Preening Politicians & Europe's Lost Testicles

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Disarmed and docile Europeans pose no meaningful threat to their governments’ depredations.

All sorts of reasons have been advanced for declining birthrates. SLL spotlights Europe as an advanced case and offers a hypothesis: its testicles have gone missing.

What does it do to a continent when a country 3,000 miles and an ocean away strikes the decisive blows in two of its cataclysmic wars? What does it do to that continent when that distant power assumes control over much of its defense? At a primal level, the very essence of manhood is the ability to defend one’s self and loved ones. Perhaps ceding responsibility for doing so is not emasculation, but it made Europe the little brother who must rely on big brother to fight his battles.

Naturally, big brother calls the tune. During the Cold War, that meant accepting one’s place under the US defense umbrella and toeing the US line on the Soviet Union. Only French President Charles de Gaulle challenged US domination, and that was more show than substance. With a nuclear arsenal and geographic proximity, the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to Europe, even more than it did to the US. If the Soviet Union had invaded during the de Gaulle era, France would have quickly rejoined a US-led alliance.

European politicians had another reason for accepting US domination. They were erecting the world’s most generous welfare states. Money saved on defense spending was spent on benefits. With little protest Europeans also swallowed high and steeply progressive tax rates in return for state-provided largess.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 posed an existential threat to the US military-industrial-intelligence complex. NATO could have been disbanded and responsibility for Europe’s defense handed back to Europe. The US could have significantly cut military spending. It took ten years and 9/11, but the complex overcame the threat and preserved the status quo. It ginned up a story that Islamic extremism posed a danger to the West of the same magnitude as the former Soviet Union.

Islam has historically been riven with sectarian strife, notably the Sunni-Shia schism. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were living in caves when the US and United Kingdom invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Not one Islamic nation, and certainly none of the Islamic non-state groups, had any appreciable industrial capacity. Only one Islamic government, Pakistan’s, had nuclear weapons, and its arsenal was tiny compared to the West’s and Israel’s. To rate the Islamic “threat” as anything but minuscule compared to that posed by the Soviet Union was absurd

The only way the West could lose to Islam was if it defeated itself (see “How to Defeat Your Enemies,” SLL). To their credit, the governments of Germany, France, and New Zealand refused to swallow the US’s concocted rationales for the 2003 Iraq invasion—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was fomenting terrorism—or support it. Globally an estimated 36 million people protested the invasion. The Guinness Book of Records lists a protest by three million in Rome as the largest ever antiwar rally.

We’ll see what happens if the US reneges on the Iran Nuclear Agreement, but to date 2003 remains the highpoint of European opposition to big brother. If they had known the consequences of US incursions into the Middle East and Northern Africa, they would have protested even more vociferously. The US has made a complete hash of it. The war against terror creates more terrorists, and turning the area into a hodgepodge of hell holes has prompted millions to flee, often to Europe.

They find a continent that economically has seen better days. The welfare state guarantees everything but the opportunity to work hard, keep what you earn, and make a better life for yourself. State favored companies use regulation to squelch smaller, less-connected competitors and stop innovative startups before they get started. The European Union is a bureaucratic, centralizing engine run amuck, creating more daunting obstacles to companies and entrepreneurs. There’s the usual corruption that comes with centralized bureaucracies. Monetary authorities are all-in on debt monetization and interest rate suppression policies that discourage honest savings and productive investment but encourage stock, bond, property, and derivatives speculation.

No surprise then that the European economy hasn’t grown much, if it all, the last few decades. Nor that it’s eating America and Asia’s dust in high-tech. It’s not even a surprise that this state of affairs evokes little protest among Europeans. When the government provides cradle-to-grave, you shut up and get with the program. Even if means you live with your parents into you’re thirties or forties, never have a real job or meaningful occupation, never marry or start a family, and nobody can remember one memorable thing you’ve done at your state-provided funeral.

Instead of taking an honest look at why Europeans are not having babies, politicians and other well-credentialed idiots have decreed that immigration is just the trick for declining birth rates and aging populations. They’ve been lucky; big brother America’s interventionist policies have created all sorts of refugees.

