HIGHER THAN TRUTH
[S1E11] MURPHY RANCH — SHADOW WAR: PART 1
DID NAZI OCCULTISTS BUILD A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR DOOMSDAY MANSION IN LOS ANGELES DURING WWII?
Note: Higher Than Truth is an ongoing series taking deep dives into strange mysteries, conspiracies, and forgotten history. Please refer to the table of contents for all articles in their chronological order.
“The three godfathers of the Nazi Thule were Guido von List (1848–1919), Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954), and Rudolf von Sebottendorff (1875–1945). It is significant that all three decided at some point to adorn their plain bourgeois names with the particle von (which in German suggests noble descent). One of the hallmarks of master-race philosophy is that no one is known to have embraced it who does not consider himself a member of that race. And what is more tempting, having once adopted the belief that one’s own race is chosen by Nature or God for preeminence, than to put oneself at its aristocratic summit?”
— Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day
In the last episode, [S1E10] — Ârya, we explored the modern history of the concept of Aryanism: its beginnings as a linguistic term used by German scholars like Max Muller; to its development as a racial identity promoted by French and English aristocrats like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who connected “race mixing” with the destruction of civilization; to its influential role in occult theories of spiritual evolution by Russian mystics like Helena Blavatsky. The word “Aryan” became a crystal ball into which scientists, politicians, and religious leaders could see humanity’s mythic past and foretell its mythic future:
Their writings and lectures encouraged people to think of themselves as members of long-established, biological-linguistic nations and thus were promoted widely in the new national school systems and national newspapers of the emerging nation-states of Europe…rooted in politicians’ need for an ancient and “pure” national heritage for each new state.
These theories collided with the revolutionary politics of the 19th and 20th centuries, as nations and citizens fought for power, wealth, and freedom on a global and personal scale. And just as those ideas became actions, we’ll now turn our attention away from the theory-heavy tone of the past few episodes and focus instead on the world changing results.
While the battles of World War I were fought across Europe, a complex network of spies, saboteurs, propagandists, assassins, and occultists waged a shadow war in the United States whose battles stretched from mahogany boardrooms in New York to weapons-laden cargo ships along the coasts of California. The Great War began in July of 1914 and officially ended ended on November 11, 1918 — but the shadow war never stopped.
June 28, 1914. Serajevo. Nineteen-year old Gavrilo Princip, member of the pan-Slavic nationalist group Young Bosnia, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife as they drove in an open topped carriage on their way to town hall. Since its annexation by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908, Bosnia had seen a rise in revolutionary groups hoping to achieve either an independent Pan-Serbian or Yugoslavist government. Princip himself was armed and trained by a separatist paramilitary group known as the Black Hand, which was secretly financed by Serbian Crown Prince Alexander I and other government officials. At his trial, Princip stated:
“I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria.”
This act marked the beginning of World War I.
At that time, the following alliances existed between nations:
- Russia and Serbia
- Germany and Austria-Hungary
- France and Russia
- Britain and France and Belgium
- Japan and Britain
Because of mutual defense agreements, each country was obligated to fight on behalf of their ally should they be attacked. So, while tensions escalated after Ferdinand’s 1914 assassination, the nations of the world tumbled into war one after the other like dominos:
- Jul. 28 — Austria declared war against Serbia
- Aug. 1 — Germany, an ally of Austria, declared war against Russia
- Aug. 3 — Germany then declared war against Russia’s ally, France, and invaded Belgium
- Aug. 4 — Great Britain, ally of France and Belgium, declared war against Germany
On August 5th, the same day President Woodrow Wilson declared the United States would remain neutral, three representatives of the German government raced back to New York City to wage the shadow war.
