“Conspiracy theories”: Poorly made and deliberately falsified reports on organized crime and secret operations
So-called “conspiracy theorists” market themselves as brave experts on organized crime and illegal intelligence operations without really being able or willing to think like professional investigators or intelligence analysts. As a rule, they are not even familiar with the extensive literature on the intelligence services of the 20th century and the historical research on the major empires.
Among influencers it is enough to know a few set pieces and use the well-known thought pattern. Every current incident, every hated policy, can be traced back to the Illuminati and a conspiracy by Jews that has lasted for several hundred years (some say several thousand years). This means that any amateur activist with a internet connection can supposedly solve virtually any case within five minutes.
In the intelligence world, on the other hand, professionals laboriously collect information and the evaluators prepare reports for the elected politicians. Investigations are carried out in all possible directions, which can take years. People want to find out how things really are.
If you ask historians, even those who specialize in intelligence services, they will say that there were no large state services before the 20th century. Because there are simply no files that could be evaluated. Researchers such as Professor Claus Oberhauser from Austria have now realized that the empires of the time, such as Britain, did have serious structures. Oberhauser followed the trail of the British agent Alexander Horn and his connections to the first big best-selling conspiracy books. Files on this man were also found in the archives of the Foreign Office.
The conspiracy authors over the course of more than 200 years simply wanted to dominate the field that historians had long avoided; to fill the vacuum with completely insane ideas that contradict every principle of the intelligence world.
The usual suspects
In a dark joke from the early 1930s, a Jewish man happily browses through the Nazi propaganda paper “Der Stürmer”. His astonished friends protest:
“Why are you looking at this rubbish? And how come you enjoy it so much?”
“Because,” he replies, “when I read the Jewish newspapers, it always says that we are doing terribly. But here the news is all good. We control the banks, we control the country – we rule the whole world!”
The French King Philip IV (1268 – 1314) from the Capetian line already believed that there were conspiracies against him everywhere: British agents. Jews. Even high-ranking Catholic church officials who did not want to pay the massive new taxes to the crown. Then even the Knights Templar. The French Capetians quarreled, also for propaganda purposes, with the House of Anjou-Plantagenet, which was very powerful at times. Later with the Guelphs, Wettins and Reginars. The Habsburgs accused the Hohenzollerns and vice versa. The Catholic Vatican, which was controlled by the Capetians for a long time, described dissenting Christian movements and later the larger rival churches as a conspiracy. The same was true of the Enlightenment movement. The Enlightenment thinkers, in turn, believed that there were sinister Jesuit agents everywhere who jealously defended Catholic rule and were involved in the plot to blow up the British House of Lords. Since all important circles used secret operations and strict laws punished undesirable acts, there was naturally enough raw material that could be used for propaganda operations. So it was not always just a case of blatant forgeries. Certain types of fakes were directed against different targets at different times. Allegations of satanic rituals affected both Jesuits, Freemasons, alleged witches and Jews. The latter group supposedly kidnapped, tortured and executed small children in the style of Jesus in order to consume their blood and harness ritual magic powers. The Catholic Church had actually kidnapped people during the witch hunts and tortured and executed them according to a manual, but Jews were considered a reliable source of tax money and therefore the Vatican officially banned these anti-Jewish persecutions by declaration, which unfortunately was not always followed in the various cities of Europe. Martin Luther, who established a rival church to the Catholics in cooperation with certain noble lines, published an anti-Semitic translation of the Bible and, in addition to a series of texts, the work “On the Jews and Their Lies” in 1543, although fewer than 40,000 Jews lived north of the Alps in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Legends about well poisonings and ritual murders were rehashed, although he had previously rejected this rubbish.
“Yes, they are keeping us prisoners in our own country, they make us work in the sweat of our noses, earn money and property, while they sit behind the stove, laze around, splurge and roast pears, eat, drink, live comfortably and well off the property we have earned, have us and our property imprisoned by their accursed usury, mock and spit on us because we work and let them lazy squires be […] so they are our masters, we their servants.”
At that time, peasant serfdom and the divine right of the ruling nobility still applied. In fact, the nobility and the church were undoubtedly the exploiters in the various countries of Europe. Even seeing a Jewish person was an extremely rare occurrence. The moneylenders were also mostly Christian, contrary to the myths about the prohibition of interest at the time. Jewish moneylenders had to bear a huge risk of default on larger transactions and could not simply compensate for this by charging usurious interest rates. In most cases, it was only a matter of small, short-term loans for ordinary citizens. Nobles also repeatedly used Jews to collect tax money from the general population.
Those nobles who supported Martin Luther and cultivated rival churches against the will of the Vatican themselves used some Jews as so-called “court factors”; this means procurers and traders. In 1600, William Shakespeare, a member of the so-called “King’s Men”, an artistic troupe under the patronage of the British king, had a success with the play “The Merchant of Venice”. The plot revolves largely around the Venetian merchant Antonio, who takes out a loan from the Jewish moneylender Shylock and agrees to the bizarre contract that if the debt is not paid, he will give up a pound of his flesh. When it comes to that, Shylock actually has a knife and a pair of scales ready, but Antonio is saved by the law, according to which no blood may be shed. In addition, the Jew is considered a foreigner, and his intentions are a serious crime punishable by death and the loss of all property.
A list of printed publications from that time lists “The Jew of Venice” as an alternative title for the play. In 1589, the English poet Christopher Marlowe published “The Jew of Malta” in which the greedy merchant Barnabas carries out one devious deed after another and walks over many corpses to ultimately help the Ottomans conquer Malta. As the new governor of Malta, he immediately betrays the Ottomans, but gets tangled up in his power games and falls into a cauldron of boiling water. English Jews had already been expelled in 1290 under Edward I and were not allowed to return until 1656 under the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The famous story collection “The Canterbury Tales” from the late 1300s by Geoffrey Chaucer, the “father of English literature” who always worked for the nobility, includes “The Prioress’s Tale” among other things. It is about a few Jews who are incited by the devil to kill a seven-year-old Christian boy. The corpse, as if by a miracle, sings a hymn to Mary, the Mother of God. The authorities had the Jews responsible tied to horses, dragged to the gallows and hanged.
The story ends with a mention of the legend of “Hugh of Lincoln” about an English boy who fell victim to a Jewish ritual murder. King Henry III himself traveled to the site and officially ordered the indictment and conviction for ritual murder. Henry’s brother was, of all people, the state functionary Sir John of Lexington. The suspect, under massive pressure, testified that Jews from all over England were involved and that the boy was scourged like Jesus and crucified with a crown of thorns for black magic purposes and as an allusion to the death of Jesus. The boy’s body was buried in Lincoln Cathedral and honored with a shrine and martyr status. However, the Catholic Church later refused to canonize him. There were many other such incidents, such as William of Norwich in England, Simon of Trento in Italy, Werner von Oberwesel in Germany, Andreas Oxner in Austria and several in France. The story of the ritual murder of Andreas Oxner became known under the title “The Jew’s Stone” and was recorded by the Brothers Grimm in “German Legends” (1816/1818).
In 1462, some Jews in the village of Rinn in Tyrol persuaded a poor farmer to hand over his small child to them in exchange for a large sum of money. They took the child out into the forest, where they placed it on a large Stone in the most unspeakable way. Since then, the stone has been called the Judenstein. They then hung the mutilated corpse on a birch tree not far from a bridge.
It is comparable to fake reports and memes in today’s internet age. It spreads virally and finds many imitators. The more it spreads in more variants, the more persuasive it is. From set pieces such as the ritual murder stories and literary characters such as Barnabas from “The Jew of Malta”, it was later easy to spin legends according to which the Rothschilds and other Jewish clans incited the Christian empires of Europe against each other and embroiled them in wars. Let us remember Barnabas: He helps the Ottomans, betrays Malta and thereby makes a career jump. He immediately betrays the Ottomans and wants to help their opponents. In the 1800s, some Jewish banking houses like Rothschild became more important in various, warring empires. The five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild ran five branches of the family business in Germany, Austria, France, England and Italy. Mayer Amschel had processed payments from the British crown for the troops that fought against France in the Napoleonic Wars. The Rothschilds helped the Prussian Hohenzollerns to raise investor money for a war against the French. If we ignore the fact that the Rothschild clan was recruited by the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel and the British crown and was most likely completely under the control of the crown, we are dealing with ordinary operations. And this leads us directly to the central weakness of the anti-Jewish conspiracy narratives: every significant group of the Middle Ages worked with the same tools. Jews did not even have a homeland and thus had the worst possible conditions for intelligence activities. Common conspiracy ideologists claim nothing less than that Jews performed intelligence miracles in series, while the most established empires acted like amateurs.
The anti-Jewish conspiracy myths, Shakespeare plays or Luther’s writings played a subordinate role for a long time compared to the books and pamphlets against Jesuits, Freemasons and Illuminati. All the basic techniques that the various groups were accused of using were more or less the same: occult rituals in secret lodge meetings, causing chaos and strife, playing opponents off against each other. Every empire in antiquity had worked like this. Any significant organization could work like this. The French king had destroyed the Knights Templar because they were accused of pursuing their own imperialism. The Templars had become a mixture of a multinational conglomerate, an army and a secret society. In order for anti-Jewish conspiracy ideas to take off, Jewish bankers of a certain stature were first needed. Only then could Jews be accused of secretly infiltrating states and drawing Christian empires into wars against each other. By imperialist standards, Jews had not even reached the local league. Since they controlled no country of their own, they lacked a place of refuge, a command base. Something like that cannot be replaced by a loose network of ghettos and certain overarching committees.
For intelligence work at a higher level, you have to have state structures and be able to issue false identification papers or other important papers, or put together a story for an agent that would withstand a background check. Jews in Europe were at times completely unwelcome in European countries, otherwise they were confined to ghettos, monitored and in the worst possible legal situation. If there was any suspicion that Jews had been recruited as agents on behalf of a foreign power, searches, arrests, expropriations and executions were easily possible. The high nobility, on the other hand, had a lot at their disposal. Camouflage structures? No problem. False papers? No problem. Training facilities for agents? No problem. Nevertheless, from the 1840s onwards, conspiracy literature succeeded in establishing the idea of a Jewish mega-secret structure. The high nobility was supposedly stupid and naive and incapable of counter-espionage. Families like the Rothschilds were said to have undermined the most powerful empires with ordinary loans, divide-and-rule tactics and a message courier system.
Court jews
Charlemagne is said to have recruited the Jew Isaac from Aachen to interpret during contacts with Muslim caliphs. In the following centuries, more of these so-called court factors or “court Jews” were recruited who enjoyed privileges but were completely at the mercy of the nobility. There were certain laws that could pull the rug out from under the feet of the Jews at any time and, in addition, there was always the option of collective punishment. A traitor had to expect that his family at home, including relatives, or even the entire local Jewish community would be punished. Conversely, it was possible to reward loyalty with money and with new freedoms for the Jews. Some families that had proven themselves to be loyal servants of the nobility over several generations married each other or even their own cousins, which was in keeping with the pattern of the aristocracy.
The constantly growing societies and their consumption of printed pamphlets and books required more and more administrators, and so reliable, loyal people from the middle classes were recruited, who had to prove themselves over generations and were sometimes even given lower noble titles. The Nazi propaganda film “Jud Süß” by Veit Harlan from 1940 revolved around the court factor Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, who – with diabolical energy – became Privy Financial Advisor to Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg and allowed him more and more luxury, which led to unrest. The aim of this, according to the film, was to create chaos on behalf of the Jewish mega-conspiracy. The real person Oppenheimer, however, does not prove the Nazis’ view of history, but refutes it. He did not even have the already very limited civil rights of the time and had to implement unpopular reforms on orders. On the very day of the Duke’s death, Oppenheimer and his staff were arrested, files were confiscated and all of his assets were confiscated. The charges were varied and he had no chance of protecting his rights in solitary confinement and under the interrogation methods of the time. There was no Jewish state that could have intervened on his behalf through diplomatic channels. His lawyer’s letter was ignored by the court and kept out of the trial files, the court met behind closed doors and the death sentence was a foregone conclusion. The execution was a grotesque spectacle under special guard with an estimated 20,000 spectators and a special cage for the corpse. The 7.5 meters of trial files were secret until 1918 and to this day they have not been fully evaluated.
The film “The Rothschilds” was released in the same year (1940) in which the narrative of the traitorous court Jews was further spun. The Elector Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel commissioned Mayer Amschel Rothschild to bring 600,000 English pounds to London to protect these assets from Napoleon’s conquest campaigns. This sum was allegedly misappropriated by the Rothschilds to increase their own family wealth. Decades later, this legend was still in some of the most popular conspiracy books in the world. The “Jewish Encyclopedia” is always cited as the source, which is intended to sound particularly credible. “The Jewish Encyclopedia” only appeared between 1901 and 1906. It was not until the 1960s that it was republished. Even the French branch of the Rothschilds wanted to co-finance the project. Today, the complete, unchanged encyclopedia can be found online, both scans of the originals and a transcript of the text. Nowhere is there any mention of embezzled money. Rothschild brought the majority of the count’s property to Denmark. In Frankfurt, Rothschild still had the count’s remaining valuables worth an estimated 600,000 pounds, which were hidden in boxes so that Napoleon’s soldiers could not find them. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Mayer Rothschild sent the Landgrave’s money to his son Nathan Rothschild in England so that he could buy gold worth 800,000 pounds from the British East India Company, which was needed for England’s war against Napoleon.
Nowhere does the Jewish Encyclopedia even begin to prove that the Rothschilds stole a fortune from the Landgrave and the crown without being caught. The legend is one of the Achilles heels of the Nazi narrative. The high nobility was supposedly so stupid and disorganized that they could not have imagined the loss or misappropriation of 600,000 pounds. Even if the loss of only a fraction of this sum had remained unexplained, the entire Rothschild family could have suffered the same fate as Joseph Süß Oppenheimer: arrest, charges, expropriation, death sentence. If there had been any doubt about loyalty, the Rothschilds would at least have been excluded from important future business deals. It is extremely likely that the Landgrave and the British Crown had almost complete control over the Rothschilds, as this would have corresponded to the logic of an empire at the time and the completely basic approach of intelligence services. We do not, of course, have any convenient files that prove such spy activity, but given the dark field and the historical context, it simply makes no sense to assume that the mighty British Empire would take significant risks with a small Jewish family that had lived in the Frankfurt ghetto a generation earlier. The Crown was known for entrusting privileges and tasks to selected non-noble individuals, and for doing so, protecting itself in every way possible. No historian can rule out that secret ownership contracts were hidden somewhere in the vaults of the high nobility. An intelligence anaylst today thinks differently than a historian. The analyst is used to working with a dark field, thinking in terms of probabilities for various scenarios and gradually approaching reality.
The Nazi film about the Rothschilds then presents the next Achilles heel of the conspiracy narrative: namely the myth that Nathan Rothschild manipulated the London stock market with the rumor that Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo. Firstly, this was based only on the untrue story of an anonymous French author from the 1840s and could never be substantiated. Secondly, it defies all logic that privileged Jewish bankers would defraud the British crown in this way and not even be punished. According to the Nazi film, a fortune of eleven million British pounds was swindled on the original basis of the stolen/misappropriated money of the Prince of Hesse-Kassel. Historian Niall Ferguson estimates that after Waterloo, the Rothschilds made only a modest profit from perfectly ordinary and legal trade, which today is equivalent to about 600 million pounds. As soon as the narrative about Jewish court factors collapses, the rest of the argument collapses too. Small Jewish families could not cheat the British Empire, decide on war and peace on their own account and involve any European state in wars at will. In order to really effectively and permanently suppress anti-Semitism, one would have to reconstruct the intelligence levels from that time to today, but this is undesirable in Western countries because it could lead straight from one topic to the next.
The Nazi leadership saw the extermination of Jews as the ultimate counter-espionage and a “final solution” to the alleged cycle of destruction of Roman-influenced empires through Jewish subversion. After World War I, the German war losers were angry with the British and Americans. Officially, the class privileges of the German nobility ended in 1919, and at the same time the rule of the Tsars ended in Russia. The forgery “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” and accompanying literature immediately spread in the West, implying that it was not Anglo-American elites who wanted to destroy Germany as an empire, but a secret Jewish lodge. The argument is circular: The Protocols of Zion would prove a world conspiracy. The authenticity could be seen from the course of the 20th century, which corresponded to the predictions of the Protocols. But how is the 20th century interpreted? According to the Protocols. Furthermore, the Rothschilds’ Waterloo spree and their theft of funds from the House of Hesse-Kassel would prove that Jews had taken power over Britain and later the USA. Accordingly, from that point on, all the sins of the Anglo-American Empire were in fact Jewish sins. And these sins would prove the authenticity of the Protocols. What are the sources of the claims about the Rothschilds? Common conspiracy books. What are the sources of the conspiracy books? Older conspiracy books. What are their sources? In addition to meaningless information in the Jewish Encyclopedia and unconfirmed stories by anonymous French authors, the Protocols of Zion would of course prove the truth of the conspiracy books. This goes round in circles endlessly. Common conspiracy media function like a kind of giant funnel, which initially has a wide diameter in order to capture as many people as possible with as many topics as possible. The more you get into it, the more you are introduced to the Anglo-American Empire. And behind it all are ultimately the “Elders of Zion”.
https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12909-rothschild#anchor1
The Search for the „Manchurian Candidate“: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. Von John Marks
America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Von Antony C. Sutton
Rainmaking Is Used As Weapon by U.S. von Seymour Hersh. NY Times, 3. Juli 1972
A front organisation collapses
The relatives of the British royal family controlled a number of smaller principalities, counties and mini-kingdoms on German soil, which was the ideal prerequisite for carrying out operations directed against France. The notorious Bavarian Illuminati order marketed itself as an enlightenment group, but was ultimately just a front organisation for the British aristocratic secret services. It is completely paradoxical to talk about enlightenment, i.e. the overcoming of old-fashioned aristocratic rule, when the most important members of the Illuminati were members of the high nobility. The Bavarian police seized membership lists and internal documents of the Illuminati and to make matters worse, the information ended up in international newspapers and pamphlets. It was only a matter of time before suspicion would fall on the British secret service, which would have had significant consequences. Other pseudo-enlightenment camouflage organizations and spy rings might have been destroyed on German soil, and even high nobility from the Welf, Wettin and Reginar families could have gotten into a lot of trouble on German soil. The trip of the important Illuminati Johann Bode to Paris in 1787 attracted particular attention in retrospect. On this trip, Bode had long discussions with members of the Parisian lodge Les Amis Reuni and promoted the ideas of the Illuminati. It would be wrong to conclude that the Illuminati had the decisive influence on the French lodges. The Order’s surviving writings are a kind of stew of Freemasonry clichés about “morality” and “human perfection,” which should be achieved through a certain amount of subversion, but not too much of it.
A diversionary tactic was needed that would simultaneously protect the vast majority of the Illuminati members and describe the radicalization of the French lodges as a primarily French phenomenon. Within a very short time, a series of conspiracy books appeared in different languages and tailored to different target groups. The three most important conspiracy authors in the years after the French Revolution (Starck, Robison, Barruel) all had a connection to the British scientific association “Royal Society” of the high nobility. These three authors, just like a number of other authors from Illuminati circles under pseudonyms, avoided any investigation of traces that led to the British aristocratic secret service. In 1794, the Duke of Brunswick had a manifesto distributed to all Masonic lodges in which he told the story that conspirators from France had infiltrated Freemasonry and that it was precisely these nebulous conspirators who were responsible for the French Revolution.
Ernst August von Göchhausen and Karl von Eckartshausen
Ernst August von Göchhausen (Privy Councillor of the Duke of Saxony-Weimar in Eisenach) published his “Revelation of the System of the World Citizen Republic” anonymously in 1786, in which he claimed that there was a Jesuit conspiracy behind the Illuminati scandal. He simply passed the buck back. For the Jesuits, the Illuminati were clear proof that radical networks wanted to overthrow the churches and the thrones. Göchhausen, however, said that the Jesuits had pulled the strings of the Illuminati and other enlightenment groups with the intention of overthrowing thrones and rival churches in order to ultimately establish world domination by the Pope. We cannot reconstruct whether Göchhausen really believed this, or was just cleverly exploiting the fact that the Vatican had its own ambitions, would have liked to break away from French control, and that even the French royal family was repeatedly suspicious. The Jesuit order, which was certainly used by the Vatican as a vehicle for secret operations, had to leave France at times in the past.
Karl von Eckartshausen, who was a member of Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati order and was later considered a mystical theosophist, anonymously published the pamphlet “On the danger that threatens the thrones, states and Christianity with total collapse: through the false system of today’s enlightenment, and the bold presumptions of so-called philosophers, secret societies and sects” in 1791. His works were translated into numerous European languages, especially French, Russian and English. His most prominent reader was probably the Russian Tsar Alexander I. It is extremely bold for someone who was not only a member of the Illuminati, but also in many ways an occultist, to anonymously publish a pamphlet in which he wants to teach the reader about conspiracies. What exactly should identify him as an expert? For him, the esoteric. He may have considered the silly nonsense a legitimate form of religious education, he had been admitted to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and he distanced himself from the Illuminati afterwards. Perhaps he wrote the pamphlet to avoid damaging his career, or he was very naive as an Illuminati member, or he was definitely a supporter of radical enlightened ideas, but the order had unfortunately been burned and he wanted to protect at least the most important members.
Johann August von Starck and Leopold Alois Hoffmann
Johann August von Starck was a German writer, influential freemason and at times general superintendent of Königsberg in Prussia. In 1811 he was raised to the nobility by the Grand Duke of Hesse. One can imagine that the House of Hesse would have been extremely unhappy if he had dared to critically examine the role of the secret services of the Guelphs, Wettins and Reginares with regard to the French Revolution. He studied theology and oriental studies at the Welfen University of Göttingen under Johann David Michaelis, a fellow of the aristocratic British scientific association Royal Society, from whose circles the most important bestselling books of the conspiracy genre were increasingly published.
From 1763 onwards, von Starck was a teacher in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he delved deeper into secret societies. The Tsarist House of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf became increasingly closely related to the British throne. Today’s British Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, also belongs to the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg through his father and grandfather. Starck initially published misleading articles in the magazine “Eudaemonia” about enlightenment philosophers, freemasons and Illuminati behind the French Revolution. Eudaemonia was at one time the most important publication in the German-speaking world for the dissemination of these views. Finally, the publication of Starck’s book “Triumph of Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century” (1803) followed. It was essentially based on the books by John Robison and Abbé Barruel, which had been published shortly before, and thus posed no threat to the aristocratic secret service networks of the Guelphs, Wettins and Reginars, who had helped encourage French revolutionaries for the British Empire. Starck’s partner in Eudaemonia was a certain Leopold Alois Hoffmann.
A few years before the French Revolution, he had found his way into Viennese Masonic and Illuminati circles. He later taught in Budapest, a city under the control of the Austrian Habsburgs, and worked as a spy for police commissioner Franz Gotthardi of the political secret police. His main task was to monitor the activities of the Freemasons, Illuminati and Jesuits. In Vienna he continued his espionage activities and enjoyed a high reputation with Archduke Leopold II of Austria. He publicly turned into a radical critic of the French Revolution, accused the lodges and movements of the Enlightenment of having brought about the revolution and denounced his former Masonic and Enlightenment friends and brothers. Perhaps Hoffmann’s about-face was simply intended to further his own career. The Austrian emperor is said to have said of him:
“The guy is an ass, I know it; but he serves me very well as a spy.”
Johann Joachim Christoph Bode
In 1775, the Freemason Bode made the acquaintance of the rich Countess Charitas Emilie von Bernstorff, widow of the famous Danish minister Johann Hartwig Ernst Graf von Bernstorff. In Meiningen, he received the title of Court Councillor of the Duke of Saxony-Meiningen from the ruling duchess there. He also came into contact with Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who was to become his brother in the Illuminati. Bode later became a legation counsellor in Saxony-Gotha and a privy councillor in Hesse-Darmstadt. All of this naturally suggests that Bode enjoyed the trust of these relevant noble families.
As the owner of a Hamburg printing works, he was able to realise a whole host of projects with prominent like-minded artists that more or less subtly incorporated enlightenment ideas. As a kind of propaganda manufacturer for the Illuminati Order, he also knew Goethe and Schiller. His most famous trip was to France in 1787. Schiller reported in a letter to Christian Gottfried Körner how Bode had told him “that he had brought something significant back from Paris with regard to Freemasonry”. At the great Masonic Convention in Wilhelmsbad in 1782, Bode had already put forward his favourite idea, the claim of secret Jesuit influence on Freemasonry. When a general journalistic attack was launched in the days of the French Revolution, against the Illuminati and Freemasons, Bode was attacked as an “unknown superior”, as a “promoter of subversion” and as a liaison officer between the Illuminati and the French Jacobins. In 1790, Bode countered with a translation of Marquis de Luchet’s sensational bestseller “Essai sur les Illuminés” from the previous year and published the translation with his annotations anonymously under the title “Is Cagliostro Chief of the Illuminati?”. The Marquis was anything but neutral. Equipped with a letter of recommendation from Voltaire, the worldly-looking Marquis de Luchet had successfully applied to the court of Landgrave Frederick II (1720-1785) of Hesse-Kassel in 1775. Luchet quickly gained the prince’s affection and within a short time became director of the French theater, superintendant of the court orchestra music and finally permanent secretary of the Princely Hessian Society of Antiquities. Alessandro Count of Cagliostro, who was described as a possible head of the Illuminati, was only an imposter named Giuseppe Balsamo and was later used as a diversionary tactic. Many years later, conspiracy author Nesta Webster added a supposed Jewish backer to the diversionary tactic of Cagliostro.
John Robison and the British secret service
The renowned British mathematician and physicist John Robison (1739 – 1805), professor at the University of Edinburgh, landed a bestseller with “Proofs of a Conspiracy” that was popular internationally. Because of his membership in the aristocratic scientific association “Royal Society of Edinburgh” and the Freemasons’ Order, he was considered by subsequent generations of conspiracy authors to be a kind of early whistleblower, insider and special expert on the subject. However, his revelations were a diversionary tactic and he did not present any information that was not already circulating in Europe. Both the Royal Society and the Freemasons were vehicles for the British crown to gradually transform the empire in the course of a fake enlightenment. Robison accuses the French of having “interfered in Britain’s colonial affairs”, by which he means that France had sunk a fortune into the American War of Independence. No one doubts the well-documented supply deliveries from the French to Washington. But Robison does not explicitly develop this idea. Why not? If he had gone into detail here, it would have dawned on the reader that Britain might have subsequently taken revenge on France by financing or otherwise supporting French revolutionaries. It would have been the obvious retaliation, but Robison avoids even the slightest hint in this direction. Even more devastating for Robison’s credibility is the fact that he had contacts with the British secret agent and diplomat Alexander Horn, who worked closely with the Thurn and Taxis family in Germany, which in turn was close to the British crown. Karl Alexander von Thurn und Taxis (1770-1827) married the daughter of Hereditary Prince Duke Karl of Mecklenburg and Friederike of Hesse-Darmstadt. The Crown Prince had none other than the English King George III as his brother-in-law and served in the Hanoverian army. Friederike was a daughter of Prince Georg Wilhelm of Hesse-Darmstadt. It gets even more embarrassing: Hesse-Kassel promoted the career of Baron Knigge, the second most important member of the Illuminati Order. Karl Alexander von Thurn und Taxis was the second Grand Master of the Masonic mother lodge “The Growing One of the Three Keys” and in 1806 the English Grand Master made him Provincial Grand Master of Bavaria.
