"THE OFFICIAL GERMAN REPORT" - UPDATE

UPDATE: THURSDAY DECEMBER 8 - there is more to this report than a quick read can do justice to. I will begin this series over the weekend.

I’ve been following Rachel Maddow’s podcst, “Ultra,” about the America First Committee and the involvement of high ranking Republican Party office holders in conspiracy with agents of Nazi Germany to spread chaos in American war preparedness, and even a planned attempt by the Nazi government of Germany to intervene in the 1940 presidential election, in favor of President Roosevelt’s Republican opponent (sound familiar?). It’s stunning information, to say the least. I am a World War II historian and thought I was highly familiar with this period in our history, and I have learned things I didn’t know before.

I did know of American collaboration with the Nazis, such as that of Prescott S. Bush - father of President George H.W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush - who began financing the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1928 when he was a Wall Street executive at Brown Brothers, and in return once they took power, he was allowed to invest in and take control of German companies, control he maintained even after war broke out between the United States and Germany, control that led to his being investigated under the Trading With The Enemy Act; he avoided indictment under that law by buying himself the Senate seat from Connecticut in 1952. It turns out he was not the only one and perhaps wasn’t even the one most deeply involved in what was, after December 11, 1941, treason committed with a country with which the United States was at war.

“Ultra” goes into a long presentation over several episodes about the attempt to charge 30 Americans with sedition out of this involvement with the Nazis, in a trial that was held in 1944, that was ultimately unsuccessful when the judge hearing the case died in the middle of it of a heart attack. O. John Rogge, the Federal Prosecutor, continued his investigation. He learned of the discovery by American troops in Germany of Nazi documentation of these activities. He went to Germany, where over 11 weeks he interviewed Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop and Herman

Göring, before Ribbentrop was executed and Göring committed suicide. Rogge also examined some 30,000 files from the German Foreign Office archive. He got everything about the Nazi penetration of the United States. It involved both Republicans and Democrats.

In September 1946, Rogge submitted “The Official German Report” to Attorney General and future Supreme Court justice Tom Clark. Clark showed it to President Truman, who ordered it declared Secret and withheld from the public on grounds it was too explosive for Americans to know about. That fall, parts of the report were “leaked” to Drew Pearson, and over ten weeks, Pearson published everything he got. Rogge was fired from the Department of Justice.

He took the report with him, and it was eventually published in 1961. After listening to “Ultra,” I went to Google and typed in “O’ John Rogge and The Official German Report,” and hit “go”. The first item that came up was a site where I could download for free the PDF of the report. 187 Kilobytes, 500 pages.

I’m going to start reporting what’s in the report, using my background as a historian of the period to put things in context. The first post will be on Thursday, December 8.

It’s going to be relevant to events that lead to our present situation, because it wasn’t just Preston Bush who was a prominent Republican who never denied his involvement with the Nazis.

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