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Bilderberg Conferences

Origins of the Bilderberg meetings

[This site campaigns for a press conference at all Bilderberg venues - and a declaration from the steering committee that any consensus reached must be in our public, not their private interest]

Creator and chairman of the Bilderbergers was a card carrying member of Hitler's SS (separate page all about Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands)

This photograph was taken at the first Bilderberg meeting at Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland in 1954. Hugh Gaitskell is in the far corner of the room looking rather sceptical and you can just see him scratching his chin.
Another more limited photo of the same room which includes chairman Prince Bernhard is here

Novus Ordo Seclorum: Pax Americana

MUST READ: The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification - by Prof. Mike Peters in 'Lobster' 32

04Apr12 - Inaugural Bilderberg meeting held in SS Field Marshal Mod...

March 2012 - Audio clips from the 1954 first Bilderberg meeting

18Mar12 - Operation Market Garden's curious Bilderberg connections

Rare book about Hitler's No. 2 whose death was faked in 1972: Marti...

Official attendee list PDF from the first ever Bilderberg meeting in Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Hotel, Oosterbeek, Holland, May 1954

"Imagine yourselves to be dictators of Europe" extract from a paper...

The Round Table - Extracted from The Anglo-American Establishment, ...

An Uncommon View of the Birth of an Uncommon Market - Alfred Mendez

1939-1945 - The Council on Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies ...

'Memoirs of an Eminence Grise' - by John Pomian - 1972 - extract fr...

Sat21Dec1968 - Daily Telegraph - Sikorski pilot denies role in deat...

Eisenhower’s special assistant for psychological warfare.......

'The Global Manipulators' by Robert Eringer - Chapter 1 'In Search ...

'Uniting the West' - by ex British chancellor Denis Healey - from h...

'The Hôtel de Bilderberg' from 'H. R. H. Prince Bernhard of the Net...

'Bosnia, Bohemia & Bilderberg: The Cold War Internationale' - A...

'Prince Bernhardt's Secret Society' by A.K. Chesterton

Historical Links

Trident research page now gone - recovered here

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NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: PAX AMERICANA

http://www.angelfire.com/wv2/blueridgeprint/

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER,

A WORLD FEDERAL UNION CALLED - the UNITED STATES OF MAN (originally entitled UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN) - by Clarence K. Streit, 1941, author also of UNION NOW

This work, at the outset of Hitler’s rise, led to the establishment of the United Nations and its relevance to post-9/11 geo-political foreign policy by the governments of the United States and Great Britain is evident--the precise formula being executed by Bush and Blair governments!

UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN was Streit’s second edition and expanded version of UNION NOW, which was widely distributed and read during WWII in America and England, what George Orwell called “this much-discussed book”.

Now more obscure, this publisher, upon discovery, saw immediately the relevance of this book to post-9/11 events and thought it needed new distribution to warn of this master blueprint for Novus Ordo Seclorum—a new world order. The relevance of UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN can be readily observed by the Bush-Blair response and Anglo-American governments coalition to launch a global “War on Terrorism” to ”reorder the world” after September 11, 2001 under the guise of establishing “democracy”, “peace”, and “freedom” in the world.

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: PAX AMERICANA (Union Now with Britain)

Read this historical treatise and see how the events of 9/11 have accelerated this blueprint for an American-led new world order!

"Out of these troubled times [Iraq/Kuwait conflict], our fifth objective -- a new world order can emerge: a new era...We're now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders." September 11, 1990 - Iraq Speech by President George H. W. Bush

"Our mission is clear: to rid the world of evil" - Pres. George W. Bush, post-Sept. 11, 2001

"Out of the shadow of this evil [9/11], should emerge lasting good... This is a moment to seize...let us re-order this world around us." - British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Oct. 2, 2001 (BBC)

http://www.angelfire.com/wv2/blueridgeprint/

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The Bilderberg Group & the project of European unification

Nato=Nazi - link four - click here for next

From Lobster 32 http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk

This article copyright Lobster Magazine and Sociology Prof. Mike Peters

Lobster is a six-monthly magazine/journal devoted to parapolitics, uncovering hidden forces that govern the way we live.  Typical articles include:  'The CIA, drugs and the media', Jane Affleck's web survey, 'the Rockefeller UFO initiative'.  It is an independently published by the editor and needs all the support it can get.  The following article has been used with permission, if you like what you read do please consider taking out Lobster's modest subscription.

The annual cost is between six and nine pounds stirling depending on where you live.  Postal address and email at the bottom of the article.

You can subscribe to Lobster here:   http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk

Download this paper as an .rtf text document here

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

Prof. Mike Peters

Introduction

Despite their reputation for 'empiricism', British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called 'Establishment' in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain became diverted from empirical investigation of power, as the study of national and international power-structures became conducted under the aegis of increasingly abstract theoretical categories derived from Marxism, and in particular by a wave of concepts based on Poulantzas's 'structuralist' critique of Miliband, and was followed by ever more esoteric discussions of the 'theory' of the state (e.g. Jessop, 1990), culminating in the hegemony of a post-Marxist version of Gramsci's conception of 'hegemony' - in which 'struggle' is posited without any identifiable human beings as its active protagonists, and with the stakes reduced to ideas rather than concrete interests.

This was in sharp contrast with the USA, where the impetus of C. Wright Mills's pioneering study of the network of interests involved in the Cold War (Mills, 1956) was continued by a flourishing group of scholars. There has been nothing in Britain of comparable scope or detail to the work conducted in the USA by G. W. Domhoff, Thomas Dye, Mark Mizruchi or Noam Chomsky, etc.

The present article is concerned with one specific facet of American power-structure research which, I believe, has important implications for the study of power in the UK. This is the subject of power-elite networks and forums, conceptualised as arenas for the conduct of intra-capitalist and inter-corporate strategic debates and long-range social planning, from which wider 'democratic' interference is carefully excluded.

The particular institution about which I will present information is the so-called 'Bilderberg Group', which is an interesting example of this kind of power-elite forum. It is one among a number of little-publicised institutions which have played an important role providing a means for debates and discussions to take place amongst different capitalist groups and different national governments over long-term planning issues and, especially, in Co-ordinating strategic policy at an international level. Other such bodies on this trans-national scale include the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the USA, with its UK sister organisation, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (otherwise known simply as Chatham House) and the Trilateral Commission (which itself grew out of Bilderberg meetings and has been essentially a more globalist version of the latter, since it incorporates Japanese representatives). Each of these bodies will be mentioned in what follows.

One of the 'functions' such institutions appear to serve is that of 'mediating' between the economic interests of private capital and the requirement of a general interest on the part of the capitalist class as a whole. I shall suggest that much of the theorising about the 'state' in the tradition of structural Marxism since the 1970s has confused this relation between capital and national governments, owing to the tendency to reify the abstraction called ‘the state' and posit it as enjoying a virtual autonomy vis-à-vis capital; whereas the empirical evidence lends more support to the rather hastily dismissed (and often grotesquely caricatured) model called 'instrumentalism’.

To anticipate what will be said later, I believe that one of the key assumptions often made by structural Marxists, namely that the capitalist class is always divided into competing fractions which have no mechanisms for co-ordination other than the state, is not empirically sustainable. Part of this misconception, it could be said, derives from an over-literal understanding of the concept of the 'market' as constituting the only social relation amongst different fractions of capital. At least as far as the very large, and above all, the international (or as we would say in today's jargon, the ‘global’) corporations are concerned, this is definitely not the case: very sophisticated organs do exist whereby these capitalist interests can and do hammer out common lines of strategy. Bilderberg is one of these mechanisms.