Robison’s declarations of loyalty to the British king and his social status, which was dependent on that same king, clearly show a direct conflict of interest. He was not interested in a scientific study of the subject, which could embarrass the king and his relatives on German soil. In 1776 his name appears in the “Minute Book of The Poker Club”, an important association of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was formerly known as “The Select Society”. The extremely wealthy Sir William Pulteney was also on board. Old William Pulteney was chosen by King George II as the 1st Earl of Bath. Robison became Secretary General of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and published the conspiracy book “Proofs of a Conspiracy” in 1797, just a few years before his death. Today, we suspect that his only concern was to draw attention to the French Freemasons and to pretend that there were no significant connections between the Illuminati Order and Britain. Why was the book not published under a pseudonym or by another author? Perhaps it was calculated at the time that Robison’s position would make him look more credible than biased. He was considered an enlightened scientist, a fan of British Freemasonry and at the same time a loyal servant of his king. In this way, he represented a contrast to the Illuminati and French Masons, who were extremists or even high treasonous under the law in Germany and France. The possible support that Britain provided to French revolutionaries would have been easier to conceal. Robison simply had to leave out everything that drew suspicion to Britain, and otherwise he could largely rely on the truth that in France the resistance against the king was secretly organized in strange Masonic lodges. Alexander Horn, who is said to have collected the material for Robison, served in Regensburg, where the Thurn and Taxis family had resided since 1748, as a liaison for for the British ambassador in Munich. Some members of the Thurn and Taxis family were members of the Roman Catholic Order of Malta. Horn was no fan of the French monarchy and traveled to England two years after Robison’s book was published and met members of William Pitt’s government there, such as Earl Spencer from the Privy Council and the Royal Society, who was decorated with the highest orders of the Empire and whose godfather was King George II. When Napoleon ruled France, Spencer set the “secret agent” Horn to bring rare books and texts from southern Germany to safety.
“You could describe Horn or Mister Bergström, his code name, as a predecessor of James Bond,”
says Claus Oberhauser from the University of Innsbruck, who has investigated the case in more detail. The so-called “Perpetual Diet of the Holy Roman Empire in Regensburg” was a meeting place for the entire power elite of Europe. For 15 years, Horn is said to have obtained secret information there and in a wider area and passed it on to the British Foreign Office. Hundreds of texts are said to still exist. This archive material remained undiscovered for a long time because people were looking for Horn in the German spelling and not the English variant Horne. Horn also went to Linz under his conservative cover, infiltrated the Habsburg court there and regularly sent the encrypted reports to the Foreign Office in London via couriers. His tradecraft also included his cover identity “Jonas Bergstrom”. He is said to have supplied money to the Tyrolean insurgents. One can imagine that the British secret service also paid French revolutionaries. Horn’s tasks also included disinformation against France, which almost certainly also included the collection of material that he made available to John Robison for his conspiracy book. Oberhauser published the book “Diplomacy from the Underground: The Strange Career of Alexander Horn” and is listed as a member of the Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories organization, which researches the phenomenon of conspiracy theories. It is extremely rare for a researcher to actually enter the secret service level. Oberhauser’s study of Horn is more of a study of an entire British secret service network that carried out all kinds of operations, including the disinformation campaign with the conspiracy books by Robison, Barruel and Starck.
The young Adam Weishaupt, long before his wild Illuminati days, attended the Jesuit college in Ingolstadt until the age of 15 and experienced the stuffy, strict fanaticism there. At the same time, the orphaned boy was adopted early by Johann Adam von Ickstatt and raised in the spirit of an “enlightened” philosophy that goes back to a certain Christian Wolff. Wolff was a member of the British royal scientific association Royal Society, lived for a time in the aristocratic stronghold of Hesse and taught at the aristocratic University of Marburg. Adam Weishaupt’s father Johann Georg had already studied law in Würzburg under Johann Adam von Ickstatt, the man of the Enlightenment scene. Later, Johann Georg taught at the University of Ingolstadt, where Adam later became a professor. Both Adam and his father apparently lived a double life: Outwardly they were very good servants of Catholic doctrine and legal order. Away from the public eye they were convinced enlighteners. Prince-Bishop Friedrich Karl von Schönborn-Buchheim appointed Adam Weishaupt’s father as public corepitor of law and extraordinary teacher of legal history. The von Schönborns rose to the nobility and had connections to the important houses of Schaumburg, Diez and Nassau-Weilburg. In 1777 Adam became a freemason in the lodge “Zur Behutsamkeit” in Munich and bore the order name “Sanchoniaton”. Through the Marchese di Constantin Costanzo the permission of the Berlin Grand Lodge Royal York was obtained for the Munich lodge Theodor zum guten Rat, which was then declared independent and transferred to the new Illuminati order. The Illuminati members messed up with their spycraft and so secret membership lists and other internal documents were confiscated and published by the Bavarian police. Adam fled. Duke Ernst II of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg (a member of the Illuminati since 1783 under the order name Quintus Severus or Timoleon) granted him asylum in Gotha. The irony did not go unnoticed by many observers: the alleged enlightener, who wanted to free the world from the yoke of absolutism, fled to a powerful nobleman and was financed by him. It would have been extremely dangerous if Weishaupt had been captured and revealed further information about his Contacts with high nobility who were related to the British throne. Instead, Weishaupt was allowed to live in Gotha with the title and pension of a court councilor. From then on, he published a series of texts that trivialized the Illuminati Order.
The princes Karl of Hesse and Ferdinand of Brunswick as well as the dukes Ernst of Saxe-Gotha and Carl August of Saxe-Weimar were members of the Illuminati Order. Ernst even used the Gotha Illuminati lodge as a secret shadow cabinet. Pope Pius VI was not exactly amused by the matter and in two letters to the Bishop of Freising declared membership in the Illuminati Order to be incompatible with the Catholic faith. In the foreword to his great conspiracy book, Robison explains that in his English homeland, when he was young, he had had many harmless (and rather boring) experiences in Masonic lodges, but in lodges on the European mainland he experienced things that, in his opinion, did not belong at all in the system of Freemasonry. So he praises the good and honest British Freemasonry on the one hand, and condemns the dark, subversive lodges in Germany and France on the other. Robison says he visited lodges in the French city of Liege, Berlin and Königsberg, where he was promised great progress in his Masonic enlightenment. However, the content offered and the promised new degrees were too irrational, too frivolous, too fanatical, too expensive and too time-consuming for him. Many respected and influential men, on the other hand, pounced on every new trend, no matter how obscure, that was presented in the many new lodges. Across Europe, according to Robison, Freemasons increasingly indulged in strange and sensitive ideas that led to public malice and state and church censorship outside the lodges.
For ordinary British Freemasons, it was an iron rule not to have critical discussions about the government and the church in the lodge. Let us not forget that under British law, until well into the 1800s, even expressing intentions to harm the king was considered high treason. A conviction would have resulted in the person in question being hanged, castrated alive, and disemboweled. Robison did not even give a concrete estimate of how much influence Weishaupt had on the French Revolution. He preferred to point the finger at the French officers and officials who had worked in America for a time and who had sniffed the scent of independence there. Robison again slanders that the French monarchy was swept away with the same enlightened ideas that it had previously promoted in the 13 British colonies in America. Robison also mentions the accumulation of mountains of debt and the new taxes in France that were levied by the royal family. Only a spark was needed to set the revolution in motion.
From the intelligence service’s point of view, however, it took much more than a spark and favorable circumstances for a coup, but rather long-prepared subversive operations and support from abroad. Instead of analyzing what had happened soberly and in terms of intelligence, Robison serves us a selectively prepared story. He taunts against “corrupt” French lodges that flattered ordinary palace guards and similar unqualified figures and turned them into Freemasons for the purpose of the coup. On page 296, Robison explicitly warns of a French world conspiracy. Robison’s dubious book was distributed in all directions and also found an audience in America with George Washington and Senator Seth Payson, who in 1802 published the text “Proof of the Illuminati” based on Robison. In a letter to Reverend G. W. Snyder, who had sent him Robison’s book, Washington declared that he was pleased that the dangerous teachings of the Illuminati and the Jacobins had not spread in America. And certainly not in American Freemason circles. Washington had been supplied with gunpowder and weapons by the French king. After the execution of the king, Britain waged war against France in 1793 and Washington merely recognised the new French government and otherwise remained neutral. As early as 1794, the USA concluded the far-reaching “Jay’s Treaty” with Britain. The new French dictator Napoleon soon sold huge areas of America to the USA cheaply. John Robison added a special dedication to his conspiracy book “Proofs of a Conspiracy”: a letter from William Windham (1750 – 1810), who served as Secretary at War and was an acquaintance of Robison’s from their time together in Glasgow. He did not obtain permission from Windham for this. Not only was Windham a member of the Privy Council, whose members we often encounter in the midst of major espionage operations, but he first took a positive and then an extremely negative attitude towards the French Revolution. This would fit in with the strategy of first destroying the French monarchy and then fighting the new, internally divided French government. In 1793, Britain declared war on France and Windham became Secretary of War. He supported the royalist uprising in La Vendée and called on the British government to help the royalists with the aim of restoring the House of Bourbon to the throne:
“I would have made this the main aim of the war from the beginning.”
It is almost certain that Robison was well aware that British intelligence services were involved in the Illuminati Order and in French revolutionary circles. But Robison was not high enough in the British hierarchy to have known exactly the extent and impact of these secret operations. His much more powerful friends on the Privy Council could have lied to him, saying that it was not a very big campaign, that it had failed and was then abandoned. The next step was to convince Robison that the absolute priority was to prevent the spark of revolutionary radicalism from spreading from France to Britain. A book like “Proofs of a Conspiracy” served exactly this purpose:
- It is a general warning against subversive, unregulated organizations
- It specifically criticized the French lodges and the Illuminati Order, without mentioning any links to British secret operations
- It promoted good subservience to the British king
- It is an indirect threat against British people who wanted to get rid of the British royal family
Robison was not allowed to write a better book, address sensitive secret operations and expose the king and his relatives in the Illuminati Order. To this day, Britain is notorious for ruthlessly shielding the secret service sphere with laws such as the “Official Secrets Act”. When the British enlightenment movements got a little out of control in the 1790s, a series of court cases for “high treason” were promptly launched. It was possible to arrest hundreds of individuals and take them out of circulation permanently. Well into the 1800s, even thinking and saying things that posed a threat to the British royal family and its power was considered high treason. Punishable by hanging, castration and disemboweling while still alive.
Oberhauser’s study
It is hard to believe that it is a coincidence that Claus Oberhauser’s study on the British agent Alexander Horn was supported in several ways by Austrian universities and various funding programs. It seems that the Austrians, who lost their status as the Habsburg empire towards the end of the First World War, are still very suspicious of the British today. Horn’s secret activities were professional and not limited to harmless correspondent networks. He is also described as one of the most important informants for the so-called “Alpine League”, a Tyrolean resistance movement against Napoleon, which was to be coordinated from Great Britain. However, a traitor had exposed the group, which led to a series of arrests and expulsions. One can imagine that Britain employed many agents in addition to Horn. Nevertheless, his commanding officers and superiors were very high up in the hierarchy.
If you now leave the British Museum and go to the National Portrait Gallery, you will find new, now buried traces of Alexander Horn. Whether it concerns George Hamilton, Earl of Aberdeen (1784 – 1860), Sir Charles Stewart (1778 – 1854) or Robert Stewart, better known as Viscount Castlereagh (1769 – 1822), they all had a relationship with Horn.
At the time, Horn is said to have felt and expressed frustration that his espionage activities were not sufficiently appreciated by the high nobility. In 1813/14, Lord Aberdeen dropped him. By then, Horn already had a disastrous reputation on the European mainland and was thus burned in important areas of operation. Based on the improved source material, Claus Oberhauser can now better reconstruct how the book project “Proofs of a Conspiracy” was realized within a short period of time:
Just a few months before the work was published, Robison wrote to Windham that a friend who had been interested in the Illuminati for a long time had introduced him to them. In 1795, he found various documents in his house, almost by chance, all of which pointed to the Illuminati as a powerful group of conspirators. Among them was only a single volume of the magazine Die Neueste Religionsbegebenheiten, but its contents increased Robison’s curiosity as he read from page to page and prompted him to study the German Freemasons and Illuminati in more detail. After he had excerpted a few passages, another acquaintance in Edinburgh found these notes and encouraged him to write a book. This person was George Gleig (1753 – 1840).
This Gleig had fought as a soldier under the Duke of Wellington against the French, later studied at Oxford and cultivated a kind of friendship with the Duke. Gleig’s father was a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Robison’s notebook even surfaced later, in which he carefully listed and sorted the ideas from various sources. Mind you, these were only texts that did not reveal any specific secrets and whose possession posed no danger, such as Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen’s “Revelation of the System of the Cosmopolitan Republic”. Usually, known information, such as from the collapsed Illuminati order or about the French Jacobins, was supplemented with vague speculations about which ominous groups were probably in charge and pulling the strings. Sometimes the Jesuits were mentioned, sometimes the unfounded “cosmopolitans”. The magazine “Neueste Religionsbegebenheiten”, which Robison evaluated, goes back to the Giessen historian Heinrich Martin Gottfried Köster, who also translated Augustin Barruel’s bestselling conspiracy book series “Denkwürdigkeiten” into German.
Barruel also stuck strictly to completely concealing the role of British secret services and increasing as many disputes as possible within France. Oberhauser seems pleased that modern research has left the paranoid stench of the old conspiracy writers behind and that the Illuminati order is no longer seen as a hotbed of diabolical subversion, but as a “network,” as historian Niall Ferguson calls it in his studies such as “The Square and the Tower.” The Illuminati, according to Ferguson, were simply a network like the Jesuits or the nobility. That sounds modern and sober, but Ferguson is a privileged, shameless defender of the British empire.
Robertson and Horn were friends and worked together in 1803. A few years later, Horn willingly gave Robertson shelter in Linz when he was on a secret mission. In addition to this rather indirect relationship, there are also some indications in the Scottish environment that Horn and Robison had the same contacts or at least held similar views.
It was therefore taken for granted that one would help the other on secret missions. And in this network we also find another conspiracy author who was extremely widely read:
Barruel was sent to the United Kingdom on the initiative of an intermediary, the Sch white scientist Jean-André Deluc, supported by Johann August Starck and his network of like-minded men.
Deluc went to London in 1774, where he became reader to the Queen of England Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In 1798 he was appointed honorary professor of philosophy and geology in Göttingen, but never lived there, instead living alternately in Berlin, Hanover, Braunschweig and London. Barruel, the author of the “Memoirs” series about Illuminati and other conspirators, received help in London from the noble MP and Freemason Edmund Burke, who was considered a great critic of the French Revolution. So, in addition to Robison, we have Barruel, another bestselling author of the conspiracy genre, who wrote in the interests of the British crown and associated with people from high circles who were involved in secret services. Why has this aspect not been the focus of academics researching “conspiracy theories” for a long time? Why is the central idea repeatedly expressed in studies and press articles and commentaries that frustrated, backward-looking bourgeois want to reverse the Enlightenment and to do so invent conspiracies like in a medieval witch hunt? It would be naive to think that the most successful conspiracy writers after the French Revolution simply happened to have the same high-ranking British contacts, copied from each other and often referred to the same sources. It was too tempting, too obvious for the British secret service to launch a media campaign to dominate the narrative, trigger further chaos in France and protect the British Empire. It remains to be clarified how aware Horn, Robison or Barruel were that they were deceiving their readers. The Illuminati order had collapsed and had to be denigrated without attacking the most important noble members who were related to the British throne. Horn’s long-term residence in Regensburg had also been a popular stomping ground for the Illuminati due to a special legal status. One of them belonged to the important Regensburg Thurn and Taxis family, Maximilian Carl Heinrich Joseph Graf von Thurn und Taxis (1745 – 1825), who Horn and his brother knew personally. They were also involved in freemasonry.
Furthermore, Regensburg was an attractive place for many secret societies because of the Reichstag, as they could recruit international members, build a (political) network and also obtain diplomatic information: Thomas Walpole’s membership of the Illuminati is worth mentioning, for example.
This refers to the British parliamentarian Thomas Walpole, son of a baron from the Privy Council, who had served for a time as director of the notorious British East India Company and also had business dealings with Benjamin Franklin. Horn is said to have been Walpole’s unpaid correspondent from 1789. After the Illuminati order was exposed due to a mixture of bad luck and mishaps, the most powerful members had to be shielded from criticism by portraying them as somewhat naive and driven by the best of intentions. However, someone from the Order had to be given the role of villain, such as Johann Joachim Christoph Bode (1731-1793), who famously made a trip to Paris in the summer of 1787 and thereby gave the impression of having coordinated with the French revolutionaries. The British secret service, assuming basic secret service behavior, would have deactivated certain parts of the Illuminati Order, but not the entire operation. The researcher Oberhauser mentions that Illuminati structures may have continued under a different name with people like the British-American Baron Benjamin Thompson of the Royal Society, knighted by the British King George III. Thompson fought in the American War of Independence and then became an advisor to Carl Theodor in Bavaria to reorganize the Bavarian army. Another new Illuminati was probably Maximilian Clemens Joseph Franz Maria Graf von Seinsheim, who became the Lord Chamberlain of the Bavarian Electress Maria Anna of Saxony (1728–1797) in 1747 and Minister of War in 1750. The Electress came from a powerful Wettin line, which also included people from Hesse-Darmstadt and Brunswick-Calenberg, which is an important connection to the British throne from the reign of George I in 1714. George’s father was Ernst August von Brunswick-Calenberg. The Bavarian government did not want to do without confirmed members of the Illuminati permanently. In Regensburg and Munich, from 1791 onwards, people had to take an “Illuminati oath” and disclose their membership. Various former Illuminati were subsequently n was again admitted to civil service.
Drake affair
In connection with Horn, Oberhauser also devotes himself to the Drake affair. The British diplomat Francis Drake (not to be confused with the famous privateer) worked in Munich and also used Horn for secret assignments. Many sensitive documents were destroyed as a precaution and there are references to encrypted messages and secret ink. It was not just about harmless spying, asking around in diplomatic circles and sending reports to London, but (as far as it can be reconstructed) about assassination plans against the French ruler Napoleon.
The assassination attempt using an “infernal machine” failed in 1800, but the plans were continued. This was recently explained by Tim Clayton: He describes in detail the assassination plan by Pichegru, Moreau and Cadoudal and the connection between English politicians, diplomats and secret agents and French confidants. In addition to this large conspiracy taking place in France, the second part took place in Munich with strong British assistance, which is closely linked to the person of Jean-Claude Hippolyte Méhée de la Touche (1762 – 1826).
This de la Touche was a secret agent and had supported the more moderate phases of the French Revolution. On the island of Guernsey, he proposed a plan to British representatives to instigate uprisings in France. This idea aroused interest and he was allowed to travel to London in person to negotiate with the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, George Hammond. It was agreed to send de la Touche to Munich to prepare the uprising there together with Francis Drake. Was the Frenchman a double agent? Could he even successfully implement such plans? Drake recommended to his superiors that a large number of agents should be sent to all countries under French control to help with revolutions that would give the impression to the outside world that they had arisen spontaneously. There is a wide range of original source documents that show that the British secret services at that time were of considerable size and professionalism and carried out very aggressive operations. There were not yet the bureaucratic secret service offices like in the 20th century, with official names and buildings. But that was not necessary either. The British strategy at that time seems quite obvious to us today, given the sources and the historical context and the usual approach of secret services: create intelligence cover organizations in Britain, America and Germany. Particularly in connection with Freemasonry and scientific circles such as the Royal Society. Through these cover organizations, establish contacts with French people who are prepared to instigate an uprising against the French king. Supply money, security guarantees and other important services to these French revolutionaries. After the revolution, use every opportunity to instigate uprisings against the new French government. Carry out assassinations against Napoleon and other important officials. Circulate conspiracy books that denigrate the revolution and thus the new government.
It can no longer be denied that the most important best-selling books in the conspiracy genre were part of the British secret service strategy. This aspect must be the focus of research, and not just for the era after the French Revolution. At the end of February 1804, the Drake operation was exposed:
The conspiracy surrounding Pichegru was discovered, the Duke of Enghien was identified as one of the co-conspirators and executed shortly afterwards. A final meeting between a contact, Méhée de la Touche, and Drake took place in March. As early as March 22, Drake reported to Hawkesbury that he expected to have to leave Munich very soon.
The scandal was so great that diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Bavaria were terminated. Franz von Reden (1754 – 1831), the representative of the Electorate of Hanover at the Reichstag (see also the Hanoverian Kings of Britain), had become an important correspondent of Horn from 1803, a year before the Drake operation was exposed. He and Horn were then probably tasked with destroying incriminating documents or securing them. Oberhauser complains that current research into history prefers to limit itself to secret diplomacy, but tends to ignore the tough area of secret operations “underground”. It is clear that important people at that time, just like in the modern secret services of the 20th century, often had a dual function. Officially active as a diplomat, but at the same time an agent leader who directed operations underground. Horn’s On The field of work was diverse.
He was tasked with spreading information in Regenburg using pamphlets and newspaper articles to cause confusion and discussions among diplomats. These were deliberate disinformation campaigns aimed at portraying people in a bad light. They were also intended to influence decision-makers.
Oberhauser understands that the Briton William Wickham (1761 – 1840) played a central role in disinformation campaigns in connection with operations to instigate uprisings in France. From December 1794, he was given the special task of creating a network under the pretext of an official diplomatic mission that would include important opponents of the French Revolution. It is said: “Wickham steadily expanded the network of correspondents and was thus able to win over more and more high-ranking French politicians and military officers to the goals of the counter-revolution.”
Quellen:
https://www.wissenschaft.de/geschichte-archaeologie/geheimagent-in-moenchskutte
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/12/the-square-and-the-tower-by-niall-ferguson-review
https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/newsroom/2016/im-auftrag-seiner-majestaet
Diplomatie aus dem Untergrund: die merkwürdige Karriere des Alexander (Maurus) Horn(e) (1762-1820) Buch von Claus Oberhauser
Augustin Barruel’s “Memoirs”
While Robison served the Protestant and Masonic audience, Augustin Barruel looked after the Catholics and, at almost the same time, created a bestselling book series that caused a stir throughout Europe and the USA and was diligently (and uncritically) cited by conspiracy authors well into the 20th century. There are many connections between Robison and Barruel. The two were integrated into the British secret service network, which was documented by the researcher Claus Oberhauser with many original sources. Barruel came from an old French aristocratic family, joined the Catholic Jesuits at a young age and became successful as a journalist and writer before the revolution. Then he had to flee to Britain as a fanatical supporter of the old order. The scientist Jean-André Deluc suggested that Barruel should get in touch with important personalities, above all with Edmund Burke. Burke was an influential politician who served on the Privy Council and had initially praised the French Revolution when it was convenient for the British Empire. As soon as the hated French royal family was deposed, Burke changed his stance and publicly called for a reversal of the revolution, thereby calling for more chaos and civil war in France. Burke supported the British war against France from 1793 and wanted Britain to fight on the side of the royalists and émigrés in a civil war. Burke also supported the royalist uprising in La Vendée. In addition to direct acts of war and the promotion of uprisings through secret service methods, a propaganda campaign was also needed. Psychological warfare that branded the French revolutionaries as satanic anarchists. Edmund Burke praised Barruel’s first volume of the conspiracy book series “Memoirs”, looked forward to the next volume and declared his express wish that the books would be widely distributed in France. It is difficult to reconstruct the extent to which Burke or other people from British intelligence circles had arranged for masses of copies to be printed, circulated and advertised as widely as possible. What we definitely know is that the Memoirs ultimately became one of the most successful books of the first half of the 1800s. Burke married the daughter of Dr. Christopher Nugent, a physician and fellow of the Royal Society, whose Edinburgh branch was once presided over by John Robison, the author of “Proofs of a Conspiracy.” Between 1800 and 1804, Barruel’s book series was also published in German under the title “Memoirs of the History of Jacobinism.” There is a rumor that in 1806 Barruel was incited by an Italian soldier named Giovanni-Battista Simonin to write a fifth volume about a Jewish world conspiracy above all conspiracies, but it was never published. It was not until the 1840s that early French socialists popularized Jew-focused conspiracy narratives, while the French arm of the Rothschild banking family and a few other Jewish merchant banks had gained importance. If a fifth volume by Barruel had actually been published around 1910 or earlier, it could have been well received due to the widespread circulation of the four previous volumes, even if the Rothschilds were still a relatively small number and the infamous fairy tale according to which this tiny family had ripped off the British stock market was still a long way from existing.
Volume I
It is already noticeable in the first few paragraphs how Barruel dismisses the French Revolution as a terrible act of destruction by the “sect” of the Jacobins and Illuminati, without even attempting to provide a sober classification. The French monarchy was backward and exploitative like every other monarchy in Europe that wanted to inherit the fallen Roman Empire. It is downright ridiculous that right-wing conservative American circles eagerly adopted this extremely negative view of the French Revolution from Barruel, but at the same time viewed the American Revolution as a fetish and founding myth of the US Republic. George Washington and his comrades, like the Jacobins, used enlightenment and republican propaganda. In France, after the fall of the monarchy, there were still many supporters of the old order and Catholicism, and Barruel simply poured more and more gasoline on the fire, which was certainly in Britain’s interest. Barruel was in no way an objective scientist or intelligence expert, but a fanatical clergyman who wrote benevolent texts about the Pope, clung to powerful structures and was intellectually in the middle.
lalter. He regarded the scribe Voltaire, who came from the lowest ranks of the French nobility and had early trouble with the authorities, as a key leader of the devilish conspiracy. He often insulted higher-ranking members of the nobility and ended up in prison. Finally, he went into exile in Britain, where he conspicuously associated with high circles such as Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough. It is conceivable that the British secret services worked on him during this period, encouraged him, and recruited him through “enlightenment” front organizations so that he could one day help bring about change in France. Barruel does not pursue this obvious suspicion. After his return, Voltaire published texts in France without prior review by the censorship authorities which described the British constitutional monarchy as a better system than the classical French monarchy. And so Voltaire had to flee Paris, went into hiding with wealthy people and devoted himself more to science, which often went hand in hand with enlightened ideas and like-minded colleagues. Barruel believes Voltaire was in league with Frederick the Great (then Crown Prince of Prussia). The 42-year-old scribe and the almost 22-year-old Crown Prince began a correspondence that would last for four decades and achieve a certain fame. The two never ran out of topics. For example, the important German scientist and philosopher Christian Wolff had published his “Metaphysics” and Frederick wanted to have it translated so that he could then send it to Voltaire and discuss it with him. Wolff had become a member of the British Royal Society in 1710 and taught in Hesse at the University of Marburg.
