance of Harry L. Laughlin (one of America's leading eugenicists), the Colonel personally traveled to Nazi Germany to observer their application of what would become a lifetime obsession for Draper.

"In 1935, Draper had traveled to Berlin, where the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems was being held, to learn first hand what sort of eugenic measures were being enacted by the Nazi government. To facilitate his contact with officials and scientists in the Reich, Laughlin had written to Eugen Fischer, president of the International Congress and an important scientific authority for the Reich, naming Draper as one of the two official delegates from the Eugenics Research Association (ERA) and commending him as 'one of the staunchest supporters of eugenical research and policy in the United States'... From Berlin, Draper reported to Laughlin that he had met 'several Germans who may be able to give me the information I seek, and which I look forward to discussing with you on my return.'

(ibid, pg. 52)

By all accounts the Colonel was impressed. He would go on to help promote a Nazi propaganda film known as Erbkrank (The Hereditary Defective) in the United States upon his return. Some have alleged that his ties to Nazi Germany went well beyond promoting a propaganda film, however. In point of fact, the full extent of Draper's dealings with the Third Reich remain classified more than 65 years after the end of WWII and 40 years after the Colonel's death.

"According to Marshall Ravnitzky [Reclusive note: this researcher's name is actually Michael, and not Marshall, Ravnitzky, though Marshall is what appears in The Fund of...], a reporter for the National Law Journal, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been withholding records on Draper's involvement with the Reich under an inappropriate application of classification rules to files more than fifty years old."

(ibid, pg. 63)

Both before and after the Second World War Draper would dedicate his rather immense fortune toward the funding of eugenics and far right organizations. Two major recipients of this largess prior to WWII were the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies (ACPS) and what would become known as the Pioneer Fund. The ACPS, founded by former military intelligence officer John Trevor Sr. (whose son, John Trevor Jr., would later become a board member of the Pioneer Fund along with long time Carto associate Roger Pearson), was already considered in depth in the first installment in this series. As noted there, the ACPS was a kind of prototype for modern day patriot groups, especially the anti-immigration types (the modern day Minutemen are especially indebted to the ACPS). It would go on to become deeply involved with the American Security Council (the founding of which Trevor Sr played a key role in) for decades. Draper was apparently the Coalition's long time financial patron.

anti-immigration activism has been a long time preoccupation of the Trevor clan

The Pioneer Fund, which Draper himself founded, would go on to become the chief proponent of eugenics in the United States after World War II. The research for The Bell Curve and numerous other neo-eugenics tracts can be traced directly back to Pioneer "scholars."

"A greater source of concern is the Pioneer Fund, a group that had direct links to Hitler and the Nazis. In 1937, Wicklife Preston Draper, heir to the giant textile machinery manufacturer, Draper Corp., established the Fund. Draper was an extreme racist and a staunch anti-unionist as early as the days of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial of the 1920's. Other projects of his hatred were the United Nations, John Kennedy, the Nye Committee and liberals. His hatred for members of the Nye Committee for trying to charge the duPonts with war profiteering led to his deliberate persecution of Alger Hiss between 1948-51.

"Draper and associate Harry Laughlin created The Model Eugenics Laws in America, which Hitler used to write the Nuremberg Laws. In 1936, Laughlin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelburg. Both Draper and Laughlin advocated the involuntary sterilization of institutionalized Americans. Twenty-four states adopted such laws that led directly to sterilizing more than 75,000 Americans...

"On Sept. 12, 1963, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission received notice from Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. that it received an anonymous gift of $100,000 to fight against civil rights. Additional money was forthcoming from the Pioneer Fund and used in a broadside attack on civil rights. The Pioneer Fund also was a source of funding for anti-bussing programs. It is also the source of much of the funding for book titles like The Bell Curve, a piece of racist drivel disguised as science. The Bell Curve is inherently false and used much of the work provided by the Pioneer Fund. One of the chief beneficiaries of the Pioneer Fund has been Roger Pearson, who is closely linked to the Liberty Lobby. In addition, the Pioneer Fund was one of the driving forces behind Proposition 187, the anti-alien measure on the 1994 California ballot. Presently, two noteworthy Republican politicians are linked with the Pioneer Fund: Jesse Helms and Steve Forbes."

 (The Nazi Hydra in America, Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins, pgs. 221-222)

But the ACPS and the Pioneer Fund are not the only contributions Draper made to the far right. Draper was also one of the chief financial supporters of the Citizens Councils of America (a group closely linked to the above-mentioned Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission), an organization founded in the wake of the 1954 Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision to oppose desegregation. The Citizens Councils were hugely popular in the 1950s and 1960s and would manage a staggering comeback in the 1990s after being re-branded as the Council of Conservative Citizens. Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott would of course become infamously affiliated with this organization.

Trent Lott speaking before the Council of Conservative Citizens

Draper was also an early backer of proto-Christian Identity "minister" Gerald L.K. Smith and reportedly provided the financing for his "Christ of the Ozarks" shrine and tourist attraction in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The Ozarks region would go on to become a hotbed for Christian Identity activity, spawning the Elohim City and Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord compounds by the 1970s.

the "Christ of the Ozarks" shrine the Colonel helped fund

Finally, there was Draper's backing of Willis Carto and his Liberty Lobby, which many believe was quite significant. Draper seems to have become affiliated with Carto via an organization known as the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), an outfit also closely linked to Roger Pearson's Northern League (NL, discussed in part two of this series).

"The International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE) was established in 1959, with Truth Seeker's Robert Kuttner as president, to further advance the cause of biopolitics. Kuttner, who became an editor for Mankind Quarterly, would later testify before the House Committee on the Judiciary on the evils of school desegregation as a spokesman for Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby. The IAAEE's general secretary was a former Queens College student named Donald Swan. A Truth Seeker/Racist Forum regular and friend of H. Keith Thompson, Swan also went by the name 'Donald Walker' and 'Thor Swenson.' H. Keith Thompson also worked with the IAAEE.

I did all the printing for the IAAEE, a distinguished group of ethnologists, many of international repute, examining racial differences from a scientific point of view... They were funded by a foundation set up by Col. [Wickliffe] Draper, and produced a series of booklets examining these matters. Their findings were used extensively in preparing defenses to Brown v. Board of Education, and by the White Citizen's Council...

"Truth Seeker, Right, and Mankind Quarterly on the one hand, and the NL and the IAAEE on the other, were interrelated wings of a close-nit political tendency. While the League and publications like Right and Truth Seeker appealed to street-level activists from the WDL, NRP, and NSRP, Mankind Quarterly and the IAAEE mobilized more sophisticated arguments to justify white supremacy..." 

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pg. 481) 

The above-mentioned H. Keith Thompson was a close associate of Francis Parker Yockey. He had also been an SD asset during WWII and acknowledged to researcher Coogan to have been in control of an SS slush fund set up prior to the end of WWII to aid high ranking Nazis after the inevitable defeat. And here he is assisting the Draper-funded IAAEE crowd. By all accounts Draper's contributions to this endeavor were significant, much to the benefit of Carto and his fledgling Liberty Lobby.