The Context

As the second world war drew to a close, the capitalist class in Western Europe was under severe threat from an upsurge of working class radicalism, the management of which required a strategy more sophisticated than conventional repression, and the first steps were taken, by political panes of both left and right, to develop 'corporatist' programmes based on a kind of national protectionism. By contrast, in the USA, the war had brought to dominance an internationally-oriented capitalist class who saw very clearly that their interests lay in a thorough 'liberalisation' (1) of the world market, abolition of tariffs etc.. Only the false wisdom of hindsight could make the eventual Atlantic Alliance system that emerged by 1950 seem preordained by 'objective' historical forces. Indeed, so used have we become to hearing phrases like 'American imperialism' and witnessing US interventions throughout the world that we can forget just how difficult it was for this internationally oriented fraction of the American capitalist class to impose its agenda upon the US state: the deep-rooted tendency of American political culture has always been what Europeans call Isolationist' and it took extensive political work to drag the Americans into these foreign entanglements. In this paper I will not be looking in any detail at how these interests influenced the US government during and after the Second World War, but rather at how they succeeded in effecting the integration of the Western European capitalist class into a new Atlantic alliance system

The period 1945-50 is highly complex and debate still rages over the origin and nature of the 'Cold War': for example over the degree to which the US was acting offensively or defensively against a (real or imagined) Soviet threat, as well as over the relation between the external or geopolitical aspect of the Cold War on the one hand and its domestic, ideological or 'class' aspect. And die recent work of. Alan Milward, for example, has thrown into question many of the received assumptions about the causes and consequences of the 'supranational' institutions created in Europe in the aftermath of the war (Milward, 1984 and 1994; Anderson, 1996).

The beginnings of a clarification of these events were made with the pioneering analysis of Kees Van der Pijl, in conjunction with other Dutch Marxist scholars (Fennema, Overbeek etc.) ten years ago, together with the detailed empirical work of US power-researchers (e.g. the journal Critical Sociology). With the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent 'coming out' of veteran anti-Communists now prepared to open up some of their dubious accomplishments to outside scrutiny (Peter Coleman, Brian Crozier e.g.), more direct documentary evidence of the scope and intensity of covert US involvement in European politics in the post-war period is now available.

The Marshall Plan and NATO

The official version of the history of the creation of the Atlantic system reads like the 'lives and teachings of saints (Milward, 1992). in these school textbook accounts, each of the pillars of the post-war world order has its great founding father, whose photographs invariably appear in magazine articles:

* the IMF and the World Bank are the work of Keynes

* European economic recovery is the work of General Marshall

* NATO is the work of Ernest Bevin, and

* the European Community is the work of Jean Monnet (with his faithful discipline Schuman)

These are not just myths; they are, in intelligence parlance, more like 'cover stories'.

The Marshall Plan is named after the speech on June 5 1947 by US Secretary of State Marshall, which invited European countries to join in a co-operative plan for economic reconstruction, with explicit requirements for trade liberalisation and increases in productivity. Over the next ten months there emerged the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, which set up the Economic Co-operation Agency (ECA) to administer the European Recovery Programme (ERP) - the so-called 'Marshall Aid' - which gave $13 billion in aid to 16 western European states. In four years, the ECA was superseded by the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) in 1951 which in turn was transformed into the Foreign Operations Agency (FOA) in 1954, later the International Co-operation Agency (ICA) in 1955 and finally the Agency for International Development (AID) in 196l (Carew 1987 p. 6ff). it is generally recognised that this aid had a decidedly militaristic purpose, being essentially a prerequisite for the development of NATO. (2)

It is less generally acknowledged, however, that this unprecedented exercise of international generosity (dubbed by Churchill the 'most unsordid act in history') served direct economic purposes for the internationally oriented US corporations which promoted it. William Clayton, for example, the Under-secretary for Economic Affairs, whose tour of Europe and letters sent back to Washington played a key role in preparing the plan, and who pushed it through Congress, personally profited to the tune of $700,000 a year; and his own company, Anderson, Clayton & Co. secured $10 million of Marshall, Plan orders up to the summer of 1949. (Schuman 1954 p. 240). General Motors similarly got $5.5 million worth of orders between July 1950 and 1951 (14.7% of the total) and they Ford Motor Company got $1 million (4.2% of the total).

Roots in the Council on Foreign Relations

The origins of the Marshall Plan are in fact to be found in the 'War and Peace Study Groups' instituted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1939. (For the details see Shoup & Minter p. 117 ff). on December 6 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation granted the Council nearly $50,000 to finance the first year of the project. Well over 120 influential individuals (academics and business leaders), at least 5 cabinet levels departments and 12 separate government agencies, bureaux or offices were involved in this. There were altogether 362 meetings and no less than 682 separate documents produced. I find it frankly astonishing that virtually none of the British academic scholarship on this period even acknowledges the existence of the CFR, let alone the War and Peace Study Groups. Evidence is surely required to show that they had no influence, if that is what scholars believe.

The plan which Marshall presented in his speech had already been outlined in the proposals of a CFR study group of 1946 headed by the lawyer Charles M. Spofford and David Rockefeller, entitled 'Reconstruction in Western Europe'; and the specific proposal for unifying the Western European coal and steel basin as a bulwark against the USSR was made by John Foster Dulles in January 1947.

To trace the origin of the movement for European unification, however, requires that we go back to May 8 1946 and an address given at Chatham House by a Pole named Joseph Retinger. In this talk he outlined a plan for a federal Europe in which the states would relinquish part of their sovereignty. At the time, Retinger was secretary general of the Independent League for European Co-operation (ILEC), run by the Belgian Prime Minister Paul van Zeeland. During the war Retinger worked closely with van Zeeland and other exile leaders who would become prominent in the Bilderberg network, (including Paul Rijkens, whom we will meet again shortly). (3) Out of these connections was born in 1942-3 the Benelux customs union, a kind of prototype of the Common Market.

The ideas adumbrated by Retinger were not new: there is a whole history of such projects for European unification and for even larger global schemes. One might just note here the assumption of the need for a 'great power' status as well as the almost taken-for-granted racism which informed Retinger's thinking:

'The end of the period during which the white man spread his activities over the whole globe saw the Continent itself undergoing a process of internal disruption........ there are no big powers left in continental Europe....... [whose] inhabitants after all, represent the most valuable human element in the world.' (Retinger 1946, p. 7)

Shortly after this speech, Retinger was invited by the US ambassador, Averell Harriman, to the USA to secure American support for ILEC.

'I found in America a unanimous approval for our ideas among financiers, businessmen and politicians. Mr Leffingwell, senior partner in J. P. Morgan's [bank], Nelson and David Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan [chair of General Motors], Charles Hook, President of the American Rolling Mills Company, Sir William Wiseman, [British SIS and] partner in Kuhn Loeb [New York investment bank], George Franklin and especially my old friend Adolf Berle Jr [CFR], were all in favour, and Berle agreed to lead the American section [of ILEC]. John Foster Dulles also agreed to help. (Pomian 1972, p. 212)

Thus was formed the European Movement (whose first congress at the Hague in 1948 is- the origin of the Council of Europe), which received substantial contributions from US government secret funds as well as private sources via the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE). The names mentioned above are significant in the present context: Leffingwell preceded John McCloy and David Rockefeller as CFR chair, 1946-53, and had been a CFR director since 1927, while Franklin was executive director of the CFR 1953-7 and was later a Trilateral Commission Co-ordinator: also, incidentally an in-law of the Rockefellers.

US funding for the European Movement extended beyond 1952, most of it going to the European Youth Campaign, initiated by John McCloy, whose own career virtually personifies the Atlantic ruling class as a whole: a corporate lawyer of relatively humble origins, he became, through his contacts at Harvard, assistant Secretary of War 1941-45 and first President of the World Bank (IBRD), which he revamped to suit the interests of Wall Street; and then US High Commissioner for Germany 1949-52 (where, among other things, he enabled Krupp to regain control of his steel companies, advising on the establishment of the Krupp-Stiftung, modelled on the Ford Foundation - he was connected to Adenauer through his German wife, whose sister married Lewis Douglas, J. P. Morgan financier and later US ambassador to Britain), after which he became a director of both the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Ford Foundation in 1953. He was also an active member of the Bilderberg Group, becoming chair of the Council on Foreign Relations itself.