The rulers of Hesse (Reginars) were allied and related to the Guelphs on the British throne, and also had ties to the Prussian rulers of the Hohenzollern family. Before Wolff went to Hesse, he had been active in Prussia, but due to pressure from religious circles, the old Prussian King Frederick William I had to banish him. One of Wolff’s students was, of all people, Johann Adam von Ickstatt, who became the director of the University of Ingolstadt, pushed back the Jesuits there and finally adopted the orphaned Adam Weishaupt, the later founder of the Illuminati Order. No one can seriously consider figures like Voltaire or Weishaupt to be the masterminds of mega-conspiracies “against all religions and thrones”. They were far too low in the hierarchy and we have no evidence that they played a decisive role in the destabilization of France. They were allowed to take on certain tasks thanks to the appropriate support from aristocratic circles and it is not even clear to what extent they were aware that ultimately the British secret service would profit from all this enlightenment fuss. The threads repeatedly run to Britain via certain aristocratic lines and organizations such as the Royal Society, but either Barruel was too amateur to smell a rat, or he simply wasn’t allowed to write anything that would have displeased his British friends. It is also conceivable that he was persuaded that Britain’s help was the best chance for the royalists in France to reverse the revolution. The fact that Barruel badmouthed figures such as Voltaire and Weishaupt could not have mattered to the British, because the two had been interchangeable figures who could be used as fuel. In 1743, French espionage urged Voltaire to visit Frederick, who had meanwhile become King of Prussia, at his castle and to sound him out about any interference in the War of the Austrian Succession. Later, Voltaire even lived in Sanssouci and Charlottenburg, but disputes arose and he traveled around various countries from then on, becoming increasingly well-known for his enlightenment writings. A little over a month before his death, he was initiated into Freemasonry. On April 4, 1778, he visited the notorious Les Neuf Sœurs lodge in Paris and became a registered Masonic apprentice. According to some sources, “Benjamin Franklin … urged Voltaire to become a Freemason, and Voltaire agreed, perhaps only to please Franklin.” Franklin was involved with the British Royal Society and was in all probability a British agent. At the time of the French Revolution, there were around 1250 Masonic lodges in France. The Les Neuf Sœurs lodge was a major lodge in the Grand Orient de France that had a particular influence on the French Revolution (1789). Some notable French revolutionaries were Freemasons, including Marquis de Lafayette, Marquis de Condorcet, Mirabeau, Georges Danton, the Duke of Orléans, and Hébert. Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, a leader of the liberal aristocracy, was the Grand Master of the Grand Orient at the time of the French Revolution. In some parts of France, the Jacobin clubs were continuations of Masonic lodges from the Ancien Régime, and according to historian Alan Forrest, “some early clubs actually took over both the premises and a large proportion of the membership from Masonic lodges before giving themselves a new coat of paint.
Prussia had every reason to participate in the destabilization of France, but needed to shield itself from a blowback from overly radical Enlightenment ideas. So Barruel was definitely clever enough to suspect secret Prussian operations against France. Are we really to assume that he was not clever enough to suspect British operations too? For Barruel, philosophy is already an anti-Christian aberration, a hubris of man, the original sin of presuming to be as clever as the gods. In short: of the devil. When he wrote this nonsense, the British scientific association “Royal Society” had already existed for 100 years as a sister organization of British Freemasonry, which was influenced by ancient mystery cults. The scientists had proven that traditional ideas about the universe and the Catholic Church were very often completely wrong. In France too, there were more and more gifted scientists and Barruel would not have been able to really answer the question of how the king and the Jesuits could have kept the empire competitive with Britain and the USA. No matter how much fanaticism and covert operations the Jesuits tried with, it would not have been enough. In Britain and the USA, the Enlightenment had been artificially controlled from above, but within certain limits, scientists and other citizens could simply be allowed to act freely and reap the best fruits. These free forces also gave rise to the impression that the ideas of the Enlightenment were simply unstoppable and had developed enough momentum of their own to end absolutist rule in the empires of the Middle Ages. In his Memoirs, Barruel even attacks the Protestant Church. But he does not cast the slightest suspicion on the British. Even the fact that Voltaire enjoyed great advantages on the island is brushed aside, since he “would have become what he did” in any other country. When the era of the Catholic Stewarts ended in Britain around 1700 and the new era of the Hanoverian Guelphs began, they were still far inferior to the French in areas such as population size, land area and finances. As the year 1800 approached, the French fell further behind. In the following period, Britain became the largest and most powerful empire, “dominated the seas” and maintained a close, secret relationship with the other great empire that relied on republicanism and science: the USA. The many influential Frenchmen who participated in the French Revolution and the preparatory actions were not simply motivated by enlightenment values or satanic intentions, but rather wanted to turn things around, finally get rid of the royal family and put France back on the road to success. Barruel’s book series was basically designed to divide the population after the fact along political lines, religion and social class lines. Britain’s secret services had participated in the overthrow of the French monarchy, but they were not in the driver’s seat and the subversive work was not completed after the revolution. It was necessary to prevent a new strong order from being established in France. This went terribly wrong, because Napoleon swept across Europe a few decades later. French Freemasons, like American or British Freemasons, were inspired by antiquity and ancient mystery cults. Dismissing this as Satanism is common practice in the conspiracy media to this day. Even when Christianity was no longer persecuted as a disturbing sect in the Roman Empire, but was thoroughly infiltrated and declared the state religion, Roman elites retained the mystery cults. The anti-Roman Jew Jesus was subsequently made into a fictional character based on ancient deities, including the virgin birth. It is not surprising that literature such as “Foxes and Firebrands” circulated for a long time in the British and American spheres, which portrayed the Catholic Church as a hotbed of ancient cults and the Jesuits as ice-cold agents who would carry out any assignment, no matter how despicable. Good forgeries contain a certain amount of ß of truth. Frederick of Prussia, mentioned repeatedly by Barruel, came from the Hohenzollern family and was considered a reformer. He abolished torture and renewed the educational system, but remained the absolutist monarch for his up to 5.5 million subjects. Many lived in hereditary servitude and serfdom. His mother was Sophie Dorothea of Hanover, whose father was the British King George I of the Welfs. The relationship between the Hohenzollerns on the one hand and the Welfs, Wettins and Reginars on the other hand was complicated despite certain, significant family ties.
Frederick fell in love with the illegitimate daughter of Elector Frederick Augustus, Anna Karolina Orzelska, who later became Princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Beck through marriage. Not only are we dealing with a connection to the British throne, but also with a connection to Schleswig-Holstein-Romanov-Gottorf, i.e. the modern line of the Russian tsars. It is quite likely that Frederick secretly made a pact with the Guelphs in some capacity to weaken France. But Barruel does not want to draw negative attention to Britain. Frederick was close friends with the eight-year-older lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, whose ancestor was Hans Katte, court marshal of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. After the Hanoverian Guelphs, the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line, together with the House of Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein, led the British throne to this day. There are very plausible suspicions that Frederick had a homosexual relationship with von Katte, and Katte was eventually sentenced to death by Frederick’s father. A marriage of his own rank was arranged with Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern of the Guelphs. The marriage remained childless. The so-called Seven Years’ War was a huge conflict fought around the world between the great powers. Russia and Austria had signed a treaty and allied themselves against Prussia. The French advanced into Germany, moving towards Prussia and wanting to take Hanover, the ancestral seat of the Welf kings of Britain, hostage. Great Britain and Prussia had joined forces from allied or related principalities such as Hesse-Kassel and Saxe-Gotha to form the so-called “Observation Army”. On July 26, 1757, French troops led by Marshal d’Estrées defeated the Observation Army under the Duke of Cumberland (a member of the British royal family) in the Battle of Hastenbeck. In an agreement dated April 11, 1758, Great Britain promised Prussia financial resources of 4.5 million thalers and the formation of a new army in Electorate of Hanover. Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was able to defeat the French in the Battle of Rheinberg on June 12, 1758 and in the Battle of Krefeld on June 23, 1758 and by the end of the year controlled the entire area to the right of the Rhine. In the Battle of Mehr (today Mehrhoog) on August 5, 1758, 3,000 Prussians under General Philipp von Imhoff defeated almost 10,000 French. France had no bargaining power in the peace negotiations at the end of the war. After the death of Tsarina Elisabeth, her nephew, an admirer of Frederick, succeeded to the throne as Peter III. After receiving the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle and other honors, he concluded the Peace of Saint Petersburg with Prussia. The British defeated France on American and Indian territory. The Seven Years’ War had driven France’s national debt to breathtaking heights. For strategic reasons, the British staged the American War of Independence with George Washington, which enticed France to generously support Washington in the hope of getting back at the British. The finances of the French monarchy were then even more of a disaster, which made it easier for the British secret services to further destabilize the situation in France through enlightened propaganda. It should be obvious that fighting was not only taking place on the seas and battlefields with cannons and rifles, but also at the intelligence level with cover organizations and propaganda.
Barruel tells how Voltaire came up with the idea of founding a secret society for his purposes and how the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel offered his support. Interestingly, the same Landgrave had hired up to 20,000 mercenaries to Great Britain to fight against George Washington in the US colonies and was paid huge sums for this. He was considered one of the richest men on the mainland, his family was close to the British royal family and most likely financed intelligence structures and operations. After the Hanoverian Guelphs on the British throne, Sachs en-Coburg and Gotha and the House of Hesse. The father of the current King Charles, Philipp Mountbatten, is from Hesse-Darmstadt. His mother, Queen Elizabeth, is largely from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (1744 to 1836) had a daughter of the British King George II (of the Hanoverian Guelphs) as his mother and created a network of Masonic lodges on German soil. After the Napoleonic Wars, he placed the Masonic lodges Zur aufgehenden Morgenröte in Frankfurt am Main and Zu den vereinigten Freunde in Mainz, founded by the Grand Orient de France and consisting mainly of Jewish members, under his protection, issued them a new constitution and even obtained a patent for the Christian Scottish high degrees for the Zur aufgehenden Morgenröte lodge. Alongside Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, he became one of the most important members of the Illuminati Order, whose documents were eventually captured by the Bavarian police. Some of these documents circulated in the public and formed the basis for a series of bestselling books in the conspiracy genre, such as those by Barruel. How did Barruel manage to ignore all these obvious traces to Great Britain? The super-Christian hysteria, mixed with the publicly known information about the Illuminati order, made an impression. Barruel at least names the King of Denmark-Norway, Christian VII of the House of Oldenburg, as a co-conspirator. His mother was the daughter of the British King George II. His stepmother was Juliana Maria of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern. He married his cousin from the British royal family. The connections to Britain are therefore obvious. Nevertheless, Barruel maintains that despite the involvement of various “kings of the north” in the conspiracy against France and (Catholic) Christianity, “the name of His Britannic Majesty is not even mentioned” in the conspirators’ correspondence. King George III. was “too wise” to get involved with the evil conspirators and therefore the conspirators’ silence about him was conclusive proof that he was not involved. This argument is nonsense to say the least. Barruel did not specialise in secret services, he only had fragments of correspondence, certain things or people are not mentioned on paper as a matter of principle and King George III was fighting on all fronts around the world against his arch enemy France. The French spent a fortune to finance and equip George Washington in the War of Independence against George III. Washington and his people used a number of enlightened ideas and slogans. Who is stupid enough to think that the British king would have refused to take part in secret operations to destabilise his arch enemy France for honourable motives? The conspirators supposedly included Ludwig Eugen and Prince Ludwig of Württemberg, who exchanged ideas with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The House of Württemberg is also connected to the British royal family and Barruel again fails to show this connection. Next, in Volume I, the French King Louis XV is accused of incompetence, romantic affairs and a lack of religious rigor. He is thus to blame for the fall of his house.
Volume II
Like John Robison, Barruel distinguishes between wonderful, honorable British Freemasons on the one hand and the evil, occult lodges in France and Germany. In Chapter Nine he states:
England in particular is full of highly decent men, excellent citizens, who are Freemasons […] and are united in the bond of common good and brotherly sympathy.
Having gone into exile in Britain, Barruel must address his potential conflict of interest and assert that he is not putting the British Freemasons in a positive light simply because he fears negative consequences if he also dismisses these brothers as dangerous and occult. Barruel was an arch-Catholic Jesuit and for that reason alone he should reject all British Masonry, whether the regular three-degree system or the more advanced systems, which all refer to mystery cults of antiquity. He uses the simple argument that British lodges cannot be dangerous because they are very numerous and yet have not started a revolution like in France. British Freemasonry was conceived under King George I in 1717 and served various purposes, including a new system of favoritism below the nobility and sometimes parallel to the nobility. British society became more complex and loyalty, privileges and obligations could be managed through lodges. You can create any kind of vehicle icles for secret operations, no matter how boring it may seem from the outside; not just theatrical lodges with all the trimmings, but also dull import-export companies. We do not know whether Barruel was aware that the sister organization of British Freemasonry was the scientific association “Royal Society” and that the focus was on progress for the benefit of the Empire. This progress required the same logic and educational opportunities that Barruel dismissed in France as an anti-Christian conspiracy.
The Bavarian Illuminati Order was just an intermediary front organization. The purpose is to have a safety net in case the front organization is exposed and burned. This purpose was fulfilled when the Bavarian police confiscated and published documents from the order. Adam Weishaupt could be portrayed as an overambitious activist and the most important members as gullible followers who did not really know what they were getting themselves into. Barruel tells a strange story about being invited to dinner by French Freemasons who locked the doors and urged him to join the order. Normally, after passing the pre-selection process, someone has to learn lengthy ritual texts by heart and repeat them as accurately as possible word for word in order to be awarded the first degree. The weird French forced three full degrees on him in a lightning ceremony, while he was actually politely leaving. After a ridiculous drama, he was then asked whether he would swear allegiance to the Grand Master of these Freemasons, as if the orders came from a king or emperor. It is likely that this story is partly or entirely made up. An almost identical story can be found in the story of conspiracy author John Robison. He tells of a trip to Europe during which wacky lodges allegedly wanted to recruit him, but he found it all far too bizarre; like a grotesque caricature of the wonderful British Freemasonry. Barruel talks about accounts by members of occult, mystical lodges of how they had to consume strange intoxicating drinks and remain disorientated in dungeons in machines that slowly pulled them up and then suddenly let them fall. It was already common practice in ancient times to use psychoactive substances from certain mushrooms and other plants for rituals. If you join a sensitive group that may be involved in illegal activities, including high treason against the ruling king, then the threats made to members are serious. If you come under suspicion or are clearly convicted of treason against the group, you can easily be poisoned or otherwise eliminated. Just like a modern secret service or mafia organization. Occult Freemasons, says Barruel, refer to the destruction of the Knights Templar several centuries ago and the execution of Jaques DeMolay. Those Templars who managed to escape swore revenge on the French king and the Pope. This inspiration was said to have been incorporated into the conspiracy behind the French Revolution. Barruel presents a clever mishmash of facts and misinterpretations. The reader is overwhelmed with many details about Rosicrucians, Kabbalists, etc. and their ritual systems and origins. And since all this weird stuff is not to be found in the usual three degrees of British Freemasonry, one is supposed to come to the conclusion that all the occult stuff in France and elsewhere was the main motivation behind the French Revolution. There is no trace of British influence or even large-scale British secret operations.
Volume III
It is about Adam Weishaupt, who supposedly wanted to bring about massive upheavals out of his own motivation. In principle, it was not difficult at the time for someone with a certain status to familiarize themselves with occult systems through contacts, learn the basic organizational structures of a Masonic lodge, and then start recruiting members. However, it was pointless to recruit ordinary, dumb citizens into the group and risk someone being horrified by the increasingly bizarre rituals and teachings and reporting the matter to the authorities. One had to aim higher and recruit people of higher status, which in turn increased the risk of being infiltrated by spies. Conversely, higher nobility had no incentive to join some rebellious lodge led by a nobody. As already mentioned, the influential Enlightenment scientist and philosopher Christian Wolff had exerted great influence on Johann Adam von Ickstatt, who was appointed director of the University of Ingolstadt, where he pushed back the Jesuits and finally adopted the orphaned Adam Weishaupt, who later founded the Illuminati Order. The young Weishaupt left the Jesuit college in Ingolstadt at the age of 15. This means that Weishaupt’s Jesuit-Catholic education was only superficial and probably had a deterrent effect on him. Adam, like his father before him, lived a double life: outwardly he made a moderate impression, but away from the public eye his zeal for enlightenment became ever more ambitious, as if anything was possible; especially under the influence of the American War of Independence and the modern constitutional monarchy in Britain. Weishaupt pursued an academic career in Ingolstadt, became a Freemason and gradually built up the Illuminati Order. For Barruel, Weishaupt is of the same satanic spirit as the French occult Freemasons, hell-bent on destroying venerable royal families and religion. It is striking that Barruel, like John Robison, avoids inciting hatred against the American Revolution, which was accompanied by enlightened ideas and slogans. According to my research, George Washington and several of his comrades were British agents and independence was just a staging. By officially separating the 13 American colonies from the British colonial empire, the French sunk a fortune in Washington and had to sell huge areas cheaply to the new USA. The world was supposed to think that the USA and Britain were now competitors. Overall, and especially for the American audience, conspiracy literature largely avoided portraying the American Revolution as the work of occult conspirators, although practically every other major revolution is viewed in such a negative light. The Illuminati members messed up their conspiratorial approach and so secret membership lists and other internal documents were confiscated and published by the Bavarian police. This is the source material that Barruel uses and quotes in detail how code names were used, secret codes and many other elements that are typical of any secret service. In the Order’s writings it is clear that great care was taken in recruiting and continually testing new members. Many specific details have been handed down from the 20th century, such as how new recruits were tested by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Britain or by various secret services. One simple method was to subtly encourage the person in question in a bar after increasing alcohol consumption to chat about secrets or to downright boast. If an attractive lady is present and an accomplice plays the arrogant show-off, then some people just give in and reveal more than they are allowed to. Then there is the fake arrest. With the help of costumed agents or real police officers, the new recruits are grilled under some pretext and waited for them to reveal their status and true identity. Former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky reports that someone was once shot in front of him, but he kept his cool. Afterwards he was congratulated and told that the man who had been shot was a traitor and was to be eliminated anyway. This presented an opportunity for a loyalty test. Rumor has it that members of secret societies had to stab a shaved animal blindfolded, in the belief that it was a traitor to the order. Perhaps this is completely made up, or animals were occasionally used for ritual killings without a blindfold. In the Illuminati, newcomers had to reveal various secrets, including embarrassing ones. In the absence of video cameras and tape recordings, someone could be made to make sensitive handwritten confessions in order to have blackmail material in reserve. There are no limits to the imagination, and over the course of ten thousand years of imperialism and secret orders, resourceful spy leaders have perfected the methods. The Illuminati order not only had to protect itself against spies, but had to try in some way to infiltrate the authorities in order to be warned whether its own activities, members and methods were compromised. Weishaupt was a nobody on his own. But with influential nobles in the background who were not just members but the actual leaders, far more opportunities arose. Barruel quotes so much from the Illuminati texts, and garnishes it with weak arch-Catholic criticism, that some of today’s readers of the book series found the enlightened ideas more interesting. Weishaupt would probably never have dreamed that the order would collapse so quickly and that s then people all over Europe and America read his ideas in best-selling books.
Volume IV
The Bavarian authorities finally stopped the Illuminati order after the embarrassing revelations, but refrained from imposing harsh punishments. The Bavarian censorship board consisted mainly of Illuminati until the Elector intervened in 1784. Enlightenment writings were often waved through, while anti-enlightenment texts were repeatedly confiscated. Other parts of the Bavarian government were also infiltrated by the Illuminati. Franz Xaver von Zwackh (code name Cato) had actually been a royal Bavarian state councilor, was transferred to Landshut as a punishment and later fled to Paris and later returned to Bavaria. Weishaupt may actually have believed that he would play the central role and he is said to have been suspicious that members Bode and Knigge were bringing high nobility on board, such as Princes Karl of Hesse and Ferdinand of Brunswick, as well as Dukes Ernst of Saxe-Gotha and Carl August of Saxe-Weimar. Ernst II used the Gotha Illuminati lodge as a secret shadow cabinet. Various Illuminati tried, in classic espionage fashion, to steal relevant secret government documents and exert influence on Bavarian policy towards Austria. Elector Karl Theodor had had enough and banned the order. Some lost their posts, some had to leave Bavaria, there were house searches, but no one ended up in prison. In public, some tried to interpret the dissolution of the order as the work of Jesuit networks. Former Illuminati published texts saying that it had all been a big misunderstanding. Adam Weishaupt fled. Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (a member of the Illuminati under the order name Quintus Severus or Timoleon since 1783) granted him asylum in Gotha. The irony was not lost on many observers: the alleged enlightener, who wanted to free the world from the yoke of absolutism, took refuge with a powerful nobleman and was financed by him. It would have been extremely dangerous if Weishaupt had been taken prisoner and revealed further information. Instead, Weishaupt was allowed to live in Gotha with the title and pension of a court councilor. From then on, he published a series of texts that trivialized the Illuminati order. Outside of Bavaria, there were hardly any notable persecutions of Illuminati. Anyone who still has any doubts that Barruel wrote a commissioned work for Britain should read his sleazy portrayal that powerful princes such as Ernst II Ludwig of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg were only deceived by Weishaupt. According to all the letters from Germany that Barruel received from German sources, they showed that the prince was aware of his mistake and was “much more concerned with the welfare of his subjects than with the mysteries of the sect.” Weishaupt was not even allowed to appear in public in the presence of the prince. The other princes had no intention of taking part in a conspiracy either. A conspiracy against France, for example? The arch-enemy of the British Empire, to whose throne the German princes were related? Any ordinary historian of modern and contemporary history will have to admit that major coups require major secret operations and that revolutionaries are happy to seek help from foreign secret services if common interests arise. It is of course nonsense to make a flat statement that the British secret service was entirely behind the French Revolution. There were enough influential circles in France, with or without membership in Masonic lodges, who wanted to overthrow the royal family. It is well known that it makes sense for subversive circles to set up bases and seek support outside their own country’s borders and thus far away from the domestic security authorities. The Jacobins, who played the key role in the French Revolution, ensured that almost no records of their most important meetings exist. One influence was the London “Revolution Society”, which overlapped with the Society for Constitutional Information (CSI). The members of the British clubs included
Richard Price: Member of the Royal Society and in close contact with American revolutionaries such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. When Lord Shelburne became British Prime Minister in 1782, Price was offered the post of his private secretary.
Joseph Priestley: Member of the Royal Society. He was a scientist and, in addition, he combined the rationalism of the Enlightenment with Christian teachings. He was also associated with Lord Shelburne. Some Britons were n his ideas went too far and there were fears that the spark of the French Revolution might spread to Britain. He eventually moved to Pennsylvania in the USA.
- Andrew Kippis: Member of the Royal Society.
- Abraham Rees: Member of the Royal Society.
- Theophilius Lindsey: He was chaplain to Algernon Seymour, the 7th Duke of Somerset
- Thomas Brand Hollis: Member of the Royal Society. He corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson
- Peter Finch Martineau: He was descended from a dynasty. He later served as Deputy Lieutenant of Hertfordshire, which is an administrative rank awarded by the Crown.
The Royal Society was essential to the British Empire and was a sister organization of British Freemasonry. All members were ultimately committed to the Crown and not to fine values of enlightenment and equality. When the “radical” movements got a little out of control in the 1790s, there were a series of trials for “high treason”. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke condemned the French Revolution in a widely read text and promoted Augustin Barruel with his four-volume series of conspiracy books. Burke married the daughter of Dr. Christopher Nugent, a physician and fellow of the Royal Society, whose branch in Edinburgh was once president of John Robison, the author of the conspiracy book “Proofs of a Conspiracy”. Burke later became private secretary to the British Prime Minister Charles Watson-Wentworth. Later, Burke himself became a member of the Privy Council. When it came to the interests of the British royal family, the fun and enlightened posturing were over. The men were initially imprisoned in the Tower of London, but they were transferred to Newgate Prison. Those accused of treason could expect the brutal punishment of hanging, disemboweling and quartering if convicted. Each would have been “hung by the neck, cut open alive, disemboweled (and their entrails burned in front of their face) and then beheaded and quartered.” The entire radical movement was put on trial. There were reportedly 800 arrest warrants ready. The whole scene could have been beheaded in one big blow. Eventually leniency was shown and new laws were passed to rigorously monitor migrants, as well as the Seditious Meeting Act, the Treasonable Practices Act and the Treason Act. The Seditious Meetings Act stated that any place, such as a room or building, where political meetings were held to discuss the injustice of laws, constitutions, governments and policies of the kingdom must be declared a house of disorder and punished. Anyone who even expressed the thought of physically harming the king or his descendants was committing treason. One can imagine how easily radical circles were kept under control in this way. Spies and informants were omnipresent and if someone was caught, they could either be brutally murdered in public or turned into an informant.
The early socialists
According to socialist logic, a constitutional monarchy and a republic are to be rejected because class differences still prevail in such systems and wealth is unequally distributed. In the centuries before, the peasants were subjected to serfdom and repeatedly tried to improve their situation through uprisings, but the leaders of such rebellions, such as the “Croquants’ Rebellion”, were more likely to be nobles or higher-ranking citizens. There was no unified socialist idea; rather, there were individual theoretical concepts, forming “councils” with democratic elements and eventually having a society in which there are no longer any class differences. It must therefore be noted that the origins of socialism lie in the oppressive serfdom systems of the major European powers. Industrial capitalism was not yet a major topic as it was in later phases with authors such as Karl Marx. Napoleon became emperor in 1804 without receiving the Pope’s traditional blessing, and militarily repelled an alliance of the British, Russians and Austrians. This was followed by the infamous campaign of conquest, which reached as far as Russia, but burned up some economic resources and slowed down industrialization, apart from the armaments industry.
It is typical for countries with sluggish or simply weak industries to try to build up a flourishing banking industry, because all that is needed is offices with filing cabinets and safes, not complicated production chains. As soon as capital was attracted, infrastructure projects such as railways could also be realized. It is not surprising that a whole series of radical socialist books appeared during this phase, which often also complained of a satanic conspiracy by better-off circles, Freemasons and especially Jewish bankers. The Rothschild family played a double role as an espionage operation and as a propagandistic enemy for socialist conspiracy propaganda. In 1812, James Mayer Rothschild came from Frankfurt to Paris and started the banking house “De Rothschild Frères”, which subsequently raised important capital for France’s wars and colonial expansions. James Mayer’s father was recruited by the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel and then passed on as a service provider for the British crown. It is very likely that noble lines and secret service structures related to Britain controlled the Rothschilds. The stereotypical prejudices of the time said that Jews were mainly concerned with profits and their small communities and otherwise had no iron loyalty to any of the major European powers. In addition to their locations in France and Germany, the Rothschilds also had locations in Austria, Italy and Britain. This made it possible to disguise cash flows from the British crown and obtain valuable, even secret, information. In France there were also the Jewish Pereire brothers with their bank Crédit Mobilier, the Société Générale and the Crédit Lyonnais. The banking sector became increasingly dominant, while even in 1851 only 1.5 million people worked in companies with more than ten employees. Three million were employed in smaller workshops. In 1815 there was almost only agriculture. In Paris the business of luxury goods for wealthy customers flourished. From the point of view of the British secret services, it was obvious to choose the following tactic to cause unrest in France: socialist propaganda mixed with conspiracy propaganda against Jewish bankers and “satanic” Masonic lodges. In 1806, Napoleon ordered the convening of the “Grand Sanhedrin” in Paris, a kind of supervisory board for Jews, following the example of the ancient Roman Empire, and in 1808 organized the “Consistoire central des Israélites de France,” the corresponding administrative authority. The consistory system made Judaism a recognized religion and placed it under state control. In the older wave of best-selling conspiracy books, the authors’ connections to British aristocratic elites in connection with secret services are very clear and, as the Austrian researcher Oberhauser showed in 2021, more and more details can be reconstructed using original sources. With the next big wave of socialist conspiracy books, the picture is more blurred, as we are no longer dealing with chairmen of the Royal Society or Jesuits with powerful British hosts, but with a colorful mix of authors. Not everyone whose statements play into the hands of the British necessarily and consciously worked for the British secret service. Which pamphlets and books We will probably never be able to find out in which (secret) printing works copies were made in order to artificially subsidize them and make them successful, due to a lack of written documents.