Quickly realizing that economic strength would be a key component of victory, Germany and Great Britain turned their eyes on the abundant resources of neutral America. But Britain’s superior navy effectively ensured that shipping lanes carrying supplies manufactured in the U.S. were cut off from Germany. Says CIA Historian, Michael Warner:
The British blockade made it impossible for Germany and Austria to import war materiel and foodstuffs from overseas, while leaving the British, French, and Russians at their leisure to buy the products of America’s farms and factories. American businessmen welcomed the foreign customers who bought huge quantities and paid cash when necessary.
So, while Britain had every reason to want the U.S. to join the war, Germany had every reason to keep it out.
Britain’s control of the oceans also meant it was impossible for Germany to send over large teams of intelligence experts to exert covert influence. Prior to the war, Germany “possessed the largest and most efficient secret service organization in Europe,” but its focus had remained on Russia, France, and England. Now that the war was ongoing, they had to largely rely upon their existing officials and U.S. residents to build a spy network on American soil from the ground up. Four of these officials ran the German Embassy: an Ambassador, a Commercial Attaché, a Military Attaché, and a Naval Attaché.
Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff learned of Ferdinand’s assassination while dining at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C. He returned to Germany on July 7, where he was quickly inducted into the intelligence service and told what his new — unofficial — role would be in America. Less than a month later, he boarded a ship bound for New York City with Commercial Attaché Heinrich Albert at his side.
While Bernstorff was an “arrogantly cultured” career diplomat married to the wealthy American socialite, Jeanne Luckemeyer — her father famously threw a $10,000 dinner in 1873 featuring “a thirty foot long country diorama centered around a lake, complete with four swans and a waterfall” — Albert, “thoughtful and refined,” may have been involved in espionage work as early as 1904, where it’s alleged he conducted intelligence gathering operations at the St. Louis World’s Fair. In any case, Albert would later be described as:
“The Machiavelli of the whole thing…the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.”
Traveling with them on August 5th was the banker Bernhard Dernburg and one Anton Meyer-Gerhard. If you’ve never heard of Gerhard that’s because — according to researcher and author Richard Spence — Gerhard was the alias of Max Warburg, director of M. M. Warburg & Co., a privately owned German bank. While I can’t verify this claim, it seems Gerhard’s true identity eventually did come under scrutiny a year later, with the New York Tribune claiming that the man posing as Gerhard was, in fact, Alfred Meyer, Chief of the Department of Army Supplies of the Imperial German Ministry of War.
Together, von Bernstorff, Albert, Dernburg and “Meyer-Gerhard” carried with them $150–175 million dollars in German treasury notes.
Their destination? Wall Street.
Their mission? According to Albert:
“…buying munitions for Germany, stopping munitions for the Allies, necessary propaganda, forwarding reservists — and other things.”
Within months, the fires started.
Joining them in New York was Franz von Papen, the Military Attaché, and Karl Boy-Ed, the Naval Attaché. Papen, born into wealth and married into more wealth, was an “intolerant, arrogant, and blunt” militarist whose post in Washington — then considered a backwater by the Europeans — wasn’t expected to hold much significance beyond schmoozy diplomacy. Boy-Ed, meanwhile, was a “polished and charming” Naval officer with a successful career as lieutenant commander on dozens of assignments around the globe who had been running Germany’s Office of Naval Intelligence since 1909. Though each had been popular in D.C.’s political and social scene prior to the war, they didn’t like each other personally but worked together nonetheless.
Von Bernstorff and von Papen set up the Bureau of the Military Attaché in an office posing as an advertising firm at 60 Wall Street, a block away from the New York Stock Exchange. Due to the rushed timeframe, this location may have been an intelligence error on the Germans’ part: their intention was to approach J.P. Morgan with bankers Dernburg and Gerhard for financial support — and J.P. Morgan’s offices had always been located at 60 Wall Street. But during the chaotic summer of 1914, the Morgan offices moved to 23 Wall Street and absorbed 33 Wall Street as well. The Germans may have arrived at their new base of operations, disappointed to learn they weren’t sharing walls with their target.
But they would.
