ALI BABBA THE GODFATHER OF THE BANKSTERS After Thomas McKittrick, the former president of the Bank for International Settlements, died in a New Jersey nursing home in 1970, at age 81, the New York Times eulogized him as a world financier. His brief obituary described him as a man sufficiently daring to attend a bank meeting in Switzerland in 1940 “within earshot of a French-German artillery duel,” while his peers voted by proxy instead. But like many obituaries, McKittrick’s death notice was more notable for what it omitted. As head of the BIS, headquartered in Basel, from 1940 to 1946, McKittrick played a crucial role in abetting Hitler’s war—and, at the same time, in revealing details about his Nazi colleagues to his friends in Washington, D.C. On McKittrick’s watch, the BIS willingly accepted looted Nazi gold, carried out foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and recognized the Nazi invasion and annexation of conquered countries. By doing so, it also legitimized the role of the national banks in the occupied countries in appropriating Jewish-owned assets. Indeed, the BIS was so indispensable to the overall Nazi project that the vice-president of the Reichsbank, Emil Puhl—who was later tried for war crimes—once referred to the BIS as the Reichsbank’s only “foreign branch.” In the closing months of the war, as American GIs fought their way across Europe, McKittrick was arranging deals with Nazi industrialists to guarantee their profits after the Allied victory.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 14:37:39 +0000