Islamic immigration is a focal point for all that ails Europe. Since 2003, there’s been no real opposition to the US’s refugee-creating policies. The refugees have found not just refuge, but state-provided benefits. Europe’s so-called leaders, apparatchiks, and media assure the population that Muslims bear no animus towards Europe. The fable goes that they will readily assimilate and become part of the taxpaying work force, forestalling the impending insolvency of the welfare state.

Only actual facts and a few alternative media outlets challenge this codswallop, for the most part Europeans have bought it. Are they fooled or neutered? The continent responsible for much of Western Civilization probably didn’t get stupid in a generation, which argues for the latter.

The isolated sparks of opposition are met with opprobrium, threats, fines and criminal sentences. Not a month goes by in which a prominent European politician doesn’t call for restrictions on the internet, the one forum that’s not completely cowed (or is it steered?). A few Eastern European nations are the resistance, pariahs. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for them if Angela Merkel-led “proper Europe” cut them off entirely.

One has to wonder if Europe’s preening politicians would be quite so obliviously oppressive (having old ladies beat up to stop them from voting and the like), if Europe’s population would be so docilely delusional, and if its Islamic immigrants would be better behaved if guns were as available as they are in the US. Pseudo-intellectuals smirk that guns are “potent phallic symbols.” True perhaps, but as noted, defending one’s self and loved ones is the first responsibility of the phallically endowed. Guns are a lot more effective than Tasers, knives, baseball bats, or calling the police.

There have been odious incidents of European women being groped, stripped, and sexually assaulted by Islamic criminals in public venues, unchallenged by what passes for European manhood. Just as odious is the pressure brought to bear on those seeking to publicize such incidents. In the US, your “intellectual” credentials aren’t in order unless you hail Europe as a “model.” It’s a model all right, for what happens when governments have no fear of their citizens. Europe’s emasculation is a potent argument for full firearms freedom in the United States.

U.S. B-1B Bombers Fly Just Off Coast Of North Korea: 4 Reasons Why This Time It's Different

Just before North Korea’s foreign minister was due to address the United Nations, the Pentagon announced that U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers escorted by fighter jets flew in international airspace over waters east of North Korea on Saturday, in a show of force which "demonstrated the range of military options available to President Donald Trump." The flight was the farthest north of the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea that any U.S. fighter jet or bomber has flown in the 21st century, the Pentagon added.

B-1B Lancer prepares to take off from Andersen AFB, Guam, Sept. 23, 2017

According to Reuters, the B-1B Lancer bombers came from Guam and the U.S. Air Force F-15C Eagle fighter escorts came from Okinawa, Japan. The Pentagon saod the operation showed the seriousness with which it took North Korea’s “reckless behavior.”

#USAF bombers, fighters fly in international airspace east of #NorthKorea, farthest north of the DMZ in 21st century https://t.co/R5DLUQigSF pic.twitter.com/fsFx4Q1oKE

— U.S. Pacific Command (@PacificCommand) September 23, 2017

“This mission is a demonstration of U.S. resolve and a clear message that the President has many military options to defeat any threat,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White, calling North Korea’s weapons program “a grave threat" adding that “we are prepared to use the full range of military capabilities to defend the U.S. homeland and our allies.”

#PACOM stands prepared to use our full range of military capabilities to defend the U.S. homeland and our allies if called upon to do so.

— U.S. Pacific Command (@PacificCommand) September 23, 2017

The DMZ is a strip of land running across the Korean Peninsula near the 38th Parallel, separating North Korea from South Korea. It was created in 1953, following the armistice which ended the Korean War.

The patrols came after officials and experts said a small earthquake near North Korea’s nuclear test site on Saturday was probably not man-made, easing fears Pyongyang had exploded another nuclear bomb just weeks after its last one. Reversing its original assessment, China’s Earthquake Administration said the quake was not a nuclear explosion and had the characteristics of a natural tremor.