Heinrich Albert, working as paymaster, set up his own office down the street at 45 Broadway in the headquarters of the Hamburg-American Shipping Line (HAPAG). Boy-Ed was a block down at 11 Broadway.
Publicly, Dernburg worked out of the Consulate where he headed the German Red Cross — “Meyer-Gerhard” also used employment at the Red Cross as ruse. But according to Richard Spence, Dernburg’s real job was to control the “secretive Propaganda Kabinett.”
The basic aim of the Kabinett was to counter Allied propaganda and champion Germany’s cause in America.
Among the earliest members of the Propaganda Kabinett was a disaffected German poet whose flowery style had lately gone out of fashion, George Sylvester Viereck. Viereck published two journals, The Fatherland and The International, that acted as conduits for pro-German points of view. Viereck’s contributing editor at that time was an occultist and black magician as well known by his nicknames — “The Beast” aka “The Wickedest Man in the World” — as he was by his given name, Aleister Crowley.
The Fatherland began its run on August 10, 1914 and ultimately published 132 issues over three years — “it thereafter changed its name four times to reflect a less obvious pro-German stance, settling on the ‘American Monthly’ in 1920.” With funding provided by Heinrich Albert, Viereck and Crowley co-wrote editorials like the one seen in the January 1918 edition of The International, saying:
The hierarchical and caste system is the system with biological truth to it…This war will make an end of the “brilliant”, “intellectual” nonsense of the George Bernard Shaws and Leon Trotzkys; aristocracy will be re-established in a more enlightened form.
But Bernstorff wasn’t content with niche literary journals to spread his propaganda, and he enlisted Viereck’s help to secure more popular news media in their favor. The problem was, according to author and history professor Chad R. Fulwider:
The top six New York newspapers, whose columns were recirculated in countless smaller papers, all openly attacked the German cause in their headlines, while the only “unfriendly” (or what might have been seen by the Germans as the only rational) newspapers were the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, which also published anti-British material as part of their general coverage.
On October 15, 1914, Viereck wrote a letter to Albert encouraging him to find the funds necessary for purchasing and controlling American newspapers that would then have “an intimate connection between the German Foreign Office and the German Embassy here.”
Attempts to purchase the Washington Post fell through in the Summer of 1916 upon the death of its owner, John R. McLean, whose son didn’t share his father’s pro-German tendencies. But other ventures were more successful. Using Indiana newspaperman Edward Rumely as intermediary, Albert purchased The New York Evening Mail for $1.7M in 1915 — the equivalent of $50M today. (Rumely was ultimately convicted of violating the Trading With The Enemies Act three years later, then pardoned by President Coolidge in 1925.)
But the Germans’ biggest “get” may have been William Randolph Hearst, publisher of The Chicago Tribune. In sworn testimony, a New York broker recounted his conversation with von Bernstorff at a Christmas party that year:
I mentioned the Hearst papers particularly and he said he had had his eye on Hearst as an available man…and when I saw that Hearst was publishing a German paper I mentioned it later to the count, and said: “I guess you got to those fellows,” and he said: “Well, it’s working all right, isn’t it?”
Between 1914 and 1916, Hearst’s Chicago Tribune spent heavily to promote war films like The German Side of the War, which had been compiled of newsreels gathered by the paper. Produced by the American Correspondents’ Film Corporation, the documentary provided a counter-narrative to the American media’s reports of German atrocities in Belgium. Fair and balanced coverage, if you will.
What moviegoers didn’t know, however, was that the American Correspondents’ Film Corporation was owned by the Propaganda Kabinett. According to Attorney General M.E. Lewis, only weeks after Dernburg arrived in America in August of 1914, a “short, dark haired young man” named Felix Malitz:
…hurried from the office of a well-known moving picture company in New York City, and reported at the German consulate for instructions. He was told that he would be notified when needed.
That October, Heinrich Albert spent $72,000 — or, $2.1M today — to purchase a 51% stake in the American Correspondents’ Film Corporation and placed Malitz as its business manager. Posing as a Swiss businessman, Malitz opened extensive offices in the Candler Building, which already housed several large entertainment companies.