As for ACUE, its chair was William Donovan (who ran OSS - forerunner of the CLA during the war) and its vice-chair was Allen Dulles (who was a leading figure in the CFR War and Peace Study Group during the early part of the war, and later the director of the CIA); and it was run in Europe by another CIA executive, Thomas W. Braden.

The Bilderberg Group

'The Treaty of Rome [1957], which brought the Common Market into being, was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings.' (George McGhee, former US ambassador to West Germany)

'Bilderberg' takes its name from the hotel, belonging to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, near Arnhem, where, in May 1954 the first meeting took place of what has ever since been called the Bilderberg Group. While the name persisted, its meetings are held at different locations. Prince Bernhard himself (who, incidentally, was actually German not Dutch) was chair until 1976 when he was forced to resign because of the Lockheed bribery scandal. The possible significance of this group may be gleaned from the status of its participants: the membership comprises those individuals who would, on most definitions, be regarded as members of the 'ruling class' in Western Europe and North America-In particular, the conferences brought together important figures in most of the largest international corporations with leading politicians and prominent intellectuals (in both academia and journalism).

Moreover, virtually all the European institutions we take for granted today, or treat as if they 'emerged' as a matter of course, from the ECSC, EEC and Euratom down to the present European Union, were conceived, designed and brought into existence through the agency of the people involved in Bilderberg.

Secrecy

What Gill has referred to, with disarming brevity, as its 'almost completely secretive' character (Gill 1990, p. 129) is neither incidental nor superficial but integral to its functioning. It is essential that these discussions be kept out of the public sphere. The lengths to which the organisers go are quite astonishing. An entire hotel is taken over in advance (existing guests being moved out) and a whole caravanserai, including special catering staff and armed security guards, descend on the site several days in advance. I recommend the amusing account by Robert Eringer - to my knowledge the only journalistic investigation yet conducted (Eringer 1980). The maintenance of this secrecy has been remarkably effective. In 1967, Cecil King, then chair of the International Publishing Corporation (at the time the press group with the largest circulation in the UK) and chair of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, formally requested his fellow proprietors to see to it that 'on no account should any report or even speculation about the content of the conferences be printed' (quoted in Sklar 1980, p. 178).

On one of the few occasions when Bilderberg meetings were mentioned in a major British newspaper, the outcome was quite interesting. In the 'Lombard' column of the Financial Times, C. Gordon Tether wrote on May 6 1975: 'If the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.' In a column written almost a year later, for the March 3 l976 edition, Tether wrote: 'The Bilderbergers have always insisted upon clothing their comings and goings in the closest secrecy. Until a few years back, this was carried to such lengths that their annual conclave went entirely unmarked in the world's press. In the more recent past, the veil has been raised to the extent of letting it be known that the meetings were taking place. But the total ban on the reporting of what went on has remained in force....Any conspiratologist who has the Bilderbergers in his sights will proceed to ask why it is that, if there is so little to hide, so much effort is devoted to hiding it.'

This column never appeared: it was censored by the Financial Times editor Mark Fisher (himself a member of the Trilateral Commission), and Tether was finally dismissed from the 'Lombard' column in August 1976.

What goes on at Bilderberg?

It is important at the outset to distinguish the active, on-going membership from the various people who are occasionally invited to attend. Many of those invited to come along, perhaps to report on matters pertaining to their expertise, have little idea there is a formally constituted group at all, let alone one with its own grand agenda. Hence the rather dismissive remarks by people like sixties media guru Marshall McLuhan, who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1969 in Denmark, that he was 'nearly suffocated at the banality and irrelevance,' describing them as 'uniformly nineteenth century minds pretending to relate to the twentieth century'. Another of those who have attended, Christopher Price, then Labour MP for Lewisham West, found it 'all very fatuous.... icing on the cake with nothing to do with the cake.' (Eringer 1980, p. 26). Denis Healey, on the other hand, who was in from the beginning and later acted as British convenor, says that 'the most valuable [meetings] to me while I was in opposition were the Bilderberg Conferences'. (Healey 1990, p. 195)

Bilderberg from the beginning has been administered by a small core group, constituted since 1956 as a steering committee, consisting of a permanent chair, a US chair, European and North American secretaries and a treasurer. Invitations are 'only sent to important and generally respected people who through their special knowledge or experience, their personal contacts and their influence in national and international circles can further the aims set by Bilderberg.' (Retinger, cited in Sklar p. 168)

John Pomian, Retinger's secretary observed that:

'...during the first 3 or 4 years the all-important selection of participants was a delicate and difficult task. This was particularly so as regards politicians. It was not easy to persuade the top office holders to come Retinger displayed great skill and an uncanny ability to pick out people who in a few years time were to accede to the highest offices in their respective countries today there are very few figures among governments on both sides of the Atlantic who have not attended at least one of these meetings.' (Pomian, pp. 254-5)

The Bilderberg discussions are organised on the principle of reaching consensus rather than through formal resolutions and voting. Such is the influence and standing of the active members that, if consensus for action is arrived at, one might expect this to be carried out and the resulting decision to be implemented in the West as a whole. But the exact position of the group, and that of other such groups, is only discernible by a close scrutiny of the specific careers and connections of the individual participants. Here, one has to say that social theorists seem convinced of the irrelevance of this kind of information, which would be called 'prosopographic' (i.e. data pertaining to concrete individuals, which companies they represent, their family connections etc.). This is somewhat contradictory, of course, because in their every-day roles, social theorists are just as interested in this kind of information as anyone else, and display a keen sense of its political relevance when it comes to conducting their own careers: but it has it nonetheless become almost a matter of principle to denounce use of this kind of data in social science itself. This tendency seems to come from a reification of the concept of 'roles' (as if these were real rather than constructs) and possibly from a functionalist assumption that social systems are subject to laws; with concrete human actors having no significance in shaping outcomes.

Origins of Bilderberg

The initiative for the first convocation came from Joseph Retinger, in conjunction with Paul Rijkens, President of Unilever. Retinger has already been introduced; and the significance of Unilever needs to be examined briefly. Unilever is one of the largest and most powerful multinational corporations in the world and one of the top European capitalist companies. In the 1950's the advisory directors of Unilever were as follows (and I'm drawing attention to the links with the Rotterdam Bank and Philips, the electrical firm):

· H.M. Hirschfield: also on the board of Philips and Rotterdam Bank and with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs during the war, and after it Commissioner for the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands;

· K.P. Van der Mandel, also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;

· Paul Rijkens: also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;

· H.L. Wolterson: also chair of Philips and on the board of Heldring and Pearson (linked with the Rotterdam Bank);

· P S.F Otten: also President of Philips (and married to a member of the Philips family)

One of the unusual features of Unilever is its bi-national structure (Stokman et al, 1985): it is a jointly-owned AngloDutch company, with a 50/r0 structure and a unitary board. This was a very useful device during the war, when operations could be shifted easily from the Netherlands to the UK. Philips had a similar arrangement under a Dutch law called the Corvo Law, whereby in an emergency it could divide itself into two parts, which it did when the Germans invaded: one with its HQ in Germany and the other American. Both these parts got large military contracts during the war, playing a role on both sides (Aaronovitch 1961, pp. 110-11). Unilever's financial advisers are the US investment bank Lazard Freres, which handles the private financial affairs of many of the world's wealthy families, including the Agnellis of Fiat. (See Koenig, 1990, Reich. 1983, Business Week June 18 1984).

