The Voice of the White House

          Washington, D.C., October 23, 2010: “:The Great Mortgage Scam is beginning its inexorable avalanche down the side of the mountain while the frantic banking industry and a fully-cooperative Obama administration is trying to both stop the disaster by ignoring it and pulling out all the stops to persuade the media to look elsewhere. None of this pathetic squealing will have the slightest effect because there is no way to conceal the basic fact that 64 million American mortgage holders can never, ever, get a clear title to their homes or businesses because the crooked mortgage industry, supported by many government agencies such as MERS, has sliced and deiced their mortgage and sold bits and pieces of it to rich urine-colored trash around the world. All the bleatings and babblings will not conceal this fact nor, in the end, delude the public into forgetting the dismal fact that they have been screwed by their government and its crooked banker friends…again. “

 

 

Battle Lines Forming in Clash Over Foreclosures

October 21, 2010

by Gretchen Morgenson and Andrew Martin

New York Times

About a month after Washington Mutual Bank made a multimillion-dollar mortgage loan on a mountain home near Santa Barbara, Calif., a crucial piece of paperwork disappeared.

But bank officials were unperturbed. After conducting a “due and diligent search,” an assistant vice president simply drew up an affidavit stating that the paperwork — a promissory note committing the borrower to repay the mortgage — could not be found, according to court documents.

The handling of that lost note in 2006 was hardly unusual. Mortgage documents of all sorts were treated in an almost lackadaisical way during the dizzying mortgage lending spree from 2005 through 2007, according to court documents, analysts and interviews.

Now those missing and possibly fraudulent documents are at the center of a potentially seismic legal clash that pits big lenders against homeowners and their advocates concerned that the lenders’ rush to foreclose flouts private property rights.

That clash — expected to be played out in courtrooms across the country and scrutinized by law enforcement officials investigating possible wrongdoing by big lenders — leaped to the forefront of the mortgage crisis this week as big lenders began lifting their freezes on foreclosures and insisted the worst was behind them.

Federal officials meeting in Washington on Wednesday indicated that a government review of the problems would not be complete until the end of the year.

In short, the legal disagreement amounts to whether banks can rely on flawed documentation to repossess homes.

While even critics of the big lenders acknowledge that the vast majority of foreclosures involve homeowners who have not paid their mortgages, they argue that the borrowers are entitled to due legal process.

Banks “have essentially sidestepped 400 years of property law in the United States,” said Rebel A. Cole, a professor of finance and real estate at DePaul University. “There are so many questionable aspects to this thing it’s scary.”

Others are more sanguine about the dispute.

Joseph R. Mason, a finance professor who holds the Louisiana Bankers Association chair at Louisiana State University, said that concerns about proper foreclosure documentation were overblown. At the end of the day, he said, even if the banks botched the paperwork, homeowners who didn’t make their mortgage payments still needed to be held accountable.

“You borrowed money,” he said. “You are obligated to repay it.”

After freezing most foreclosures, Bank of America, the largest consumer bank in the country, said this week that it would soon resume foreclosures in about half of the country because it was confident that the cases had been properly documented. GMAC Mortgage said it was also proceeding with foreclosures, on a case-by-case basis.

While some other banks have also suggested they can wrap up faulty foreclosures in a matter of weeks, some judges, lawyers for homeowners and real estate experts like Mr. Cole expect the courts to be inundated with challenges to the banks’ actions.

“This is ultimately going to have to be resolved by the 50 state supreme courts who have jurisdiction for property law,” Professor Cole predicted.

Defaulting homeowners in states like Florida, among the hardest hit by foreclosures, are already showing up in bigger numbers this week to challenge repossessions. And judges in some states have halted or delayed foreclosures because of improper documentation. Court cases are likely to hinge on whether judges believe that banks properly fulfilled their legal obligations during the mortgage boom — and in the subsequent rush to expedite foreclosures.

The country’s mortgage lenders contend that any problems that might be identified are technical and will not change the fact that they have the right to foreclose en masse.

“We did a thorough review of the process, and we found the facts underlying the decision to foreclose have been accurate,” Barbara J. Desoer, president of Bank of America Home Loans, said earlier this week. “We paused while we were doing that, and now we’re moving forward.”

Some analysts are not sure that banks can proceed so freely. Katherine M. Porter, a visiting law professor at Harvard University and an expert on consumer credit law, said that lenders were wrong to minimize problems with the legal documentation.

“The misbehavior is clear: they lied to the courts,” she said. “The fact that they are saying no one was harmed, they are missing the point. They did actual harm to the court system, to the rule of law. We don’t say, ‘You can perjure yourself on the stand because the jury will come to the right verdict anyway.’ That’s what they are saying.”

Robert Willens, a tax expert, said that documentation issues had created potentially severe tax problems for investors in mortgage securities and that “there is enough of a question here that the courts might well have to resolve the issue.”

As the legal system begins sorting through the competing claims, one thing is not in dispute: the pell-mell origination of mortgage loans during the real estate boom and the patchwork of financial machinery and documentation that supported it were created with speed and profits in mind, and with little attention to detail.

Once the foreclosure wheels started turning, said analysts, practices became even shoddier.

For example, the foreclosure business often got so busy at the Plantation, Fla., law offices of David J. Stern — and so many documents had to be signed so banks could evict people from their homes — that a supervisor sometimes was too tired to write her own name.

When that happened, Cheryl Samons, the supervisor at the firm, who typically signed about 1,000 documents a day, just let someone else sign for her, court papers show.

“Cheryl would give certain paralegals rights to sign her name, because most of the time she was very tired, exhausted from signing her name numerous times per day,” said Kelly Scott, a Stern employee, in a deposition that the Florida attorney general released on Monday. A lawyer representing the law firm said Ms. Samons would not comment.

Bill McCollum, Florida’s attorney general, is investigating possible abuses at the Stern firm, a major foreclosure mill in the state, involving false or fabricated loan documents, calling into question the foreclosures the firm set in motion on behalf of banks.

That problem extends far beyond Florida.

As lenders and Wall Street firms bundled thousands of mortgage loans into securities so they could be sold quickly, efficiently and lucratively to legions of investors, slipshod practices took hold among lenders and their representatives, former employees of these operations say.

Banks routinely failed to record each link in the chain of documents that demonstrate ownership of a note and a property, according to court documents, analysts and interviews. When problems arose, executives and managers at lenders and loan servicers sometimes patched such holes by issuing affidavits meant to prove control of a mortgage.

In Broward County, Fla., alone, more than 1,700 affidavits were filed in the last two years attesting to lost notes, according to Legalprise, a legal services company that tracks foreclosure data.

When many mortgage loans went bad in the last few years, lenders outsourced crucial tasks like verifying the amount a borrower owed or determining which institution had a right to foreclose.

Now investors who bought mortgage trusts — investment vehicles composed of mortgages — are wondering if the loans inside them were recorded properly. If not, tax advantages of the trusts could be wiped out, leaving mortgage securities investors with significant tax bills.

For years, lenders bringing foreclosure cases commonly did not have to demonstrate proof of ownership of the note. Consumer advocates and consumer lawyers have complained about the practice, to little avail.

But a decision in October 2007 by Judge Christopher A. Boyko of the Federal District Court in northern Ohio to toss out 14 foreclosure cases put lenders on notice. Judge Boyko ruled that the entities trying to seize properties had not proved that they actually owned the notes, and he blasted the banks for worrying “less about jurisdictional requirements and more about maximizing returns.”

He also said that lenders “seem to adopt the attitude that since they have been doing this for so long, unchallenged, this practice equates with legal compliance.” Now that their practices were “put to the test, their weak legal arguments compel the court to stop them at the gate,” the judge ruled.

Yet aside from the actions of a few random judges, little was done to force lenders to change their practices or slow things down. Since March 2009, more than 300,000 property owners a month have received foreclosure notices or lost their home in a foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosure listings.

What finally prompted a re-examination of the foreclosure wave was the disclosure in court documents over the last several months of so-called robo-signers, employees like Ms. Samons of the Stern law firm in Florida who signed affidavits so quickly that they could not possibly have verified the information in the document under review.

Lenders and their representatives have sought to minimize the significance of robo-signing and, while acknowledging legal lapses in how they documented loans, have argued that foreclosures should proceed anyway. After all, the lenders say, the homeowners owe the money.

People who have worked at loan servicers for many years, who requested anonymity to protect their jobs, said robo-signing and other questionable foreclosure practices emanated from one goal: to increase efficiency and therefore profits. That rush, they say, allowed for the shoddy documentation that is expected to become evidence for homeowners in the coming court battles.

For example, years ago when banks made loans, they typically stored promissory notes in their vaults.

But the advent of securitization, in which loans are bundled and sold to investors, required that loan documents move quickly from one purchaser to another. Big banks servicing these loans began in 2002 to automate their systems, according to a former executive for a top servicer who requested anonymity because of a confidentiality agreement.

First to go was the use of actual people to determine who should be liable to a foreclosure action. They were replaced by computers that identified delinquent borrowers and automatically sent them letters saying they were in default. Inexperienced clerical workers often entered incorrect mortgage information into the computer programs, the former executive said, and borrowers rarely caught the errors.