In addition to producing pro-German war documentaries, Malitz covertly worked with Friedrich von Pilis — an Austro-Hungarian friend of von Bernstorff — who entered the United States as an agent of the Hamburg-American Shipping Line to obscure the fact that he had worked for the German Colonization Bureau for decades. Once in the U.S., Friedrich changed his name to Fritz de Pilis and pretended to be a French citizen conducting lecture tours around the United States that provided “the real facts” to Americans about Germany’s role in the war.
But even with funding from Albert and publicity provided by Hearst, the American Correspondents’ Film Corporation wasn’t particularly successful with the American public. There was a pro-British leaning already, of course, but the films themselves just weren’t very good. And for some reason, the Germans expected this venture to not only change minds, but to also turn a profit. In order to stay financially solvent, Malitz and von Pilis needed to diversify their activities beyond mere propaganda.
By day, Malitz continued to run the film company on a budget from the German government that was less than half of that given to Rumely’s newspaper. By night, Malitz reinvented himself as an importer-exporter in a new business he opened at 2 Rector Street — literally around the corner from Heinrich Albert’s office in the Hamburg-American building. With the help of complicit Norwegian shipping stewards in New York harbor, Malitz evaded trade embargoes by smuggling supplies like silk, cotton, and rubber from New York through Norway to Germany.
Von Pilis, meanwhile, continued his French citizen act and got himself hired at the new investment firm of Kennedy, Mitchell & Co. His reasons for doing so may have been twofold. First, the firm’s stated purpose was to help Austro-Hungarians route their money home at a time when they didn’t trust American banks. As an employee of Kennedy, Mitchell & Co., von Pilis carried documents and cash to neutral European countries every two weeks where, like Malitz’s exports, they were re-routed to Germany. Second, the firm’s offices were located at 35 Wall Street — literally sharing a wall with J.P. Morgan’s new offices at 33 Wall Street.
In December of 1916, Kennedy, Mitchell & Co. opened a second, bigger office at 42 Broadway — yet again, literally across the street from Albert and Boy-Ed.
(Coincidentally, this real estate deal was facilitated by one Grayson M-P Murphy, who sold the building at a loss to the investment firm where von Pilis worked. Eighteen years later, it would literally be in Murphy’s office at 52 Broadway that the details of the alleged Business Plot to overthrow the Roosevelt administration were discussed: “We need a fascist government in this country to save the Nation from the Communists….” — More on this in later episodes.)
But the Germans’ plans didn’t stop at newspapers, film companies, lectures, smuggling, and financial institutions. They set their sight on American weapons — and if they couldn’t get weapons, they needed to stop their production entirely. On April 9, 1915, von Papen wrote,
“…The army administration is prepared to employ large funds to curtail the supply of war materials for our enemies in every way possible.”
To this end, they set off on a more dangerous course:
Revolution and sabotage.
In early 1915, von Bernstorff began the establishment of “German Employment Bureaus” in New York (NY), Bridgeport (CT), Philadelphia (PA), Pittsburgh (PA), Cleveland (OH), Cincinnati (OH), and Chicago (IL). Their purpose, according to von Bernstorff, was to address the rampant discrimination that German-Americans were experiencing as a result of the war, and to provide employment to those persons who had been fired or left voluntarily.
To be fair, this may not have been entirely without merit — Malitz claimed he was fired from his job at the Pathé Film Company because of his nationality not long after Germany invaded France. But the reality of the situation was, as usual, more complicated and — for those German immigrants who found themselves with conflicting loyalties between their native homeland and their American home — more sinister.
In a letter dated September 24, 1915, the German Employment Bureau addressed one German immigrant working at a New York munitions plant:
Mr. — — — — — —
As we have heard that you are employed in one of the many factories which deliver war material to the enemies of Germany, we wish to call your attention to fact that according to the notice published in many newspapers, under Section 89 of the German Criminal Code, you are guilty of treason if you are a German subject.
