John Bevilaqua Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds This thread came to its conclusion without ever being finished. Too important to let this lie fallow. #1 12-11-2009, 06:10 AM John Bevilaqua oin Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 199 At last: Shickshinny Knights of Malta linked to the Draper/Vonsiatsky Condon ManCand crowds -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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. 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 Romanian Relief Council with the help of the Romanian Royal Family. Queen Marie was a prominent member of the OSJ. There is evidence that Count A. Cherep-Spiridovich’s presentation of the Anglo-Latino-Slavic League to J. Edgar Hoover of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, and to Secretary of State Robert Lansing was the impetus for founding the Society of Friends of Albania, and later the Society of Friends of Yugoslavia. In 1941, the American Friends of Yugoslavia was begun by Wm. J. Donovan, founder of the OSS and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, long serving First Secretary of the CFR. At this time, the “Little Entente” was created by the Balkan countries as a mutual protection pact, and the American “societies of friends” allowed for civilian “access” in the fledgling efforts to contain the Bolsheviks. Civilian experts in the early 20th century on the so-called “Jewish Problem” became involved with the SOSJ. Among them were Paquita de Shishmareff, Fr. Denis Fahey, Lady Edith Starr Miller Queenborough, John B. Trevor, Jr. and Princess Julia Grant Cantacuzene. 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. Father Ernest Jouin appears to have been associated with A. Cherep Spriridovich, OSJ in this research during the early decades of the last century. All the work of the knights of the SOSJ to include research and education efforts did help the Vatican and the monarchies of Sweden, Spain and Denmark to survive. Unfortunately, the knights failed to prevent the collapse of the Balkan monarchies that resulted from the Allied “victory” after WWII. GERMAN NATIONALISTS NURTURE THE WHITE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE The Russian Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem had been first re-organized by the monarchists in the Ukraine as an anti-Bolshevik army. German General Ludendorf assigned Walter Nicholai, the leader of German Military Intelligence during WWI, to develop the Order’s intelligence service for Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich. After the defeat of the army in the Baltic campaign the OSJ essentially became a paramilitary intelligence agency. In 1916 Russian Secret Service Lieutenant Boris Brasol had been stationed permanently in New York City. He developed a career as an anti-Bolshevik expert and informer with American Military Intelligence and the fledgling intelligence department of the United States Department of State after the Bolshevik Revolution. Boris Brasol and Cherep Spiridovich were the principal SOSJ intelligence operatives in the United States. Brasol helped Major General Cherep Spiridovich redirect SOSJ activities in the West against international anarchism and the “One World” global agenda. They both championed the validity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. An associate of Prince Awaloff, General Constantin Sakharov, was head of the military division of the Russian Grand Priory. That division came to be known under the front name of Russian National Society. The Russian National Society worked from offices at 5 Columbia Circle in Manhattan from 1921. Grand Duke Cyril, the Heir Apparent, declared himself Protector of the Russian Throne in July, 1922. He positioned his government in Lubeck, Germany where he was titled from 1918 to 1938 as Sovereign Prince Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. His wife’s ancestral home was a castle in Coberg, Bavaria, and this became his initial residence. He created his Court and permanent residence on the seacoast of France in St. Briac, Brittany. Supported by nationalist elements of the German government since the Russian Civil War, he had been the nominal head of the pro-German Western Russian Government in northwest Europe in 1919. Walter Nicholai, the leader of German Military Intelligence during WWI, expanded the SOSJ intelligence service for Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich in order to closely cooperate with Aufbau. Aufbau was the White Russian monarchical organization which was founded to coordinate the future economic recovery of Russia. Colonel Nicholai founded Organization Consul ©, a “full-service” intelligence operation which matched the Bolsheviks in ability to assassinate leaders of the opposition. Until his death in 1938, Grand Duke Cyril was to be the chosen candidate of Hitler for Czar of Russia when the Soviet Union was defeated. THE SOSJ GOVERNMENT IS MOVED TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Because many exiled Russians were seeking permanent residence in the United States and Canada, from where much of the financial support for the exiled Russian Imperial Court originated, the shift of SOSJ leadership to the American Grand Priory was a natural process. Baron Rosen, former Russian Ambassador to the United States, and now head of Grand Duke Cyril’s Intelligence operation, was run down and killed by an automobile in New York City in 1922. Prince Awaloff was accused as a terrorist in connection with Organization Consul and expelled from Germany in 1922 by the Socialist Weimar Government. He and Ataman Semenoff traveled to New York City and were involved with meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel offices of American Grand Prior William Nelson Cromwell. This resulted in the formal re-establishment of the Sovereign Council of the Order on September 5, 1922. Cromwell became the President of the Sovereign Council of the SOSJ. Prince Awaloff returned to Europe later that year to continue the work of the Counter- Revolution, and the American Grand Priory assumed operational control of the SOSJ. Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander, as mentioned previously, continued to have little to do with the SOSJ after the Civil War. He spent much of his time traveling and writing his memoirs and books on spirituality. Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector Sovereign Council Chancellor (n. President Assn.) 1919 Russian Sovereign Imperial Order of St. John of Jerusalem Grand Duke Cyril Cmdr in Chief Prince Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt 1922 G M Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich W N Cromwell J P West J G B Bulloch King Alexander I American Grand Priory John J Sheridan H J Bowen 1. Grand Priory of Russia MG C Spiridovich a. White Cross Hospital and Relief Assn. W W Butcher A MacNaughton b. Polish White Cross Count J Potocki On June 24, 1925 Eleazar Wilson of Philadelphia became Grand Prior of America. In 1925 Captain Sidney G. Reilly, founder of the Anti-Bolshevist League, was lured from the United States into Russia and killed by the Bolsheviks. The exploits of Reilly later prompted the “James Bond” series. In 1926 Cherep Spiridovich incorporated the Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association of the Anti-Bolshevist League in Albany, N.Y. with H. V. Broenstrupp and G. M. Sykes. This was a project planned by Captain Reilly and by Cherep Spiridovich. It was intended to provide propaganda about the danger of the internationalist’s agenda and was the continuation of the publishing operation of Cherep Spiridovich in Paris from 1904 to1920, known as the Agence Latine. It had been continued in 1921 for a few years by Henry Ford and his newspaper the Dearborn Independent. Major General Cherep Spiridovich, OSJ was assassinated at his residence on Staten Island, N. Y., a few months after re-starting the publishing operation. Boris