Unilever's chief adviser on international affairs was David Mitrany, whose book, A Working Peace Svstem, published in 1943, secured him this post. (He also worked for Chatham House). it was Mitrany who coined the term 'functionalism' to refer to the strategy of supra-national integration through a series of sectoral processes of internationalisation, designed to set in motion an autonomous logic, making inevitable further integration and ultimately making national states obsolete (Groom and Taylor p. 125 ff.). In the post-war period there were three basic models for European union: alongside the 'functionalists' (in this sense), were the 'inter-governmentalists' (e.g. Spaak) and the 'federalists' (e.g. Monnet himself). In the 1960s the functionalists used the slogan 'Atlantic Partnership' as the framework for the integration or synchronisation of US and European interests.

The immediate chain of events leading to the setting up of the first conference was as follows. Prince Bernhard set off for the USA in 1952 to visit his old friend Walter Bedell Smith, director of the newly-formed CIA. Smith put the organisation of the American end into the hands of Charles D. Jackson (special assistant for psychological warfare to the US President), who appointed John S. Coleman (president of the Burroughs Corporation. and a member of the Committee for a National Trade Policy), who in turn briefly became US chair of Bilderberg.

Charles Jackson was president of the Committee for a Free Europe (forerunner of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) whose extensive operations financing and organising anti-Communist social democratic political intellectuals has only recently been fully documented (see Coleman 1989); and ran the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe in Germany. Earlier he had been publisher of Fortune magazine and managing director of Time/Life, and during the war was deputy head of psychological warfare for Eisenhower. At the time of Bernhard's visit he was working with a committee of businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic which approved the European Payments Union.

It was thus a European initiative, and its aim was, in official bland language, to 'strengthen links' between Western Europe and the USA. A selected list of people to be invited to the first conference was drawn up by Retinger, with Prince Bernhard and Rijkens, from the European countries of NATO plus Sweden. The resulting group consisted of the Belgian and Italian prime ministers, Paul van Zeeland and Alcide de Gasperi (CDU), from France both the right wing prime minister Antoine Pinay and the Socialist leader Guy Mollet; diplomats like Pietro Quaroni of Italy and Panavotis Pipinelis of Greece; top German corporate lawyer Rudolf Miller and the industrialist Otto Wolff von Amerongen and the Danish foreign minister Ole Bjorn Kraft (publisher of Denmark’s top daily newspaper); and from England came Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell from the Labour Party, Robert Boothby from the Conservative Party, Sir Oliver Franks from the British state, and Sir Colin Gubbins, who had headed the Special Operations Executive (SOL) during the war.

On the American side, the members of the first Bilderberg assembly included:

· George Ball, who was head of Lehman Brothers, a former high State Department official, where he was architect of the policy of Atlantic Partnership, and later member of the Trilateral Commission. Ball was closely associated with Jean Monnet, owing to his work as legal counsel for the ECSC and the French delegation to the Schuman Plan negotiations.

· David Rockefeller was the key American member of Bilderberg. Space only permits the briefest sketch of his direct economic and political involvements: head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, member of the Business Council, the US council of the International Chamber of Commerce, and, of course, the founder of the Trilateral Commission.

· Dean Rusk: US Secretary of State 1961-69, earlier President of the Rockefeller Foundation 1952-60, having succeeded John Foster Dulles, himself an earlier Secretary of State and - this is not at all a coincidence - a close personal friend of Jean Monnet whom he had first met at Versailles in 1918 as well as of Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State and the true author of the Marshall Plan.

The final list was 67. Since then, the group enlarged somewhat, but the steering group remained the same size. (4)

After Retinger's death in 1960, the role of secretary was taken over by E. H. van der Beugel, who had headed the Dutch bureau for the Marshall Plan and later became president of KLM airlines and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. After the resignation of Prince Bernhard, the role of chair was taken by British ex-prime minister Lord Home.

The status of the group and its meetings is ostensibly 'private'. Gill names it simply 'a private international relations council', but nothing could be more misleading than this name private, unless in its sense of ‘secret’ When political leaders gather together with a view to arriving at consensus, in conjunction with leaders of industry and finance and press magnates and leading journalists, then this is not the same kind of thing as an assembly of ordinary private citizens. The vocabulary of pluralist political science ('lobbies', 'non-governmental organisations' etc.) systematically distorts the actual power relations at work in these different kinds of associations. It is even questionable whether Bilderberg meetings are really 'private' in the legal sense of non-governmental. Robert Eringer, for example, having received an official reply that 'government officials attend in a personal and not an official capacity', found that in fact officials had attended Bilderberg conferences at government expense and in their official capacity. The British Foreign Office responded to his queries by saying 'we can find no trace of the Bilderberg Group in any of our reference works on international organisations', while he later learnt that the Foreign Office had paid for British members to attend Bilderberg conferences.

Van der Pijl's assessment of the role of Bilderberg seems about as accurate as the available information would allow:

'Rather than constituting an all-powerful secret Atlantic directorate, Bilderberg served, at best, as the environment for developing ideas in that direction, and secrecy was necessary for allowing the articulation of differences rather than for keeping clear-cut projects from public knowledge. In this sense Bilderberg functioned as the testing ground for new initiatives for Atlantic unity.' (Van der Pijl p. 183)

But on occasions the group is known to have exerted real power. An (unnamed) German participant at the 1974 conference held six months after the Arab Israeli War at Edmond de Rothschild's hotel at Megeve in France, commented:

'Half a dozen knowledgeable people had managed, in effect, to set the world's monetary system wolfing again [after OPEC's quadrupling of oil prices], and it was important to try to knit together our networks of personal contacts. We had to resist institutionalism, bureaucratic red-tape, and the creation of new procedures and committees. Official bodies should be put in the position of ratifying what had been jointly prepared in advance.' (Sklar, p. 171)

The European 'Community'

The Treaty of Rome signed on March 25 1957 created the 'common market' (the European Economic Community) and its roots were laid down in the ECSC (the European Coal and Steel Community) established on April 18 1951, based on the Schuman Plan of May 9 1950 (Vaughan 1976, Milward 1984). It is not implausible to suggest that the route from the one to the other in fact passed through the first five Bilderberg conferences, May 1954 at Oosterbeek (Netherlands), March 1955 at Barbizon (France), September the same year at Garmisch (Germany), May 1956 at Fredensborg (Denmark) and finally in February 1957 at St. Simon's Island (Georgia, USA); and that these secret meetings played a decisive role in overcoming the opposing, centrifugal tendencies symbolised by the collapse of the European Defence Community in 1954, the Hungarian revolution and its suppression and the fiasco of the Anglo-French adventure at Suez in 1956 - the last gasp of independent European imperialism.

Even more important the 'protectionism' implicit in the European unification project was successfully subordinated to the ‘liberalising’ hegemony of the Americans, through the close involvement of the key US players at every stage. The evidence for this is entirely circumstantial, and this hypothesis must remain speculative, but I believe there is a prima facie case to launch an investigation. It should be clear from the details recounted earlier that not all the possible roads led to the Rome Treaty, and that there is far more to the politics of European 'integration' than the legislative enactments already known about.

Monnet's network

Monet himself, who mentions-neither Retinger nor Bilderberg in his memoirs (Monnet 1978), cannot have been unaware of the activities of these crucial constituents of his programme. However much he may be portrayed in the hagiographies as a far-sighted idealist, Monnet was, first and foremost, an international financier, with an extensive network of connections on both sides of the Atlantic, occupying a particular place in the configuration of capitalist interests forming what Van der Pijl calls the Atlantic circuit of money capital (Van der Pijl 1984). He was, for example, a close friend of all the key figures in the US power structure; but, more importantly, his network centred around the New York investment banks Lazard Freres (run by Andre Meyer who was also on the board of Rockefeller's Chase International Bank), and Goldmann Sachs, which, after the war gravitated into the Rockefeller orbit. Monnet's right-hand man, Pierre Uri, was European director of Lehman Brothers; and Robert Marjolin, one of Monnet's assistants in the first modernisation plan, subsequently joined the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Uri and Marjolin were also active in Bilderberg.

