Tower of Basel Quotes

“BIS is an opaque, elitist, and anti-democratic institution, out of step with the twenty-first century. The BIS should have been closed down in the early 1930s, after the collapse of the German reparations program. Instead it funded the Holocaust and the Nazi war machine. Its staff members, such as Thomas McKittrick and Per Jacobssen, passed vital economic intelligence to the Nazis—often with the knowledge of the Allied authorities. The bank embodied the most cynical kind of capitalism. While millions died, it kept financial channels open across the frontlines.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The bank’s annual reports are regarded as essential reading in the world’s treasuries and governments. The head of the bank’s Monetary and Economic Department, who writes and oversees the annual reports, is one of the world’s best read and most influential financial and economic analysts and commentators. The BIS hosts one of the world’s largest restricted databases of banking information.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The European Central Bank opened for business. Seven months later, on January 1, 1999, eleven countries launched the euro. Technically, the birth of the single currency was an extraordinary achievement, justly earning the former BIS manager the title of “Father of the Euro.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“As the cynical wartime saying noted, “For six days a week Switzerland works for Nazi Germany, and on the seventh it prays for an Allied victory.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The bank’s American presidents stood at the center of the network of connections between Wall Street and American industry and Nazi Germany. Standard Oil had formed a cartel with IG Farben, whose CEO, Hermann Schmitz, sat on the board of the BIS. The French subsidiary of J. P. Morgan, a founding member of the BIS, traded profitably with the Nazis after the invasion of France. ITT had gone into partnership with Kurt von Schröder, the powerful Nazi banker who was a director of the BIS. For the new class of transnational financiers, war was merely an interruption in commerce, albeit a highly profitable one.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“the SS used one of IBM’s prototype computers, known as a Hollerith machine, to keep a record of Jewish properties and their subsequent Aryanization. The Vienna Nazi party newspaper boasted that thanks to the Hollerith machine, “within six weeks we shall have laid hands on all Jewish fortunes over 5,000 marks; within three years every single Jewish concern will have been Aryanized.”31 The historian Edwin Black argues that IBM’s technology, used for cataloging and identifying the Jews of Europe, was crucial for the organization of the Holocaust.32”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“American car industry. Opel, General Motors’ German division, produced the “Blitz” truck on which the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Ford’s German subsidiary produced almost half of all the two- and three-ton trucks in Nazi Germany. There is a strong argument that without General Motors’ and Ford’s German subsidiaries the Nazis would not have been able to wage war.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“We saw the civilians from IG Farben all over the place. We worked very near a site where they were building a chemicals factory. We could see people dragging sacks of cement, then they would collapse and die. The IG Farben civilians had to go past that on the way to their canteen. They absolutely knew what was going on. There is no question.”23 When IG Farben’s managers judged their slave laborers to be gebraucht, or used up, they were dispatched to Auschwitz I or II, to be dispatched by Zyklon B. Degesch, the German pest control company, which manufactured the poison gas capsules was a subsidiary of IG Farben. Rudy Kennedy survived. His father, Ewald, endured for about two months before being killed by an injection of prussic acid, which fit with IG Farben’s planners’ calculations about how long a slave laborer could live on his own body fat reserves.24”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“Some of the BIS gold had an even more grisly origin, which came from the watches, spectacles, jewelry, and gold teeth of concentration camp victims. This was why, after the war, Emil Puhl, vice president of the Reichsbank and BIS director, would be found guilty of war crimes.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The Nazis set up a network of informers and torturers, called the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK), to track down private gold holdings in occupied territories. The stated purpose of the special unit that was handpicked by SS soldiers was to control currency traffic across the Third Reich. Its actual purpose was “the acquisition of gold by any means, including deceit and brutality,” according to British intelligence records.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The fate of the Belgian gold reserves is the most extraordinary. At the end of 1939 the National Bank of Belgium sent more than 200 metric tons of its reserves to France for safekeeping. As the Nazis advanced, France transported the Belgian gold and some of its own to the port of Dakar in West Africa. Fearing an Allied raid, the French authorities then moved the gold inland. After the fall of Paris, Germany ordered the collaborationist French government based in Vichy to send the gold to Marseilles to be taken into the “custody” of the Reichsbank. The gold was then transported by boat, truck, train, and camel train through the Sahara Desert to Algiers. From there it was flown to Marseilles and eventually deposited in the vaults of the Reichsbank.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“Nazi Germany needed a financial channel to the neutral countries it ran through Basel. Which is the main reason why Nazi Germany did not invade Switzerland or Sweden. These neutral countries were far more use to the Third Reich as monetary hubs on the transnational financial network than as extra swathes of German-controlled territory.