Five Brothers and a War

Prins Bernhard

Rockefeller (who was a director of Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil and Remington Arms), George Herbert Walker, John Rockefeller Prentice. The Thyssen family had established three banks in the 1920s: The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking Corporation in New York City (which was run by Prescott Bush). Before the breakout of the war, Thyssen had moved its German assets into the Rotterdam bank, with the hopes that Holland would remain neutral as it did in World War I. After Holland was overrun, the Nazis travelled to Holland to find out where the money went. They found nothing, because Thyssen had moved the material back to the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. Thyssen sold its holding company, Holland-American, at a supposed loss. In turn, Thyssen claimed the loss as a tax write-off. The buyer of the company turned out to be the Union Bank, which was still owned by Thyssen. When the “Third Reich” fell in 1945, Thyssen had a problem because his paperwork was not only stuck in the Thyssen Bank vaults in Berlin, but worse, those vaults were located in the section of Berlin controlled by the Russians. In order to get the papers out of Germany, Thyssen engaged Prins Bernhard, who claimed that the Nazis had stolen the Dutch Crown Jewels. Bernhard in turn led a group of Dutch intelligence agents to retrieve them. The crown jewels were never missing. What they retrieved instead were the files regarding all of the assets hidden by Thyssen. Those files were returned to the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. At a certain point, the Dutch manager of the bank, realizing that he was sitting on massive Nazi assets, said that he was going to go to the authorities to expose the issue, at which point he was summarily fired. He then decided to travel to New York to reveal the secrets to Prescott Bush, who did in fact meet with him. Two weeks later, the whistle-blower was dead. That was not the only death related to the matter. In 1996 the present Baron Thyssen Bornemisza (Fritz Thyssen's nephew) was interviewed by a Dutch investigative reporter, Eddy Roever in London. Two days later, Roever was dead. Ultimately, the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank owned 31% of the Thyssen Group, through another sleight of hand. The Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, which functioned as the Thyssen Group’s holding company, merged in 1970 with Nederlandse Credietbank. Thyssen Group owns 25%. The upshot is that the laundering of Nazi money was complex and very, very dirty. Prins Bernhard was one of the players who made it all work.

holland

Five Brothers and a War

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