The Schiff and Rothschild families can be traced back to the Judengasse, a street in Frankfurt, Germany, where both families shared a house (p.2) that was marked on the Schiff side by a ship and on the Rothschild side by a red shield, symbols from which the surnames of the two families had originally derived. The Rothschild's tell us that they would become "world famous for their contributions to the economic, political, and social history of many nations."

Solomon Loeb, also born in Germany, was a co-founder of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Solomon’s eldest daughter, Theresa Loeb, married Jacob Schiff who had joined Kuhn, Loeb & Co as a partner in 1875. When Solomon Loeb retired in 1885, Jacob Schiff became head of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. The youngest daughter of Solomon Loeb, Nina Loeb, married Paul Moritz Warburg who emigrated to the USA with his brother Felix Warburg who married Jacob Schiff's daughter Frieda. Both Paul & Felix Warburg became partners in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Their brother Max Warburg remained in Germany to run the family business M.M. Warburg& Co.   

Baron Edmond de Rothschild, known as the 'godfather' of Palestine colonisation, helped to found approximately thirty Jewish colonies in Palestine between 1880 - 1895. More information can be accessed at Ramat Hanadiv via the Rothschild archive here.

In the 1870's foreign companies in Russia were granted rights to explore and develop oil fields. The main oil-producing regions were located near Baku in Azerbaijan, then part of Russia. The Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company (BNITO), financed by the French branch of the Rothschild family, built a railroad connecting the Caspian and Black seas, allowing for the export of oil. The Rothschild's then established extensive storage facilities and bought BNITO in 1886. The Rothschild's changed the focus of Russian oil from domestic production to the global market. This spurred companies like Standard Oil to reinvent itself as a multinational corporation and Shell to develop into the most important oil transportation company in the world. Here the Rothschild archive gives us information about the Rothschild's close association with Royal Dutch Shell, a company in which the Rothschild's became the controlling shareholders. (p.18). 

The aforementioned Standard Oil Company of Ohio had been founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller and financed by J.P. Morgan who had been sent to the U.S. at the age of 21 to work as an agent for N.M. Rothschild & Sons. In 1882 the Standard Oil Company of Ohio was renamed the Standard Oil Trust and traded stockholder's shares in return for trustee certificates. U.S. laws at that time prohibited one company from owning stock in another. The Trust method enabled Standard Oil to acquire other oil related properties and conceal their corporate ownership.

Both John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan were members of a syndicate intent on monopolising industries through buying small or failing companies and consolidating them into the biggest and most powerful company in each industry. Such companies included Wall Street Banks,  Standard Oil Company, Consolidated Gas Company (p.5), United States Steel Corporation,  General Electric,  Shipping Companies  and  the railroad companies to which competitors were requested to pay exorbitant rates for the transportation of goods. 

U.S. President Grover Cleveland, in 1895, was forced to strike a deal with J.P. Morgan to save the United States Gold Reserves. This article in the New York Tribune, 13 February 1895, tells us that J.P. Morgan of New York acted on behalf of J.S. Morgan of London, and August Belmont of New York acted on behalf of N.M. Rothschild & Sons of London to buy U. S. government bonds in exchange for $62 million worth of European gold.

By 1895 the Rothschild's (p.6) had already financed the construction of railways in Europe and other parts of the world, founded The Exploration Company, acquired Société Le Nickel, financed the establishment of  De Beers, and gained control of the Rio Tinto Company (p.3). The latter had been purchased by a consortium led by Rothschild's close associates Matheson & Company. The Rothschild's, in 1895, bought one-third of the stock in the U.S. based Anaconda Copper Mining Company which was the premier copper producer in the world. In April 1899 Standard Oil formed the Amalgamated Copper Company to acquire the stock of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Eight years later, an attempt to corner the stock of United Copper would trigger the biggest financial crash in U.S. history to that date.

