September 11 Commission Report - Gnostic Liberation Front

“If one drives southwest from Hanover, Germany, and is careful to remain on Berliner Strasse for
about 125 kilometers, one will come to Gutersloh, a pleasant town of sculptured tulip gardens, highspired
churches, and tree-lined streams and lakes. It is a town of thirty-six thousand that lists as an
honorary citizen, among others, Reinhard Mohn. This is the ancestral home of the Mohn family, who
happen to own the privately owned firm of Bertelsmann A.G., the fifth largest media corporation in the
United States and, among other things, the largest printer of English-language books in the world.
…Like the other members of the Big Five that dominate the American media world, Bertelsmann's list
of media companies is lengthy. It requires nine typed pages. Thirty percent of its holdings are in the
United States, bringing from this source alone $63 billion annually.
Most of Bertelsmanns eighty-two book subsidiaries were once freestanding, independent publishing
houses, some of them household words not so many years ago Alfred Knopf, Pantheon, Random
House, Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Doubleday, and Modem Library. Its magazine groups include
familiar names like Family Circle and Parents (joint ventures). The twenty different record labels
issued by Bertelsmann include RCA, RCA Victor, and Windham Hill. Like others in the Big Five,
Bertelsmann has shared enterprises with its "competitors," including a 50-50 ownership with Disney of
a German TV operation, Super RTL.
With all its power, Bertelsmann is haunted by a ghost....With the advent of Hitler and Nazism in the
1930s and the aftermath horrors of the Holocaust in World War 11, questions were asked how the
company had emerged from the war ready to resume its growth around the world. To queries like
"What did you do under Hitler?" the Bertelsmann official answer was, in effect, "We suffered for our
anti-Nazism." Postwar records seemed to confirm this because in 1944 there was a temporary closure
of the Bertelsmann plant in Gutersloh. But as postwar German archives became available, Gennan
sociologist Hersch Fischler discovered that, during the war, Bertelsmann had, in fact, been the largest
publisher under Hitler. Among its 19 million books, it had large contracts from the Nazi Propaganda
Ministry, including anti-Semitic tracts supporting Hitler's insistence that Germans needed to take over
central and western Europe. One book echoed Hitler's propaganda claim. Bertelsmann's anti-Semitic
tracts were standard literature for Hitler's Brown Shirts.” [The New Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian,
Beacon Press, 2004]
While the Bertelsmann Media giant is owned mostly by the quiet Mohn family of
Germany, they have cast their lot with a familiar global financial powerhouse: Group
Bruxells Lambert, largely controlled by Andre Desmarais. The reader will recall that
Desmarais was identified as a board member of Barrick Gold, along with George Bush
Sr., Adnan Khashoggi, the Bronfmann family and a host of German/Swiss bank cartel
members. Desmarais had himself placed on the Board of BertelsmannAG, suggesting
another media company controlled by one of the extended Bush syndicate.
“In February 2001, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, one of Belgium’s top 10 companies and 25 percent
owned by Power Corp., acquired control of BertelsmannAG. Andre Desmarais, President and Chief
Executive Officer of Power Corp., was named to the BAG board.
As it turns out, the publishing company controlled by Canada’s powerful Desmarais family has a less
than honourary history. Indeed, during the days of the Third Reich, BertelsmannAG was the biggest
publisher of Nazi texts, with production more prolific than the National Socialist Party’s own printing
business. The Nazi chapter of BertelsmannAG began in 1933, but was only documented and disclosed
by a historian Saul Friedlander in 1999.
Bertelsmann published the nefarious, The Christmas Book for Hitler Youth.
The publishing empire which employs some 80,000 workers in 51 countries, posted an overall cash
flow of $18.3-billion in 2002.
Originally run by the Heinrich Mohn family, the company donated money to the SS and to various
ecology Save-the-Earth factions of the Nazi movement.” [Canada's global connections, Judi McLeod,
Canadafreepress.com, December, 15, 2004.]
THE SEPTEMBER 11 COMMISSION REPORT Page 338