"Judging by the fact that its efforts were advertised, and its publications distributed, exclusively by extremist sources, however, the association seemed more interested in providing scientific authority for a reemerging racist and Nazi movement than in having an impact on academic thought. For example, IAAEE membership was solicited in Western Destiny, where it could attract the attention of a readership also interested in how the Jewish Culture Distorters were destroying the white racial basis of Western civilization by peddling false notions about equal rights. The IAAEE reprints were available from the 'Sons of Liberty' publication list, along with such learned works as Christ Was Not a Jew, an analysis of 'Jewish parasitism and the Aryan deliverer'; Jewish Ritual Murder, which 'documents the case proving Jewish ritual murder of Gentiles'; and A Real Case against the Jews, in which 'a Jew tells... the real reason why the Jews should be hate.' Even before its first issue, advance notice of the Mankind Quarterly's imminent publication was announced in Pearson's Northern World and subscriptions offered by British Publishing Company, a notorious specialist in anti-Semitic literature. In the United States, subscriptions to the Quarterly could be ordered from a Liberty Lobby circular also offering subscriptions to Northern World, the 'complete file back issue' of Right, and Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium, a particularly influential book in the neo-Nazi movement, dedicated to 'the Hero of the Second World War,' Adolf Hitler. Race and Modern Science also appeared on the lobby's Noontide Press List, together with the classic fraud The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The International Jew, Hitler Was My Friend, and a host of works 'exposing' the Holocaust as an enormous hoax. And all the IAAEE publications regularly appeared on the list of recommended literature in the Citizen, the monthly publication of the Citizens' Councils. Swan and Gregor even toured the South, distributing copies of Mankind Quarterly and the reprint series to state departments of education to encourage the use of scientific date 'to counter the Brown decision' and the introduction in the high school curriculum of a course on race based on IAAEE materials. And in an internal dispute within the neo-Nazi movement, each side would claim its position was based on IAAEE publications. If the IAAEE's real purpose was to dignify hate groups and racists with academic support, then the Colonel's money probably was not spent in vain.

"Whatever Draper's motivation, however, there is no doubt that he spent liberally. Without the relevant financial records... it is not possible to know exactly how much of Draper's resources were donated to various IAAEE projects, but the amount was certainly substantial. In 1963, the only year for which some financial data are available, the IAAEE reported income of $23,210, all but $400 coming from 'contributions and donations,' undoubtedly Draper's money. The almost $22,000 ($133,000 AFI) of expenditures included $7,600 ($44,000 AFI) for 'printing costs' --in a year neither Race and Modern Science nor any of the monographs was published --and $5,000 ($29,000 AFI) for the purchase of Avin's symposium on housing; the fact that copies of the symposium were later distributed as part of the Liberty Lobby's campaign against a civil rights bill suggests that some projects carried out by Carto's organization, which had a number of prominent members in common with the IAAEE, probably were also funded by Draper."

(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William H. Tucker, pgs. 99-100)

the Colonel in the flesh

Let us step back for a moment and consider the implications of all these things. Effectively Willis Carto --patron saint of the racist wing of the conspiratorial right and Holocaust revisionists --and his Liberty Lobby were effectively bankrolled by prominent members of the European fascist underground (including individuals who were "former" Nazis and SS men and affiliated with powerful members of the US intelligence community) and a "former" military intelligence officer who just happened to be a scion of one of the richest and most powerful families to hail from New England (the Colonel's inheritance was actually managed by the notorious Morgan Guaranty Trust). Nor did the Draper family's power and interest in eugenics died with the Colonel. Let us briefly consider his nephew, General William H. Draper Jr.

"In 1958, Prescott Bush and Gordon Gray, who were President Eisenhower's frequent golfing partners, helped secure an appointment for William Draper to chair a committee advising Eisenhower on the use of military aid to other countries. He was a relative of Wickliffe Draper. Dillon and Read employed him the 1930s. He helped Prescott Bush float the largest bond issue for Nazi Germany, and later served in postwar Germany as head of the economics unit in charge of dismantling the cartel system.

"Draper was a racist and major funding source of the eugenics movement. He used his position as commission head to direct its focus away from military aid to the danger of overpopulation in third world countries. The Eisenhower administration dismissed his racist views. Draper went on to fund the Population Crisis Committee with money from the Rockefellers and duPonts. In the 1960s, he served as an adviser to LBJ. He was instrumental in getting the Johnson administration to use overseas aid programs to fund birth control in nonwhite countries...

 "George H.W. Bush, Prescott's son, was a vocal supporter of Draper's politics. In 1964, he campaigned in Texas against the Civil Rights Act. In 1969, as a member of Congress, Bush arranged hearings on the dangers posed by the birth of too many black babies...

"In the 1980s, as vice president, George H.W. Bush urged Reagan to appoint William Draper's son Bill as administrator of the United Nations Development Program, an organization connected with the World Bank and charged with supervising population control. Bush also was in on the appointment of Bill Draper to the Export-Import Bank. During the 1980s, the Export-Import Bank, at the urging of the Reagan administration, served as a funnell to provide Saddam Hussein with funds and credits during the Iran-Iraq war.

"The Bush and Draper families shared close friendships going back to the 1920s. Bill Draper was co-chairman for finance and head of fund raising for the 1980 George H.W. Bush for President campaign. The Pioneer Fund was established by Wickliffe Draper. Charles Murray, the Pioneer Fund's best-known expert, has served as adviser to many of George W's top consultants, and is often quoted by them. He directly influenced the repressive welfare programs of Tommy Thompson and NYC Mayor Giuliani, and was a consultant to Thompson on changes in the Wisconsin welfare system. Murray's books, The Bell Curve and Losing Ground, both about the inferiority of blacks, serve as bibles for the school privatization and anti-welfare movements in the United States..."

(The Nazi Hydra in America, Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins, pgs. 172-173) 

William H. Draper Jr.

In fairness to the Draper clan, they reportedly disowned the Colonel to the point of refusing to allow him to be buried in the family cemetery. Still, one suspects their disappointment in the Colonel stemmed more from the crassness of his eugenics ventures rather that out of any kind of ideological disapproval.

Overall, the Draper clan (along with the Bushs and the Mellons, among others) seem to have served as one of the chief bridges between the old guard Eastern Establishment (who were themselves quite taken with fascism and Nazism, as I briefly noted before here) and the emerging military-industrial complex. What's more, the Draper clan still remains highly relevant. William H. "Bill" Draper III, besides being deeply involved with various civic activities for the Reagan/Bush regime, was also a highly successful venture capitalist. His son Timothy C. Draper carried on the tradition via Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a firm that funded Skype, Hotmail, Overture, Baidu, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and so forth.

WHD III (top) and Timothy C. Draper (bottom)

And it is from this family that one of the chief backers of the Patriot movement (to say nothing of the eugenics, neo-Nazi, and Holocaust revisionist movements) emerged. Curiously, Prescott Bush (the patriarch of the Bush dynasty) seems to have served in military intelligence during the First World War, an event that may well have marked the beginning of the Bush's clans longstanding ties to the US intelligence community.

Prescott Bush

Besides military intelligence, another strange overlap between the Draper and Bush clans are their extensive family membership in the mysterious Yale secret society commonly referred to as Skull and Bones. The Bush clan has had longstanding ties with Skull and Bones over the years while the Draper clan has also managed a few members (most notably William Henry Draper III, who was initiated into the Brotherhood of Death in 1950, two years after George H.W. Bush had joined).

the legendary logo of Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones famously uses the symbol of skull and cross bones (commonly referred to as the Jolly Rogers) as its symbol. It was founded in 1832 and has long alleged to have been an extension of a mysterious German secret society that has never been named.