Other record-keeping problems that are likely to become fodder for court battles involve endorsements, a process that occurs when notes are transferred and validated with a stamp to identify the institution that bought it. Eager to cut costs, most institutions left the notes blank, with no endorsements at all.

Problems are also likely to arise in court involving whether those who signed documents required in foreclosures actually had the authority to do so — or if the documents themselves are even authentic.

For example, Frederick B. Tygart, a circuit court judge overseeing a foreclosure case in Duval County, Fla., recently ruled that agents representing Deutsche Bank relied on documents that “must have been counterfeited.” He stopped the foreclosure. Deutsche Bank had no comment on Wednesday.

Cynthia Veintemillas, the lawyer representing the borrower in the case, Patrick Jeffs, said the paperwork surrounding her client’s foreclosure was riddled with problems.

“Everybody knows the banks screwed up and loaned out money to people who couldn’t pay it back,” she said. “Why are people surprised that they don’t know what they are doing here either?”

Meanwhile, another judge on Wednesday indicated that the courts would not simply sign off on the banks’ documentation. Jonathan Lippman, the chief judge of New York’s courts, ordered lawyers to verify the validity of all foreclosure paperwork.

“We cannot allow the courts in New York State to stand by idly and be party to what we now know is a deeply flawed process, especially when that process involves basic human needs — such as a family home — during this period of economic crisis,” Judge Lippman said in a statement.

A Case In Point:

The Role and Status of Women in Nazi Germany

January 31, 1998

by Frank Thayer PhD

“Sexual Agony: Expert solutions for when things get weird in bed—I Had My Rapist’s Baby: One woman’s happy ending—Sex to write home about”; these are titles of recent magazine articles in mainstream American women’s magazines of 1997. Look how far we’ve come.

If society is indeed free of inhibition,  anxiety, and the “oppression of roles” in today’s enlightened age, why would anyone consider looking at the role of women in an authoritarian state such as Nazi Germany? In many ways, the social  history of German women before 1933 was not unlike that of mainline culture in other Western societies of the time, including the United States. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, though, a cathartic change came for all Germans, including women.

In post-WWI days, the male was the family provider, and the goal of society was to provide a base on which men and women could marry and form strong nuclear families whose offspring would have the greatest chance of a stable upbringing and a resulting healthy outlook for maturity. In Germany, as in the United States, women also pursued careers, while viewing home and family as their primary responsibility. With the coming of the second world war, German and American women increasingly became the cadre of industry, becoming more and more involved in all aspects of home front life so that able-bodied men could serve at the front.

The question remains whether women in a paramilitary National Socialist Germany held any real status or if the society was guilty of demeaning women. The stance of the Nazi party is clear from looking at original literature such as books and magazines written by and about women in the Third Reich. Women authors of the time were highly educated professionals, many holding doctoral degrees, and their writing shows that women were viewed as peers of society, but the overwhelming appreciation of societal roles meant that men were the political leaders, and directors of industry. Women did not consider their “role” to be demeaning, rather they wrote about themselves as the girders of civilization. Indeed, this was still a time where women’s life expectancy was much longer than men’s, and stress-related illnesses, lung cancer, alcohol and drug addiction was far more prevalent among men than women.

Modern civilization suffers from the Inclined Plane theory of history, the world view that finds only negative lessons in history, and which necessarily holds that what is, is the best that has ever been. The sociological propaganda of modern society maintains the myth that history begins in the primordial slime of primitive ignorance and climbs steadily toward today’s utopia. The same is true of the 1990s view of women in society. The drumbeat of media insists that women should be relieved to have thrown off the shackles of 2,000 years of oppression.

In his 1972 book, whose English edition was titled Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, Peter Bleuel pointed out the gap between the ideal model proposed by the Nazi state and the discrepancies of practice as demonstrated by Nazi leaders. His thesis is that the “rule by popular sentiment” was merely a facade to mask the shortcomings of society whose actualities failed to meet the lofty standards preached by the elite, be it the hierarchy of the NSDAP or the women’s leadership of the Reichsfrauenführung.

A society that promoted heroic idealism of man aspiring to the Nietzschean ideal of the philosopher king, also positioned woman as the guardian and cement of domestic society, without limiting her to home and hearth. The fact that Nazi leaders did not practice what they preached is not a valid argument for viewing society as a whole. No discussion of similar dichotomies between White House behavior and pronouncements of respect for women in America will be attempted here.

Students of history point out that women were not excluded from significant roles in Nazi Germany. In addition to  Gertrud Scholz-Klink, the overall leader of the Reich women’s organizations, it is only necessary to point out the remarkable achievements of pilot Hanna Reitsch and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make the point that capable women found no “glass ceiling” in Nazi Germany.

Frau Scholz-Klink assumed leadership of the N.S. Frauenschaft  in February 1934, and remained the director of a nationwide organization that promoted healthy lifestyles, solid family life, better education for women, social welfare tasks,  and patriotic service to the Reich. At all levels, women were recruited into leadership roles that contributed materially to the mission of the Reich.

Hanna Reitsch would be described, even by political detractors, as an intrepid pilot whose achievements matched any of her male counterparts at a time when American and British women maintained much lower profiles in the military. Reitsch  landed a plane on a Berlin street in the last days of the war, while under fire, but she also test flew many experimental combat aircraft including the manned version of the V-1 flying bomb and the ME 163 “Komet”  rocket-powered fighter. Reitsch was the holder of the pilot-observer badge w/diamonds, and she won both the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. Her story reads very much like the script for an action-adventure movie that Hollywood would have made had this woman been heir to a left-wing ideology.

Born in 1892, Leni Riefenstahl should be remembered as one of the most innovative filmmakers of the century. Adolf Hitler gave Riefenstahl complete control of a 120-man film unit, her own SS guard detachment and a blank check to film the Nuremburg party rally of 1934. What she created was arguably one of the greatest films ever made, Triumph des Willens — a film that is regarded with awe by the sympathetic and shown only with dire warnings by those who sense that the film’s propaganda message is still a danger to their world view.

Though it would be assumed that Riefenstahl would answer to Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, Hitler gave her full authority to guide Nazi filmmaking. In addition to “Triumph of the Will”, her film “Olympiad” was also a masterpiece that has seldom been matched, though her editing techniques have been copied in Hollywood many times. Her work was so successful that she faced obloquy after the war, lost all copyright to her brainchildren, and yet she went on to a rich career in photo documentary work that continues to inspire both men and women just through the excellence of her images. Both Riefenstahl and Reitsch are examples of how the Third Reich ignored gender barriers and encouraged women to build impressive careers.

When it comes to assessing society’s perception of women and their competency, an idea of what should interest German women becomes apparent in a survey of a dozen issues of the N.S. Frauenwarte  magazine. While every weekly issue of this party-authorized periodical examined between 1936 and 1944 certainly contains a photo section on women’s fashion, patterns for the home seamstress, and recipes, each issue also contains articles on family health and medicine, education, military, political, and cultural issues. The covers of these magazines are generally full color art works of high quality, sometimes of Germanic heritage subjects, sometimes of political, cultural, or military significance. The treatment of national issues mirrors the coverage given of the same topics in magazines generally targeted to male audiences. Political propaganda in a 1944 issue discusses “the gangster Roosevelt”, playing to a readership that had already been subjected to bombing raids that had destroyed neighborhoods in most German cities.

One of the best measures of how the worth of woman is gauged in a society is the extent of physical protection afforded to women. The pandemic domestic violence in modern American society is assumed to be a price that must be paid for enlightenment and equality, but even harsh critics of Third Reich society have to admit that draconian punishment of sex crimes achieved what many Americans say would have the same chilling effect on crime if swift and sure sentences were levied on American criminals

During the Third Reich, castration was a possible but rarely pronounced sentence; however, protective custody in a concentration camp was a common penalty for sex offenses, including homosexuality. Disruptions of the public order was not tolerated, and this meant a remarkable personal safety for German citizens that started with the outlawing of the Communist Party, and continued even with the bombing of German cities in the latter years of the war. While there was civil crime in Nazi Germany, critics who accept facts have admitted that, even in the extremities of the last years of the war, a female in the Reich had little to fear except allied bombs. Doors did not require locks— streets and personal property were safe at all hours of the day and night. German media of the time made propaganda capital of the relatively insecure conditions in American society, and the American situation does not seem to have grown more secure for women with the social enlightenment of utopian engineers.

In her well-researched book The Nazi Organization of Women, Jill Stephenson points out that German women were as meticulously organized as were men in National Socialist Germany. Just as males routinely went from German Youth to Hitler Youth, from Adolf Hitler academies to the Ordensburgen, from the German Labor Service to the armed services, so women joined the young girls’ organization, then the BDM, and then to the N.S. Frauenschaft when they reached their majority.

