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At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - John Bevilaqua - 11-12-2009
Game, Set and Match
THIS IS BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT POSTING I HAVE EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF MY ENTIRE JFK ASSASSINATION INVESTIGATION.
Anastase Vonsiatsky has finally been linked to Wickliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund cronies like Major John B. Trevor, Sr., Lt. Gen. Pedro A. del Valle, Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso, OSJ and even to John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles as well as to "Wild Bill" Donovan, OSJ through even more pro-Nazi White Russian Spies involved with either The Knights of Malta or the even more sinister Shickshinny Knights of Malta chapter. And the threads from Boris Brasol through The Coudert Brothers Law Firm include both a young Robert J. Morris who worked on the Rapp-Coudert Committees in the early 1940's and later to William F. Buckley, Jr. whose NYC Mayoralty campaign was run by a partner in the Coudert Brothers Law firm who ran the White Russian Rat Lines from Paris, France to either the USA or Canada. This means that at least 10 of Richard Condon's Dirty Dozen from The Manchurian Candidate, were part of this document and part of The Shickshinny Knights of Malta. And both identified participants in The Winnipeg Airport incident are referenced here, too. GLK Smith via Wm. Dudley Pelley and The Silver Shirts plus Wickliffe Draper, of course. Stick a fork in it, the JFK Final Solution is done. Finito. Completo.
Even Col. Robert T. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune is listed just below who was among his close fiends and associates
And good old boy, William Dudley Pelley founder of the Nazi Silver Shirts during World War II where GLK
Smith cut his Nazi-loving eye teeth, YES Reverend Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith from the Winnipeg Airport Incident is included by reference herein for all to see.
When everything comes together like this in one single document, within one single organization for all to read for themselves, it is almost magical.
1) Draper and his evil cronies at The Pioneer Fund like Pedro Augusto del Valle, and the Trevors Sr. and Jr.
2) Richard Condon and the Manchurian Candidate Dirty Dozen included in his dirty rotten scoundrels
3) The Shickshinny Knights of Malta (Philip J. Corso, Pedro del Valle, Charles Willoughby, Bonner Fellers, Sir Barry Domville)
4) Anastase Vonsiatsky and his ROND friends plus the Russian Orthodox Church.
5) The Dulles Brothers and William J. Donovan, OSJ who was a Knight of Malta first and foremost
Who knows why Jupiter, Florida was the headquarters of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem?
Name two military crustaceans who retired to Jupiter, Florida who had the OSJ credentials?
Free Gift Certificate to Taco Bell for the winner.
One of them ran the Nazi Rat Lines behind the back of Giovanni Battista Montini. (Pope Paul VI) He also
was in charge of pushing the UFO brainwashing theories into the public domain and he was once the hero of
John Armstrong, too. And he worked for J. Strom Thurmond.
The other one was a McCarthyite who served as Oswald's Travel Agent and worked as head of The Passport Office in
the State Dept. Security Office (SY). He got fired over the Walt Whitman Rostow confirmation hearings.
I can count on either the crack Australian research duo (Richards and Parker) or Tom Scully to get this one right.
These two suspects both used the OSJ honorary title in their signature with their correspondence. As in Lt. Col. XXXXXX Y ZZZZZ, OSJ
Holier than though Nazi Super-Catholics, and Conservative Military Right Wingers who took their role as the Protectorate of the Holy See saw JFK as an obstacle to the removal of the Communists in Korea, Viet Nam and Latin America.
ABOUT TEN OF RICHARD CONDON'S DIRTY DOZEN ARE MENTIONED OR INCLUDED BY REFERENCE HEREIN.
And how about this one. Even Major John Trevor, Sr. of The American Coalition of Patriotic Societies founded
by Wickliffe Draper, and his son John Trevor, Jr. of The Pioneer Fund also founded by Wickliffe Draper are mentioned herein.
John B. Trevor opposed Brown vs. Board of Education on eugenic grounds.
The Shickshinny Knights of Malta were his friends too: Charles Willoughby, Pedro A. del Valle, Bonner Fellers,
Sir Barry Domville, Lord Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton, Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso...
I hate to say I told you so.... but I told you so.
And I hate to say that Richard Condon told you so... but he did. You just wouldn't listen.
Get on this aspect of the JFK case or you will forever be inhaling the dust from the fast-trackers.
Anyone see any other obvious suspects in the JFK mayhem here? Lemmie know.
This is a long and tedious posting, but it is well worth the effort. I posted it intact and will add comments later after I find out the name of the person who actually wrote this.
I now think that Richard Condon's informant was a member of the Military-Religious Protectorate. Who else could have given him ALL the names of those plotting to kill JFK when he was a Senator by 1958 when he was writing this historical novel? No one. Except maybe Wilbur Baldinger who worked for the Reuther Brothers, or Armen Dernounian (a/k/a John Roy Carlson) who wrote both The Plotters and Undercover during World War II. One was the NY Times bestseller for 1944. Thanks to Andy Winiarzyk who brought this work to my attention.
Here is the complete article... verbatim:
SOVEREIGN ORDER OF SAINT JOHN OF JERUSALEM
History and Lineage Charts Since 1797
Founded near Our Lord’s Holy Sepulcher c. 1050, the Brothers of the Hospital of Saint John is one of
the oldest orders of the Catholic Church. The Order of St. John of Jerusalem was elevated to a monastic order
in 1098 by which time it had developed into a military brotherhood known as the Hospitallers. The Brethren
defended their Hospital and ensured the health and safety of pilgrims coming to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The King of Jerusalem confirmed the Hospitallers as an international corporation in 1104. The Apostolic See
became its perpetual Protector in 1113 by a Papal Bull of Paschal II. Renowned for skilled hospital care and
prowess in battle, the Hospitaller Knights became indispensable defenders of Christendom and the Order was
recognized as a sovereign state in 1191. The Order was forced by the Moslems from the Holy Land in 1291
and from Rhodes in 1523. The Convent of the Order was on the island of Malta, and its 70th Grand Master was
Prince Ferdinand von Hompesch, when the humanist revolution was creating widespread change on the
political map of Europe. The Knights of the Order used strategic foresight in gaining the Czar of Russia as a
secondary Protector because in 1798 Malta was seized by General Napoleon Bonaparte. A large contingent of
French Knights of Malta, who had accepted the precepts of the revolutionaries, joined Napoleon’s army. Most
of the remainder rallied to St. Petersburg, Russia, which was the home of their new powerful Protector.
There have been many questions concerning the legal and historical validity of the SOSJ after its
transfer from Malta to Russia, and later to the United States of America. This essay addresses various aspects
of the continuity of the Order’s government starting from the late 18 th century in St. Petersburg, and following it
to the United States of America in the beginning of the 20th century. The knights compromised their principles
as they focused on the survival and independence of their brotherhood, but they succeeded in preserving their
lineage intact. Other provincial groups of Knights of Malta eventually became sufficiently organized to warrant
their respective national monarchs to recognize them as distinct orders later in the 19th century. This is the
cause of the several orders of St. John and of Malta that we know today. The Sovereign Order of Saint John of
Jerusalem is, in contrast, the factual continuation of the Order from Malta, and was supported as such by the
Russian monarchy continuously until the death of Czar Kirill I in 1938.
THE SOSJ PRESERVES ITSELF BY DEFENDING MONARCHY
Shortly after their arrival in Russia, the exiled Knights of Malta joined with the Catholic Grand Priory of
Russia and elected their Orthodox and married Protector, Czar Paul I, as the 71st Grand Master. Grand Master
Czar Paul I helped to settle the SOSJ in the Russian capital city. He decreed that their Convent would remain at
the Imperial residence of St. Petersburg, and that his successors would continue as its protectors. He created a
second Grand Priory principally for his Orthodox nobility. He then invited non-Catholic Europeans, mainly
Lutherans, to join this new priory for the purpose of preserving the SOSJ and European monarchism by
perpetual opposition to the Humanist Revolution. His plan to return the Russian Orthodox Church, of which he
was the head, to full communion with the Catholic Church had created enemies among his closest advisors and
relatives. Czar Paul I, an unrecognized champion of the Order, was martyred, allegedly by Freemasons, in
1801.
The Holy See had often desired in the past to control the election of the Grand Master and the Order’s
history shows that the knights always successfully resisted this interference. The election of Czar Paul I had
broken the lineage of unmarried Catholic grand masters, but continued the jealously guarded tradition of
independent election of their leader by the knights. The Knights of Malta believed that the unusual
circumstances in world affairs which resulted in the relocation of the convent to Russia called for nontraditional
action to salvage the Order and to counter the Revolution. Election disputes developed after the death of Grand
Master Czar Paul I and this created a permanent split between the Sovereign Order in Russia and the surviving
Italian priories of knights. The Sovereign Council in Russia and Czar Alexander I asked the Pope to name the next Grand Master
“for one time only” from a list of candidates presented from the various priories of knights. The Pope selected
the Russian Catholic Grand Priory’s candidate, who became the 72nd Grand Master, John Baptist di Tommasi.
Tommasi died in 1805, and then the Pope tried to name Tommasi’s successor. This intervention was not
acceptable to the Sovereign Council and to the majority of the Knights of St. John who were determined to elect
their own leader as was the tradition and historic right of the Order. It was also generally known that Napoleon
was directing the Pope’s choice for Grand Master. The SOSJ chose the Russian Czar as the head and Protector
of the Order which was being managed by the Sovereign Council. They refused to recognize the papal
appointments which followed thereafter, for they were not legitimately initiated by the Order. Early in the 19
th
century, the Italian priories adopted the name Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The members of the fledgling
SMOM declared themselves the legitimate continuation of the Order and refused to recognize the Sovereign
Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. The knights of the SOSJ reciprocated by not recognizing the splinter group
in Italy. The disagreement continues today. Indeed, it has only been in the past few years that the SMOM has
grudgingly accepted Czar Paul I, but as the 72nd Grand Master of the Order. They continue to describe him as
Grand Master “in fact” but not “in justice” because the Czar was a married Orthodox Christian.
Nevertheless, the Order became an influential institution in Imperial Russia deeply involved with the
preservation of the European monarchies in general, and with the Romanoff dynasty in particular. The two
grand priories in Russia, one Catholic and the other principally Orthodox, educated young men at their school,
the Corps des Pages, in St. Petersburg. The Corps des Pages was the academy for the creation of new Knights
of Malta. The graduates of this school became leaders of the exclusive Guard Divisions and thereby protectors
of the Imperial Family of Russia. Their tradition of health care was continued through the hospital and relief
agency known as the Russian White Cross. The Sovereign Council, consisting of senior Knights of Justice,
governed the Order and ensured its legal continuation. Initially the Order was led by Lieutenant Grand Master
General Soltikoff after the death of Czar Paul I. Eventually the leadership of the SOSJ consisted of a President
of the Sovereign Council who was assisted by a Grand Chancellor. These men reported directly to each
reigning Russian czar who was described as the “Head of the Chapter.” Each Czarina was likewise traditionally
the honorary head of the White Cross. The czars took personal custody of the Order’s famous icon of Our Lady
of Philermos and the two relics which are the hand of St. John the Baptist and a piece of the True Cross. These
were kept either at the Winter Palace or at the SOSJ Priory Chapel of the Gatchina Palace, depending upon the
liturgical calendar. This arrangement continued until the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.
Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector
Sovereign Council Chancellor
1797 Prince GM Ferdinand Pope Pius VI
von Hompesch Czar Paul I
1798 GM Czar Paul I LGM J Count de Litta Prince de Conde GM Czar Paul I
1799 GM Czar Paul I LGM Field Marshall Prince de Conde GM Czar Paul I
Count Soltykoff
1801 LGM Field Marshall Undetermined Czar Alexander I Czar Alexander I
Count Soltykoff
1803 GM John Baptist di Tommasi Undetermined Czar Alexander Czar Alexander I
1805 Undetermined Czar Alexander Czar Alexander I
1825 Undetermined Senior Grand Duke Czar Nicholas I
1855 Undetermined Senior Grand Duke Czar Alexander II
1881 Undetermined Senior Grand Duke Czar Alexander III
1894 Undetermined G D Vladimir Czar Nicholas II
THE INTERNATIONAL WHITE CROSS OF THE SOSJ
In 1893 the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Prince Cantacuzene, Russian Admiral Grand
Duke Alexander Michaelovich and Russian Transportation Commissioner Colonel A. Cherep Spiridovich,
introduced the Russian SOSJ White Cross at the Chicago World’s Fair to American civic leaders. Pope Leo XIII
promised prominent civic leader Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago his support for her chairmanship of “Women of
the World” presentations at the Fair and assigned Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota to work with
her. Thereby began the SOSJ affiliation with an American White Cross movement supported by the Catholic
Church. The American Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland continued their affiliation with the White
Cross and the Knights of St. John for at least twenty years thereafter. Archbishop Ireland was the head chaplain
for the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic and therefore had a responsibility for the welfare of
American servicemen. Their initial efforts resulted in a White Cross headquarters in Portland, Oregon which
coordinated American nurses sent to Cuba and the Philippine Islands during the Spanish-American War.
The next public result of this Russian-American-Catholic coordination was an attempt in 1899 to get a
Title 36 Charter from the U.S. Congress for the National White Cross of America. The proposed charter would
have allowed the organization to continue hospital and relief work exclusively for the American military
community. While it was passed through both the House and Senate without dissension, it was not ultimately
signed into law by the President of the United States. General Nelson Miles and George Westinghouse of
Pittsburgh were among those involved directly in the White Cross charter effort. The charter bill was passed to
the foreign affairs desk and stalled indefinitely by those concerned about Russian and Catholic influence in the
organization. After all, the White Cross was a Russian institution of the SOSJ, and Roman Catholic Archbishop
John Ireland would be one of the founding members of the proposed American affiliate. Though the American
White Cross proposed exclusive support for the American military community, the obvious competition with the
American Red Cross which did similar work also concerned some politicians. Archbishop Ireland, Chief
Chaplain for the Grand Army of the Republic, General Miles, commanding General of the U.S. Army, George
Westinghouse of Pittsburgh, founder of Westinghouse Electric, Chicago industrialist Richard Teller Crane,
Chicago real estate mogul Potter Palmer, and many others continued life long affiliations with Russia or with the
Russian-American White Cross movement.
Several things occurred in 1901 which would have long term effects on the SOSJ. Grand Duke Boris
Vladimirovich, son of the Russian OSJ Grand Prior, assisted Richard Teller Crane of Chicago with plans to
organize the American White Cross in New York City. It is believed that they created the American
International Academy and named explorer and geologist Francis C. Nicholas as its first president. This pan-
American organization was designed for intelligence gathering operations. In 1901, the SMOM (Sovereign
Military Order of Malta headquartered in Rome) and Cardinal Gibbons announced that an American Grand
Priory would be started solely for the American Catholic members of a fraternal organization called the
“Knights of St. John” which had been started about 1880 in imitation of the old order. Colonel Cherep
Spiridovich, mentioned previously, became President of the Slavonic Society of Moscow. For five years, he
had been Serbian Consul to Moscow, and was a member of the Serbian and later of the Russian Secret Services.
The Slavonic Society was an intelligence operation which funneled arms and resources to nationalist elements
in the Balkans. The patron of the Society was Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. His wife, Grand Duchess
Ella, was the elder sister of the Russian Czarina.
In 1903 the American Red Cross administrators restructured their organization and curtailed the authority of their founder, Clara Barton. Barton had been influenced in her famous work by the Russian White Cross and by the Johanniter Orden relief services in Europe. Her friend, Princess Louise of Baden, was the daughter of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, Herrenmeister of the Johanniter Orden. The American Red Cross Field Service Superintendent was Edward Howe from the English St. John’s Ambulance Association. Barton resigned from the American Red Cross and established the National First Aid Association of America in the District of Columbia in 1904. She was assisted in this by men who had tried to start the American White Cross,
namely General Nelson A. Miles and Field Superintendent Edward Howe. In 1904, R. T. Crane, U.S. Consul for Persia, built an emergency hospital clinic in Chicago in memory
of a niece killed in a disastrous inner city fire. Mrs. Palmer sent funds from Chicago to the Russian Czarina,
Patroness of the Russian White Cross, to be used for relief of victims of the Russo-Japanese War. St. Andrew’s
Ambulance Society of Scotland received its new name and independence from the St. John’s Ambulance
Association of England.