"Incidentally," the SS (which was modeled upon secret Medieval military orders such as the Knights Templar, Knights Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights, a fact that will be especially curious in light of an organization that will be addressed in just a moment) also used the skull and cross bones as an insignia. Of course, the German military had been using the skull and cross bones as a symbol going all the way back to the time of Frederick the Great, when the insignia was adopted by elite cavalry troops of the Prussian army.

During the interwar years between the First and Second World Wars Freikorps, paramilitary organizations drawn from the ranks of former German military men to combat communist forces, used the skull and crossbones extensively as an insignia. Numerous future leaders of the Nazi regime such as Ernst Rohm (the head of the SA, commonly referred to as stormtroops or brown shirts) and Heinrich Himmler (the head of the SS). It is widely believed that the Freikorps had an enormous influence on both the SA and SS as well as the Nazi regime in general.

Prussian cavalry (top), a Freikorps member (middle) and one of the famed SS death's head rings (bottom)

More than few of the guiding lights of the American far right also became enamored with the concept of the Freikorps and esteemed historian Alfred W. McCoy indicates in Policing America's Empire that military intelligence had indeed organized members of the American Legion and other ex-military organizations into Freikorps-like vigilante groups in the wake of the First World War when the nation was in the grips of the First Red Scare. But I digress --back to the modern day Patriot movement.

While it may seem incredible that such forces were behind the Liberty Lobby, the group behind the John Birch Society and the Posse Comitatus may be even more bizarre. Both strands, like virtually all of the conspiratorial right, were obsessed with the notion that the nation was falling under the control of Eastern Establishment groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, which in turn were controlled by centuries-old secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati (and of course the Jews). In theory these secret societies are in turn engaged in a Satanic plot to destroy America's Constitution (usually via sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll PSYOPs conducted by the US intelligence community) and replace it was a Communistic, one-world dictatorship.

Thus it is quite ironic that in all probability the JBS and almost surely the Posse were themselves controlled by a secret society that claimed descent from a Medieval military order; that was dominated by "former" high ranking military officers and intelligence personnel; that was likely involved on some level in the trafficking of drugs, arms, and black market gold; and was accused of practicing occultic rituals (a charge not without merit, but which we not be addressed at length in this particular series). Despite these endeavors this group presented itself as a far right wing traditionalist Catholic/Orthodox organization engaged in a mortal struggle against the forces of godless Communism (and of course, the Jews).

The organization was known as the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta and sometimes referred to simply as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta. It did indeed claim descent from the Medieval Knights Hospitallers, but via the Russian line of succession and was distinct from the "official" successor organization to the Hospitallers, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (though there does seem to have been no small amount of collaboration between the SOSJ and SMOM over the years). While it is highly unlikely that the SOSJ's claims of descent from the Knights Hospitallers are legitimate, the organization would wield a shocking degree of influence over twentieth century America.

The origins of the modern Sovereign Order of Saint John and its long time Grand Master, "Colonel" Charles Pichel, are quite murky. There seems little doubt, however, that by the 1930s the SOSJ and Pichel had become deeply involved with both the Nazis and powerful figures in the White Russian exile community.

"... Pichel's interest in chivalric orders went back at least to 1924, when he helped establish the American Heraldry Society in New York City. By the early 1930s, he was active in the far right. On 15 July 1933 he wrote to a prominent Nazi named Ernst Hanfstaengl offering his services as a liaison between the American right and Hitler. In the late 1930s he became involved in a nebulous Axis propaganda wing called 'The Order of the Blue Lamoo.' Pichel's ties to the Blue Lamoo surfaced in a 1939 report by a New York detective named Boris Casimir Palmer (Pilenas). A former World War I military intelligence agent, Palmer ran his own detective agency out of an office located at 170 Broadway. On 27 June 1939 he sent a letter to the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League (NSANL) under the title 'Subject Japanese espionage.' In it, he discussed Pichel's involvement with Boris Brasol, a leading White Russian anti-Semite, intelligence operative, criminologist, literary figure, and founder of the Union of Czarist Army and Navy Officers. Brasol was said to have been a representative of a Nazi propaganda organization called the Fichte Bund, and was close to the Cossack General Grigori Semionov, who was financed by Japan.

 "Palmer told the NSANL that a Franciscan priest, Father Peter Baptiste Duffee, claimed that Brasol also belonged to 'a Nazi propaganda organization known as the Blue Lammoo [sic]. At the head of the group is Charles T. Pichel, an ex-con.' Pichel, then living in Leonia, New Jersey, was said to be working 'for a member of the IRA, who is in the employ of the Japanese Commercial Attaché in Washington. Duffee identified the IRA man as Vincent Walsh. Walsh, who later worked with the Japanese consulate in New York, was tied to Pichel, who was 'said to be an Englishman, alleged drug smuggler, and Nazi spy.' Duffee also reported on another Blue Lamoo'er close to Pichel, a 'Count Tcherep-Spiridovich.'

"How well informed was Father Duffee? In his book American Swastika, Charles Higham reports that the priest served as Father Coughlin's liaison to Boris Brasol. Duffee was also right about the Blue Lamoo. According to the anti-fascist Friends of Democracy group, the Ancient and Noble Order of the Blue Lamoo was a White Russian fascist organization one of whose members was the 'Count V. Cherep-Spiridovich.' The 'Count' was born Howard Victor von Boenstrupp. A former patent lawyer, Boenstrupp was also known as 'the Duke of St. Saba,' 'Colonel Bennett,' and 'J.G. Francis.' A close associate of Silver Shirt leader William Dudley Pelley, he was indicted along with Pelley on sedition charges on 21 July 1942. Nor was this his first encounter with the law. In 1933, when he was just plain Howard, he was charged with grand larceny for allegedly stealing a valuable book and other crimes. During the House Committee on Un-American Activities questioning of Fritz Kuhn, Cherep-Spiridovich's name came up in connection with two publications, Intelligence and American Tribunal. He was also linked to 'the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.'

"Boenstrupp said he got his title after being legally adopted by a real White Russian count, Major General A. Cherep-Spiridovich, who died a suicide. A friend of Boris Brasol, the count lived in America after World War I and headed the Anglo-Latino-Slav League. He was also involved in the Anti-Bolshevik Publishers Association, which published The Gentiles' Review. Cherep-Spiridovich was the author of a near-psychotic 1926 tract called The Secret World Government of the Hidden Hand, and was intimately involved in promoting The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in the United States.

"Starting in June 1922, the well-known journalist Norman Hapgood ran a series of exposes in Hearst's International entitled 'The Inside Story of Henry Ford's Jew Mania.' In it, Cherep-Spiridovich and Brasol were identified as the two most influential figures behind Ford. According to Hapgood, Cherep-Spiridovich at one point lived in Detroit and worked for Ford. He also identified another Russian friend of Brasol's involved with the Protocols, a former diplomat and Hereditary Knight Commander in Pichel's order named Boris Bakhmeteff.

 "As for Brasol, his ties to Ford evolved out of an earlier connection to American military intelligence. One of his ex-military intelligence cronies was C.C. Daniels, then head of the Ford Detective Agency in New York and the brother of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Dr. Harris Houghton, C.C. Daniel's family physician and the New York head of Army Intelligence, was also close to Brasol. After World War I, Houghton created the Beckwith Company to publish tracts like the Protocols. 

