The Splendid Blond Beast

The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century by Christopher Simpson, Common Courage Press, 1995. 

Armenian Genocide

The Armenian genocide of 1915 was lead by a group of young Turkish military officers named the Ittihad, and informally referred to as “The Young Turks”. They deported the Armenians in Anatolia southward, to Syria. The Ittihad then declared their property abandoned, and the stolen loot became patronage for the Ittihad supporters. The Ittihad received amnesty from Britain and France in exchange for access to the oil and mineral wealth of the Ottoman Empire.  Robert Lansing, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, argued that international law governed relations between nations, not what happened within one individual nation. Secretary Lansing opposed the effort to prosecute the Turks for the Armenian genocide.  Admiral Mark L Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey, accused the Armenians of lacking national spirit. Bristol barred newspaper reporters from the parts of Turkey where Armenians were being slaughtered. Admiral William Colby Chester supported Turkey, and later received oil concession in Iraq from Turkey. 

Dulles Brothers

Robert Lansing was the uncle of the brothers Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles. The Dulles brothers were attorneys at the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, which specialized in German reparations and international finance. The elder brother, John Foster Dulles, later became Secretary of State under Eisenhower. The younger brother, Allen Dulles, worked for the CIA and its predecessors, and eventual became head of the CIA.

Banking

Simpson discusses the Swiss Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which had been set up for the reparations Germany had been forced to pay the victors of World War I. But later on, during the period of Nazi rule, the BIS also played a major role in the confiscation of property from the countries that Germany invaded in World War II. The BIS also laundered gold stolen by the Nazis from the Jews. The Dulles family, including Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, had long had strong connections to the BIS.

Nazi Aryanization

Simpson discusses the Aryanization of Jewish property, where the Nazi government stole businesses from the Jews and then gave them to ethnic German businessmen. This process increased support for the Nazi Party by German businessmen who were not antisemitic, but merely greedy.

Operation Sunrise

Operation Sunrise was an agreement made between the Nazis and the Allies to arrange for the surrender of German troops in northern Italy in 1945. This agreement enabled the British and American armies to gain the Adriatic city of Trieste, which otherwise may have ended up on the other side of the Iron Curtain. SS General Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff handled the negotiations on the German end. After the War, Allen Dulles tried to protect Karl Wolff, but Wolff eventually spent 7 years in prison for killing Jews in Treblinka.

Miklós Horthy

After the War, the United States State Department protected the Hungarian Nazi-collaborator Miklós Horthy from prosecution for war crimes he committed against the Jews, Romani, and Serbs. Horthy was protected not only from the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, but also from Yugoslavia, who wanted to try him for his crimes against Serbs.

Romanian Oil

The Nazis created a holding company called Kontinentale Öl by combining several oil companies from conquered territories, prominently including Romania. The company used slave labor to build oil fields, pipelines and refineries in Eastern Europe. Many of the laborers came from Jewish concentration camps, and many of these laborers died from overwork. Karl Blessing, one of the company’s directors, worked at the company’s corporate offices in Berlin. Allen Dulles protected Karl Blessing from being prosecuted for war crimes. Blessing later became chairman of West Germany’s central bank.

White Lists

Allen Dulles, who was the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) chief in Berlin, created “white lists” of Germans who would be given amnesty after World War II. Allen Dulles turned to the not entirely impartial Swiss Bank for International Settlements for information regarding whose hands were clean. There were two kinds of useful people: (a) technocrats who would help run postwar German business and industry, and (b) intelligence agents who could be redirected to spying against the Soviet Union.