Sources:
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.
The Campaigns of Napoleon, David Chandler
Alphonse Toussenel’s “The Jews, Kings of the Age”
The socialist French journalist Alphonse Toussenel published the book “The Jews, Kings of the Age: A History of Financial Feudalism” in 1846. The big hook is James de Rothschild, who was able to acquire the railway line from Paris to Belgium. Toussenel warned urgently that Jews would strive for world domination. The book seems rather reserved compared to other works from France. There is a blanket complaint that in the new capitalism there is an individual price tag everywhere:
Before the law granted the Jews the railways, every traveller could travel freely on the highway, on the king’s sidewalk. Now that all means of transport, i.e. railways, canals, rivers, belong to the Jews, no one can cross them without paying tribute to them.
If there had been no Jews in France at all, the same resentment would probably have arisen among the population. Many still worked as farmers or in small businesses and were unable to build up wealth, while wealthy circles divided up the various markets. Since only a few tens of thousands of Jews lived in France at the time, the average citizen did not know any of them and never met one. But everyone travelled from time to time or was dependent on the transport of goods, and had to pay accordingly.
Who holds the monopoly of banking and transport, the two branches of trade? The Jew. Who has the monopoly on gold and mercury? A Jew. Who will soon hold the monopoly on coal, salt and tobacco? The same Jew. Who has the advertising monopoly? The Saint-Simonians, lackeys of the Jews. Who has the monopoly on newspaper printing? A Jew accused by the public prosecutor of stamp fraud. If air could be monopolized and sold, tomorrow there would be a Jew monopolizing it.
Toussenel could just as well have written “capitalist” instead of “Jew” to vent his anger. Then he would not have sounded much different from Karl Marx of the same era. In the communist idea of a functioning society, transport, heavy industry, wholesale trade and banking/monetary systems are in state hands, i.e. under the administration of councils or a single party, and not in the hands of a king or a capitalist entrepreneur. Toussenel may have imagined that this would work in the real world, but the reality in socialist states in the 20th century was characterized by inefficiency and shortages. The means of transport (especially private cars) in the USSR were inferior to the capitalist West and were based largely on purchased Western technology. Many goods were rarely available to the average citizen. The press was in the hands of the party. And no one was allowed to exert political influence outside of the pre-established channels. In capitalism, everything has a price tag, but people often had the money to buy goods and services. Toussenel sarcastically says that in (Jewish) capitalism even the air we breathe would be sold off and monopolized if this were technically feasible. In capitalist countries people laughed that there would soon be a shortage of sand in the desert if communism spread there. Did Toussenel think that the problems could be controlled if Jewish bankers could be gotten rid of from France because local bankers were more patriotic or their institutions were easier to nationalize? Did he really believe that greed was a characteristic that was specifically Jewish or more pronounced among Jews? That Jewish entrepreneurs did immoral things because of their Jewish religion or ethnic roots? Or was Toussenel’s anti-Semitism more of a means to an end, to stir up sentiment against bankers? Was it a legal loophole because he did not dare to directly attack the French government and legal system? It was not permitted to call for a violent overthrow of the existing order, for a new revolution with the aim of establishing a socialist system. His fixation on the Rothschilds and Jews in general was a way of increasing discontent in the population. The more people participated in the corresponding activism, the more people like Toussenel would have tried to direct this potential anger against all major entrepreneurs and the state. In 1849 he published an appeal to the Parisian workers, to free themselves from “Jewish despotism”. The text accuses the Jews of worshipping a dark god. For Toussenel, it was a way to agitate past the censors. For the government, his activism was not particularly threatening, but perhaps served as a pressure relief valve for the frustrated working class. The company “Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord” (NORD) belonged to the French and British arms of the Rothschild banking family and was subsequently expanded further and further. But in 1938, the NORD and other private railways were nationalized. Certainly, some observers found it suspicious that a single bank had such dominance and that a British branch was also involved. But the railway was hardly evidence of a Jewish world conspiracy. Everyone knew that the political situation in France was shaky and that, theoretically, a new government could nationalize private sector projects at any time. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who had a Jewish family background, visited the Paris bank of his friend Baron James de Rothschild in 1841 and wrote afterwards:
Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is its prophet.
Jews had suffered for many centuries in Europe from discrimination that was primarily controlled by the nobility and the church. This is why Freemasonry, to which Heine belonged, seemed so attractive, because here the Old Testament tradition of antiquity was honored and members who had reached the third degree were considered equals, at least in the lodge. Socialist ideas seemed partly exciting to Heine, partly dangerous. In Paris, James de Rothschild openly helped finance the “French Invasion of Spain” because a revolt in Spain threatened the rule of King Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand’s mother was from the House of Bourbon, which had been overthrown in the course of the French Revolution. Ferdinand was recognized as his son by Charles IV and Charles’ mother was Maria Amalia of Saxony from the circle of the Welfs, Wettins and Reginars. James de Rothschild had the infamous Ferrières Castle built near Paris in 1855, which became the family’s permanent residence. According to conventional historiography, when he died, Rothschild had the largest private financial assets of the time. It is more likely that this was the money of the British crown.
Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 to 1865) was a left-wing French economist and sociologist who is considered one of the most important early socialists. He got into difficulties with his ideas and projects under Napoleon III. He was involved in a dispute with Karl Marx over theoretical details, which further divided the socialist movement. He considered Jews to be an inferior race of people who were incapable of economic productivity, metaphysical conceptualization and statehood of their own. Jews were always parasites, an “enemy of the human race”. Therefore, there were only two options: “This race must be banished to Asia or destroyed. By iron or by fire or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear.” As a child, Proudhon was unable to afford basic things like books or shoes for school, which caused him great difficulties and often made him the object of ridicule from his wealthier classmates. While working in a printing works, he met the socialist Charles Fourier, who wanted to have his new work “Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire” reproduced there. The two became friends and discussed the great authors of the revolution such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot. Proudhon travelled all over the country in search of employment without much success. In 1840 he published his first work, “What is property?” Even today he has followers who are on the left-wing anarchist spectrum and who quote his slogans such as “Property is theft.” Rousseau had already explained this long before:
“The first man who, after fencing in a piece of land, thought to say: ‘This is mine’ and found people who were simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes could someone have saved humanity by pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch and shouting to his fellow men: Do not listen to this deceiver, you are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth itself to no one.”
At that time, people also freed themselves from the spiritual chains of the classical monarchy and the Catholic Church. It was, of course, an organized fraud that noble lines and better-off citizens could take something and cement their claim with ritual and bureaucratic fuss. It was of course irritating for the average Frenchman even after the revolution when a few rich and super-rich circles owned the railways, the best land and the banks. If you trace the chain of individual trading steps back, so the thinking goes, you will find no ultimate justification for the arbitrary appropriation of property. But France had to remain an empire in order not to be conquered or taken over by force by other empires. The French concept of property also dates back to the old Roman Empire. If it were given up in favor of socialist experiments, it would not be possible to defend the land in communal ownership or in communal administration against external enemies, which is a classic empire. The experiment would quickly end. The socialist states of the Eastern Bloc in the 20th century were all classic empires and vassals. One could say that the role of the nobility and clergy was simply taken over by the Socialist Party. Others compared these states to mega-corporations that also controlled the police and the judiciary. At best, Proudhon’s writings could be used to swindle the poor, frustrated French. But he could not design a defensible new order. Later in life, he even became successful as a senior employee of a company in Lyon and became a Freemason. He did not advocate the idea of violent overthrow (the authorities would have arrested him for that) and he deplored nationalism and militarism; precisely what had saved France from rival powers. His concept of freedom was for a long time naive:
To be governed is to be observed, controlled, spied on, directed, legislated, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached to, controlled, valued, censored, and bossed around by creatures who have neither the right, wisdom, nor virtue to do so. To be governed is to be noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, rated, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, prohibited, reformed, corrected, punished in every operation, in every transaction. It is to be taxed, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, cheated, robbed under the pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest;
Later in his life he became much more conservative and moderate in his views.
Drumont’s “Jewified France”
Edouard Drumont, a French journalist from the right-wing spectrum who represented partly anarchist ideas, published the work “La France Juive” in 1886, of which hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. There was also a German edition under the title “Das verjudete Frankreich”. Drumont vaguely suggested that Jews and Freemasons were secretly controlling France. Since Freemasonry was already widespread, ritually referred to a few Old Testament elements from antiquity, and James de Rothschild was a powerful banker in France, this conspiracy hypothesis seemed plausible to readers. As already mentioned, Jews in Masonic lodges were given the feeling that they were on the same level as non-Jewish lodge brothers and were working on a new world. Drumont preached a racial theory according to which Jews were seriously different from the rest of humanity due to their parasitic characteristics. Drumont even described the founder of the Illuminati, Weishaupt, as a Jew, in order to imply that this conspiracy was behind the French Revolution. In 1889, Drumont founded a French “anti-Semitic league” and a corresponding newspaper. The model was the German anti-Semitic league of the left-wing anarchist Wilhelm Marr. Marr had attended schools in the aristocratic strongholds of Hanover and Braunschweig and then completed training in the north. In February 1879, Marr’s propaganda pamphlet “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism” was published in Berlin. He believed that France and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were ruled by Jews. His student was Theodor Fritsch, of all people, who became very successful on the right-wing spectrum and supplied the public with books and pamphlets well into the Nazi era, including German translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the magazine articles published by Henry Ford under the title “The International Jew”. Édouard Drumont was elected for the French parliamentary elections in May 1898. Drumont represented Algiers in the Chamber of Deputies from 1898 to 1902. He was sued for accusing a member of parliament of accepting a bribe. Drumont was accused of accepting money from the wealthy Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild to pass a law that the banker wanted. Drumont had many followers. He reached the peak of his fame during the Dreyfus affair, in which he was the fiercest accuser of Alfred Dreyfus.
Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux
Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux came from a noble family and was chamberlain of the French Bourbon king Charles X. In 1869, Gougenot des Mousseaux published the work for which he is still known today: the polemic “Le Juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens.” In this work, he relied on the traditional, Christian-based anti-Judaism of authors such as Théodore Ratisbonne. He believed that Freemasonry was a trap set up by anti-Jewish conspirators to recruit and manipulate Christians. In 1921, the prominent National Socialist Alfred Rosenberg translated Gougenot des Mousseaux’s work into German under the title “The Jew, Judaism and the Judaization of the Christian Peoples.” It should be emphasized again: Gougenot des Mousseaux came from the exploitative nobility and served directly a king from the House of Bourbon. The serfdom of the peasants was not ended until the French Revolution in 1779. The nobility, together with the Catholic Church, had been the greatest, most brazen exploiters in France that one could imagine. Nevertheless, Gougenot des Mousseaux presented the Jews per se as the exploiters par excellence. Other great powers such as Britain, Austria and Russia were still ruled by exploitative nobility, with the British increasingly striving for world domination with the help of science, military, trade and espionage. For Gougenot des Mousseaux, however, a small group of Jews was reaching for world domination with a few loans and costumes in lodges. When the ordinary French citizen heard that the political upheavals were accompanied by Freemasonry and that individual figures such as James De Rothschild had become very rich, the conspiracy hypothesis seemed plausible. Britain officially created modern Freemasonry in 1717, even though it had already been developed in Scotland. The Old Testament elements in the lodge rituals are more or less a gateway into the spiritual world of antiquity. This gateway usually seems inconspicuous and harmless to Christians. The tiny Jewish empire of antiquity pales in comparison to ancient Egypt, whose symbolism plays an important role in Freemasonry. Ancient Greek and Roman elements are also represented in Freemasonry. Even if someone only has a superficial knowledge of antiquity, it should be clear to them that at that time there was a wide range of very similar religions, cults and even exclusive secret societies that were dedicated to apparent “mysteries”. Judaism in antiquity originally had many gods and then made the step towards monotheism. Elements such as the Kabbalah were also nothing unusual. After the Roman Empire had infiltrated and taken over Christianity through secret services, it was adapted to the traditions of antiquity, while the important mystery cults were retained. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the great European aristocratic houses established themselves and continued mystery cults. In addition, in 1717 the British colonial empire under the Hanoverian King George I gave Freemasonry a strong science-friendly component and developed the secret society parallel to the elite scientific community “Royal Society”. Nevertheless, Gougenot Des Mousseaux and Rosenberg declared Freemasonry to be a Jewish-Kabbalistic conspiracy:
Freemasonry, which arose from the mysterious doctrines of the Kabbalah, is nothing other than the modern form of occultism, whose prince is the Jew, the centuries-old master of the Kabbalah.
The Jew is therefore by nature, and we say necessarily the soul, the real master of Freemasonry, of which the well-known dignitaries are usually nothing more than the deceitful and deceived heads of the order.
Of course, the noble Gougenot Des Mousseaux does not lament in his book the death and destruction that the Bourbons and the Catholic Church had brought upon people over the centuries. War, the Inquisition, the exploitation of the peasants and the ancient mystery cults of the nobility are not mentioned. Instead, he tells a fantasy story about how a few Jews needed a human sacrifice to make Easter a success:
“Tobias went out into the street before evening and met a boy of more than two years, whose name was Simon. The child was lured, kidnapped and carefully hidden, because the parents and the B The people immediately went in search of the child. What had become of the child? Who had carried out the theft? We must look for it among the Jews! That was the message. But night fell. The Jews led the child into an anteroom, and one of them, Moses, who was considered to know the time of the Messiah’s arrival, put it on his knees. Here it was tortured. Samuel tied a cloth around its neck to suppress its screaming, others held its hands and legs while Moses performed the circumcision. Immediately afterwards he set about torturing the child and tearing off pieces of its flesh. Then everyone did what Moses had done: the flowing blood was collected in bowls. But the cloth wrapped around the child’s neck had come loose, and a scream coming from the throat, which had been somewhat freed, alarmed the Jews. They pressed their hands over the child’s mouth and it seemed almost dead. Moses had Samuel sit down on his left. The two men spread the victim’s arms in the shape of a cross and the Jews, armed with nails, now reveled in the pleasure of being able to crucify him. Thus we have killed Jesus, the God of the Christians! Thus shall our enemies be overthrown forever. And the child breathed his last sigh after more than an hour of torment. The Jews immediately washed the blood from his body and sprinkled their houses with this water, glad to be able to wash their hands and faces with it as well . . .”
Not only are Jews greedy for such individual satanic rituals, but they generally intend to bring about the death of Christians. Gougenot des Mousseaux admits that he cannot provide any valid evidence of satanic ritual murders, but it is enough for him that such mythical stories have gone viral:
However, if these words are clear, if the facts are countless, if they come from all times and all countries, and if history, with its accuracy and lavish abundance of details, seems to give us photographs; the Jew denies it.
Next, in his work of 1869, Gougenot des Mousseaux refers to the narratives that had already been circulating in manipulative conspiracy books since the 1790s.
Some clumsiness that occurred under the watchful eye; several breaches of trust that slipped out in the drunken state of imminent triumph; clear admissions, investigations; All this, together with our personal documents, allows us to form a very definite opinion about the nature and power of the activities of the high secret societies in which the Christians are united as the flock under the hand of the Jew. In this Germany, where the Jews and the societies that help them have long since placed themselves at the forefront of the efforts to unite the peoples and to form an empire, with the aim of later being able to easily substitute the other form of government, the form of a cosmopolitan republic; in this Germany, the “Munich Historical and Political Papers” published the complaints of a mason in 1862 on the occasion of Alban Stolz’s pamphlet on Freemasonry. The documents, it is said, were presented to King William . . . and the author, who is entirely devoted to the Protestant cult, describes in them as the greatest danger to throne and altar “the power that the Jews have managed to acquire with the help of Freemasonry, a power that has today reached its peak.” In Germany, he tells us – and we leave him the full responsibility for his words – “there exists a secret society with Masonic forms, which is under the control of unknown leaders. The members of this association are mostly Jews, their degrees and their systems have Christian symbols only as an external form and serve all the better to conceal their true activity. The Jews use Christianity only for mockery and to increase the darkness of their machinations.”
In addition to Satanism and the infiltration of social institutions, Jews would also (metaphysically) engage in biological warfare:
Since 1832, Jews have been almost completely spared [from epidemics], even when they lived in the dirtiest parts of the city. The entire Middle Ages testifies to the immunity of Jews during plague epidemics, which often provided a pretext for persecution. Regarding the plague of 1346, the historian Tschudi reports that this disease did not affect Jews in any country. The Jews, says The Internationale in London, live in an unhealthy environment, and at the time of the cholera, when all the inhabitants of the same part of the city fell ill with the disease, the Jews miraculously escaped this scourge. Frascator shows us that the Jews were completely spared from the typhus epidemic of 1505. were constantly spared; Rau confirms the same about the year 1824; Ramazzini says the same about the fever epidemic in Rome in 1691; Deguer shows us that the Jews were spared from dysentery in Nimes in 1736; Eisenmann claims that tans are rare among Jewish children; according to Wawruch, no tapeworm infections are found among German Jews.”
For centuries, the explanation was that Jews had poisoned the wells. It is no longer possible to reconstruct what percentage of Jews died from epidemics. During the “Black Death,” the popes publicly declared several times that Jews were not responsible. Nevertheless, Christians organized pogroms in the hope that this would solve the epidemic problem. In 1349, King Charles IV declared that not only the property of Jewish plague victims should fall to the administration of the city of Frankfurt, but also the property of Jews who were killed. Very soon afterwards, all of Frankfurt’s Jews (around 60) were beaten to death or burned in their houses. In the Middle Ages, the nobility and the church dominated the ordinary population. There were special laws for Jews, such as the “Jewish Regal” or the “Protection of Jews,” which was nothing other than extortion of protection money. Under Rudolf of Habsburg, the Jewish Regal was interpreted as royal serfdom, which gave rise to the right to expropriate Jews without compensation if necessary. In 1356, Charles IV transferred the Jewish Regal (i.e. the right to extort protection money) to the electors. The emergence of individual Jewish court factors (also disparagingly called court Jews), who carried out certain transactions for the nobility, and the establishment of Jewish banks were interpreted by some early socialists as a reversal of power relations. However, it is a classic beginner’s mistake (or an attempt at concealment) to simply take the ownership structures of corporations and private banks from the 1700s and 1800s officially listed in the documents as fact without assessing the probability that there were secret (noble) ownership structures and that it was just a front company. For a secret service, establishing front companies is one of the essential techniques and therefore the history of capitalism is much more complicated than historians realize.
Mikhail Bakunin
The socialist Mikhail Bakunin came from a noble family, his father was a career diplomat. He surrounded himself with representatives of the Enlightenment movement, studied for three semesters in Berlin and then became friends with Arnold Ruge in Dresden, who had dealings with the Italian revolutionary fighter Mazzini. Mazzini was supported by the Welfs. Instead of studying, Bakunin became more and more of an activist until the Russian authorities ordered him back to Russia, which he refused, and so he went to Switzerland with Georg Herwegh. Between 1869 and 1870 he was in cahoots with the Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev. He got his start in Freemasonry in a Scottish Rite lodge under the Grand Orient of France. Then in Florence he learned about the Masonic and revolutionary structures of Garibaldi and Mazzini, after which he converted to atheism. Bakunin was also enamored with the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy. He had apparently read anti-Semitic bestsellers of early socialism, because he expressed identical ideas about inherently parasitic Jews who wanted to exploit the working, non-Jewish population through central banks. This was no longer the old-fashioned anti-Semitism, but the modern, new, politicized kind. He wrote to the Bologna Department of the International:
“This whole Jewish sphere is one single exploitative sect, a kind of blood-sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite which not only crosses the boundaries of states but also the boundaries of political opinion. This [Jewish] sphere is now, at least for the most part, under the control of Marx and Rothschild.”
Karl Marx – the conspiracy theorist
The name Karl Marx does not initially spring to mind as a classic conspiracy theorist, but the influence of the early French socialists on him is unmistakable and he did not just preach that Jews were secretly plotting the exploitation of people, but he preached that all capitalist entrepreneurs and traders were constantly plotting the exploitation of people. He wanted to shed his Jewish roots and saw banking as overlapping with specifically Jewish behavior, worshiping money as a god and making money with money (“usury”), which was the worst form of exploitation. The high capitalists without Jewish roots were at least essentially Jewish because they allowed the special Jewish greed to rub off on them. n described Marx’s explanation of what was wrong with the world as a mixture of anti-Semitic drivel from student cafés mixed with the old ideas of Rousseau. Capital is parasitic, blood-sucking. Even children are not safe from vampires. It is reminiscent of all the myths about Jewish blood rituals on children and the chatter of the early French socialists. We also find in Marx the same kind of contacts as in the propaganda operations of the British secret service in connection with the French Revolution. On June 30, 1869, Marx was elected a member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce. The president of the organization was the British Crown Prince Albert Edward (later King Edward VII). Marx’s mentor was his father-in-law, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, whose father in turn was the closest confidant of the Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel from the ranks of the Guelphs, who had occupied the British throne since 1714. Ferdinand was a very high-ranking Freemason and member of the Order of the Illuminati. At Marx’s funeral was Carl Schorlemmer, a communist chemistry professor from the Royal Society who had been involved in the revolutionary activities in Baden in 1848. During his summer holidays he had regularly visited Marx and Engels in London. Also present at the funeral was Ray Lankester, a British zoologist and biologist from the Royal Society with degrees from Cambridge and Oxford. Early industrial capitalism did ruthlessly exploit workers, even children. But many entrepreneurs risked their own money and were able to create added value with clever new ideas, rather than just profiting from existing assets or the labor of others. If a moneylender took the right risk, the right capital could be made available to someone with new ideas. In the USA in particular, there was an explosive production power and more and more attractive products that more and more people could afford. For Marx, the ideas of the French Revolution were far from enough. He called the USA “a great democratic republic,” but even there, according to his logic, capitalism would ultimately end in misery and collapse due to mutual exploitation. His current followers in particular suspect a right-wing global conspiracy everywhere and the ordinary middle class is deeply mistrusted. Marx knew full well that his revolutionary agitation could not work: the workers and peasants were not nearly educated enough to overthrow an existing system and replace it with a functioning, socialist one. A crash course in Marx’s rambling theory would not change that. Beneath all the philosophical gibberish was nothing but cheap conning.
The Prussian government agent Karl Marx, Wolfgang Waldner. Karl Marx, A Psychography, Arnold Künzli. The Makers of Modern Italy Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi. Three Lectures Delivered at Oxford. J. A. R. Marriott
The Protocols of Zion
The “Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion” is a forged text from Russia around 1900, which was later made available to a mass audience by influential Americans and Britons and has had a strong influence on conspiracy literature to this day. The authors of the Protocols were themselves influenced by older conspiracy literature and did not even bother to think up the whole text, but took parts from a satire by Maurice Joly, from the novel Biarritz and from Theodor Herzl’s “The Jewish State”. The text itself is a jumble of lame drivel that could have been written by practically any person familiar with the current anti-Semitic literature. In principle, the Protocols were constructed in such a way that they acted as a counterpart and apparent confirmation of the previous conspiracy literature. The individual Protocols of Zion are not arranged thematically or in any other way in a strict manner, but simply repeat the same old talk about how the press, the financial world and politics are controlled. Protocol #1 consists only of general phrases about power versus freedom and how easily the mass of the population can be manipulated. Protocol #2 announces that the Jewish conspiracy has control of the press and gold. Protocol #3 is about the intention to exterminate non-Jews. Protocol #4 is more general talk. Protocol #5 is about how the non-Jews are too divided to form a coalition against the Jewish conspiracy. In addition, confusing tactics are used so that people cannot understand politics properly. Protocol #6 talks about how the aristocracy no longer has political power, but still represents a potential threat because of its wealth. It was precisely this idea that led the National Socialists to cooperate with the Guelphs. Protocol #7 describes how problematic countries are automatically drawn into wars with neighboring states. Anti-Semites generally blame every significant outbreak of war on the Jewish conspiracy. Protocol #8 deals with the legal and economic aspects that the Jewish conspiracy wants to use for its own ends. Protocol #9 contains various points that have already been dealt with several times in previous protocols. Protocol #10 is even more vague talk about how the “poison of liberalism” has been deliberately used to undermine states and societies. Politicians who can be blackmailed are specifically promoted. Protocol #11 promises, after all the talk about the current state of the Jewish world conspiracy from the first 10 protocols, to finally reveal the strategy for the future in order to finally and irrevocably secure world domination. But you don’t learn anything that hasn’t already been covered. Protocol #12 is again about control over the press. You don’t get any deeper insights. It continues like this up to and including Protocol #24. For a forgery, the quality is abysmal and it is obvious that no effort was made. It was the aura created around the Protocols that made the impact, not the actual text. The Protocols do not reveal a single verifiable secret, a single secret technique or methodology, they do not reveal a single Jewish agent or a single specific operation. The intelligence value of this “revelation” is therefore zero, which is typical of a complete forgery. If we compare the Protocols with Victor Ostrovsky’s exposé book about the Israeli secret service Mossad, we see that Ostrovsky does indeed reveal secret operations, names and methods. A good forgery contains interesting secrets that are revealed. The Protocols are empty and hollow. That is why so many forewords, comments and detailed conclusions were added to various print editions, as well as supposedly newly discovered additional protocols, to make the forgery look somehow more interesting and convincing. It is the typical effect of the echo chamber and filter base when someone only reads anti-Semitic texts and then sees apparent confirmations everywhere in the world.