"Casimir Palmer, who worked for the Military Intelligence Division in Washington during World War I, also knew Brasol. In a signed affidavit dated 2 April 1937, he said he first met Brasol in April 1918 when the Russian was working for the War Trade Board in New York City. After telling Palmer that the downfall of the Russian monarchy had been part of a Jewish conspiracy, Brasol 'mentioned something about there being in existence some sort of secret document known as the Protocols of Zion. They next met on 29 June 1918 at Brasol's apartment on West 84th Street. Again Brasol claimed that Jewish bankers like the Warburgs were behind the Bolshevik Revolution, information that Palmer relayed 'to my superior, Captain Carleton J.H. Hayes, now Professor of History at Columbia University.' Palmer then reported that a copy of the Protocols manuscript was sent to a Congressional Committee by 'a very close friend of Henry Ford, a Dr. H.A. Houghton.' When Palmer met Brasol for a third time, Brasol gave him a copy of the Protocols, which he had gotten translated into English.

"Brasol spread the Protocols in league with the Grand Duke Kirill. Kirill and his chief aide-de-camp General Vasily Biskupsky appear to have received financial support from Henry Ford, with Brasol serving as their intermediary. According to Robert C. Williams' book Culture in Exile, Kirill's wife Viktoria managed 'to obtain funds for the movement from the United States.' In their book Who Financed Hitler, James and Suzanne Pool state that Brasol was Kirill's American representative at the time. They reported that Brasol sent money from Ford to the Grand Duke and Duchess, who in turn gave it to Ludendorff to support the Bavarian far right, including Hitler. If this information is correct, it might explain the Nazi refusal to give Biskupsky the money he claimed was due him, since the funds hadn't originated with Grand Duke Kirill in the first place.

"Grand Duke Kirill had another supporter on the American far right: Charles Pichel. Pichel reports that on 13 January 1934, 'the late Grand Duke Kirill, acting officially as Kirill Wladimirovich (Kirill I)' from his place in exile in Saint Briac, France, confirmed the legitimacy of Pichel's Order. Two years later, in a proclamation dated 24 November 1936, he conferred upon Pichel 'the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, First Class in Gold' for his 'zeal in defending and helping to perpetuate the noble history of Imperial Russia and the Imperial Families of Russia.' Kirill's order was 'signed by the President of the Committee of Imperial Orders and the Delegate of the Emperor in the United States,' presumably Brasol."

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 606-608)

the original Count Cherep-Spiridovich (top) and Grand Duke Kirill (bottom)

The above-mentioned Grand Duke Kirill was a member of the Russian Imperial family who became head of the Romanov clan (and thus, the firmest claimant to the Tsarship) after the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II and his brother Michael in the wake of the Russian Revolution. That supporters of the Romanov dynasty were involved in financing Hitler's rise to power (with the ample assistance of Henry Ford) as well as the spread of the Protocols of Zion (possibly with assistance of elements within military intelligence) is most interesting. That Pichel and the Shickshinny Knights of Malta were in the midst of it is even more so for our purposes here.

The SOSJ would once again find itself in the midst of intrigue by the late 1950s when it received an influx of former high ranking military officers.

"In the 1950s the Knights developed close ties to the Defenders of American Constitution, and some DAC leaders became members of the 'Military Affairs Committee' of Pichel's Knights. General Pedro Del Valle was a member of both the Supreme Court of the Knights and its Military Affairs Committee. Other members of the Military Affairs Committee included Gen. Lemuel C. Sheppard, Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, Brigadier General Boner Fellers, Admiral Charles M. Cooke, and seven retired U.S. Navy rear admirals. The Order's 'Honorary Grand Admiral' was Admiral Sir Barry Domville, the Nazi sympathizer and former head of British Naval Intelligence who had been interned during World War II under Regulation 18B. Both Willoughby and Del Valle had been close allies of General Douglas MacArthur. In order to overcome the MacArthur network's opposition to CIA activity in Asia, CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith once tried to interest Del Valle in heading a CIA office in Tokyo, bur without success."

(ibid, pg. 604)

General Douglas MacArthur, object of idol worship amongst countless members of the post-WWII far right

The eyebrows of regular readers of this blog should have been raise by the above citation as it references several military men we have already encountered in this series and other recent ones, most notably Brigadier General Bonner Fellers and Major General Charles Willoughby. Before getting to these two cretins, however, a word should briefly be said about General Pedro Del Valle, a highly important figure in relation to the modern day Patriot movement. In many ways Del Valle is the key link between the Carto-Draper faction of the Patriot movement and the Bircher/Posse Comitatus wing that the SOSJ was behind. For instance, Del Valle was involved with both the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies (the American Security Council-affiliated super patriot group founded by former military intelligence officer John Trevor Sr. and bankrolled by Wickliffe Preston Draper even after future Pioneer Fund-board member John Trevor Jr. took over the organization in the wake of his father's death in 1956) and the Liberty Lobby.

"Upon his father's death in 1956, Trevor Jr. took control of the coalition. Despite its own indictment for sedition during the war, the organization was concerned about a long list of 'subversive' institutions and activities. In regular resolutions, which were read into the Congressional Record and used in attempts to influence national legislation, the coalition expressed its opposition not only to attempts to 'undermine' the immigration laws by admitting more 'aliens' or relaxing the requirements for deportations but also to arms negotiations, membership in the United Nations and its very presence on 'American territory,' diplomatic relations with the USSR, NATO-sponsored conventions to promote 'greater political and economic cooperation,' display of the Panamanian flag in the Canal Zone, fluoridation of public water supplies, the National Council of Churches, and the World Federation of Mental Health, whose purpose was the destruction of 'our form of government and our American Way of Life.' One of the coalition's official spokesmen who presented its resolution to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs was General Pedro del Valle, a member of the Liberty Lobby's advisory board, who professed 'the instinctive distrust which is natural in all Christians for all Jews, diluted or pure'; Jews 'cannot also be good Americans,' he wrote to a fellow officer, because 'all Jews are hostile to the kind of America that anybody but a Jew desires.' Del Valle was also a co-owner of the biweekly paper Common Sense, which claimed that Mao Zedong was a 'front... for New York Jews,' and was considered a member of 'our... inner circle of top people' by George Lincoln Rockwell, 'Commander' of the American Nazi Party, one of the faithful few who donated to Rockwell's campaign to 'nail the nigger and Jew LEADERS' behind 'Martin Luther Coon.'"

(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William H. Tucker, pgs. 61-62) 

General Pedro Del Valle

Del Valle's Defenders of the American Constitution is also significant in that it was one of the earliest post-WWII attempts to spur a paramilitary patriot movement. Del Valle initially had ambitious plans for it, envisioning it as a modern day Minutemen that would organize citizens into vigilante groups to gather intelligence on "subversive" elements within the United States (i.e. trade unions) and eliminate "saboteurs." Fortunately, many of the views of Del Valle and other key members proved to be so extreme that the group never really got off the ground. But this hardly marked the end of Del Valle's involvement in the far right and paramilitarism. In point of fact, it was only the beginning as we shall see. But for the time being, let us consider Willoughby, General Douglas MacArthur's long time intelligence chief.