Brasol provided the funds to bury this leader of the SOSJ. Cherep Spiridovich was one of the principal founders of the American Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem. H. V. Broenstrupp, OSJ published “The Hidden Hand” by Cherep Spiridovich shortly after his assassination. The SOSJ continued to raise funds for the relief of Russian exiles. The “Monday Supper Opera Club” was one of the society programs. Leaders of the relief fund drives included the following: Captain George Djamgaroff, Mrs. Henry P. Loomis, Princess Julia Grant Cantacuzene, Representative Hamilton Fish, III, Count Paul Ignatieff, President of Columbia University Nicholas Murray Butler and many of the displaced former royals of Russia and Eastern Europe. Djamgaroff and Loomis were close friends of Czar Krill and Czarina Victoria Melita. In 1927, after the assassination of Count Cherep-Spiridovich, the SMOM started their American Association. This founding of the American Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta was the unintended result of SOSJ success at fund raising. The new Catholic association overshadowed the SOSJ and placed its future in jeopardy. In response to SMOM propaganda, many members, such as Colonel Edgar Erskine Hume, MD, left the SOSJ. The remaining members were predominantly nationalistic, anti-Communist, senior military and intelligence officers. Some Protestant former SOSJ knights joined a new English Venerable Order American Chapter. It is probable that the Episcopalian Archbishop of New York, William T. Manning, a good friend of N. M. Butler and the Serbian Orthodox Church, was among this group. Fr. J. P. Chodkiewicz and exiled Polish leaders started the Polish Nobility Association in 1927. He continued Cherep Spiridovich’s Slavonic Society work, which focused on pan-Slavism and resulted in the Intermarium Movement. Cherep Spiridovich had suggested to President of the Sovereign Council W. N. Cromwell a project similar to the Panama Canal which would create a navigable waterway link from the Baltic to the Black Sea. SOSJ knights leading the Counter Revolutionary Anti-Bolshevist League continued to promote the theme of a continuous Eastern European buffer zone of free, independent and usually monarchical states. The OSJ was also involved with the Columbian Lighthouse Project in the Dominican Republic as part of their pan-American project. N. M. Butler was the American head of the lighthouse project and is credited with bringing it to final completion. THE EXILED ROMANOV FAMILY DEFEATS ITSELF Grand Duke Cyril declared himself Czar Kirill I on August 31, 1924. The White Russians in exile had a power struggle for the throne which started during the Russian Civil War. The failure to make a successful coalition of exiled forces which resulted made all their efforts to retake Russia from the Bolsheviks ineffective. Though Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich received more support until his death in 1929, as time passed Cyril was recognized as the rightful heir to the throne. The senior Knights of Malta on the Sovereign Council in the United States always supported Grand Duke Cyril, and, as noted, they became very influential because of financial support to his cause from men as prominent as Henry Ford. Colonel Vasilieff, the last Czarist Chief of Police, died in 1928. Upon the death of the Dowager Empress in 1928, her daughter, Grand Duchess Xenia, became a Patroness of the SOSJ. She sent the OSJ relics to the new ROCA Cathedral in Berlin where Prince Awaloff resided. Records show that the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony took receipt of the relics in Berlin. Grand Prior Grand Duke Alexander ensured that his wife Xenia, sister of Czar Nicholas II, did not separate the relics and icon. The illness and death of the Queen Mother in 1928 also prompted a group of SOSJ Russian Hereditary Commanders, who were not tainted by revolutionary support for the Kerensky regime, to attempt to reorganize the Russian Grand Priory in Paris. Most of them had supported the Russian pretender Grand Duke Nicholas and the pro-Entente Monarchist Supreme Council in Paris, but they still asked Grand Duke Alexander to be their Grand Prior. They then pled as the “Russian Grand Priory” for admission to the SMOM in Rome, but were denied due to their Orthodox religion. Their “expert” legal counsel was Baron Michael von Taube, who at the time was under the erroneous impression that the SOSJ had been dissolved in Russia in 1817. This was the same Taube, who as a minion of the so-called Conspiracy, had been an adversary of Prince Awaloff during the campaign against the Bolsheviks in Western Russia in 1919. Because of his reputation as an expert on Russian history, von Taube created widespread doubt about the historical continuation of the SOSJ in Russia. His theory became the legend of the suppression of the Order in Russia, which is still widely believed even in the 21st century. The Order still retains letters from Prince Serge Troubetzkoy, OSJ which discuss von Taube, who was a Roman Catholic, and his extravagant lifestyle in Rome at the expense of impoverished Russian exiles. It was not until 1950 that von Taube found the documentary evidence that caused him to change his mind, and after which, he recanted his belief in the 1817 demise of the SOSJ in Russia. When the facts about the Russian survival of the SOSJ became known in 1950, von Taube disclaimed the Prince Awaloff, Vladimirovichi and King Alexander I succession of the SOSJ in an attempt to save his reputation. He was little more than an agent of the SMOM at this time. However, the damage had been done, and because of the deaths of so many of the SOSJ royals, his disclaimer went unchallenged and has had longstanding effect on the Order. Shipping receipts show that the SOSJ relics and icon were moved again in 1932, and sent to King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. Grand Duchess Xenia and her close associate Prince Dolguruky, one of the 1928 Paris Hereditary Commanders, were signatories on the transfer. An Officer Candidate School similar to the Corps des Pages had been started in Belgrade. Many of the cadets from the Russian military academies had been sent there after the defeat of the White Russians. The Yugoslavian capital was becoming the White Russian center for military activity. Charles Pichel, OSJ directed a study on the Maltese Nobility done by Lord Dorchester of England which assisted Grand Duke Cyril and Grand Duchess Victoria Melita. For this research, he was named Grand Chancellor of the SOSJ in 1934 upon the death of J.G.B. Bulloch. Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander died in France in 1933, followed closely by many leading SOSJ members from either natural causes or assassination. SOSJ Protector King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was assassinated in 1934 on a trip to France. Queen Marie of Romania and Czarina Victoria Melita Romanov, grand daughters of Queen Victoria, both died in 1936. Mdme Paderewski, Patroness of the Polish White Cross, died in Switzerland in 1936. The death of Czar Kirill I in 1938 left the SOSJ without a Protector for the first time since the 12th century. THE SOSJ SUPPORTS FASCISM TO DEFEAT BOLSHEVISM The death of Grand Master G. D. Alexander coincided with the victory of the NAZI party in Germany. Prince Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt was elected the 74th Grand Master of the SOSJ in 1934. Colonel Dr. William Sohier Bryant, MD became President of the Sovereign Council. The SOSJ made alliances with various National Socialist movements believing this to be the best solution to defeat “Jewish Bolshevism.” The Order started a Grand Priory in Denmark in 1934 named the Sovereign Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in Denmark. It was founded by Prince Awaloff and was led by Danish National Socialist, Episcopalian Archbishop Preben Wencke. Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark was once Grand Chancellor of the Grand Priory. Prince Awaloff became head of the Russian Fascist Party in Germany, called the Russian National Liberation Movement (ROND). Awaloff was named to this position by the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Awaloff was apparently a double agent, as he is known to have been associated with “Wild Bill” William J. Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, and American spy-masters W N Cromwell, OSJ and Allen Welsh Dulles before, during and after WWII. Awaloff’s friend, Constantin Sakharov, was again named the military leader of this organization (ROND), which was the successor to Kirill’s secret army organization in Germany. Prince Anastase Vonsiatsky and Howard Broenstrupp led the Russian Nationalists in the United States, which was headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut. Paul Winter, OSJ, long time associate of Grand Chancellor Pichel and former KKK leader from New York and Philadelphia, was involved with the American Nationalists. Pichel contacted Germany through Hitlers’s friend Putzi Hanfstaengel in an effort to become the German Chancellor’s personal representative in the United States. The Russian and American Nationalists coordinated their anti-Bolshevik activity with an agency called Welt Dienst with offices in Erfurt, Germany. German Lt. Ulrich Fleischauer was in charge of this Welt Dienst publishing concern which inherited the campaign of the American Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association of Cherep Spiridovich and Sidney Reilly. Translated as World Service, and known before this time in France as Service Mondial, the SOSJ publishing effort had actually been started in 1904 by Cherep Spiridovich in Paris. At that time it was called Agence Latine. When it was exposed by the Bolshevists in 1919, Cherep Spiridovich convinced Henry Ford to succeed him by using the Dearborn Independent. The German agency Welt Dienst continued in Germany, eventually coming under the administration of Alfred Rosenberg after 1938. The American Grand Priory also restarted this propaganda in the United States in 1936, and it was called Edmondson Economic Service. This work, considered by many as anti-Semitic, was continued by the American Grand Priory into the 1950’s. In 1936 Count Jerzy Potocki, OSJ, was the Polish Ambassador to Washington, D. C. When the Second World War started in 1939, he was instrumental in restarting White Cross relief and intelligence gathering programs of the Polish American and Canadian-Polish Ambulance Corps. The Commission for Polish Relief, Inc. was run by Count Jerzy Potocki, OSJ and Chauncey McCormick, OSJ of Chicago. In 1940, Mrs. Richard Teller Crane and Chauncey McCormick represented the American White Cross and the Committee for Polish Relief, which raised funds for the National Polish Army of General Haller, OSJ. Nicholas M. Butler also had a fund raiser for General Haller at Columbia University. Colonel William J. Donovan was President of the Paderewski Fund for Polish Relief, Inc. He led the intelligence service and coordinated with Paderewski, Count Jerzy Potocki and U. S. Ambassador to Poland J. Drexel Biddle. Due to the impending advance of the Nazis into Yugoslavia in 1941, the Order moved the relics and icon from Belgrade to the Serbian Orthodox Monastery in Cetinje, Montenegro. Prince Awaloff, Queen Marie of Yugoslavia, her aunt, Queen Elena of Italy, King Carol of Romania and Grand Duchess Militza were all involved in this decision. They feared the Nazis would take the relics and icon because of their keen interest in historic objects with legendary power. The Order lost possession of these items because of the Communist takeover of the Balkans at the end of the war. However, the famous icon and relics remain to the present time in Cetinje, Montenegro. The icon is on display in the National Museum, and the relics are in the Serbian Orthodox Monastery. Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector Sovereign Council Chancellor 1934 Prince G M Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt Dr W S Bryant Fr Chodkiewicz Czar Kirill I American Grand Priory E Wilson Col C L T Pichel Grand Priory of Denmark 1938 Prince G M Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt Dr W S Bryant Fr Chodkiewicz Col C L T Pichel American Grand Priory Paul de Torres Grand Priory of Denmark LIBERALS USE THE AMERICAN COURTS TO SILENCE AMERICAN ANTI-COMMUNISTS By 1944, the SOSJ was working closely with German General Reinhard Gehlen’s “Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost Gehlens” (Foreign Forces East). The alliances with fascist organizations cast doubts on the honorable purposes of the Order. As a result of this, and partial involvement in the Great Sedition Trials of the 1940’s, a second exodus from the Order occurred. Charles Pichel had operated a genealogical association out of an office in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with which he attempted to provide noble titles to Americans from 1925 to 1929. Later he was associated with John B. Trevor’s American Coalition of Patriotic, Civic and Fraternal Societies. Pichel converted to Catholicism and joined the SOSJ through Fr. J. P. Chodkiewicz, a leader of the Polish White Cross in upstate New York. He became Grand Chancellor of the SOSJ in the heyday of the National Socialist Movement after the death of J. G. B. Bulloch, MD in 1934. He moved to Pennsylvania in the late 1930’s to be near Robert E. Edmondson, a noted anti-internationalist author who became President of the Sovereign Council in 1944. Many knights started “right-wing” organizations as a means of providing a militant response to the rapid growth of international Communism. The death of Czar Kirill I in 1938 left the Sovereign Council independent and afforded Grand Chancellor Pichel the ability to assume the control that had been reserved for its president. In 1939 the Order of St. John of Jerusalem was mentioned in Congressional hearings investigating the anti-Communist and pro-fascist American movements. In the 1940’s, twenty-seven Americans were charged by the U. S. Attorney General with conspiring to destroy the morale of the American armed forces. A massive show trial, known as the Great Sedition Trial, was conducted for the purpose of connecting these individuals to a conspiracy thought to involve the German Propaganda Ministry and anti-Communists in the United States. The unintended backlash of the trial was the exposure of Communists and Internationalists in the United States and Allied countries. Charges were dropped by the government, but not before the defendants were ruined financially. This led to the “McCarthy Era” and further “show trials” that were, this time, aimed at the Left. The President of the Sovereign Council from 1934 to 1944 was Colonel Dr. William Sohier Bryant, MD, OSJ. Bryant became implicated in the Great Sedition Trial when his name appeared on anti-government correspondence involving William Dudley Pelley and H. V. Broenstrupp. Trevor’s American Coalition of Patriotic, Civil and Fraternal Societies was also named. Bryant, formerly the personal physician of President Grover Cleveland and a Masonic Knight Templar, found the negative publicity of the trial too controversial, and he dropped out of the Order thereby leaving Grand Chancellor Pichel to name Edmondson as President of the Sovereign Council. Robert Edmondson of Scranton, Pennsylvania was President of the Sovereign Council from 1944 to 1948, but the control of the Order was firmly in the hands of Grand Chancellor Pichel. The Convent was moved to Shickshinny, Pennsylvania in 1945. This was an area in which Eastern Europeans had been relocating for years. In 1946, the Polish White Cross of Baltimore bought an ambulance for Warsaw and donated it though the offices of Nicholas Murray Butler. Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector Sovereign Council Chancellor 1944 Prince G M Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt Robert Edmondson Col C L T Pichel American Grand Priory Grand Priory of Denmark THE ORDER ENTRENCHES ITSELF FOR THE COLD WAR The SOSJ had lost the majority of its Russian and European membership during the last phases of WWI when the Russian Guard Divisions were thrown into battle in tragic fashion. British and French General Staffs directed all battlefield strategy, and therefore, many suspected that the slaughter of the elite of their allied Russian forces was part of the conspiracy. This carnage was followed in 1919 by further military betrayal which permanently defeated the forces of Prince Awaloff in the Baltic. The English and French navies bombarded his anti-Communist army resulting in decisive defeat outside of Riga, Latvia. Much later, the intervention of British and Americans on the side of the Soviet Union during WWII culminated in the great victory for international Communism that was the Second World War. The Allies rounded up and incarcerated free White Russians for deportation to Stalin’s death camps in Operation Keelhaul, a result of an agreement made between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference. Forced repatriation by the Allies resulted in the deaths of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of White Russians by firing squads or deportation to the Gulag archipelago labor camps. This consistent action during the 20th century in favor of the Communists with the obvious goal of creating high mortality among monarchists was conclusive proof to the SOSJ that the western governments were controlled by Internationalists and Communist conspirators. Because of this, the SOSJ continued to attract patriotic and nationalistic western military men to its membership, and to operate as an anti-Communist intelligence agency. Admiral Barry Domville, former head of British Naval Intelligence, was a long serving member of the SOSJ. It appeared that General Douglas MacArthur’s entire senior staff was in the Order. The Order became involved in Operation Paperclip and the famous “Rat Lines” which spirited Nazi anti-Communists out of Europe. THE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND KNIGHTS OF THE SOSJ DEFEND AGAINST COMMUNISM The Order was engaged worldwide in anti-Communist activities. Former SS Major General Boris Holmston-Smyslovsky, alias Colonel von Reganau, and U.S. Marine Lieutenant General Pedro Del Valle spurred renewed SOSJ activity in opposition to the Communists in Europe after 1948. Holmston-Smyslovsky was an old associate of Prince Awaloff. These men were involved with the Gladio program which prompted the founding of the U.S. Army Special Forces. The secret army of Czar Kirill I formed a nucleus for Gladio “stay behind” operations which were designed to wage perpetual war on the Communists. As successor to SOSJ Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations operations, Allen W. Dulles, Colonel William J. Donovan, Gen. Reinhard Gehlen and Lt. General Pedro Del Valle initiated NATO’s Operation Gladio during the era of the founding of the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency and German BND. The U. S. Counter-Intelligence Corps, the Gehlen Organization and the Knights of Malta started the Volunteer Freedom Corps otherwise known as Operation Gladio. Ten thousand men were descendants of the secret army of Czar Kirill I and the fifty garrisons of East European Freikorps mentioned by Cherep Spiridovich in the 1920’s and by Phillip Corso, OSJ in the 1950’s. Even in the United States, some knights started anti-Communist domestic militias and supported conservative publications to increase public awareness of the agenda of International Socialism. Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector Sovereign Council Chancellor 1948 Prince GM Gen Pavel Awaloff Col C L T Pichel American Grand Priory Grand Priory of Denmark C Christensen THE POST-WAR GERMAN ORDER OF ST. JOHN ABANDONS THE SOSJ TO IMPROVE ITS IMAGE A succession of German Lieutenant Grand Masters during the 1950’s is evidence of the continued close ties Grand Master Prince Awaloff had to the German Order of St. John. Scipio Baron von Engelhardt- Schnellenstein from the Palatinate contacted Grand Chancellor Pichel during the period 1949 to 1951 with the offer to help reinvigorate the SOSJ. He was an old associate of Prince Awaloff from the Baltic Brotherhood. He served as Lt. Grand Master from 1951 to 1955. Prince Grand Master Awaloff was brought to the United States from Austria by Operation Paperclip in 1952. His stepson, a former German SS officer with the Russian Volunteer Army of Major General Holmston-Smyslovsky, had been captured by the Communists while working behind the lines for the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1949. Grand Master Prince Awaloff died September 30, 1954 in the United States and is reportedly buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Many of the remaining members of Awaloff’s Grand Priory of Columbia were taken onto the roles of the American Grand Priory in 1955. Their contribution to the defense of the West and to war relief led members of the SOSJ to believe that they would be recognized as equal partners among the national orders of Malta. Therefore, the election of a new Grand Master to replace Prince Awaloff was postponed. Frederick H. Count von Zeppelin served from 1956 to 1960 as Lt. Grand Master. Franklin Allen West of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania became President of the Sovereign Council in 1956. Pichel wrote an inaccurate history of the SOSJ in 1958 designed to conceal the fascist ties of the SOSJ but complementary to the SMOM, and the English and German orders of St. John. The hope of acceptance of the SOSJ by these orders would again prove to be futile. The Prussian Prince Wilhelm Karl, the head of the German Order of St. John, visited Grand Chancellor Pichel in Pennsylvania in 1961 after the death of Grand Duke Cyril’s eldest daughter. She was the wife of the Hohenzollern Pretender to the throne of Germany, the Prussian Prince Louis Ferdinand. Wilhelm Karl ended Johanniter Orden association with the SOSJ when he learned that there were no charitable activities undertaken by the SOSJ and that most members appeared to be connected to military and government Intelligence. Scipio Baron von Engelhardt-Schnellenstein and F. H. Count von Zeppelin were forced to resign from the SOSJ at the risk of their membership in the German Order. Princess Ileana of Romania, Queen Maries’ daughter, had been given land in Ellwood City, Pa. near Franklin West in Pittsburgh. There, similar to her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth, she started the first community for Orthodox religious sisters in the United States and became the Mother Superior. Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector Sovereign Council Chancellor 1954 LGM Baron von Col C L T Pichel Engelhardt-Scnhellenstein 1956 LGM Graf von Zeppelin F A West Col C L T Pichel A Frenchman, Paul Granier de Cassagnac, was recruited for the Lieutenancy in 1960. Scandalized when the National Socialist ties to the Order became known by the newer members in 1962, and believing that the presence of King Peter II of Yugoslavia as a new member would improve the Order’s social standing, Cassagnac called for the members to elect him Grand Master. Crolian Edelen was present at the vote count and verified that Cassagnac failed in his attempt to gain the Order’s highest office. Nonetheless, ignoring the failed election, Cassagnac created a splinter order. King Peter II was the son of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and had joined the SOSJ in 1961. He followed Cassagnac into schism but soon disagreed with him and started his own Order of St. John under his Yugoslavian royal title. Prince Serge Troubetzkoy had also left the original Order and became King Peter’s Lieutenant Grand Master. When the King claimed that their new order was not the original trunk of the old order, Troubetzkoy took his Russian dominated organization and operated independently. The Order retains letters from Prince Troubetzkoy in which he discusses the nature of these different orders. In the meantime, Pichel and his Supreme Council asked Admiral Felix Count von Luckner, a famed German naval officer and associate of Prince Awaloff, to assume the position of Lieutenant Grand Master that had been vacated by Cassagnac. LGM Admiral Count von Luckner became terminally ill and resigned in 1966. He died in 1967. Because the use of the title Grand Master was becoming quite popular with the various branches of the SOSJ, Pichel engineered the election of the 75th Grand Master, Crolian Edelen, in 1966. Edelen was a German-American and former Pacific WWII Army intelligence officer and was an avid amateur genealogist. He attempted to unravel the 20th century history of the SOSJ, but succeeded only in creating more controversy about its origins. Unfortunately, though necessary at the time, the attempt to conceal former alliances to fascist governments prior to and during WWII created chronic problems for the American Grand Priory. The Order was protecting its members and their families. The reluctance to offer proof of lineage through Czar Kirill I fueled the critics of the SOSJ. The SOSJ membership roles during this time included Generals Lemuel Sheperd, Pedro Del Valle, George Stratemeyer, Charles Willoughby, Ralph Smith, Terry Morrison, Bonner Fellers, Admirals Charles Cooke, RL Porter, Herbert Howard, Richard Black, Francis Spellman and Prince Michel Sturdza of Romania, Congressman Larry MacDonald and Senator John Ashcroft. Well known leaders of the American intelligence community accepted various positions in the SOSJ. Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector Sovereign Council Chancellor 1960 LGM P Cassagnac F A West Col C L T Pichel 1962 LGM Count von Luckner Bishp B Kurz Col C L T Pichel 1966 Prince GM Sir Crolian Edelen Bishp B Kurz Col C L T Pichel THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA STAND AGAINST HUMANISTS WITHIN THE CHURCH After the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1969, the Order became one of the few institutions to preserve the ancient Latin Rite liturgy. Catholic traditionalists were attracted to the Order by its ecclesiastical independence guaranteed in perpetuity by numerous popes. The humanist revolution had entered the Catholic Church and the Order struggled to resume its former role as a staunch defender of the Catholic Faith. Unfortunately Grand Chancellor Pichel became increasingly eccentric in his later years. He alienated the members but retained legal control of the SOSJ by his use of proxy votes. Grand Master Edelen resigned in 1976. The 76 th Grand Master elected was Prince Roberto Paterno from Sicily, Hereditary Grand Prior of the ancient Langue of Aragon. Elected in 1976, he served until 1983. Pichel finally resigned in 1977. His duties were divided between new Grand Priors of America and Europe. A power struggle ensued after the unexpected death of American Grand Prior Capell in October, 1980. When Pichel died in May, 1982 several knights took control of a weakened SOSJ corporation that he had founded in 1956. The loss from old age of many influential members of the SOSJ gave impetus for a few knights to attempt to seize control of the Order in order to make legal claim on the legendary lost Romanoff treasure that reportedly lay on the floor of the Sea of Japan. They filed a claim against the Sovereign Council for patent infringement. SOSJ Security General Nicholas Nazarenko was a former Cossack German Waffen SS Intelligence Officer. After the war he was recruited to work in Romania for the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps. His timely intervention helped the Sovereign Council to form the Association of Family Commanders and Hereditary Knights in 1983. A federal court case filed by the splinter group in an effort to seize control of the Order finally succeeded only in the legal grant to them of a trademarked name from Pichel’s 1956 corporation. Dr. John Grady defended the SOSJ against the coup attempt and was elected in a Chapter General in 1991 as the 77 th Grand Master of the SOSJ. Dr. Grady, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, medical doctor and politician helped to write a new constitution which was accepted by the Order at the first Chapter General since the Fall of Malta. Grand Master Dr. Grady then proceeded to rebuild the Order. The 78 th Prince Grand Master of the SOSJ, Barry Garland, was elected in 2006 and assumed office in 2008 upon the retirement of Dr. Grady. Garland, a critical care nurse and professional bodyguard, assumes leadership of the Order at a critical time for the Church and others who seek peace and security in the world. Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Grand Protector Sovereign Council Chancellor 1976 Prince GM Sir Roberto Paterno Col C LT Pichel American Grand Priory F Capell European Grand Priory T Wicklund 1983 LGM Prince Troubetzkoy Regent Gen B von Stahl Dr J L Grady 1991 Prince GM Dr. Sir John Grady, MD LGM Prince Troubetzkoy 2003 Prince GM Dr. Sir John Grady, MD A Chadwick LGM B Garland 2008 Prince GM Sir Barry Garland K Weger GM Emeritus Dr. Sir J Grady, MD THE HISTORIC MISSION OF THE SOSJ Since its inception in 1048, the OSJ has been an indispensable defender of Christendom and servant to the poor and infirm. Until the French Revolution the Order could always count on moral support from the Church of Rome. Because of the capture by Napoleon of the Pope and of his sovereign territory, the Church was compromised by Revolutionary philosophies which affect it even to the present day. Thus the SOSJ suffered the loss of the public support of the Catholic Church. The SOSJ turned inward for the survival of its own government and compromised its ideals and traditions by supporting an Orthodox czar who was the strongest proponent of the Counter Revolution. The Order continued to perpetuate its government since the loss of Malta in the best ways that it could. Occasionally, men with decidedly non-Catholic beliefs have been accepted as knights because it was thought that their prominence in society would benefit the Order. That has proven to be a false assumption and has led to the creation of multiple splinter organizations claiming the SOSJ lineage. During the last five decades, the Order has been among those few organizations which have decried the deterioration caused by social humanist intrusion into the highest circles of the Catholic Church. As described in this abbreviated history of our militant Catholic brotherhood since the loss of Malta, the SOSJ has continuously striven to fulfill its historic mission as defender of Christendom and as servant to the poor and infirm. There is no other organization that can claim the history described in this essay. Two hundred years of counter revolutionary service for Christendom have challenged the Knights of Malta with engagement in both physical and spiritual combat. Even so, the Order has not been formally recognized by the Holy See since the Fall of Malta. It has relied on the ancient rights and privileges granted in perpetuity by popes of the Middle Ages. The knights, who have always preserved the ancient Catholic liturgy, recently resolved to seek reaffirmation from the Holy See that it is in full communion with the Catholic Church. The ancient Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem continues as an hospitaller service organization structured as an army of the Catholic Church. The Knights of Justice are the protectors of the Order’s sovereignty and traditions as handed down from antiquity through Czar Kirill I and the Sovereign Council. The Headquarters of the Order is in Jupiter, Florida, U.S.A. The Convent of the Order is located in Benton, Tennessee, U.S.A. SOSJ TIMELINE FROM 1797 1798 The SOSJ moves its convent from Malta to the home of its protector, Czar Paul I, in St. Petersburg, Russia, and elects him the 72 nd Grand Master. The Russian czars become the perpetual protectors of the SOSJ. 1803 John Baptist di Tommasi is named the 72 nd Prince Grand Master of the SOSJ. He was chosen by the Pope from a list of candidates presented from the dispersed priories of the Order. He was the candidate of the SOSJ in St. Petersburg. 