In December, 1904 the American White Cross First Aid Society was started in Chicago by civic leader
Mrs. Potter Palmer, Roman Catholic Cardinal Gibbons, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, representatives of
the U.S. Army and Edward Howe, formerly the American Red Cross Field Superintendent. Edward Howe was
thus the field superintendant for both the National First Aid Association and for the American White Cross First
Aid Society. A similar arrangement existed in England between the Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem
and the British Red Cross. The Catholic Church, American civic leaders, the U.S. Army and the English St.
John’s Ambulance Association were thus working together with the Russian White Cross. This was the
“ecumenical beginning” of the SOSJ of which Grand Chancellor Pichel described in his history of the SOSJ in
1958. The American White Cross First Aid Society had Mrs. Potter Palmer, Mrs. H. McCormick, Andrew
Carnegie, R. T. Crane, General J. D. Irwin and Cardinal Gibbons as Vice Presidents. By association, this
brought the Crane Family, the Cantacuzene Family, the McCormick Family, Nicholas Murray Butler, the
American military medical community, and the Catholic Church into the White Cross ambulance work which
soon followed.
Besides Edward Howe, the moving force in the White Cross was the famous Chicago surgeon and Illinois militia officer Dr. Nicholas Senn. Dr. Senn had been President of the American Medical Association and a founder of the Association of U. S. Military Surgeons. He had also been involved with the early organizing activities of the White Cross. He was associated with the Knights in Russia and had visited them in St. Petersburg in 1902. He was instrumental in the organization of the program in New York. Unfortunately he died prematurely in 1908. After his death the American Red Cross was assured of the lead in national relief work, and in 1910, reinstated their “First Aid to the Injured” program. The American White Cross therefore
eventually focused on large-scale relief overseas during war and famine. As we will later see, a 1921 relief
association of American Catholics from the White Cross evolved into a new American Association of the
SMOM in 1927.
The Chicago Crane family affiliation with the White Cross eventually led, in 1941, to their daughter Frances’ marriage to OSJ Hereditary Knight Commander Belosselsky-Belozersky, in New York City. The White Cross work of the Chicago Palmers was continued by their relatives, the Cantacuzenes. Prince Michel Cantacuzene and Julia Grant Cantacuzene were members of the Romanian Prince Cantacuzene and President General Ulysses S. Grant families. An early and prominent member of the American White Cross was Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell, who was responsible for the success of, among many other projects, McCormick Harvester and Carnegie’s U.S. Steel Corporation. He became Grand Prior of the American SOSJ in 1912. Charles R. Crane, son of R. T. Crane, became a philanthropist, diplomat, and, unfortunately, a financial supporter of the first Russian revolution of February, 1917.
IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST INTERNATIONAL ANARCHISTS THE SOSJ ADDS AN AMERICAN GRAND PRIORY The late 19th and early 20th centuries was an era of anarchist activism. (Meaning Sacco and Vanzetti) The SOSJ in Russia searched for potential allies in its ongoing defense of Christendom. An epidemic of political assassinations and the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905 prompted the expansion of the Order into the United States. In 1905 Count Alexis Ignatiev, Commander of the SOSJ Chevalier Guards, was assassinated in Russia. Grand Duke Sergei
Alexandrovich was also assassinated. The Grand Duke was the patron of the Slavonic Society of Moscow, of
which Cherep Spiridovich was president. As mentioned previously, this agency was an intelligence organization
funneling arms into the Balkans in support of nationalists struggling against the Turks, and is believed to have
been an arm of the SOSJ. These events hastened the development of a permanent presence of the Knights of St.
John in America, in addition to their White Cross First Aid Society, to ensure the Order’s survival and to tap the
resources of the American Republic. At the time of his death, Grand Duke Sergei was the Military Governor General of Moscow and had worked to uncover the cells of anarchists who were responsible for constant murders of government officials to include his own father’s assassination. His wife Grand Duchess Elizabeth, sister of Czarina Alexandra, was involved in the research to unmask the anarchists and this interest brought them both into contact with an Orthodox spiritual writer named Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus. Nilus was one of the earliest men to produce a copy of the “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” and Grand Duchess Ella introduced him and the Protocols to her sister and to Czar Nicholas II. Major General Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich, President of the Slavonic Society, was thereby one of the earliest members of any Intelligence Service to see the Protocols. He was given the mandate by the Russian Imperial family to investigate the matter and to spread the alarm about “the hidden hand” of international Zionism and its conspiracy to gain global control. He was made a Count of the Catholic
Church by Pope Pius X about 1907. He was President of the Catholic Grand Priory of Russia, which he referred
to as the Celtic-Latino-Slav League, and was one of the principal organizers of the American branch of the
SOSJ. His patronesses, Czarina Alexandra and Grand Duchess Ella, were convinced of the authenticity of the
international conspiracy and eventually both were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
After the death of Dr. Nicholas Senn in 1908, the American White Cross movement with headquarters
in Chicago was expanded further by union with the Knights of St. John and Malta Hospital and Relief
Association of Brooklyn, New York. The organization was named White Cross Hospital and Relief Association.
The main offices of the relief association remained at the GAR Hall, at 990 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. The
headquarters of this new association was apparently being prepared at what is now called the Audubon Terrace
on North Broadway in New York City. Senior knights were building a facility to be complete in every aspect for
the conduction of the affairs of the Order. The proposed headquarters on Broadway in New York City can be
seen at http://www.museumplanet.com/tour.php/nyc/at/5. Charles Hayward and George Bruce, formerly of the
Knights of St John and Malta Hospital and Relief Association, had joined with senior SOSJ knights, many of
whom were agents of the Imperial Russian Secret Service. Most of them were Catholic Knights of Malta of the
Catholic Grand Priory of Russia, and represented many of the nations of Europe. They considered this
American association not only as a new organization for the Americas, but as the continuation of the old Polish
Grand Priory that had been in the minority in Russia since 1815.
Major General Arthur Cherep Spiridovich, President of the remnant Catholic Grand Priory of Russia,
was among the coordinators of this expansion. By this time the general was also an emissary of Czarina
Alexandra of Russia, Patroness of the Russian SOSJ White Cross and of her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth. As
an intelligence operative, he was handled by the Russian Ambassador to the U. S., Baron Rosen. He was also an
agent of the Serbian royal family. This began a long relationship between the OSJ in America and the
Yugoslavian royal family.
The four orders of St. John jockeyed for positions of influence in American society. These included the
SOSJ, the SMOM, The German Order of St. John and the British Venerable Order of St. John. The constant
interaction with the aristocracy, nobility and royalty of the Old World motivated some American members to
become involved in genealogical and racial studies. To qualify for knighthood in accordance with the ancient
rules of the SOSJ was nearly impossible for Americans. The result of the strict admittance qualifications was the
founding by private individuals of the National Genealogical Society, the interaction with an unrecognized
College of Arms of Canada, the founding of the American Heraldry Association, and, to some degree, the
support of the early racial eugenics movement. Various patriotic and genealogical societies were established
during this period to qualify Americans and Canadians for OSJ knighthood. The Lords of Manors of Baltimore,
Scions of Colonial Cavaliers, Order of Colonial Dames, Imperial Order of the Yellow Rose, and the Order of the
White Crane are some of the societies the American knights started.
In 1909, Grand Duke Vladimir was assassinated in Russia, and his son, Grand Duke Cyril, thereby
became Grand Prior of the OSJ Russian Grand Priory. Grand Duke Vladimir had cultivated relations between
the SOSJ in Russia, the German Order of St. John and the Spanish Order of St. John the Baptist. The German
and Spanish orders were branches of the original Order. He had also encouraged the American members of the
White Cross to further develop those relationships. German influence on the new OSJ American Association
through the Johanniter Orden Protector Emperor Wilhelm II and his brother Prince Henry of Prussia was evident
before World War I with exchange visits by the industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt and President of Columbia
University Nicholas Murray Butler. German influence also came from the Czarina and her sister Ella who were
both members of German royalty. That relationship, which developed with both the Protestant Johanniter Orden
and with the Catholic Malteser Orden, continued from joint efforts in the Baltic during the Russian Civil War
through the redevelopment of the German Intelligence Service after WWII.
Colonel Dr. Wm. Sohier Bryant, MD, of New York City, and lawyer Wm. B. Stites of New Jersey wrote
a constitution in 1911 to form an American Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem from
members of the American White Cross. The American Grand Priory constitution was accepted by the
membership in 1912. The new Grand Priory included the Grand Priory of Russia, i.e., the former Catholic OSJ
Grand Priory of Poland. The headquarters of the knights was initially the meeting hall of the Knights of St.
John and Malta at Wurzler’s Building, 315 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. Most early meetings
were held at Joseph Burrows office at 56-58 Pine Street, near Wall Street. Wall Street lawyer William Nelson
Cromwell became American Grand Prior in 1912, and meetings thereafter were usually held at his offices in the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. According to Pichel, this continued until 1929, after which the meetings were held at
Dr. Bryant’s office in the Murray Hill section of New York City.
In 1912 the Order consisted of the Russian Grand Priory in Russia and the new American Grand Priory
and its subsidiary, the Catholic Grand Priory of Russia, which included remnants of the Spanish Caballeros
Hospitalarios de San Juan Bautista. The Russian Grand Priory was composed mainly of Slavic Knights of the
Orthodox Faith. The American Grand Priory leaders were mostly socially prominent Protestant Episcopalians
from New York City and Chicago. There was also a small group of American descendants of Catholic Celtic
Jacobites, who were still followers of the old Stuart Pretender to the throne of England and Scotland. The
Pretender at the time was Queen Mary IV of Bavaria, and an army physician named Edgar Erskine Hume was
among the Knights of Malta who later considered Mary’s successor, Crown Prince Rupprecht, as their “rightful
sovereign.” The American Grand Prior, William Nelson Cromwell, and Dr. Francis C. Nicholas had had contact
with Spanish Knights of St. John during years of preparation work for the American Panama Canal project.
Interaction with the Spanish knights was also the result of Americans meeting Spanish knights during the
Spanish-American War from 1898 to 1900, and later during the Mexican civil wars. The remnant Castellany of
Guadalajara, Mexico, of the Spanish Order of St. John the Baptist joined the American Grand Priory with their
monarchist Pretender, Don Agustin Yturbide. King Alphonso XIII of Spain was the protector of the remnants
of the Spanish Order which was given a papal blessing as late as 1879. He expanded his association to the
SOSJ in America.
American Catholics, however, had been joining a fraternal organization similar to the present day
Knights of Columbus, called the Knights of St. John, since it was founded in the 1880’s. By the turn of the
century, a union of all military style fraternal associations of the Catholic Church in America, to be called the
Roman Catholic Union of the Knights of St. John, was supported by Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland.
Therefore, Catholic knights of the SOSJ had difficulty determining their loyalties, not only because of the
broad spectrum of their own origins and nationalities, but also because of the presence of this non-chivalric
fraternal organization supported by the Catholic Church. Prominent Catholics associated with the SOSJ who
were disenchanted with their order’s political leanings eventually founded, in 1927, the American Association
of the SMOM. Edgar Erskine Hume, MD, was among this group of former members of the SOSJ.
Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector
Sovereign Council Chancellor
1912 Undetermined Czar Nicholas II
Russian Grand Priory G D Cyril
American Grand Priory W S Bryant W N Cromwell J G B Bulloch
1. Grand Priory of Russia MG Cherep Spiridovich (Celtic-Latin-Slav League)
a. White Cross Hospital and Relief Assn. G H Bruce
THE AMERICAN GRAND PRIORY VENTURES INTO FOREIGN SERVICE
The English started a private intelligence gathering operation supported by their government in 1904
called the Legion of Frontiersmen. This organization, composed of wealthy patriotic English volunteers,
prefigured MI6. Members of this group, traveling worldwide as was their customary lifestyle, became an
important source for the British Empire’s constant need for information. The American White Cross was being
used in similar fashion, and the new American Grand Priory expanded on that practice. The most prominent
families in the United States joined the American Grand Priory of the SOSJ, and thereby developed the first
American civilian foreign intelligence network.
American Grand Priory leaders, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, Archer
Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of America, William Nelson Cromwell, Wall Street lawyer and
Francis C. Nicholas, founder of the American International Academy, are among those who crafted the
American Grand Priory into an intelligence organization. Nicholas, a mining engineer and explorer, had done
Cromwell’s Panama Canal construction feasibility studies. He had also done geological research in Central and
South America for Archer Huntington and Colonel William Lamb, who were supplying fuel coal to the Russian
Navy. These men wielded significant influence in the United States during the late 19th through the mid 20
th centuries.
Some results of their careers include the founding of the Republic of Panama, and the successful
purchase and construction of the Panama Canal. They were also responsible for the founding of the Pan-
American “Organization of American States” and directly influenced the founders of the Central Intelligence
Agency. Others prominent in the OSJ at this time included John Jacob Astor until his death on the Titanic, J. P. Morgan, J P Morgan, Jr. and the extended Cornelius Vanderbilt and Chicago Crane families. The
Mexican White Cross association was promoted by Don Agustin Yturbide, OSJ, Pretender to the royal throne of Mexico.
Cromwell used the College of Arms of Canada, of which Yturbide was President, to create dissension during
congressional hearings into the Panama Canal controversy. Legalistic maneuvering about ancient French noble
rights in Canada brought pressure on Great Britain to drop complaints about the U. S. control of the canal. This
preceeded by many decades the modern secession movement of French speaking Canada. Grand Chancellor
Bulloch was involved in this movement which tended to divide the OSJ into Anglophile and Francophile
factions. Cromwell had become a seasoned veteran at creating trusts, monopolies and even countries by using
revolution if necessary. The principle White Cross societies besides America and Russia were located in Spain
and Mexico. Dr. Francis C. Nicholas was involved during the Mexican Civil War from 1912 to 1914 as a
White Cross “observer.” The English St. John’s Ambulance Brigade was started in Canada, and may have
helped with the founding of the White Cross in Brooklyn as well.
The American Grand Priory also had a history of cooperation with members of the monarchist and anti-
Semitic Russian Black Hundred’s Movement due to their association with Cherep Spiridovich. Admiral Grand
Duke Alexander Michaelovich, OSJ, was the head of Russian Naval Intelligence. He spent time in the United
States developing relationships with the wealthiest people in American society. His regular traveling
companion became Major Barclay Harding Warburton of the U.S. Army Military Intelligence community.
Warburton was a member of the “East Coast Establishment,” and was closely related to the Wannamaker and Vanderbilt families. The American Grand Priory cooperated with Russian Naval Intelligence and the Russian Secret Service directed by Baron Rosen. Grand Duke Alexander was elected the 73rd Grand Master of the SOSJ in 1913 during meetings in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector
Sovereign Council Chancellor 1913 Grand Master G D Alexander Michaelovich Undetermined Czar Nicholas II
Russian Grand Priory G D Cyril
American Grand Priory W S Bryant W N Cromwell J G B Bulloch
1. Grand Priory of Russia MG Cherep Spiridovich
a. White Cross Hospital and Relief Assn. W W Butcher A MacNaughton
The First World War found the American Grand Priory allying itself with the Entente. In 1915 Colonel
Robert R. McCormick, of Chicago Tribune fame, reported from the Russian front lines while interviewing Knights of Malta who were graduates of the SOSJ Corps des Pages.