When Monnet resigned from his position of 'High Authority' in the ECSC in 1955 to run his Action Committee for a United States of Europe (ACUSE), his secretary at ECSC, Max Kohnstamm who had earlier been private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina, (i.e. Prince Bernhard's mother-in-law), and then Dutch representative in the Schuman Plan negotiations, became the vice-president of ACUSE, which had extensive overlaps with Bilderberg. Kohnstamm, for example, later became a member of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, and Georges Berthoin, who was Monnet's private secretary at the ECSC 1951-55, took over Kohnstamm's place on the Trilateral Commission in 197S. Francois Duchene and Paul Delouvner, who both worked for ECSC in the fifties (and joined the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s), Guy Mollet and Antoine Pinay were in the Bilderberg network (5)

Europe since the fifties

It would be simply too large and complex a matter to trace the twists and turns in the politics of European unification since the period from the fifties to the present. Too much water has flowed under the bridge, and it is doubtful that it is any longer even the same bridge, so many times has Europe' or the European idea' had to be periodically 'relaunched'. Instead of even attempting this in broad outline, I will draw attention very briefly to the role played by secretive and unaccountable organisations of members of the European economic and political elites.

One little-reported group, for example, which seems to wield immense influence is the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). To my knowledge there have only been two or three reports of this group in the British press, and yet in articulating the demands and interests of the largest and most powerful European multinational corporations, it surely calls for close study. I suspect this is the same group as that mentioned in passing in Charles Grant's biography of Jacques Delors. Delors' arrival as European Commissioner in 198S, he says, could not have occurred at a more propitious moment: he had spent the autumn of 1984 searching for a 'Big Idea' to relaunch the EEC.

'That autumn, in Brussels, Delors had met a group of officials and industrialists brought together by Max Kohnstamm, who had been Monnet's chief assistant. After Monnet's death in 1979, Kohnstamm had become one of the guardians of the sacred name of federalism. The Kohnstamm group advised Delors to make the internal market his priority and to lay down a timetable of eight years (the life of two Commissions) for its achievement...... At the same time Wisse Dekker, the chairman of Philips, made several speeches calling for the EEC to remove its internal barriers by 1990.' (Grant 1994, p. 66)

If this is in fact referring to the same group as that known as the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), then we have an example of a continuity between the fifties and today. This ERT comprises the chairs/CEOs of the leading European multinational corporations and it is by no means a mere assembly of dignitaries. This is an extremely powerful body. According to research conducted by the ASEED collective, its reports feed directly into the European Commission decision making process. One of its first reports, for example, entitled 'Missing Links', urged the immediate construction of a series of large-scale transport projects, including the Channel Tunnel. As well as Dekker of Philips, other leading figures in the ERT are Agnelli of Flat, Gyllenhammer of Volvo, and Denys Henderson of ICI.

Theoretical Excursus

A persistent problem with theories of power over the last 20 years has been their lack of engagement with empirical evidence, compounded by the demonstrable empirical ignorance of theorists. It is as if every academic feels able to develop theories about power, and engage in debates it, without any requirement for relevant information, or at any rate with a tacit assumption that everyone at has such information.

One possible place to start an attempt to 'theorise' the role of Bilderberg and other international power-elite forums, might be to re-enter an old debate at the beginning of the present century: this is the debate between Lenin and Kautsky over imperialism.

Lenin’s theory of imperialism sought to explain the first world war by reference to what he called inter-imperialist rivalries. While this theory has had an enormous influence during this century (it under-pins, for example, much contemporary discussion of the relations between 'the West' and the 'Developing World, in which it is assumed that power operates between geographically-defined regions, and that nation-states act at the behest of nationally-based capitalist classes), it is nevertheless demonstrably false in a number of crucial particulars. For example, one of the difficulties in Lenin's theory is reconciling it with the increasing interpenetration of national economies by trans-national capitalist blocs. To put this issue simply: wars take place between states, but inter-capitalist rivalries do not necessarily coincide with the territories between states, especially where international or trans-national corporations have developed. The material presented here, I would suggest, is of just this kind: it shows an inter-penetration of capitalist interests between the USA and Western Europe, and indicates a field of 'political struggle' within and between states, entirely outside that of the public sphere.

What is far less well-known today, however, is Kautsky's alternative conception which explicitly addressed this issue, and can be summed up by his notion of ultra-imperialism (Fennema, 1982). The simple hypothesis is that rival capitalist interests may, at least for a time, be able to coalesce into a relatively unified hegemonic bloc. Now this idea of a tendency towards stabilisation on a global scale may sound unrealistic today, but arguably this was what was achieved for fifty years, at least in the American-dominated half of the world, after 1945. It could even be said that the demise of the other half permits its universalization. Where are the 'inter-imperialist rivalries in the world today'?

Silence of the Academics

When first asked for a title for this paper, I briefly entertained the idea of using the above sub-heading, (paraphrasing a recent film-title), and I do believe it is important to ask why certain topics rather than others are deemed worthy of investigation. The material presented here is certainly 'dated' and therefore unfashionable, but similar information about the present could be investigated. It is surprising and somewhat depressing that such investigations no longer seem to be being carried out in universities today. (6) Academics often represent themselves somewhat flatteringly as 'critical' intellectuals, independent from or even determinedly opposed to the established systems of power in society, willing to face personal or professional risks in the pursuit of truth. Maybe they are more like lambs.

Footnotes

(1) The term 'liberal' signifies policies opposed to restrictions on international trade. The distinction between 'free trade' and 'protectionism' in international trade does not correspond exactly with the theoretical opposition of 'competition' and 'monopoly'. None of these concepts have straightforward empirical reference. The 1992 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) for example, is in fact profoundly 'protectionist' in relation to such matters as intellectual property rights (software, patents for seeds, drugs etc.) with elaborate 'rules of origin' designed to keep out foreign competitors etc. see Dawkins 1993.

(2) If the Marshall Plan had military objectives (containment of Soviet influence) as much as economic ones (creation of markers for US industry), then NATO has a civilian, political and ideological role as much as a military one. NATO has been relatively neglected by students of 'supranational' organisations, and it is often Presumed to be just a treaty rather than a quasigovernmental organisation in its own right. Its highest political body, the North Atlantic Council, covers foreign policy issues as well as strictly military questions, and the North Atlantic Assembly works to influence the parliamentary members of individual countries. It falls within the brief of NATO to conduct propaganda and defend states the 'infiltration of ideas'. Few citizens of NATO countries are aware of the whole apparatus to which membership commits them - e.g. Plans 10 G and 100-1 under which in 'emergency situations' special US units would be activated to suppress any movement 'threatening to US strategic interests'.

(3) It is extremely difficult to define the exact status of Retinger. One Polish war-time exile leader has been quoted as saying that Retinger was 'suspected of being in close touch not so much with British politics as with certain of its discrete institutions'. Presumably SIS. See Korbonski p. 20.

(4) Later American participants included Robert MacNamara, US Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson (earlier chair of the Ford Motor Company, and later President of the World Bank); and McGeorge Bundy, who worked on the Marshall Plan, was US National Security Adviser and later special foreign policy adviser to Kennedy and Johnson 1960-65, and became President of the Ford Foundation 1966-79. His brother, William Bundy, was with the CIA 1951-61 and later managed the CFR journal Foreign Affairs from 1979, after working at the Pentagon 1964-69. He married Dean Acheson's daughter. Finally, all three Directors of the CIA in this period were also members of Bilderberg: Allen Dulles (John Foster Dulles's brother), John McCone and Richard Helms. Needless to say, all these figures were also members of the CFR. For more details of participants see the essay by Thompson in Sklar ed. 1980, and Eringer 1980.

(5) Pinay, who was French Prime Minister in 1951, figures rather allusively in Brian Crozier's memoirs (Crozier, 1993 ch. XV) as the eminence grise of the controversial 'Pinay Cercle', an anti-communist intelligence outfit in the 1970s and 80s (Ramsay & Dorril 1986, p. 39 and Teacher 1989).