In 1919, the American newspaper Philadelphia Public Ledger published translated excerpts from the protocols under the title “Red Bible”, which were slightly rewritten so that it looked like a document from the Russian Bolsheviks. The person responsible, Carl W. Ackerman, later got the head post at the journalism faculty of the elite Columbia University, which was originally founded by the British King George II. The owner of the newspaper was the unbelievable The wealthy Cyrus H. K. Curtis and from 1918 to 1921 the former US President William Howard Taft was also an author. Taft was a member of the dangerous secret organization Skull & Bones, which was actively involved in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and in supplying the new Soviet regime with Western money and technology. Skull & Bones was later exposed by historian Antony Sutton using original documents. Skull & Bones goes back to the influence of the British crown. Here we had “journalists” from a milieu that used secret service methods to end Russia’s tsarist rule and supported Soviet communism, and it was precisely these journalists who, as a diversionary tactic, spread the forged Protocols of Zion about a Jewish world conspiracy to establish godless communism and dissolve nations. So every time the British Empire undertook a major secret operation to overthrow an existing order somewhere in the world, the British secret services simultaneously launched mendacious books and pamphlets in public to draw attention to someone else. Harris A. Houghton, a member of the American military intelligence service, had a complete English translation of the Protocols prepared and distributed in 1920. For this purpose he created the front company “The Beckwith Company” and also published books such as Nesta Webster’s “Boche and Bolshevik”. The money for Houghton’s publishing activities probably came from the organization “American Defense Society”, whose honorary president was former US President Theodore Roosevelt. The chairman was Richard Melancthon Hurd, a graduate of Yale University and member of the secret organization Skull & Bones. In Great Britain, the first English edition of the Protocols appeared in 1920 and there was extensive coverage in the newspaper “The Morning Post” in London. This resulted in the book The Cause of World Unrest, which was co-written by Nesta Webster, George Shanks and half of the newspaper’s staff.
Shanks had made the very first translation of the Protocols from Russian into English, possibly with the help of Count Cherep-Spiridovich, who had served as a general under the Tsars. The Count also wrote the book Secret World Government or The Hidden Hand, in which he identified 300 Jewish families as the core of the conspiracy and which was probably an inspiration for the legend of the Committee of 300 and the corresponding work by John Coleman. According to Lord Alfred Douglas, influential men such as Henry Ford and newspapers such as the Financial Times helped the Count to reach a wider public. The Morning Post was edited by Lilias Borthwick, the wife of Seymour Henry Bathurst, 7th Earl Bathurst (a Deputy Lieutenant of the Royal Family). Under their leadership, the newspaper was arch-conservative, imperialist, protectionist, militarist and anti-Semitic. On April 7, 1924, the newspaper was sold to the busy anti-Semitic conspiracy writer Alan Percy, the 8th Duke of Northumberland (recipient of the highest British decorations), and a consortium of prominent conservatives. Victor E. Marsden had been the newspaper’s Russia correspondent and is said to have also helped with the translation and occasionally met with the Prince of Wales. In the publication of the Marsden Protocols we find an afterword by the nobleman Lord Sydenham, who was awarded several of the highest British decorations, in which it is declared irrelevant that the text was copied from other sources. Sydenham uses the argument that the Protocols predicted with “deadly accuracy” the coming events, including the communist revolution in Russia. But this means that he interprets the communist revolution according to the Protocols. So he goes around in circles with his argument, although an educated man like him should have understood that circular argumentation is nonsense. The text of the Protocols is extremely vague and imprecise, but Sydenham explains that the predictions came true “to the letter”. He thanks the American car manufacturer Henry Ford for his “outstanding” further revelations as a supplement to the Protocols. Ford not only supported the National Socialist regime, but interestingly also built factories important for the war effort in the Soviet Union, the supposed Moloch of the Jewish Illuminati. The Protocols became known to a mass audience in America through Ford, because he paid for the printing of countless copies and also made the eyes of the German Nazis. Of course, the Protocols served as a diversion for him and drew attention to a supposed Jewish worldview. conspiracy. To reinforce the effect, Ford also published the book “The International Jew”, which is based on the Protocols. Practically all negative developments are attributed to a Jewish conspiracy, not to the Anglo-American Empire. The numerous readers of the Protocols generally suspected families like the Rothschilds of implementing the plans in the Protocols. The public did not learn that the important Jewish clans had been built up by the British Empire in the same way as non-Jewish robber barons. After a British newspaper revealed in the 1920s that the Protocols were a fabrication, reactions varied. One of the most frequently cited arguments, which can also be found in Henry Ford and in later conspiracy literature, is that it does not matter whether the Protocols were forged or not, because the plans contained in them would have been implemented by the Jewish conspirators in the world exactly as described. In some later conspiracy books, the Protocols were printed in a modified form, with terms such as “Jews” and “Goyim” (non-Jews) replaced with “Illuminati” and “subjects”. In his 1991 bestseller “Behold a Pale Horse”, Milton William Cooper printed the entire text in its original form, along with the comment that the word “Jews” should be replaced with “Illuminati” every time.
Sources:
Jenkins, Philip (1997). Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950.
Robert Singerman, “The American Career of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, in: American Jewish History,
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Reedy, W. Va. : Liberty Bell Publications
https://archive.org/details/protocolsofthelearnedeldersofzion_201905/page/n63/mode/2up
“The International Jew”
Influential American anti-Semites and British aristocrats had ample means to search for concrete evidence of actual criminal acts by Jewish individuals and networks, and to take action against these individuals and networks with the help of lawyers and sympathetic state officials. Instead, only hollow and toothless pamphlets were printed that contained no court-admissible evidence that could have been used to obtain even a single lousy search warrant or even a conviction in court. Only in Europe did the pamphlets by the Nazis have a devastating effect, culminating in the Holocaust. Henry Ford’s 1920 publication “The International Jew: A World Problem” was based on the Protocols and was published in large numbers in various languages. It is a compilation of 91 articles by various authors. In 1922, the German translation was published by the Leipzig-based Hammer publishing house of the anti-Semitic publisher Theodor Fritsch, and was a sales success in the nationalist scene and with the NSDAP. Right at the beginning, the first essay is devoted to the question of how Jews managed to take over financial power in the USA. There is no breakdown with reliable sources of how much financial power Jews are supposed to have had in 1920. Instead, the reference is made to the fact that the influential American Jews were simply among the European Jews who were already ultra-rich. Which European Jews are they? We are not told. What is also missing is a convincing answer to why the Jewish advance in the USA was not stopped when there were so few Jewish families that belonged to the super-rich. In the third essay, it is striking that the American Revolution is not described as the work of Jewish-communist Illuminati, although according to the common view, the revolutionaries broke away from the British nobility with slogans about freedom and equality and destroyed the old order in favor of democracy and capitalism. European Jews are said to have simply financed American Jews in order to gradually buy up the American economy, without this plot being noticed and stopped. As in countless other conspiracy texts, the impression is created that non-Jews have completely failed in terms of intelligence, while Jews have performed intelligence miracles unhindered. The argument is again used that Jews had some outstanding intelligence, conspiratorial skills. It continues:
“The Jew is the only and original international capitalist.”
This statement is identical to what the early French socialists believed. Jews use non-Jewish straw men to a particularly large extent, it is said, but without giving a single example of this. Instead of the alleged discretion, one saw how the Rothschilds, for example, practically sought the limelight, built huge palaces and rtys were organized for high society. Countless individuals and groups, including of course the nobility, were free to engage in banking. For some inexplicable, unstated reason, however, the field is said to have been left to the Jews. In terms of intelligence, Jews were always faster and better informed than others, which is probably an allusion to the Rothschild-Waterloo myth. No evidence is provided, but the reader is only given a reference to “many authors in the Middle Ages” who wrote about it. Anti-Semitic literature therefore uses anti-Semitic literature as a standard source and views the sheer mass of publications within this echo chamber and filter bubble as a kind of scientific field. The British nobility, it is said, had completely gotten into debt with Jewish moneylenders, without providing any sources or an overview and without mentioning the Rothschild-Waterloo myth. The second essay deals with the signs of decay in Germany, which are of course blamed on Judaism. Germanic peoples and Jews are fundamentally different and particularly alien to one another in Germany, it is explained, which is a complete distortion of the facts, because German Jews (or Germans of Jewish descent) are among the most assimilated Jews in the world. The countries, it is explained, that were most under Jewish influence (presumably the USA and Britain) treated Germany the worst in World War I. With this well-known trick, Anglo-American propaganda succeeded in ensnaring right-wing circles in Germany and ensuring that the anger of the Germans was not directed against the Guelph nobility. Jews were supposed to have been “the only winners of the war,” according to the grotesque assessment. It was precisely because of this nonsense that nobles were able to manipulate the National Socialists and create the impression that high circles in Britain and the USA were sympathetic to the Nazis and would allow Germany to expand eastwards and even fight against the (supposedly Jewish-dominated) Soviet Union. Immediately after the First World War there was a short-lived high point in which left-wing movements and prominent Jewish socialists secured positions in Germany. The left-wing movement was completely infiltrated by Prussian and Guelph-British secret services, which was of course kept completely secret. You can find a detailed treatise on Karl Marx in my book “The Deepest Secrets of the Superpowers Volume I – Revolution”. Soviet Russia was also involved in the German left-wing sphere through its secret services, although the communist revolution in Russia was not an action of the Jewish Illuminati, but of the nobility. The Anglo-American propaganda naturally interpreted the left-wing phase in Germany as a Jewish-illuminated agenda. An international, anti-Semitic network was therefore necessary to push back the Jewish world conspiracy.
Nesta Webster
Nesta Webster was born in Trent Park, a stately home north of London that was repeatedly used by secret services and the military, for example as a prisoner of war camp for important German and Italian officers. The house was rented by King George III to his doctor in 1777. It later became the property of the Bevan family, whose men were partners in Barclays Bank. Nesta Webster’s father was also a partner in Barclays. Trent Park also belonged for a time to the Jewish nobleman Sir Philip Sassoon, whose clan had been built up by the British Empire. Sassoon was a relative of the Rothschilds, who had been built up by the House of Hesse-Kassel, which in turn is related to the British royal house of Hanover. The Sassoon brothers David and Albert were friends of the British Prince of Wales. David Sassoon (1792 – 1864) was an Iraqi Jew who emigrated with others to Bombay (Mumbai) and led his community there. The British Empire made him rich through the trade in opium and textiles between China, India and England. In 1853 he officially became British, his son was given the minor nobility title of baronet and married into the Rothschild family. Nesta Webster was thus literally born into the midst of circles of aristocratic conspirators. She could actually be trusted to understand the meaning and true power of the British Empire, but in her writings she instead spoke of mystical circles of occultists, Jews and Illuminati as the masterminds of major conspiracies such as the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the spread of socialism. After the First World War she was allowed to give several lectures on these topics at military institutions and to the secret service. The secret service agents are said to have urged her to write the book “World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization”. For this she received praise from high-ranking politicians such as Lord Kitchener, and Winston Churchill, of all people, promoted her work in 1920 in an article entitled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People”. You have to imagine the audacity: Important members of the British Empire ranted about Jewish world conspirators, even though the British secret services were the main suspects in the destabilization of the French monarchy, the Russian Revolution and the spread of socialism via the Fabian Society. And of course the empire had built up Jewish clans such as Sassoon and Rothschild. Were Webster, Churchill and others really so mercilessly naive? Or did they consciously promote conspiracy theories that distracted from the role of the British Empire? Webster described continental Freemasonry as sinister and subversive, while calling British Freemasonry (refounded by the Hanoverian Guelphs in 1717) “an honorable association” and “supporters of law, order, and religion.” This is precisely the pattern we already know from the early phase of conspiracy literature shortly after the French Revolution. Freemasons of the United Grand Lodge of England supported Webster’s writings. She became the leading author of The Patriot, an anti-Semitic newspaper financed by Alan Percy, the 8th Duke of Northumberland, who was awarded the Order of the Garter, the Order of the British Empire, and the Royal Victorian Order. Percy’s 1930 essay “The First Jewish bid for world power” cites as its source a three-year-old study of the Roman Empire published by Oxford University Press and co-authored by a professor of ancient history at Yale University. The study states that the uprisings of the widely distributed Jews caused serious problems for the Romans and that Jews later engaged in a lot of trade in luxury goods. This is intended to illustrate that Jews are dangerous troublemakers who constantly dare to take on large empires. An influential Jew at the court of Emperor Nero would have stood up for other Jews (against bribes, of course). Jews are always ready to commit mass murder, such as the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Greeks in ancient times or countless Russians in the 20th century during the communist revolution. The Roman Emperor Claudius was even afraid of the millions of Jews in Rome, Egypt, Jerusalem and elsewhere. Ultimately, Rome fell, partly because of Jewish subversion and “anarchy”, while the Jews were able to continue to exist. It reads like corresponding Nazi literature, which follows exactly this line of argument and practically assumes that Jews always pose a massive threat to “civil society”. The idea was that the Jews were not reformable, but could only be expelled or destroyed. Together with the Rothschild-Waterloo myth and the Protocols of Zion, this interpretation of history gave the impression that the British Guelph nobility had lost control of the Roman-inspired British Empire to conspiratorial Jewish revolutionaries, and that the Guelph nobility in Russia had even been swept away by a Jewish revolution. It is not surprising that the National Socialists felt attracted to the Guelph nobility because they thought that together they could push back the Jewish world conspiracy and create new empires based on the Roman model. The Duke of Northumberland thanks Nesta Webster at the end of his essay. Later editions of The First Jewish bid for world power include advertisements for other anti-Semitic conspiracy pamphlets that can be ordered, such as
- The Talmud Unmasked
- The Jewish war of survival (documented evidence that the Jews were responsible for World War II)
- an annotated version of the Protocols of Zion (fresh off the press!)
- Pawns in the Game by William Guy Carr
- The International Jew by Henry Ford
- The Myth of the Six Million [referring to Holocaust deaths]
One of Webster’s major works is Secret Societies and Subversive Movements from 1924. In the foreword she immediately mentions how important John Robison’s book Proofs of a Conspiracy and the works of Abbé Barruel were. She discusses various historical secret societies and makes the claim that a Jewish group somehow managed to infiltrate secret societies and thereby gain great power on the European mainland. To do this, it uses ancient elements from the early conspiracy literature that had spread shortly after the French Revolution, such as the diversionary tactic with the “unknown superiors” of the “Strict Observance”. The Masonic high-grade system called “Strict Observance”, which from the middle of the 18th century determined most German and many other European lodges, included noblemen with ties to Great Britain, such as Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick and Charles of Hesse-Kassel. There was talk of there being “unknown superiors” who were the true masters of the organisation. At the time, there was repeated suspicion that the “superiors” could be agents of the House of Stewart, who had been driven from the British throne by the Guelphs, or perhaps Jesuits or some Frenchmen. In 1776, the Illuminati Order was founded, which attracted some disillusioned members of the feuding Strict Observance. Nesta Webster, however, had no interest in investigating the possibility of a Guelph conspiracy, but instead writes of a mysterious Mr. Johnston who appeared on the Masonic scene and was sent by the “unknown superiors.” According to the writings of the Prince of Hesse, this Johnston was a Jew whose real name was Leicht or Leucht. Because he aroused too much suspicion, he was arrested and died in the Wartburg. It is at this point that it is worth remembering that the nobility had the means to conduct resolute counter-espionage, with in-depth background checks and, if necessary, brutal (and illegal) methods. Sure, impostors and blowhards like Cagliostro could always enjoy a certain degree of success, but when it came to potential threats of importance, the nobility would immediately pull out all the stops to uncover espionage nests. According to Webster, the Prussian Hohenzollerns under Frederick the Great and the Jews were somehow in league to gain control over Freemasonry and spread their own interpretations of the Knights Templar. In 1786, French Freemasonry was “completely Prussified.” Frederick certainly had an interest in overthrowing the French monarchy and, among other things, misusing Freemasonry as a vehicle for espionage, but the Guelphs also had the same motive of overthrowing France’s Bourbon rule. Frederick was the son of Sophie Dorothea of Hanover. She was the second child and only daughter of the Elector of Hanover and later British King George I and his wife Sophie Dorothea of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Celle. To make matters worse, according to Nesta Webster, there was a wave of occultism in France and the founding of the “French Illuminati,” whose founder was said to have been a Spanish Jew. Jewish-Kabbalistic Martinists also became a major Masonic power in France. In order to construct a large-scale Jewish conspiracy, Leut en like Webster had no choice but to provide explanations that reached into the nebulous world of lodges, where nothing was really clear. She did not need to provide any real evidence, but rather claims that this or that person was Jewish and that Jewish mysticism was somehow evil compared to the very similar mysticism of many other groups that also refer to antiquity. For thousands of years, secret orders and mystery cults have existed that could be used for espionage purposes. All groups had essentially the same options and tools at their disposal. Why should Jews in particular have been so much better and more successful at using secret groups? Webster uses a well-known circular argument when she attributes a natural and particularly pronounced talent for subversion to the Jews, then interprets various revolutions as a Jewish conspiracy and then uses these “Jewish” revolutions as proof for the original claim that Jews were particularly subversive. Webster writes explicitly of Jewish “super-spies,” intelligence agents, and a network of “crypto-Jews” (Jewish men who assumed non-Jewish cover identities).
“It is obvious that such an “intelligence service” gave the Jews considerable hidden power, all the more so since its existence was largely unknown to the rest of the population.”
What were the special techniques and capabilities of the Jewish intelligence service? Jews were subject to special registration requirements and various restrictions, which made it particularly easy to monitor Jewish communities. The legal status of Jews was so poor that it was child’s play to eliminate, intimidate, forcibly interrogate suspects, and threaten their families. By all standards we know of modern, documented intelligence services, Jews had the worst possible conditions for achieving any notable intelligence success. Webster’s text is the familiar mixture of warmed-up horror stories from the Middle Ages and the building blocks of early conspiracy literature from the period after the French Revolution. She takes the opportunity to attack the British King Charles II of the hated Stewarts, who would have accepted Jewish money in order to be able to lead the British throne and in return he allowed Jews to settle there again, who of course immediately began subversive secret service activities. In reality, Charles had a partly secret agreement with the French that provided for his conversion to Catholicism, which Webster must have known. Finally, Webster talks about the Bavarian Illuminati Order and Adam Weishaupt. As expected, she emphasizes Weishaupt’s education at a Catholic Jesuit school, but fails to mention that his formative family environment consisted of people who were loyal to the Guelphs. Weishaupt was said to have been trained in certain techniques by the Jesuits, but ended up working for a Jewish conspiracy. In 1771, a trader named Franz Kölmer came to Europe from Egypt to recruit members for his secret order. In Malta, he met the mystic Cagliostro (who was probably Jewish) and almost instigated a popular uprising, then he found a few recruits from the French “enlightened ones” and finally arrived in Germany to initiate Adam Weishaupt into the secrets of the mystical doctrine. Weishaupt’s secret order name was “Spartacus” in reference to the famous rebel leader who rebelled against the Roman Empire. Webster speculates that Kölmer might have been a secret Jew. The entire Kölmer legend, however, is based on the writings of Abbé Barruel. Webster’s “argument” is once again lost in the impenetrable fog. Jews played no role in the original conspiracy literature immediately after the French Revolution, but Webster here attempts to construct a Jewish plot after the fact, despite no relevant new information pointing in this direction. She mentions how the Duke of Brunswick (a member of the Illuminati and Grand Master of German Freemasonry) distributed a manifesto to all lodges in 1794 in which he told the story that very secret conspirators had infiltrated Freemasonry and that these conspirators were responsible for the French Revolution and various insurrectionary movements.
“Three years after the Duke of Brunswick distributed his manifesto to the lodges, the books by Barruel, Robison and others appeared, which explained the whole conspiracy.”
But Barruel and Robison only served the purpose of taking certain noble lines and the British secret service out of the firing line and directing suspicion towards the Stewarts, the Jesuits and some French Freemasons and enlightened people. Later, through authors such as Webster, Jews became the focus of the diversion. Robison and Barruel’s books influenced the passing of a law in the English Parliament in 1799 that banned all secret societies except Freemasonry. The Unlawful Societies Act 1799 made it illegal for groups to require their members to take an oath. The societies were also required to keep membership lists available for inspection. A court permit was required for all premises where public lectures were held and for paid public reading rooms. Printing works were strictly regulated because one of the main problems, in the government’s view, was the widespread circulation of seditious pamphlets. Ultimately, every Masonic lodge that existed at the time the law was passed was exempted, provided it kept a list of members and presented it to the judges. Robison and Barruel’s books were also very successful in America, although it is notable that Webster does not classify the American Revolution, which took place just shortly before the French Revolution, as the result of Jewish Illuminati in her book. After all, George Washington (a Freemason of the Royal Arch System) and other revolutionaries preached slogans about freedom and the overthrow of the monarchy. Webster does not deal with the American Revolution any more than Barruel and Robison once did, because the British secret service had set this framework for conspiracy literature. The Jewish Illuminati conspiracy is said to have continued under socialism and the “phraseology of illuminated Freemasonry” was also adopted into the language of socialism. She concludes with a plea for a fascist renewal. It had connections to several relevant right-wing British groups, where there were most likely also some British spies among military officers and aristocrats. Even after the Second World War, the British disinformation and propaganda of Webster and others lived on and influenced new generations of conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis. It was also widely read in the USA by the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and the militia movement.
Heimbichner, S. Craig; Parfrey, Adam (2012). Ritual America: Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society: A Visual Guide. Feral House
Theodor Fritsch
With his work “Leuchtkugeln. Altdeutsch-Antisemitische Kernsprüche” (“Lightbulbs. Old German anti-Semitic core sayings”), which he published in 1881 under the pseudonym Thomas Frey, Fritsch began a long series of anti-Semitic pamphlets. In September 1882, he took part in the “First International Anti-Jewish Congress” in Dresden alongside Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg and 200 other participants. Von Sonnenberg’s “German Social Reform Party” (DSRP) planned to reverse the legal equality of Jews living in Germany and also spoke of a “final solution to the Jewish question” and the “annihilation of the Jewish people”. This was followed in 1887 by the “Anti-Semitic Catechism: a compilation of the most important material for understanding the Jewish question”. In it, in a simple question-and-answer format, it first explains what the “register of sins” of the Jews actually is. The reader is told that this is a short summary of hundreds of books on the subject:
“The Jews, under the guise of religion, are in reality a political, social and business association which, guided by common instincts and in secret agreement among themselves, is working towards the exploitation and subjugation of the non-Jewish peoples. The Jews of all countries and all languages are united in this goal and work into each other’s hands for this purpose.”
The Jews are so clever in this that they cannot be prosecuted under the ordinary laws; which in practice means that the “Anti-Semitic Catechism” openly admits that it cannot provide any evidence or intelligence against Jews that can be used in court, which we have also seen in all the other anti-Semitic publications that promise the greatest possible revelations but ultimately cannot produce any verifiable secrets of any significance. Practically all the problems in the German Reich, from moral decay to low wages, are to be blamed on the Jewish conspiracy. We recognize the basic argument pattern from the Anglo-American conspiracy literature, according to which the Jews form a kind of super secret service. Jews are said to be in control everywhere and would naturally keep the organized seizure of power in Germany out of their international press. While the Jews perform supposed secret service miracles, the non-Jewish elites in the German Reich are portrayed as helpless failures. In the chapter “The Jew in Secret Societies” it is said that Jews infiltrated the Knights Templar and undermined it with diabolical mysticism, which has no basis whatsoever, apart from perhaps the influence of ancient mysteries among the Templars, which, however, go back more to Rome and Greece and can also be found among the Guelphs or the Freemasons. Of course, the classic false claim follows that the Jews have infiltrated Freemasonry; an accusation that was previously made against the French and the Jesuits. Later, the chapter “The fortune of the House of Rothschild” is estimated at 5,000 million, without pointing out that the Rothschilds were deliberately built up by the noble House of Hesse-Kassel and the British throne. The author does not cite the Waterloo fairy tale here, according to which Nathan Rothschild ripped off the British stock market, but it is certain that Fritsch knew and believed the fairy tale, because it is cited in his “Handbook of the Jewish Question”. Then follows a chapter on the German Reichsbank, which is described as a Jewish private bank that only creates the appearance of statehood. After the founding of the American Federal Reserve, conspiracy literature circulated with a practically identical pattern of argumentation. Jewish staff at the bank would prove that it was a Jewish institute disguised as a state institute. Fritsch founded the Hammer publishing house in 1902 and published German translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Dearborn Independent journal articles published by Henry Ford under the title “The International Jew”. The 1932 edition of the Protocols by Fritsch contains a foreword by the editor in which he fails to mention that the text had long since been exposed as a forgery based on older source texts. Fritsch chose the English version by Victor E. Marsen as the model for the German translation and he praises the publications by Henry Ford and the English newspaper “Morning Post”. After the actual text of the Protocols, the Fritsch publication contains a long, drawn-out closing statement in which it is implicitly admitted that the text sounds rather detached and exaggerated. Fritsch wants to use the closing statement to make the text seem more credible. The (Welfen) nobility was practically incapable of any counter-espionage and would have had no trouble at all. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the Jews:
“The old princes had no idea how they were being abused and fooled by clever jugglers. With the eyes of a thief, the cunning burglar followed the clumsy, self-satisfied behavior of the “rulers” and directed them to his own advantage through hypocritical gestures. May the fallen greats today learn from the “Protocols” what an unworthy role they played.”
An “Aryan brain” would not have the imagination to falsify a text like the Protocols anyway.
“The English translator Marsden explained that he could only work on this translation for one hour a day because these unnatural and dishonest trains of thought made him mentally ill.”
It is doubtful that Marsden had any mental problems during the translation, because the Protocols were not one bit different from the rest of the anti-Semitic propaganda that was constantly being read in the British newspaper “Morning Post.” According to Fritsch, anyone who does not believe the Protocols are genuine is either stupid and uneducated, or someone who wants to cover up the truth. The Jews were responsible for the First World War and were vermin that needed to be gotten rid of. Hitler and the NSDAP had internalized this view and believed that they could ally themselves with “the old princes,” the “deposed greats” against the Jewish “thieves” and “jugglers.”
The ethnic scene
The conservatives in Germany and Austria were appalled by industrialization, socialist movements, the increasing importance of large international banks and the triumph of science over mysticism and tradition. Towards the end of the 1800s, a number of ethnic organizations were formed, which, in their aversion to banks and industrial capitalism, sounded just like the older texts of the early French socialists. The central idea was that Jewish conspirators were behind all the problematic changes. The leaders of the ethnic groups were anything but backwoodsmen, but came from the top universities in the big cities. One also often saw typical lodge constructs that were tailored to the target audience. The German Empire from 1871 was under the leadership of the Prussian Hohenzollerns, but it was de facto still a patchwork, some of which had existed for centuries as principalities, duchies and mini-kingdoms of the Welfs, Wettins and Reginars. One must expect that spy networks existed everywhere, reaching as far as Great Britain. The first Chancellor of the German Empire was the Prince or Duke of Lauenburg, Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen. The Duchy of Saxony-Lauenburg was “Electorate of Hanover” for over 100 years and produced George Louis of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who became British King in 1714. The Bismarck family can be traced back to 1270. There is a connection to the (von) Katte family. Hans Katte was the court marshal of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte was gay and had a relationship with Prince Frederick of Prussia (Hohenzollern). His mother was Sophie Dorothea of Hanover, whose father was the British King George I of the Welfs. The relationship between the Hohenzollerns on the one hand and the Welfs, Wettins and Reginars on the other hand was complicated, despite certain, significant family ties. During the so-called “German War” of 1866, Prussia annexed the mini-kingdom of Hanover from the Welfs and confiscated its assets of 16 million Vereinsthaler. Most of the money was used by the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to make the press compliant. The dispossessed George V of Hanover was a first cousin of the British Queen Victoria and, as a legitimate male descendant of King George III, a member of the British royal family and second in line to the British throne. Bismarck saw the Social Democrats as a revolutionary threat and pushed for the Anti-Socialist Law. At the same time, a right-wing conservative welfare state system was to be set up in the form of accident insurance, health insurance, old-age poverty, etc. He wanted to “create a conservative attitude among the great mass of the propertyless”. For Britain, it was an attractive strategy to use covert methods to promote left-wing aspirations on German soil as well as right-wing aspirations in order to destabilize the German Empire. There was something for conservatives to complain about everywhere, such as the cautious colonial policy. A right-wing mass organization, the “Pan-German League,” even formed.