Just as membership in Boy and Girl Scouts in the United States has proved to be character-forming, so did memberships in these German organizations shape the attitudes and directions of the German man and woman. To look at the view of women’s organizations of the Nazi period is to see the influences that shaped women’s attitudes. A 1934 publication, the N.S. Frauenbuch , outlines the goals of women in the new Reich. The women’s movement was commissioned to resist the degenerate influences that would damage the race, and would build the community of the Volk.. The German approach to love, marriage, home, arts and crafts, physical training, education, child-rearing was such that it is no surprise that the contemporary view of Germanic womanhood would be substantially different from role of American womanhood of the 90s as promoted by Ellen Degeneres and Patricia Ireland.

As National Socialism certainly promoted what are today called “racist” policies, it sought to emulate nature’s perpetual improvement of all living things through genetic diversity within the limitations of particular races. Women in Germany of the period practiced racial hygiene and the result was intended to produce stronger, healthier children. Books and magazine articles repeatedly affirmed that this duty to maintain racial continuity was primarily the responsibility  of women.

Further than racial hygiene, German women were also taught that they were also held up as the nucleus of their society. An essay in the 1934 N.S. Frauenbuch  explains the role of woman in the new Reich as “exemplar and way-shower” to the movement, serving as the guiding hand for civilization that could be traced as far back as the Bronze Age, and that women served as a civilizing and directing influence for German men. Another essay in the same book deals with the paramount importance of motherhood and its importance to society because the mother is the first teacher of every child.

With the award of the first Mother’s Crosses on Mother’s Day in May 1939, the official party women’s magazine N.S. Frauenwarte  extolled the strength of the German mother, affirming the power of a mother’s love and how even women who were childless could participate in the meaningful rearing of children. Nazi Germany established mothers’ homes, and the SS created the Lebensborn  society to see to the rearing of healthy German children. This latter society was savaged in British and American propaganda and pictured as a “stud farm” for the SS, when it was actually an organized series of homes for pregnant women and young mothers whose mates had fallen, or would soon fall, in the great bloodbath of the Ostfront.   In this sense, the German system offered dignity, income, and respect for German women who were victims of circumstance, whereas establishments for women in similar distress in America of the era were organized as the last refuge of the shamed and discarded.

In matters of sexual behavior, Bleuel recounts the content of German sexual hygiene manuals of the 1930s as condemning premarital sex,  warning that masturbation leads to mental disease, and preaching that sex outside of marriage was inherently wrong; however, he neglects to point out English and American books such as What Every Young Man Should Know  carries those same ideas to neurotic extremes, and every man over 40 remembers the dictionary definition of masturbation to be found as “self abuse,” with no other instructions given. The inclined plane theory of civilization notwithstanding, modern pundits are once again flirting with the outrageous concept of premarital abstinence, although American counselors stress that it should be a matter of “personal choice.”

What about the concept of love in the Nazi society? Of course modern propaganda movies present the German society as cold and inhuman, but an essay by Dr. Else Vorweck in the N.S. Frauenbuch  addresses love in the National Socialist state. She points out that the foundation for family resides in a deep and lasting spiritual love between a man and a woman, and that this love and loyalty, as manifested in marriage, is a true “loyalty unto death” that is natural and instinctive for the German woman. The same essay looks disparagingly at “free love” as the sexual revolution was labeled in less-complicated times. Free love was seen as destructive to the woman and to the race, because any resulting single parenthood was damaging to both.

Such a concept would not seem strange to American readers of the 1930s where such ideas were still a part of common mythology until television and modern Hollywood movies “liberated” women. Of course, modern media hucksters of the Murphy Brown generation point out that such dependence on love and family has led to great disappointment in society where not every man and woman is able to find such an accommodating relationship, and they point out the 60% American divorce rate as proof of that reality.

An understanding of propaganda lends a hand here in that situation comedy of the 1950s touted “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Leave it to Beaver” as the ideal of the American family. The next generation celebrated “All in the Family” as a mirror of the dysfunctional American family, and today’s generation considers “Married with Children” as the mold for American family experience. While no American family, including the Nelsons, ever lived the Ozzie and Harriet life, that propaganda ideal offered a societal model that real people actually expected to aspire to. With woman’s role changing in succeeding sitcom series that offer a lowest-common-denominator example for people to live down to, the disintegration of the family became less painful as it became more inevitable.

While it is common to date the “women’s movement” in America from the 1960s and the writings of Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and other leftist revolutionaries, German women recognized the political origins of feminism long before this modern era. Dr. Ruth Hildebrandt wrote in the 1940 yearbook of the Reichsfrauenführung  of women and the new European Order, saying that the women’s movement had made a “decisive choice” in the late 19th Century, identifying with Marxist ideas.

Indeed, most American women’s organizations have relied on the separation and politicizing of gender and other social classes in order to create internal conflict. Before feminist ascendancy, both America and Germany considered the importance of society as a whole, and the responsibility of both men and women to work together for the good of the culture as a whole.

The result of the German view of female status was to create a unity of society wherein women were valued both in their role as the center of the family, and as respected members of society whose work on farms, in factories, in medicine, letters, and education was essential to the existence of the short-lived Reich.

The role of German women, even as outlined in propaganda, was based on a classic view that offered much in the way of social status and protection, while placing both women and men into a mosaic that created the assurance of continuity of society and a way of life.

In America, the feminist movement found more than sexual liberation in the wake of the 1964 birth control revolution. Today’s liberated woman has been able to free herself from traditional concepts of family in the certainty that the welfare state and the National Education Association will take over the onerous and thankless job of raising and indoctrinating children. The treasure trove thus created will be an entire generation of dysfunctional talk show guests and subjects for magazine articles such as “Fighting the Stigma of my Interracial Baby” or “My Stepfather is My Lover.” As heretical as it seems, German women under Hitler perhaps lived roles that 1990s women might well envy if they were able to review the facts.

REFERENCES

Bleuel, Hans Peter. Sex and Society in Nazi Germany. Lippincott, Philadelphia & New York 1973.

Fillies-Kirmsse, Erika (ed.). Deutsches Frauenschaffen im Kriege—Jahrbuch  der Reichsfrauenführung. Hauptabteilung Presse-Propaganda, Berlin N.D. (1941).

Hamilton, Charles. Leaders and Personalities of the Third Reich. R.James Bender Publishing, Palo Alto, CA 1984.

Leiser, Erwin. Nazi Cinema. Macmillan, New York 1974.

Littlejohn, D. & Dodkins, Col. D.M. Orders, Decorations, Medals and Badges of the Third Reich. R. James Bender Publishing, Palo Alto, CA 1968.

Semmelroth, Ellen & von Stieda, Renate (ed.). N.S. Frauenbuch.. J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, München 1934.

Semmelroth, Ellen (ed. in chief). N.S. Frauenwarte.  NSDAP Reichsleitung, Berlin.1933-1945.

Stephenson, Jill. The Nazi Organization of Women. Croom-Helm, London 1981

Dr. Frank Thayer is a professor . of Journalism and Mass Communications at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Born 15 July 1939 in anta Rita, NM, Thayer has had extensive mass media and journalism education experience, both in the United States and Canada. Aside from teaching news writing, editing, reporting, and photojournalism, Thayer also teaches public opinion and propaganda. Recent publications include “Symbols and Propaganda” in the Salem Press volume Encyclopedia of Propaganda, and a forthcoming paper “Principles and Tactics of Propaganda: Inevitability and Effectiveness of Managing Public Attitudes.” Thayer has an interest in the history of the Third Reich and has published numerous articles on the history and regalia of Third Reich organizations, including that of the N.S. Frauenschaft.

Nazis Were Good to Women, Prof Says

September 2007

by Rafael Medoff and Laurel Leff

(Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org Prof. Leff is Associate Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University, and author of ‘Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper’.)

A leading German television station has fired its anchorwoman for praising the status of women and family in Nazi Germany.

By contrast, New Mexico State University is refusing to even criticize the head of its journalism department for praising the status of women in Nazi Germany and writing forewords for books denying the Holocaust.

The two cases raise important questions about how democratic societies should respond to outrageous speech.

The controversy in Germany involves NDR-Television’s news anchor, Eva Herman. A critic of feminism, Herman urges a return to the days when most German women were housewives and mothers, and has proposed government subsidies to combat Germany’s low birth rate. German feminist leader Alice Schwerzer called Herman’s proposal reminiscent of the Mother’s Cross award that the Hitler regime gave to women who bore more than three children.

Last week, at an event launching her new book, Ms. Herman remarked: “[The Hitler era] was a gruesome time … but even then there were good things and these were the values of children, mothers, families, togetherness.” NDR Television responded by firing her.

Germany is a democracy, but because of its unique history, it restricts some forms of public expression in ways that would be unthinkable in the United States. The need to prevent a resurgence of Nazism has resulted in German bans on publicly displaying Nazi symbols, publicly praising the Nazis, and denying the Holocaust. In America, by contrast, someone cannot be fired from her job for praising the Nazis; the Constitution protects a person’s right to praise anyone or anything she chooses.

But just because someone can’t be fired, does that mean there should be no response at all to those who praise Hitler?

Consider the case of Dr. Frank Thayer.

Thayer is head of the Journalism and Mass Communications Department at New Mexico State University, where he has taught since 1986. According to the university’s web site, “his teaching concentration is in news writing, editing, and in public opinion and propaganda.”