The White Cross Hospital and Relief Association named its overseas work “The American Ambulance” partly because Socialists had taken to the use of the “White Cross” name. Anarchists embedded themselves into the Red Cross movement as well. This was similar to the use of the so-called “Peace Movement” by internationalists, socialists and Communists in the 1960’s. Members of the American Grand Priory quickly became the leaders of massive relief efforts during WWI. W.N. Cromwell helped to start the Lafayette Escadrille Flying Corps with Cornelius Vanderbilt and Dr. Ed Gros of the American Ambulance. This Corps was later supported by the Order of Lafayette. Rep.
Hamilton Fish of New York was both a member of this order and the reinstituted Order of Lafayette following
WWII. Unfortunately, the SOSJ is implicated in the support and possibly in the direction of the “bloodless
revolution” in Russia in the opening months of 1917.
REVOLUTIONARIES WITHIN THE SOSJ CONTRIBUTE TO ANARCHY
Until the First World War, relations between the German Order of St. John, the English Venerable Order
of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, and the SOSJ were mostly cooperative. The leaders of these
organizations, many of them members of royal houses, were often close family relatives and/or financially
interdependent. The European royal families were well aware of the survival of the SOSJ in Russia. Queen
Victoria’s son, the Duke of Connaught, led the English Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem for many
decades. He was closely associated with, and related to, Grand Duke Alexander and others of the Romanoff
family. He had been present in 1894 at the marriage of Czar Nicholas II and Alexandra of Germany in the tiny
Winter Palace Chapel, in which the chief relics and icon of the SOSJ were prominently venerated. Before
Alexander I became its king, the Duke of Connaught had been seriously considered for the throne of
Yugoslavia. He was Grand Duchess Victoria Melita’s uncle, and at one time was the potential father-in-law of
Grand Duke Alexander’s daughter.
The Duke of Connaught, led for many decades both the English Venerable Order and, as Grand Master
of the United Grand Lodge of England, the Masonic Knights Templar. As the English Governor-General of
Canada from 1910 to 1916, he had a relationship with the American Masonic Knights of Malta. He also had
some influence over the American Masonic Knights Templar. Unfortunately, the new American members of
the White Cross and SOSJ American Grand Priory did not heed the prohibitions on Freemasonic affiliation that
had been enforced in Russia. When they joined with the SOSJ from Russia, some persisted in their Masonic
affiliation as Templars. The amalgamation of the SOSJ with the Knights of St. John and the Malta Hospital and
Relief Association brought Freemasons into the ranks of the American Grand Priory. The new Grand Priory of
1912 was thereby influenced by Freemasonry and Anti-Catholicism. The Freemasons who came into the Grand
Priory had believed in a descent of their fraternity from an ill-defined Templar-Malta Order from France, or
from the old “reformed” Torpichen Preceptory in Scotland. Some of the new members were the
aforementioned Catholic Jacobites but there was also a small but significant number of Rosicrucians. A
significant philosophy of the Rosicrucians included an anti-Semitic and racial superiority agenda. Some
prominent members appear to have persisted in the Freemasonic quest for humanistic “freedoms” which had
caused the downfall so many Christian kingdoms. In Imperial Russia it was widely known that Freemasonry
had been prohibited because it is a fraternity designed for Revolution. Their personal philosophies supported
the exportation of “democratic” ideals of the United States of America, which did not translate peacefully into
the needs for social change in Imperial Russia.
The American Grand Prior, William Nelson Cromwell, was a well known adept at high level regime
change. The lifestyles enjoyed by Americans, combined with the Wilsonian theme of spreading Democracy
worldwide, appear to have seduced both Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander and Russian Grand Prior Grand
Duke Cyril into revolutionary scheming against Czar Nicholas II. Many others in the Imperial Romanoff
family were sympathetic to liberal Socialist plans to end the absolute monarchy in Russia, and the American
Grand Priory of the SOSJ is implicated in their revolutionary activities. Unfortunately the Czar and his wife
were also influenced by occultism which was in vogue in their society, and of which Rasputin was an infamous
practitioner. This behavior during wartime on the part of the Czar and his family caused extreme anxiety in
Russia and helped to prompt militant action among the diverse forces determined to transform the monarchy.
The story of Rasputin’s influence on the Imperial family and on the politics of Russia is widely known. It is not
generally known, however, that Grand Duke Alexander directed the assassination of the spiritualist monk
Gregori Rasputin in late 1916. The men directly involved in the murder of Rasputin were the Grand Duke’s
sons, son-in-law, cousin and a member of British MI6. The Russians were all students or graduates of the SOSJ
Corps des Pages. Grand Duke Alexander afterward successfully interceded with the czar on behalf of the
assassins, all Knights of St. John.
Grand Duchess Ella was the head of the White Cross Supreme Council in Russia which oversaw all
Hospitaller activity during WWI. In 1916, the OSJ “American Ambulance in Russia,” which was organized by
Hamilton Fish III, Dr. Philip Newton, Capt. Philip Lydig, Nicholas Murray Butler, Colonel Robert McCormick
and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt of New York City and Chicago, started service on the Russian Front. Their
patroness was a daughter of the Czar, Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanoff. The American Grand Prior, William
Nelson Cromwell, distanced himself from the adventure as his name was too well connected with American
engineered foreign revolutions of the recent past. Instead, Charles Richard Crane of the Chicago White Cross
assisted with financing revolutionary change in Russia. The American Ambulance in Russia, at least
financially and philosophically, supported the Kerensky Regime. The Knights may have also tactically
supported the first Russian revolution in the early months of 1917. Prime Minister Kerensky was on the payroll
of the American Ambulance. Grand Duke Cyril was in charge of the troops available to defend the Czar in St.
Petersburg. He used his naval guard corps to passively support the forced abdication of Czar Nicholas II.
Though many blamed both the February and later the October Revolutions on Jewish revolutionaries supported
by Germany, both Grand Duke Cyril and Grand Duke Alexander were ostracized by many Russians because of
their alliances with the Freemasons and other Social Humanists. Grand Duke Alexander was able to retain his
elevated status due to the position of his wife, the Grand Duchess Xenia, sister of the Czar.
THE KORNILOV AFFAIR
A Counter Revolution was soon planned by Russian Guard officers under Generals Keller, Markov and
Kornilov. General Count Keller, OSJ, an intimate of the Russian Imperial family and friend of German
monarchists, had refused to accept the abdication of the Czar. As an influential member of the SOSJ he
singlehandedly started the resistance of the Knights whose historical charge was the defense of Imperial Russia
and the Romanoff family. These monarchists managed to place many of their sympathizers in command of the
armed forces in St. Petersburg. Colonel Pavel Bermondt, who served in an Ussuri Cossack unit of Keller’s 3rd
Cavalry Corps, was one of these officers and was given command of an Ulan cavalry regiment in St.
Petersburg. Captain Sidney Reilly of MI6 was also in charge of a cavalry contingent during this conspiracy. A
coup d’etat was planned which would coordinate the armed members of a large number of Russian patriotic
societies to join with an approaching Guard army under General Kornilov to depose Kerensky. Kerensky was
forewarned and he armed the Bolsheviks to defend his government and the city against the Monarchists. The
Kornilov uprising attempt failed and most of the conspirators, including Bermondt, were jailed. Many were
able to escape with the assistance of sympathizers. Kerensky had armed the Bolsheviks and the failed Kornilov
coup d’etat had thus prepared the way for a third, but violent revolt, in October of 1917. The October
Revolution of the atheistic Bolsheviks was successful and merciless.
THE SOSJ RESPONDS TO THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
As noted above, the first response against the socialist revolutionaries of the Kerensky Provisional
Government came from Count Keller, OSJ. The Count immediately started working with German General
Rudiger Von der Goltz to build a German-Russian army of monarchist volunteers in the Baltic states. This
cooperation between the German and Russian orders of St. John was the attempt to return both Germany’s
Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II to their thrones.
On September 15, 1917, J. G. B. Bulloch, MD, first cousin of President Teddy Roosevelt, incorporated
the Order of Lafayette in New York City with an international membership as a recruiting front for the SOSJ.
An American counter revolutionary effort became immediately prominent since it became apparent from both
government and military intelligence reports that Jewish anarchists were in the majority in the new Bolshevik
government in St. Petersburg. The revolutionaries had developed their operational base in the Lower East Side
district of New York City. The American Grand Priory became isolated due to its support of the first
“Bloodless Revolution” in Russia and thereafter remained in the hands of operatives of the anti-Bolshevik
intelligence communities. The American Grand Priory of the SOSJ concentrated its activities in NYC,
Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. It worked to defeat the international anarchist
movements and to expose their aligned secret societies.
The Poles responded both to stop the Bolshevik advance into their territory and to take advantage of
their new found independence from both Russia and Germany. The Polish White Cross was founded in New
York a few days after the Bolshevik Revolution. Its president was Count Jerzy Potocki, OSJ, who became
Polish Ambassador to the United States. Ignace Paderewski, the famous pianist, helped to start the Polish
White Cross in New York in October and used the resources of the American Ambulance in Russia. His wife,
Madame Paderewski, daughter of Baron Rosen, OSJ, was Patroness of the Polish White Cross. The Polish
effort was both an intelligence operation and relief service of the old Polish Grand Priory which was now part
of the American Grand Priory. The Catholic Knights of the Polish White Cross eventually renamed their
organization the Grand Priory of Podolia in honor of the birthplace of Ignace Paderewski. Captain Sidney
Reilly of MI6 and Colonel William J. Donovan, US State Department Intelligence, were also associates of
Ignace Paderewski, who became the first President of Free Poland.
COUNT KELLER, PRINCE AWALOFF AND GRAND DUKE CYRIL
SALVAGE THE RUSSIAN GRAND PRIORY
After the failed Kornilov Affair, imprisonment and the October Revolution, many Guard officers were
able to escape and flee to the Don Cossacks in the Ukraine. There they helped to create the Volunteer Army
with the assistance of Ukrainian separatists. Generals Alekseev, Denikin and Kolchak were the early leaders
and they started the Russian Civil War to defeat the Bolsheviks.
Grand Duke Cyril was now a potential inheritor of the Russian throne and gave his support to the
remnant of the SOSJ headed by Count Keller and his fellow Knights. The Russian Order of St. John rallied to
form a secretive organization of officers and civilian nobility called the White Cross Society under Generals
Markov and Count Keller. The Russian Grand Duke Cyril and the German Grand Duke of Hesse were
members of the organization as German monarchists assisted the White Cross effort to rescue their kin, the
Czarina Alexandra and her family. American Lt. Col. Joseph Boyle and his machine gun detachment may have
been part of this effort by the Order to rescue members of the Imperial family. Among the conspirators was the
son-in-law of Rasputin and the Czarinas best friend Anna Vyrubova. The Imperial family was murdered by the
Bolsheviks in July, 1918. The historical record shows that Count Keller and most of the well known General
officers from the SOSJ fought for Imperial Russia until killed in action against the Bolsheviks during the
following year.
General Markov had been the Director of the Nicholas Cavalry School in St. Petersburg. This school
was a post graduate school for the elite cavalry Guard officers most of whom came from the SOSJ Corps des
Pages. Markov organized his Guard officers on February 12, 1918 and instituted a black Maltese cross badge
for those in his unit. Count Keller was a graduate of the Corps des Pages and his father had been one of its last
Commandants. General Keller used a large plain white Maltese cross breast badge for all troops under his
command. The belief in an international socialist conspiracy was central to their understanding of the
revolution. Count Keller also worked with monarchist German General Rudiger Von der Goltz to start a
German backed government in the Baltic and recruited Russian POW’s in Germany for this army. As noted
earlier their combined plan was to join their forces in an attempt to replace the rightful monarchs both in
Germany and in Russia. Colonel Bermondt was the chief of counter intelligence for this Volunteer Army and
he promoted the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion and the international conspiracy theory widely among the
White Russian and later among the German troops in the Baltic. General Keller was soon fighting Ukrainian
Socialist formations and was captured in Kiev with the remnant of the Volunteer Army in December 1918.
Bermondt and many of his fellow Monarchists were once again jailed. This time they were scheduled for
execution. Count Keller was shot by the Bolsheviks while in captivity. Fortunately a German army freed many
of the Russian officers, including Bermondt, and took them back to Germany where they were interned in Camp
Salzvedel near Berlin. German Monarchists had already taken up the cause of the Russian White Guard as they
faced the same threat from international Bolshevism and their own Socialist Weimar Government.
The SOSJ ties encouraged with the Germans before the war were bearing fruit for the exiled knights
who had survived the Revolution. Beside his association with William Nelson Cromwell, Colonel Bermondt
now became connected with other members of the American Grand Priory and to Boris Brasol and Major
General Count Cherep Spiridovich due to his work against the one world conspiracy. It was in Camp
Salzvedel during January to April 1919 that Colonel Bermondt and his fellow Russian Guard officers reestablished
the Russian Grand Priory of the Sovereign Imperial Order of St. John of Jerusalem. On March 4,
1919 by Order number 24 he made the Maltese cross breast badge the emblem of his SOSJ army and enameled
it black in memory of General Graf Keller. High level German nationalists backed this re-establishment of the
Russian Sovereign Imperial Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Among them was General Ludendorff who had
been Chief of Staff of the German Army during WWI. His chief intelligence officer Major Walter Nicholai was also involved. The Protector of the Order was the legitimate heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Cyril
Vladimirovich. Grand Duke Cyril continued to finance the SOSJ venture with the help of the American Grand
Priory. Prince Awaloff and Grand Duke Cyril planned to join with German forces to drive the Bolsheviks out
of the Baltic. This idea to cooperate with Germany was unique to these Knights of St. John who believed that
Russian-German cooperation was the only way to rid the world of the Bolsheviks. In 1919 Colonel Prince Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt, supported by the Johanniter Orden, the Romanoff Pretender Grand Duke Cyril, and American financier J. P. Morgan, Jr., OSJ, became Commander in chief of the Russian Imperial Army. He led the SOSJ and apparently Johanniterorden plan, financed through attorney W. N. Cromwell, OSJ American Grand Priory, to clear the Bolsheviks from the Baltic and to set up a pro-German
government. Most of the officials of what became known in the Fall of 1919 as the West Russian Government
were members of the OSJ. Prince Awaloff recorded much of this information in his memoirs which he wrote in
1925 in Hamburg, Germany.
Bermondt was first addressed by the royal title of Prince Awaloff in September, 1919. Prince Awaloff
states that he was adopted at this time by Prince Michael Awaloff from whom he gained the royal title. It is just
as likely that Bermondt was elected Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem which would
have given him the royal title of Prince. We must wait for further information to confirm this suspicion and we
therefore retain the claims of Grand Duke Alexander as Grand Master during this period. During the Baltic
campaign, Baron Rudolf Engelhardt and Baron Engelhardt-Schnellenstein, both close relatives of Lt. Grand
Master Baron Scipio Engelhardt-Schnellenstein (1954-1956) and Admiral Felix Count Luckner, who also
became the Lt. Grand Master of the OSJ (1962-1966) worked with Prince Awaloff in the Baltic venture. The
Bavarian Freikorps, some of whom were associated with the Stewart Pretender Crown Prince Rupprecht, wore
the Maltese Cross. (The possible connection with the Royal Stuart Jacobite Pretender in Bavaria has not yet
been researched by the SOSJ.)
The relics and icon were rescued from the SOSJ Priory at the Gatchina Palace outside of St. Petersburg
in October, 1919, by men of the army of the White Russian General Yudenitch. They were brought to Reval,
Estonia, and delivered to the former Russian Master of Court Ceremonies Count Alexei Ignatiev. Ignatiev was
head of the Russian White Cross in Estonia, a leader of the Russian SOSJ and a son of the murdered Count
Ignatiev, Commander of the SOSJ Chevalier Guards. The relics and icon were then delivered to the SOSJ
headquarters in Mitau and there were solemnly received by Prince Awaloff and General Von der Goltz. Later
the relics and icon were placed in the hands of the Romanov Queen Mother, Dagmar Feodorovna. She kept the
relics at Villa Hvidore, her residence in exile near Copenhagen, until her death in 1928. Awaloff proclaimed
himself Governor-General of Western Russia for a brief time. The short-lived government in the Duchy of
Courland, Latvia, with headquarters in Mitau, was the closest that the Order had come to gaining a permanent
sovereign territory since the loss of Malta in 1798.