I've already briefly considered Willoughby in the final installment of my series concerning the American Security Council where I noted that he and MacArthur had effectively shut the OSS out of the Far East, ensuring that virtually all US intelligence operations there were under their direct control. After "retiring" from the military in 1951 in the wake of MacArthur's removal from command in Korea Willoughby, with the assistance of the notorious Hunt clan of Dallas, formed his own private intelligence network. This intelligence network would later become affiliated with the Gehlen Organization, a group of former Nazi intelligence assets controlled by Reinhard Gehlen that would go on to dominate West Germany's primary intelligence organization, the BND, for decades.

"... General Willoughby... was set up in a right-wing intelligence network called the 'International Comite for the Defense of Christian Culture' by H. L. Hunt's sons Nelson Bunker Hunt and Lamar Hunt.

"In the 1960s this group's self-named 'Foreign Intelligence Digest' network incorporated some of Kennedy's most outspoken ideological opponents in the United States: men like Frank Capell... and Billy James Hargis, the 'Christian Crusade' ally of General Edwin Walker's army indoctrination program in West Germany. German neo-Nazis and Abwehr veterans rounded out this group, along with Cuban exile, José Ignacio Rasco... 

"One avowedly racist member of this network was Austin J. App, chairman of the Federation of American Citizens of German Descent. According to a British book, the West German intelligence network, the BND, may have funded App's Federation to the tune of $280,000 in 1964. If so, the Hunt-Willoughby connection can be called transnational, in that it melded assets, and probably funds, from overseas to supplement the Hunt family's assets. The Hunts' own marginal status in U.S. society should not therefore mislead us into subordinating Willoughby's network still further. In a postnational era, transnational influence flood into our country by vehicles whose apparent marginality is misleading...

"In late 1963 the most conspicuous transnational feature of the Hunt-Willoughby network was their closest identification with Madam Nhu, the widow of the recently assassinated Ngo Dinh Nhu in Vietnam. The ongoing Willoughby interest in the Far East was represented by the presence of Father Raymond de Jaegher of the Free Pacific Association, the patron in America of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. The Hunt-Willoughby-Walker intelligence network seems to have taken care of Madam Ngo Dinh Nhu when she came to Dallas in the fall of 1963 and was presented with a banquet of flowers at in October 1963 'U.S. Day' rally in Dallas, organized by General Walker..."

(Deep Politics and the Assassination of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 213-214) 

a young Charles Willoughby who, like Wickliffe Preston Draper, was a physically imposing presence in his prime (journalist Dick Russell places him at 6'3, 220 pounds)

But this is only scratching the tip of the proverbial iceberg as far as Willoughby's connections are concerned. During World War II Willoughby would become deeply involved in the recovery of a portion of the Golden Lilly, the name for the rather extensive amount of plundered gold and other precious metals Imperial Japan accumulated during their various military occupations. While plundered Nazi gold is the stuff of legends, by all accounts the Japanese far surpassed their Nazi counterparts in no small part to the meticulousness of their plundering. A good portion of it made it back to Japan but vast amounts were also buried within massive underground vaults in the Philippines.

recovered Golden Lilly treasure

Wiloughby, or Sir Charles (as his men lovingly referred to him), became privy to the recovery of a portion of this gold when two of his underlings, soon-to-be-infamous CIA "unconventional warfare" guru Edward Lansdale and the mysterious soldier known as Severino Garcia Diaz "Santy" Santa Romana (whom researchers Sterling and Peggy Seagrave would allege was also an agent of some type Vatican-linked organization, most likely Opus Dei), was able to extract directions to several of the vaults in the Philippines from a Japanese POW after several days of intensive torture.

"Early in October, after many days of torture, Kojima broke and revealed everything he knew. Lansdale organized a convoy of cars and set out with Santy and Major Kojima to retrace the trips made by General Yamashita to 'more than a dozen' Golden Lilly treasure vaults. These were all in high valleys north of Manila, in a triangle from Baguio in the west to Bambang in the center, and Aparri at the northern tip of Luzon.

"When they returned to Manila in mid-October, Lansdale reported to Colonel McMicking, then flew to Tokyo where he briefed Willoughby, Whitney, and MacArthur. At their instruction, he then flew to Washington to brief General Magruder, who still headed the Strategic Services Unit, a last vestige of the OSS just before the new Central Intelligence Group (CIG) was created under General Hoyt Vandenberg. It was Magruder who had moved Lansdale to Manila two months earlier. Vandenberg or Magruder then sent Lansdale to the White House to brief President Truman's national security aide, Navy Captain Clark Clifford, and members of the Cabinet. President Truman decided to keep the discovery secret, and to recover as much of the Japanese loot as possible. At this stage, it is impossible to say precisely how these briefings unfolded, or exactly what President Truman did. The secrecy surrounding Santy's recoveries is nearly total.

 "What we do know, from two separate high-level sources in the CIA, is that Robert B. Anderson flew back to Tokyo with Lansdale, for discussions with MacArthur. After some days of meetings, MacArthur and Anderson flew secretly to Manila, where they were taken by Lansdale and Santy to some of the sites in the mountains, and to six other sites around Aparri at the northern tip of Luzon. In the intervening weeks, Santy's men, aided by hand-picked teams from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had successfully opened several of these vaults, where MacArthur and Anderson were able to stroll down row after row of gold bars. Other sites were opened in subsequent months. In all, the recoveries took two years to complete, from late 1945 to early 1947.

"From what was seen in these vaults, and also discovered by U.S. Army investigators in Japan, it became evident that over a period of decades Japan had looted billions of dollars' worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea, but a lot had been hidden in the Philippines."

(Gold Warriors, Sterling & Peggy Seagrave, pgs. 95-96)

Willoughby would go on to control a slush fund of this loot that he would use to fund some of the wettest wet works the US intelligence community would become involved during the post-WWII era. We shall examine these operations in a moment but first we must consider another fortuitous occurrence that happened to Willoughby while he was stationed in the Far East: namely, the close relationship he forged with Japanese war criminal and yakuza chief Yoshio Kodama.

I've already considered Kodama in depth in the first installment of my examination of the World Anti-Communist League where I revealed that he was one of the most powerful figures in post-WWII Japan. Kodama was thought to be the major power broker behind the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (which has been the ruling party in Japan almost exclusively since 1955) for decades in addition to being one of the largest drug lords in the world. Kodama, along with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (whom Douglas MacArthur was closely affiliated with) of Taiwan, dominated the drug trade in the Far East for decades.

Kodama was able to operate with impunity for so many years thanks in no small part to the close ties he forged with the US intelligence community in the wake of the Second World War. And it was no other than Sir Charles who was responsible for bringing Kodama into the fold.

"Kodama then spent two years in Sugamo Prison as an indicted war criminal, but was magically released in mid-1948 when he made a deal with General Willoughby to give the CIA $100-million (equal to $1-billion in today's values). This payment bought Kodama his freedom from prison and from any prosecution for war crimes. The money was placed in one of the secret slush funds controlled by the CIA station at the U.S. Embassy. Subsequently, Kodama was put directly on the CIA payroll, where he remained for many years, until his death in 1984. Tad Szulc of The New York Times wrote, 'Kodama had a working relationship with the CIA.' Chalmers Johnson said Kodama was 'probably the CIA's chief asset in Japan.'"

(ibid, pg. 108)

Kodama

Such a possibility is highly probable due to Kodama's vice-like ties to the ruling political party combined with his obscene wealth, much of it derived from off-the-books assets such as black market gold and heroin. Kodama was by all acounts an incredibly powerful man, but one who owed much of his post-WWII fortunes to Sir Charles, who was instrumental in the rehabilitating Kodama's image from one of war criminal and drug lord to something semi-respectable.