Sometimes Thayer’s interest in propaganda strays beyond the classroom.

During the mid-1990s, Thayer helped edit, and wrote the forewords for, a three-volume work called “Gestapo Chief,” which purports to be based on secret interviews with Gestapo head Heinrich Muller, but which mainstream historians regard as fraudulent. At one point, Muller is quoted as saying that less than half a million Jews died in Nazi captivity, “mostly from typhus.” The book’s author, one Gregory Douglas, adds his own “reflections” supporting Muller’s denial of the Holocaust. In an interview with the Albuquerque Journal last year, Prof. Thayer was asked about Muller’s claim regarding the Jews. He replied: “I don’t know, I don’t think I can address that.”

Thayer, who says he became friends with Douglas because they both collect war memorabilia, wrote about Nazi Germany again in 1998–in the pages of The Barnes Review, a magazine that promotes Holocaust-denial. His article, “The Role and Status of Women in Nazi Germany,” would no doubt interest ex-anchorwoman Eva Herman, and not only because the article included a photograph by Thayer of the Mother’s Cross.

Thayer favorably cited Hitler’s National Socialist Women’s League for having “promoted healthy lifestyles, solid family life, better education for women, social welfare tasks, and patriotic service to the Reich.” Thayer did not explain how the League’s devotion to Nazism made for better education or a healthy lifestyle.

“[T]he Third Reich ignored gender barriers and encouraged capable women to build impressive careers,” Thayer wrote, pointing to filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl as an example. Riefenstahl’s films glorified and promoted Nazism, but that does not seem to trouble Thayer, who asserts that Riefenstahl’s only critics are those who see her films’ message as “a danger to their world view.”

Thayer repeatedly compared Nazi Germany to America–and not unfavorably. He wrote that the “character-forming” impact of Nazi youth movements was reminiscent of “membership in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in the United States” … The U.S. is afflicted by “pandemic domestic violence,” while “a female in the Reich had little to fear except Allied bombs” … The Nazi “Lebensborn” program of using unmarried women to breed ‘racially pure’ Aryan children with SS officers “offered dignity, income and respect for German women,” while “women in similar distress in America” were “shamed and discarded.”

Prof. Philip Kushner of the University of Texas, whose diligence has brought Thayer’s writings to public attention, has urged the New Mexico State University administration to criticize Thayer’s involvement with Holocaust-deniers. So far, no luck. University spokeswoman Mary Benanti said: “The university, at this point in time, is respecting Dr. Thayer’s First Amendment right to free speech as well as the other individual engaged in the discussion. They both have a right to express their opinions.”

The New Mexico State U. administration is missing the point. Nobody is saying Prof. Thayer should be fired or prevented from publicly praising the Nazis. In Germany, of course, Thayer might end up like Eva Herman. But this is America; his repulsive statements are not illegal. All Prof. Kushner is suggesting is that the administration publicly reject Thayer’s views. Yes, Thayer has freedom of speech; but so does New Mexico State University. Is it too much to ask the NMSU administration to exercise its right?
Editorial Comment:

Pity poor Dr. Thayer who made the cardinal error of providing a moving target for the vicious Holocaust Industry.

In his article on German women, he did not once refer to their (sacred) murder of millions and millions of European Jews during the Second World War.

In the years ensuing since the end of the war in 1945, an enormous, very profitable and politically powerful movement has developed  It is the basic dogma of this congregation that the evil Nazis, led by a psychopathic anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler, embarked on a secret program to exterminate all the Jews in Europe.

To further their evil ends, the vicious Nazis set up a host of concentration camps, most particularly Auschwitz in Silesia, where daily train-loads of weeping, harmless Jewish men, women, children and, often, beloved pets, were unloaded with the use of whips, forked sticks, raging dogs and cattle prods onto the railroad platforms of the camp to be whipped and driven, screaming, into enormous gas chambers the size of an indoor sports area where they were gassed to death and their tens of thousands of bodies cremated in immense crematoriums.

Huge clouds of smoke pouring from their 500 foot high chimneys could be seen as far away as Norway, is the claim.

This Industry produced hundreds of books dealing with this theme such as ‘The Anna Frank Diaries,’ “The Painted Bird,” “Fragments,” “Into that Darkness,” and many, many more,

‘Institutes’ such as the aforementioned ‘The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies’ and the ‘Wiesenthal Foundation’ sprang up like mushrooms after a good rain and poured forth a great rolling thunder  of vicious and entirely fictional drum-beatings, not only to make money for themselves but to gain political recognition and political power for their co-religionists..

Unfortunately, nearly all of the so-called ‘Holocaust literature’ is entirely fictional as is, an objective person must realize, the entire legend of mass evictions and gassings. Because there is not one scrap of original German paper supporting the Industry thesis of mass murder, the Industry people have invented endless and emotional books, television shows, motion pictures and slide-enhanced lectures in their various institutions.

In this case, the totally objective Thayer article was seized upon by the ‘Wyman Institute’ people and calls were made for the professor to be fired by his school because he was, obviously, an evil Nazi-loving ‘Holocaust’ denier.

Of course, a sane and objective reader would be unable to detect these, to the Industry people, horrific postulations anywhere in the article but truth and objectivity are never a part of Industry public relations rantings.

In this case, the Wyman people were aided and abetted by one Phillip Kushner who claimed to be a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Like to many of the ‘Holocaust’ allegations, Kushner was only a part time lecturer on statistics, was never a professor and was eventually fired by the school because, according to posted student evaluations, he was a terrible teacher.

Like so many other ‘Holocaust’ writers, Kushner’s life was filled with an endless parade of societal and persona disasters. His divorce was particularly unpleasant and tasteless with charges of impotence and drunkenness flying back and forth like bovine fecal matter. An ugly child support case was hardly an improvement and Kushner’s subsequent lawsuits against his former lawyers were quickly rejected by the courts.

Finally, as a sad finale to his failed academic career, his school sacked him. One would wonder if the people at the ‘Wyman Institute’ were aware of the credentials, or utter lack thereof, of their informant and co-religionist when they used his bleatings to attack Thayer, his article and his school..

However, in a venue crammed to the Plimsoll Line with emotive fiction masquerading as fact, Kushner’s shabby background puts him in the same category as ‘Binjimin Wilkomerski’ the author of ‘Fragments.’ This disconnected purported memoir of tragic horror as a  very young concentration camp inmate, fell to pieces when if was revealed in the columns of the New York Times that ‘Wilkomerski’ was actually a German Swiss named Bruno Dosseker who had never left Switzerland and had been born during the war to a Protestant Swiss family.

In the final analysis, what the Industry fails to realize is that great bulk of the American public has no interest in their woeful fictions and is far more interested in such important and pressing issues as the validity of their mortgages or the score of a current sports event.

Roosevelt against the Jews: A Retrospective View

January, 2009

by Col. Harold R. Kreig  USA (ret)_

The institution of the Nuremberg racial laws in 1936 and the pogroms that swept Germany in November of 1938, made it clearly evident to the world that Hitler was determined to drive the Jews out of Germany. There was no program or intention in Germany then to put them into concentration camps because these camps were designed solely for political dissidents and common criminals. The addition of the 500,000 Jews living in Germany at that time would have put an intolerable strain on the camp system. It was the general idea that there should be a new diaspora, a dispersing of the Jews. But the problem facing the Germans, aside from international outrage engendered by their program of harassment and expulsion, was that no other country wanted to accept the Jewish refugees. Many of these originated in Russia and had fled into what was then the Grand Duchy of Poland when the Imperial Russian government started its great pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century.

When Poland gained its independence from Russia after the First World War, the new Polish head of state, Marshal Pilsudski, strongly encouraged as many of the five million Jewish residents of his country to leave it as quickly as possible. The great bulk of these escaped into what was then a very tolerant Germany only to encounter, after 1933. the political programs of Adolf Hitler.

Once it became evident to the Jewish community of Germany that the persecutions would nor cease, many fled the country, some legally and some illegally. A number went to Switzerland, which took in about fifty thousand, and many others went to France, Belgium and Holland, while a very few managed to go to England and America. The British initially permitted immigration to Palestine, a territory they had controlled since the end of the First World War, but in 1939, when Müller took over the Jewish diaspora, the Arabs of that territory were in a state of open revolt against the British, in part because of the influx of Jews. The British then curtailed any Jewish immigration and threatened to sink any refugee boats full of Jewish refugees headed for Palestine.

France was overwhelmed with a quarter million refugees from the recently ended Spanish Civil War and declared that they would accept no more refugees. The desperate Jews trickled in small numbers to South America and such remote places as Shanghai, the foreign business center of a China that was engaged in a major war with the Japanese. When that city fell to the Japanese Army, Shanghai was cut off as a haven for any further refugees.

‘The United States had a reputation as a haven for the persecuted of Europe, but this reputation was about to be irremediably tarnished through the actions of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Breckenridge Long, one of the highest officials of the U.S. Department of State.