There were other plans by Russian exiles to retake their country. One of them was planned and
undertaken by Baron Taube as potential Secretary of State who enlisted Russian Jewish bankers to fund General Yudenitch in an attempt to retake St. Petersburg with a Northwestern Army.
They also would have supported Grand Duke Cyril as the new Czar. Their White Russian army in northwestern Russia ultimately failed in its attempt to take St. Petersburg. Awaloff refused to place his command under General Yudenitch and Baron Taube, whom he considered to be controlled by “conspiratorial forces”, that is, the Jewish bankers. Baron Taube eventually became an antagonist of the SOSJ.
The Western Russian Volunteer Army of Prince Awaloff initially gained advantage and took Riga from
the Bolsheviks. However, the British Naval Squadron that had been supporting the left flank of General
Yudenitch’s drive into St. Petersburg for political reasons abandoned Yudenitch and directed its guns on the
forces of the SOSJ. This intervention caused the defeat of both the SOSJ anti-Bolshevik force of Prince
Awaloff and of the drive into St. Petersburg by General Yudenitch. The Knights of St. John ultimately
retreated into Germany due to lack of support from the socialist Weimar Government and the treason of the
Entente British and French governments. These entities propped up the Bolshevik regime which was about to
crumble. The result of this intervention was 75 years of Communist dictatorship for a large portion of the
world. The Knights of this army of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem became known as the “Baltic
Brotherhood”.
When the SOSJ was exiled from the Russian Imperial City its historic mission as defender of the
Catholic Church and secondary mission to defend Orthodox Russia brought it into opposition to those Orders of
St. John that were connected to Freemasonry. It was widely known that Grand Master Czar Paul I had been
killed by Freemasons, and that Czar Alexander II was killed by anarchists with Freemasonic backgrounds. It
was acknowledged that these same revolutionary philosophies were now responsible for the loss of yet another
Christian monarchy, and for the deaths of Czar Nicholas II and his family. This included, among the many
members of the OSJ who were simply murdered by the Bolsheviks: the Patroness of the American Grand Priory
relief operation, Grand Duchess Tatiana, the Patroness of the White Cross, Czarina Alexandra and the Protector
and leader of the SOSJ, Czar Nicholas II.
Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander’s friend, Major Warburton, was the U.S. Military Charge
d’Affaires in Paris at the end of the war. Grand Duke Alexander and his immediate family survived the
Bolshevik purge of the Romanovs during a long captivity in the Crimea. When rescued by the British navy he
went straight to Paris. He attempted to get into the international peace talks which followed WW I to plea for
help for those trapped inside Russia. He was refused admission to the peace conference and all of his personal
efforts failed to save any of the Russian Imperial Family, who had, unknown to him, already been murdered by
the Bolsheviks. Thereafter, it appears that Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander could not cope with his
involvement in the first revolution which installed the Provisional Government. All of his brothers were killed
by the Bolsheviks soon after they seized power from the Kerensky regime. The Grand Duke spent the rest of
his life involved in spiritualism, apparently attempting to gain forgiveness from his murdered brother-in-law,
Czar Nicholas II.
THE AMERICAN GRAND PRIORY JOINS THE FIGHT
AGAINST THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONALE
The American Grand Priory was peopled with the scions of Wall Street and the “Eastern
Establishment.” These men and women, many of them active or reserve officers in the military, worked with the
fledgling western military intelligence communities and made the Grand Priory the first civilian foreign
intelligence organization in the United States. Their intimate associates included the brothers John Foster and Allen Welsh Dulles who were nephews of U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Both were Wall Street lawyers who worked directly for William Nelson Cromwell, OSJ. John Foster Dulles eventually became President Eisenhauer’s Secretary of State, and Allen Welsh Dulles was instrumental in founding the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. One of the Chicago Crane sons became Asst. Secretary of State under Lansing. Another close associate was Wall Street lawyer “Wild Bill” William J. Donovan, who founded the Office of Strategic Services, and eventually became a knight of the SMOM. As a result of the “success” of SOSJ international ventures President Woodrow Wilson and his friend Colonel Edward M. House had created “The
Inquiry” at the American Grand Priory headquarters in New York City in 1917. This early “think tank” became
the internationalist advisory Council on Foreign Relations in 1921, which, ironically, is widely thought to be in control of the “One World Conspiracy.” The liberal wing of the Knights of Malta continued to be active in international affairs. The Irish White Cross relief effort was run by future founders of the American SMOM, James Phelan and Judge Morgan J. O’Brien.
Grand Duke Cyril became the head of a secret army scattered around the world in which the SOSJ
played a significant role. In New York City alone there were reportedly three thousand former White Russian
military officers organizing for counter-revolution. The SOSJ was an important participant in counterrevolutionary
engagement in Eastern Europe throughout the 20th century. It engaged in small unit warfare in
the regions controlled by the Communists. [B]The Order gathered intelligence on the international revolutionary movements. It engaged in psychological warfare operations including the distribution of anti-Bolshevist information such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This document allegedly details a plot by elite Jews to control the world through finance, and it has been the cause of political and social unrest during the past one hundred years. Because the Communist movement in Russia was dominated by Jews from New York, the
American military intelligence community continued to join the ranks of the SOSJ as sworn enemies of the
“International Conspiracy.” Among those included were the following: Colonel Harris Ayres Houghton, MD, Colonel John Jacob Astor, Major General Ralph Van Deman, Colonel William Sohier Bryant, MD, Major
General Frederick Dent Grant, Colonel Nicholas Biddle, Major Barclay Harding Warburton, Major Walter
Miller, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Major John B. Trevor and Captain Sidney
Reilly. All of these prominent members of the armed forces have close association with their successors in the Military Affairs Committee of the SOSJ that are found in the Order records well into the 1980’s.
Cherep Spiridovich was personally presented to J. Edgar Hoover by the US Ambassador to Romania, T.
Tileston Wells, and was supported by Grand Duke Cyril’s U.S. representative, Boris Brasol, by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Robert McAdoo and of course by the Chicago Crane family. Many of the White Russian armed forces were encamped in the Balkan countries after the Russian Civil War. These forces, often led by Knights of Malta, represented the “fifty American oriented strongholds” which were promised in Eastern Europe by Cherep Spiridovich to (former President Herbert) Hoover and Lansing during his presentations. Presented as a private alternative to the
League of Nations, the A-L-S League, which was the remnant of the SOSJ in Eastern Europe, had been a
bulwark against the spread of Islam. It now was promoted as a force against the new menace of Bolshevism.
This A-L-S League was soon being called the Anti-Bolshevist League. Cromwell, the Dulles brothers, and the
Masonic Knights Templar T. Tileston Wells founded, in 1920, the Society of Friends of Romania as a successor
to the American Roma...
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - John Bevilaqua - 11-12-2009
Here is a link to this exact article with images, tables and extended visual references...
http://www.osjknights.com/History-After-Malta.htm
![[Image: Double%20Headed%20Eagle.jpg]](http://www.osjknights.com/8%20OSJ%20Heraldry/Double%20Headed%20Eagle.jpg)
Someone from Albania explained to me the significance of the Double Headed Eagle in this Coat of Arms for OSJ as follows:
Do you know why we have the double-headed eagle on our flags and on some Coat-of-Arms symbols? Because the Turks once said to our ancestors after trying to defeat us in how would you call it... a racial genocide or a pogrom: "You know we just can not defeat you in combat... it seems as if we cut off one of your heads, and you always grow one back to come back to life to fight us once again. You are truly brave and noble warriors and we salute you." He continued: And ever since then we have always used the Double Headed Eagle as the symbol of our tenacity, our military strength and our strong will and our commitment to
survive any attacks from any enemy no matter what it may take. And it is also a warning to our enemies, the infidels, that no matter how many of us you may kill, we will always come back from the dead, grow a new head, and come back to defeat you and to kill you. That is why we use the Double Headed Eagle. And this guy was only about 5' 2" tall and his weight was about 120 pounds and he was about 70 years old, but he was still a ferocious and a fearsome and combative guy with a very fierce countenance. I believed him very strongly and would not want to meet him in a dark alley if he was armed to the teeth either. The Turks learned their lesson, according to him, and turned to the Armenians for their genocidal campaigns instead expanding to the south instead of to the West, again according to him.
Please note that the Double Eagle on the cover of The Russian Fascists is IDENTICAL to the one from the KStJohn site. IDENTICAL. I will try to find a larger version of the book cover later.
This 2nd image expands to a more legible version...
What does this mean to my universal assassination theory? That Vonsiatsky's Russian Fascists were intimately associated with both the SKOM of Charles Willoughby, Pedro del Valle, Philip J. Corso and The Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Malta and Rhodes. And since Frank Aloysius Capell, who was Revilo P. Oliver's "head researcher" was once the Grand Prior of this order also including other people like John B. Trevor, Sr. from The Pioneer Fund and The American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and William J. Donovan from the OSS/CIA and Philip J. Corso from Army Intel and the the Senator J. Strom Thurmond camp, James J. Angleton from the CIA, it implies that the real common linkage for ALL the elements involved in the JFK hit was indeed SKOM and Knights of St. John. The CIA should only be considered to be one very small but very powerful and dedicated intelligence arm of The Knights of St. John and by implication of the Church in Rome. That is what William Nelson Cromwell had in mind when he turned SMOM into an intelligence gathering agency during World War I.
And it also shows beyond the shadow of a doubt the entire coterie of groups involved with my unified conspiracy theory ALL were represented within SMOM in one way or another: The John Birch Society, The Pioneer Fund, Army Intel, SKOM, the World Anti-Communist League, the CIA.... everyone had representation on SMOM. EVERYONE and EVERY SINGLE GROUP.
And it also proves that more than HALF of Condon's Dirty Dozen were part of SMOM, WACL or a closely related group: Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, Charles Willoughby via Douglas MacArthur, J. Strom Thurmond via Philip J. Corso, James J. Angleton, Anastase Vonsiatsky via SKOM, ROCOR and the Russian branch of SMOM, Wickliffe Draper via Major John B. Trevor, Sr., Philip J. Corso, George Racey Jordan and Ray S. Cline.
So I guess one could conclude that Richard Condon solved the identity of the JFK plotters in 1959 and that I have proven that he solved the entire JFK plot about 40 years later. And under this scenario, as large as the CIA might have loomed in the JFK plot, their efforts were dwarfed and trivialized by the roles of Condon's Dirty Dozen, by SKOM, by SMOM, by Army Intel, and by the John Birch, WACL and Pioneer Fund forces. You have to learn to think BIG... to think INTERNATIONAL, to think in terms of CENTURIES AND MILLENNIA and to think of how to identify the HIGHEST LEVELS of the JFK plot and their common ground and their common membership.
Think Crusaders of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem who have been around for almost 1,000 years. Think Eugenics. Think of the White Supremacists and The Master Race proponents. Think of The Church in Rome and their history as we start The Third Millennium. Think of the Centuries long battles waged by the Church in Rome and their Crusaders against the Infidels, the Heathens and those Godless Communists or the previous threats from Saladin or the current perceived threats from Islam or from the Muslims. Because that is what caused JFK to be eliminated and that is what we face for the next Century at a bare minimum.
As for the CIA. They have only been around for 60 years or so. But 80% or more of their leadership were made members of SMOM who took an oath to God. Not an oath to La Familia. Not to Patria, the Homeland, not to La Compania the Organization or The Company, but to Dei. Think about that. The death of JFK was an Opus Dei, a Work of God. Let thy will be done.
Are there any questions?
in 1999.
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - John Bevilaqua - 11-12-2009
This link shows the double-headed Eagle on the Coat of Arms of SOVEREIGN [SIZE=+2]ORDER OF SAINT JOHN OF JERUSALEM
I think the publications of OSJ carried this symbol on all of its publications, including the ones read by Lee Harvey Oswald...
http://www.osjknights.com/code.htm
[/SIZE]THE [SIZE=+2]CODE OF THE [/SIZE]
SOVEREIGN [SIZE=+2]ORDER OF SAINT JOHN OF JERUSALEM[/SIZE]
1. Thou shalt believe the teaching of the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and obey all Her admonitions.
2. Thou shalt defend the Church.
3. Thou shalt show regard for the weak and defend them.
4. Thou shalt love the country of thy birth.
5. Thou shalt never retreat before the enemy.
6. Thou shalt lead an unceasing and uncompromising war against the infidel.
7. Thou shalt never tell a lie and shalt stay true to thy word.
8. Thou shalt be generous and charitable.
9. Thou shalt always and in all places be champion of Good and Justice against evil and iniquity.
I think the publications of OSJ carried this symbol on all of its publications, including the ones read by Lee Harvey Oswald...
http://www.osjknights.com/code.htm
[/SIZE]THE [SIZE=+2]CODE OF THE [/SIZE]
SOVEREIGN [SIZE=+2]ORDER OF SAINT JOHN OF JERUSALEM[/SIZE]
1. Thou shalt believe the teaching of the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and obey all Her admonitions.
2. Thou shalt defend the Church.
3. Thou shalt show regard for the weak and defend them.
4. Thou shalt love the country of thy birth.
5. Thou shalt never retreat before the enemy.
6. Thou shalt lead an unceasing and uncompromising war against the infidel.
7. Thou shalt never tell a lie and shalt stay true to thy word.
8. Thou shalt be generous and charitable.
9. Thou shalt always and in all places be champion of Good and Justice against evil and iniquity.
Here is a larger version of the book cover: The Russian Fascists. The double eagle image is EXACTLY the one used by those from The Order of St. John. EXACTLY. And my supposition now is that the newspaper read by Oswald with the Double Eagles on the cover described by Greg Parker was published by either The Order of St. John or by one of the Vonsiatsky affiliated ROCOR based organizations.
http://libweb.hawaii.edu/images/fascists.gif
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - John Bevilaqua - 11-12-2009
The Vonsiatsky-Molzahn Espionage Trial of 1942
A democracy has no way to deal with people of Vonsiatsky's or GLK Smith's ilk. Vonsiatsky only received a 5-year prison sentence courtesy of Senator Thomas J. Dodd who was the lead prosecutor at Vonsiatsky's trial and a junior prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals. If Vonsiatsky had been sentenced to life in prison, executed or even deported, JFK would most likely never have been murdered. And yet it appears that Vonsiatsky joined in with those on the Shickshinny Knights of Malta with their full approval as a registered agent to carry out their sinister plot against JFK.
James Hosty, the FBI Agent who was in charge of tracking Oswald had a series of ready-made canned excuses ready for me in order to attempt to exonerate him from any wrongdoing in the JFK plot as if he expected the subject to come up when I called to interview him upon the publication of his book on Oswald and JFK. When I asked him if he had an alibi for Vonsiatsky with witnesses both during the execution of the plot or during the Winnipeg Airport Incident, he just stammered and blubbered and babbled while groping for some logically consistent answer which he could not come close to providing after being so confident that he could convince me of his innocence. He could not give me an answer as to how he reached the conclusion that Vonsiatsky was either incapable of such a crime or that he was innocent of the crime. And the FBI web site had over 25 pages on the Acts of Espionage carried out by Vonsiatsky which they called one of their Top Twenty cases in the entire 20th Century. Something just does not jive here. Richard Condon, in ManCand implies that Vonsiatsky's alter ego in the novel, eventually went to work as an FBI contact or informant. Lou Amjac is his alter ego's name in the novel. Anastase was also in the Army Reserve at the time
having served in the U.S. Army before World War II.
I think someone should subpoena the records of The Shickshinny Knights of Malta on all the characters mentioned on their website who have been identified as JFK murder suspects.