An earlier stock market crash in May 1901 was orchestrated by members of a syndicate that included Jacob Schiff, J. P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, James Hill, Edward Harriman, and James Stillman whose daughters Sarah and Isabel had married into the Rockefeller family. The syndicate pretended that their was a struggle for the financial control of the Northern Pacific Railway. As a result of the 1901 panic, thousands of small investors were ruined. After reaching a so-called compromise, syndicate members formed the Northern Securities Company in an effort to monopolise the railroads. After the break up of the Northern Securities Trust, the New York Times reported about "the formation of a gigantic railroad trust" that would make all other railroad trusts that had come before, dwindle into insignificance.

In September 1901 President William McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. William Loeb Jr was private secretary to Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt during the McKinley administration and then became Presidential Secretary to Theodore Roosevelt. The U.S. Attorney & Secretary of War in 1901 was Elihu Root who would be appointed U.S. Secretary of State by Roosevelt. Elihu Root would become a major player in the negotiations surrounding the Russian revolution.

Queen Victoria of Britain had died in January 1901 and was succeeded by her son Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, who was crowned King Edward VII. Years earlier Albert Edward had been reminded by Queen Victoria that, ‘your whole family are German and you are yourself half German.’ And that Albert Edward should learn to love Germany (p.36), as "it is in fact also your country." Queen Victoria would often speak of "Dear Germany" and wrote in her diary, "Dear, dear Germany, I wish we were not so far from her." The nine children of Queen Victoria married into royal and noble families across Europe in an endeavour to bind those families together. This earned Queen Victoria the sobriquet "the grandmother of Europe". N.M. Rothschild & Sons in the City of London had been appointed bankers to Queen Victoria during a Royal excursion to Germany (p.4), and the Rothschild's were also the private bankers to the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg, other European monarchies, & governments. Several members of the Rothschild family were close friends of Albert Edward both before and during his reign as King Edward VII. They included Ferdinand, Leopold, Alfred, and Nathaniel de Rothschild who was Governor of the Bank of England.

In London, the Marx Memorial library contains a room where, in 1902-1903, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) edited and printed the revolutionary newspaper Iskra (The Spark), which was smuggled into Russia. Trotsky also wrote for the Iskra newspaper while residing in London from 1902-1903. Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein on 7 November 1879 in Yanovka, Ukraine, then part of Russia. His father was a prosperous Jewish farmer. Arrested in January 1898 for revolutionary activities, Lev Bronshtein spent four and a half years in prison and in exile in Siberia where he joined the Social Democratic Party. Bronshtein escaped Siberia in 1902 with a forged passport bearing the name Trotsky which he adopted as his revolutionary pseudonym. Bronshtein (now Leon Trotsky) made his way to London, where he joined the group of Russian Social-Democrats working with Lenin. The Iskra staff in London, along with Lenin & Trotsky, were transferred to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1903.

Following the Russian rejection of a Japanese plan to divide Manchuria and Korea into spheres of influence, Japan in February 1904 launched a surprise naval attack against Port Arthur, a Russian naval base in China. The Russian fleet was decimated. The Rothschild archive informs us that shortly after the Russo-Japenese war broke out, the Japanese government appointed Takahashi Korekiyo as their financial representative to sell Japanese treasury bonds ‘to capitalists’ in London. And that on 3 May 1904 Takahashi wrote "The House of Rothschild cannot come in openly during the war...They cannot do anything that might inflict oppression on the Jews by the Russian Government." Jacob Schiff, the Rothschild archive goes on to tell us (p.22), was the primary mover in arranging the sale of Japanese treasury bonds. Schiff (p.16) hoped that a Russian defeat at the hands of Japan might lead to a revolution and the installation of a liberal constitutional government, one that would cease to discriminate against Russia's five or six million Jewish subjects.