When confronted with a mass of frightened German (and Austrian) Jews seeking entrance into the United States, Roosevelt at first attempted to find some other area in the world that would accept a large number of them. The President, through the Department of State, suggested Ethiopia as a country into which “refugees could be admitted in almost unlimited numbers,” while the Germans recommended Madagascar. Mussolini felt  that Siberia had its attractions and Roosevelt then decided that central Africa might be a better choice. The British suggested the jungle areas of South America or perhaps Venezuela could be an “excellent settlement area for unwanted German Jews.” Needless to say, the German Jews had no great interest in the jungles and unpopulated, remote areas of the world, and as middle-class professionals and businessmen, preferred to go to the United States since the rest of civilized Europe plainly did not want anything to do with them.

In 1938, the immigration quota from Germany was 25,957. This figure reflected German immigrants, not Jewish, and the question put to the State Department was how many of the German quota would be Jews. This matter was never officially resolved because it suited the Department of State not to do so.

Breckenridge Long, the official in the State Department who oversaw immigration, was strongly xenophobic, disliked immigrants from countries that were not Northern European Protestant in origin, and most especially detested Jews. In these attitudes, Long was entirely in harmony with the American East Coast establishment which felt exactly as he did.

The United States was still suffering from the effects of the Depression that had begun in 1929 and had erupted again in 1938. In times of economic travail, the minorities always suffer and this maxim was certainly true from 1938 onwards. While Roosevelt had opened his administration to Jews, something that had never happened before, he nevertheless had no interest in assisting the Jews of Europe in entering the United States. The President was a man of his age and of his milieu, and anti-Semitism in America was not violent as it was in Germany, but was certainly evident and very persistent in American society.

After the pogroms of Crystal Night, Roosevelt publicly expressed outrage to the German government about the blatant mistreatment of the Jews. But in private, he agreed with the stringent boycott of Germany and her exports by his friend Samuel Untermeyer and powerful members of the American Jewish community, who had expressed their anger against Hitler for a number of years before the 1938 incidents. But when it became evident that the United States was the intended goal of the Jews of Germany, Roosevelt balked. Verbal outrage and high-sounding morality was one thing, but an influx o f Jews was quite something else. Even after Crystal Night, American public opinion was strongly opposed to any loosening of the very restrictive 1924 immigration act, and, in fact this opposition rose from 70 percent to 83 percent following the German pogroms.

If nothing else, Roosevelt was a thoroughly pragmatic and coldly realistic politician. Even though he personally enjoyed considerable support from America‘s Jewish community, he realized that the Jews alone could not keep him in office so he quickly pandered to the exclusionist view of the overwhelming bulk of his electorate.

His personal views were certainly reflected in the elitist attitudes of his career diplomats. In 1938, after Mussolini had promulgated some anti-Semitic laws. Roosevelt wrote to his Ambassador in Rome, “What a plight the unfortunate Jews are in. It gives them little comfort to remind them that they have been ‘on the run’ for about four thousand years.”

In 1942, after the war had been raging for three years and there was no doubt that all of Europe’s Jews were being rounded up and put into detention camps, Roosevelt remarked to Leo Crowley, an Irish-American Catholic who was his Custodian of Alien Property, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., his Secretary of the Treasury, “ Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here on sufferance. It is up to both of you to go along with anything that I want at this time.”

In a 1943 trans-Atlantic scrambled telephone conversation with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Roosevelt said. “Of course I have pity on the Jews, but we simply don’t want them over here. No one wants them here. You don’t want them in Palestine and neither do the Arabs. Could we not send them to some place like South America?” to which Churchill replied, “Certainly that could be done, but I cannot countenance shipping hundreds of thousands of perfectly obnoxious Polish Jews to our territories.”

In May of 1939, Heinrich Müller head of the German Gestapo or secret state police, and in charge of Jewish immigration, had arranged with the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line to charter one of their passenger ships, the SS St. Louis, to transport a group of 936 German Jews to Cuba. Müller had purchased landing permits from the Cuban government and secured passports for the Jews, but shortly after the ship sailed on May 13, the U.S. Department of State, in the person of Breckenridge Long, who was acting on the specific orders of President Roosevelt, requested that the Cuban government immediately cancel all of these landing permits. Neither he nor the President wanted that many unwelcome Jews so close to America, a country which, they reasoned, the refugees would then wish to move to. Never adverse to making money, the Cubans, in defiance of the American President, claimed they would permit the Jews to land if they would renegotiate their fees and pay an additional $500, plus Cuban legal fees per person. Since the homeless refugees had spent all their money on the voyage and on their original landing fees, only twenty two of them were able to raise the necessary cash. The others, and the Captain of the St. Louis, were ordered out of Cuban waters at once. The Captain, Gustav Schröder, knowing that taking his passengers back to Germany guaranteed that they would be imprisoned, made every effort to land them at an American port. But Roosevelt ordered out the American Coast Guard which followed the ship to prevent any of the refugees from attempting to swim ashore.

In America, many Jewish groups, including the influential Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, petitioned official Washington, and the President, to relent. They pointed out that of the 936 passengers, 734 had U.S. immigration-quota permits, but Roosevelt and Long would not move an inch and the St. Louis had to sail hack to Europe. They would not even accept the children among the passengers.

Most of the passengers were landed in countries other than Germany, which only postponed their fate by a few months. When the 1940 campaign in France ended, the refugees there were in the same situation again.

Prior to this, immediately after the Crystal Night pogroms, the British government had agreed to relinquish their own quota of 65,000 British immigrants to America in favor of the Jews, but again Long rejected this out of hand. Tired of the complaints of the American Jewish community, Roosevelt discussed the possibility of “establishing Jewish colonies on uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural land,” hut of course, not in the United States. This idea came to nothing because no country possessing such land had any interest in permitting the creation of Jewish colonies.

A year later, the ship SS Quanza from Portugal with a manifest of eighty Jewish refugees landed at Norfolk, Virginia. The passengers had no valid papers and had been summarily rejected by both Mexico and Nicaragua. Mrs. Roosevelt exerted her influence and sent down the head of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees to see that the refugees would be accepted. This act incurred the wrath of Long who in this case, at least, had been overruled by higher authority.

A few months before the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt blocked a plan to permit the $50 million Congressional appropriation for the American Red Cross to spend $1 million of it to aid for the transportation of refugee children from Europe. Although some of his closest aides supported this bill, Roosevelt blocked it and it died. However, he did donate $250 to a U.S. charity to assist in the emigration of the children of one Jewish family, a matter that had been pressed on him by a cousin.

Roosevelt’s man in the State Department, Breckenridge Long, did everything in his power to prevent the entrance of any “undesirable” refugees into the United States, and this term encompassed almost anyone from Eastern Europe. He detested Jews and did not wish this country to be contaminated by a group of people whom he viewed as impossible to assimilate.

Long instructed U.S. Embassies and consulates throughout Europe to block any attempt at emigration by European Jews to America, stalling the process by erecting as many bureaucratic barriers as possible. When Interior Secretary Harold Ickes attempted to issue permits for 12,000 refugees to land in the Virgin Islands, which his agency controlled, and then permit them to immigrate to the United States, Long went to the President and quickly convinced him to block the Ickes program, which Roosevelt promptly did.

In 1944, after the collapse of the Horthy regime in Hungary and the installation of a right-wing government, the SS was asked to deport all the Jews from Budapest. A year before, a group was formed in Hungary called Waadah, short for Waddat Ezra Vö-Hazzalah Bo-Budapest or Jewish Rescue Committee, Budapest. The purpose of this group was to facilitate the escape of Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe to Palestine.

With the fall of Horthy, who was not viewed as an enemy of the Jews, and the arrival of the SS in the capital, the leaders of Waadah commenced negotiations with Himmler’s representatives with a view to buying the freedom for many Jews. They played on Himmler’s increasing interest in establishing his credentials with the Allies and finally got him to agree to abandon his deportation plans for Hungarian Jews in return for 10,000 military trucks and other supplies, including tea and coffee. Adolf Eichmann, head of Muller’s deportation department, asked Joel Brand, a Budapest businessman and founding member of Waadah, to take these proposals to Istanbul in neutral Turkey and commence negotiations with the World Jewish Organization.

As a token of good faith, Eichmann stated that if the Allies were willing to even consider this exchange, they would at once release 100,000 Jewish prisoners from the concentration camps. Armed with this information, Brand took a train to Istanbul where he was unable to convince the Jewish groups to support the trade. On his way to address the British officials in Palestine, he was arrested in Syria by British military police and flown eventually to Cairo, Egypt, where he was put in jail and held incommunicado.

Brand eventually was brought before Lord Moyne, the British Resident Minister in the Middle East. He was informed by Moyne that neither the Jewish groups nor the Allies would consider negotiating with Himmler, and that the “Jews-for Trucks” program was impossible to implement. When the frantic Brand told Moyne that all the Allies had to do was, at least, agree in principle and talk with German representatives in neutral Switzerland, Moyne refused.

Brand said that if the Allies agreed to meet with Himmler’s representatives, even if it was understood that nothing would come of the meetings, 100,000 Jews would be released from the concentration camps and sent to whatever country the Allies wished. Moyne declined to even consider this saying, “Whatever would we do with a hundred thousand Jews?”

