CHURCHILL'S DEBT TO NAZI SLOGANEERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500110004-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 9, 2005
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: November 23, 1983
• Content Type: NSPR

ARTICLE
ON PAGE
Letters .
NEW YORK TIMES
23 November 1983
Churchill's Debt to Nazi Sloganeers
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To the Editor:
An Oct. 30 Associated Press article
about an address at Westminster Col-
lege in Fulton, Mo., by William J.
~C;asey,,.Directar of Central.lntelli.
Some, stated: "It was at. Westmin
star College in Fulton that Winston
Churchill delivered his now famous
speech in which he coined the phrase
'Iron Curtain' in reference to the
Communist bloc countries of Eastern
Europe, and Mr. Casey referred to
that speech today."
Churchill did not coin the phrase;
he exploited it.
Just before the close of World War II
in Europe, the German Foreign Minis-
ter, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk,
made a speech (reported in The Times
of London on May 3, 1945) in which he
used the Nazi propaganda phrase
"Iron Curtain" In the context used
later by Churchill. On May 12, just
three days after the German surren-
der came into force, Churchill wrote to
Truman (who had become President
one month earlier) to express his con-
cern about the future of Europe and to
say that an "Iron Curtain" had come
down to conceal everything that was
going on within the Russian sphere of
eastern Europe.
Nearly a year later, March 4 and 5,
1946, Truman and Churchill traveled
on the President's special train to
Missouri, where Churchill delivered
those historic lines: "From Stettin in
the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended across
the Continent.
Former O.S.S. member Casey
might well recall that by working
closely with Nazis and Nazi sympa-
thizers before the surrender of Ger-
many, the O.S.S., and particularly its
agents Frank Wisner and Allen
Dulles, nurtured the idea that the
time had come to split the Western al-
liance with the Soviet Union. It was
this covert policy that encouraged the
Nazis to put forth the "Iron Curtain"
theme to save their own necks and to
stir up resentment against. the Rus-
SianS. L. FLETCHER PROUTY
Alexandria, Va., Nov. 2,1983
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 ~/ ARTICLE APPEARED
TQEW YORK TIMES
d For Release 2006?0f)b'TK-F i1-00901EMAQ A
An Unsung `Good German '?
Fame Comes at Last
BONN, Nov. 8-- In the aftermath of he wanted toshare his knowledge,"
World War II, many .Germans came Mr. Riegner continued. "I was still in
forward to proclaim that they had been . touch with him after the war, and he
secretly against the Nazis, or had car- confirmed that be did not want his
Tied out "inner resistance" to Hitler's name used. My personal suspicion was
dictatorship. But Eduard Schulte kept that he may have been afraid of the
his secret. neo-Nazi movement."
Mr. Schulte, a tall, prosperous busi-
nessman who until 1943 had directed a
mammoth German zinc mining com-
pany in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Po-
land), lived out most of the postwar
years in Zurich. In 1956, a year after
the death of his first wife, the 65-year-
old Mr. Schulte' married Dora Jette
Kurz, a Jewish woman of Polish par-
entage who was born in Zurich and ran
a boutique there. He died in the Swiss
banking capital in 1966, according to
Swiss archives.
In recent weeks, American histo-
rians have disclosed that Eduard
Schulte was the mysterious German in-
dustrialist who was long known to have
passed to the Allies vital information
about Hitler's war plans, including the
decision to invade the Soviet Union. In
1942, Mr. Schulte provided intelligence
from Hitler's headquarters that the
German dictator was considering the
mass killing of European Jews using
prussic acid.
The story of how the United States
and its Allies ignored or disbelieved
this intelligence has been told many
times: a filter of skepticism, disbelief
and in some cases anti-Jewish preju-
A series of interviews have turned up
many new details about Mr. Schulte,
including the revelation that his highly
classified information came from
Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the
Abwehr, ? the military intelligence
branch of the high command of the
.German armed forces.