While the US has flown similar sorties before, according to The Aviationist, the show of force is a bit more interesting than usual, for four reasons:

1. it is the farthest north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) any U.S. fighter or bomber aircraft have flown off North Korea’s coast in the 21st century;


2. unlike all the previous ones, the latest sortie was flown at night, hence it was not a show of force staged to take some cool photographs;


3. no allied aircraft is known to have taken part in the mission at the time of writing, whereas most of the previous B-1 missions near the Korean Peninsula involved also ROKAF (Republic Of Korea Air Force) and/or JASDF (Japan’s Air Self Defense Force) jets;


4. it was a U.S. Air Force job: no U.S. Marine Corps F-35B stealth jet took part in the show of force this time, even though the STOVL (Short Take Off Vertical Landing) variant of the Joint Strike Fighter has taken part in all the most recent formations sent over Korea to flex muscles against Pyongyang. The photo here below shows the “package” assembled for Sept. 14’s show of force.

Munitions from a U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps and Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF)
bilateral mission explode at the Pilsung Range, South Korea, Sept 17, 2017.

When In Doubt, Nuke China

Authored by Pepe Escobar via Asia Times,

A situation in which the US military feels "unhampered" has precedent – and, as General MacArthur"s endeavors in Korea prove, it"s something to be afraid of...

The current collapse of the unipolar world, with the inexorable emergence of a multipolar framework, has enabled a terrifying subplot to run amok – the normalization of the idea of nuclear war.

The latest exhibit comes in the form of a US admiral assuring everyone he’s ready to follow President Trump’s orders to launch a nuclear missile against China.

Forget about the fact that a 21st century nuclear war involving great powers will be The Last War. Our admiral – admirably named Swift – is simply preoccupied by democratic minutiae, as in “every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and to obey the officers and the president of the United States as commander and chief appointed over us.”

So it’s all about loyalty to the President, and civilian control over the military – irrespective of the risk of incinerating untold masses of said civilians, Americans included (as there would be an inevitable Chinese response).

Swift, once again, to the rescue: “This is core to the American democracy and any time you have a military that is moving away from a focus and an allegiance to civilian control, then we really have a significant problem.”

It doesn’t matter that the proverbial spokesman on behalf of the US Pacific Fleet – in this case, Charlie Brown (an apt name?) – swiftly engaged in damage control, deriding the premise of the (nuclear) question as “ridiculous.” Both the question and the answer are in fact quite revealing.

MacArthur’s park is melting in the dark

To shed extra nuances on “civilian control of the military,” a flashback to September 1950 and the Korean War, with some help from Bruce Cumings and John Halliday’s Korea: The Unknown War, may be far from “ridiculous.” Especially now that factions of the War Party in Washington have been pressing the case for nuking not China but North Korea itself.

It’s key to remember that by 1950 President Truman had already issued a “civilian control of the military” order to drop two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 – a historical first.

Truman had become Vice-President in January 1945. FDR treated him with the utmost disdain. He was clueless about the Manhattan Project. When FDR died he had been Vice-President for only 82 days, and became POTUS knowing absolutely nothing about foreign policy or the new military/nuclear equation.

Truman and MacArthur on Wake Island, 1950. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Truman had five years after bombing Japan to learn all about it, on the job. Now the action was on the Korean front. Even before an amphibious landing in Inchon, led by General MacArthur – the greatest since D-Day in Normandy, in 1944 – Truman had authorized MacArthur to advance beyond the 38th parallel. There’s substantial historical debate that MacArthur was not told exactly what to do in detail – as long as he was winning. Fine for a man who was fond of quoting Montgomery: “Generals are never given adequate directives”.

Still, MacArthur did receive a top secret memorandum from Truman stressing that any operations north of the 38th parallel were authorized only if “there was no entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese Communist forces, no announcements of intended entry, nor a threat to counter our operations militarily”.

And then, MacArthur received an eyes-only message from Pentagon head George Marshall: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.”

MacArthur kept going. He was sure China would not intervene in Korea: “If the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter.” Well, he was wrong. US forces captured Pyongyang on October 19, 1950. Exactly the same day, no fewer than 250,000 soldiers of the 13th Army Group of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crossed the Yalu river and entered Korean territory. US intel was clueless about what military historian S.L.A. Marshall described as “a phantom which cast no shadow”.