1805 Upon the death of Grand Master di Tommasi, the SOSJ in Russia, in order to remain independent of the intrigues of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, continues under the President of the Sovereign Council and the Czar Alexander I, Protector of the Order. 1893 Russian Knights of Malta introduce American civic leaders to the White Cross at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. 1904 The American White Cross First Aid Society is founded in Chicago, Illinois by civic leaders in association with the U.S. Military, the Catholic Church and a member of the English St. John’s Ambulance Association. 1899 The U.S. Army, civic leaders and the Catholic Church attempt to gain a U.S. Title 36 Charter for the American White Cross from the Congress of the United States of America. 1908 The White Cross Hospital and Relief Association is founded in New York City, New York. It was the combined effort of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Knights of Malta joining with a Protestant relief organization. 1912 The American Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, including the Catholic Grand Priory of Russia is given a Constitution and a Grand Prior. Its founding is dated to 1908. 1913 Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich is elected the 73 rd Grand Master of the SOSJ. 1917 The SOSJ is forced from Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution. The Polish White Cross is founded by the Grand Priory of Russia in the United States a few days later. 1919 The Russian Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem is re-established in Saltzvedel, Germany by Knights of the Corps des Pages, Colonel Pavel Awaloff and Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich. 1922 The OSJ Sovereign Council is reconstituted in New York City by the authority of Grand Duke Cyril, Guardian of the Imperial Throne of Russia. William Nelson Cromwell assumes operational control of the SOSJ as President of the Sovereign Council. 1928 Dowager Empress Dagmar Feodorovna dies in Denmark, and her daughter Xenia, wife of Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich and Patroness of the Corps des Pages, sends the SOSJ relics to the ROCA Cathedral in Berlin. 1932 Grand Duchess Xenia authorizes the transfer of the SOSJ relics from Berlin to Belgrade to the custody of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Protector of the SOSJ. 1933 Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich dies in France. General Prince Awaloff is made President of the Russian National Liberation Movement in Germany. 1934 King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Protector of the SOSJ, is assassinated in France. Czar Kirill I becomes Protector of the SOSJ. Prince Awaloff is elected the 74 th Grand Master of the SOSJ. The Sovereign Council and Prince Awaloff found the Sovereign Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in Denmark. Colonel Charles L.T. Pichel becomes Grand Chancellor of the SOSJ upon the death of J.G.B. Bulloch. Dr. Bryant becomes President of the Sovereign Council. 1944 Robert Edmondson of Scranton, Pennsylvania becomes President of the Sovereign Council upon the retirement of Dr. Bryant. 1945 Grand Chancellor Colonel Charles L.T. Pichel moves the SOSJ Convent from New York City to Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. 1946 The SOSJ Grand Priory in Denmark is reconstituted after the war by the Sovereign Council. 1951 Lt. Grand Master Baron Scipio von Engelhardt-Schnellenstein, from Germany, assumes the leadership of the American Grand Priory. 1954 Prince Grand Master General Awaloff dies and Grand Chancellor Pichel and Lt. Grand Master Scipio Baron von Engelhardt- Schnellenstein assume the leadership of the SOSJ. 1955 Lt. Grand Master Frederic Graf von Zeppelin from Germany assumes the leadership of the SOSJ. 1956 Franklin A. West of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania becomes President of the Sovereign Council. 1960 Lt. Grand Master Colonel Paul de Cassagnac of France assumes the leadership of the SOSJ. 1962 Lt. Grand Master Felix Count von Luckner of Germany assumes the leadership of the SOSJ 1966 Crolian Edelen of New Jersey is elected the 75th Grand Master of the SOSJ. 1976 Don Roberto Paterno of Naples, Italy is elected the 76th Grand Master of the SOSJ. He resigns in 1983. 1983 General Benjamin von Stahl assumes the leadership of the SOSJ as President of the Sovereign Council and moves the Convent of the SOSJ to Benton, Tennessee. 1991 Dr. John L. Grady, MD of Benton, Tennessee is elected the 77th Grand Master of the SOSJ. 2006 Barry Garland of Florida is elected the 78th Grand Master of the SOSJ. 2008 Grand Master Barry Garland assumes office upon the retirement of Dr. John Grady. SOSJ LEADERSHIP SINCE 1797 Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Protector Sovereign Council 1797 Prince GM Ferdinand von Hompesch Pope Pius VI 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 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 G D Czar Nicholas I 1855 Undetermined Senior G D Czar Alexander II 1881 Undetermined Senior G D Czar Alexander III 1894 Undetermined G D Vladimir Czar Nicholas II 1908 Undetermined G D Vladimir Czar Nicholas II Russian Grand Priory 1. Grand Priory of Russia MG Cherep Spiridovich a. White Cross Hospital and Relief Assn. G H Bruce 1912 Undetermined Czar Nicholas II Russian Grand Priory G D Cyril American Grand Priory W S Bryant W N Cromwell 1. Grand Priory of Russia MG Cherep Spiridovich a. White Cross Hospital and Relief Assn. G H Bruce 1913 G M Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich Undetermined Czar Nicholas II Russian Grand Priory G D Cyril American Grand Priory W S Bryant W N Cromwell 1. Grand Priory of Russia MG Cherep Spiridovich a. White Cross Hospital and Relief Assn. W W Butcher 1919 Russian Sovereign Imperial Order of St. John of Jerusalem Grand Duke Cyril Cmdr in Chief Prince Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt 1922 G M Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich W N Cromwell G D Alexander King Alexander I American Grand Priory LGM John J Sheridan J P West 1. Grand Priory of Russia MG Cherep Spiridovich a. White Cross Hospital and Relief Assn. W W Butcher b. Polish White Cross Count J Potocki Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior Protector Sovereign Council 1934 Prince GM Gen Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt Dr W S Bryant Fr Chodkiewicz Czar Kirill I American Grand Priory E Wilson Grand Priory of Denmark 1938 Prince GM Gen Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt Dr W S Bryant Fr Chodkiewicz American Grand Priory Paul de Torres Grand Priory of Denmark 1944 Prince GM Gen Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt Robert Edmondson American Grand Priory C L T Pichel, G Chancellor Grand Priory of Denmark 1948 Prince GM Gen Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt C L T Pichel, G Chancellor American Grand Priory Grand Priory of Denmark C Christensen 1951 Prince GM Gen Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt C L T Pichel, G Chancellor American Grand Priory LGM Baron von Engelhardt-Scnhellenstein Grand Priory of Denmark C Christensen 1954 C L T Pichel, G Chancellor Engelhardt-Scnhellenstein 1955 LGM Baron von C L T Pichel, G Chancellor Engelhardt Scnellenstein 1956 LGM Graf von F A West Zeppelin 1960 LGM P Cassagnac F A West 1962 LGM Count von Luckner Bishop B Kurz 1966 Prince GM Sir Crolian Edelen Bishop B Kurz Rev Shelley 1976 Prince GM Sir Roberto Paterno American