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA:
THE GSP FROM THE 1930S THROUGH THE 1960S
On October 6, 1933, 15,000 German Americans gathered at the Pastorius
Monument at Vernon Park in Germantown to celebrate the 250
th
anniversary
of the first German settlement in America. This elaborate, threeday
commemoration of German Day was among the few occasions since
the Great War that had brought Americans of German descent together in
such large numbers. [Figure 5] Anti-German hysteria during and immediately
after World War I had limited public demonstrations of German-
American ethnic pride. But now, eight months after Hitler had taken
control of the Reich, Germans in America celebrated their ancestry publicly,
proud of Germany for its reemergence from the ravages of war and
because it seemed to be weathering the storm of the worldwide economic
depression better than the U.S. Sponsored by well-established cultural
organizations such as the United Singers of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia
Turngemeinde, as well as the German Society of Pennsylvania, the
event was also supported by a new, right-wing Nazi organization, the
Friends of the New Germany.
1
Adolf Hitler and President Hindenburg
sent telegrams.
2
The German Ambassador Hans Luther, however, canceled
his appearance because organizers had refused to raise the swastika
flag. In response to the absence of the highest-ranking diplomat from
the German Reich, GSP board members resolved to send him a letter
expressing their “sentiment.” In it, they objected to the organizers’ lack of
German Day Celebration at Vernon Park, Germantown, October 6, 1933
78 ETHNICITY MATTERS
“decency and tact” that had prevented the ambassador from speaking at
the event.
3
While the GSP continued its dedication to German literary and musical
culture during the 1930s, some leaders and members became key
figures in the American Nazi movement. One board member was even
convicted of conspiring to spy on behalf of Hitler’s regime. It is difficult
to know exactly what most GSP members thought about the Nazis, yet
some outspoken Nazi sympathizers seem to have set the tone at public
events. At the annual charity ball, for example, the swastika flag was
raised. GSP President Louis Schmidt, who led the society from 1923 to
1942, was well-liked; he had united members during the 1920s after the
crisis of World War I. Yet in the last ten years of his presidency, he did not
exert much power.
4
Through action and inaction, the GSP found itself on a treacherous
path in this decade, and it alienated many of its members. Jewish members
were put off by anti-Semitic reading material in the library, for
example, as well as by more covert hostility. In 1938, the society did
publicly condemn Hitler for his military aggression, but the GSP still had
lost a substantial number of its members by the time the U.S. entered
World War II in late 1941. The GSP also heeded the government’s call to
purchase war bonds as a patriotic duty, and so its investments yielded
much lower returns. With reduced membership contributions and low
investment returns, the GSP was more or less ruined financially at the
end of the war.
Although German Americans overall did not experience the kind of
anti-German hysteria they had suffered during the previous war, the GSP
emerged from the Second World War severely weakened. Had it not been
for the renewed influx of German immigrants after the war and a large
monetary bequest to benefit the library, the organization might have
collapsed. New German immigrants who joined the GSP after 1945 allowed
the organization to focus on the plight of German refugees rather
than the German war atrocities or the society’s own fascist sympathies
before the war. The continued problem of declining membership after the
war and through the 1960s can, in part, be explained by the society’s
failure to address this past both among its membership, as well as in
German history generally.
The GSP during the 1930s
As discussed in chapter three, the 1930s began under the shadow of the
Great Depression. Large numbers of Philadelphians were unemployed,
and many people had difficulty meeting basic needs. Philadelphia was
the third largest city in the country with a population of almost 2 million:
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 79
1.36 million were native born, 370,000 were foreign born, and 220,000
were African Americans. German-born inhabitants made up a little more
than 10 percent of the city’s foreign-born population (about 37,000), and
94,000 people had at least one German parent. 50 percent of the city’s
residents were Catholic and 15 percent were Jewish. Philadelphia was
also one of the largest Jewish cities in the U.S.; it had 82,000 Yiddish
speakers.
5
When the Great Depression began, the GSP had finally reached pre-
World War I membership levels again, with around 640 members. Despite
Prohibition, which was opposed by virtually all Germans, “associational
life was in relatively good condition.”
6
The library enjoyed record
readership. Although lectures and other GSP events were not as well
attended as the board might have liked, the explanation apparently lay
not in a general decline of interest in the GSP by German Americans, but
rather in “the rich calendar of events of the local Deutschtum, distractions
through radio and movie theaters and the increasingly unfortunate location”
of the GSP.
7
In 1930, after a fifteen-year interruption, the society
revived its traditional annual charity ball held at the Bellevue-Stratford
Hotel, which came to be heralded as the “highlight of German-American
social life” in Philadelphia by 1934.
8
The ball was held annually through
1941.
Despite this successful annual event, GSP membership declined over
the course of the decade, decreasing steadily from 520 in 1932 to 411 in
1940.
9
The membership records of GSP agent Henry Hoffmann indicate
that at least 300 members resigned or simply stopped paying their dues
between 1929 and 1940. In addition, more than 100 members died during
this period.
10
While it is difficult to determine why individual members withdrew
from the society, five major reasons for the general decline are apparent.
First, participation in ethnic organizations lessened in general during the
1930s due to the expansion of alternatives for inexpensive, ethnic amusements.
11
Radio shows and movies offered in German, for example, gave
German Americans opportunities to use their language without joining a
Verein. Second, the economic hardships of the Great Depression might
have made it difficult for some GSP members, especially those who were
small business owners, to pay the annual dues. Third, some German
Americans, remembering the anti-German hysteria of World War I, left
the society by the late 1930s out of fear that their affiliation with the GSP,
or anything German for that matter, would become a liability once again.
This fear became especially pronounced when Hitler’s aggression led to
war.
12
Fourth, the Treaty of Versailles had raised hope among Jews that
they would have their own state in Palestine. This Zionist hope caused a
80 ETHNICITY MATTERS
split between German Gentiles and Jews everywhere.
13
Increasing anti-
Semitism in Germany and in Philadelphia, as displayed in Philadelphia’s
German-language daily, the Herold, led some German Jews to distance
themselves from anything German and from the GSP, where Nazi propaganda
was readily available in the library. Lastly, some non-Jewish
GSP members may not have been comfortable associating with pro-Nazi
members.
The fact that a few GSP leaders and members were among the most
prominent Nazi sympathizers in Philadelphia no doubt deterred new
Jewish immigrants from becoming members. Nearly half a million Jews
entered the U.S. from Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia between
1933 and 1945, some of whom stayed in Philadelphia.
14
This number
could have been larger had not both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations
implemented tighter immigration restrictions, motivated by
notions of alleged “Nordic” superiority, growing isolationism, and
xenophobia in general.
15
Acculturation for the Jewish refugees fortunate
enough to make it to the U.S. was quick: almost all of them conducted
their religious, social, and cultural activities in English soon after arrival.
In short, as historian Herbert Strauss puts it, “these immigrants had few,
if any, organized connections with the German-American community
during the Third Reich and for a considerable time thereafter.”
16
Strauss’s assertion also held true for the GSP, as confirmed by anecdotal
evidence from interviews with members. Some Jewish members
were allegedly told around 1933 that they were no longer desirable members.
On the other hand, former longtime GSP President George Beichl,
who did not join the society until 1964, recalls rumors of Jews using the
GSP library during the 1930s and ’40s.
17
Considering the amount of Nazi
propaganda on display at the library, it is doubtful the Jewish readership
was large. The surviving records unfortunately fail to shed any light on
Jewish membership.
18
Throughout the 1930s, many German Americans celebrated the
newly emerging, stronger Germany.
19
Pride in the new Germany continued
into the late 1930s among Philadelphia’s German Americans.
As many as 1,500 German Americans gathered there to celebrate the
Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria, on March 13, 1938.
20
They sang
not only the Deutschland Lied, but also the Horst Wessel Lied, the Nazi Party
anthem.
21
Sigmund von Bosse, a Lutheran pastor and prominent GSP
leader, gave a rousing speech, and almost everyone in the audience gave
him the Hitler salute at its conclusion.
Demonstrators increasingly protested these celebrations with anti-
German rallies in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
22
Protestors feared a newly
aggressive Germany, but German Americans rejected such fears as remi-
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 81
niscent of World War I anti-German hysteria. Most of the celebrations
ceased once Hitler invaded Poland, but Pennsylvania’s extreme right did
not disappear completely.
The GSP reacted to the rise of anti-German sentiment in the 30s first
with stoicism and later with a kind of siege mentality. As early as 1933,
after Hitler had come to power, the Women’s Auxiliary and the German
Society complained about the “increasing distress for people of German
descent,” in part due to “anti-German tendencies” in Philadelphia. The
men and women of the GSP vowed to be steadfast and to “preserve the
respect of their fellow citizens through model behavior.”
23
By 1936, newspaper
headlines about Germany’s territorial aggression, militarism, and
national chauvinism increased Americans’ hostility toward Germans in
Philadelphia. Harry Pfund, head of the events committee, voiced his
fervent hope that the community would “remain faithful to itself” at a
time when the Deutschtum needed to “draw closer together” for selfpreservation.
24
When war broke out in September 1939, Pfund remarked
that he was reminded “of the gray days of 1914, except that this time the
slow burning fire of hatred by the press and certain circles against everything
German burst into flames already much earlier.”
25
Although largely only a bystander in world events, the German Society
may have contributed to the anti-German sentiment Pfund perceived.
As we have seen, GSP board members sided with the German
ambassador in his desire to have a swastika flag flying at the German Day
celebration in 1933. They also unanimously voted to send a congratulatory
telegram to the German Führer in 1935 when the Saarland plebiscite
returned the area from French to German rule. They believed this indicated
“the victory of German faithfulness in spite of all insidious attacks.”
26
Notwithstanding this public outburst of German patriotism,
board members were cautious when they merely acknowledged an invitation
to a joint Hitler-Bismarck birthday celebration extended by the
Friends of the New Germany in the spring of that year and did not attend
as a group.
27
Sigmund von Bosse, however, may have persuaded some of his fellow
GSP board members to join in this revival of Pan-Germanism. Although
von Bosse never officially joined the Friends of the New Germany
or its successor, the German-American Bund, he was widely known as
“an open sympathizer” and “a leading figure in later Bund activism.” He
was also the last President of the National German-American Alliance.
28
Right-wing German groups had already emerged in the 1920s and gained
momentum after 1933 when the Association of Friends of the New Germany
was founded in Chicago. When some of its members voiced concern
in 1936 that the organization was too German and thus could be
82 ETHNICITY MATTERS
deterring potential supporters from joining, the name was changed to
German-American Bund. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, one scholar
argues, permitted “some Americans of German descent to feel their
homeland was being restored to its proper dignity.”
29
Von Bosse was
merely one among several GSP members who felt this way.
Overall, the German-American Bund never had more than a few
thousand members in the entire United States, and these were concentrated
in the Mid-Atlantic region.
30
The Philadelphia chapter of the
Friends of the New Germany thrived quickly: it had over 220 members by
the end of its first year in 1933.
31
The organization had strong ties to New
York Nazis such as Heinz Spanknoebel and sang the Horst Wessel Lied at
the end of its meetings. New members were also required to pledge that
they were Aryans without Jewish or black blood. Like the Nazis in Germany,
Bund members joined forces with members of other associations to
form uniformed paramilitary groups that even conducted regular drills.
In Philadelphia, for example, the hall of the Liedertafel Sängerbund on Sixth
Street, not far from the society’s building, served as the drill room.
32
As an American-born man, von Bosse was in the minority among
Bund sympathizers, as well as members, who consisted mostly of post-
World War I German immigrants.
33
Nevertheless, his involvement was
not limited to attending the organization’s gatherings. He also gave passionate
speeches at several meetings. The most famous was the Bund
rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, where 22,000 Hitler
supporters cheered him and other speakers on. Ostensibly held in honor
of George Washington’s birthday, the rally was, in reality, a glorification
of Hitler. In his speech, von Bosse explicitly linked the two men: “if
Washington were alive today, he would be a friend of Adolf Hitler, just
as he was of Frederick the Great.”
34
Within days of war breaking out in
Europe, von Bosse used Aryan racial ideology to call “upon all our racial
fellows to stand behind the neutrality proclamation of the President 100
percent,” although he knew it would be difficult “due to the vicious
propaganda” that was being circulated in the press.
35
Less than a month
later, the pastor chaired the German Day celebration, which still drew a
crowd of 2,300. Although overt symbols of Nazism such as the swastika
flag were not on prominent display, highlights of the speech were greeted
with an enthusiastic “Heil” cheer from the audience.
36
Later that year, von
Bosse became the head of the Pennsylvania Zentralbund. In this capacity
he became part of the isolationist movement after Germany invaded Poland.
Like other leaders of the movement, von Bosse called for American
neutrality, framing his argument in anti-Communist, or rather, anti-
Jewish, terms: Jews were generally considered to be radical Communists.
He said, for example, “the main lineup is not democracy versus fascism,
but fascism versus Communism and here our choice is clear.”
37
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 83
To be sure, Sigmund von Bosse was not representative of GSP members,
although he seems to have found sympathy in the organization.
38
In
1935, within a year of his election to the board, GSP leaders commended
von Bosse for his work as the society’s secretary and for his accomplishments
on behalf of “the Deutschtum in general.”
39
A number of GSP
members were associated with the conservative Pan-German movement.
R.T. Kessemeier, who joined the GSP in 1930, was a “leading figure in the
Association of the Friends of the New Germany” and later also a Bund
member. As manager of two German steamship lines in Philadelphia,
Kessemeier offered free passage to German Americans, especially to sympathetic
academics, so that they might see German progress first hand.
Quite a few German-American college professors from Philadelphia-area
schools traveled to Germany through this offer.
40
Theodore Martin, head
of the Philadelphia Bund, was also a GSP member for at least part of the
1930s. Another prominent Bund sympathizer, Fred C. Gartner, had joined
the GSP in 1923. The largely German population of Northeast Philadelphia
elected him to the Pennsylvania State Legislature in 1933 as a Republican
representative and then to the U.S. Congress for one term in
1938. Reverend Erich Saul, pastor of the German Seamen’s Home in
Philadelphia from 1912 to 1942 and GSP member from at least 1923 to
1937, was also a Nazi sympathizer.
41
In addition, in the late 1930s the
German Society lost several members who returned to Germany.
42
These
so-called Rückwanderer had followed Hitler’s call for all Volksdeutsche to
come home to the German Reich. Many of these same members had been
active in the Bund.
By the early 1930s, the 19-member GSP board was dominated by
German-born men and included some recent immigrants, at least one of
whom had served on the German side during World War I. But regardless
of their place of birth or length of time in the United States, all board
members viewed Germany as the victim of the Versailles Treaty. The
provisions of the treaty had been very hard on Germany, not least because
Germany was held to be solely responsible for the war, as dictated
in its war guilt clause. Under its provisions, Germany was forced to pay
reparations, it permanently lost possession of its colonies, the French
occupied the Saarland for fifteen years, and the Ruhr/Rhine River area
was demilitarized.
43
Like most Germans in Germany, GSP board members
believed in the so-called Dolchstoßlegende, or the “stab in the back”
theory, according to which Germany had lost the war because of internal
strife, primarily brought about by Communist agitators and Jews.
44
There were two indicators of this mindset. First, in early 1931, the
board unanimously resolved to purchase five copies of a Thomas St. John
Gaffney’s recently published book, Breaking the Silence.
45
Discussion
about the book itself was unusual: typically reading material acquisitions
84 ETHNICITY MATTERS
were not discussed in detail at board meetings. The librarian merely
submitted a written report including the number of visitors and books
loaned. Written by the former American consul to Munich and based on
his personal experiences, the book is an indictment of the Wilson administration
for not preventing the war and for getting the U.S. involved
in it. Moreover, Gaffney condemns the Treaty of Versailles for a long list
of atrocities. Among them were “the annexation of German provinces
and colonies to the territory of racially heterogeneous and inimical
peoples . . . [and] the occupation of German territory by tens of thousands
of vicious African blacks.”
