Many bitcoiners know Agustín Guillermo Carstens Carstens, the general manager of the Bank of International Settlements, through memes depicting him as the final boss of Bitcoin, due to his monumental stature as well as his disparaging comments about bitcoin, and the Bank’s push for global crypto regulation and pushing for CBDC adoption.
The history of the BIS is less well know, but boy is it full of some juicy tidbits. The following quotes are from David Talbot’s masterpiece about Allen Dulles, America’s first psychopath CIA director and puppet master, The Devil's Chessboard.
“One of Dulles’s most important contacts in Europe was Thomas McKittrick, an old Wall Street friend who was president of the Bank for International Settlements. BIS had been created by the world’s leading central banks to administer German reparations payments after World War I, but it soon took on a life of its own, transforming itself into a pillar of the emerging global financial system. Lodged in a former hotel next to a chocolate shop in Basel, Switzerland, BIS was so secretive that nobody was permitted to peer inside its boardroom, even when it was empty. By 1940, when McKittrick arrived in Switzerland to oversee the bank, it was effectively controlled by Hitler’s regime. Five of its directors would later be charged with war crimes, including Hermann Schmitz, the CEO of IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate that became notorious for its production of Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler’s death camps, and for its extensive use of slave labor during the war.”
“The secretive BIS became a crucial financial partner for the Nazis. Emil Puhl—vice president of Hitler’s Reichsbank and a close associate of McKittrick—once called BIS the Reichsbank’s only “foreign branch.” BIS laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold looted from the treasuries of occupied countries. Some of the gold was torn from the mouths of concentration camp victims or melted down from Jewish families’ candleholders, cigarette cases, and other personal belongings.”
(Completely unrelated side note: McKittrick went on to work for Chase Bank after the war.)
Understandably, this sort of behavior soured the Allied countries toward the BIS, and at the Bretton Woods Conference the decision was made to completely disband and liquidate the BIS. However, this decision was opposed by none other than the head of the British delegation at the conference, well known economist and sexual predator John Maynard Keynes, and so the bank was never dissolved, and continues to be a tool economic imperialism and money laundering for the world’s richest and most powerful people to this day.
Isn't history fun?