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Russian Intelligence Details How US Politicians, Tycoons Tried to Hush Up American Support for Nazis

© Wikipedia / BundesarchivAdolf Hitler watches troops mark into Poland; screengrab from Nazi propaganda film.
Adolf Hitler watches troops mark into Poland; screengrab from Nazi propaganda film. - Sputnik International, 1920, 20.12.2022
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The role of US and British political and business interests in financing the Nazi Party and later bankrolling the Third Reich has been well documented by documentary filmmaker Michael Romm, and academics like Antony Sutton and Jacques R. Pauwels. Now, Russian archival documents shed light on what Moscow knew about these activities at the time.
US politicians and Wall Street traders plotted to secretly pump billions of dollars into Nazi Germany via a loan, and tried to cover up their activities on the eve of the Second World War, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, has revealed, citing intelligence obtained by the foreign intelligence arm of the NKVD – the SVR’s predecessor.
Among a massive trove of materials which have been declassified, digitized and published on the website of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library dedicated to the years leading up to WWII is an NKVD report from the summer of 1939 by an undercover field agent detailing “the participation of statesmen of the USA and Great Britain in financial transactions in aid of Nazi Germany.”
The document details how, on July 24, 1939, just over a month before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Soviet intelligence received information from one of its sources about efforts to cover up American involvement in planned multi-billion dollar loan to the Third Reich by London.
“All American newspapers reported on a conversation between Sir Robert Hudson [the UK Secretary of Overseas Trade], and [a] German economic advisor…on the question of a five billion dollar British loan to Germany,” the report indicated, citing former president Herbert Hoover’s suspected “direct involvement” and “interest” in the Anglo-German agreement.
“At the same time, a message flashed in the papers that, since Britain alone would not be able to raise such a large sum, local Wall Street were supposed to help out,” the report said. The document emphasized that Mr. Hoover could provide “substantial support for the implementation of Hudson’s negotiations with the Germans,” and that Wall Street had bet on the former president in matters of US foreign and domestic policy.
The intelligence report further indicated that after these publications in the press, “urgent measures” were taken to seize materials related to the planned loan amid concerns about the political scandal it would cause Hoover and the Republican Party. Three folders containing materials related to the loan were said to have been confiscated by Hoover advisor and businessman Francis White.
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According to the document, Hoover was petrified about his name being leaked to the press in connection with the loan, with Hudson urged to maintain the “strictest secrecy” in relation to the transaction, and not to divulge names of the people involved in the ‘London property’, the codename used to refer to the loan.
The declassified document sheds new light on what the Kremlin knew about US and British ties to Hitler, and Moscow’s calculations in the summer of 1939 as it made the decision to ditch stalled negotiations with Britain and France on the creation of a tripartite alliance against Nazi Germany in favor of a non-aggression pact with Berlin to buy time for the USSR’s rearmament and military reorganization.
The document is just one of a series of fascinating prewar and wartime intelligence reports featured in the trove of digitized materials. Another details how Adolf Hitler hatched plans for a coup d’état against Joseph Stalin shortly after becoming chancellor in 1933. Another outlined aborted British-French plans to attack the USSR via Finland to try to protract the Soviet-Finnish war.
Yet another detailed how Pope Pius XII of the Catholic Church became aware of Operation Barbarossa, the planned Nazi German offensive against the USSR, two months before the invasion began on June 22, 1941.
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Tuesday is the 102nd anniversary of the creation of the SVR’s predecessor agency, the Cheka, in 1920. The foreign intelligence agency was known by many names during the Soviet era, including the OGPU, the NKVD and the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. The latter was formally succeeded the SVR in December 1991.
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