46
Secondly, Conrad Linke, a prominent GSP
member and artist, left the society several folders of newspaper clippings
and his own writings, which show that he was a leading proponent of the
Germany-as-victim view among GSP members.
47
Periodically, the library sent new book lists to local newspapers or
enclosed them in the GSP annual report. These records reflect the conservative,
middle-class character of the society. They also illustrate a slant
toward a Heimatliteratur that idealized Imperial Germany in much the
same way that “Lost Cause” writings glorified the antebellum American
South after the Civil War.
48
Moreover, the lists reveal that the GSP library
contained more pro-Nazi literature than works by exiled writers by the
1930s. In 1930, the GSP acquired Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The library
had already purchased a collection of Hitler’s speeches in 1924 within
months of its publication.
49
Over the course of the 1930s, the GSP library
made a variety of Nazi literature available to its readers, ranging from
Julius Streicher’s notoriously anti-Semitic weekly Der Stürmer and the SS
publication Das Schwarze Korps to the more serious, less overtly anti-
Semitic periodical Volk im Werden, published by the pedagogue Ernst
Krieck.
At least some Nazi propaganda came to the GSP through the Volksbund
für das Deutschtum im Ausland (League for Germandom Abroad),
which is listed among the donors of reading material in library reports of
the 1930s.
50
Apparently these were “very welcome” additions to the library.
51
When the Nazis acceded to power in Germany, they increased
their effort to reach all Volksdeutsche, that is, Germans outside of the
Reich. They created the League to send propaganda abroad as part of this
effort. Collections for Volksdeutsche in Germany’s public schools partially
financed this propaganda campaign.
52
At the same time, it is clear that the
GSP ordered books by Joseph Goebbels or Alfred Rosenberg, who had
helped to create Nazi ideology, and subscribed to American pro-Nazi
periodicals like the Herold. The Herold was published by the same company
that printed the anti-Semitic, Nazi paper, Deutscher Weckruf, whose
front-page slogan called for a unified Deutschtum everywhere.
53
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 85
The GSP also established close connections to the German Reich in
the 1930s. The Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland contacted the
GSP to request material for an exhibit on Germans outside of Germany to
be held in Bremen in 1936. The GSP responded by appropriating funds
and selecting and sending photographs.
54
In the wake of the 1936 Olympic
games in Germany, a representative of the German Olympic press
committee brought a German film about the games for GSP members to
enjoy.
55
The GSP also aimed to update members on the latest views in
Germany by hosting lectures mostly by pro-Nazi speakers. One was a
lecture in 1936 by Colin Ross, who offered a self-professed National-
Socialist view of Germans’ role in American history in his book Unser
Amerika, published in Germany. German Americans, Ross explained, had
“experienced their own Versailles and the heavy weight and humiliation
of defeat.” But just as in Germany, Germans in America had emerged, he
argued, “with enormous pride and undefeatable strength.”
56
Harry
Pfund, head of the events committee, later approvingly remembered
Ross’s lecture as a “brilliant speech defending today’s Germany” and as
“an attack against all powers whose aim it is to prevent an understanding
of the true situation in the Third Reich through false and distorted reports.”
57
By January 1938, however, the GSP publicly disavowed its Nazi sympathies.
58
Twenty-two German-American associations in Philadelphia including
the GSP joined the German-American league of Culture at this
time, whose purpose was to “expose the dangerous roles the Nazis [were]
playing in numerous organizations throughout Pennsylvania.”
59
Within
a year, the number of German Vereine in the league had increased to
nearly 100. Led by Raymond Ruff, who had begun to publicly denounce
Hitler and his policies as early as 1936, the league clearly opposed the
“theory of militarism and racial hatred” of the Nazis without relinquishing
their “pro-German” ideals. Ruff called on the member organizations
to advertise “the dominant role Germans have played in the development
of this country,” which was, of course, something the society had already
been engaged in for at least fifty years. Yet it was hard for pro-Nazi
members to break old habits. At the GSP annual charity ball in February
1938, only a month after the society had joined the league, Ruff personally
tore down a swastika flag.
60
This awkward situation was not mentioned,
of course, in the glowing account of the event in the society’s annual
report.
Nazi sympathizers now came under attack in Philadelphia. Protestors
marched in large demonstrations by the thousands, picketed German-
American Bund meetings, and some even beat up Bund members.
61
Two
Nazi sympathizers in the GSP also came under attack. The home of
Dr. Richard Gerlach, GSP director and physician for the German Consul-
86 ETHNICITY MATTERS
ate, was bombed in September 1938. No one was injured in the blast, but
damage to the front of the house was severe. Anti-Nazi protestors had
recently demonstrated outside the German Consulate against Hitler’s
plan to annex the Sudetenland. Yet Gerlach refused to acknowledge that
there could be any connection between the two occurrences.
62
Another
GSP member, William Graf, the publisher of the Herold and the Bund’s
Deutscher Weckruf, reported that his print shop on Germantown Avenue
had been bombed.
In this climate of anti-Nazi violence, the German-American Bund
basically became defunct and then officially dissolved after the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor. The Bund’s disappearance was more a strategic
move than a real indication that it had lost all support. New organizations,
such as the America First Committee, which led the neutrality
campaign in which some GSP members were involved, were much more
effective at a time when overt Nazism and its symbols had become untenable.
While most German Philadelphians appear to have rejected
Hitler by 1939, some continued to work covertly for the German cause.
For example, the Kyffhäuserbund, a German veterans’ association with
Nazi connections, called for charitable contributions to assist German
POWs held in Canada. Instead of going to German soldiers imprisoned in
Canada, however, the money collected was diverted through a German
steamship company and went to Germany in support of the Nazi regime.
63
Although there is no evidence that there was a united “Fifth Column”
as Roosevelt and others warned, there were some suspicious explosions
at various defense plants in the Mid-Atlantic region that suggest that
some German Americans sought to undermine American forces in the
war. The most sensational sabotage story was a plot that was never
carried out. In the summer of 1942, eight German agents who had landed
by submarine in Florida and on Long Island were arrested for conspiring
to destroy several military installations and strategic logistical support
stations. The plan was named “Operation Pastorius” in honor of the
founder of the first German settlement in America—an honor the GSP as
well as other German-American Vereine could have done without.
64
After 1938, the GSP avoided overt connections with Nazis abroad.
This does not mean, however, that it repudiated Nazi sympathizers
within its ranks. Prominent society members who were also Philadelphia
Bund supporters, such as Sigmund von Bosse, Fred Gartner, and Kurt
Molzahn, remained very popular among members even as late as 1939.
Von Bosse was approvingly characterized as “an undaunted man,” Gartner
was the guest of honor at the society’s 175th anniversary celebration,
and Molzahn continued to be a valued director of the poor relief program.
65
At the same time, the society invited an exiled German writer for
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 87
a lecture in 1940. Although not overtly political, Hamburg novelist
Joachim Maass left Germany in 1939 and found employment as a lecturer
through the Carl Schurz Foundation. His brother Edgar Maass, author
of the World War I novel Verdun, also lectured at the GSP that same
year.
66
In the political arena, however, the GSP did not get involved in any
way during the summer of 1940 when German aliens were required to
register under the Alien Registration Act.
67
After the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. a few days later, the
fear of subversive aliens suddenly became so great that thousands of
them across the country were arrested overnight. Few Americans noticed
at the time that 10,905 German legal resident aliens were interned during
World War II, and since then, the government, the general public, and
most scholars have forgotten.
68
Some GSP members had their homes
searched, and a few were arrested and interned.
69
INS facilities at Ellis
Island housed hundreds of detainees, and the immigration center closest
to Philadelphia, Gloucester, New Jersey, became the temporary home of
dozens of Germans suspected of subversion. FBI officers interrogated
suspected Nazi sympathizers. They often asked detainees whether they
would be willing to shoot their brothers or other close relatives fighting
for Germany and used photographs of Hitler and other Nazi paraphernalia
as evidence of their un-American activities.
70
The GSP did not officially
receive any pleas for legal assistance from Germans affected by
FBI investigations in the 1940s, as it had during World War I. GSP board
member Kurt Molzahn, however, did visit some internees in Gloucester
in his capacity as a clergyman.
71
A Nazi Spy?
Pastor Kurt Molzahn was a man whose German nationalism turned into
fascism in part because of his experiences during World War I. After four
years of fighting on the Russian front in the German cavalry, Molzahn
attended the Kroop Seminary to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a
minister. He then emigrated to the U.S. in 1923. Soon he was able to send
for his fiancée, and by 1929, he was appointed as the minister at St.
Michael’s and Old Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, the oldest German
Lutheran congregation in the country.
72
Within weeks of arriving in the
city of brotherly love, Molzahn joined the GSP, and his wife became a
member of the Women’s Auxiliary.
73
He also quickly became involved in
other German organizations and preached in his capacity as a clergyman
and German war veteran to a gathering in commemoration of the armistice
of World War I veterans from both the American and the German
sides.
74
Although the speech had nothing to do with his GSP member-
88 ETHNICITY MATTERS
ship, the GSP annual report for 1930 favorably noted Molzahn’s involvement.
A year later, he was elected to the GSP board of directors and
served until his arrest for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1942.
By 1937, Molzahn had become an indispensable leader not only for
the GSP but also as an overt propagandist of the Nazi regime. He had
reportedly “done everything in his power to win over the people in his
congregation for the Third Reich.” The Volksbund für das Deutschtum
im Ausland sent materials to Molzahn, and he was in close contact with
officials in Berlin through the German Consul in Philadelphia, Arno
Mowitz.
75
According to numerous scholars, the pastor had become a
German secret agent. He allegedly “had recruited several V-men for
the Abwehr [German intelligence service], and, after the outbreak of
the war in September 1939, he worked as a producing spy under registry
No. 2320.”
76
Molzahn was allegedly “one of the most energetic and productive
agents in the United States.”
77
Supposedly, he became involved
with Gerhard Kunze, a Philadelphia Bund member and Abwehr agent, in
an effort to raise money and to devise a way to communicate secretly
with Berlin, so that German officials could find ways to pay known Bund
members indirectly.
By 1938, Molzahn allegedly had found a reliable source of funds in
Count Anastase Andreyevich Vonsiatsky, the leader of a Ukrainian anti-
Communist exile group. In December 1940, Kunze supposedly arranged
for Molzahn and the Ukrainian Count to meet in Chicago, where they
agreed on “an operations plan for sabotage of war installations.”
78
Although
it is not clear whether the plan ever resulted in any real damage,
the group did collect sensitive information about US military fortifications
on both coasts, which Molzahn allegedly delivered to a man at the
German embassy.
79
The spy ring was discovered when Vonsiatsky confided
in a supposedly reliable fascist priest, Alexei Pelypenko, who
turned out to be an FBI agent. On June 10, 1942, a federal grand jury
indicted Molzahn, and he was arrested the next day.
80
While three of his
co-defendants pleaded guilty “to conspiracy to transmit to Germany and
Japan information relating to the national defense,” and the Ukrainian
count was declared mentally ill, Molzahn did not. A three-week trial,
however, resulted in a guilty verdict and a ten-year prison sentence.
81
The pastor was released after three years due to heart disease.
In a church trial after his release, Molzahn was deemed fit for the
ministry despite his criminal conviction. He became an associate pastor at
a Philadelphia church and headed his own congregation at Germantown’s
St. Thomas Lutheran Church by early 1949. In 1956, President
Eisenhower pardoned Molzahn fully and unconditionally. The legal effect
of a pardon is to eliminate both the punishment and the guilt asso-
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 89
ciated with the crime.
82
Although it might be a little surprising to people
in the twenty-first century that the president of the United States would
thus remove the stigma from a felony conviction for spying, it was a
strategic move in 1956: the U.S. needed all the allies it could get in the
Cold War against the Soviet Union and Communism at home. Perhaps
granting a pardon to a former Nazi spy seemed harmless and ultimately
meaningless in a world that was faced with a new foe. Pastor Molzahn
was, of course, relieved.
83
In his biography published in 1962, Molzahn denied all charges. Refusing
to acknowledge his public propaganda activities on behalf of Germany’s
Nazis, Molzahn claimed that he “tried to maintain a neutral position”
during the 1930s.
84
Molzahn devoted most of the book to the story
of how he survived prison, but he did address his arrest and conviction
as well. His version of events suggests that an overly paranoid FBI concocted
a fantastic tale. Molzahn claimed that he had never heard of the
Ukrainian Count Vonsiatsky, although he acknowledged that he met
Wilhelm Kunze several times. Still, he “had not seen or talked to him
since 1938—before he became headline material as national leader of the
Bund.”
85
Molzahn did admit to a visit by the Ukrainian priest Pelypenko
but placed the encounter in a harmless, albeit convoluted, context.
Molzahn also differentiated between knowing about a conspiracy and
actually participating in it. Molzahn’s son suggests that his father was
aware of Kunze’s and others’ activities and plans but did not participate
in the plot.
86
Upon his arrest, the Lutheran minister and his wife disappeared
overnight from the records of the German Society without any explanation
or comment. Most people in his congregation, which included some
GSP members, did support Molzahn for a while and raised $25,000 for his
bail. They only hired a new pastor when Molzahn’s last appeal was
denied in June 1943. His wife Nina and their three children stayed in the
parsonage until December 1942. They relied on the $30 a week Nina
earned working for the American Friends Society, as well as the proceeds
of a Friday night poker game friends donated every Saturday morning.
However, most German-American friends and acquaintances, among
them many GSP members and leaders, stayed away from the Molzahn
family. Associating with the relatives of a convicted spy could only bring
suspicion upon them.
87
Once the pastor was released from prison and
transported by ambulance to Lankenau Hospital, the staff initially refused
to treat the man who had once been a member of its board of
directors.
But life for the Molzahns improved quickly thereafter. Within months
of Molzahn’s release the family bought a house “with the help of generous
friends.”
88
He did not appear again in official GSP records until 1954,
90 ETHNICITY MATTERS
when he gave the benediction at the Pastorius Day celebration at Vernon
Park in Germantown. It must have been quite strange for Molzahn and
other society members to be at the monument again twenty-one years
after the jubilant celebration of 1933.
89
In 1957, Molzahn’s name appeared
in GSP records listed among the guests at its Herrenabend (Gentlemen’s
Evening).
90
His wife Nina frequented the GSP library and was a member
of the Women’s Auxiliary for at least part of the 1950s. Although longtime
society members recall seeing Molzahn at various other Society
events, he never rejoined the GSP officially before he died in 1979.
The GSP Beyond World War II
By the time Molzahn was arrested for espionage, the GSP had already
drastically reduced its cultural programming. To save money, the GSP
decided to publish its annual report in 1941 in abbreviated form. Then it
did not send out an annual report again until 1950. By the spring of 1942,
President Louis Schmidt announced that the war prevented the society
from planning “many events.” But he hoped that if members continued
to work “in the same patriotic ways as in the previous 177 years,” they
would be able to preserve what they had inherited from their predecessors.
91
At the same time, the GSP attempted to publicize its patriotism. In
January 1943, the board ordered agent Henry Hoffmann to buy a “Service
flag” to demonstrate GSP patriotism. Intended to have 150 stars (in the
end the flag only had 120 stars, one for each service member associated
with the society), the flag was to be installed “on the stage or at the
window of the hall.”
92
Eugene Stopper, the new president, urged society
members to remain active and to work hard to ensure that the society
would survive the war. He warned that “any organization that closes its
doors now will never open again.” Stopper spurred members on to attract
new members and to publicize members’ and the society’s involvement
in the war bond drive. As part of this demonstration of patriotism, the
GSP also invited a former member’s daughter to give a lecture on Thomas
Jefferson from her recently published book.
93
Beyond the issue of American
loyalty, however, the society recognized that members wanted to
help loved ones in Germany. Thus, members were reminded that donations
to the Red Cross would also benefit German POWs.
94
The GSP
donated $1,000 to the Red Cross, an amount unmatched by any other
German-American organization in Philadelphia.