Pan-German League
This lobby group of the nationalist scene is based on the initiative of Adolf Fick (studied at the Welfen University in Marburg) and Otto Lubarsch (studied at the Welfen University in Heidelberg, among others, member of the Heidelberg fraternity, chair at the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, which is named after a nobleman from Schleswig Holstein Gottorf, director of the Pathological Institute founded by Rudolf Virchow and holder of the chair for pathology at the Charité in Berlin, member of the Leopoldina). Theodor Reismann-Grone and Alfred Hugenberg contacted the initiators. Reismann-Grone was at the Humboldt University, as well as at the University of Munich, which is named after a nobleman who married into the Saxon Welfen family. Hugenberg (studied at the Welf universities in Göttingen and Heidelberg) was on the board of the Frankfurt mining and metal bank of Richard Merton, who was connected to the Ladenburg clan, whose company merged with other companies that also had Welf connections to form Deutsche Bank. Adolf Fick studied at the University of Marburg, was a member of various academies of sciences associated with the Welfs, received the Leopoldina medal and was a privy councillor of the Bavarian crown. His close friend was Carl Ludwig, who studied medicine at the University of Marburg, was a member of the Corps Guestphalia there and was the founder of the Corps Hasso-Nassiovia. Ludwig was on the committee of the liberal Fatherland Association founded by Heinrich von Sybel in Marburg with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. Johannes Wislicenus studied at Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts, was a member of the Leopoldina and various other academies of sciences and received the Royal Society medal. Theodor Eimer became a member of the Allemannia Heidelberg fraternity while studying medicine. On April 9, 1891, the “General German Association” was founded in Berlin with the support of Carl Peters. Peters had studied in Göttingen, had relevant professors and was a member of the fraternities. After returning from London, Peters settled in Berlin, which he initially disliked, founded the “Society for German Colonization” (GfdK) together with Felix von Behr-Bandelin in March 1884, moved to Hanover in the meantime and completed his habilitation in philosophy under Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in the summer. Wundt was part of the circle of the British-American secret society Skull & Bones. In 1919, Karl von der Heydt transferred his bank to the Delbrück, Schickler & Co. bank, which merged with other clans to form Deutsche Bank.
German Fatherland Party
The party railed against a “peace of renunciation” or “Jewish peace” and “treason” on the home front and obscured the discussion about the “November criminals” and the “stab in the back”. The First World War was lost primarily because the Welf-controlled Britain, together with the Welf-controlled Russia and the secretly Welf-controlled USA, represented a superior power from the start and because the Germans failed in terms of intelligence, which was not least due to the fact that the Welfs also had their headquarters in Germany and their spy networks. The Fatherland Party was led by Alfred von Tirpitz and Wolfgang Kapp. The honorary chairman of the party was Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg. Tirpitz was a Frankfurt freemason and married the daughter of Gustav Lipke (who attended the University of Heidelberg and Berlin). Friedrich Kapp studied in Heidelberg, was a member of several fraternities and had a lot to do with America. His infamous coup attempt failed. Johann Albrecht, Duke of Mecklenburg was married to the Welf Princess Elisabeth of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1854–1908). The DVLP wanted to dissolve the Reichstag and then make a “strong man” dictator whose “Caesaristic rule techniques” would destroy democracy and defeat the left.
Deutschbund
The Deutschbund was founded in 1894 by the journalist Friedrich Lange in Berlin and was racist, anti-Semitic and very bureaucratic. The functionary Friedrich Lange studied at the University of Göttingen and was a member of the fraternities. Lange’s friend was Paul de Lagarde, who was sponsored by the Prussian ambassador Christian von Bunsen and was allowed to make a “study visit” to London. Lagarde later became a professor at the University of Göttingen. His most famous readers included Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The “brothers” of the German League communities, mostly from Protestant-conservative circles of dignitaries, maintained a quasi-Masonic secrecy, considered themselves a racial elite and wanted to produce the military leaders of the future.
German Social Party
Theodor Fritsch’s Hammer publishing house, founded in Leipzig in 1902, published not only the magazine “Der Hammer – Blätter für deutschen Sinn” (1902–1940), but also many misleading anti-Semitic propaganda publications that spread the fairy tale of a Jewish world conspiracy in a variety of forms. These included German translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Dearborn Independent magazine articles published by Henry Ford under the title “The International Jew”. Fritsch published the “Handbook of the Jewish Question”, which was a kind of compact summary of the world conspiracy fairy tale and the race war ideology. Hitler derived his pseudo-education from it, as did many other contemporaries. The Stürmer editor Julius Streicher described the book as an awakening experience that made him a “knower”. Anti-Semitism played into the hands of the British and the Guelphs, as the right-wing conservative Germans increasingly targeted socialists and Jews as enemies. Not surprisingly, the Guelphs promoted such anti-Semitic propaganda wherever they could. Fritsch founded the Germanic Order as a secret twin organization. Members of the Germanic Order founded the Thule Society for public political meetings in 1918. The Handbook of the Jewish Question taught that “the relatively strong inbreeding that lasted for centuries had by no means made the Jewish people a ‘new race’ in the true sense of the word,” but that “environmental influences had particularly promoted the reproduction of those who had a certain combination of characteristics and had permanently inhibited the reproduction of those who had all other combinations of characteristics.” The interpretation of history makes a strict distinction between the West and the Orient, which is a gross misrepresentation:
“All the diseases we suffer from come from the Orient; they grew in the swampy soil of the Oriental chaos: imperialism and mammonism, the urbanization of peoples with the destruction of marriage and family life, rationalism and the mechanization of religion, the mummy-like priestly culture and the delusional idea of a theocracy encompassing humanity.”
The Greeks and Romans, on the other hand, had created a “flourishing national lay culture,” which “they defended confidently and bravely against the Asian spirit and the Asian great states. They became the conquerors of the Orient: externally and internally.” Ironically, the ancient mysteries are blamed for the downfall of Rome and Greece:
“The Greeks and Romans gave up their national culture; an international cultural community emerged. In reality, the peoples around the Mediterranean were gradually orientalized: the Asian gods, Chaldean astrology, mystery magic spread throughout the empire; Asian ways of life and worldviews penetrated; people allowed themselves to be infected by Asian vices; Asian theocracy, Asian universalism and absolutism were adopted by the Roman emperors.”
Of course, the manual adopts the fairy tale that tiny clans like the Rothschilds stole the British empire without being stopped:
The English government had to have Rothschild’s gold, and he sold it to them.
The English crown could have easily taken Rothschild’s gold, but the probability is almost 100% that the Rothschild money was actually the British crown’s money anyway. The British Empire would stop at nothing, but we are supposed to believe that it would have watched stupidly and passively as a tiny Jewish clan became incredibly rich. Then the British Empire would have had to ask the small clan for money and would have groveled before the Jews. And of course the Handbook of the Jewish Question mentions the Waterloo fairy tale about Nathan Rothschild:
In any case, he [Rothschild] knew sooner than the English government that Napoleon I had been decisively defeated. While people in London were still under the impression of the defeats suffered two days earlier and prices were sinking ever lower, Nathan had all the securities that his secret agents could get their hands on bought up, because he knew that they would soon rise.
This myth has long been refuted. The alleged Jewish Freemasonry was of course “mainly to blame for the World War and its revolutionary outcome.”
German National Freedom Party
One of the leading politicians of the DVFP was Ernst zu Reventlow, who belonged to the ancient nobility. Detlef Reventlow, who was appointed Danish Chancellor by Christian IV of Denmark (Welfe) in 1632, came from the Ziesendorf branch of the family (in Mecklenburg). Detlef was the progenitor of two new branches, both of which gained great influence. The older branch acquired the Danish feudal count’s title in 1767 and married into the Danish royal family and Schleswig Holstein-Sonderburg. The Danish monarchs are closely related to the British.
In the Reichstag election in May 1924, the DVFP ran in a list union with replacement organizations of the still banned NSDAP, which received 6.6% of the vote.
German national National People’s Party
The first chairman was Oskar Hergt, who worked in the Guelph strongholds of Saxony and Hanover. Other members were Kuno Graf Westarp, Tirpitz, Kapp and Karl Helfferich (directorate of Deutsche Bank).
National Socialist Freedom Party
This party was the work of the aforementioned Ernst Graf zu Reventlow.
Tannenberg League
The official chairman was General a. D. Friedrich Bronsart von Schellendorf, an old childhood friend of the mystic and General Ludendorff. As Chief of the General Staff of the Ottoman Army, Bronsart was the most important German officer in the Turkish army and in this capacity was involved in the genocide of the Armenians.
Reichshammer League
A mystical-esoteric organization founded by the publisher and author Theodor Fritsch.
Teutonic Order
The structure was based on Freemasonry and ethnic ariosophy (according to Guido von List) and used the music of Richard Wagner.
Thule Society
The organization of the occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorf. From 1901 to 1914 he claims to have stayed in Turkey several times. In Bursa in 1901 he made the acquaintance of a Greek Jew named Termudi, who is said to have introduced him to a Masonic lodge. The British researcher Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke suspects that the lodge in Bursa was connected to French lodges of the Memphis Rite. In addition, it was a front organization for the Young Turk “Committee for Unity and Progress”, an illegal opposition movement led by Britain against the absolutist regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Sebottendorf also claims to have inherited Termudi’s library of occult books.
The Ariosophists
The early Ariosophists such as Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels drew on the British theosophy of Helena Blavatsky and specifically addressed those Germans who were disappointed by the dull bureaucratic and industrial reality in the German Empire under Prussian leadership. Many missed a mystical-religious-romantic superstructure for the previously functional construct of the German Empire and longed for a theocracy, a mixture of religious and secular leadership castes. The right-wing conservatives in Austria were also angry about the multiculturalism that sought to bring millions of Czechs, Poles and people of other nationalities under one roof. The British theosophy leader Annie Besant, who had a great influence on the German ethnic-esoteric groups, was close to the Fabian Society, which built up socialism in Europe as a controlled opposition on behalf of the British nobility and British big capitalists. The irony that Besant simultaneously promoted socialism and inspired German ultra-rightists who see socialism as a purely Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world went unnoticed. The ethnic groups were not yet a unified and, above all, not a revolutionary mass movement, as National Socialism later became, but the various magazines and books that were produced reached a much wider spectrum of people. When the Austrian government decided in April 1897 that civil servants in Bohemia and Moravia must be able to speak both German and Czech, there were protests, political blockades and riots that almost led to the deployment of the army to restore order. Hundreds of German clubs were dissolved by the government for endangering public order. The Ariosophists were also opponents of Catholicism and the Habsburgs, which meant a further division in society.
It was not difficult for the British aristocratic spies to secretly infiltrate the ethnic scene, to spy on it, to influence certain developments and content, and to increase social tensions. Instead of objectively representing the classical Austrian interests against the Slavic ones and making the amendment to the electoral law sensible, everything was given a group-narcissistic, occultist character. Lanz von Liebenfels, who was not actually a real nobleman, preached racial warfare, reviled compassion, and wanted to keep women under strict control. Only the aristocracy were capable of creating progress and moving closer to deification. In his magazine Ostara, various authors mashed up the texts of the British theosophical leaders Annie Besant and Helena Blavatsky. Hitler admitted in “Mein Kampf” that he had found the “granite” foundation for his views in Vienna and had read racist pamphlets, without explicitly admitting that it was probably only Ostara. Guido von List drew on well-known sources such as Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, other organizations, the Kabbalah and also Tempe Knight myths, each of which was tailored to suit the occasion. All sorts of tricks and gimmicks were used to claim a supposedly advanced Armanian civilization that was supposed to have existed ages ago as a golden age. From coats of arms to statues to place names; List interpreted everything as hidden traces of the Armanian culture. Particularly perfidious was List’s idea that German noble families were “descendants of old Armanian families” and that a new age would come after an imminent end time and apocalypse (messianic birth pangs). Once again, one can see how adaptable the mysteries and the underlying principles are; they could easily be combined with Germanic elements such as runes or the Edda and a specially adapted agenda for German and Austrian national conservatives. The same trick works today, where the new right is ensnared with Knights Templar iconography or right-wing occultism from Russia. Even List’s elitist “High Armanen Order” was not a particularly impressive affair, but taken together as a whole, the ethnic organizations did not fail to have their effect. List did not live to see the NSDAP, but his ideas ended up with Heinrich Himmler and his vision of an SS state. Lanz von Liebenfels blatantly and openly brought a good portion of psychopathy and group narcissism into his esotericism; lower races and classes should be enslaved and exterminated. The traces of the “holy electronic force” had prevailed in the old princely dynasties of Germany. The fact that the Guelphs on German soil were closely related to the British throne and posed a threat was not recognized or even discussed. Lanz von Liebenfels used astrology to predict a victory for the Central Powers in the First World War, and the war was generally framed in the mold of apocalyptic thought, where “messianic births” were indispensable on the way to a paradisiacal future. The fact that the Hohenzollern German Empire and the Austrian Habsburg Empire crumbled after the lost war in 1918 was a result that the competing Welf nobility would have certainly pleased. In an Austrian castle ruin, Liebenfels created the Ordo Novi Templi (ONT), where he wanted to gather the elite of the future with costumes and copied ceremonies. Of course, Lanz had never wielded a sword in battle or carried out any kind of warfare. He simply constructed the fairy tale that the Knights Templar were an Aryan league with an Aryan mission to build a new empire in the Mediterranean. The Catholic Church got wind of this and destroyed most of the Templars. Hans Heinrich XV. Prince von Pless gave the ONT generously. In London he had married Mary Theresa Olivia Cornwallis-West, whose brother George married the mother of Winston Churchill, whose family in turn served the Guelphs for generations. Mary’s sister Constance married Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, a member of the Royal Victorian Order. Hugh fought with a volunteer unit of the Yeomanry in the Second Boer War, and later served as aide-de-camp to Lord Roberts and Lord Milner. In the period before the Second World War, Grosvenor joined various groups on the far right of the political spectrum, including the Right Club, which was also openly anti-Semitic. Hugh’s anti-Semitism was probably just as much a tactic as Winston Churchill’s anti-Semitic ranting about revolutionary Jews and Illuminati. The Germanic Order had to contend with internal disputes and divisions and was nowhere near as broad a revolutionary front as the Nazi Party later did. Johann Albrecht, Duke of Mecklenburg, Regent of the Duchy of Brunswick (successor of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel), worked to rebuild it until his premature death. We are dealing with an important nest of the Guelphs that was involved in all kinds of secret operations and also had cross-connections with Karl Marx, who was most likely an agent of the noble networks (see Volume I of “The Deepest Secrets of the Superpowers”). Johann Albrecht married Princess Elisabeth of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach from the Houses of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach and Orange-Nassau. In the summer of 1917 he became honorary chairman of the right-wing radical German Fatherland Party. His tomb was designed based on Byzantine-Ravennatic art forms.
The Teutonic Order also took part in political assassinations. Why did influential people like the Duke of Mecklenburg trust an organization run by the impostor Sebottendorff? Had the latter already made contact with the British and occult circles active there in Egypt? In Turkey he learned Turkish and began to take a serious interest in the occult. His wealthy host, Hussein Pasha, was a follower of Sufi mysticism, which was sometimes used as a vehicle for revolutionary purposes or for espionage. The Jewish-Kabbalistic Termudi family were Freemasons and introduced Sebottendorff to the lodge in Bursa, which, according to historian Goodrick-Clarke, may have been a local group of the pre-revolutionary “Secret Society of Union and Progress”. This network acted on Britain’s behalf against the Turkish-Ottoman Sultan and was modeled on the Freemasons. Of course, Goodrick-Clarke does not tell us that British espionage was heavily involved and ultimately overthrew the Sultans, ended the Caliphate and transferred leadership of Islam to Arab tribes under Britain’s control. With its sister organization, the Thule Society, the Germanic Order fought against the communists in Bavaria and especially Munich, who were interpreted as an expression of a supposed Jewish world conspiracy. Sebottendorff lashed out at his members:
“Instead of our blood-related princes, our sworn enemy rules: Judah.”
Was he aware that he was talking nonsense and making grossly misleading advertisements for the dangerous “blood-related princes”? The later NSDAP was unable to understand the nature of the great powers of Britain, Russia and the USA, and even less able to create a serious espionage system including counter-espionage. They relied on attitudes and the illusion that they already knew everything that mattered, i.e. the supposed Jewish world conspiracy. Nobles such as Countess Heila von Westarp and Prince Gustav von Thurn und Taxis were present at Thule, but they were shot by the communists, probably because Sebottendorff had not protected the membership lists well enough. Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch, an occultist and anti-Semite, worked closely with the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, allegedly had a library with 40,000 titles and traveled from one Nazi organization to the next to spread the mantra of a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy. Rosenberg said he had his awakening experience in Moscow in 1917 after reading Nilius’ work “The Great in the Small” and the Protocols of Zion. He traveled to Germany, as did many Russian emigrants who fled the chaos of the war and the communist revolution. This flow of migrants was devastating in terms of counter-espionage, because the underdeveloped German intelligence services lacked the capacity to uncover Russian spies among the migrants. Since occultism similar to that in Russia circulated in right-wing German circles, there were many opportunities to make contacts.
Accountants, not bosses: The Rothschilds
No other name permeates the conspiracy literature of the 19th and 20th centuries as strongly as Rothschild. Under the leadership of this tiny family, a secret Jewish lodge took over the British Empire and then the USA. From the time of these alleged seizures of power, conspiracy writers regard all of Britain and America’s domestic and foreign policy sins as sins of the Jewish conspiracy. Everything possible is then considered as proof of the existence of the conspiracy. Most of the time, the Jewish world conspirators did not even have to make any special effort with secrecy measures, because the public was fully aware of the existence of Jewish banks and the Rothschilds also built themselves gigantic palaces in order to attract public attention. These Jewish conspirators did not even bother to use non-Jewish straw men to camouflage themselves. The current conspiracy literature not only exaggerates the alleged masterpieces of subversion by Jewish families like the Rothschilds, but at the same time accuses non-Jewish circles (especially the high nobility) of stupidity that actually reached the dimensions of mental retardation. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a small trader from Frankfurt’s Judengasse, had to wear the yellow badge every time he left his house, be back by nightfall, pay Jewish tax when crossing the bridge over the Main, and take off his hat and bow whenever asked. In principle, the reason for locking up the Jews was to generate more tax revenue. Protection money was paid, just like to the Mafia. Life in the tightly packed ghetto was latently threatened by major fires, epidemics, and pogroms (massacres), which inevitably gave rise to the naked, psychopathic ambition in some individuals to escape the ghetto and gain power in the cold and cruel world outside. The more power Mayer and his sons were granted by the nobility, the more they realized how far they could fall at any time if they fell from grace. The populations of Germany, France or Great Britain would have felt malicious glee if they had read in the newspaper one day that a rich Jewish family called the Rothschilds had been expropriated and thrown back into the ghetto. The Jews had no country of their own to which the Rothschilds could have fled if necessary, there was no influential Jewish lobby in Europe, there was no secure legal citizenship and they were completely at the mercy of the ruling nobility. Mayer had lost both his parents in an outbreak of smallpox at the age of eleven, although the chance of survival would have been much better outside the ghetto. After attending a religious school, which did not excite Mayer as much as the business world, at the age of 13 he went to the Oppenheim bank in Hanover, home of the British royal family, to learn the advanced forms of commerce and learned of the advantages of being a court factor. One of the Oppenheims served in this capacity to the Elector Clemens August I of Bavaria, supplying the court with luxury goods such as rare gold coins. Mayer Amschel returned to Frankfurt around 1764, at the age of twenty, where the laws against Jews were stricter but the business opportunities were greater. His contact, whom he had met at Oppenheim, was General von Estorff, and through this channel he was able to sell some coins (at an extremely reduced rate) to the Hereditary Prince William of Hesse-Kassel in Hanau. William’s mother was Princess Mary, a daughter of King George II of Great Britain. Wilhelm and his father had already amassed an extremely large fortune by selling Hessian soldiers for the American War of Independence and were considered some of the richest princes of their time. The close relatives of the British crown paid millions, insane sums at the time, which was not only simple nepotism, but established Wilhelm as an outpost of the British Empire on German soil. His passion was money and fathering illegitimate children (estimated at 40 of them), while his wife Wilhelmine Caroline of Denmark was completely averse to sex. After a few coin sales in which Rothschild had to make losses, he finally got the title of court factor, or “court supplier to His Illustrious Highness”, with which he could advertise his business and through which his reputation in the Judengasse increased exponentially.
In 1770, with his new social status, he was allowed to marry the young Gutle Schnapper, daughter of a court factor of the Principality of Saxe-Meiningen, which was created through the division of the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha. Nevertheless, he did not speak German properly and could not write it. Hereditary Prince Wilhelm already had half a dozen Jewish middlemen on hand and also used established companies such as the Bethmann brothers for his finances, so that Rothschild was not able to gain access to this closed society for years. Mayer moved into a new house in Judengasse, half of which was occupied by the Schiff family, who later became influential bankers in America. The idea was to have as many children as possible who would continue to build up the family’s fortune, but only about half of the 20 children survived under the harsh conditions of Judengasse, because child mortality there was significantly higher than in the rest of Frankfurt. For 20 years Rothschild had failed to win orders from Landgrave William, but then he befriended his clever finance officer Carl Friedrich Buderus von Carlshausen at court and finally got his foot in the door. The onslaught of French troops forced William to spend money on a few battalions to protect himself and his wealth, and his losses were quickly replaced by another deal with his relatives on the British throne: the rental of another 8,000 Hessian soldiers for the British Empire. Rothschild imported clothing and other goods from England for sale in Germany, charging extortionate prices, particularly during wartime, due to shortages. Finally, some restrictions on Jews had been lifted and he was allowed to rent warehouses in Frankfurt for his British goods. Napoleon’s advance and requests for credit from William’s Danish relatives made it increasingly necessary to hide money and make payments by secret means. The perfect front men for the loan to the Danes were Rothschild and a Jew named Lawaertz. Buderus would have been far too obvious as a middleman and stayed in the background. Even though Wilhelm did not participate generously in the war against France, he turned down the lucrative French offers to defect. Half of the European monarchs and a number of princes and other rulers owed money to Wilhelm because he operated like a major bank. If Napoleon won, the loans would not be repaid and he would have to flee. The worst possible case occurred: Napoleon marched through Germany and Wilhelm’s wealth and treasures had to be transported as quickly as possible in all directions to save them from the French. Around 50 crates had to be left behind and Wilhelm fled to his relatives in Denmark. Carl Buderus managed to bribe the new French governor to get back some of the 50 crates that had been confiscated. Four of them, some of them filled with important contracts and documents, were taken to a special hiding place at Rothschild’s house in Frankfurt’s Judengasse. Mayer’s most capable son, Nathan, who looked like a Brit with red hair and blue eyes but spoke poor English, worked from Manchester and then from London, where he met the richest Jew in all of England, Levi Cohen, whose children later married into almost all of the leading Jewish families in England, including the Rothschilds. Buderus received a title of nobility from Wilhelm for successfully saving most of the wealth and was given special power of attorney for the Landgrave’s business in exile in Denmark. Mayer Rothschild was to take on the task of collecting the repayments of outstanding loans, which was only possible with the help of his sons, sophisticated smuggling techniques and protection money payments without being caught by the French. The Rothschilds had at times incurred Wilhelm’s displeasure with their arrogance and risked their lucrative business, but elsewhere they also had relationships with nobles such as the Thurn and Taxis family, Karl Theodor von Dalberg and the Brentanos. Buderus had to explain to Wilhelm at length why it made sense to use the Rothschilds as straw men and middlemen: they were more thorough, more discreet, more punctual, more ambitious. Nevertheless, it was only possible to involve Nathan Rothschild in important business behind the Landgrave’s back, such as trading in safe British government securities (Konsols). The trade had made Mayer one of the richest men in Frankfurt and the demands and desires to form a dynasty like the nobles grew accordingly and as a result his N children could only marry within their own family if they wanted to participate in the family business. Nathan was instrumental in buying up gold from the East India Company (British Empire) and immediately selling it back to the British government, enabling the Duke of Wellington to pay his troops fighting Napoleon.
Nathan also took on the risky task of smuggling the gold and for this purpose bought the protection of the Grand Duke of Dalberg, on whose help the Rothschilds had already relied on several times. Further support came from the powerful Thurn and Taxis family, who dominated the letter and parcel post business. Amschel died, Napoleon was pushed back and Nathan again played a reliable role in supplying the Duke of Wellington. The British Treasury even entrusted Nathan with processing huge payments to Britain’s continental allies. It would have been pointless to steal the money and make a run for it, because the British were anything but novices and the Rothschilds wanted to ingratiate themselves with the Empire and not let the slightest doubt arise about their loyalty. This major financial operation was led by the influential politician and paymaster John Charles Herries, but the Rothschilds were rewarded for their inventiveness and efficiency with one million British pounds. The Rothschilds’ courier system, which was used to transport all kinds of information at lightning speed, could not keep up with the British Empire’s secret service network and was certainly closely monitored by the nobility. The famous Battle of Waterloo, which sealed Napoleon’s downfall, led to false legends about Nathan that persist in conspiracy literature to this day and serve as an explanation of how the Rothschild clan, which had started modestly in the Jewish ghetto just a generation earlier, seized financial power and left the nobility behind. Various versions of how, when and where Nathan found out who would emerge victorious from the Battle of Waterloo circulated over time, with one pamphlet telling the cinematic tale that Nathan was the quickest to receive the information and fooled the stock market into thinking Napoleon was the victor. After prices plummeted due to panic selling, he suddenly made massive purchases and earned around 20 million pounds through this insider trading. This version is almost entirely a fairy tale. Several newspapers immediately reported on the battle’s outcome in special editions. Nathan soon received a copy through his courier system, he informed the British nobleman Lord Castlereagh and then simply bought a bunch of British bonds, which rose in value by two percent relatively quickly. That was all. He had already been rich through his work for the British Empire. However, the current conspiracy literature still claims that Nathan, the son of a Jewish ghetto shopkeeper, made an incredible fortune in a lightning-fast operation at the expense of all the other big businessmen, while the nobles had to watch with their mouths open, and the foundation was laid for the Rothschilds to take over power over the British Empire. The fairy tale of Nathan’s Waterloo rip-off was an invention of the French journalist Georges Mathieu-Dairnvaell. After Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel was able to move back into his luxurious Wilhelmshöhe castle, Rothschild dutifully paid back all the money entrusted to him, with interest. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Rothschilds were the richest private bankers in Europe, but their wealth was completely dependent on their position as obedient confidants of the British Empire. The Rothschilds’ performance in precious metal smuggling, money laundering and operating a clearing house for money flows was impressive from the perspective of the British crown. Nevertheless, it was a matter of course to keep these newly rich Jews on a short leash and to ensure that they did not become too arbitrary with their money and skills at some point. The nobles could have arrested Nathan at any time after his work was done and dispossessed him under any pretext. Conversely, the Rothschilds had no real means of exerting pressure against the phalanx of the nobility, the secret societies, the parliaments, the courts and the police. What about the Jewish networks that existed at the time? Old Mayer Rothschild also conferred with representatives from other Jewish communities in Frankfurt’s Judengasse, but the police always kept their eyes and ears open.