"Willoughby also took on the job of falsifying the Japanese military history of the Pacific War, so that it would conform to the needs of America's Cold Warriors. On the Japanese side, Willoughby's 'historians' included the most notorious war criminals, Kodama and Tsuji (who masterminded the Sook Ching massacre in Singapore and Malaya). The historical monographs they prepared were first composed in Japanese, then translated with the help of Nisei in Willoughby's ATIS. The monographs were then laundered of anything remotely sensitive. Once sanitized, they were published by the U.S. Government, collectively titled The Japanese Monographs and Japanese Studies in World War II. Not surprisingly, the series contained big gaps. As the official introduction states: 'The paucity of original orders, plans and unit journals... rendered the task of compilation most difficult... However, while many of the important orders, plans, and estimates have been reconstructed from memory... they are believed to be generally accurate and reliable.' According to Louis Morton, author of the official military history of the Philippines campaign, the reports prepared by Willoughby's office 'constitute the most important single Japanese source on Japanese operations in the Pacific and Asia during World War II.

"Willoughby persuaded Kodama to write a memoir guaranteed to please his new American clients. Disingenuously title I Was Defeated in its English translation, it was published in 1951 by a CIA proprietary called Asian Publications. Listed as publishers were Harvey Fukuda, who did the editing, and Robert Booth, who did the bookkeeping. In 1952, the same publishers gave birth to the English-language translation of the memoir by Colonel Tsuji --a man who... also had been charged by British investigators with cannibalism. Tsuji's Underground Escape presented a falsified story in which he claimed he spent years after the war hiding from the Allies in Thailand and China, when in fact he was, like Kodama, an employee of General Willoughby and the CIA in Tokyo.

"The purpose of these memoirs was to shift the blame away from certain politicians, so they could be groomed for political careers in postwar Japan. Kodama's memoir put blame for the war exclusively upon senior officials of Japan's army and navy, most of them dead, who he portrayed as fanatical war-crazed monsters. Everyone else was a hapless pawn.

"Generously, Kodama provided the funds from his own deep pockets to launch two postwar political parties headed by fanatical rightists, which eventually merged into the Liberal Democratic Party..."

(ibid, pgs. 113-114)

Masanobu Tsuji, another Willoughby favorite who suspected of indulging in "recreational" cannibalism during the war

Ah, but this was only the beginning of Willoughby and Kodama's collaborations. You see, Willoughby was charged with suppressing leftists in the postwar years to ensure that Japan did not fall prey to communism. He was given a slush fund known as the Yotsuya Fund, drawn from a portion of the recovered Golden Lilly treasure, to finance this operation. Frequently Sir Charles would turn to Kodama and his yakuza thugs to carry out such endeavors.

"... the Yotsuya Fund. This was set up to manipulate and steer Japan's underworld, and to finance 'wet work' --extortion, kidnapping, and murder. General Willoughby, MacArthur's 'lovable fascist' and head of G-2 at SCAP, controlled the Yotsuya Fund and worked energetically with Kodama and his legions of yakuza to suppress any kind of leftist activity or public protest during the occupation. Because democracy tolerated dissent, the concept of democracy had long been regarded by Japan's ruling elite as 'a poisonous idea from the West.' In Japan, even the mildest kind of dissent was not tolerated. During the McCarthy era in America, suppression of dissent became synonymous with anti-communism. But the witchunt in Japan during that epoch was far more severe, and bloody.

"Despite being head of G-2, at this late stage in his career Willoughby was involved in dirty tricks rather than intelligence-gathering or counter-espionage. Among other things, his Yotsuya Fund financed a Korean Liaison Office that sent spies into North Korea, Red China and the far eastern USSR.

"Yotsuya, the district for which Willoughby named his underground fund, was a seedy Tokyo tenderloin populated in the postwar years by gangsters, prostitutes, and bottom-feeders, a hub for the blackmarket, awake all night with illegal gambling casinos and attached brothels... Kickbacks from postwar dives like the Mandarin Club, a casino and brothel in Yotsuya run by American Ted Lewin, a pal of Kodama, funded the Cannon Agency, Willoughby's dirtiest and wettest operation in Japan. Named for U.S. Army Colonel J.Y. Cannon, this was a military version of Murder Incorporated, a death squad.

"Jack Cannon arranged the beatings and killings of student leaders, liberals, leftists, socialists, labor union organizers, scholars, journalists, and anyone else who got in the way. Cannon worked closely with Machii Hisayuki, Kodama's Korean lieutenant who headed the ethnic Korean Tosei-kai gang of yakuza. Jack Cannon initially worked for the U.S. Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps, or CIC. His job was to ferret out and to murder dissidents. A Nisei interpreter employed by Willoughby's ATIS, who once had helped Cannon blow open a safe, recalled that the colonel always behaved like 'a movie style gangster.' Once the Cannon Agency was set up, Jack Cannon became something that would have chilled the blood of most Americans. He is thought to have been behind the kidnapping of a prominent left-wing writer, Kaji Wataru. Also attributed to him was the torture, dismemberment, and murder of Shimoyama, the president of Japan's national railroads whose body was found scattered along the railway tracks. Whenever he needed a hand, Cannon called on Machii's Korean yakuza. He also was suspected of arranging plane crashes that took the lives of British and American diplomats and military officers who were investigating links between Willoughby and indicted war criminals like Kodama and Colonel Tsuji Masanobu. When the job was so wet and dirty that it had to be completely divorced from Washington, Willoughby bypassed Cannon and brought in a murder squad called KATOH, the acronym of five Japanese Army officers who did surgical assassinations for money.

"To be sure, what makes this even more disturbing is that Willoughby was judged by U.S. Army contemporaries to be incompetent, paranoid, and congenitally driven to cover up his misjudgments. As most documents relating to Willoughby's activities still are kept hidden by the U.S. Government half a century later, we may reasonably suppose that there is yet more disturbing information on his messianic activities."

(The Gold Warriors, Sterling & Peggy Seagrave, pgs. 110-111)

Machii Hisayuki, yet another Willoughby favorite

The above mentioned Jack Cannon would be described by former military intelligence/CIA asset Richard Case Nagell as a "rub-out man for the CIA." Unsurprisingly, he would become involved with Willoughby's International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture upon returning to "civilian" life.

"Little else has been written about Canon, but in the late 1950s, this 'rub-out man for the CIA' is known to have penetrated Fidel Castro's guerrilla operations against Batista, and by the early 1960s he would become an associate editor for Willoughby's Foreign Intelligence Digest and work with the ex-general on the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture..."

(The Man Who Knew To Much, Dick Russell, pg. 68) 

While mainstream historians have almost exclusively depicted Willoughby as a marginal and rather buffoonish figure, the above would seem to indicate otherwise. Willoughby may have been incompetent as far as conventional military intelligence was concerned, but he seems to have displayed considerable abilities at managing wet works and organized crime for the suppression of leftists. The job he did in Japan was so thorough that the party he and MacArthur backed has remained in power almost exclusively since 1955.