During the Russo-Japanese War, which ended in a humiliating defeat for Russia, many Jewish financiers – notably Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb – not only abstained from lending to Russia, but actively sought to support Russia’s Japanese enemies. "The Tsarist government’s odious treatment of what the Rothschilds called their ‘co-religionists’ (p.17) was the principal driver of the wedge between the Jewish house [of Rothschild] and the Tsarist regime." The economic impact that the war was having on the Russian economy, helped to fan the flames of revolution. In January 1905, a large workers' procession went to the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to Tsar Nicholas II, who was married to Queen Victoria's grand-daughter Alix of Hesse. The Cossack troops guarding the palace opened fire, and hundred's of protesters were massacred on what became known as 'Bloody Sunday'. Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905 and was an active participant in the 1905 revolution and main leader of the organization that emerged out of the revolution—the St. Petersburg Soviet, or workers council. 

President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. According to the Rothschild's (p.22) it was only after the Russo-Japanese war ended that the Rothschild family entered centre stage. The Paris Rothschilds underwrote all of the French £12 million allocation for Japanese bonds, the Rothschilds in London and Kuhn, Loeb in New York underwrote three-and-a quarter million each, and M.M. Warburg in Hamburg and the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in Berlin equally underwrote a combined three-and-a-quarter million.

In 1905 the National Committee for the Relief of Sufferers by Russian Massacres (NCRSRM) was founded by Jacob Schiff and was an organisation with which Elihu Root was associated. By 16 February 1906 the NCRSRM had collected a total of $1,277,675.44. (p.4). Later that same year the committee’s efforts to aid pogrom survivors led to the creation of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Jacob Schiff and Elihu Root were also members of the Board of Directors at the Western National Bank of the United States and both were vice-presidents of the New York Peace Society.

Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were subsequently tried in October 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion and sentenced to exile in Siberia. In January 1907, Trotsky was able to escape from Russia once again and fled to Austria 

A number of European countries by 1907 had central banks and Paul Warburg had seen them work very successfully. Between 1902 when he arrived in the United States and the years leading up to the bank panic of 1907, Warburg had delivered numerous speeches and written essays such as 'Defects and needs of our banking system' that espoused centralised banking. Others in favour of central banking were Elihu Root & J.P. Morgan.

In the USA, a financial crash in late 1907 was of such severity that it helped to focus public awareness on the problems with the banking system.  What sets 1907 apart from earlier crashes was that the crisis focused on the trust companies in New York City. Augustus Heinze was a businessman from Montana who consolidated a number of mining interests in 1902 to form the company United Copper. In 1906 Heinze sold his interests in United Copper to Standard Oil's Amalgamated Copper Company (p.5) for a reported $25 million, half in cash and half in amalgamated securities. Heinze, who remained President of United Copper, then went to New York where he was placed on the board of directors of eight banks and two trust companies. In February 1907 Heinze was elected President of the Mercantile National Bank and quickly gained control of several other banks in New York. This article from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta explains that during 1907, a subsidiary of Amalgamated Copper called United Metals  Selling Company had apparently been manipulating the market for raw copper. In an attempt to corner the stock of United Copper, Heinze began to secretly buy back his shares in United Copper through the brokerage house of his brother Otto Heinze. Augustus Heinze ordered other brokerage houses such as Gross and Kleeberg to buy United Copper shares that they did not realise already belonged to Heinze and then sell those shares to Heinze when the price of the shares had risen. Heinze's attempted corner was thwarted by what appeared to be a group of unknown individuals determined to hinder his scheme by controlling a large block of United Copper stock.

When the Heinze scheme became public knowledge, depositors began withdrawing their cash from the Mercantile National Bank and other banks that Heinze was associated with. This run on the banks triggered the crash. Heinze announced his resignation as President of the Mercantile National Bank on 17 October (p.4) and was pressured by the Clearing House Committee into leaving banking.  J.P. Morgan worked with other bankers and the U.S. Treasury to inject tens of millions of dollars into the U.S. financial system to prevent it from complete collapse. J.P. Morgan was hailed "the saviour of Wall Street", and in a flagrant breach of the Antitrust Act, President Theodore Roosevelt allowed J.P. Morgan's United States Steel Corporation to acquire TCI, the 1st and 2nd largest U.S. steel companies respectively.