There are only unproven legends about powerful Jewish conspirator groups at that time; the paa The few Rothschild men had their hands full with their business and were definitely not allowed to use their money to change Europe’s power politics as they saw fit. Only under the guidance of the British crown did the brothers take steps in France and Austria. They sent their extremely arrogant design of a family coat of arms to Austria for their new noble titles, which included the imperial eagle, the British leopard, the Hessian lion and five arrows (for the five brothers). Of course, this audacity was rejected. The Rothschilds sought contact with Friedrich von Gentz, the influential Jewish advisor to Prince Metternich. Meanwhile, the Rothschilds’ services were no longer in such demand as they had been during wartime and older, established banks were often given preference for large deals. In a surprising move, the Rothschilds themselves became involved in a gigantic French loan deal. Nathan’s family and private life was limited to influential Jewish families and extended to a significant extent to the higher British nobility. Now and then a diplomat or the Duke of Wellington would show up. Nathan’s small, modest house in St. Swithin’s Lane in London was also incongruous with his status as one of the richest bankers in Europe. Was he not the one who possessed the great wealth? Was he never more than a front man? It is also striking that he practically never gave money to charities, not even to the Jewish synagogues, although he was formally rolling in money. It is said that he behaved arrogantly towards foreign princes in his office. He subsequently granted loans worth millions of British pounds to various monarchs in Europe. If Nathan and his brothers were indeed largely front men for the British crown, what advantage would this arrangement have had? It would have concealed the British influence behind the granting of loans and aroused less suspicion, because the Jewish bankers were seen by the public as simply rich snobs who were interested in nothing other than interest and dividends. If a bank (majority owned) by the British crown had offered these loans instead, ulterior motives for power politics would have been suspected, especially if these loans were granted to various noble houses that were competitors of the British, but also competed with each other and waged war against each other. One would think twice about starting a war if one knew that the far-away bankers were financing both sides of the conflict. Against the background of this theory that the Rothschild bank was a front company of the British crown, it makes even more sense that Nathan lived for the longest time in a rather modest house in England rather than in a palace, it makes more sense that he had mainly Jewish friends and it also makes more sense that he behaved demonstratively arrogantly towards European noble houses. If he had lived in a palace in the neighborhood of the British nobility and had behaved in a flattering manner towards other noble houses, suspicion would have arisen immediately. Carl Rothschild, who was considered to be somewhat slow-witted and shy (but was the exact opposite), gained the trust of the Austrians and Italians with important loans and settled with his wife in a palace in Naples, where he received guests such as Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, favorite uncle of the British Queen Victoria and later King of Belgium. Leopold played a key role in the creation of the Masonic Grand Lodge “Grand Orient de Belgique” (1833) and laid the foundation for the later lodge system. His son Leopold II ruled the African state of Congo in an absolutist manner and was responsible for several million deaths there. Anyone who did not work enough as a (child) slave had his hands chopped off as punishment. Amschel was the only strict believer among his brothers who still ate exclusively kosher food and retained the look of a rabbi. He stayed in Frankfurt, worked on the territory of Prussia and even rose to become a kind of finance minister with access to explosive information, and he continued his relationships with Buderus and the Hessen-Kassel family. His mother, who was over seventy years old, did not dare to leave the Frankfurt ghetto out of superstition, and she made a statement whose significance has been greatly exaggerated in conspiracy literature: When a neighbor expressed his fear that there might be another war, she waved it off and said that was nonsense because her sons would not grant the necessary loans. In conspiracy books it sounds as if her sons would rule Europe, but that is not the case at all. pt did not correspond to the reality of the time.
The brothers were a target for the animosity of many different people and thus served to conceal the actual balance of power. The infamous information courier system with carrier pigeons, supply points for horses and fast boats had not reinvented the wheel either. This network also transported messages from other people and was theoretically able to read this foreign correspondence, but of course disinformation also circulated and codes were used, so we cannot say that the Rothschilds were able to challenge the nobility for the empire. While Salomon Rothschild dealt with the Austrians, his brother James was responsible for major financial operations in France to support the new King Louis XVIII, but experienced more than one near-disaster because there were more sharks competing for the best deals and using tricks. The unrest in France cost the Rothschilds 17 million guilders, and rumors were already circulating that they were about to go bankrupt. The family’s rapid courier system prevented the catastrophe, and according to former French ambassador Talleyrand, the Rothschilds always diligently shared their information with the English authorities. It can be assumed that the British Crown was also always aware of what the Rothschilds’ many agents in France were able to find out about the danger of revolution. James managed to get his confidant Casimir Périer, the son of Claude-Nicolas Perier, in whose Château de Vizille the famous meeting of the Estates of Dauphiné took place in preparation for the French Revolution, appointed as the new French Finance Minister. Let us remember that the British Crown was interested in overthrowing the old French monarchy and secretly supporting the revolution. Adam Weisshaupt had been set up for this purpose, and his Illuminati order was then exposed by the Bavarian police for negligence. Nathan was the star, the leader, clever, creative and determined. But how much of his success was his own work and how much was the work of the British Crown? Of course, it is possible that he was able to give the British Empire new impulses and ideas about banking, but it is much more likely that important decisions and tactics were whispered to him. Unlike today, when only conspiracy theorists talk about the family, Nathan and his brothers were the focus of mass media coverage, a target of hatred, a go-to person for petitioners and ultra-celebrities of high society. All the excesses that were previously reserved for the high nobility were demonstratively practiced by the Rothschilds, as was the way they married: of the 12 sons of the famous five brothers, nine married within their own family, although their daughters, described as exceptionally beautiful, attracted the interest of various noble families. Anyone who married a Christian was practically disinherited and only a few marriages with other powerful Jewish families were considered acceptable over time. Hannah was never forgiven and when her son had an accident, it was seen as “God’s punishment”. But Nathan, despite following family traditions, also suffered a severe and final blow of fate in the form of a common boil caused by the bacteria Staphylococcus Aureus. While the established nobility had thousands of members, the Rothschild clan was very small and therefore vulnerable. Nathan’s son Lionel demanded that he and his family finally be allowed to officially use the title of baron, which the new Queen Victoria granted him. A close friendship developed with the politician and later Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who had Jewish roots but belonged to the Anglican Church. The remaining four old brothers were still the bosses and moved into large palaces, with James as their leader. The nobility of Austria, Italy and Prussia considered the Rothschilds to be homeless Jewish upstarts who were only interested in profit and with whom they could increase their own money and stabilize the state budget. The ability to raise money quickly was like a drug that was needed more and more, and the more access the Rothschilds were given to the courts, the more they gained access to sensitive information. The parties were also far more than just showing off and private pleasures, but more access to information and rumors. The Rothschild women, who were excluded from the family business, cultivated friendships with influential people and probably also ache have heard of. James was estimated to have had a fortune of 50 million British pounds; unheard of at the time. With Salomon he had entered the railway business late in the 1840s. By comparison: Johann Jakob Astor, another alleged “self-made man” and possible front man of the British Empire, left the sum of 20 million dollars (today’s equivalent of about 100 billion dollars) in America when he died in 1848. The Rothschilds worked the European territory and left America to other rich families. At that time the Rothschilds were still busy preventing wars, such as between France and Austria, which earned them the reputation of putting profits above honor and promoting peace only out of self-interest.
Only later did they work on loans for war and gain the opposite reputation of profiting from war, although it would have been impossible to interfere in the political affairs of Europe to such an extent without the permission of the British Crown. Otto von Bismarck looked at the situation soberly and tried to establish solid relations with the bank, which later proved to be the downfall of the German Empire. In private letters, the Rothschilds talked about coordinating with “Windsor and King Leopold”. The public generally did not see the Rothschilds’ connection to the British as being much different from their connection to the noble houses of Prussia, Austria or Italy. A serious mistake. The renewed revolution in France in 1848 drove out the king and led to the proclamation of the republic, which put James Rothschild’s finances at risk, such as the 82 million francs he had invested and the railway shares, which fell in value. The revolution had also spread to Germany, Austria and Hungary. James immediately became friends with the new dictator Eugène Cavaignac in Paris, but it was Louis Napoleon, descendant of Bonaparte, who ultimately became president of the new republic. Only two monarchies were untouched by the upheavals of 1848: the related British and Russian monarchies. Of course, it is necessary to examine more closely the extent to which these two empires and the Rothschilds were involved in the destabilization of mainland Europe. The Rothschilds also organized 16 million pounds for the massive Crimean War, which ushered in the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. It is not clear whether and to what extent the bankers were privy to the larger geopolitical plans. It is quite possible that the British crown simply whispered to them what loans they should provide, when, where and for whom. The new generation of Rothschilds were patronizing in the Jewish communities and put pressure on them to repeal anti-Jewish laws, which of course also meant self-interest and benefit for the British crown, because money brought loyalty and with loyalty more money could be made, favors could be called back and information could be obtained. Mayer Rothschild had Mentmore Towers built, a decadent ostentatious building designed to distract from the established aristocracy. Baron James de Rothschild had a larger version of the chateau built, called Ferrières. Lionel went into politics and was elected six times in London without taking the obligatory oath to the Christian faith, meaning he was blocked each time. It was not until 1858 that he entered Parliament, but he never made a single speech there. Baron James tried to build a relationship with Louis Napoleon, the descendant of Bonaparte, against whom the Rothschilds had fought with their financial network by quietly channeling money from the British crown to troops on the mainland. Rothschild’s rival Achille Fould from the Fould and Oppenheim bank became French finance minister and stole the Rothschilds’ friends, the Jewish-Portuguese investors from the Pereiras family. Perhaps Émile Pereire only appeared to have defected to Fould, but that is just pure speculation. The new idea of Pereire, built up by the Rothschilds, was a kind of semi-socialist people’s bank called “Crédit Mobilier”, which served countless small savers and was able to raise capital without the help of large foreign banks. Ultimately, however, large international shareholders dominated here too. James had a relationship with General Changamier, head of the National Guard, who would have been able to overthrow Napoleon, but it is not known whether such plans were discussed between the two. The general was also in love with James’ wife, which was of course even more suspicious, and so Napoleon had him deposed and arrested, dissolved the National Assembly, ruled from then on as a dictator and in the next step had himself made emperor. Other private affairs smacked of classic spying. onage: Baron James’ wife threw the most popular parties and Eugénie de Montijo, whom Napoleon was keen to marry, was cultivated. During the massive Crimean War in the middle of the 19th century, a kind of precursor to the coming world wars, the Rothschilds organized and guaranteed large loans for France and Britain, which was no surprise to anyone and was no secret. The decision about the conflict and the military objectives were not under the control of the bankers. Afterwards, the Ottoman Empire was practically doomed. In 1855, three of the four remaining brothers died: Carl, Salomon and Amschel. It is a very unlikely coincidence, which, together with the previous premature death of Nathan, suggests that the circumstances of the deaths should be examined more closely for possible signs of murder. There were many unscrupulous competitors and the family did not have a huge security service to protect against poisoning or the like.
The competitor Crédit Mobilier was initially extremely successful, and in Austria Salomon Rothschild’s son Anselm prepared a very similar project called “Kreditanstalt”. The leaders of the third generation were the cousins Alphonse, Anselm, Lionel and Mayer Carl. The family tradition regarding marriages was largely observed, just as the important aristocratic families of Europe had done for centuries. Crédit Mobilier financed Napoleon’s war against Austria and as a result got into serious trouble; its shares fell by half and mismanagement dragged everything down the drain. Fould had become extremely suspicious of the Pereires he had recruited and had to recommend that Napoleon approach the Rothschilds again. Lionel Rothschild was proposed for a “peerage”, a serious title of nobility including a seat in the House of Lords, but Queen Victoria refused on the artificial grounds that the Rothschilds had made their money with foreign governments and through speculation on the stock market and were therefore not eligible for such a patriotic status. In reality, the Rothschilds had only been able to rise to become important bankers because of contracts from the British Empire and the House of Hesse-Kassel, and the pressing suspicion is that they were working as front men for the British crown. The Queen apparently made it a point to deny any overly close connection between the bankers and the Empire and to create the impression as clearly as possible that these rich Jews only cared about their money and not about Britain. A clear move. Other noble families in Europe would hardly have been so willing to use the services of the Rothschilds if it had been assumed that the bank was just a front organization for the British aristocracy. Victoria’s son, the Prince of Wales, married Alexandra of Denmark in keeping with his status and complained bitterly that he was only given £100,000 a year by Parliament (the other dukes received double that at most) while the Rothschilds built palaces worth millions. It all seems to have been part of a strategy to make the nobility recede into the background and not attract the envy of the population. We are talking about one of the most powerful and greedy empires of all time, which ruled the seas, subjugated countries like China and India and traded at gunpoint. It would have been very easy to use the Rothschilds as royal accountants in the first place, rather than allowing the upstarts to amass millions. It would also have been extremely easy to steal much of the Rothschilds’ wealth under some pretext, such as suspicion of collaboration with England’s enemies. By far the easiest and most effective way would have been to use the Rothschilds as front men. In the public perception, the aristocracy was neither exceptionally rich nor did it significantly influence politics, but this elaborate deception was of the utmost importance. The Prince of Wales had met Lionel’s sons, Nathaniel, Alfred and Leo, at the elite Cambridge University, and had relationships with other Rothschilds and other Jewish families such as the Sassoons (who had also been built up by the British Empire). The Rothschilds paid the Prince of Wales’ debts and invested his money. Alphonse Rothschild’s information network stretched from Napoleon III to Otto von Bismarck and Empress Eugenie. Bismarck often visited the Rothschilds’ Chateau Ferrières during his time as ambassador to Paris. Bismarck later became Prime Minister of Prussia and had a huge continental land power at his disposal, which made the British very nervous. He brought them h Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark, with the Danish nobility of course being closely related to the British nobility and to German families such as Hesse-Kassel, who in turn were closely connected to the Rothschilds. War broke out between Prussia and Austria, which Austria lost very quickly. Gerson von Bleichröder, the Rothschilds’ confidant, had become Bismarck’s banker and Bismarck used the Rothschilds’ information network instead of setting up his own secret service. The French expected a war against Prussia next and therefore sent the French Rothschilds to England so that England could have a calming influence on Prussia.
Nevertheless, open conflict broke out and the French suffered a decisive defeat at Sedan after only six weeks. Gerson Bleichröder and other bankers had already collected the loans for the Prussian-Austrian War and Bleichröder was also significantly involved in the negotiations and settlement of the French reparations payments after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Bismarck and Field Marshal von Moltke promptly made the Rothschild castle of Ferrières their temporary headquarters and then moved to Versailles. The representatives of the new French Republic had to negotiate meekly and sought the advice of Alphonse Rothschild, whereupon reparations payments amounting to 5 billion francs were processed by Alphonse and his cousins with the usual efficiency and with the usual commissions. The German troops evacuated France, the old French rulers were out of the way to the delight of the British crown, and the Germans’ joy was not to last too long. The Rothschilds built more palaces like Waddesdon, bought more racehorses and produced more expensive wine. Hannah Rothschild married Lord Rosebery, the future Prime Minister, and was only the third Rothschild lady from the British branch to marry a Christian and break with her family tradition. Lionel’s biggest deal came in 1875, four years before his death, with the Suez Canal, which was of great strategic interest to the British Empire. Four million pounds flowed from the Rothschilds, secured by the British government, for shares in the canal. The transactions were carried out quietly as usual, using roundabout routes so as not to alarm the markets, and with huge profits. The suspicion arises that when the British Crown borrowed money from the Rothschilds, it was actually lending itself to itself, giving the impression that it was notoriously short of money. If the British aristocracy had carried out these transactions themselves and owned these riches themselves, the British people would have taken to the barricades. In the 1870s, things were very busy for the bankers, because in addition to the core business of banking, they were involved in railways, natural resources and diamonds, although limited to Europe, the Middle East and parts of Russia. The USA was handled by other, mostly non-Jewish families. A Rothschild loan went to the Russian Tsar and in return they received a permit to drill for oil in Baku. This gave them a similar amount of power in the oil business as the Rockefellers in America with Standard Oil, but before this industry really dominated, the Rothschilds sold the B’nito Petroelum Company to the Royal Dutch Shell Combine of the Dutch royal family, which was related to the British aristocracy. Gerson Bleichröder also brokered further, urgently needed money to the Russian Tsars, who were also related to the British Empire. If Prussia or the German Empire or the Turks had known in time what a global colossus was forming, some decisions would probably have been made differently. Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild finally received his peerage and his family still intermarried with a few exceptions, such as Leo, who married a sister from the Jewish Sassoon family, which had been built up by the British Empire. The young Winston Churchill was a regular guest at Rothschild’s and formed a long-lasting relationship with the bankers. Nathaniel Rothschild dramatically scaled back his bank’s operations, favoring simple, safe investments, while competitors like Barings bitterly regretted their adventures in the markets. Alfred Rothschild served for a while as director of the Bank of England, which conspiracy literature generously misinterprets as a takeover of the central bank. He eventually violated privacy to see if he was being ripped off in the sale of a painting and lost his job as a result. Edmond, one of the few staunchly religious members of the family, financed Jewish settlements in Palestine as an experiment to see if this was even sustainable. the considerable sum of six million pounds. Other Rothschilds and other influential Jews were not very enthusiastic about the desolate spot in the desert and preferred areas in the USA or Western Europe as the new homeland of the Jews. Later, however, the tiny state of Israel was created, secured by guarantees from the British and Americans. It is not known which Rothschild made the following statement:
“A Zionist is an American Jew who gives an English Jew money to bring a Polish Jew to Palestine.”
225,000 Jews from Russia flocked to Western Europe because of the anti-Jewish laws under the Tsars and not every Jewish migrant was interested in going to the desert. The settlements were in chaos and there was ingratitude towards Edmond, who in turn complained that the settlers used large subsidies to go on vacation and have hired Muslims work the fields. There was also a dispute over the sabbatical year stipulated in the faith, during which the fields were to be neglected. Rothschild threatened to send the settlers back to Russia. After the collapse of the Rothschild bank in Naples, the branch in Frankfurt was also closed because there were no sons there and no one else wanted to move there. The tensions between Russia, England and France on the one hand, and Germany on the other, conjured up the coming downfall of the Prussian land power. After the old powers in France had already been eliminated, it was now the turn of the German Empire and Austria. Once again, the Rothschilds were busy financing the coming (world) war, without being involved in any recognizable way in the military and geopolitical decisions. The British Empire had restricted the Rothschilds to banks and industry and never granted them access to the high levels of the nobility and the military. The current conspiracy literature spreads the myth that the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers organized the world war themselves and controlled both America and Great Britain. What almost no conspiracy theorist knows is that the Rothschilds themselves fought and died at the front in the war. James de Rothschild, son of Edmond, joined the armies of France, Canada and Britain. Eugene served at the front in Russia and was seriously wounded in the leg. Evelyn died fighting the Turks in Palestine. Lionel Walter and another Rothschild also died in battle. All of this does not fit at all with the myth that the Rothschilds, as secret kings, instigated and managed the war from a safe distance. It is highly questionable whether they chose to serve at the front out of a sense of duty, or because they were looking for an adventure, or perhaps because the British crown insisted on it. After all, members of the British nobility had repeatedly had to fight for the Empire with their own hands in the past. After the war, Austria was no longer a real great power, the currency collapsed and the population had shrunk dramatically, France was badly hit, Germany was exhausted. The Rothschilds subsequently stabilized France’s currency with the help of J.P. Morgan of New York. After the war, the Rothschild clan became increasingly occupied with distractions and pleasures. Three leading men from the family had died in the war and a large amount of money had to be paid to the British government in a special tax (so-called “death duties”). Alfred also broke with family tradition and left his money to his daughter Almina Wombwell, who was married to the Earl of Carnarvon. The large, decadent houses in London were sold or demolished, and most of the chateaus in the country were also sold. They were still high society and a power in banking, but the phase of demonstratively celebrated luxury was over and more family members devoted themselves to other fields such as medicine, racehorses, expeditions and the study of insects. In the 1930s, there were only two active bankers in the clan, Lionel and Anthony, and the Rothschild bank was “only” in the top 10, no longer the undisputed number one. Victor Rothschild helped a number of Jewish refugees, while the British establishment feigned sympathy for the Nazis outside of official channels.
Baron Louis Rothschild from Austria even ended up in prison because of the Nazis; other Rothschilds fled to Switzerland and France. Three Rothschilds served at the front again in the spring of 1940. Two were taken prisoner and were lucky enough to be treated as officers. Guy Rothschild fought his way through the Nazis and was able to escape. h through to Dunkirk, where he had to be evacuated along with the British troops by the Expeditionary Force and almost died at sea. This does not fit at all with the myth of the all-powerful Rothschilds. The central legends of conspiracy literature do not stand up to closer scrutiny and new ones have simply been created over time to focus on Jewish clans. Even the entire British aristocracy has been accused of having Jewish ancestry on the Internet, without any solid evidence. All sorts of important figures have already been falsely described as Jews. An article in the London Times newspaper and Moshe Kohn in an article in the Jerusalem Post claimed that Churchill had Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side, but there is no evidence of this in the many different biographical studies on the Churchills. Author Shane Leslie is said to have planned an expose. Evidence? None. The legal revisionist David Irving repeated the legend in his book “Churchill’s War” and cites only the old article by Moshe Kohn as a source, which ironically makes fun of revisionists like Irving and provides no evidence of Churchill’s alleged Jewish ancestors. While several Rothschilds almost died in the war, the Hesse-Kassel family, which had made the rise of the Rothschilds possible in the first place, had it much easier and was one of the richest clans in Europe in 1939. Prince Philip did not have to go to the front, but was instead able to take part in espionage by playing the role of a supporter of Hitler and, because of his marriage to the daughter of the Italian king, taking on the duties of a special ambassador between Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. After the war, he was considered the richest man in Germany and the richest prince in Europe. Victor, on the other hand, defused bombs and wrote military manuals on the subject. After the war, he moved back into his house at 23 Avenue de Marigny in the middle of Paris. The family continued to be involved in big business, but the days of palaces and Bentleys were over. Jacob married Serena Dunn, the non-Jewish descendant of the Earl of Rosslyn and the Canadian ultra-rich Sir James Dunn. London investment banker Nathaniel Rothschild broke family tradition a few years ago and married a nude model, even though he is the only son of Lord Rothschild and was expected to marry into the moneyed aristocracy. The Daily Mail reported that Nathaniel had found the model with the help of the dating app “Happn”. A little-heard, marijuana-smoking rapper named Jay Electronica from the New Orleans ghetto became the partner of Kate Rothschild, whose previous marriage to the wealthy Ben Goldsmith had failed. Experts assumed that she received none of her ex-husband’s fortune. Jay’s rap career so far consists of little profound talk about the meaning of life and a record deal with Jay Z’s label, but without having released a major album. He is also a member of the bizarre Muslim sect “5 Percent Nation”. Ben, the son of the late billionaire Sir James Goldsmith and Lady Annabel, married Kate in 2003, daughter of the late Amschel Rothschild and Anita Patience Guinness. She ominously stated that her relationship with Jay “saved her life in many ways”. There were also suspicions that he was too close to model Cara Delevigne. Amschel Rothschild came late into the banking industry and was more interested in racing throughout his life. In July 1996 he was found hanged in the Hotel Bristol in Paris. The important patriarchs were Baron Éric Alain Robert David de Rothschild and David René James de Rothschild. The latter is married to the Italian Princess Olimpia Anna Aldobrandini. One of the banks that most used the services of Panamanian accounts and shell companies (Panama Papers) is Rothschild Trust Guernsey Limited. Guernsey, the second largest of the British Channel Islands, is not part of the United Kingdom, nor a crown colony, but is directly subordinate to the British crown as a “crown possession”. Rothschild Trust Guernsey Limited operates as a subsidiary of Rothschild Bank AG, based in Zurich, which in turn belongs to Rothschild Holding AG in Zurich, which in turn is more than two-thirds owned by Rothschilds Continuation Holdings AG in Zug, Switzerland, which in turn is majority controlled by Rothschild & Co. and thus by members of the Rothschild families and their companies. The stories of other influential Jewish clans and banking houses apart from the Rothschilds all revolve around upstarts who are provided with contracts and relationships by the Anglo-American empire. t were. The Sassoons were built up by the British. Kuhn, Loeb & Co. was an American investment bank whose founder Loeb came from a humble background and was given contracts during the American Civil War. To supply the Union Army. Jakob Heinrich Schiff from Frankfurt am Main joined and brought more experience with him as he was born into wealthy circles. Schiff was only able to set up a large investment bank because he had connections to the railroad industry, which was owned by non-Jewish oligarchs such as the Vanderbilts or the Harrimans.