The North’s industry and infrastructure was totally destroyed. It’s impossible to understand the actions of the leadership in Pyongyang over these past decades without considering how this human and physical destruction is still very much alive in their minds

MacArthur progressively ran amok, including calling for nukes to be used on North Korea. He had to go. The question was how. The civilians – Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman – were for it. The Generals – Marshall, Bradly – were against it. But they were also worried that “if MacArthur were not relieved, a large segment of our people would charge that civil authorities no longer controlled the military”.

Truman had already made up his mind. MacArthur was replaced by Lt. Gen. Ridgway. But the war folly still raged, hostage to the Sino-Soviet “threat” of “communist world domination”. Over two million North Korean civilians were killed. And what General Curtis LeMay – a real- life Dr. Strangelove – later said about bombing Vietnam “back to the stone age” actually was inflicted by the US on North Korea.

The North’s industry and infrastructure was totally destroyed. It’s impossible to understand the actions of the leadership in Pyongyang over these past decades without considering how this human and physical destruction is still very much alive in their minds.

So what Admiral Swift actually said, in code, is, if a civilian order comes, the US military will start WWIII (or WWIV, if one counts the Cold War), duly applying the Pentagon’s first-strike doctrine. What Swift did not say is that President Trump also has the power to pull a Truman and fire any run-amok, aspiring MacArthur clone.

Buchanan Asks "What Is America's Goal In The World?"

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

For the World War II generation there was clarity.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before — in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost.

After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided.

Only with the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the fall of China to Mao and Russia’s explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, did we unite around the proposition that, for our own security, we had to go back to Europe and Asia.

What was called the Cold War consensus — that only America could “contain” Stalin’s empire — led to NATO and new U.S. alliances from the Elbe to the East China Sea.

Vietnam, however, shattered that Cold War consensus.

The far left of the Democratic Party that had taken us into Vietnam had repudiated the war by 1968, and switched sides to sympathize with such Third World communists as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Sandinistas.

Center-right presidents — JFK, Nixon, Reagan — accepted the need to cooperate with dictators who would side with us in fighting Communism.

And we did. Park Chung-Hee in Korea. The Shah in Iran. President Diem in Saigon. Gen. Franco in Spain. Somoza in Nicaragua. Gen. Mobuto in the Congo. Gen. Pinochet in Chile. Ferdinand Marcos in Manila. The list goes on.

Under Reagan, the Soviet Empire finally fell apart and the USSR then disintegrated in one of the epochal events of history.

The American Century had ended in America’s triumph.

Yet, after 1989, no new national consensus emerged over what ought to be our role in the World. What should we stand for? What should we fight for?

What Dean Acheson had said of our cousins in 1962: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” was true of us.

What was our role in the world, now that the Cold War was history?

George H.W. Bush took us to war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Soaring to 90 percent approval, he declared America’s new role was to construct a New World Order.

Those who opposed him, Bush acidly dismissed in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1991, the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor:

“We stand here today on the site of a tragedy spawned by isolationism. … And it is here we must learn — and this time avoid — the dangers of today’s isolationism and its … accomplice, protectionism.”

Neither Bush nor his New World Order survived the next November.

Then came payback for our sanctions that had brought death to thousands of Iraqis, and for the U.S. bases we had foolishly planted on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia — Sept. 11, 2001.

George W. Bush reacted by launching the two longest wars in our history, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and announced that our new role was to “end tyranny in our world.”

The Bush II crusade for global democracy also fizzled out.

Barack Obama tried to extricate us from Afghanistan and Iraq. But he, too, failed, and got us into wars in Yemen and Syria, and then started his own war in Libya, producing yet another failed state.

What does the balance sheet of post-Cold War interventions look like?

Since 1991, we have lost our global preeminence, quadrupled our national debt, and gotten ourselves mired in five Mideast wars, with the neocons clamoring for a sixth, with Iran.

With the New World Order and global democracy having been abandoned as America’s great goals, what is the new goal of U.S. foreign policy? What is the strategy to achieve it? Does anyone know?

Globalists say we should stand for a “rules-based world order.” Not exactly “Remember the Alamo!” or “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

A quarter century after the Cold War, we remain committed to 60-year-old Cold War alliances to defend scores of nations on the other side of the world. Consider some of the places where America collides today with nuclear powers: the DMZ, the Senkakus, Scarborough Shoal, Crimea, the Donbass.