Grand Priory Francis Capell (Researcher for Dr. Revilo Pendleton Oliver, Warren Commission Interviewee) European Grand Priory T Wicklund 1983 Gen B von Stahl 1991 Prince GM Dr Sir John Grady LGM Prince Troubetzkoy 2003 Prince GM Dr Sir John Grady LGM B Garland A Chadwick 2008 Prince GM Sir Barry Garland GM Emeritus Dr Sir J Grady, MD K Weger SOVEREIGN ORDER OF SAINT JOHN OF JERUSALEM 1798 71st Grand Master Czar Paul I 1801 LGM Field Marshall Count Soltikoff 1803 72nd Prince Grand Master John Baptist di Tommasi 1805 Czar Alexander I, Protector of the SOSJ 1825 Czar Nicholas I, Protector of the SOSJ 1855 Czar Alexander II, Protector of the SOSJ 1881 Czar Alexander III, Protector of the SOSJ 1894 Czar Nicholas II, Protector of the SOSJ 1913 73rd Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich 1922 William Nelson Cromwell, President of the Sovereign Council 1934 74th Prince Grand Master General Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt 1954 LGM Scipio Baron von Engelhardt-Schnellenstein 1956 LGM F. Graf von Zeppelin 1960 LGM Colonel Paul Cassagnac 1962 LGM Admiral Felix Count von Luckner 1966 75th Prince Grand Master Crolian Edelen 1976 76th Prince Grand Master Don Roberto Paterno 1983 General Benjamin von Stahl, President of the Sovereign Council 1991 77th Prince Grand Master Dr. John Grady, MD 2008 78th Prince Grand Master Barry Garland And that's the Truth.... John Bevilaqua View Public Profile Find all posts by John Bevilaqua #2 12-11-2009, 06:46 AM John Bevilaqua Banned Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 199 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is a link to this exact article with images, tables and extended visual references... http://www.osjknights.com/History-After-Malta.htm 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. Attached Images TheRussianFascists.jpg (7.2 KB, 1 views) fascists.jpg (13.7 KB, 1 views) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last edited by John Bevilaqua; 01-24-2010 at 03:40 AM. John Bevilaqua View Public Profile Find all posts by John Bevilaqua #3 12-11-2009, 06:52 AM John Bevilaqua Banned Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 199 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This link shows the double-headed Eagle on the Coat of Arms of SOVEREIGN 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 THE CODE OF THE SOVEREIGN ORDER OF SAINT JOHN OF JERUSALEM 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 Attached Images fascists.jpg (15.4 KB, 1 views) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last edited by John Bevilaqua; 01-24-2010 at 02:27 PM. John Bevilaqua View Public Profile Find all posts by John Bevilaqua #4 12-11-2009, 09:04 AM John Bevilaqua Banned Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 199 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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: Der deutsche Anteil an den Vereinigten Staaten (Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1936), 300. 57 GSP Annual Report 1937. 58 GSP internal documents do not explain why or how this shift came about. The annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland occurred later in 1938 and therefore could not have triggered the society’s change of heart. 59 “German Americans in City Unite to War on Hitlerism,” Philadelphia Record, January 17, 1938. 60 As described by Jenkins, 160. 61 In 1940, Erich Windels, the new German consul in Philadelphia, received threats by mail. “German Consul is Threatened,” Philadelphia Record, June 20, 1940. 62 “Bomb Rocks Doctor’s Home: Family Unharmed by Blast,” Philadelphia Record, September 20, 1938. Hitler did march unopposed into the Sudetenland on October 1, 1938. 63 Members of several German churches and other organizations responded enthusiastically, including Lutheran pastor and GSP board member Kurt Molzahn. Jenkins, 162. “Reich Vets in U.S. Send $32,000 Home,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 14, 1940. 64 Jenkins, 211–2. 65 GSP Annual Reports 1939, 1940. 66 GSP Annual Report 1940. 67 For a discussion of the law and the internment of Germans, see Holian, The German- Americans and World War II, especially 90–96. 68 For a recent, impressive, multi-volume project that records this part of German-American history, see Don Heinrich Tolzmann, ed., German-Americans in the World Wars, Vols. 1–4 (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1995). 69 Interview with Doris McPherson, February 10, 2006. She recalls that her family’s home was searched during the war, and her father was required to have the short-wave capability of his radio removed. 70 For a fascinating oral history of Germans’ internment, see Stephen Fox, America’s Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment and Exclusion in World War II (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). 71 Kurt Molzahn, Prisoner of War (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), 20–21. 72 All biographical information based on Molzahn, Prisoner of War, 1–18. 73 GSP Annual Report 1929. 74 GSP Annual Report 1930. HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 99 75 Qtd. in Jenkins, 154–5. 76 Ladislas Farago, The Game of the Foxes: The Untold Story of German Espionage in the United States and Great Britain During World War II (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1971), 569. See also Charles Higham, American Swastika (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1985), 128–132. 77 Farago, The Game of the Foxes, 569. Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts, 157. 78 Farago, 517. The meeting was allegedly recorded by the FBI. Higham, American Swastika, 128. 79 Higham, 132. See also Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts, 157. 80 “Phila. Clergyman Indicted by U.S. in Nazi Spy Ring,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 11, 1942. 81 Molzahn, Prisoner of War, 23–48. See also Philadelphia Inquirer, August 21, 1942, and August 29, 1942. 82 “A pardon reaches the punishment prescribed for an offence and the guilt of the offender . . . if granted after conviction it removes the penalties and disabilities and restores him to all his civil rights. It gives him a new credit and capacity. . .” Ex Parte Garland (1866) 71 U.S. 333. I am grateful to my friend Gerald Shelley, a lawyer, for bringing this legal definition and citation to my attention. 83 Francis Fisher Kane, who was Philadelphia’s District Attorney during World War I and oversaw the baseless prosecution of hundreds of Germans due to the anti-German hysteria, volunteered to defend Molzahn after his arrest in 1942. Kane was also instrumental in obtaining the pardon for the pastor. Based on my interview with Klaus Molzahn, Kurt Molzahn’s oldest son, who was a teenager at the time, Hanover, PA, March 25, 2006. 84 Molzahn, Prisoner of War, 250. 85 Molzahn, Prisoner of War, 27. 86 Interview with Klaus Molzahn, March 25, 2006. Without access to the FBI records on Molzahn, it is impossible to verify Molzahn’s guilt or innocence. In another interview, Klaus Molzahn said that he has obtained the FBI records and the trial documents of his father’s case. He is currently working on a book about his father. He does not recall that his father was an overt Nazi. However, after a trip to Germany in 1935 sponsored by Kessemeier, the elder Molzahn did express his admiration for Hitler’s success in Germany. The younger Molzahn also spoke of Molzahn’s relationship with Kunze. Kunze’s father was the organist at a nearby church and had almost daily contact with Molzahn. Klaus Molzahn phone interview, February 12, 2006. 87 Otto Schweizer, a sculptor and GSP member, however, testified on behalf of Molzahn at his trial. Based on my interview with Klaus Molzahn, March 25, 2006. 88 Molzahn, Prisoner of War, 236. 89 Pastorius Day Program, September 12, 1954, unmarked, uncataloged. 90 GSP Minutes, May 2, 1957. 91 GSP Minutes, April 27, 1942. 