Although the issue of a central bank was unpopular because of its connotations of powerful central authority, the 1907 crash forced Congress to act. The Aldrich-Vreeland Act, passed by Congress in May 1908, provided for the issuance of emergency currency and created a bipartisan National Monetary Commission to study central banking and other alternatives for monetary and banking reform.

The acquisition of the Equitable Life Assurance Society by J.P Morgan in 1909 resulted in a concentration of banking power greater than Wall street had ever known. Banks under J.P. Morgan's control included First National Bank, Chase National Bank, National Copper Bank, National Bank of Commerce, Liberty National Bank, the Mercantile Trust, Bankers Trust, Guaranty Trust, Standard Trust, and Aetna Insurance Company which had been founded by his grandfather Joseph Morgan. 

At the invitation of J.P. Morgan, Paul Warburg, Nelson Aldrich, A. Piatt Andrew, Henry Davison, Arthur Shelton, and Frank Vanderlip met at the Jekyll Island Club in November 1910 to write a plan to take control of the nation’s banking system. The meeting and its purpose were closely guarded secrets and laid a foundation for what would eventually be the Federal Reserve System owned not by government, but by private bankers.

Due to the Antitrust Act, the Standard Oil Company was dissolved in 1911 by the U.S. Supreme Court into 38 subsidiaries that were given new names such as Amoco, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Esso, all of which remained in Rockefeller-Morgan control. Time after time we see so-called mergers and so-called hostile take-overs of companies that are actually owned by the same people. This is to give the impression that there is a lot more competition than there really is.

In 1912, a special subcommittee was convened by the Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Arsene P. Pujo. Its purpose was to investigate the "money trust," a small group of Wall Street bankers that exerted powerful control over the nation's finances. The committee's majority report concluded that a group of financial leaders had abused the public trust to consolidate control over many industries. The 'Pujo Committee' report (p.129) published in 1913 reads, "...there is an established and well-defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance which has been created and is held together through stock holdings, interlocking directorates, and other forms of domination over banks, trust companies, railroads, public service and industrial corporations, and which resulted in a vast and growing concentration of control of money and credit in the hands of a few men."

J.P. Morgan died on 31 May 1913, leaving his business interests and estates to his son J.P. (Jack) Morgan and his daughter's Louisa, Juliet, and Anne Tracy Morgan. The U.S. Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which President Woodrow Wilson signed into law on 23 December 1913. In the words of Paul Warburg (p.13), the Federal Reserve System "is the same method that has been followed in Europe by the Banque de France, the Reichsbank, the Bank of the Netherlands, the Bank of Italy and many other central banks. These institutions are enabled, through their note issue, to assemble a large part of the gold of the country in a central reservoir."

During the first decade of the twentieth century, a huge oilfield had been discovered in south west Persia (Iran) by the British owned Burmah oil Company. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), a subsidiary of Burmah oil, was formed to develop the Persian oil field. To ensure access to consumption markets, Anglo-Persian Oil Company made an agreement with Asiatic, (p.31) the trading arm of Rothschild's Royal Dutch-Shell. APOC was later merged with Royal Dutch-Shell. The origins of British Petroleum (BP) can be traced back to APOC.

In 1913 the British Royal Navy made the complete fuel conversion from coal to oil. On the eve of world war one (WWI), Oil now had a strategic significance for the British Empire. But, unlike coal, Britain had no oil reserves of its own. Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, believed along with others that Britain needed a dedicated oil supply, and he argued the case in Parliament, urging his colleagues to “look out upon the wide expanse of the oil regions of the world!” Only the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company, he said, could protect British interests. In May 1914, the British government entered into an agreement with APOC for the supplying of oil to the British Navy. On the 17 June 1914 the British government acquired a 53% controlling interest in APOC for £2,200,000 and in doing so became the largest shareholder in the Turkish Petroleum Company with 50% of the shares. Less than two weeks later, an assassin killed the heir of the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo. 