What is vital to us in any of these venues to justify sending an American army to fight, or risking a nuclear war?

We have lost control of our destiny. We have lost the freedom our Founding Fathers implored us to maintain — the freedom to stay out of wars of foreign counties on faraway continents.

Like the British and French empires, the American imperium is not sustainable. We have issued so many war guarantees it is almost assured that we will be dragged into every future great crisis and conflict on the planet.

If we do not review and discard some of these war guarantees, we shall never know peace. Donald Trump once seemed to understand this. Does he still?

"Nuclear War Much More Likely" Paul Craig Roberts: In Dangerous World, Putin Will Not Trust America

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Don’t be fooled by appearances.

President Trump is only at war with the Deep State on one level.

On another, the Deep State already run everything – when it comes to foreign policy, economics, politics and the mainstream narrative that is meant to set & sync headlines, clocks and consumer habits around the world.

War is brewing, as Trump hinted strongly in his upstart presidential campaign, but it will come, ultimately, at the terms of the long-running organ that actually steers U.S. policy.

After a very dubious “chemical attack” in Syria to stir the pot (the White Helmets did not even use gloves when picking up, touching and treating supposedly contaminated children), it is clear that war could erupt overnight with any number of middle eastern ‘enemies,’ or with North Korea, Russia or just about anyone else.

And one narrative that has been almost constant from the establishment power base and their media lapdogs during the last cycle has been dogging Russia in anyway it can – from baseless hacking accusations, to controversial sanctions talks, to attributing ultimate responsibility for chemical warfare attacks.

One can clearly see that a fight is being picked. If the story doesn’t fit, they’ll force it, or just find another excuse.

This, in short, is why the well respected Paul Craig Roberts says we are one step closer to “going poof” – it is three steps back to the thermonuclear cold war, only this time the leaders aren’t even attempting to work it out diplomatically.

According to Dr. Roberts, foreign policy figures in the days of Kennedy and Krushchev were actually attempting to trust and deescalate, fearful of setting things off.

Today, foreign policy men and woman seem dogged and emboldened by the chance for destruction.

As USA Watchdog reported:

Dr. Roberts, formerly a top editor at the Wall Street Journal, says nuclear war is the most dire problem Americans face. This comes at a time when trust between Russia and America is at all-time lows.  Dr. Roberts says, “The danger is both warning systems, ours and the Soviets (Russians).  During the period of the cold war, there were many false alarms of incoming missiles.  Both sides would see incoming missiles, and yet no one believed it, and the reason they didn’t believe it was that the governments were working together to defuse tensions.”

“You had Kennedy with Khrushchev.  You had Nixon who gave us SALT-1, an anti-ballistic missile treaty.  You had Carter who gave us SALT-2.  You had Reagan and Gorbachev who ended the cold war.  So, all during these periods when false information of incoming missiles came in, no one believed it, but if you have distrust between the two powers as we now have, and Putin has said on a number of occasions we can no longer trust the Americans, if you can’t trust and you get incoming missile alerts, you are much more inclined to believe it.  So, the prospect of nuclear war is more likely.  Washington and the media . . . are creating distrust among their populations with Russia with this constant anti-Russian propaganda.  With all this bogus and false allegations about Russia. . . . the chances of all this going poof are very high.”

via Greg Hunter’s YouTube channel

Combine all the mistrust, aggression and attempts to conflate conflicts into a larger disaster.

The debt situation, the economics and the social indicators are all abysmal and depressing. The morale of the country has devolved, and mutated strangely with the pockets of information and counter-information that reside online.

And there are those who’d prefer to torch things off, collect on military industrial contracts during prolonged war, and start things over when people have sobered up to the grim new realities.

These will be trying times.

Jewish Trust Sues Deutsche Bank For $3 Billion

Just when it seemed that no more lawsuits are possible for Germany"s largest lender, which over the past two years has settled or otherwise paid billions to set aside a barrage of allegations of wrongdoing leading to the bank"s suspension of bonuses for most senior bankers, today we learn that Deutsche Bank was sued by a Jewish charitable trust in Florida, alleging that the bank wrongly withheld as much as $3 billion from the heirs to a wealthy German family.