Officially the Yotsuya Fund was taken away from Willoughby in the early 1950s and rolled into another slush fund that was eventually turned over to the Japanese in 1960. Thus, Willoughby's role in the Golden Lilly publicly ended. But it was the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, dominated by Willoughby's dear friend Yoshio Kodama, that gained control of this slush fund in 1960. What's more, Santa Romana (the soldier who originally uncovered several Golden Lilly vaults) was reportedly still in control of Golden Lilly-derived slush funds at the time of his death in the mid-1970s (the Seagraves allege that as much as $50 billion in assets belonged to Santy at that time). As a close associate as well as a former subordinate of Willoughby's controlled vast sums of the Golden Lilly funds, it does not seem beyond that realm of possibility that Willoughby himself also had access to the funds well after he officially retired from the Army.

Nor was this likely the only source of funding available to Sir Charles. Kodama, as noted above, was also a major international drug lord. Kodama's primary partner in this endeavor was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, a man who owed his postwar politcal fortunes to Willoughby's close friend and mentor, General Douglas MacArthur.

"The man who would make the new regime in Taiwan palatable to the Americans was General Douglas MacArthur. One day in July 1950, while he was commander in chief of the United Nations forces fighting in Korea, MacArthur breezed into Taipei, met with Chiang Kai-shek, and promised him, in contradiction to President Truman's policy, that American expertise and weapons would soon be flowing to the island bastion. Appearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the general extolled the virtues of the Kuomintang government...

"That MacArthur had achieved such a firm grasp of the state of affairs in Taiwan during a single day's visit was not questioned by the American legislators. Indeed, his promises of American support were prophetic. As the Korean War turned against the United States, Chiang Kai-shek, with his dream of returning to the mainland and defeating the communists, were seen as a potential pressure point against Mao. With the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his 'exposing' of communist sympathizers in the federal government, American officials muted or stopped criticism of Chiang's rule. Suddenly the Kuomintang was respectable, and American aid began to pour in. The American Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Taiwan grew from a handful of advisers in 1951 to 2,300 five years later. Economics aid and war material flowed in at a rate that the island could not possibly absorb. By 1961, military expenditures, nearly all provided by the American government, were three-quarters of the national budget."

(Inside the League, Scott & Jon Anderson, pgs. 49-50)

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek

I have been unable to confirm a direct link between Willoughby and Chiang Kai-shek or his Kuomintang (KMT) party but given the fact that both men shared close ties to Douglas MacArthur and Yoshio Kodama, it seems highly improbable that they were not acquainted with one another.

Thus, all of this would indicate that one of the key figures in the Sovereign Order of Saint John had access to vast amounts of underground revenue generated from black market gold and drug trafficking. What's more, it is quite possible that the SOSJ itself was involved in such activities. Consider one of the Order's above-mentioned members, Admiral Charles Cooke. Cooke seems to have been an early player in what would become the CIA's drug trafficking operations involving Civil Air Transport (CAT, later known as Air America).

"The plan to save Taiwan advance on 7 November 1949, when privateer William S. Pawley received permission from Secretary of State Dean Acheson to lead a group of retired military officers, headed by Admiral Charles Cooke, to Taiwan to advise the KMT on security affairs. No stranger to political intrigues or the underworld, Pawley owned sugar plantations an airline and a bus system in Cuba, and was linked to Mafia leaders who had investments there too. He was connected to the espionage Establishment as well: Bill Donovan met with Chiang Kai-shek's defense minister and secret police chief to grease the skids on Pawley's behalf, and William Bullitt in December began raising funds for the so-called Pawley-Cooke Advisory Mission --the lion's share of which was provided by a group of Texas oilmen led by right-wing fanatic H.L. Hunt, a one time professional gambler who, in his younger days, helped finance his empire by running a private racing wire.

"Also involved in the Pawley-Cooke escapade was M. Preston Goodfellow, former publisher of the Brooklyn Eagle and Donovan's liaison, with Garland Williams, to William Keswick and the British SOE in 1942. Later in the war Goodfellow managed sensitive OSS operations in Burma and China, and formed close ties to General Tai Li and drug smuggler Du Yue-sheng. According to Korean War historian Bruce Cumings, Goodfellow made a fortune by combining business ties with 'right-wing regimes in Asia and interests in Central America.'

"Pawley's collusion with Cooke, Donovan, Goodfellow, Bullitt, and Hunt is a textbook example of how Establishment privateers run the secret government. And naturally the mission dovetailed with federal narcotics activities. In January 1950 Goodfellow traveled to Taipei with Cooke, and in April Bullitt's bagman arrived. Soon thereafter, a 'Colonel Williams' introduced the bagman to Satiris Fassoulis, 'who gave him $500,000 for a PR campaign on Taiwan,'

"Was this our Garland Williams? Probably. Williams had experience at both ends of the Iran-China connection. In 1948 and 1949 he had conducted surveys of Iranian opium production and had reported to Anslinger that Iran's most influential families had amassed a fortune through the opium trade, and that they intended to keep anti-drug laws weak. He knew that Iran shipped tons of opium to Indochina through Greece and Armenian brokers like Fassoulis. But Williams was also a security chief for the secret government, and at the same time that CIA officer Allen Dulles was meeting with KMT officials to seal the Pawley-Cooke deal, he was recalled to active duty and took command of the Army's 525th Military Intelligence Group. Among its functions, the 525th MIG prepared intelligence officers for duty in Korea, and as chief of the Group, Williams was in position to provide covert support to the Pawley-Cooke Advisory Mission, or to Satiris Fassoulis.

"For his part, Fassoulis denies ever having met Williams, or that Hunt provided money, or that Pawley was involved. He denies everything. However, he had been an American pilot in China during the war, where he may have met Garland Williams, and in 1950 he was vice president of Commerce International China (CIC), a subsidiary of Donovan's WCC. CIC was exempt from the Foreign Agents Registration Act and supplied the Pawley-Cooke mission with everything from gas masks to airplanes. It was also accused of smuggling contraband to America."

(The Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valentine, pgs. 78-79)

There's a lot to note from the above quote. I've addressed the figure of William D. Pawley before during my examination of the American Security Council (ASC), of which he was a member of along with Charles Willoughby and a host of other former MacArthur men. What's more, the Sovereign Order of Saint John was also directly involved with the ASC via its Coalition for Peace Through Strength, as I noted before here.

Pawley

The opium trafficker Du Yue-sheng was also briefly mentioned in the first installment of my examination of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL, an organization both Yoshio Kodama and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek were major financial backers of). Du Yue-sheng was a Triad boss involved with the legendary Green Gang (of which Chiang Kai-shek has long been alleged to have been a member of). He was one of the Generalissimo's earliest backers, throwing in with the KMT in the late 1920s. He would be instrumental in both the KMT's rise to power as well as its long time ties to drug trafficking.

Colonel Garland Williams is a truly mysterious figure. He first became involved with the US Intelligence community during WWI when he was recruited into military intelligence by General Ralph Van Deman, the chief architect of the modern day industrial security apparatus organizations like the American Security Council and the John Birch Society likely became deeply involved in (more information on Van Deman's industrial security apparatus and its links to the ASC can be found here; the links to the JBS will be discussed in the next installment). After the war Williams joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics where he became a mentor to men like Charles Siragusa and the notorious George Hunter White. When WWII broke out Williams, Siragusa and White became deeply involved with the US intelligence community, both for the OSS and military intelligence (White, for instance, was involved with both).

Colonel Garland Williams

They would also become involved with state-sanctioned ventures with narcotics on various levels. Siragusa would help James Jesus Angleton forge ties with the Mafia in Italy, ties that would be instrumental in establishing the post-WWII drug trade, as I briefly addressed before here. White would also become involved in establishing drug routes into the United States as well as experiments involving bids to discover drugs capable of operating as a truth serum, or even to control the mind of the individual. White would continue this work with the CIA after the war under the auspices of MK-ULTRA (much more on White can be found here, here and here).

It's also interesting to note that Williams was called back into military intelligence and deployed to Korea at the same time as Charles Willoughby was the chief of military intelligence there. Thus, Willoughby would have been his commanding officer and almost surely aware of the Pawley-Cooke operation if not outright participating in (a possibility that is highly likely, as will be discussed in a moment).

Finally, there's H.L. Hunt to consider. Hunt, as well as several of his sons, had long time ties to both MacArthur and Willoughby. He bankrolled MacArthur's disastrous 1952 bid for the presidency and hired Willoughby as an "agent" for the Hunt Oil Company shortly after he "retired" from the military in the wake of MacArthur's sacking. The Hunt family would go on to become major financial backers of Willoughby's intelligence network, an investment that may have paid out handsome dividends for them. Researcher Douglas Valentine alluded to the possibility that the Hunt family became deeply involved in Texas drug trafficking, a prospect that the legendary Kefauver Commission on organized crime may have been stirred away from by George Hunter White himself.

"... why would White want to keep the Committee out of Dallas? Was it to deflect attention from the Pawley-Cooke mission in Taiwan, which was funded by ultra Texas oilmen like H.L. Hunt, and which, in 1951, was facilitating the CIA-Kuomintang drug smuggling operation that entered the US by crossing the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas?

"There was certainly enough evidence for the Kefauver Committee to take a long lookk at the Lone Star State. In 1951, Lait and Mortimer had identified Hunt as a professional gambler who ran a private racing wire, which suggests Mafia ties. They had also claimed that the Mafia had 'taken over the age-old racket of running guns across the border,' under the aegis of Carlos Marcello."

(The Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valentine, pg. 309)

H.L. Hunt

While the CAT/Air America drug smuggling is generally credited solely to the CIA there were ample amounts of military men, including military intelligence officers, involved. Acclaimed researcher Peter Dale Scott noted that many of the original military intelligence officers involved in the Pawley-Cooke operation worked for Willoughby.

"... Garland Williams, who went into deep-cover in the Far East, was pretty clearly the 'Col. Wiliams from the Army' who arranged for a mob associate, Satiris 'Sonny' Fassoulis, to become an officer of Commerce International China, a company which 'had definite ties with Army intelligence.' Fassoulis thus became a principal agent in the 'private' procurement of military supplies and advisers for Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, a project originally proposed to the U.S. government by William Pawley. Funds for CIC's 'volunteers' came 'through "Texas oil people," presumably including H.L. Hunt'; and many of the advisers came from General Charles Willoughby's intelligence G-2 in Japan, itself working with elements from Japan's yakuza underworld."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 168-169)

Thus it doesn't seem much of a stretch to state that Willoughby was likely deeply involved in establishing the Kuomintang/Air America opium network as well as the route this network used through Texas. And a little over a decade later Willoughby would find himself in the Sovereign Order of Saint John (SOSJ) along with Charles Cooke while the Texas route was still humming along (General Claire Chennault, another individual deeply involved in the establishment of CAT/Air America, was also a co-founder of the Defenders of the American Constitution along with SOSJ member General Pedro Del Valle). In point of fact, there is ample evidence to indicate that the individuals directly involved in the drug (as well as arms) trafficking were largely drawn from the ranks of the Syndicate, anti-Castro Cuban exiles (of whom Willoughby would establish ties with) and members of various patriot groups, most notably the Minutemen. Such a possibility will be further examined in the series that shall follow this one.

Before moving along I can't resists pointing out the irony of patriot groups being involved in drug trafficking by the time the 1960s rolled around. The internet is awash with hundreds of thousands of articles proclaiming that the 1960s and the counterculture that is famously associated with it was some type of PSYOP constructed by elements drawn from the CIA, MI6 (Tavistock is especially important to such strands) and of course the Jews and the Communists to enslave America's youth with cannabis and entheogens. Apparently this was meant to lead them down the paths of feminism, uncontrollable dancing, and other such evils things that would invoke a child-like mental state in the next generation.

While it is undeniable that the CIA played a significant role in introducing LSD in the United States (as I've noted before here, here and here) there is little to indicate that the acid culture that emerged in the 1960s was some type of PSYOP. In point of fact, things did not end especially well for individuals and groups such as Alfred "Captain Trips" Hubbard (and not Albert, of whom I've written more on here), Mary Meyer, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (the Brotherhood was almost surely railroaded by a scion from the Mellon family, as I noted before here) and others who had a vision for entheogens that was distinct from that of the CIA and the Pentagon.

the Captain (top), Mary Meyer (middle), and Brotherhood of Eternal Love founder "Farmer John Griggs (bottom)

Conversely, few researchers seem to have paid much mind to the fact that major powerbrokers within powerful "think tanks" such as the American Security Council and the World Anti-Communist League have been willfully and consciously flooding the United States with cheap, high grade heroin (and later methamphetamines, cocaine and crack) for decades, with things going into overdrive as the 1960s set in (more on the ASC's involvement on drug trafficking can be found here; for the WACL's ventures, check here, here and here). To say that this has had a devastating impact on this nation would be an understatement (consider, for instance, comments recently made by The Wire creator David Simon, who described the War on Drugs as "a Holocaust in slow motion"). And yet few researchers, most especially those from the conspiratorial right, have seriously considered the implications of this.

Opiates, from which heroin derives, have been the drug of choice to enslave peoples since at least the time of ancient Sumeria. And yet few researchers seem to have been especially troubled by the ties the Patriot movement had to individuals who were actively engaged in shaping the post-WWII narcotics trade. In the grand scheme of things, what's a little heroin trafficking amongst patriots?

And it is here that I shall wrap things up. As I've established over the course of this installment, the chief backers of Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby were a cabal of "former" Nazis and their collaborators (more than a few of whom had been recruited by some branch of Nazi Germany's intelligence community) and Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a "former" military intelligence officer who was also a prominent member of a wealthy and powerful New England family. The Colonel also seems to have had some link to Nazi Germany, though FBI records concerning such things are still classified over 65 years after the end of the war. The Colonel would go on to support numerous other far right organizations and individuals besides Carto, including the eugenics think tank known as the Pioneer Fund (which the Colonel himself founded and which much of his fortune was left to), the American Coalition of Patriot Societies (an organization founded by a military intelligence officer and which became closely affiliated with the American Security Council), the Citizen's Councils (which later became the infamous Council of Conservative Citizens), and proto-Christian identity "minister" Gerald L.K. Smith.

I also introduce the Sovereign Order of Saint John, a secret society whose long time Grand Master also seems to have been involved with Nazi intelligence prior to WWII. In the postwar era the Order received an influx of former high ranking military officers, more than a few with backgrounds in military intelligence. Most notably there was Charles Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur's long time intelligence chief whose finest hour came while managing death squads and organized crime in Japan towards the suppression of leftists. Willoughby, along with another SOSJ member, Charles Cooke, was also deeply involved in the creation of Civil Air Transport/Air America, an airline that was involved in trafficking drugs for decades with the sanction of powerful members of the CIA and military.

And it was the Sovereign Order of Saint John that was chiefly responsible for the creation of the John Birch Society and the Posse Comitatus, as we shall examine in the next installment. Stay tuned.