Following the collapse of his project, Himmler ordered the deportation of all the Jews of Budapest. Instead of releasing what Himmler expected would be all the Jews in his camps, the camps increased their Jewish populations by 300,000.

In addition to refusing to permit refugee Jews into the United States, Roosevelt had earlier enriched the national coffers by ordering all Swiss assets held in their American branches frozen. On June 14, 1941, all such assets were taken over by the American government. The prudent Swiss had moved deposits to what they felt was the safety of the United States when war broke out in 1939. These deposits were put into Swiss hanks by anti-Nazi and Jewish individuals prior to the war, and the Swiss felt with some justification, that these funds could be taken if and when the Germans invaded Switzerland.

The foresight of the Swiss in protecting vulnerable monies was negated by Roosevelt‘s order, and over $229 million of Jewish assets disappeared into U.S. custody along with millions more from other sources. Some of this money, approximately $500,000 was eventually returned after the war. The rest was kept by the U.S. Treasury on the grounds that, as accounts which had been dormant for five years, they were deemed abandoned. hence passing irrevocably to the U.S. government. A significant number of confiscated bonds ended up in the hands of Roosevelt Administration official, Jesse Jones and a smaller number in the hands of one of Roosevelt’s sons.

One would ask the question that if no one was able to access his accounts during the five years the Treasury Department held them, how could they ethically be considered abandoned? The answer, quire obviously, lies in the amount of money, coupled with what obviously was a total lack of official U.S. interest in the welfare of European Jews. While there was disinterest in assisting these unfortunate Jews, there was no lack of interest in acquiring their money

After the war, Swiss accounts which could be proved not to be of “Nazi origins” was returned, but none of the Jewish funds seized by Roosevelt, with small exceptions, ever surfaced again.

 

The art world’s Bernie Madoff, and his deceptions

October 23, 2010

by Helen O’Neill 

Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — In a clattery, uptown bistro, not far from the studio where he once watched his father paint bold abstract masterpieces, Earl Davis contemplates the greatest loss of his life.

Not his beloved father, Stuart Davis, who died in 1964 when Earl was 12. Nor his father’s work, which Davis, an only child, spent three decades trying to document, preserve and showcase. Even the loss of the millions of dollars that the paintings were worth — Davis’ inheritance, swindled from him in the cruelest fashion — is not what hurts the most.

The biggest loss, Davis says, was the love and friendship of the man he admired and adored, a man he trusted with everything — his confidences, his dreams, his father’s life’s work.

Even now, several years after the unraveling of one of the most elaborate art frauds in history, Davis has nightmares about confronting Lawrence Salander, begging him for answers, for the truth.

Why did the art dealer spend decades cultivating his friendship even as he sold more than 90 of father’s paintings behind his back, dismantling a collection that Davis had sought so hard to preserve? How could he have collaborated with Davis for 23 years, working together on an exhaustive catalog that detailed the story behind every Stuart Davis work, only to be sentenced before it was published?

What of the more mundane things — those endless, richly satisfying conversations about art and philosophy and life? Was any of it real?

The same anguished questions have tortured dozens of other victims — from celebrities to wealthy collectors to artists and those managing their estates — defrauded of some $120 million by a man some call the Bernard Madoff of the art world, owner of a lavish Upper East Side gallery one luxury magazine called the best in the world.

Earlier this year, Salander pleaded guilty to 29 counts of grand larceny and fraud. In August, he was sentenced to six to 18 years in prison.

In court documents and testimony, the 61-year-old Salander outlined his schemes: How he would sell art he didn’t own, sometimes peddling the same painting or shares in a painting to two or more buyers. How he falsified records, lied to investors, submitted fraudulent loan applications, sold paintings that were for exhibit only, and pocketed the money to pay for private jets, his multimillion dollar Manhattan town house, his 66-acre estate upstate.

Was it all a great con from the start? Or did Salander, as some suggest, cross to “the dark side” of the art world, taking advantage of a strangely unregulated place where priceless works are often consigned to galleries with little more than a handshake, where trust is as important as receipts?

“Larry Salander took that which is the essence the art world — relationships — and violated it in the worst possible way,” says Ellyn Shander, a psychiatrist who lost her late father’s art collection to Salander. “He is a sly, manipulative sociopath, a con man with no soul.”

But others describe Salander as a misunderstood visionary who was passionate about great art, who nourished lesser known artists as well as established ones, who ultimately felt betrayed himself by the world he loved and the backers who once believed in him.

“Was he a cheat? Yes. Was he ruthless? Yes,” says artist Paul Resika, who exhibited with Salander for 19 years and lost much of his own art. “But he did great exhibitions that I consider a very high and moral thing to do. He did tremendous things for art.”

Resika is speaking on the phone from Cape Cod. In the background his wife cries out, in disgust: “Larry Salander was a villain.”

___

Ellyn Shander treasures childhood memories of the Sunday morning ritual with her father, Alexander Pearlman. They would take the train to Manhattan from their home in Queens, sometimes with her two sisters in tow, and spend the afternoon wandering through art galleries, inevitably winding up at the Salander-O’Reilly gallery on 79th Street. (Salander’s partner, William O’Reilly, retired from the gallery in 1997, but Salander kept the original name.)

Shander’s eyes glow as she sits in her Stamford, Conn., home and describes growing up in a house filled with art, how the children pretended to friends and neighbors that their father, a physician, was an amateur painter because they were afraid the work would be stolen.

The tiny figurative piece by Modigliani — the first her father ever bought. The vivid Monet seascape. Small Picassos and Cezannes.

All had their stories and memories. They were more than just objects, Shander says. “They were part of our life, part of our connection to our father.”

At the gallery, Shander remembers a stocky, balding, genial man who embraced her father and called him “Doc.” They would stroll through rooms filled with paintings — American modernists like Marsden Hartley and Albert Pinkham Ryder as well as works by Matisse, Corot, Constable, Rembrandt and El Greco — as the two men talked about the latest acquisitions. Her father, Shander says, loved Salander like a son.

And so after Pearlman died in 2004 at the age of 91, his daughters felt relieved when Salander drove to his home after the funeral and loaded the entire collection into a van “for safekeeping.” It was the last they ever saw of their father’s art.

“He walked in all concerned and crying for my dad, and he walked out with a $2 million-plus art collection that he stole. What kind of human being does that?” Shander cries.

And, she adds bitterly, what kind of a world lets him get away with it?

In fact, the art world, with its clubby nature and casual intimacy between dealers, collectors, galleries and artists, is particularly vulnerable to exactly the kind of fraud that Salander masterminded.

“It’s a world of relationships, friendships, handshakes,” says longtime Manhattan gallery owner Joan Washburn. “A world where you only deal with people you know and trust. And often, transactions are very informal.”

It’s also a world of fabulous wealth, enormous egos and creative pride. Artists, eager to have their work exhibited in the finest galleries, hand over paintings with few safeguards. Paper trails can be murky, especially with paintings or sculptures that are hundreds of years old. Title is not always clear. And the agreements that are signed when a work is handed to a gallery for sale or for exhibit offer little protection if the gallery owner is dishonest or goes bankrupt.

Art is also portable. It’s difficult to track whether a piece is in an exhibit, or a gallery or in storage, especially if a dealer is lying about its whereabouts.

Certain legal protections are available, such as filing a Uniform Commercial Code contract or lien that protects the title of the work. But in the art world that’s often considered unseemly, almost a violation of the very trust that is the heart of deals between galleries, collectors and artists.

So Salander was free to build his empire, and his reputation, by manipulating that trust.

By the time his gallery collapsed in October 2007, Salander had become a towering presence in the art world, a self-taught scholar who had risen from relatively modest beginnings managing his father’s small gallery in Manhattan and another in Wilton, Conn. An amateur painter himself (his oil depiction of the crucifixion is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum), Salander’s charm, his prodigious knowledge of art, his energy and passion were irresistible to many.

Tennis star John McEnroe, a serious art collector, apprenticed with Salander in 1993 and is the godfather of one of Salander’s seven children. Abstract expressionist painter Robert De Niro Sr., the late father of the actor, became Salander’s friend and exhibited at the gallery. Hedge fund executive Roy Lennox, a neighbor of Salander’s in Millbrook, N.Y., invested millions in various deals with the gallery. Later, he would describe them in court documents as “nothing more than an illegal Ponzi scheme.”

Earl Davis … Alexander Pearlman … John and Neelon Crawford, sons of the painter and photographer Ralston Crawford … T. Kinney Frelinghuysen, nephew of abstract artist Suzy Frelinghuysen who also represents the estate of her husband, artist George L.K. Morris. All were the recipients of Salander’s perceived bounty, and ultimately his betrayal.

“It was such a beautiful location and Larry was very personable and we were really looking to showcase the art and give Suzy and George a bigger market presence,” says Frelinghuysen, director of the Frelinghuysen Morris house in Lenox, Mass. Though apprehensive at first about leaving his old gallery and handing over so much work, Frelinghuysen was thrilled by the prospects of a magnificent exhibition, and flattered that Salander included some of the nephew’s original work. “I was very proud, and Larry was excited and happy.”

Other collectors and artists felt the same way, privileged to be in such a special place, filled with a sense of gratitude as they handed over valuable pieces.