According to Bloomberg, the lawsuit claims the bank refuses to return the funds initially deposited by the Wertheim family in accounts opened at what is now Credit Suisse Group AG before the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Those accounts were later transferred to Deutsche Bank, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in federal court by Wertheim Jewish Education Trust LLC.

Deutsche Bank has “refused to cooperate with the heirs of the Wertheim family fortune in the recovery and return of the monies that they are withholding from the rightful heirs,” and preventing the use of the funds for charitable and other purposes, according to the complaint filed in Fort Lauderdale. 

While on the surface, the case looks mindane, the details are interesting.

The charitable trust is an heir to the descendants of Joseph Wertheim, a family that amassed a fortune by building the KaDeWe department store in Berlin and a textile and manufacturing empire in Frankfurt, according to the complaint. One of those descendants, Karl Wertheim, feared the German rise of anti-Semitism in the 1920s, moved his businesses to Spain and opened an account at Credit Suisse in 1931.

The Swiss bank protected the family assets through the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and during World War II, using secret numbered accounts, pseudonyms and trust accounts, according to the complaint.

When Karl Wertheim died in 1945, the estate passed to his wife, Maria, who managed the fortune until the early 1970s, according to the lawsuit. The fortune included the sewing machine and office-machine business of Hispano Olivetti SA, accounts and investment portfolios in Swiss banks, land in Europe and the U.S. and art collections, it said.  As the health of Maria Wertheim deteriorated, she turned to Ambrosius Wolfgang Bauml to help manage the assets. After she died in 1976, Bauml managed the Wertheim family fortune until his death in 1990, when control passed to the family of Rudolf Sutor.

This is where Deutsche bank comes in: "through a complex series of events, the assets were transferred in 1993 to Deutsche Bank, which misled the Wertheim heirs for many years about the accounts, according to the complaint." The lawsuit thus seeks return of $3 billion and an accounting of the assets in dispute.

Understandably, being quietly accused of antisemitism did not strike Deutsche Bank as proper and it responded that is “taking the matter very seriously,” according spokesman Tim-Oliver Ambrosius. “The accusations are completely unfounded, and Deutsche Bank denies them,” he said. “All proceedings initiated against Deutsche Bank in this matter have been decided in favor of Deutsche Bank.”

To be sure, Deutsche Bank has had "sensitive" exposure in the past. Back in 1998, Deutsche Bank acknowledged that it had dealt in Nazi gold during World War II and said it ""regrets most deeply injustices that occurred.""  The publication of a historian"s report commissioned by the bank, and the bank"s response to it expanded a class-action suit brought by lawyers in New York on behalf of Holocaust survivors against Deutsche Bank which had long been regarded by other historians as having played key roles in the financing of the Nazi war effort.

""Of course these transactions took place,"" said Ronald Weichert, a Deutsche Bank spokesman, referring to the report"s conclusion that the bank had bought more than 4.4 tons of gold from the Reichsbank, the onetime central bank. ""This gold business was normal business during the war."" At wartime values and exchange rates, the gold was worth some $5 million, about one ninth of its estimated worth today.

The bank commissioned historians from Israel, the United States, Britain and Germany to produce an independent report on its wartime gold dealings -- part of a wave of inquiries inspired by developments in Switzerland. The Swiss central bank was the biggest single purchaser of looted gold acquired by Nazi Germany from countries it occupied and from individual Jews robbed as they faced death in extermination camps.

The report said Deutsche Bank channeled gold transactions with the Reichsbank through branches in occupied Austria and Turkey, then a self-avowed neutral power. Of purchases totaling 4,446 kilograms of gold, the report concluded, 744 kilograms were dental gold taken from Jews" teeth, wedding bands and personal jewelry amassed in Berlin by an SS officer named Bruno Melmer.

It is unclear whether DB"s Nazi war effort" roots will be unearthed as part of this lawsuit. However, with Deutsche Bank rolling over on virtually every other lawsuit it has been handed in recent years, it would not be surprising if the plaintiff"s case emerged as strong. Ultimately, should a court find in favor of the Trust, Deutsche Bank may just need to get that refinancing that it avoided when the DOJ slashed its "ask" on the US RMBS settlement by more than half.