(6) It is ironic that while the initial research which discovered the existence of the Bilderberg network and explored its ramifications within the power structure of Atlantic capitalism came entirely from Marxist and left-inclined scholars in the USA, the whole subject has now been virtually taken over by the US far right as the centre piece of its own bizarre world-view. These writers of the far right (Anthony Sutton, Lyndon La Rouche, Spool and the Liberty Lobby etc.) have added virtually nothing to our understanding or knowledge of the phenomenon, and accordingly, are not referenced in the bibliography below. They have, however, contaminated the topic with their confusion. Since around the mid-1980s, the American Left has dropped the whole issue like a hot potato. For a singular exception sec Brandt 1993, which is essentially a response to Bcrlet, 1992.

Bibliography

Aaronovitch, Sam The Ruling Class, Lawrence & Wishart 1961

Anderson, Perry 'Under the Sign of the Interim', London Review of Books, 4 January 1996

Ayala, Cesar J. 'Theories of Big Business in American Society' Critical Sociology, Vol.16 No. 2-3, Summer-Fall 1989

Beret, Chip Right Woos Left, Political Research Associates, October 1992

Brandt, Daniel 'Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite', NameBase Newsline, October- December, 1993

Businessweek, June 18 1984

Carew, Anthony Labour under the Marshall Plan Manchester University Press, 1987

Chomsky, Noam Necessary Illusions, South End Press, 1989

Chomsky, Noam What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1993

Chomsky, Noam Secrets, Lies and Democracy, Odonian Press, 1994

Chomsky, Noam Powers and Prospects, South End Press, 1996 Coleman, Peter A Liberal Conspiracy, Macmillan 1989

Crozier, Brian Free Agent, Harper Collins, 1993

Cumings, Bruce 'Chinatown: Foreign Policy and Elite Realignment' in Ferguson, Thomas & Rogers, Joel (ads.) The Hidden Election, Random House, 1981

Hawkins. Kristin NAFTA: The New Rules of Corporate Conquest Open Magazine, 1993

Domhoff, G. William The Power Elite and the State, Aldine de Gruyter, 1990

Eringer, Robert The Global Manipulators, Pentacle Books, 1980

Fennema, Meindert International Networks of Banks and Industry Maninus Nijhoff, 1982

Fennema, Meindert & van der Pijl, Kees 'International Bank Capital and the New Liberalism' in Mizruchi, Mark & Schwartz, Michael (eds.) Inter-corporate Relations, Cambridge University, 1987

Freitag, Peter J. 'The Cabinet and Big Business: A Study of Interlocks', Social Problems Vol. 23, 1975

Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society, Polity Press, 1984

The Nation-State and Violence, Polity Press, 1985

Gill, Stephen American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge University Press, 1990

Grant, Charles Delors, Nicholas Brealey, 1994

Groom. A. J. R. & Taylor, Paul beds.) Frameworks for International Co-operation, Pinter, 1990

Hatch, Alden HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Harrap, 1972

Healey, Denis The Time of My life, Penguin, 1990

Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan The Wise Men, Simon & Schuster, 1986

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri The CIA and American Democracy Yale University Press, 1989

Jessop, Bob State Theory, Polity Press, 1990

Koenig, Peter 'A prince among bankers who wears Lazard's triple crown' Independent on Sunday, 11 February 1990

Korbonski, Stefan Warsaw in Exile, Allen and Unwin, 1966

Milward, Alan The Reconstruction of Federal Europe, Methuen, 1981

The European Rescue of the Nation State, Routledge, 1992

Milward, Alan et al The Frontier of national Sovereignty, Routledge, 1994

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956

Mizruchi, Mark The American Corporate Network 1904-1971 Sage, 1982

Monnet, Jean Memoirs Collins, 1978

Pisani, Sally The CIA and the Marshall Plan University of, Edinburgh Press, 1992

Pomian, John (ed.) Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise Sussex University Press, 1972

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril, Stephen Lobster 11, April 1986

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril, Stephen 'The Pinay Circle' Lobster 17, 8 November 1988

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril Stephen 'In a Common Cause: the AntiCommunist Crusade in Britain 1945-60' Lobster 19, May 1990

Reich, Cary Financier: the biography of Andre Meyer Quill, 1983

Retinger, Joseph The European Continent? Hodge, 1946

Schuman, Frederick The Commonwealth of Man Robert Hale 1954

Shoup, Laurence H. & Minter, William Imperial Brain Trust Monthly Review Press, I977

Sklar, Holly (ed.) Trilateralism South End Press, l980

Stokman. Frans et al. (eds.) Networks of Corporate Power Polity Press, 1985

Teacher, David The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe' Lobster 18, October 1989

Tether, C. Gordon The Banned Articles of C Gordon Tether Hetheringstoke, 1976

Van der Pijl, Kees The Mating of an Atlantic Ruling Class Verso, 1984

Vaughan, Richard Post-War Integration in Europe Edward Arnold 1976

Preceeding article is copyright The Lobster, a most readable intelligence oriented journal from Humberside in North East England

Contact: Robin Ramsay (Dept. W)
214 Westbourne Avenue
Hull HU5 3JB
United Kingdom

UK tel: 01482 447558
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Email: robin@lobster.karoo.co.uk

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04Apr12 - Inaugural 1954 Bilderberg meeting held in Nazis Oosterbeek Hexenkessel ten years after Arnhem slaughter

As we have already heard, TWO chairmen - former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Lord Peter Carrington were both heavily involved in the Nijmegen/Arnhem Operation Market Garden debacle of September 1944 (see below).

http://groups.google.com/group/pepis/browse_thread/thread/a26394696... and below

For the background watch the fine film A Bridge Too Far

Sometime over the next decade the name of the Wolfheze Hotel became a branded Bilderberg Hotel..

Model was the direct opposite equivalent to Allied commander Bernard Montgomery who planned Market Garden and was unjustly criticised for its failure.

Monty's plan very nearly succeeded but for any one of three massive errors - or betrayals:

1. Former SS Officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was refused security clearance for the Admiraltybut, on the express orders of King George VI was included in the British Army's Whitehall warr planning team with Brian Horrocks, Monty etc. He looks also to have been involved in removing Sir Brian Urquhart from the staff who had come up with serious reservationsabout the operation. The plans of MG were supposedly found by Germans in a crashed glider, so the SS knew exactly what was planned. But was this a made-up story to cover for Prince Bernhard's spying in Whitehall? How else did several German generals in Arnhem & Nijmegen appear to have 'prior knowledge' of the attack?

2. Despite having up to 80 sherman tanks at their disposal - The 40 tanks each of the Irish Guards and the Grenadier Guards regiments, Welsh Guards (Eindhoven area) & Coldstream Guards (Groesbeek Heights SE of Nijmegen) were tied up elsewhere - Carrington, Adaire, Horrocks and the Guards Armoured division failed to advance after sucessfully securing the Nijmegen road bridge which the 10th SS panzer divsion commander had rigged to blow - but it did not blow up. Heinz Harmel was unprepared for the Nijmegen road bridge to fail to blow up so had to put together a blocking force in Elst that night, but before he had a chance to do that it looks almost certain that Carrington and the other tanks would have had almost no resistance, a clear run to Arnhem to reinforce Frost's 2nd Battalion just hanging on by their fingernails at Arnhem bridge. This is according to OC 10th SS Panzer division Heinz Harmel's German Artillery map for that evening which show there were virtually no German forces between Lent and Arnhem. Just a few infantry security pickets in Elst.

3. Brigadier Lathbury of 1st Airborne Division, acting under the command of the other Urquhart.  failed to send several companies of 1st Airborne division troops to the Arnhem bridge despite being given a clear route (Lion Route) to the main objective of Market Garden over the radio by Major Tony Hibbert who was at the bridge.