Even staff at the gallery felt anointed by Salander. Paula Hornbostel, hired as a researcher in 1996, spent a thrilling 11 years at her dream job working for a boss and mentor who inspired her. Salander nicknamed her “Supe” — short for “superwoman” — because of her ability to verify the work of obscure pre-Raphaelite painters. In 2000 Salander flew her to Boston in a private plane and introduced her to the Gaston Lachaise foundation, whose directors were so impressed that they named her curator. Salander went to Hornbostel’s wedding. He offered to help publish her graduate work.

“It was just all so exciting and I was learning so much,” Hornbostel says, recounting traveling expeditions to Budapest and Prague, parties at Salander’s country estate, cozy dinners with artists at his favorite Italian restaurant, Girasole, on East 82nd Street. In 2004, when Salander rented the opulent Frick collection museum on 70th Street for a lavish 40th birthday party for his second wife, Julie, he hired Hornbostel’s sister, a baker, to cater the event.

But even as she was swept up in Salander’s magical world, Hornbostel wondered privately about how he was paying for it all. Her sister was having trouble getting paid. Hornbostel suspected others were, too. The gallery was simply not selling enough work to pay for its exhibits and overhead.

Hornbostel wasn’t the only one who questioned Salander’s lifestyle. In the fall of 2005, Salander moved the gallery to a 25,000-square-foot Italianate mansion on East 71st street with lush velvet walls, a marble foyer and a rent of more than $150,000 a month. Many other gallery owners wondered if he was over-stretched.

Salander talked grandly about bringing “soul” back to art, about acquiring the greatest collection of old masters and Renaissance paintings. He made no secret of his disdain for the astronomical sums of money paid by wealthy new collectors for pieces by contemporary stars like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Art, he said, was the expression of the human soul. And America, he wrote, had become “a soulless society … one that would value a work of art by Andy Warhol or by Francis Bacon three times more than that of a great, late masterpiece by Rembrandt.”

Salander’s new gallery would change that. He was going to single-handedly restore the art market’s soul. Says Hornbostel, “He talked about it all the time.”

The art world was skeptical. Old masters don’t come on the market very often and their authenticity can be hard to trace.

“It was just a mystery to the rest of us, how he could afford it all,” Washburn says.

Then, almost overnight, the mystery was revealed.

___

For Davis, the first hint of trouble came in 2005 when he began asking basic accounting questions about hundreds of paintings and drawings stored with Salander. He was shocked to learn that several pieces had been sold without his permission. Salander stalled, promising that Davis would be paid, offering vague answers about the whereabouts of other works.

Though Davis trusted Salander implicitly, he was worried. There were rumors about cash-flow problems at the gallery, about others not getting paid, about paintings being sold without authorization. Trade magazines began were reporting on legal complaints by collectors, Salander’s former landlord, even his former partner, all saying they hadn’t been paid.

Salander kept reassuring his friend. “The only thing that could stand in the way of paying you would be my death,” he wrote in one 2006 e-mail. Little did Davis know that similar assurances were being sent to dozens of others.

Finally, when Davis demanded a return of all the work, Salander produced a favorite piece — “Music Hall,” from his father’s Ashcan period. Davis felt so relieved, he stopped asking questions, at least for a time. Some time later, according to Davis, Salander called apologetically and said he had been mistaken. “Music Hall” had in fact been sold to a collector years before and he was forced to return it. Davis says he eventually discovered that Salander had simply borrowed back the piece temporarily to falsely reassure his friend.

Later, dozens of similar tales would unfold, many of them detailed in the blizzard of lawsuits that eventually became part of the Salander saga. In the case of McEnroe, Salander persuaded him to buy half shares in two paintings, Arshile Gorky’s “Pirate I” and “Pirate II.” McEnroe later discovered that the shares, for which he had paid $2 million, already belonged to someone else.

“The level of deception was just staggering,” Davis says. “And the level of control.”

But things were spiraling out of control. By 2007 the lawsuits were mounting, as were questions about the gallery’s viability.

Salander’s response, in press reports, was to dismiss the lawsuits as disputes among friends. Everything would be resolved, he said. And the key would be one of the most ambitious exhibitions of old masters paintings ever mounted, a show called “Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture,” to open in the fall of 2007. Anchoring the show: a rare Caravaggio on loan from a London dealer. It was called “Apollo, the Lute Player” and Salander boasted that he could sell it for $100 million.

But that wasn’t enough to assuage the growing unease.

In Massachusetts, even before he learned of the lawsuits, Frelinghuysen became suspicious when a collector from California called to praise a piece he had just bought from the collection stored with Salander. The piece was not for sale. Salander assured Frelinghuysen that the gallery had made a mistake, and that he would be paid — the same assurances he was making to so many others.

Today Frelinghuysen says he feels not only betrayed, and guilty about losing his aunt’s

work, but also painfully naive. “I was still thinking of Larry as a buddy, who believed in the integrity of the foundation,” he says. Court documents indicate that Frelinghuysen’s foundation was defrauded of 41 works worth more than $2 million.

In Connecticut, after reading about Salander’s troubles, Shander went directly to the gallery and demanded her father’s work. She was escorted out by a security guard. Later, she says, Salander called and “tried to sweet-talk me into a deal to sell five paintings and get paid over five months.” Shander refused. She found out later that part of the collection had been sold. The rest is now tied up in bankruptcy proceedings; even her lawyer says it is unlikely she or her sisters will ever retrieve it.

Brooklyn artist John Crawford, son of Ralston Crawford, experienced the same kind of stomach-churning unease when he requested an inventory of his father’s work. In 2007, sick of not getting answers, he drove his 1987 Dodge Dakota into the city, parked on 71st Street, marched into the gallery and loaded any of his father’s paintings that he could find.

In Wyoming, Crawford’s brother, Neelon, was beginning to feel desperate. Even three trips to Manhattan couldn’t get him a full accounting, or a meeting with Salander. Finally, tipped off by a sympathetic gallery worker some of his fathers’ paintings were about to be sold for far less than he had agreed, Crawford called New York City Detective Mark Fishstein in the art fraud division. As Crawford tells it, the detective made a short, laconic phone call to Salander.

“There’s a guy in Wyoming who wants his paintings, you understand? There’s a guy in Wyoming who wants to be paid, you understand? There’s a guy in Wyoming who wants everything shipped to him on a truck next Friday, you understand?”

The detective ended the conversation with a veiled threat to personally visit the gallery.

Most of the paintings were shipped by the end of the week. Crawford laughs heartily as he tells the story. But, he adds, “I feel a lot luckier than most.”

Hornbostel, Salander’s “superwoman,” was not so lucky. In her basement office, she recalls a creeping sense of doom as the gallery prepared for the Caravaggio show. Salander seemed grimly distracted, everyone else was busy, and Hornbostel couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

It wasn’t until another staff member mentioned that a Lachaise sculpture “Garden Lady” was being boxed and carted off in a shipping truck upstairs that she panicked. She burst into Salander’s fifth-floor office, crying out that the piece was not for sale. With a grand gesture, Hornbostel recalls, he picked up the phone and announced, “there has been a mistake, cancel the shipment.” But by the time Hornbostel raced back down to the ground floor, the piece was gone.

She remembers the chaotic day the gallery closed, ordered padlocked by a court after Salander’s former partner and biggest investor, Donald Schupak, filed a series of legal motions to end Salander’s control. It was the opening day of the Caravaggio exhibit. Earlier that day, the London dealer had marched into the gallery and removed “Apollo, the Lute Player,” from the wall. Crowds had gathered outside, some hoping to see the exhibit, others demanding their work.

Hornbostel watched in dismay, barely beginning to digest the level of Salander’s betrayal. And yet she hugged him farewell, saying, “I guess I won’t come in tomorrow.”

“I still don’t know why I did that,” she says.

___

About six months after the gallery closed, Hornbostel was having lunch with her husband and young children when Salander and his wife walked into the restaurant. He smiled, joked with the kids, never mentioned the gallery or the fact that he had filed for personal bankruptcy. Hornbostel could barely contain her anger, and her bewilderment. The Lachaise Foundation, for which Hornbostel had been responsible, had lost an estimated $6.6 million.

“There was no apology, no remorse,” Hornbostel says. “After all the agony he had put me through. I kept looking at him thinking: How could you? Who are you?”

“He was a crook from the start and I believe he thought he could get away with it to the end,” says the poet and collector Stanley Moss, who professes never to have bought into what he calls the Salander myth. He tells of a piece, a small Madonna and child supposedly by 15th-century Italian sculptor Luca Della Robbia, that Salander gave him as a housewarming gift when he moved upstate several years ago. “I knew it was a fake, and he knew I knew it was a fake,” Moss says. “I think it was all about the glamour of money.”

But others have more complicated feelings about a man they had considered a great scholar and friend. Collector Monty Diamond’s voice cracks on the phone as he talks of how hard it is to reconcile his friend of 40 years — the “standup guy” with whom he shared summers on Brant Lake in the Adirondacks, the man who taught him a love and appreciation of great art — with the broken man he witnessed in court.

