Percival Flack Brundage

Brundage was a Unitarian, and from 1953 to 1958, was president of the US fund-raising body for the Albert Schweitzer College, the aforementioned-Friends of Albert Schweitzer College. With some overlap, he was also president of the IARF between 1952 and 1955.

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In 1956 Brundage was made Director of the Bureau of the Budget. He retired in 1958 but continued with the Bureau in an "advisory" position for a further two years – no doubt because of his involvement in sensitive projects.

One such project was Vanguard which was the result of NSC 5520 and "was intended to establish 'Freedom of Space'--the right to overfly foreign territory for future intelligence satellites. The initial estimate of its cost was $15-20 million[1], but by mid-1956 the program was already over budget and estimates of its total costs continued to grow."[i]

           
Brundage held the purse strings and had a great deal of influence over a program concerning the hot issue of aerial surveillance while also having a strong connection to the Albert Schweitzer College. This remarkable set of circumstances is on a par with Ruth Paine’s sister, Sylvia Hoke working for the CIA under Air Force cover on surveillance flight manpower issues.

Robert H Schacht

The application that Oswald completed for entry to the Albert Schweitzer College was a drab three-page questionnaire.

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On page one Oswald supplied basic personal information along with the request to attend the semester commencing April 12, 1960 and ending on June 27, 1960. The form was signed and dated on March 19, 1959. There are no indications as to how Oswald knew the start and end date of the semester. The most logical answer is that the pamphlets Oswald had been receiving and which Nelson Delgado thought might be from a church, were informational pamphlets about the college. Yet negating that is George Michael Evica’s fruitless search for evidence that any advertising took place through which Oswald may have been sent such material. Additional confirmation that no such advertising existed came via an interview by Evica with Reverend Leon Hopper which took place in 2003. Hopper told Evica that recruitment to Albert Schweitzer College was almost always through personal contact, and because of this, Stephen Fritchman could have been the direct source.

           

The second page had to be completed in duplicate with one copy going to Dr. Robert H. Schacht at an address in Providence, Rhode Island and the other to the college itself. Everyone knows the assassination is piled high with coincidences that exceed what could be considered statistically “normal”. But less known is that within the wider assassination investigative parameters, there are subsets of coincidences that equally defy the odds. Schacht is a case in point. Consider that he shared his surname with Hitler’s finance wizard, Hjalmar Schacht. Hjalmar was born in Tingleff, Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia (now part of Denmark) to William Leonhard Ludwig Maximillian Schacht and  Constanze Justine Sophie von Eggers, a native of Denmark. However, he was raised largely in the US and his full name was Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht with his middle names a nod to the famed American Universalist journalist. 

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 After Hitler came to power, Schacht made some trips to the US to calm nerves about the new Chancellor, but by 1938, he had been stripped of several positions for his opposition to militarization and the treatment of Jews. After the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 on Hitler, Schacht was one of 7,000 arrested. The coup that was to follow Hitler’s assassination was code-named Operation Valkyrie.

           

Schacht was related by marriage to Prince Guitare de Spadaforo, an Italian industrialist who sat on the board of Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). Clay Shaw, the only man ever tried over the assassination, stated that he joined the CMC board in 1958. The company had been kicked out of Switzerland under a cloud of suspicion that it was a CIA front. It thereafter set up shop in the friendly environs of Johannesburg.[ii]

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Fast forward again to Robert Schacht and we see in the records that Schacht was in contact with another Unitarian minister concerning the college – one, Dr. Dana McLean Greeley, a cousin to Horace Greeley.[iii]

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But that is not the end of it. Robert Schacht married Ethel Grace Gerlach on September 6, 1941 at the Emmanuel Evangelical Church, Irvington, New Jersey.[iv] Genealogical records show that other members of Schacht’s family were lifelong members of this Lutheran church in Irvington. Robert however, must have left the church to become a Unitarian sometime between 1941 and 1959. The real question is, was this the result of an epiphany, or something a bit more sinister?

Emmanuel Evangelical Church

The Lutheran Emmanuel Evangelical Church (a church from within the same faith as the Oswald and the Ekdahl clans) was put under the microscope at the 1934 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings which found that the church was a “center for Friends of New Germany activity”. This group, known by the acronym FONG, was formed on the order of Rudolph Hess. Forced to break up by the HUAC exposure, the group resurfaced a year later as the German-American Bund. These hearings were also notable for the testimony of Smedley Butler and the fascinating details of the plot to oust Franklin D. Roosevelt from the Oval Office. The plot had everything including large sums of money being splashed about, clandestine meetings, astroturfing of veteran’s groups, particularly ordinary members of the American Legion, dubious cutouts, and fascists. Lots of fascists. Rich fascists. Filthy rich.

 

The Pitcairn family fell into the rich fascist category.  As stated in Volume One, Marguerite Oswald had worked for Pittsburgh Glass (a Pitcairn flagship enterprise) circa 1941. This was information she herself was not forthcoming about. It was learned only through the testimony of others. The Pitcairns poured money into the American Liberty League which had been formed solely to lead the coup against the New Dealers – the plot exposed by Butler.

           

In sum, there is circumstantial evidence of a blood relationship between the Albert Schweitzer College US intake officer, Robert Schacht, and Hitler’s banker, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. Additionally, Robert Schacht was married in a Lutheran church which, seven years earlier, had been under government investigation as a meeting place used by American and German Nazis. We can add that the HUAC found that the pastor of the church, Reverend Edward J. Paetzold, was a Nazi sympathizer and a friend of Carl Jaeger, the Vice-President of FONG.  However, despite his title, Jaeger was the real leader behind the scenes. The paper president, Ludwig Gruenwald, took his orders from Jaeger.[v]

The Temple Society

Could it be yet another odd coincidence that in 1926, a pastor named Ernst Paetzold took over the Immanuel Church in the port city of Jaffa[2] in 1926? The church was associated at various times with the Temple Society (not to be confused with the Knights Templar). A millennial offshoot of the Lutheran Church, their aim was to bring about the apocalyptic visions of the prophets of Israel in the Holy Land, thus bringing about the Second Coming. We lose track of Ernst Paetzgold after he returned to Germany in 1931 – two years prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor.       

           

Members of the Temple Society were interned in Palestine at the outbreak of WWII. At the time, some younger Templers were signing up with the German army, and Hitler Youth groups were springing up across the territory. In 1941, over 600 of those internees were transported to Australia. They were not released until one to two years after the cessation of hostilities. Many were granted residency and stayed. When Israel gained status as an independent state in 1948, the remaining Templers were kicked out of the new nation but were awarded 54 million Deutschmarks in restitution for the confiscation and nationalization of their land.

 

[1] 2.5 million dollars of that budget was supplied by the CIA.

[2] Jaffa is believed to be the setting for the biblical stories of Jonah, Solomon and Saint Peter, as well the area associated with Andromeda and Perseus.

 

[i] NASA website: history page on Sputnik

[ii] Ramparts, volume 6, number 6, The Garrison Commission by William Turner, p52, January, 1968

[iii] Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Dana McLean Greeley papers, 1925-1969

[iv] Genealogy.com

[v] Nazis in Newark by Warren Grover, pp 84-85