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The world’s most powerful international bankers were not only unwilling to obstruct the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovak—or Austrian—assets. They simply could not conceive of any reason why they should do so. As long as the formalities were observed, the necessary papers were stamped and the gold was re-assigned. Norman’s precious independence for both the Bank of England and the BIS had been bought at a high price—in mountains of gold ingots to pay for steel to build bombs that would soon rain down on London.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“Norman’s precious independence for both the Bank of England and the BIS had been bought at a high price—in mountains of gold ingots to pay for steel to build bombs that would soon rain down on London.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“Carved out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Czechoslovak Republic was a new and fragile nation. A good part of the gold had been donated by the public in the country’s early years. Josef Malik, the governor of the national bank, and his fellow Czechs believed that, even as the Nazis’ dismembered their homeland, if the national gold was safe, then something of the country’s independence would endure. They were wrong. The Czechoslovaks’ faith in the probity of the BIS and the Bank of England was tragically misplaced. The gold was sacrificed, with barely a second thought, to the needs of transnational finance and the Third Reich.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“So as Franco’s troops advanced, bank account holders cashed in their savings and quickly spent the money on whatever they could. One bank, Banco Zaragozano, even sent its chairman to the front. As soon as each city fell, he entered the newly captured territories with the military leaders to reorganize the local banks.23 This, as much as the Blitzkrieg, was the real lesson of the Spanish Civil War: the nationalists’ sophisticated fusion of financial and military power. The Nazis would hone this model, using the BIS to underpin their economic empire.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“So as Franco’s troops advanced, bank account holders cashed in their savings and quickly spent the money on whatever they could. One bank, Banco Zaragozano, even sent its chairman to the front. As soon as each city fell, he entered the newly captured territories with the military leaders to reorganize the local banks.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“It was not the bank’s business to ask where the money came from or how it had arrived. It was this obsessive formalism, repackaged as “neutrality,” that would soon lead the BIS to become, in the words of Henry Morgenthau, the US Treasury Secretary, “a symbol of Nazi instrumentality.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria, is noted on pages 100 and 101 of the 1938 report as follows: “In connection with the incorporation of Austria in the German Reich in March and April 1938, the Austrian National Bank entered into liquidation and a series of measures were promulgated transferring most of its assets and liabilities to the Reichsbank.” These assets included the Austrian National Bank’s gold reserves and their 4,000 BIS shares. The BIS accepted their “transfer” to Berlin, the first of many decisions that the bank’s leadership would take to legitimize Nazi plunder and looting.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“on finance, rather than on the complex moral and political issues that shaped nations and the world’s economy. In this they succeeded so well that an article in the Bankers’ Magazine in 1943 described the BIS reports as documents “whose emotionless neutrality would do credit to a visitor from Mars.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“Born out of a merger in the 1920s between Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, and other companies, IG Farben was the fourth-largest concern in the world (after US Steel, General Motors, and Standard Oil). It produced pharmaceuticals, chemicals, high explosives, film, plastics, fuel, rayon, paint, pesticides, car tires, poison gases, lightbulbs, aspirin, margarine, detergents, fertilizer, and much more.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“all through the 1930s, as American financiers and lawyers—none more than John Foster Dulles—ensured that American money, commodities, and expertise flowed steadily into the Third Reich.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“Layton was ushered into Norman’s office where he sat at a mahogany table in the center of the wood-paneled room.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“In theory, sensible housekeeping and mutual cooperation, overseen by the BIS, will keep the global financial system functioning smoothly. In theory. The reality is that we have moved beyond recession into a deep structural crisis, one fueled by the banks’ greed and rapacity, which threatens all of our financial security.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The BIS is a unique institution: an international organization, an extremely profitable bank and a research institute founded, and protected, by international treaties.14 The BIS is accountable to its customers and shareholders—the central banks—but also guides their operations. The main tasks of a central bank, the BIS argues, are to control the flow of credit and the volume of currency in circulation, which will ensure a stable business climate, and to keep exchange rates within manageable bands to ensure the value of a currency and so smooth international trade and capital movements. This is crucial, especially in a globalized economy,”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“The BIS buys and sells gold and foreign exchange for its clients. It provides asset management and arranges short-term credit to central banks when needed.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World

“when his airplane stopped briefly at Lydda airport in 1951.”
― Adam LeBor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World