The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

by Christopher Simpson

Book by Simpson, Christopher

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Law, World War II, War, Politics, Conspiracy Theories

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Christopher Simpson is a veteran reporter, historian, and analyst who teaches at American University's School of Communication in Washington, DC. His work has won national awards for investigative journalism, history, and literature, and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Current study includes technology, democracy, revolution, and peer learning.

Reviews

[david · Rating 4 out of 5]

I keep asking myself, “Do we think we are better persons today than we (or any of us) were yesterday?”

I keep asking myself, “Do we really believe that one day the world will be better than it is today, and are we are more alert and aware now of the dangers we have witnessed throughout history and better prepared for dangers around the upcoming corner?” (Does a generation actually and constructively learn from history, before it too, goes away?)

I keep asking myself, “Do we feel, intellectually or otherwise, that there exists proportionately less evil today than at any other time in history?”

I keep asking myself, “Are we really all convinced that systemic societal detritus emanates from bankers, celebrities, the rich or the poor, the wealthy or the destitute, the undocumented criminals we all are?”

I keep asking myself, “Does the USA feel it can create here and export everywhere lawyers and legislation that will change the behaviors of all earth’s creatures for the better?”

While lawmakers and politicians debate, decide, discuss how things must change in this theatre (this reader thinks we cannot sway from what we are), do they ever escape from their own little worlds to understand the decimation of life and health going on as they engage over fancy dinners?

The death and dying from famine and thirst for water half of the world seeks each day, while the powerful drink seven-times distilled liquor as they theorize about the human predicament, in a cozy and sequestered location?

If these books offer us anything, it removes the mess and results of any ‘genocide’ and encourages us to analyze human nature, human motives, and human needs to destruct another and often self-destruct, with hubris and without reflection.

Our audacity, our arrogance, to think, for just one minute (or an entire lifetime), that we have the capacity to change the human condition is just…well…folly.

Throw us, humanity, into a pool (a sea) unaffected and untouched by ambient toxicity and wait a little while until our true natures reveal themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, genocide is not a good thing, but it is a human thing.

And it will recur and destroy and then fade slightly, during dusk, just as people do.

There exists no explanation to mortals, anywhere.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably not the cheeriest of holiday reading, but a fine account of how US financial, read: political, interests basically giggled and skittered around morality by investing in and then largely turning a blind eye to Nazi atrocities, especially that one you may have heard of, the Holocaust.
It's uncontroversial that American financial interests like Ford and others poured money into Nazi Germany. It's also uncontroversial that the US government protected prominent Nazi scientists and other various assholes, often reinserting them back into Germany vs the Soviet Union or bringing them to the States, setting them up with nice pensions and comfortable lives. All uncontroversial, but I bet the average American doesn't know all that, making this a great gift for the holiday season for your most beloved unsuspecting patriot.
Simpson does you one better and ties all this informal indulgence to the Armenian genocide waged by the Ottomans in the Teens, arguing that the policy was first formulated there. What policy? "Oh, we care. We really do. But the money is nice, frankly, so fuck off, persecuted minorities!"

[Michael Connolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

About the Author: The author is a professor of journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.

Overview: Simpson’s book is about the failure of international law to punish genocide, often because of the financial interests of the major nations.

Armenian Genocide: The Armenian genocide of 1915 was lead by a group of young Turkish military officers named the Ittihad, and informally referred to as “The Young Turks”. They deported the Armenians in Anatolia southward, to Syria. The Ittihad then declared their property abandoned, and the stolen loot became patronage for the Ittihad supporters. The Ittihad received amnesty from Britain and France in exchange for access to the oil and mineral wealth of the Ottoman Empire.

Post-Genocide Revenge Killings by Armenian Assassins
• Talaat Pasha (March 15, 1921 in Berlin, Germany)
• Djemal Azmy Bey (April 17, 1922 in Berlin, Germany)
• Baha Lddin Chaklr (April 17, 1922 in Berlin, Germany)

American Reaction to the Armenian Genocide: Robert Lansing, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, argued that international law governed relations between nations, not what happened within one individual nation. Secretary Lansing opposed the effort to prosecute the Turks for the Armenian genocide.  Admiral Mark L Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey, accused the Armenians of lacking national spirit. Bristol barred newspaper reporters from the parts of Turkey where Armenians were being slaughtered. Admiral William Colby Chester supported Turkey, and later received oil concession in Iraq from Turkey.