Food for thought... Arnhem and Bernhard

by retired Marconi engineer Dave B.

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Admin

If you look at (‘From a Bridge Too Far’):

http://inquiringminds.cc/food-for-thought-arnhem-and-bernhardt-dave-b

http://www.ohiomotorpool.oldmv.com/htm-files/arnhem.htm

and scan down to the fourth map, you will see that the German blocking force (Battalion Krafft) shown as black line, waiting ready for 1st Airborne on that sunny afternoon on Sunday 17th September. The battalion obviously has its HQ right there in the Bilderberg Hotel (Wolfheze Hotel).

If you look at the Drop Zones 9and landing zones) on proceeding map the line was abreast 1st Brigade’s route to Arnhem, at least some of the Brigade.

As you can see the Recce Squadron (yellow) ran straight into the line and had to double back quicktime. Only 2nd Battalion (Frost) and some of 1st Brigade HQ (with Brigade Major Hibbert, but without Lathbury, the Brigadier) made it through to Arnhem.

The 3rd Battalion (think they came from glider landing) got round the southern flank but failed to get anywhere near Arnhem and the 1st Battalion had to skirt round the block to the north and also failed to get to Arnhem.

How did this blocking force happen to be in the right place at the right time??? and just a short while after landing.

So you can see that Bilderberg Hotel was where the 1st Airborne (and MG) came unstuck (effectively) right after the Sunday drop – a good place to celebrate 10 years later with 1st Bilderberg meeting.

Top German Hermann Abs (Chairman of Deutsche Bank), Hitler’s banker and IG Farben guy was there (he must have thought it very appropriate venue) along with another 8 or 9 Germans.

It would be good to know when name was changed and why (to disguise real name Wolfheze in case someone in the British contingent noticed?).

I wonder if the name (Bilderberg) has any particular meaning.

You say Bernhardt owned the hotel, did he acquire it after MG debacle?

I reckon Bernhardt (and Retinger) must have been laughing down his sleeve at getting all those Brits to gather at this notorious location.

dave

Credits: The Battle For Arnhem – A Bridge Quite Near

http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/58485

http://bcfm.org.uk/2012/03/16/17/friday-drivetime-62/15420

Recent revelations that show Field Marshal Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden, in September 1944, aimed at severing German supply lines on the Western Front should have worked. It was early morning in Holland on Sunday 17th September 1944 and as the gliders and paratroopers poured down along a sixty mile corridor to hold the bridges. The furthest bridge from the front line at Arnhem became the focus of attention as and the biggest airborne operation in history unfolded. Was it really ‘A Bridge Too Far’ as the title of Cornelius Ryan’s book and Robert E. Levine’s famous film imply? Or could the tanks and ground troops of XXX corps have gotten through to relieve the surrounded British paratroopers? With Arnhem only 10 kilometres, a 30 minute drive away and a virtually clear road ahead – General Horrocks’ M4 Sherman tanks inexplicably halted for 17 hours. By the time the tanks started rolling at lunchtime the next day British paratroopers had run out of ammunition, been forced to surrender and German Panzer 5 & Tiger tank reinforcements had arrived to block the way. The Nijmegen bridgehead was established around 19:00hrs, 3 hours later, at 22:00hrs that evening the British were forced to surrender at the Arnhem bridge. So paratroopers of the 1st Airborne division at Arnhem bridge may have been relieved in the nick of time and war in Europe could have been over six months earlier, by Christmas 1944. We look at Cornelius Ryan’s book ‘A Bridge Too Far’ as well as Joseph E. Levine’s film of the same name. Interviews with: Captain T. Moffatt Burriss, author of ‘Strike and Hold’ who was commander of i-company, 504th regiment, 82nd Airborne division during the legendary Waal river crossing; Robert Kershaw author of ‘It Never Snows In September’ who interviewed 10th SS Panzer Division Brigadeführer Heinz Harmel, commander of the German defence of the Nijmegen and Arnhem bridges; Major Tony Hibbert who was a senior officer of 2nd batallion 1st brigade, British 1st Airborne division at the Arnhem bridge; Tim Lynch author of ‘Operation Market Garden: The Legend of the Waal Crossing’; Sir Brian Urquhart, army intelligence officer in the run-up to the operation he was critical of it and transferred before it began… but later became Secretary General of the newly formed United Nations.

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March 2012 - leaked audio clips from the 1954 first Bilderberg meeting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99ppJ2QI1nQ

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18Mar12 - Operation Market Garden's curious Bilderberg connections

http://www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6765

Friday's show about Operation Market Garden has several Bilderberg references. Here is a more comprehensive exposition of the three bizarre Bilderberg/Market Garden links: Sunday 17th September 1944's Operation Market Garden and Bilderberg

Horrocks and Monty with Bilderberg founder & former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands

1) Firstly Despite being a former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was actually with Field Marshal Montgomery, General Brian Horrocks etc. in Whitehall influencing planning intelligence at the highest level in the run up to Market Garden in September 1944. The Royal Navy and RAF did not trust Bernhard but it seems King George VI insisted he had to be trusted by the Army as he could liase with the Dutch resistance. Trouble with that was he knew very little about Holland, he was a German, brought up in Bavaria who married into the Dutch royal family in 1937. Sir Brian Urquhart makes reference to Bernhard's presence too in the second clip toward the end of the show. Bernhard was chair of the top secret Bilderberg conference from 1954 to 1975.

2) A later chairman of the Bilderberg Lord Peter Carrington was a young Grenadier Guards captain and radio operator in the second squadron of tanks to cross the Nijmegen road bridge. Because he would not go on to Arnhem after the bridge was taken at 18:30hrs on the evening of Wednesday 20th September he was threatened at gunpoint by Captain T. Moffat Burriss of 82nd Airborne who ordered Carrington to get moving. Confronted by Burriss' tommy gun pointing at his head Carrington pulled the lid down on his tank and stayed in there all night. Burriss had just lost half his company seizing the north end of the Nijmegen bridge and now the advance had ground to a halt right at the crucial moment.
At that point evidence suggests the road from Nijmegen to Arnhem was clear of any force that could stop a tank - this we know because of an artillery map passed to parachute regiment liason officer and historian Robert Kershaw by CO of the 10th SS Panzer Division Heinz Harmel before he died. Artillery maps are very reliable because they show exact dispositions of friendly forces so the German artillery does not fire on their own people.
There is also the fact that Harmel was expecting to be able to dramatically blow up the Nijmegen Road bridge that evening when the first British tanks crossed it. When he tried to do this around 18:30hrs the charges failed to go off and this necessitated bringing his forces down from Arnhem to contain the forces he expected to be pouring over the captured Nijmegen bridge at any moment. Trouble was the Arnhem bridge was still being denied to him by Colonel Frost's regiment who held the Arnhem bridge until their defences collapsed around 22:00hrs that evening.
You may have noticed from the timings here that the mighty British Guards Armoured division had precisely 3 hours to make the 9km drive to Arnhem where Frost's men were hanging on by their fingernails. That would have taken Lord Carrington's M4 Sherman about 30 minutes to get there. By 22:00hrs Frost's position was being overrun so why did Peter Carrington, Allan Adair and Brian Horrocks not send one or two battle-groups of tanks through the security pickets which were half way to Arnhem in Elst to relieve the beleagured paratroopers in the nick of time?
Harmel was later to say "The four tanks who crossed the bridge made a mistake when they stayed in Lent. If they had carried on their advance, it would have been all over for us. ... Why did they not drive on to Elst instead of staying in Lent? ... At this instant there were no German armored forces available to block Elst. This gave us time to get Kampfgruppe Knaust down there." The time Horrocks gave them was in fact over seventeen hours, XXX corps did not move out until 12:30hrs the next day by which time the road was utterly impassable, it had been heavily fortified with anti-tank guns, dug-in tank destroyers and of course the notorious Tiger tanks.