According to an extremely close
relative who requested anonymity, Mr.
Schulte was a member of a network of
anti-Nazi plotters that also included
Hans Bernd Gisevius, the German vice
consul in Zurich, and Carl Goerdeler,
the one-time Mayor of Leipzig who was
the civilian leader of the German
resistance to Hitler. Canaris and Goer-
deler were both executed for their in-
volvement in the 1944 assassination at-
tempt against Hitler.
Met in Zurich in '38
Mrs. Schulte, who is 74 and lives
comfortably in Zurich, was initially too
frightened to talk after the newspaper
reporting uncovered the industrialist's
second marriage and her whereabouts.
But Monday night she relented, and, in
two telephone conversations, spoke of
her husband, whom she first met in Zu-
rich in 1938. "We have our own littl
e
capitals to inaction as late as 1944, love story,. but this is not the time to
when full details were known of the talk about that," she said.
Auschwitz death camp. Mrs. Schulte praised her husband -
Motive Remains an Enigma an upstanding, good man, one of the
M11
modest
m
But, even after his name was dis-
closed for the first time, an aura of
mystery surrounded Eduard Schulte.
What compelled this scion of the Ger-
man establishment to risk his life as an
unpaid Allied agent?
Gerhart Riegner, the Swiss repre-
sentative of the World Jewish Con-
gress, still refuses to acknowledge that-i
it was Mr. Schulte who in 1942 supplied
him with the information about the
"final solution."
"I have not identified the man for 40
years," said Mr. Riegner in a tele-'
phone interview, "and I see no reason
not to keep the one request he ever
made of me."
en m the world - and
said his hatred for Hitler was sharp-
ened by the plight of his many Jewish
friends in Europe. "He had Jewish
friends everywhere," said Mrs.
Schulte. "I used to joke with him that
be was more Jewish than I was."
In 1940, she said, Mr. Schulte warned
her that she should flee neutral Switz-
erland, fearing that it would be invad-
ed. But she stayed. After the war, she
said, Mr. Schulte was profoundly disil-
lusioned about his own i
was doing things we could never go for.
ward," said Mr. Jung, who is now re-
'tired. "He spoke out openly, but of
course in trust. He said we were up
against, the world, that Hitler had
created a dirty mess."
IN =1
ploits - "that he had done methiinng
that put his life in danger and there was
no reaction,"
Eduard, Reinhold Karl Schulte was
born on Jan. 4, 189L in Dusseldorf, and,
after earning his law degree, went into
banking and industry. In 1926, he be-
came managing director of Georg von
Giesche's Erben, the biggest zinc pro-
'ducer in Germany, which had impor-
tant holdings in Poland. The American
Anaconda Copper Mining Company
controlled 51 per cent of the German
With company's first wife, Clara Luisee,1 Mr.
Schulte had two sons, Eduard Wolf-
gang Oskar and Ruprecht Franz Hu.
bertus, who were both born in Berlin
and fought in the war. The first son died
in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at
Stalingrad in 1943, and Ruprecht
Schulte today lives in San Diego, Calif.,
where he works for a defense company.
Reached by telephone today, Ru-
precht Schulte said that under the Wei-
mar Republic his father was a member
of the Social Democratic Party and had
a number of friends who "were later
unceremoniously pushed out of office
and killed" after Hitler's takeover in
1933. In 1937, he said, his father was in-
terrogated by the Nazi authorities
about foreign currency transactions.
Albrecht Jung, who was Giesche's
legal adviser, said that before the war
Mr. Schulte had known Allen W.
Dulles, then a lawyer with the firm of
Sullivan & Cromwell, through Anacon-
da's dealings in Silesia. (In 1928, ac-
cording to his son, Mr. Schulte had
broadened his American contacts' on a
long trip to the United States.) During
the war, Mr. Dulles became the Bern
chief of the Office of Strategic Serv-
ices, and a key Schulte contact.
"Dr. Schulte told us the way Hitler
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