The Rothschild archive (p.13) informs us that by 1914 "the ‘force of credit’ made it possible to fight war on a far larger scale than ever before and for far longer." In Britain, on the eve of the outbreak of WWI, the Austrian Consul General in London (p.29) was Alfred de Rothschild. It was an Emperor of Austria, who almost a century earlier (p.27) had bestowed the title of Baron on five Rothschild brothers. Austria's largest bank in 1914 was the Creditanstalt (p.41) which had been founded years earlier by Anselm von Rothschild. In 1914 the Chairman of the Creditanstalt was Louis de Rothschild and the Creditanstalt Chairman of Directors was Alexander Spitzmuller. The latter was apparently considered a confidant to the heir of the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Austria formally declared war against Serbia on 28 July 1914. The central powers (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and later the Turkish Ottoman empire, were at war with the triple entente (Britain, France and Russia). The central powers were primarily financed by the Rothschild bank in Germany, M.M. Warburg& Co in Germany (p.18), and the Austrian Creditanstalt owned by Rothschild. The triple entente was primarily financed by N.M. Rothschild & Sons in the City of London, de Rothschild Frères in Paris, Kuhn, Loeb & Co (USA) and J.P. Morgan & Co (USA). (pp.19, 20). At an American bankers conference during WWI, Paul Warburg said about gold (p.23), that "there never was before in the world a period of inflation such as is now in process in Europe, and the adjustment after the war will create the keenest competition for the yellow metal."

At the outbreak of WWI the First Sea Lord of the British Royal Navy was the German Prince Louis of Battenberg who was married to Queen Victoria's granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. Due to anti-German feelings prevalent in Britain during WWI, Prince Louis, his children and his nephews, changed their surname Battenberg to the more English sounding Mountbatten. The British Royal Family, in that same year, changed their German surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the more English sounding Windsor.

Germany's ruler at the outbreak of WWI was Kaiser Wilhelm II, grandson of Queen Victoria, and also first cousin to King George V of Great Britain, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The Rothschild archive (p.13) informs us that Max Warburg, head of the bank M.M. Warburg & Co, was one of Kaiser Wilhelm's closest advisors.

Kent Cooper, in his book 'Barriers Down (pp.6-9 & 21), noted that by the beginning of the 20th century, the European news agencies Reuters, Wolff, and Havas were a triumvirate that together monopolised international news. Kent Cooper served as general manager of the U.S. Associated Press and then became it's executive director. On page 21, Kent Cooper noted that in his circles, the account was that international bankers, led by the Rothschilds, had assumed ownership of Reuters, Wolff, and Havas at the beginning of the 20th Century. Charles Havas,  Julius Reuter, and Bernard Wolff (pp.38 & 39) founded what became international news agencies through the adoption of telegraphy. Julius Reuter exploited the telegraph especially for global financial trading. Reuter had moved from Germany to London where he formed the Submarine Telegraph Company which was able to set up office at the London Stock Exchange. Reuters first major client in London was Baron de Rothschild. 

In August 1914, Henry Morgenthau Sr, then United States Ambassador to Turkey, cabled Jacob Schiff asking for $50,000 for the relief of Jews living in pre-State Israel. Shortly thereafter, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) was established to channel funds raised to aid Jews in Europe and Palestine. The chairman of the JDC was Felix Warburg. Other JDC members included Jacob Schiff, Arthur Lehman, Herbert Lehman, and Paul Baerwald of Lazard's. The current Chair of JDC International Council is David de Rothschild.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson issued Proclamation 1287 in November 1914 which stated rules and regulations governing the use of the Panama canal by merchant and war vessels of belligerent nations. On the 2nd December 1914, Charles Schwab, owner of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in Pennsylvania and also a board member of J.P. Morgan's United States Steel Corporation, met with U.S. Secretary of State William Bryan to discus how far his company and the United States Steel Corporation could go in the manufacture and shipment abroad of war materials. The U.S. in 1914 was perceived to be a neutral country and the U.S. government took the stance of being "opposed to the prohibition by a neutral nation of the exportation of arms, ammunition, or other munitions of war to belligerent Powers during the progress of the war." 

Both the United States Steel Corporation and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation either manufactured or provided the metals for the manufacture of ships, submarines, guns and munitions, tanks, motor vehicles, and ordnance for countries fighting in WWI, including Germany and its allies. The warring nations on both sides placed orders with U.S. companies for a wide range of military armaments and equipment. From August 1, 1914, to April 1, 1917, the U.S. Steel Corporation (p.275) supplied a total of 6,057,640 tons of steel intended for the manufacture of munitions of one kind or another. A report in a New York newspaper in late 1914 indicated that the Rockefeller-Morgan Standard Oil Company was transporting oil to Germany and Turkey via neutral ports.

Even after the 1915 sinking of RMS Lusitania (a ship owned by J.P. Morgan's Cunard Line) the U.S. government continued to do business with Germany. In 1903, the British Admiralty had secretly subsidised the construction of RMS Lusitania to Admiralty specifications with the understanding that at the outbreak of WWI, the RMS Lusitania would be consigned to government service. After the sinking of the Lusitania, former Secretary of War Elihu Root and ex President Theodore Roosevelt promoted the Preparedness movement to get the U.S. ready for participation in WWI.

In a House of Lords debate on 31 May 1916, Lord Beresford, a retired British Admiral, stated "I maintain that had an effective [naval] blockade been established at first [in 1914], the war would have been over now; and we could have made an effective blockade according to International Law. The neutrals would not have said anything at first, because they had not then embarked upon their present enormous enterprises and contracts with Germany and Austria." Germany was able to continue fighting for another two years primarily through the activities of the unofficial Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) which had Herbert Hoover as its Chairman. Since 1914, the CRB were involved in an elaborate charade of organising relief for an allegedly starving Belgium that was under German occupation.

The CRB spent hundreds of millions of dollars in procuring food and other war supplies, largely, but not exclusively, in America and Argentina. The CRB shipped millions of tons of produce through the neutral port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where it was supposed to be handed to the Belgian Comite National for transportation into occupied Belgium. By agreement of both neutrals and belligerents, the sole port of entry for all the food and materials sent to Belgium was sited at the head of Germany’s arterial river, the Rhine. All land and river exit routes from the Netherlands passed through Germany or German occupied territory. One of the many companies assisting the CRB was the Rockefeller-Morgan International Harvester Company (IHC) which had a wide spread dealer network and, at its height, had an 85 percent share of U.S. sales of harvesting machines. A 1916 list of IHC foreign branch houses and principal distribution points in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North, Central, and South America can be found on page 18 here. IHC also had iron foundries, sawmills and timberlands, coal and iron mines.

Lord Alfred Milner was a Director, and later (p.207) the Chairman of the Rothschild's Rio Tinto Company. In late January 1917, Lord Alfred Milner (pp.63-136) who was also a member of the five-person British War Cabinet, led a delegation to Russia. The Mission had the multiple objectives of attempting to co-ordinate the coming summer’s offensives, reaching an agreement for supplying equipment to Russia and, in consequence, help to boost the Russians’ morale. On 31 January 1917, the delegation travelled to the Alexander Palace 15 miles south of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to be presented to the Tsar. Milner and other delegates had several more meetings with the Tsar, the final meeting being on 18 February 1917, at which "Milner pointed out that Russia's manpower and resources were being mismanaged and badly organised by the Russian authorities. Milner went on to recommended that, should materials be supplied by Allied countries to Russia, personnel from those countries should be in charge of the distribution and implementation. Despite Milner attempting to present this as an offer of aid, it demonstrated a clear lack of confidence in the abilities of the Russian government to get things done."

Milner and the rest of the delegation left for Britain on the 22 February 1917 and arrived in London on 3 March 1917. Some days later riots and disturbances broke out in Petrograd, sparked by food shortages. Strikes and demonstrations took place in the capital and the government collapsed. On 15 March 1917, the Tsar abdicated and a new Provisional Government was formed. In March 1917, it became “known” in the United States that Jacob Schiff at Kuhn, Loeb & Co had substantially funded Russia’s revolution and the overthrow of its tsarist régime. Jacob Schiff sent a telegram to the Editor of the New York Times that was published on 17 March 1917. It reads, "May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high !" On March 22, the American ambassador to Russia, David. R. Francis, (p.5) formally recognised the Provisional Government on behalf of the United States. Negotiations for a series of loans totalling $190,000,000 by the United States to the Provisional government in Russia where begun on the advice of the American ambassador to Russia, David. R. Francis who noted in his telegram to Secretary of State Lansing (p,20) "financial aid now from America would be a master-stroke. Confidential. Immeasurably important to the Jews that revolution succeed..." In April 1917 Lenin was returned from exile into Russia aboard a German military train.

Charles R. Flint was the founder of IBM and a close associate of the Rothschild agents J.P. Morgan and August Belmont, Jr (p.19). In a letter to Charles R. Flint dated March 24, 1917, Elihu Root (p.95) states that, "this wonderful change in Russia marches with and is part of the mighty and I believe irresistible movement of the whole world to substitute democracy for autocracy in human government". On 6th April 1917, the U.S. declared war against Germany and entered WWI. In June 1917 Elihu Root headed a special delegation to Russia sent by President Woodrow Wilson to arrange American co-operation with the new revolutionary government. Root remained in Petrograd for close to a month and is photographed here with Trotsky and Lenin who months later led the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the Menshevik Provisional Government in what became known as the October Revolution, (November in Gregorian Calendar).

After returning to the U.S. the subsequent report from Elihu Root urged President Woodrow Wilson to wage a propaganda campaign in Russia that would include films. The U.S. Committee on Public Information opened its Petrograd office in November 1917 at the very time of the Bolshevik Revolution.  Motion pictures were popular in Russia even before the war and could be shown over and over again with captions read out by speakers. Elihu Root would later become the founding Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In Britain, Lord Walter Rothschild had been closely involved in the formulation of the draft declaration for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and in November 1917 a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, addressed to 'Lord Rothschild', set out the Balfour Declaration, which committed the British Government to supporting the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for Jews. Six months before the Balfour Declaration was issued, this May 1917 front page article from the Charlotte Observer notes the announcement that Arthur Balfour and Woodrow Wilson had "informally discussed" the project. Lord Rothschild and German Jewish bankers in the U.S. were promised Palestine in return for persuading the U.S. government to enter WWI which Britain was losing. A substantial quantity of archival material relating to the work of the Rothschilds' Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA) is held at the Central Zionist Archives that can be accessed via the Rothschild Archive here. PICA was replaced by Yad Hanadiv.

The WWI Armistice on 11 November 1918 ended the fighting between the Allies and Germany. By that time the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German monarchies had been abolished. It left the British Royal family (predominantly German) as not only the most prominent Royal family in Europe, but by way of the British empire, also the world. The French monarchy had been abolished in the 19th century during the days of Alexander Herzen, a Russian socialist and close associate of James de Rothschild who had provided Herzen and his family (p.39) with security and much support. 

On the 18th January 1919, delegates from 27 nations attended the year long Paris Peace Conference in Versailles. On the 7th May 1919 the German delegation first received a copy of the treaty at the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles. The treaty was later signed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on the 28th June 1919. Among those who attended the signing were Max Warburg (p.382) as part of the German delegation; Lord Alfred Milner (Britain); Bernard Baruch (USA). The treaty forced Germany to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions, pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers, and established the League of Nations. Less than 20 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, Adolf Hitler would re-militarise and set about reclaiming territories that the treaty had taken from Germany.

In 1919, the head of N M Rothschild & Sons in the City of Londontook on the role of Chair for the daily fixing of the world gold price.

Posted by Ken Craggs

@BetweenMyths