KK-Forum, KK støttespillere,
Her er noe spennende fra Los Angeles Times, Sunday 25. juni 2000, som viser
hvordan næringslivsinteresser styrer den politiske agendaen, dvs våre liv.
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000625/t000060061.html
"... With Ries as his mentor, Kohl became the advisor to the Assn. of
Chemical Industries of Rhineland-Palatinate-Saar.
It's not clear if Ries, now dead, was one of the secret donors who
illegally pumped funds into the CDU's coffers, but this much is certain: He
had a great deal of influence over Kohl. "Even if I call him at three
o'clock in the morning, he has to jump," Ries once boasted.
But who was Ries, and where did he get his money? During the Third
Reich, Ries made a fortune from expropriating "Aryanized" Jewish property
and from slave labor in factories near the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Not only was Ries never condemned for his Nazi-era crimes, he went on to
become the patron of several conservative West German politicians,
including Kohl, who was elected chancellor in 1982. As a token of his
gratitude, Kohl awarded Ries West Germany's highest civil decoration, the
Bundesverdienstkreuz or "Federal Cross of Merit." "
Mer om hvordan den tyske industri og finanselite (som tjente på
Arianiseringen av jødisk eiendom; døds/arbeidsleirene, osv) ble beskyttet
av amerikanerne (Dulles-brødrene, m.fl.), se Christopher Simpson's bok:
"The Splendid Blond Beast. Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth
Century" (Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, ISBN 1-56751-062-0, 1995) og
hans tidligere bok: "Blowback. Nazis the CIA and the Roots of the Cold War".
Mer om Fritz Ries og Helmuth Kohl på
http://www.rath.nl/mr-publishing-internet/books/old_version/usa/most-wanted/
hot3_b.htm
Om filmen Eberhard Taubert var medansvarlig for, se
http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/teaching-material.shtml
http://www.holocaust-info.dk/shm/yale.htm
Om Martin A. Lee's bok, "The Beast Reawakens", se f.eks.
http://www.publiceye.org/lee/beast.html
********************************
Sunday, June 25, 2000 (Los Angeles Times)
The Nazi Past Underlying Politics Today
By MARTIN A. LEE
SAN FRANCISCO--Americans like to recount the story about how George
Washington, father of their country, would not tell a lie about chopping
down his cherry tree as a child. Many Germans were similarly enamored of
Helmut Kohl and the legend of the two pens he kept on his desk while
serving as chancellor for 16 years. Deified as the father of German
unification in 1990, Kohl was said to be so meticulously honest that he
used a government-supplied pen only for official business and switched to
another pen he had purchased himself for his private correspondence.
But today, less than two years after Kohl left office, the man once
hailed as the greatest German statesman since Otto von Bismarck is the
principal protagonist in a major political scandal involving secret slush
funds and influence peddling by big business. Likened to Watergate, the
scandal has resulted in the political destruction of Kohl and several other
leaders of the Christian Democratic Union, currently the main opposition
party in Berlin.
This tale of crooks and cronies has all the makings of a pulp-fiction
thriller: suitcases filled with dirty cash, funny-money bank accounts,
falsified and missing documents, phone taps, kickbacks, shady arms dealers
and influential German industrialists with unsavory ties to the Third Reich.
Facing the possibility of several years' imprisonment on various
charges related to money laundering, embezzlement and illicit campaign
financing, Kohl is expected to testify this week at a parliamentary inquiry
into his party's web of corruption. He has already admitted that the CDU
violated the law by accepting secret contributions worth several million
dollars in return for granting political favors to donors Kohl refuses to
name. They are respectable businessmen who prefer anonymity, the former
chancellor asserted, adding: "I did not steal or buy elections. I have not
personally profited."
But the truth is, Kohl seems to have profited throughout his political
career by soliciting the support of big business--which he always received.
The seeds of the current scandal were planted during Kohl's early years as
a CDU official, when he forged a close relationship with the chemical and
pharmaceutical industries.
In 1966, Kohl became regional party chairman of the CDU in what was
then the West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. But he needed
additional sources of income to further his career.
Enter Fritz Ries, a wealthy German industrialist who took Kohl under
his wing and introduced him to a charmed circle of chief executives,
business heavyweights, and high-powered lobbyists. With Ries as his mentor,
Kohl became the advisor to the Assn. of Chemical Industries of
Rhineland-Palatinate-Saar.
It's not clear if Ries, now dead, was one of the secret donors who
illegally pumped funds into the CDU's coffers, but this much is certain: He
had a great deal of influence over Kohl. "Even if I call him at three
o'clock in the morning, he has to jump," Ries once boasted.