Sullivan and Cromwell Law Firm: Robert Lansing was the uncle of the brothers Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles. The Dulles brothers were attorneys at the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, which specialized in German reparations and international finance. The elder brother, John Foster Dulles, later became Secretary of State under Eisenhower. The younger brother, Allen Dulles, worked for the CIA and its predecessors, and eventual became head of the CIA.

Bank for International Settlements: Simpson discusses the Swiss Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which had been set up for the reparations Germany had been forced to pay the victors of World War I. But later on, during the period of Nazi rule, the BIS also played a major role in the confiscation of property from the countries that Germany invaded in World War II. The BIS also laundered gold stolen by the Nazis from the Jews. The Dulles family, including Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, had long had strong connections to the BIS.

Aryanization of Jewish Property: Simpson discusses the Aryanization of Jewish property, where the Nazi government stole businesses from the Jews and then gave them to ethnic German businessmen. This process increased support for the Nazi Party by German businessmen who were not antisemitic, but merely greedy.

Operation Sunrise in Italy: Operation Sunrise was an agreement made between the Nazis and the Allies to arrange for the surrender of German troops in northern Italy in 1945. This agreement enabled the British and American armies to gain the Adriatic city of Trieste, which otherwise may have ended up on the other side of the Iron Curtain. SS General Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff handled the negotiations on the German end. After the War, Allen Dulles tried to protect Karl Wolff, but Wolff eventually spent 7 years in prison for killing Jews in Treblinka.

Miklós Horthy: After the War, the United States State Department protected the Hungarian Nazi-collaborator Miklós Horthy from prosecution for war crimes he committed against the Jews, Romani, and Serbs. Horthy was protected not only from the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, but also from Yugoslavia, who wanted to try him for his crimes against Serbs.

Kontinentale Öl AG: The Nazis created a holding company called Kontinentale Öl by combining several oil companies from conquered territories, prominently including Romania. The company used slave labor to build oil fields, pipelines and refineries in Eastern Europe. Many of the laborers came from Jewish concentration camps, and many of these laborers died from overwork. Karl Blessing, one of the company’s directors, worked at the company’s corporate offices in Berlin. Allen Dulles protected Karl Blessing from being prosecuted for war crimes. Blessing later became chairman of West Germany’s central bank.

White Lists: Allen Dulles, who was the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) chief in Berlin, created “white lists” of Germans who would be given amnesty after World War II. Allen Dulles turned to the not entirely impartial Swiss Bank for International Settlements for information regarding whose hands were clean. There were two kinds of useful people:
• Technocrats who would help run postwar German business and industry
• Intelligence agents who could be redirected to spying against the Soviet Union

[Noric Dilanchian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant expose on the role of lawyers in US foreign office from end of the Great War and the response to the Armenian Genocide through to World War II. It illustrates the connections between German industrialists and their lawyers and the establishment in Washington as well as New York financiers and their lawyers.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

nice segments on Armenian genocide. transitions from there into NSDAP. fairly standard there.

[Jennifer Mangler · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is disturbing how offering people economic incentives helps create a society that passively or actively supports genocide.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try to visit my old high school friends and former roommates, the brothers Michael and Thomas Miley, annually since they moved to California. It is customary for them to greet me with book recommendations--from Tom, often a literal pile of books--I'm expected to consider during the stay which can last anytime from one to four weeks. Fortunately, our tastes overlap and my opinions of them are positive. Consequently, I will usually read several books, drawing from both of their selections. This historical expose was a recommendation from Tom.

[Tomasz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the easiest read, nor very uplifting, this sad tale of business as usual steamrolling over the basic human decency. The book attempts to present the approach of WWII Allied powers to the issues of war crimes, with WWI events as the background and the ultimate results of "denazification" in West Germany as the outcome, and it mostly succeeds - the author had held an amusingly rosy view of Soviet foreign and internal policy, but since this was but a minor point in this book, the conclusions he draws remain valid. Recommended.

[John Plowright · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Splendid Blond Beast of Christopher Simpson’s title refers to Nietzsche’s image of a predatory elite operating outside the law and above conventional morality. Whilst it is often claimed that Nietzsche’s philosophy was misappropriated by the Nazis, the choice of this particular phrase by Simpson seems apt given that his book is subtitled ‘Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century’ and his thesis is that financial interests collaborated with certain politicians, unconstrained by domestic or international law, in committing genocide.

The book focuses on two genocides in particular: the Armenian Genocide of 1915-18 and what Simpson calls “Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews”, although this shorthand phrase is something of a misnomer in terms of Simpson’s argument as he alleges (in words echoing Daniel Goldhagen) that “the Nazi party, SS, and similar groups — by themselves lacked the resources to disenfranchise and eventually murder millions of Jews” so that they only “succeeded in unleashing the Holocaust … by harnessing … commerce, the courts, university scholarship, religious observance, routine government administration, and so on — to the specialized tasks necessary for mass murder.”