92 GSP Minutes, January 21, 1943. The Women’s Auxiliary donated the funds for the flag. 93 GSP Minutes, April 15, 1943. 94 GSP Minutes, March 23, 1943. 95 April 16, 1943, Red Cross event held at the GSP. 96 Postilion, Oct. 1943, vol. 1, issue 1. 97 Postilion, Dec. 1943, vol. 1, issue 2. It is interesting to note that former GSP president George Beichl does not recall any negative repercussions as a result of speaking German in wartime Philadelphia. Interview with George Beichl, January 25, 2006. Doris McPherson, president of the Women’s Auxiliary, on the other hand, remembers that she refused to speak 100 ETHNICITY MATTERS German as a child, in part because she was afraid to be perceived as unpatriotic. Interview with Doris McPherson, February 10, 2006. 98 Postilion, March 1944, vol. 1, issue 3. 99 GSP Minutes, January 20, 1944. 100 GSP Minutes, April 13, 1944. 101 GSP Minutes, January 18, 1945. 102 Further research into the charge of un-American activities is needed. The surviving GSP records do not address the matter. 103 GSP Minutes, April 29, 1945, and January 17, 1946. 104 GSP Minutes, April 20, 1950. 105 The bequest was first announced in October 1946. See October 17, 1946, GSP Minutes. 106 GSP Minutes, September 6, 1962. 107 GSP Minutes, January 17, 1963. 108 GSP Minutes, March 1, 1965. 109 GSP Minutes, January 30, 1967. 110 GSP Minutes, October 17, 1946. 111 Harry Pfund, A History of the German Society of Pennsylvania, Founded 1764 (Philadelphia, PA: German Society of Pennsylvania, 1944), 18. 112 Ibid. 113 Periodic grumblings about the use of English instead of German appear in the records repeatedly. See, for example, GSP Minutes, January 16, 1947. 114 GSP Minutes, January 28, 1954. 115 GSP Minutes, April 17, 1947. 116 The issues surrounding the GSP location will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. 117 See GSP Minutes, September 27, 1949. In 1950 the GSP once again appointed an immigration committee, and in 1956 the GSP offered English and citizenship courses. 118 One study estimates that 888,303 Germans emigrated to the US between 1946 and 1970. Most arrived between 1946 and 1957. Between 1957 and 1965, an average 22–32,000 came each year. After that, German immigration steadily declined to an average of 10,000 per year by 1970. See Wolfgang J. Helbich, “Alle Menschen sind dort gleich . . .” Die deutsche Amerika- Auswanderung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1988), 152. I am indebted to Frank Trommler for pointing out this source to me. 119 In 1955 there were some concerns within the GSP that newly arriving Germans were not joining “the old associations” and thus constituting a loss for “the established German- American movement.” Speech by former GSP President Louis Schmidt at the Pastorius Celebration, October 2, 1955, GSP box 1957–58. 120 Decorations in the Ratskeller of the German Society are a good example of how World War II refugees shaped the society’s image of Germany and its past. A huge map in the hallway to the Ratskeller, for example, depicts “Deutschland in den Grenzen von 1937,” which does not recognize the post-war borders of Poland or the existence of the GDR from 1948–1989. The map itself was drawn by Wilhelm Neufeld and Martin Kornrumpf and published by the Müller & Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1953, 1954. It is not clear when the map was put up by the GSP. 121 Harry Pfund, head of the library committee in 1949, asked whether he should return “certain books that had been held back during the war and in recent years” to the shelves. The board decided he should wait before doing so. See GSP Minutes, April 26, 1949. Frank Trommler, a member of the library committee from 1978 to 2000, knew about the closet and HITLER’S SHADOW IN PHILADELPHIA 101 remembers open discussions about its contents. Nothing, however, was ever done with the stacks of Nazi literature, as with so many other library materials at the GSP. 122 I am grateful to Bettina Hess for telling me about the Giftschrank and for helping me locate some materials. The Giftschrank might have been named after a similar “closet” in Michael Verhoeven’s 1989 film Das Schreckliche Mädchen [The Nasty Girl]. This film tells the story of a young woman’s quest to uncover the history of her hometown during the Third Reich. Many of the pertinent records are located in the so-called Giftschrank of the city archive. 123 Gazette Democrat, October 7, 1951. 102 ETHNICITY MATTERS John Bevilaqua View Public Profile Find all posts by John Bevilaqua #5 12-11-2009, 09:29 AM John Bevilaqua Banned Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 199 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. John Bevilaqua View Public Profile Find all posts by John Bevilaqua #6 12-11-2009, 10:49 AM John Bevilaqua Banned Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 199 Who was William Nelson Cromwell anyway and why was he Grand Prior? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. John Bevilaqua View Public Profile Find all posts by John Bevilaqua #7 12-11-2009, 04:36 PM David Guyatt Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 2,378 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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..._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. __________________ "The historical process can now be seen as the self-manifestation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious as they emerge and develop in time and space through the actions and fantasies of humanity." Edward F Edinger David Guyatt View Public Profile Send a private message to David Guyatt Find all posts by David Guyatt #8 12-11-2009, 07:00 PM Jan Klimkowski Founding Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 2,074 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/for...read.php?t=223 __________________ "It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...." "Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek." "They are in Love. xxxx the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon "Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Túpac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last edited by Jan Klimkowski; 12-11-2009 at 07:03 PM. Jan Klimkowski View Public Profile Send a private message to Jan Klimkowski Find all posts by Jan Klimkowski #9 12-11-2009, 09:10 PM John Bevilaqua Banned Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 199 Possible origin of the term Manchurian Candidate -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last edited by John Bevilaqua; 12-12-2009 at 11:50 AM. John Bevilaqua View Public Profile Find all posts by John Bevilaqua #10 12-11-2009, 11:02 PM Helen Reyes Member Join Date: Aug 2009 Posts: 529 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. Helen Reyes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kathleen Collins Posted August 19, 2010 Share Posted August 19, 2010 Thank you for publishing this. And I thank you for mentioning Cardinal Spellman, that little, obnoxious b______d. Kathy C Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Andrews Posted August 21, 2010 Share Posted August 21, 2010 (edited) John, I enjoyed the .pdf file on the "isolationists" very much. In your research, what is the history of the FBI following the postwar activities and regroupings of the former Bundists, Silver Shirts, Coughlinites, and America Firsters, absent their joining any race hate groups? Was there any other type of FBI involvement with pro-fascist groups, such as in anti-communist alliances? I've read your many past posts and the history of your research personae up to 1963 and the assassination coverup, but I'm wondering about the movement history from the FBI angle. Anything I should read in that line? I'm as interested in the rank-and-file Americans who fell for this volksfascismus as much as I am in the leadership and its useful idiots. Edited August 21, 2010 by David Andrews Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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