3) Then there is the little town of Oosterbeek, which was where the Bristish 1st Airborne division were headquartered in the Hartenstein hotel, surrounded by Germans. The SS called the allied pocket "Der Hexenkessel" which means "Witches Cauldron" because, the lightly armed paratroopers in Oosterbeek who were short of ammunition were facing rockets, flamethrower tanks, Tiger and other heavy tanks as well as anti-aircraft guns. Only a tiny proportion of the British Paras. managed to get back to the allied lines alive. This Oosterbeek 'witches' cauldron' was the venue, ten years later, for the first ever secret Bilderberg meeting at Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg hotel in Oosterbeek.

http://groups.google.com/group/pepis/browse_thread/thread/a5c75e476...

http://bcfm.org.uk/2012/03/16/17/friday-drivetime-62/15420

http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/58485

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Martin Bormann, Nazi In Exile by Paul Manning (1981)

Nazi finance & continuity network - rare book about Hitler's No. 2 whose death was faked in 1972

Download the eBook for free below

A decisively powerful network of corporate entities run by hardened SS veterans, the Bormann group constitutes what one veteran banker termed “the greatest concentration of money power under a single control in history.” The foundation of the organization’s clout is money—lots and lots of money. Controlling German big business and, through investments, much of the rest of the world’s economy, the organization was the repository for the stolen wealth of Europe, estimated by British intelligence to have totaled more than $180 billion by the end of 1943 (not including the money taken from Greece and the former Soviet Union, nor that taken after 1943.) [For more on the global economic significance of the Bormann group, see—among other programs—FTR#99.] This organization literally constitutes a postwar “Underground Reich” with (as discussed in FTR#155) a governing hierarchy composed of the sons and daughters of SS men, holding military ranks and titles from the Third Reich.

http://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/

Read the book here

Download or read it here in Word document - PDF - or Rich Text formats

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Official attendee list PDF from the first ever Bilderberg meeting in Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Hotel, Oosterbeek, Holland, May 1954

I have been passed this large attendee list - please click here and be patient to download what is a 6Mb PDF file

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'Imagine yourselves to be dictators of Europe'

The Single Market programme was the 1980's relaunch of the economic and ultimately political integration of Europe. So-called Father of the EU, [see Mike Peters' paper for more on his role] Jean Monnet, had always felt it crucial to rein back big business. The single market programme turned this policy on its head. The relaunch document (see below) was prepared by Philips Industries in Holland and researched by unnamed Philips staff. The staff were told to "imagine yourselves to be dictators of Europe."

Few realise how pivotal the 2000 Bilderberg chairman, Viscount Etienne Davignon, was in this process. As European Commissioner for Industry and the Internal Market from 1977 to 1980 he was perfectly placed to put big business in the driving seat of European policy. In 1985, as Industry Commissioner, he challenged Pehr Gyllenhammar, CEO of Volvo, (also administrator of United Technologies, Vice President of the Aspen Institute and one of the five partners of Kissinger Associates) to organise a group of the top European businessmen to lobby the Commission. Davignon argued that the Commission would be obliged to respond to the demands of some of the largest European industrialists. The Gyllenhammar group was to become the highly influential European Round Table of Industrialists or ERT, drawing up policy for Europe.

Extract from: The Politics of Big Business in the Single Market Program, by Maria L. Green, The American University, Visiting Fellow, CSIA, Harvard University.

School of International Service, The American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington DC 20016.

Paper presented for the European Community Studies Association, Third Biennial International Conference, May 27 1993, Washington DC.

This is an essential document for anyone curious about the origins of the present policies and direction of the European Union. The above paper has the following structure. The opening section of the most relevant chapter, IV, is reproduced below.

Introduction
I. The Early Years: The Rise of the Multinationals in EC Policymaking
II. The Origins of the ERT: Setting the Agenda for a New Europe
III. The ERT and the French Connection
IV. The Dekker Paper, the Political Agenda and a Constituency for Delors [extract below]
V. The Delors Commission's Policy Alternative and the Eurpean Council Vote
VI. Ensuring the SEA's Implementation: The Internal Market Support Group (Committee)
VII. Conclusions

IV. The Dekker Paper, the Political Agenda and a Constituency for Delors - extract

Repackaging the message: The Dekker Paper

On January 11, 1985, in Brussels, Wisse Dekker, CEO of Phillips, unveiled a plan, "Europe 1990", before an audience of 500 people including many of the newly appointed EC commissioners. The plan laid out in precise terms the steps needed in four key areas - trade facilitation (elimination of border formalities), opening up of public procurement markets, harmonization of technical standards, and fiscal harmonization (elimination of the fiscal VAT frontiers) -- to open up a European Market in five years. For the first time a plan was produced which identified some 50 measures needed to eliminate non-tariff barriers to trade and to relaunch the European Market. The Dekker paper was revolutionary -- not only because it was proposed by the head of a major multinational, but because it produced what had escaped national and European policymakers -- a simple plan for a unified market.

The Dekker paper was an internal Philips project led by Dekker's government affairs representative in Brussels, Coen Ramaer. It was the result of the company's growing dissatisfaction with the inability of government officials -- national or EC -- to produce a concrete proposal for a European market. While Mitterrand was promoting an industrial initiative, there were no specifics to the French President's plan. Moreover, when the Commission did produce a comprehensive package of proposals in late 1984, there was no outpouring of support for the initiative. The Commission document developed by Commissioner Narjes listed hundreds of pre-existing pieces of legislation -- ranging from standardisation to social actions to environmental issues -- deemed necessary for the creation of an internal market. Business leaders, while pleased that a package was produced, found the Commission package "unwieldy" and lacking "a precise time-table." Moreover, there was no strategy to ensure its implementation and no rationale for industrial growth. It became apparent to the heads of multinationals that industry needed to produce its own concrete program.

With Dekker's support, Ramaer assembled four Philips experts who had long dealt with the four key areas later outlined in the Dekker speech. As Ramaer explains, he instructed the men to:

"imagine yourselves to be dictators of Europe and that you have decided that the job must be done in five years. And they [the experts] started out "but this is impossible! Be realistic!" And I told them that I couldn't care less if we were realistic or not.

Once they had picked up this idea, they found it fascinating. And they discovered that it could be done -- given the political will, of course." [Interview, September 24th 1992]

Some of the experts set up informal meetings with their counterparts in the Commission to discuss the project and to hammer out key problems. Dekker stressed to Ramaer that the proposals had to be complete -- he did not want the outcome to be simply another speech on the necessity of European integration.

"Europe 1990" was not simply another speech. In addition to introducing a precise agenda, the paper introduced a number of new conceptualisations of what a unified European market might entail. In the trade facilitation area, for example, the "ultimate goal" of the plan was to create "frontiers without formalities for goods traffic and the replacement of paper documents by data transmission via a telecommunications network used by traders, transporters, banks and statistical and tax authorities..." Of course, to implement this strategy, member states would also be required to allow for the development of a trans-European telecommunications network. The paper left little doubt of the importance of creating a united European market. As Dekker noted in his introduction: "The survival of Europe is in fact at stake."

When the "Europe 1990" plan was presented, it was not for Brussels' consumption alone. Dekker sent the plan, along with a letter, to the heads of government and state of the European Community. One letter went to The Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher, January 7th 1985, from Dr. Wisse Dekker. The letter opens as follows "Europe's industries - both large and small - will have little future if the common market is not created as intended by the Treaties of Rome. This we all know..." Dekker concludes by submitting "these proposals for the consideration of you and your government, hoping that you will promote the action necessary to get Europe out of the deadlock in which it has been for a number of years. You will agree that this is an urgent matter. There is little time left to correct the consequences of a lack of dynamism in the past decade.

[from footnote - Margaret Thatcher refused to meet with ERT who were promoting 'Europe 2000'.]

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Original Source Document here