Both von Papen and the Austro-Hungarian government released proclamations to the press that the penalty for this type of treason was ten to twenty years in prison. Within a year, some 8000 German-Americans left their jobs — 60% from munitions plants.
Not all, however, were asked to quit. Instead, they were given pencils.
Between January 1915 and April 1917, dozens of mysterious fires broke out at American factories and aboard American ships. The fires followed a pattern, but it took several years for investigators to put the pieces together. This is how it worked:
Based on a technique developed by scientists in the German Secret Service, German agents working from a small laboratory in Washington, D.C. replaced the lead inside ordinary pencils with a thin glass vial filled with sulphuric acid on one end and a mixture of sugar and chlorate of potash on the other. Factory employees or dockworkers carried the pencils with them to work in their coat pockets, snapped off the pencil tip at a designated time, then left their coats behind in strategic locations as they walked away. Within minutes or hours, a white-hot flame erupted from the pencil, setting fire to everything nearby.
In the first half of 1915 alone, fires or explosions broke out at: the John A. Roebling Company plant in Trenton, NJ; the Dupont Plant in Haskell, NJ; the Equitable Powder Plant in Allon, IL; the Freight Depot in Pompton Lakes, NJ; the Anderson Chemical Company in Wallington, NJ; the Dupont Plant in Carney’s Point, NJ (the first explosion on May 10, followed by two more on May 15); and the Aetna Powder Plant in Pittsburgh, PA. At least 43 such fires occurred over a two year period.
One plant not targeted was the New Jersey Agricultural Company, whose president, Dr. Walter T. Scheele, had recently begun doing business with the New York banking firm of G. Amsinck & Co. — conveniently located at 3 Hanover Square, two blocks east of the German espionage hub on Broadway. It was here that Scheele met with Karl Boy-Ed and Franz von Papen, who had only recently purchased ownership of G. Amsinck through Heinrich Albert.
Scheele’s career began in Germany’s Field Artillery Regiment #8 and evolved into the field of spy craft, where he spent twenty-one years in the United States reporting on the Americans’ advancements in the production of explosives. (Of those employed by Albert and von Papen, Scheele was one of the few whose intelligence work in the U.S. pre-dated WWI.) Using this expertise, Scheele oversaw the development of larger explosive devices covertly assembled with chemicals available at his New Jersey Agricultural Company — and, with rubber likely provided by Malitz’s import-export business. Over a roughly 18 month period, Albert paid Scheele the modern day equivalent of ~$4.2M to convert 2000 barrels of fertilizer into 300–400 cigar bombs and other incendiary devices.
Shortly after midnight on July 30, 1916, four fires ignited outside the Black Tom munitions depot in New York Harbor, where railroad cars loaded with “3,125 cases of ammunition and explosive projectiles” and a barge carrying 100,000 pounds of TNT waited to transfer their cargo on ships bound for Russia. The fires resulted in “one of the largest non-nuclear artificial explosions in history” — a detonation wave that traveled at 24,000 feet per second, killing three men and a 10-month-old boy, registering 5.5 on the Richter scale, lodging shrapnel in the Statue of Liberty, “atomizing windows in tens of thousands of homes,” shattering glass facades at Times Square, and cracking the walls of Jersey City’s City Hall. The blast was felt in Philadelphia. The shockwave was heard in Maryland and Connecticut.
The bombs were built by Walter Scheele.
While acts of sabotage were exploding across North America — in addition to targeting factories and ships, von Papen hired saboteurs to destroy the Vanceboro Bridge in Maine, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., and numerous locations throughout Canada — the Germans coordinated a separate strategy that took advantage of American neutrality and global independence movements in a plot that would eventually be called The Hindu-German Conspiracy.
What do Russian militants, telepathic communicators, and an exiled maharajah have to do with all this? Find out next, on:
