Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World (26 page)

The first headquarters of the BIS was a former hotel near the Basel central railway station. It was intended as a temporary site, but the bank remained there until 1977. (Courtesy BIS)

The Board of Directors meeting in May 1935. Those in attendance included Montagu Norman, Hjalmar Schacht, and Kurt Freiherr von Schröder, a powerful Nazi private banker. (Courtesy BIS)

Hjalmar Schacht (center) with Adolf Hitler. Schacht, the architect of the German war economy, once described himself as Hitler’s “most loyal co-worker.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung/Northfoto)

Donald MacLaren, a British intelligence agent, ran a sabotage operation against the American subsidiary of IG Farben, the giant Nazi industrial conglomerate. Hermann Schmitz, the CEO of IG Farben, sat on the board of the BIS. (Courtesy MacLaren family)

Allen Dulles, the American intelligence chief in Switzerland during the Second World War (right). Dulles was friends with Thomas McKittrick, the president of the BIS, who supplied him with information as codename 644. (Süddeutsche Zeitung/Northfoto)

Karl Blessing (left), the president of the Bundesbank and BIS board member from 1958–1969. Blessing, like many German bankers, was a loyal Nazi during the Third Reich. He oversaw an empire of concentration camps and slave laborers. (Süddeutsche Zeitung/Northfoto)

Thomas McKittrick, the American banker who served as BIS president from 1940–1946. The BIS acted as the foreign branch of the Reichsbank, accepted Nazi looted gold and was a back channel for secret contacts between the Allies and the Axis powers. (Courtesy BIS)

Roger Auboin, the general manager of the BIS from 1938–1958. The French banker embodied the continuity of transnational financial interests before, during, and after the Second World War. (Courtesy BIS)

Alexandre Lamfalussy, the Hungarian-born economist known as the “Father of the euro.” Lamfalussy served as BIS general manager from 1985–1993 before leaving to set up the European Monetary Institute, which became the European Central Bank. (Courtesy BIS)

Per Jacobssen, the bank’s influential economic adviser from 1931–1956. Jacobssen used his status as a neutral Swede to pass economic information from Washington, DC, to Berlin during the war. (Courtesy BIS)

Andrew Crockett, a well-regarded British economist, succeeded Lamfalussy as BIS general manager. Crockett oversaw the transformation of the BIS from a primarily European institution to a global one, thus ensuring its survival. (Courtesy BIS)