But who was Ries, and where did he get his money? During the Third
Reich, Ries made a fortune from expropriating "Aryanized" Jewish property
and from slave labor in factories near the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Not only was Ries never condemned for his Nazi-era crimes, he went on to
become the patron of several conservative West German politicians,
including Kohl, who was elected chancellor in 1982. As a token of his
gratitude, Kohl awarded Ries West Germany's highest civil decoration, the
Bundesverdienstkreuz or "Federal Cross of Merit."
It gets worse: Ries retained as his legal advisor and chief of staff
Eberhard Taubert, another compromised Third Reich veteran. During World War
II, Taubert served as a judge on the People's Tribunal, which handed down
death sentences for such "crimes" as telling an anti-Hitler joke or
sleeping with a Jew. Taubert was also employed by Joseph Goebbels'
Propaganda Ministry. In this capacity, he wrote scripts for several
horrendous Third Reich propaganda films, including "Der ewige Jude" ("The
Eternal Jew"), which depicts Jews as rats and vermin. "Wherever rats turn
up, they bring destruction with them. They destroy goods and foodstuffs and
they spread disease . . . . Among animals, they represent an element of
treacherous, subterranean destruction, just as Jews do among men," the
film's narrator explained.
Like Ries and so many other Nazis, Taubert eluded punishment after the
war. Instead, he found favor with the West German government and worked for
the army's Division of Psychological Defense. In addition, he was recruited
by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to serve as an espionage asset
during the Cold War. "It was a visceral business of using any bastard as
long as he was anti-communist," explained Harry A. Rositzke, former head of
the CIA's Soviet desk. "The eagerness to enlist collaborators meant that
you didn't look at their credentials too closely."
Taubert plied his cloak-and-dagger skills for the "Gehlen Org," a
CIA-sponsored spy network, based near Munich, that was run by Gen. Reinhard
Gehlen, formerly Adolf Hitler's chief anti-Soviet spymaster. Staffed by
several thousand Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS veterans, the Gehlen
organization functioned as the CIA's eyes and ears in Central Europe,
according to American University Professor Christopher Simpson, a member of
the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group established by
President Bill Clinton to review U.S. government documents related to Nazi
activity.
By 1955, the Org had evolved into the Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND),
West Germany's main foreign intelligence service. Gehlen's appointment as
the BND's first director was emblematic of the wholesale restoration of
Third Reich veterans to positions of power in West German society. Intent
on turning West Germany into a strong, prosperous bulwark against
Soviet-bloc communism, U.S. policymakers sanctioned the lenient treatment
given to dubious characters like Ries and Taubert.
As part of the bulwark strategy, a privileged status was accorded the
Christian Democrat Union, West Germany's dominant political party, which
enjoyed the support of Washington. It appears that German conservatives
were spoiled by the Cold War climate that made their presence in government
so reassuring to U.S. officials, fixated on containing Moscow.
In the interest of fighting communism, the United States turned a
blind eye to political corruption in West Germany for years. Undoubtedly,
this encouraged Kohl, who ran the CDU as his personal fiefdom for a
quarter-century, to do whatever he thought was necessary to maintain his
party's grip on power, even if it meant breaking the law.
While we may never know the full extent of the current slush-fund
scandal, it should serve as a reminder of how closely the Nazi era lies
beneath German politics. Another example came to light last week when the
Deutschland Foundation, closely tied to the CDU, gave its prestigious
Konrad Adenauer Prize to Ernst Nolte, a controversial historian who has
sought to justify Hitler's anti-Semitism and downplay Nazi war crimes.
Honoring Nolte in such a manner shows the extent to which extremist
thinking has penetrated the mainstream, metastasizing like a cancerous
tumor in German ruling circles. It also underscores the dangerous
possibility that the far right, energized by a growing intellectually based
radicalism, could join forces with a nationalist, right-wing faction of the
CDU at a time when many Germans are deeply disillusioned with the political
status quo.
The CDU has long been almost a catch basin for an assortment of
right-wing interest groups, including fascist elements that cling to the
memory of the Third Reich. Paradoxically, this has both thwarted the
success of Germany's ultra-right-wing parties (flourishing in Austria and
other European countries), while also perpetuating a political culture that
has incubated the extreme right. But Kohl will not acknowledge the ugly
"brown streak" that exists in his own party and in mainstream German
society. tidens
- - -
Martin A. Lee Is the Author of "The Beast Reawakens," a Book on Neo-fascism
******************************
Knut Rognes
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