The fractional reserve banking system of the British colonial empire
The British Empire was only moderately successful around 1615 under the rule of the House of Stewart. The population was not particularly large, there was a lack of money everywhere and there was nowhere near as much going on in the colonies as one would have hoped. 200 years later, under the leadership of the Guelphs, Wettins and Reginars, Britain was the most powerful player in the world and “Britannia rules the waves” was a feared slogan. The secret of success consisted of a superior family intelligence service that had hardly been researched at all, control over modern science by the “Royal Society” and the parallel British Freemasonry, as well as covert control over a system of pseudo-private banks, special economic zones such as the City of London, offshore islands, the new central bank and the new fractional reserve banking. At its peak, the colonial empire officially comprised up to 25% of the land mass and 25% of the world’s people. Without highly professional intelligence services, it would not have been possible to hold colonies such as India with little personnel. It is estimated that in India only 0.05% of the population were British. The greatest mistake the old Roman Empire made was to act as one in a contiguous territory with long, sometimes difficult to defend external borders, instead of splitting up into individual parts and concealing a central authority. For the average citizen, our current monetary system is quite absurd and disadvantageous. A central bank has the sole monopoly on the legal tender with which taxes must be paid, and private commercial banks can lend out many times more for every euro they deposit with the central bank. For the British Empire, this “fractional reserve banking system” was already the key to success, as this system was superior to those of other nations. In order to reduce the not inconsiderable risk of collapse, it was necessary to secretly control politicians, the central bank and the most important private commercial banks. The Rothschild and Barings banks, for example, are highly suspected of having been front organizations of the nobility, and they are not the only ones. The Kleinwort Benson bank goes back to Heinrich Kleinwort, a grandfather of Sir Alexander Drake Kleinwort, 1st Baronet. In 1786, Heinrich in Holstein formed a partnership with Otto Müller to finance trade with England. In 1786, Robert Benson, a Quaker, founded Rathbone & Benson with William Rathbone IV. The company acquired the bullion dealer Sharps Pixley in 1966, securing a seat on the London Gold Price Manipulation Committee, which met twice a day in the offices of N M Rothschild & Sons. The central bank, the Bank of England, was founded by Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, in 1694, under Queen Anne of the Stewarts, who was already backed by the Guelphs. Montagu was a member of the Privy Council, bore the Order of the Garter and was President of the Royal Society. Under the Guelph King George I, he was made Viscount Sunbury and Earl of Halifax, a Knight of the Garter and First Lord of the Treasury. The bank’s original home was in Walbrook, a street in the City of London, where archaeologists found the remains of a Roman temple of Mithras during reconstruction in 1954. The ruins of the Mithraeum are perhaps the most famous of all 20th century Roman discoveries in the City of London and can be visited by the public. The bank moved to its current location in Threadneedle Street in 1734 and slowly acquired neighbouring land thereafter. The chief architect, Sir John Soane, was a member of the Royal Academy and Royal Society, as well as a Freemason who extended the Freemasons Hall in London by building a new gallery. There are only a few specially trained architects capable of fulfilling the complicated structural wishes of the Freemasons, which date back to buildings of ancient empires such as Rome, Greece or Egypt. The Bank of England is protected by its royal charter status and the Official Secrets Act. From In 1858, the nobility, through the Bank of England, dared to relax restrictions and establish further large, apparently private banks. Banking has been inextricably linked with secret services and noble families since ancient times. Banks existed as early as ancient Mesopotamia, and several clay tablets were found on which the details of credit transactions were meticulously recorded. The Babylonian Egibi family were bankers for generations, but the leading, actual lenders were the kings and the religious ruling caste. The Egibis worked for the government of Nebuchadnezzar II. And one can imagine how security mechanisms had to be built in even then to prevent the rule from collapsing and bankers from cooking up their own soup or even conspiring with foreign powers. In the Middle Ages, it was common for the nobility to use Jews as front men for credit transactions because Jews were not subject to the Christian ban on interest, were controllable due to a lack of a secure legal status, and, according to anti-Semitic prejudices, were supposed to play the role of “debt collectors” and usurers so that people’s anger would be directed against Jews rather than against the nobility. But there were also some non-Jewish bankers. In Venice in the 1500s, Jews were only allowed to live in a special area and anyone who stayed in Venice for a longer period of time had to wear a yellow scarf or some other yellow symbol. For the average Christian citizen of Venice, this simply seemed to be an expression of Christian antipathy towards Jews, but for secret services it had a completely different reason: Anyone marked in this way could be observed and followed more easily on the street. If the Jews had to live close together, this was even easier and they could get by with a manageable number of informers. Money was so important that they wanted to protect themselves with counter-espionage.
During the war between Venice and the Turkish-Ottoman Caliphate, Venice ordered the confiscation of Jewish property and even the arrest of Jews. This nasty precautionary measure was probably due to the fact that Jews had also settled among the Turks and suspicious contacts were to be strictly prevented. After the war, the Jews were released and their property returned to them. The historian Niall Ferguson stresses that for a long time the moneylenders did not have the power to ensure and enforce the repayment of loans. But he then says that the moneylenders solved this problem by becoming ever larger. He refuses to touch on the secret service level and repeats the great myth that private banks could become systemically important without being subject to total control. Florentine banks such as Peruzzi and Bardi went bankrupt because, among other things, the British king did not repay the loans. The Medici, on the other hand, flourished for quite a while longer, but a lot of their business was also secret. Noble families ruled in Italy. Later, Holland, England and Sweden became the new centres of banking. The central bank, the Bank of England, was founded in 1694 under Queen Anne. With her, the Guelphs already had more or less control of the British throne. Anne married Prince George of Denmark, her sister married William of Orange. The House of Orange-Nassau worked together with the Guelphs. Denmark had already infiltrated Scotland and married a Danish princess to King James. Masonic lodges existed in Scotland from a very early stage. In 1714, the Hanoverian Guelph George I ascended to the British throne and in 1717 Freemasonry was re-established to cover up Scottish traces. The Spanish crown relied too heavily on precious metals and could not keep up with the British. As nice as the idea of a medium of exchange with intrinsic value is, it is relatively inflexible. Banks such as Barings and Rothschild provided Britain with fresh money, even from small investors, to finance wars. Of equal strategic importance was Baring’s transfer of British government money to Allied governments to support their war efforts. This work, which was at times secret and sensitive, required expert knowledge of money transfers and a solid correspondent network. It again underlined the government’s trust in Baring. Other countries increasingly copied the British central banking system because it was more effective. This was not, as conspiracy literature claims, an international seizure of power by Jews. France under Napoleon had used a traditional system of taxing conquered peoples. According to legend, Nathan Rothschild made a fortune from the Battle of Waterloo. In reality, the battle was a fiasco for the Rothschilds: Britain raised money through the bond market and then converted the money into gold, which At some point, the only thing that could be done on the transit route was to transport or smuggle gold to Portugal, where the fighting was raging. Before 1811, Nathan Rothschild was only involved in the textile trade. He had experience with smuggling and the family had a network in Europe, so he was given the corresponding secret contract by the British Empire. This contract was so important that control mechanisms must have been in place. Nathan’s father had been carefully built up by Hesse-Kassel and protected Hesse-Kassel’s wealth from Napoleon. Every cent was apparently paid back. If Mayer Amschel Rothschild had taken anything, he would have been a dead man. Napoleon had to retreat, but then made a comeback and Nathan Rothschild bought a lot of gold on behalf of the British crown because another extensive war was expected, but this turned out to be a miscalculation. The Battle of Waterloo brought a quick end to the conflict, the Rothschilds were sitting on too much gold, and the price of gold would soon fall dramatically. Nathan bought British bonds, held them for over a year and then sold them at a profit, around 600 million British pounds in today’s money. The Rothschilds then played an important role mainly in the bond market and also marketed bonds from other countries. Nathan died in 1836 and his “private wealth” was estimated at 0.62% of the British national income. The family members had to marry mainly within their own family, which was probably a requirement that the nobility had ordered. When you build up a new clan, such as a banker, you want to avoid this clan falling apart again soon and only caring about private luxury. The Rothschilds were ideal for an international espionage program because they had headquarters in several countries and could have a say in which staff were hired by the government in France, for example. According to the propaganda that was circulated, many people thought that Jews only cared about money and other Jews had no homeland and thus no loyalty to any great power. With the help of conspiracy literature, the actual structure of the British Empire and its actual history were obscured and instead the reader was fed the fairy tale that a few “wise men of Zion” had taken over Britain and America. The history of the first two US central banks was also falsified retroactively and at the same time with the third central bank (Federal Reserve) there was another such propaganda campaign. The John Birch Society became one of the most important centers of the modern conspiracy media.
Pretty families
The high nobility married in very small circles and built up a number of lower aristocratic families and upper middle class families. In Hanover, the place of origin of the British Guelph kings from George I onwards, the so-called “pretty families” such as the Barings were cultivated. In 1717, Johann Baring, who came from Bremen, emigrated to England. His sons John and Francis founded the bank John & Francis Baring & Co in London in 1770 (since 1806 Baring Brothers and Comp.), which became an important financier of government projects in the 19th century. Francis Baring was made a baronet in 1793. His nephew William Baring, whose mother belonged to the Gould family, was granted a special coat of arms under the name Baring-Gould in 1795. Numerous descendants of the company founder were admitted to the British nobility and founded various lines. The family’s descendants also include Diana, Princess of Wales, whose great-grandmother was Margaret Baring (1868–1906), the daughter of Edward Baring, 1st Baron Revelstoke, and through her also her son Prince William, Duke of Cambridge. In the 19th century, Barings became the leading London bank alongside Rothschild. The Rothschilds, in turn, were built up by the noble Hesse-Kassel family. It is abundantly clear that the nobility controlled the bankers and not the other way around. The high nobility was anything but naive, as is portrayed in the usual conspiracy literature and sometimes in historical research. The fight against France and colonies such as India would never have been possible without excellent planning and outstanding secret services. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is descended from an illegitimate child from the highest circles: through his great-great-great-grandparents Adelheid Pauline Karoline von Rottenburg (1805–1872), illegitimate daughter of Prince Paul of Württemberg, and Karl Maximilian Freiherr von Pfeffel (1811–1890), Boris Johnson is related to Queen Elisabeth and Prince Charles through the Royal House of Württemberg. Paul of Württemberg’s mother was Auguste Karoline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, whose mother in turn was Augusta of Hanover, a niece of King George III and also related to Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Hanover is the origin of the modern British Guelph royal house and ruled up to and including Queen Victoria. After that, the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line took over. Boris Johnson went through the elite training schools of Eton and Oxford University. In Oxford, Johnson was a member of the elite Bullingdon Club, as were other later top politicians, business moguls such as Nathaniel Philip Rothschild and even King Edward VII. Boris Johnson should actually be called Kemal, because he has Turkish roots. His great-grandfather Ali Kemal was briefly Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire in 1919 and was assassinated in 1922 at the instigation of Nureddin Pasha. Johnson’s grandfather Osman Ali then fled to London and took the name “Wilfred Johnson”. Ali Kemal took part in the revolution against the Ottoman Empire and its Sultan Abdülhamit II and it is clear that British espionage was heavily involved in the revolution. In Paris, Kemal became acquainted with the Young Turks, who had been set up by the British services in the form of Masonic lodges. He was later considered an opponent of Atatürk and was murdered on the orders of Nureddin Pasha, two years before the caliphate collapsed completely. Boris Johnson’s (supposed) political opponent in Brexit was the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. The Albrecht family (her birth name) is one of the so-called “Pretty Families of the Electorate of Hanover”.
Quellen:
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798-1848 by Niall Ferguson
Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England 1694-2013, David Kynaston
The Romanovs in Exile Tried to Dominate Anti-Communism
The Romanovs in exile were seen by some as washed-up losers, by others as the only figures from the old order in Russia who still had any international recognition. They sought to dominate an international anti-Communist movement. As explained above, they were not to be trusted because of their close relative Louis Mountbatten and the general Soviet infiltration of émigré circles. In addition to their glamour, the Romanovs had money and could always claim to their supporters that they had hidden secret fortunes in British bank accounts or on the stock exchange. Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia was a first cousin of the last Tsar. He was also the uncle of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent. In 1905 he married his paternal cousin, Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. During the February Revolution of 1917, Kirill marched at the head of the Naval Guard to the Tauride Palace to swear allegiance to the Russian Provisional Government, wearing a red ribbon on his uniform. Kirill had authorized the raising of a red flag over his palace on Glinka Street in Petrograd, and in correspondence with a Romanov relative claimed the honor of “saving the situation by my recognition of the Provisional Government.” Kirill proclaimed himself emperor-in-exile in 1926 and supposedly worked to restore the monarchy in Russia.
After ascending the imaginary throne in exile himself, Kirill became known as the “Soviet Tsar” because he wanted to retain some features of the Soviet regime in the event of the monarchy being restored. While in exile, he was supported by some émigrés who called themselves “legitimists,” which underlined the legitimacy of Kirill’s succession. Kirill’s opponents were called the “Unpredestined.” Kirill found his strongest support in a group called the Mladorossi, which eventually became heavily influenced by fascism. The organization eventually began to show pro-Soviet sympathies, arguing that the monarchy and the Soviet Bolshevik system could peacefully coexist. The Mladorossi believed that the Soviet government, despite its negative ideology, preserved the Russian state and defended its national interests. They also believed that the October Revolution was merely the beginning of an evolutionary process that would create a new, young Russia. Mladorossi used the slogan “Tsar and the Soviets,” a variation of the traditional phrase “Tsar and People.” Kirill distanced himself from the organization when its founder, Alexander Kazembek, was seen meeting with Soviet diplomats. For Kazembek, Stalin should serve alongside a monarch like Kirill. Between 1944 and 1957, Kazembek was allowed to teach Russian language and literature at Yale University and Connecticut College. During his visit to New Delhi in 1954, Kazembek applied for permission to return to the Soviet Union permanently.
During his stay in Germany, Kirill Romanov was close to members of the Nazi Party. He is said to have once paid Erich Ludendorff “in the years 1922–1923 a sum of almost half a million gold marks for German-Russian state affairs.”
Kirill’s son was Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich. During World War II, Vladimir lived in Brittany. On June 26, 1941, he made a statement:
“In this difficult hour, when Germany and almost all the nations of Europe have declared a crusade against Communism and Bolshevism, which have enslaved and oppressed the Russian people for twenty-four years, I appeal to all the faithful and loyal sons of our Fatherland with this appeal: do what you can to the best of your ability to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and free our Fatherland from the terrible yoke of Communism.”
Vladimir was allowed to visit Russia in November 1991, when he was invited to St. Petersburg by the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. Like Putin, Sobchak had the misleading reputation of having been a member of a right-wing underground in Russia as early as Soviet times.
Fake and Real Knights
Kirill Romanov had ties to the US group “Shickshinny Knights of Malta”, which recruited the Soviet defector Goleniewski, who then claimed to be a Romanov himself. This order is also called the “American Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem” and is based in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, an area largely populated by German and Russian immigrants. It is sometimes ve rconfusing to distinguish the true historical knightly orders from fake and semi-fake offshoots and imitators.
Charles Pichel’s “Shickshinny Knights of Malta” claimed to have a connection to the original Knights of Malta. A special relationship between the real Knights of Malta and the Crown of Russia lasted until the 18th century. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, various Catholic orders were founded. The Eastern Roman Orthodox Church found its way to Russia and we see similar Russian orders of this kind. Russian émigrés who went into exile after the 1917 revolution tried to keep these structures alive. We know that the émigrés were thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet intelligence. And what was the best way for the Soviets to control the émigrés? To have one or more Romanovs as agents.
On June 24, 1928, a group of 12 Russian commanders met in Paris to restore the activities of the Russian Knight Grand Priory. They were assisted by three other Russian nobles who were aspirants and admitted as knights, and by a hereditary commander of the Catholic Grand Priory of Russia. They were led by Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich until 1933 and by Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich until 1956, both of whom bore the title of “Grand Prior.” Money may well have enticed Charles Pichel to found his own “Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem” in 1956. Pichel gave his organization a mythical story that it was founded by Russian hereditary commanders living in or visiting the United States. After its founding, Pichel was able to win over some Russian nobles, which gave the cause greater status. The Ancient and Noble Order of the Blue Lamoo had its “fortress” in the Black Hills of South Dakota and its eastern “headquarters” on Nassau Street in New York. At the latter address, residents claim no knowledge of the organization’s existence.
The Order of Peter the Great was founded in 1930.
The Romanov Conspiracy Mythology
Social scientists today call themselves experts on the phenomenon of “conspiracy theories” and describe it in many words as an ideology of losers for losers. Frustrated by a complex world, they explain everything through (mainly Jewish) conspiracies in order to get the satisfying feeling of answers, “the truth”, control over fate and a plan to remedy it. Social scientists are not experts on the world of intelligence and empires. They can only denounce obvious forgeries such as the “Protocols of Zion” and add the usual interpretation that losers use them to explain the world to themselves. In the scientific literature on “conspiracy theories”, the authors mostly only attack circles that they consider to be relatively weak. They do not really want to reveal the role of very powerful Western structures with regard to conspiracy media. A rare exception was Professor Oberhauser from Austria, who presented a study of the role of the British aristocratic secret services behind the conspiracy bestsellers of John Robison and Augustin Barruel after the French Revolution.
The Romanov dynasty played a crucial role in popularizing the traditional mythology of a Jewish world conspiracy. Previously it was mainly a Western European phenomenon, but became a global phenomenon with the adoption in late Tsarist Russia and the subsequent export of the fake “Protocols of Zion” to the USA. Right-wingers everywhere were absolutely convinced by the material when they heard that communist revolutionaries with Jewish backgrounds had started the revolution in Russia. The fact that Lenin, for example, had only one Jewish grandfather did not bother the conspiracy writers. In fact, however, there was little sympathy for the Bolsheviks in Jewish circles in Russia before 1917 – there were fewer than 1,000 Jews among the group’s members before 1917. Count Cherep-Spiridovich was responsible for conspiracy literature such as The Secret World Government, or the Hidden Hand, published by the Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association in New York City. Spiridovich argued that the United States must lead the great white struggle against communism. He headed the Anglo-Latino-Slav League in Manhattan and was essentially a Russian intelligence agent working for the Romanovs, mainly in Europe. Grand Duke Sergei was governor of Moscow in 1891 and expelled 20,000 Jews from the city. It is possible that his wife Elizabeth Feodorovna (the German-born Elizabeth of Hesse) alerted her sister, the Empress Alexandra, to the forgery of The Protocols of Zion. Cherep-Spiridovich also seemed to have greatly influenced the text. to promote.
The idea of a complex Jewish world conspiracy first gained wider currency in French socialist circles in the early 19th century. It was a way to circumvent the censorship of the time by denouncing capitalism as Jewish-parasitic. The French Rothschild bank invested in a railroad project and became the focus of the tirades. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that the British aristocratic secret service supported these French pamphlets and books as disinformation to destabilize arch-enemy France.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild had been recruited by the House of Hesse to protect assets from Napoleon’s troops and was then tasked with smuggling money from the British crown to Wellington’s troops. The British throne certainly knew that the Rothschilds were not involved in a major conspiracy against Britain. Did these aristocrats tell their close relatives, the Romanovs, the truth about this disinformation? Were the Romanovs actually aware that they were spreading untruths? Elite figures in Britain such as Churchill publicly praised traditional conspiracy media in the 1920s and 1930s to create a certain sympathy for the Nazis. Although the British publicly warned the Germans against invading Poland, Hitler was under the impression that neither the British nor the French would risk another major war just for the sake of the Poles and to limit German territory. Louis Kilzer, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, documented the charade in his book Churchill’s Deception. After World War II, during the Cold War, the traditional conspiracy media was consumed by increasing numbers of people in the West, and Soviet Russia had a significant degree of control over it. Defector Ion Pacepa documented how Soviet intelligence printed countless copies of the Protocols of Zion for the Muslim world. In the West, the exiled Romanovs and the many heavily infiltrated émigré organizations continued to promote the Protocols, mixing anti-communism with anti-Semitism and fascism.
Cherep-Spiridovitch was funded by Henry Ford, who popularized the Protocols of Zion in America. The Russian count revived an old legend about 300 Jewish families leading the great conspiracy. This influenced the later book The Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300 by John Coleman. Tsarist Russia had sent Boris Brasol to New York to oversee and secure the purchase of weapons technology during World War I. He was on the hunt for traitors and saboteurs, while the Americans were also strengthening their counterintelligence, especially against German collaborators who tried to blow up ammunition depots, as in the infamous Black Tom event. US naval intelligence agent Sergius Riis probably knew Brasol and had connections with the Tsarist secret service, the Okhrana. After the war, Brasol was appointed to the War Trade Intelligence department of the War Trade Board, transferred to New York City, and then joined military intelligence under General Marlborough Churchill. We see a continuing relationship between American intelligence and the Romanovs in exile, with people on board such as Colonel Harris Ayres Houghton, Colonel John Jacob Astor, Major General Ralph Van Deman, Colonel William Sohier Bryant, Colonel Nicholas Biddle, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, and others.
Henry Ford set up his own personal intelligence service and recruited a significant number of exiled White Russians. Boris Brasol owned a copy of Nilus’ edition of the Protocols of Zion, which was passed on to Harris Houghton. Houghton paid for the translation and Henry Ford made it a mass phenomenon. The stated goal was the creation of an anti-communist international based on conspiracy theories. The Western House of Hesse had not only popularized the Rothschild tales much earlier to confuse the German right, but it had also initially recruited and controlled the Rothschilds. The Hesses could have told their relatives, the Romanovs, and the American right. Perhaps they did so on a limited scale, claiming that the conspiracy nonsense was a necessary part of psychological warfare. But perhaps they did not. If the Hesses had been compromised by the Communists (through Louis Mountbatten and possibly the captured four Grand Dukes and the last Tsar) or if any kind of working relationship existed with the Communists, this provided a back door for the Communists to penetrate the entire anti-Communist movement. Cherep-Spiridovich arbe probably worked with “Ace of Spies” Sidney Reilly, who was probably a Soviet traitor all along. Grand Duke Alexander Romanov met Reilly in 1900. Reilly was tasked with buying war supplies from America for Russia during World War I. After the Bolshevik Revolution, countless anti-communist groups formed. These included people like Sir Reginald Hall, a former head of British naval intelligence, which was part of the Admiralty, which had long been the domain of the House of Hesse, and specifically Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Herman Bernstein sued Henry Ford over the “Protocols of Zion” and published the book “History of a Lie” in 1921. Belarusian émigré Vladimir Orlov, who headed his own intelligence group, provided Ford with materials for Bernstein’s lawsuit. Orlov also forged documents against two US senators. Boris Brasol was also tasked with helping Ford. The Bolshevik Revolution itself has been used by authors and politicians as absolute “proof” of the idea of a great Jewish conspiracy of the “Elders of Zion” dating back to the time of the Bavarian Illuminati. The usual modus operandi of conspiracy writers and activists is to point to a significant person who has a Jewish background (no matter how small and insignificant that background may be) and declare this as proof of the master theory of a Jewish world conspiracy. Real analysis of this person and the context is avoided. Outright forgeries such as the “Protocols of Zion” and others are included in the circular argument and the sheer volume of material presented is emphasized.
So when Romanov rule over Russia ended, it fit this mythological pattern of “the Jews” as destroyers of Christian empires. Lenin had a grandfather named Sril Moiseyevich Blank in Odessa who lived in the early 19th century. He converted to the Orthodox Church and changed his name. Otherwise, Lenin was of Russian and Kalmyk descent. He was a Russian who joined the communist revolution. Trotsky’s father was not a religious man, his mother was halfway. He was simply a petty-bourgeois Russian who joined the communists. The Bolsheviks’ challenge was to transform loutish peasants into proletarians and capable revolutionaries. The upper strata of Russian society were dominated by the white aristocracy. Jews in the Russian Empire were often better educated and thus suited to perform complex tasks for the Bolshevik movement. Later, many Jews were removed from the Soviet leadership.
“Aufbau”
In Germany, the Russian monarchists collaborated with the Nazis through an organization called “Aufbau.” Walter Nikolai, the former head of German military intelligence, worked with Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich Romanov. Members of the Houses of Hesse, Hanover, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg, etc. eventually joined the Nazi Party, while their relatives in Britain undertook a monumental deception to create Nazi sympathies.
General Ludendorff set up an intelligence service for Kirill Romanov. Walter Nikolai had worked for Ludendorff during World War I as Chief of Intelligence of the Army High Command.
Ludendorff’s father came from a Pomeranian merchant family whose lineage traced back to King Eric XIV of Sweden, the son of the Welf Catherine of Saxe-Lauenburg, who in turn descended from the Welf Catherine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel is a precursor to the Kingdom of Hanover (see also British throne from 1714). After World War I, von Hindenburg and Ludendorff spread the so-called “stab-in-the-back legend” through the Supreme Army Command (OHL), according to which the German army had remained “undefeated in the field” and that the defeat was ultimately due to treacherous socialists and international Jewry. Russian monarchists funneled large sums of money to the NSDAP. Boris Brasol and other members of the “Aufbau”, especially Kirill’s wife Grand Duchess Victoria, linked the German right-wing extremists with the Americans, such as Henry Ford, who was a Hitler supporter or at least pretended to be one. In 1938, Brasol, who now had American citizenship, secretly helped organize an anti-Comintern congress in Germany with the support of the Gestapo. The meeting was attended by representatives from Canada, France, England and Switzerland. Heinrich Himmler showed interest in Brasol in August 1938 and even asked Heinrich Müller to write a report on the activities of the white emigration. Victoria Romanow was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain and a niece of King Edward VII.
Kirill and Victoria moved to Coburg in Bavaria (see Saxe-Coburg and Gotha). They were (or pretended to be) Hitler supporters and knew Aufbau founder Max Scheubner-Richter. Their donations saved the extreme right. However, it is likely that they received some of the money from Henry Ford and not just from hidden accounts in Great Britain. The founder and managing director of Aufbau was Max-Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, one of Hitler’s most important advisors. Baron Theodor von Cramer-Klett Jr. and Prince Biskupski served as president and vice president respectively. The managing director of the NSDAP, Max Amann, was a member. The radical reconstruction ideologist Winberg, a close friend of the murdered tsarina, propagated the apocalyptic anti-Semitism of the Black Hundreds in his 1922 book “Krestnyj Put'” and advocated the extermination of the Jews. Winberg also founded the monarchist newspaper Prizyv. In May 1922, General Biskupsij and his personal secretary Arno Schickedanz reached an agreement with Ludendorff, according to which Ludendorff was allowed to use the assets of the heirs to the throne Kirill and Viktoria Fjodorovna as part of the organization’s activities to promote German-Russian interests. Biskupski also transferred funds from emigrants directly to the NSDAP, and Scheubner-Richter transferred significant amounts of money from white immigrants to the NSDAP, especially funds from Russian industrialists, oil magnates, as well as German businessmen, industrialists and bankers. Other circumstances also point to the organization’s terrorist activities, such as its contacts with the Consul organization. In the summer of 1921, Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen, who called himself Vasil Vyshvani and was an informal Habsburg candidate for the throne of a Ukrainian satellite state during World War I, ordered Biskupski to assemble an army in Bavaria for use in Ukraine. This was to implement an agreement with Scheubner-Richter and Biskupski, who had managed to obtain 2 million marks and 60,000 Swiss francs for Vyshvani’s throne in an independent Ukraine.
The plans failed partly for financial reasons. Von Scheubner-Richter played an increasingly central role in right-wing extremist circles in 1922 and 1923. He was an adviser to Hitler and Ludendorff and also the executive director of the German Combat League, whose action program he designed. He played a central role in Hitler’s putsch. According to Otto Strasser and Ernst Hanfstaengl, Scheubner-Richter was the leading figure in the conspiracy. Others also believe that he was the real intellectual mastermind of the coup. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich lived outside Paris and worked on a second option: gaining French support. These circles in 1922 advocated a French and Polish attack on the shattered Soviet Union. The Aufbau people called Nikolai “Jewish-financed” and even considered a temporary alliance with the Communists in Russia. Were the Romanovs simply exploring two options at the time? Or were they deliberately splitting their own movement on orders from the Communists or British relatives? The false Knights of Malta (the Pichel group) formed a “Committee for Military Affairs” for retired military officers such as General Pedro del Valle, George Stratemeyer, Major General Charles Willoughby and Colonel Philip J. Corso.
Corso tried to link the FBI and the State Department to Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. In 1997, he published the best-seller “The Day After Roswell” about UFOs and aliens. These many anti-communist groups had members such as Admiral Barry Domvile, the former head of British naval intelligence, or the senior staff of General Douglas MacArthur.