Simpson addresses and cogently dismisses the thesis that the Holocaust is unique and his pairing of the Armenian with the Nazi genocide is well chosen, given that “Hitler repeatedly pointed to the Turkish race-murder of Armenians as an example for his own thinking”, although obviously the Armenian genocide lacks big business involvement analogous to the role of, say, I. G. Farben in Auschwitz.

‘The Splendid Blond Beast’ is often illuminating but it is not without shortcomings arising from the very boldness of Simpson’s claims and the vigour with which he advances them. For example, Simpson writes that, “Jewish wealth, and later Jewish blood, provided an essential lubricant that kept Germany's ruling coalition intact throughout its first decade in power.” Yet to speak of a “ruling coalition�� of Big Business and the Nazis overstates the case.

Gleichschaltung was the process of co-ordination or Nazification whereby Hitler sought to eliminate independent institutions and agencies so as to bring all the levers of power within the control of the Nazi state. It is a word that does not appear in the almost 400 pages of Simpson’s book but whilst Big Business, like the German military, was not subject to the full force of Gleichschaltung it is misleading to treat Germany’s business elite as if it constituted an independent partner of the NSDAP in the Third Reich. Nazi ideology did not always sit comfortably with business interests as shown by the way in which Kristallnacht initially threatened to undermine the fragile recovery of the economy, until the Nazis hit upon the idea of fining the Jews themselves for the damage caused during the pogrom.

Simpson’s tendency to make sweeping statements is also illustrated by his claim that “crimes against humanity are usually something a government does to its own people, such as genocide” when a moment’s thought reveals that the German and Austrian Jews – Hitler’s “own people” (not of course that he would have accepted that characterization) comprised only a small percentage of the Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Simpson may well be right to castigate the United States for blocking the creation of an international criminal court but it is difficult for the reader not to feel that at times his frustration with perceived U.S. failings today results in unjustified harshness in his assessment of the record of previous administrations, so that he claims, for example, that “by the 1940s the Allied refusal to rescue Jews … seemed to key U.S. officials of the day to be reasonable and ‘appropriate’, even in situations where rescue would have been relatively simple and inexpensive.” Would it really have been “simple” to extract Jews from a continent locked in total war? Would genocidal Nazis (or rather genocidal Germans if one follows Simpson’s argument) have been willing to let them be rescued?

In short, this is an ambitious and thought-provoking book, which does particularly well in reminding us of the Armenian Genocide when the Turkish government persists in denying it, but it is flawed in making assumptions and claims which reach beyond what the evidence can always comfortably support.

[Kevin Farran · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well researched, painfully true account of the unaccountables who commit atrocities and genocide. The book sadly runs on a bit but that may be reflective of the level of crimes committed. The writing is dry and yet somewhat unfathomable that things have not moved forward from Lucy's days in Africa. The question about accountability is not fully resolved in the book in that, of course the perpetrators are often excused which is appalling, but who are those that facilitated it - from the blind public to the overweening privileged statesmen (?). Facilitator and vacillator are as guilty as the perpetrator surely.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book received from NetGalley

This book goes into what happens when the law doesn't punish those who many feel should be punished. The people who committed genocide starting just after World War I and the consequences of the lack of action and how it pertained to the aftermath of The Second World War. It was a rough read and many times I felt myself getting mad at the lawyers who represented the individuals who participated in the various atrocities mentioned in this book. I believe that I learned quite a bit about a part of history that seems to be glossed over.

[Kevin Farran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had wanted to enjoy this book more than I was actually able to. The research was well documented but had, I felt a constant underlying bias. Many of the arguments are presented from only one perspective when in truth there were far more players involved than Mr. Simpson gives due space to. It is one perspective but by no means a complete picture. I believe it is a useful contribution to a vastly misrepresented time in human history.

[Karen Lee-Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chilling but could have been much better. Not my interest area, it did highlight things I had previously not known. Won't be read again though!

[Croisley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an important book for me because most of the parapolitical books I've encountered start during or after World War II. This book, in tracking Wall Street lawyers and their role in diplomacy from the drafting fo the Hague Conventions until the end of World War II, provides continuity for my understanding of deep politics. This is a great start for the question "What did they do before the OSS/CIA?"

[Larry Ggggggggggggggggggggggggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean it’s genocide/international law studies so it’s bleak and boring unless you are really into history