95
But the society had problems beyond the war. In 1943, the board
acknowledged that a real divide existed between the leadership and the
general membership, evident in dwindling enrollment and the small
number of people attending quarterly meetings. In an attempt to solve
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 91
the problem, the board decided to publish a newsletter every two
months. To dispel any suspicion, the newsletter was written in English. In
the first issue, the GSP announced that most lectures and other activities
would also be held in English, ostensibly to attract younger people.
96
In
the next Postilion, longtime board member Ferdinand Mostertz took up
the language issue again. He noted that all the worries about using German
could be solved by using “tact and common sense.“ While acknowledging
that it would be “unwise during these wartimes to speak German
in public places,” Mostertz advised that people simply had to “use discretion
as to where to use it and where not to use it.”
97
A stern reminder
not to anglicize German names followed in the next issue. Although
Mostertz was ready to refrain from speaking his native language in public,
he had no sympathy for those who changed their names.
98
The limited
use of the German language in the GSP did not end with the war.
The newsletter served to inform members about GSP history and
internal issues. It tried to instill pride in the past accomplishments
of Germans in the U.S. by including short biographical sketches of
eighteenth-century GSP heroes such as society founder Heinrich Keppele,
founder and printer Henrich Miller, and Revolutionary War hero von
Steuben. The Postilion, however, never addressed fascism, the Holocaust,
or any other events in Europe. Perhaps because of this omission, it did
little to bring people into the society. President Stoppers recognized this
and asked members to suggest other ways to improve sociability in the
organization at the annual membership meeting in 1944.
99
Attendance at meetings did not improve until the society came under
official attack. In 1944, federal officials told the GSP that it was not contributing
enough to charitable causes to qualify for tax-exempt status,
even though members had contributed to five war bond drives in less
than three years and had broken all records as an ethnic group and
organization for effort.
100
The society also came under investigation for
un-American activities.
101
Thirty-five members were present at a meeting
to hear updates on the situation instead of the usual twenty or sometimes
fewer than fifteen. The struggle to regain tax-exempt status took over
three years and required the society to submit financial records from 1933
to 1945. In the end, the society temporarily merged its charitable contributions
with those of the Women’s Auxiliary. In addition, the GSP was
required to sell its real estate mortgages and to invest the money in
federal treasury notes at much lower returns.
102
Picking up the Pieces
The financial losses were felt immediately. By the spring of 1945, the
German Society had invested half of its cash assets in $25,000 of war
92 ETHNICITY MATTERS
bonds. The sharp decline in investment returns by early 1946 caused the
society to operate at a deficit.
103
The fiscal situation did not improve until
1950, when the GSP finance committee sold the last of the war bonds and
invested in the booming stock market instead, resulting in a balanced
budget for the year.
104
A bequest by Joseph P. Horner in 1946 could not have come at a
better time. It was not immediately clear how much money the society
would receive, or when it would receive it, but it was apparent that the
sum would be substantial.
105
In 1962, the GSP at last received an endowment
of $388,000. Horner, a member of the Philadelphia orchestra and a
longtime GSP member, had requested that the interest income be used for
general expenses and the library.
106
The $3,600 annual income from the
Horner estate saved the GSP from running a substantial deficit.
107
Apart
from the endowment the value of the society’s cash assets had dropped
to less than $21,000 in 1965 and continued to decline.
108
At the annual
membership meeting in January 1967, outgoing President Hermann Witte
rightly reminded everyone that Horner’s bequest was “the ‘life-safer’ of
the Society.”
109
In 1946, the society also participated in the bicentennial celebration of
the birth of Peter Muhlenberg, the German-American Revolutionary War
hero. In a remarkable display of revived German-American pride, members
began a campaign to have Mühlenberg’s statue moved from City
Hall to Independence Square, where they felt it “belonged.”
110
Although
the effort failed, it is significant that the GSP felt strong enough as an
organization in 1946 to attempt the transfer. By then, the GSP had
begun efforts to help war-torn Germany. In the summer of that year, the
Women’s Auxiliary began to meet regularly to mend donated clothing, a
warehouse had been rented for storing collected items, and good progress
had been made in obtaining governmental permission to collect
money towards the cause.
Society members’ engagement with aid for Germany helped them to
distance themselves from the recent past by allowing them to focus on
Germans and German Americans as victims rather than perpetrators.
Harry Pfund had shaped this focus in 1944 when the board of directors
asked him to write a short history of the society in celebration of the
tercentenary of William Penn’s birth. In twenty-one pages, Pfund painted
a glowing picture of the society’s history but characterized the last three
decades as “the most tragic” period.
111
Concentrating on cultural highlights
such as a Goethe celebration at the Academy of Music in 1932, the
chair of the library committee left out any reference to the Third Reich
and Nazis in the U.S. or abroad. Pfund instead focused on Germans as the
victims of events in both the New World and the Old. Germans everywhere,
he wrote, were “distressed by the sufferings of one’s kith and kin,
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 93
of those of the same blood, the same language and the same cultural
heritage,” and members of the German Society had borne “this grief in
silence.”
112
Pfund’s essay set the stage for the society’s silence about the
Third Reich.
After the 1940s, the GSP became more American. The society no
longer insisted that most events be conducted in the German language.
Initially due to the war, the society made English its official language, to
the chagrin of some, although there were some exceptions.
113
Later this
policy was continued because fewer people spoke German. The society
also focused on offering more social events to restore a sense of German
Gemütlichkeit to its members, as well as prospective ones, and therefore
sought permission to serve alcoholic beverages. In early 1954, the GSP
acquired a liquor license, which it carefully guards to this day, especially
because serving alcohol is an important part of almost all events.
114
Lastly, a special committee urged the society to move to the northeastern
section of Philadelphia, “where the bulk of our present and future members
live.”
115
Lacking money and decisiveness, the board failed to act on
this recommendation and three years later decided to stay put. The idea
of moving recurred periodically over the next twenty-five years.
116
In the meantime, after a twenty-year interruption, GSP services for
immigrants, ranging from employment referrals to English and citizenship
classes, were once again in demand.
117
Increasing numbers of German
refugees were entering the United States. Conrad and Marion Linke,
two longtime GSP members, were instrumental in effecting a change of
status for incoming Germans. They had moved Congress to revise the
Displaced Persons Act so that new Germans, who were classified as
Expellees and were ineligible for emigration, became refugees. Of the
nearly 600,000 Germans entering the United States between 1946 and the
late 1950s, thousands came to the Delaware Valley.
118
Although many
refugees established their own organizations, a sizable number of the
most active and dedicated GSP members today are former refugees and
their children.
119
These expatriate families had endured terrible hardships
and had little interest in dealing with German atrocities or questions
of culpability. Instead they focused on their own ordeals, which
helped to shape the society for the next sixty years.
120
It was around the time that German war refugees came to the U.S. in
increasing numbers that the German Society decided to keep all Nazi
periodicals and books in a dark and dirty storage room on the third floor
of the building.
121
By the late 1970s, this closet became known as the
Giftschrank.
122
This mysterious space is not a closet full of presents, as the
English word “gift” would suggest, but a poison cabinet, because “gift”
means “poison” in German. It is not clear how this forbidden closet came
into being, who named it, or who filled it with “undesirable” materials
94 ETHNICITY MATTERS
from the 1930s: bundled stacks of Nazi periodicals, envelopes containing
small fascist pamphlets, and books written by Hitler, Goebbels, and Alfred
Rosenberg, for example. What is clear is that the “gift” is a poison
that the society decided to keep apart from the rest of its library collection.
By literally and figuratively putting their recent past in a closet,
society members bestowed a general amnesia on the organization.
Instead of addressing their own recent past, longtime GSP leaders of
the 1950s, together with the new postwar refugee members, carefully
resumed their programs celebrating German-American contributions to
American history. Without any reference to the war or the Holocaust,
about 1,000 German Americans gathered in 1951 at the Pastorius Monument
on October 6, 1951, to celebrate “Pastorius Day” instead of the usual
“German Day”. Perhaps organizers intended to acknowledge the recent
war or to distance themselves from the German nationalism that had led
the world to disaster by renaming the celebration. The speeches for the
occasion, however, seamlessly picked up where prewar celebrations had
left off – with the society’s perpetual lament that German-American contributions
to American history were being ignored.
123
Conclusion
The GSP did not turn into a quasi-Nazi organization during the 1930s.
However, some leading American Nazi sympathizers were influential
society members and might have contributed to the decline in membership.
While the GSP tried its best to demonstrate its American patriotism
during the war, it was put on the defensive when the U.S. government
investigated it. With a declining and aging membership, financial problems,
and a divide between leadership and rank-and-file members, the
GSP emerged from World War II with less resolve and support than after
World War I. Only the influx of German refugees, a fortuitous monetary
bequest, and the challenge of sending aid to Germany made it possible for
the society to survive this crisis. New and old members alike, however,
cast themselves as victims of Soviet brutality in World War II and Cold
War politics in the 1950s rather than perpetrators, and this framing of
recent history shaped the society for years to come. Some Americans of
German descent may have been put off from joining the organization
because of its failure to address Germany’s and its own recent past.
Perhaps this partially explains low membership numbers through the
early 1970s. Yet the GSP’s troubles now extended far beyond the membership
in its walls: postwar economic and social changes radically altered
the landscape and politics of Philadelphia and other urban centers,
transforming the neighborhood in which the GSP was located and, therefore,
the GSP itself.
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 95
Notes
1
For a complete list of the sponsors, see “250-jährige Gedenkfeier der Landung der ersten
deutschen Einwanderer und Gründung von Germantown durch Franz Daniel Pastorius
unter den Auspizien des Deutsch-Amerikanischen Zentralbundes von Pennsylvanien und
anderer angeschlossenen Vereinigungen, Zweiter Deutsch-Amerikanischer Kongress, Philadelphia,”
Oct. 6–9, 1933. (Philadelphia: Graf & Breuninger, 1933). GAC Pamphlet AB46.4.
2
Philadelphia Record, October 7, 1933.
3
GSP Minutes, October 19, 1933.
4
Louis Schmidt continued to be well-liked among GSP members during the 1930s, however.
The GSP held a festive dinner in honor of his seventieth birthday. See photo of “Testimonial
Dinner in honor of Capt. Louis H. Schmidt to celebrate his Seventieth Birthday, September
29, 1938, Bellevue Stratford Hotel,” uncataloged.
5
These numbers are based on the 1930 census and were summarized in Jenkins, Hoods and
Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997), 63, 138.
6
GSP Annual Report 1930.
7
GSP Annual Report 1936.
8
GSP Annual Report 1934.
9
The German Society stopped publishing membership numbers on a regular basis after
1929, but membership in the following years can be determined by counting member names
printed in the annual reports. Membership in the intervening years was 461 in 1934, 437 in
1936, and 421 in 1938. Numbers derived from the annual reports of 1932, 1934, 1936, 1938,
1940.
10
“Mitgleider vorgeschlagen seit Amtsantritt des Geschaefts-Agenten Henry Hoffmann,
1923,” GAC uncataloged. The GSP was not the only German organization experiencing
difficulties. The German Club was forced to dissolve due to “the bad times” and donated its
furniture to the GSP. See GSP Annual Report 1937.
11
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
12
Several resignation letters from before and after the war broke out in Europe reveal that
some members did not wish to be associated with a German organization. Some members
were rather vague about their reasons for resigning. Rudolph Huebner to Herr Hoffman,
October 12, 1938. But others, such as Rudolph Stüven, explicitly stated that “owing to
conditions abroad which have a certain bearing on me in my community, I find it expedient
to sever for the present at least my connection with the Society.” Rudolph Stüven to GSP,
April 26, 1939. Two more letters that gave no explicit reason for the resignation were
William Hellmann to GSP, May 19, 1939, and J.M. Snyder to GSP, December 11, 1939.
Gesangsverein Harmonie, Box 450, file “Handed over to FBI & returned.” All of these letters
are unusual since few members officially resigned over the course of the GSP’s 240-year
history, and even fewer resignation letters seem to have survived.
13
For a discussion of the Treaty of Versailles’s role in this, see Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty, 322.
14
Herbert A. Strauss, “Transplanted and Transformed: German-Jewish Immigrants Since
1933,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, Vol. 2, ed.
Trommler and McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 250.
15
For an overview of U.S. immigration policies, see Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door:
American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).
Chapter 3 addresses immigration during the 1930s.
16
Strauss, 261.
17
Based on my interview with Dr. George Beichl at his home on January 26, 2006.
96 ETHNICITY MATTERS
18
Decades later, when the film “Germany’s Road to Israel” was shown at the GSP to a
Jewish audience, a Philadelphia newspaper stated that “most Jewish members resigned
during the Hitler era.” The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 11, 1967.
19
Longtime GSP director and attorney Arno Mowitz was among those rewarded for his
German nationalism when he was appointed Philadelphia’s German Consul in 1932. However,
union leaders of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers charged that Mowitz,
as the Hosiery Manufacturers’ attorney, was bringing Nazi influence and Hitler’s antiunionism
to the factory. See “Warns Workers of Nazi Trend in Hosiery Industry,” Evening
Bulletin, June 6, 1934.
20
The Bund meeting celebrating the Anschluss ended in a riot when anti-Nazi protestors
stormed in. For a description, see Timothy J. Holian, The German-Americans and World War
II: An Ethnic Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 31–2.
21
Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts, 145.
22
One such anti-German demonstration took place on May 10, 1933, in Philadelphia. Several
thousand Jews gathered at Fifth and Washington Streets and paraded to City Hall,
“protesting anti-Semitic actions of Germany’s new Nazi government.” See Fredric M.
Miller, Morris J. Vogel, and Allen F. Davis, Philadelphia Stories: A Photographic History,
1920–1960 (Philadelphia, Temple University, 1988), 88–9.
23
GSP Annual Report 1933.
24
GSP Annual Report 1936.
25
GSP Annual Report 1939.
26
GSP Minutes, January 17, 1935.
27
Bismarck and Hitler were both born in April, yet this joint celebration was unique to the
German-American community and occurred just once. Celebrating both men together
might also indicate how some German Americans viewed Hitler and his place in German
history. With Bismarck as the father of imperial Germany, Hitler seems to have been seen
as the heir of that legacy rather than as the brutal dictator he was.
28
Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 263–4.
29
Jenkins, 136–7.
30
New York Congressman Samuel Dickstein estimated that Pennsylvania alone had a Bund
membership of 20,000–30,000. See Evening Ledger, March 24, 1937.
31
Active support and membership in right-wing organizations, such as the movement led
by Catholic priest Father Coughlin, Italian Fascists, and the Ku Klux Klan, numbered more
than 20,000 in Philadelphia between 1938 and 1941. Estimate based on Jenkins, 13. When the
Klan reemerged with new vigor during the 1920s, the GSP was actively involved in opposing
new immigration quotas. Thus, it stood in direct opposition to Klan views. However, the
Klan was also a part of the Protestant movement fearful of “new immigration” from Eastern
and Southern Europe, as well as Asia. Although German-born men were not permitted to
join the Klan, naturalized German Protestants did join the American Krusaders, a Klan
affiliate. In part, many German Americans got involved because more recent immigrants
had begun to encroach upon employment territory traditionally reserved for older immigrant
groups from Germany or Great Britain, such as the steel, coal, and textile industries,
but also white-collar industries like retail. Nevertheless, the boom of the Klan in Pennsylvania
was short-lived: after 1925, record membership numbers of at least 250,000 dropped
to 20,000 and less than 5,000 by 1930. Only the pronounced concentration of members in
Philadelphia prevented the Klan from disappearing altogether. White Protestants, especially,
many of them of German descent, reacted defensively to a large influx of African
Americans and Jews in Pennsylvania by joining the Klan. Germantown and also German
neighborhoods in Philadelphia, such as Olney, had hundreds of Klan members. See Jenkins,
73–77. New York Congressman Samuel Dickstein estimated that Pennsylvania alone had a
Bund membership of 20,000–30,000. See Evening Ledger, March 24, 1937.
HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 97
32
Jenkins, 143–4.
33
For a discussion of why most Bund members were German-born immigrants who had
arrived after 1918, see Susan Canedy, America’s Nazis: A Democratic Dilemma (Menlo Park,
CA: Markgraf Publications Group, 1990).
34
Qtd. in Geoffrey Smith, To Save a Nation: American Countersubversives, the New Deal, and the
Coming of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 148. Philadelphia held a similar,
though smaller, rally on the same occasion. Scores of uniformed men from many different
organizations, especially veterans’ groups, came to hail the swastika flag, sing Nazi songs,
and chant “Heil Hitler.” GSP board member and German consul Arno Mowitz was among
those present. To be sure, some mainstream city officials were also at the gathering, which
legitimized the proceedings. Yet those who attended more than one such celebration were
more sympathetic to the right-wing cause than they later cared to remember. Jenkins, 147–8.
35
“Penna. Germans To Remain Neutral,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 1939.
36
Jenkins, 151.
37
Qtd. in Jenkins, 199. Blaming Jews and Communists for the outbreak of the war was a
mainstream conservative view. Philadelphia’s chapter of America First was led by prominent
and respected figures like Isaac Pennypacker, a prominent GSP member and the
nephew of the former Pennsylvania governor, Samuel Pennypacker. But even more conventional
meetings, such as the widely anticipated speech by Charles Lindbergh at an
America First event in May 1941, were somewhat discredited when extremists such as
Sigmund von Bosse, or Klan leader Frank Fite, showed up. Philadelphia Record, May 30, 1941,
and Jenkins, 203. According to Klaus Molzahn, son of Kurt Molzahn, von Bosse fled to
Mexico sometime in the early 1940s. Interview with Kurt Molzahn, March 25, 2006, Hanover,
PA.
38
A comparison of GSP and Bund membership records still needs to be done.
39
GSP Minutes, January 17, 1935.
40
Later, when real and suspected acts of espionage dominated newspaper headlines, the
managers of these steamship companies “were often accused of espionage and the importation
of contraband or propaganda into the United States.” They worked closely with the
German consulate under the leadership of GSP board member Arno Mowitz. Jenkins, 122,
140, 155.
41
He signed his letters to German sailors during the 1930s with “Heil Hitler” or variations
of the “German Salute.” See Erich Saul, Scrapbook 1903–1952, GAC AM2073. It is interesting
to note that Saul left the GSP sometime in 1938, perhaps because the GSP was at least
publicly denouncing Nazism at that time.
42
GSP Annual Report 1938.
43
The GSP archive contains a thick file of documents relating to the French occupation of
Germany’s industrial area. See Manuscripts Collection, box 501 Deutsch-Americana I;
World War I and Post, Nr. 2. “Didactic Literature—French Occupation of Ruhr and Rhine
Districts.”
44
Philip M.H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (London; New York:
Longman, 1997).
45
GSP Minutes, January 16, 1931.
46
T. St. John Gaffney, Breaking the Silence: England, Ireland, Wilson and the War (New York:
Horace Liveright, 1930), 312.
47
Conrad Linke folder #1, “Scrapbook with items pertaining to the lead-up to WWII, ca.
1917–1940, bulk 1939,” Manuscripts Collection.
48
I am indebted to Frank Trommler for sharing his expertise on twentieth-century German
literature with me.
49
GSP Annual Reports, 1924, 1930.
98 ETHNICITY MATTERS
50
Acknowledgement of these donations ended after 1938, although subscriptions to Der
Stürmer and Das Schwarze Korps continued until at least 1939.
51
GSP Annual Report 1937.
52
My father Klaus Pfleger, born in 1932, recalls being asked regularly to bring money to
school in support of the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland.
53
William Graf, the owner of a Germantown small business where the Deutscher Weckruf
was printed, later tried to disguise his political sympathies by pointing out that he merely
printed what he was paid for. Graf was also a GSP member and appeared on the membership
lists as early as 1923, the first year the GSP resumed publishing them again after 1917.
Jenkins, 152–3.
54
GSP Minutes, April 16, 1936.
55
GSP Annual Report 1937. The report does not mention if the film was the famous Leni
Riefenstahl film Olympia.
56
Colin Ross, Unser Amerika: De...
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - John Bevilaqua - 11-12-2009
The case against "isolationist" (i.e.) pro-Nazi America First Committee, Rev. Gerald L K Smith, Charles Lindbergh, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Rep. Hamilton Fish, II and Anastase Vonsiatsky directly from partially redacted FBI documents from the period during World War II:
http://www.5000Watches.com/OSJ/CharlesLindbergh.pdf
This PDF file is almost 6 MB so be patient please.
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - John Bevilaqua - 11-12-2009
William Nelson Cromwell was the incorporating partner of a little old country law firm known as Sullivan and Cromwell made infamous because of its association with the brothers Dulles.
He also helped to form serveral major monopolies like McCormick Harvester later International Harvester (Cyrus McCormick invented the Wheat Thresher and sold thousands of them to the Rooskies), U.S. Steel, Edison Electric and General Electric among others. He probably also created the concept of "Regime Change" as well, also passing this little technique along to his star pupils, the brothers Dulles.
And he gets the credit for turning the OSJ Knights of Malta into a true
intelligence gathering organization. William N. Cromwell, Grand Prior of OSJ during World War I, should be known as the Father of the American Monopoly, the inventor of Intelligence Gathering Agencies (which he obviously taught to the brothers Dulles), and the lobbyist for putting the river between the oceans in Panama instead of in Nicaragua. As for being the Father of Regime Change, I vote for him.
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - David Guyatt - 11-12-2009
This is a really interesting essay with many aspects worthy of serious consideration. Having read this document I also would like to know who authored it and on what sources the author drew, because I am pretty sure much of the information provided can only have derived from confidential/secret inside archives.
I also found it interesting that the meaning of the word “Corso”- as in Philip J Corso - (the mysterious “Lt. Col. XXXXXX Y ZZZZZ, OSJ” cited by Mr. Bevilaqua) is drawn from the word “Corsair” (as in the Knights Corso” meaning the spoils of their corsairing activities) which was one of the operations of these knightly orders (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Hospitaller#Foundation_and_early_history).
One therefore wonders if the spoils of piracy was an accurate family name of Col. Philip Corso or simply a name chosen to reflect his interests? Probably the former, as names sometimes do fit the man with remarkable accuracy -- the same as pets often appear to share features very similar to their masters.
This article also reminds me very much of an English gentleman I once met who conducted an intense investigation of the English Order of the KNights of St. John who he believed were responsible for engineering the overthrowing the Australian Prime MInister, Gough Whitlam. On this subject he privately published a slim volume of his investigation which was dense with facts. And fascinating it was too. In that book he also made the claim that it was the KstJ who were responsible for the assassination of JFK and claimed he had that confirmed in a conversation with a representative of the KstJ who threatened his life if the ever revealed what he had learned. Having spoken to the author I didn’t doubt for a second his sincerity and depth of research and this allegation has always stayed with me. As I recall it he said that at the time Kennedy was shot the KstJ had a representative office/commanderie in Dallas (I think it was Dallas anyway - certainly a main Texan city).
Quote:Much of their knowledge had been gained from the
work of Monseigneur Jouin of France, who, with the blessing of the Pope, researched and wrote about secret societies involved with the occult and humanist movements.
I wonder if this included the Tolouse based occult Martinist Order which had Papus as its chief? According to one author The Protocols of the Priory of Zion was probably a Martinist document that was hijacked and then used as a false flag template for a Jewish World conspiracy, when it in fact was concealing forces altogether different. To my mind this seems likely.
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - Jan Klimkowski - 11-12-2009
As an aside, one of the key works (script and film) of the French artist, symbolist and initiate, Jean Cocteau, was The Eagle with Two Heads (French title L'aigle à deux têtes).
John - whilst always retaining a certain scepticism about any hypothesis which attempts to explain everything neatly and tidily, (the uber solution, so to speak), I'm most intrigued by your research.
When you are able, in this thread or perhaps a new dedicated one, I would like to learn more of your research into why manufactured assassins, or patsies, bear the description of Candidates from Manchuria.
You may also have comments on this thead:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=223
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - John Bevilaqua - 11-12-2009
Jan,
My take on the origin of this term is a lot different than the common, generally accepted one. Based on the contents of the book called "The Russian Fascists" by Prof. John J. Stephan (Little, Brown 1979) Still available at http://www.abebooks.com I determined that Anastase Vonsiatsky had his headquarters in Harbin, Manchuoko, (Manchuria) where many of his like-minded White Russians were living out their diaspora waiting for their "annointed savior" and fearless leader "Annie" to lead them out of their dilemma and retake Mother Russia for them and for the other pro-Czarist White Russians located in Paris, France and other major cities. See Chapter titled: "The Manchurian Mafia".
And also based on his own self professed, but sometimes exaggerated, boastful written communications with Goebbels, Ribbentrop and others, he had also been annointed and appointed by them to become their "Candidate" as the new premier of a Fascist-led and dominated vanquished "Red Russian" Russian Empire. Therefore, "Prince" or "Czar" Anastase Vonsiatsky was in fact "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" himself and was indeed to become the new "Czar" of all of Russia. He held millions and millions of Czarist Ruble banknotes and surely would have been rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams.
I have reached the conclusion that Vonsiatsky and his team of "mind controllers and brain washers" within Manchuria (called Manchuoko during the Japanese occupation) used Pavlovian style conditioning, Chinese or Korean inspired techniques later used against Cardinal Josef Mindszenty from Hungary and other Korean prisoners of war, among other unknown techniques to actually train the Japanese "Kamikaze Pilots" near the end of World War II right out of Harbin. (Just a serious inference and supposition, without any solid recovered documentation, however). So perhaps these Kamikaze self-immolation Pilots and the other assassins trained by this Vonsiatsky crowd became colloquially referred to as "Manchurian Candidates" by dint of common and loosely applied terminology and it just stuck permanently. Yet another inference, but based on solid analysis.
In fact, General Charles Willoughby went to Harbin right after the war to gather evidence and other "human detritus" related to the ongoing desperate biological warfare experiments and vivisection operations ongoing in and around Harbin where either Unit 751 or Section 751 were and where these operating rooms were also located. Allegedly both Chinese prisoners of the Japanese, American and British POWs from WW II and later Korea and others were used to test the results of the deliberate application of biological agents like anthrax, botulism and the like on unsuspecting victims. The progress of these diseases was monitored and examined during live vivisection operations without any aenesthesia whatsoever. Some patients were then stitched up after these operations then examined a few days later with new incisions on top of the stitches (if they lived that long) after these diseases had advanced further. By extension both American and British POWs were subjected to "brainwashing" and "mind control" in order to force them to make incriminating statements and to sign incriminating documents, also in Harbin.
Jeanne de Mohrenschildt was actually BORN in Harbin (China) and George's favorite pseudonym was Philip Harbin or literally from Philos the Greek word for Love, "I Love Harbin." Every White Russian Nazi spy in North America reported to Vonsiatsky according to Charles Higham in American Swastika and since George was a Nazi spy, IMHO, he also reported to Vonsiatsky by logical inference.
There is a lot to consider here, including the fact that these Kamikake techniques were deliberately let out of the Genie bottle and transferred to both the Palestinian suicide bombers via Inamullah Khan who attended the WACCFL conference in Mexico City in 1958 and eventually to the 9/11 bombers as well, IMHO. How else could you "make" someone aim an aircraft at a target guaranteed to result in their own immolation? Again, a logical inference, I think, but undocumented and maybe undocumentable.
More later...
I hope to add a thread on Richard Condon's so called Dirty Dozen, about 10 of whom actually show up directly or indirectly in this SKOM and OSJ article. Much of this info has been posted on Spartacus Education Forum already. That site seems to be loaded with anti-USA anarchists convinced that the ONLY alphabet soup agency involved in the JFK hit was the CIA and they prefer to totally ignore the obvious roles of Army Intel, the DIA, DISC and even the ONI. When you combine and cross-correlate the independent evidence offered by Condon and the author(s) of this article which appeared totally unattributed on the actual website of The OSJ what comes out of this correlation are not only Condon's Dirty Dozen but also a hit list of other major ultra right wing arch-Catholic Military Intel Agents named by many as suspects in the JFK conundrum.
I was also amazed to find out that William N. Cromwell, one of the original founding partners in Sullivan and Cromwell "INVENTED" the concept of Regime Change around 1900. Apparently he taught the brothers Dulles all he knew about the concept and they learned their lessons well. He also turned SKOM and OSJ into "intelligence gathering" operations discussed on Wikipedia I think.
And yes this is an Uber-based solution, IMHO, not only because it explains away the obvious presence of both SKOM and OSJ in the JFK plot and in the FDR plot in the 1930's involving John J. Raskob, OSJ from Rockefellers Chase Manhattan Bank, but because it covers the entire vertical and horizontal spectrum of these characters (from The Pelly/Smith Stormtroopers and Silver Shirters, to the Wall Streeters, to the Intelligence Operatives both Military and CIA/OSS) and all their associates, including their motivations, their inspirations and their ultimate goal: the creation of a Chivalric Order of modern day Militant Knights Templar who existed only to combat any "infidels" and "heathens" who attack the Mother Church whether they were Communists, Muslims or Martians.
Gotta keep those offering baskets circulating at all costs. "Dominic, go frisk'em" as we used to say instead of "Dominus Vobiscum" (The Word of God perhaps?) or whatever. I never took Latin but I was raised as a rabid right wing arch-Catholic within a rabidly anti-Communist AND anti-Nazi household within a boiling pot anti-Castro exile community in Dade County Florida, and almost totally against my will, I might add, which is the ONLY reason that I am infinitely well versed on some or all of these topics. I truly was intended to become a "Teenage Fascist" and a Knight Templar.
Quod Est Demonstratum. (That which was to be proved.)
I will never rest my case until I am too old to type or to think clearly. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to post on this site, whose existence was totally unknown to me until recently. And David, I want to publicly apologize for over-reacting to your comments on some of the background and history of the new Pope and the possible sinister implications of his Germanic origins. It was just the Chivalric Knight Templar coming out of me, you heathen. <grin> Those Dominican and Jesuit Priests and Nuns (Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) and Marist Brothers in Miami really did think they were raising and training even more Chivalric Knights Templar as part of their curriculum, God Bless'em. To this day, my old high school has an alumni group and honor roll where approximately equal time is given to military, industrial, athletic, academic and religious contributions to our society. I could have even written my early autobiography perhaps titled: "I Was a Teenage Fascist" and I actually regret applying that perhaps grossly over-stated moniker to Dr. Harry Aguilar at one time just because his parents ran John Birch Society cells and held Birch Society meetings in his home which was populated with Birch propaganda in every corner. I was only trying to make a point because he might have even been a better trained and more qualified "Teenage Fascist" than even myself. You can better realize what was happening during the early Cold War days when you see how our parents raised us to extract them from under the aegis of the perceived threats from the Khrushchev regime. Even for them it meant recovered contacts with parents, family and friends stuck behind the Iron Curtain, and the recovery of perceived and real wealth appropriated by either the Communist or Nazi regimes. My parents lost their grandparents and their family wealth to either the Nazis in Poland or to the Communists in Hungary. I am talking over one million dollars in 1950 valued dollars. I too, am justifiably steamed.
At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds - Helen Reyes - 12-12-2009
I can't get through that initial wall of text all in one sitting, but my initial thought is that this goes a long way toward explaining george de mohrenschildt's origins and alliances. it might also help to explain how bell helicopter received designs from the third reich scientists, which i understand is the case. is there a pseudo-royal house of abkhazia? I remember coming across an old lady in canada who was a princess of abkhazia and had come by way of the far east, china, maybe harbin. anyway, i assumed she was tied into the white russian community there.