German Watergate Leads to Bitburg | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Jewish Advocate May 9, 1985 | (certain sections lost)

 

“Bitburg: Tip of the Iceberg.” So reads the headline over Joe Conason’s article in the May 7 Village Voice on White House links to the Right wing’s outer fringe. A close look at the politics behind Ronald Reagan and Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery uncovers deeper layers of this iceberg – starting with the massive payoffs to members of the Kohl administration from the industrial empire founded by war criminal Friedrich Flick.

            To understand Reagan’s decision to pay homage to German war dead, one must look beyond the President’s 1933-1945 blackout to present-day politics. The staunchly conservative Kohl has been the most vocal European supporter of Reagan’s escalation of the Cold War. He has welcomed Pershing missiles to German soil is is now a confirmed “Star Wars” advocate.

            In return, Reagan, through appearances with the Chancellor, has been boosting Kohl’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in a period of important local elections. This is particularly vital in light of the magazine Der Spiegel’s relentless exposure of payoffs to assorted officials in the Bonn coalition.

            The heads began to roll last June. Finance Minister Count Otto Lambsdorff resigned just prior to his official indictment for corruption. His predecessor, Hans Friderichs, who awaits trial for bribery and income tax evasion, resigned in February from the presidency of Germany’s second largest bank. The pockets of the two former finance ministers, according to Der Spiegel, were lined by Flick in return for a huge tax concession following the conglomerate’s sale of a 29 percent interest in Daimler-Benz, manufacturer of Mercedes cars.

            In 1975, the Flick Group, which controls an empire whose holdings range from steel and explosives to armored tanks, sold the Daimler-Benz shares to Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest, for $800 million. For a $175,000 payoff to Friderichs, Flick won a $175 million tax waiver. As Der Spiegel has documented, the payoff was just one part of an on-going corruption scheme that secured Flick a grip on the fiscal policies of the West German government.

            While Flick’s beneficiaries have included politicians of every stripe but the left-of-center, ecology-minded Greens, the most scandalous exposés, naturally, have touched those in power. The biggest star to fall so far has

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served in the Nazi financial hierarchy. Anong those executives was Hans Martin Schleyer, who in 1976 would use his influence to help arrange Flick stooge Rainer Barzel’s appointment to a parliamentary commission on economic affairs.

Schleyer’s wartime record leaves little to the imagination. He joined the SS in July 1935 aid the Nazi party two years later. He was assigned in 1(88 to direct a Nazi party training school, and sent to Prague in 1941 to man¬ age the Reich Central Office for industry, all of which is reported in Tom Bower’s penetrating study, The Pledge Betrayed.

In January 1944, Schleyer was replied to Berlin to work in the Reich Security Office, the nerve center of the Gestapo and SS which coordinated the extermination operations. Following the war he was interned in a camp with industrialists and bankers, one of whom recruited him in 1951 to work for Daimler-Benz.

Twelve years later Schleyer ordered a lock-out of 420,000 metal workers in Baden-Wurtemburg. He became the symbol of the German establishment. In the fall of 1977, Schleyer, who had become the president of the German federation of employers, was kidnapped.

In a video-taped message from captivity, he stated: “I’ve been locked up for five and a half weeks by these terrorists just because I’ve worked so hard to build a free and democratic society.” Soon thereafter he was murdered. Last month, two members of the Red Army Faction were finally sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Schleyer, as well as a chief federal prosecutor, and the chairman of the bank through which the Flick payoffs were made. One of the two sentenced was the banker’s god-daughter.

While Schleyer’s name was long a feature of German headlines, only recently has Eberhard von Brauchitsch come into the limelight as the manager and political payoff man for the Flick Group. Like Richard Nixon’s tapes, it was his detailed personal notes that became the public record of the corruption of a federal government. It also earned him an indictment last July.

As noted by James Markham of The New York Times, “the Flick case has become both a journalist’s and prosecutor’s dream because of the meticulous notes and memoranda (he) kept.” Von Brauchitsch’s downfall also minor vindication for the Jewish slave laborers to whom he, on behalf of the aging Friedrich Flick, steadfastly refused compensation some fifteen years earlier. As recounted in Benjamin Ferencz’ award-winning book, Less Than Slaves, subsidiaries of Dynamit Noble

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consummately evil SS. The question of Army complicity in the Final Solution was settled long ago — in the case of Eber¬ hard von Brauchitsch’s uncle, who in 1938 was appointed commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht by Reichfuehrer Adolf Hitler.

As made clear in The Pledge Betrayed, documents disclosed only after completion of the Nuremberg trials establish that Field Marshall Walter von Brauchitsch issued an order in July 1941 on the “Treatment of Enemy Civilians and Russian Prisoners of War in Army Group Rear Areas.” According to his guidelines, German soldiers who committed “criminal acts out of indignation at atrocities or the destructive work of the emissaries of the Jewish Bolshevist system are not to be prosecuted.”

The Soviets claimed after the war that three million Russian POWs died after capture, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews and other civilians in German-occupied territory. When Britain and the U.S. bickered for three years over whether or not to prosecute German field marshalls, the Russians demanded that they be extradited to stand trial in Moscow.

Von Brauchitsch had already died of natural causes. The only Wehrmacht leader to stand trial was General Erich von Manstein, who had ordered that “the Jewish Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all . . . The soldier must appreciate the necessity for the harsh punishment of Jews, the spiritual bearer of the Soviet terror.”

Von Manstein was tried in Hamburg in the summer of 1949. He was found guilty of neglecting to protect civilian life and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. He was confined in a fortress with his family and a secretary who assisted with his memoirs. Within three years he was released and became a consultant on the rebuilding of the German Army.

The amnesty granted to convicted war criminals in the early ’50s was the big step in the “reconciliation” that reestablished Germany as a world power and American partner in Europe. It allowed the rebirth of wartime industrial giants like Friedrich Flick and ultimately led to “Wassergate.” Helmut Kohl would prefer that the past were forgotten. His friend Ronald Reagan didn’t have to be asked. The rest of us would do well to remember.

 

 

 

New Right and death squads | by Jerry Meldon | The Boston Globe, January 26, 1985

 

In early December in Washington 12 conservative groups paid tribute to the leader of El Salvador’s extreme right, Robert D’Aubuisson, a man called a “pathological killer” by a former US ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White. This and other recent events point to a cozy relationship between the New Right and that element in Central America which uses death squads to exterminate its foes.

            No name connotes right-wing violence more than that of D’Aubuisson, who was purged from the Salvadoran army in October 1979. Five months later, Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose sermons were roll calls of death-squad victims, was gunned down during a Mass. Three months after that, D’Aubuisson was arrested for treason in the midst of organizing a coup d’etat. On his bodyguard police found records of D’Aubuisson’s operations, including the name and phone number of the hit man believed to be Archbishop Romero’s assassin.

            Arrested with D’Aubuisson and his bodyguard were two men who later ordered the killing of two US labor advisers and El Salvador’s chief land-reform official. Since they were fingered in the triple murder, D’Aubuisson has referred to his right-hand men as “national heroes” and said, “I am honored to be their friends.”

            This is the Roberto D’Aubuisson whom New Right guru Jesse Helms describes as a “deeply religious man.” Last spring Helms blasted the US government, our ambassador to El Salvador in particular, for backing D’Aubuisson’s moderate rival in El Salvador’s presidential election. Ambassador Pickering’s name has since been on the death-squad hit list.

            On Dec. 4, conservatives gave the same D’Aubuisson a plaque expressing “appreciation for his efforts and accomplishments in El Salvador.” Sponsors included Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the Washington Times. Also represented were the Richard A. Viguerie Co., the Conservative Caucus, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and the National Council for Better Education – the last three creations of Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich and Terry Dolan. With Viguerie they are the Big Four of the New Right.

            The link between North America’s New Right and Central America’s extreme right is well established. In April 1980, for example, Howard Phillips and officials of the Moral Majority and American Conservative Union were flown to Guatemala by the “Guatemalan Freedom Foundation.” A right-wing businessmen’s lobby, the foundation’s members include a landowner who lent the CIA his ranch as a training base for its invasion of Cuba, and John Trotter, a lawyer from Texas. Trotter owned Guatemala’s Coca Cola franchise at a time when three of its union leaders were murdered during labor-management strife.

            Upon his return, Howard Phillips reported that “Guatemala has a brilliant future, if the policy of the United States does not ruin it” – an obvious stab at President Carter’s conditioning of US aid upon respect for human rights.

            Also paying hommage [sic] to D’Aubuisson was Young Americans for Freedom, a campus group founded in 1960 by William F. Buckley Jr. D’Aubuisson was YAF’s guest speaker the next evening at Georgetown University. A YAF official told the Washington Post his group had arranged the appearance because D’Aubuisson “hasn’t had a fair shake” from the US media. “Death squads have a very negative connotation. He’s not been able to get across the message of free enterprise, anticommunism, freedom of exports and imports.”

            If that sounds like the babble of naïve youth, consider these words of wisdom from William F. Buckley himself, taken from a guest editorial in last May’s Soldier of Fortune, a magazine for mercenaries:

            “What one must guard against is the notion that our alliance with the government of El Salvador is a function of its civilized deportment … We are in El Salvador because its government, for all its impurities, is geopolitically allied with us in the great cosmic effort, however disheveled, to give freedom and democracy and decency a change against the communist monolith. To suggest that US support should be contingent on El Salvador’s regulation of its grisly death squads is, simply, to miss the point.”

            The point, it would seem, is to note the New Right’s kinship with the masterminds of death squads.

 

Ignoring the right-wing link to the narcotics trade | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Globe, November 17, 1984

 

Echoing the late, discredited Narcotics Bureau chief Henry Anslinger, conservatives on the trail of drug traffickers have been shouting Red. Oblivious to the narcotics trade that finances right-wing extremists – like the eight nabbed by the FBI earlier this month in a plot to assassinate the president of Honduras – the Republicans in their campaign platform asserted:

            “Communist dictators – Cuba, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and now the Sandinistas in Nicaragua – are international pushers, selling slow death to young Americans in an effort to undermine our free society.”

            In the 1960s, Anslinger’s bete noire was Communist China. When he retired, the Narcotics Bureau repudiated Anslinger with a report that China had wiped out the illicit production of opium (from which morphine and heroin are derived) by the mid-1950s. A bureau agent told Al McCoy, the author of “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,” that “Anslinger … always said the same thing – the [Communist Chinese] are flooding the world with dope to corrupt the youth of America. … There was no evidence for Anslinger’s accusations, but that never stopped him.”

            Today’s Republicans are certainly not getting their information from the Drug Enforcement Administration, or its director, Francis Mullen. In September, Mullen and other DEA officials told the New York Times there was no concrete evidence linking the Soviets to the drug trade, or Communist-run governments to more than a trickle in the narcotics flood.

            No, the Republicans seem to be quoting such conservative journalists as Michael Ledeen. In a Times article last spring, Ledeen asked: “Are [the Sandinistas] within their rights when they organize a vast drug and arms-smuggling network to finance their terrorists and guerrillas, flooding our country with narcotics?”

            Preoccupied with this perceived Communist conspiracy, journalists on the right seem unaware of the escapades of the right-wing terrorist/traffickers, like those who recently planned to overthrow the Honduran government with the help of 760 pounds of cocaine.

            Then there is the case of Eduardo Arocena, head of the Anti-Castro Cuban exile terrorist group “Omega 7.” On Nov. 9, Arocena was sentenced in New York City to life plus 35 years for a decade of bombing Cuban embassies and ordering the assassination of a Cuban diplomat. He has also been charged with arranging contract murders for drug dealers. Such experience must have qualified Arocena, as he claimed on the witness stand, to assist “intelligence” groups in Central America investigating Communist involvement in drugs coming out of Cuba.

            Stefano Delle Chiaie has also lived in a conservative blind spot. Known by the nickname “Il Caccola” (Shorty), Delle Chiaie is an intriguing right-wing terrorist because he masterminded the August 1980 bombing of the main railway station in Bologna, Italy.

            The Bologna bombing left 85 dead and 185 maimed. It drove Il Caccola and his neo-Nazi cohort, Jochen Fiebelkorn, to Bolivia. There the two joined the “Bridegrooms of Death,” a paramilitary death squad under the aegis of Gestapo war criminal Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyons,” formerly of US intelligence. The gang doubled as a goon squad for the Bolivian military dictators and as enforces for cocaine billionaire Roberto Suarez.

            In 1982 democracy returned to Bolivia. Barbie was extradited to France, and the authorities raided the Bridegroom headquarters. But Il Caccola, apparently tipped off, was out, and Fiebelkorn had turned himself in when a warrant for his arrest was issued in Bologna.

            Fiebelkorn did not surrender to the Italians, who sought him for the train station massacre. He went instead to West German authorities, who indicted him on narcotics charges. That led the tale to its most bizarre twist. On trial that spring in Hamburg, Fiebelkorn revealed that while a Bridegroom in Bolivia, he was a paid agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration – until 1981, when the DEA, told of the Bologna blast, farmed him out to West German intelligence.

            Unbeknown to the Republican Party platform committee, the narcotics business transpires in a netherworld habituated by extremists of all shades, financing nefarious activities with tiny cuts of an annual take in excess of $100 billion.

            Conservatives would have us believe the Reds alone are drugging us. To convince us, they must distort the truth.