“I was the beneficiary of this great friendship,” Diamond says. “And at the same time he duped me, he was a con man …” Diamond’s voice trails off.

Salander would offer no public explanations. His sobbing apology in the courtroom seemed, to many of his victims, to be entirely self-centered.

“I’ve lost my wife, my business and my reputation,” he said. “I am utterly and completely disgraced.”

Salander, now jailed at Riker’s Island, has said no more; through his lawyer, he declined to be interviewed.

If there are clues to his actions perhaps they lie in the pages of his unpublished manuscript, “Soul Wars,” a rambling 578-page treatise on the state of the human soul.

In it, Salander laments a decaying society in which “too many of us have prostituted our beautiful souls for money.” He took a risk, Salander writes, “by standing up for the human soul and the art that proves it exists.”

There is one chapter titled “Betrayal.”

“All betrayals are to some degree premeditated,” Salander writes. “Betrayal is never an accident.”

 

Conversations with the Crow

 

            When the CIA discovered that their former Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs, Robert  T. Crowley, had been talking with author Gregory Douglas, they became fearful (because of what Crowley knew) and outraged (because they knew Douglas would publish eventually) and made many efforts to silence Crowley, mostly by having dozens of FBI agents call or visit him at his Washington home and try to convince him to stop talking to Douglas, whom they considered to be an evil, loose cannon.

             Crowley did not listen to them (no one else ever does, either) and Douglas made through shorthand notes of each and every one of their many conversation. TBR News published most of these (some of the really vile ones were left out of the book but will be included on this site as a later addendum ) and the entire collection was later produced as an Ebook.

            Now, we reliably learn, various Washington alphabet agencies are trying to find a way to block the circulation of this highly negative, entertaining and dangerous work, so to show our solidarity with our beloved leaders and protectors, and our sincere appreciation for their corrupt and coercive actions, we are going to reprint the entire work, chapter by chapter. (The complete book can be obtained by going to:

http://www.shop.conversationswiththecrow.com/Conversations-with-the-Crow-CWC-GD01.htm🙂

 

Here is the thirty-eighth  chapter

 

Conversation No. 38

 

Date: Friday, September 27, 1996

Commenced: 11:05 AM CST

Concluded: 11:21 AM CST

RTC: Gregory, I see that the material you got from God knows where about the Clintons is causing real havoc here. Were you aware of that?
GD: One has hopes, Robert, hopes. What kind of havoc?
RTC: Well, it might be a well-kept secret but it turns out to be perfectly true. It’s gotten all over the place. I had two people call me to give me disjointed reports. People can read a simple sentence and then mix it all up when they try to repeat it.

GD: I know. In the main, camels are smarter and they smell better. I hope the Clinton’s like my little sendings. I did the same thing to Cranston[1] earlier on.

RTC: I recall you discussing this with me. You know, I have gotten so disillusioned with some of these people that I really ought to dig into things and send my more material. By the way, did you get the Angleton papers?

GD: Oh, I did but I didn’t want to discuss them on the phone. My God, Angleton was tapping all the phones there, wasn’t he?
RTC: Oh he did. Jim was convinced that everyone was spying on him and in the end, what with tapping the phones of the DCI, the President and God alone know how many bankers, stock brokers, poor Ollie North and so on he had so much data he got a bit out of his head.

GD: Such criminals they are. Thieving, lying, corrupt assholes, all of them. We trust these bank CEOs and heads of major companies, not to mention our top leadership, that I am certain if I released all of Angleton’s material, there would be great trouble. We would see the heads of the Federal Reserve running for Rio before the storm of public opinion. The public, myself included, thinks the Fed is a government operation while it is not.  Private.operation all the way

RTC: Yes, and run by the Jews for the Jews. The famous Bank of New York is a Jewish operation who works with the Russian Mafia to launder money. The FBI knows all about this but Clinton says hands off.

GD: No doubt his wife is behind that. I think her background needs to be exposed.

RTC: And how could you do that? The press would never handle it so you would have to send out thousands of letters. That takes time and costs money. No one really cares here, at least in public. Bus, as I say, your little surprises have stirred up real comment. Of course, it will never go any further than the cocktail circuit.

GD: No, but in your city, that rules, doesn’t it?

RTC: Oh, it does, it truly does. Given your particular talents, Gregory, I don’t doubt that you could start a war if you got loose on the cocktail circuit. Inside the Beltway, everyone wants to be in the know so if they hear some malicious gossip, they will tell their friends that a certain top government official casually told them this. This place is a pressure cooker, filled with liars, babblers and deadbeats. When I say you could raise hell here, of course, I do not include you in any of the above categories.

GD: No, no offense. Are the Kimmel types still calling you about how evil I am?
RTC: I think once they discovered that I passed their names and telephone number on to you, it all stopped. Kimmel himself is horrified that I talk to you and he told Bill that he was afraid I might say or do something you could run with. If they only knew. I know Trento has made a deal with Langley that when I am dead and gone, he will get all my papers…and of course give them what they don’t want out. Joe will be satisfied with some useless crumbs. But when he finds out all the important material is gone with the wind, I imagine he will get on the horn down there and there will be attempts to find out what you have. They know what you will do with it.

GD: What did General Sherman say? Publish and be damned? Something like that. I kept some of this material in footlockers in my bedroom until common sense dictated that I ought to find a safer place for it.

RTC: And what if someone breaks in? Unofficially, that is.

GD: Why I would kill them very dead, Robert. And after I took a sharp axe to their head, I would put a knife in their lifeless hands, call the police and tell them I caught a burglar who tried to kill me. I suppose his friends down the street would find it expedient to drive off. If I did that, I would frisk the stiff and remove any identification. Maybe that way he’d find himself a cheap wooden box out in potter’s field.

RTC: Think of the family. Whatever happened to the breadwinner?

GD: Well, they can comfort themselves with the thought that he is feeding the environment. Helping the worms feed and the grass grow. One time when I became aware that someone was getting into my place and drinking my really good brandy, I poured some old Mr. Boston swill into a good bottle and added some rat poison. Came back from a trip and found vomit and shit all over the entrance hall but no perp. Probably died outside.

RTC: Old Rough on Rats! Terrible, Gregory. I remember that. ‘They Die Outside’ was the motto.

GD: In this case, he probably did but I never heard a word.

RTC: One would think that he didn’t get far.

GD: Agreed. Maybe his friends came and got him. Must have stunk up the car something terrible. Anyway, my brandy was safe. Croton oil is even better. They usually don’t die but there is nothing like a prolapsed rectum to keep a man on his toes.

RTC: (Laughter) No, I suppose not.

GD: I remember once my idiot sister was dating a policeman and I did not like him in our house. Used to give me a hard time and ate up all the candy from the coffee table. I bought a box of Awful Fresh MacFarlane’s soft mints, injected a mixture of croton oil and peppermint extract into all of them and left them in the dish. Bugger gobbled all of them down and then rushed to the back bathroom where it sounded like a drunken hippo thrashing around in a mud flat. After the ambulance came, I replaced the loaded mints with real ones and the next day when his friends came over, they found wonderful, fresh and harmless candy. Of course he never came over to the house again.

RTC: I would think that was wise of him.

GD: My idiot sister told me that he carried one of those tiny liferings around for months. I imagine his anus looked like the sun setting over some tropical island. Flaming red.

RTC: I hope your sister didn’t eat any.

GD: No, that was safe. Booze, yes, but not candy. They probably figured he had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Say, I just remembered a lovely joke I played on my favorite Chop Suey emporium. I got a friend of mine, dressed him up in a coverall and had him walk in the front door of a local Chinese eatery with a live cat in a cage. Through the dining room and right into the kitchen. Of course out the back door before the kitchen staff could grab the cat for the Sunday special. I am told a number of people left at once and never came back. The place closed down about a month later.

RTC: (Laughter)  A man of creative action.

GD: Sometimes. If I couldn’t laugh at the cesspit, I might go mad. Or I could go to the Jockey Club and stuff a wiggling cockroach into the Caesar salad. Well, back to reading the Bible to the cats, Robert.

(Concluded 11:21 AM CST)

Dramatis personae:

 

James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy

 

James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden, and fatal, “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.

 

William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.

 

John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight to the United States.

 

James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organizaed the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.

 

Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.

 

Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley.) Lives comfortably in a nice house overlooking the Mediterranean.

 

Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first, the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organizaion eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.

 

Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of  attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired and lives in retirement in Florida

 

Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.

 

Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller  became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.

 

Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this. Neither were his employers.

 

Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarian and then failed them. First, a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.

 

Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Archives. A strong supporter of holocaust writers

---

[1] Alan MacGregor Cranston June 19, 1914 – December 31, 2000 was an American journalist and Democratic Senator from California. Cranston, a supporter of world government, attending the 1945 Dublin Declaration, and later became president of the World Federalist Association in 1948. He was reprimanded by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics for “improper conduct” on November 20, 1991 after he accepted $1 million in campaign contributions from the Lincoln Savings head, Charles Keating. Keating had wanted federal regulators to stop “hounding” his savings and loan association. The committee deemed Cranston’s misconduct the worst among the Keating Five.