In 1917 Kaiser Bill sent Lenin from Switzerland to St. Petersburg in the famous Sealed Train to overthrow Kerensky’s government and get Russia out of the war. The Kaiser’s plan worked. Lenin’s Bolsheviks struck a separate peace with Germany and pulled Russia out of the war, throwing a monkey wrench into the Allies’ war plans and throwing the US into general political hysteria.
In 1919 an Anglo-American expeditionary force landed on Russia’s Pacific coast to strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle, but the force was withdrawn because it was too small and had no achievable mission.
During the Twenties, the international banking community feared that once Lenin had stabilized the Soviet Union and ended its civil war, he would send his barbarian hordes to conquer central and western Europe. Once Lenin died, Trotsky made this one of his highest priorities, along with a half-baked plan for getting American blacks to rebel and install a communist government in Red Dixie. Fortunately, Stalin had a higher priority, which was consolidating power at home.
Anyone who could read a map of Europe understood that a strong and stable Germany was critical for containing the Soviets. But the Weimar constitution had a fatal flaw: It permitted political parties to maintain their own uniformed militias. The Germany Communist Party had the biggest and toughest militia in the country, and seasoned observers saw a communist takeover of Germany as inevitable -- unless someone intervened.
Once Hitler’s Nazi militia proved its mettle in the streets, bankers began to funnel money to Hitler as Germany’s last hope. When he achieved power, Hitler removed the genuine socialists from his party in the Night of the Long Knives, allied with the military/industrial complex and the Prussian junker class, and began to gird for war.
War is all about credit. How did Hitler take a country with a thoroughly debauched currency and raise the capital to build the biggest and best military machine in Europe? The dirty little secret of the international baking community in general -- and the American banking community in particular -- was the role they played in financing Hitler. All parties to this plan understood that the long range goal was to build the German army into a force that would invade and topple the communist regime in Moscow (Operation Barbarossa).
Thus, when Hitler’s invasion of Poland brought declarations of war from England and France -- and the year-long “phony war” -- the bankers were certain that once Hitler violated his pact with Stalin and sent his troops into the Russian heartland, it would be a simple matter for England and France to rescind their declarations of war and ally with Hitler in the great campaign to rid the world of Stalin and his ilk.
But the bankers discovered too late that Hitler, like Lenin, was a historical wild card. Hitler was not supposed to invade France, Norway, half of Europe, bomb England and prepare to invade it. Rudolf Hess’ airplane flight to England was a last-ditch attempt to pull together support for an Anglo-German alliance against the Soviets. The final opening of Operation Barbarossa was too tempting for the bankers, and they continued to funnel money to Hitler even after the American declaration of war. The Walker, Bush, Dulles and Harriman families were up to their necks in a gambit that had looked good on paper but had blown up in their faces.
Ironically, when the war ended their worst nightmare had been realized. Stalin’s hordes had conquered all of eastern Europe, half of central Europe, and were on the verge of taking western Europe. The “wise men” of Wall Street and the Foreign Policy Community then drafted the US to unite western Europe and rebuild it so as to form a bulwark against the Soviet communists, creating NATO in the process. We call the result of that action the Cold War.