Duchy of Cornwall & The Prince & the Holocaust

[Massimo.A. Allamandola]

1. Prince who can't help interfering
2. Prince Charles - and the Nazi company he keeps 



1. Prince who can't help interfering
http://tinyurl.com/39s9bs
Daily Mail - 10th March 2007

(...)

But it's not just the Prince's activities behind the scenes that raises concerns. Questions are also being asked about where all his money comes from.

On the surface, it appears simple: the Duchy of Cornwall, established in 1337 to provide an income for the Heir to the Throne, pays Charles his wages - a staggering £14 million last year.

But how the Duchy of Cornwall works is less clear. Is it Prince 
Charles's personal property, or held in trust for future generations? 
Its accounts are equally opaque. We used a Freedom of Information Act 
request to gain financial information about the Duchy's dealings from 
the Treasury, which must approve all transactions exceeding £200,000.

It seems the Duchy isn't quite the sort of genteel organisation that it and the Prince always likes to portray. Rather, it is an aggressively run property empire whose land covers more than 200 square miles across 22 counties.

As well as vast tracts in Cornwall and Devon, the Duchy famously owns 
the Oval cricket ground and many of the surrounding streets of South London.

But it also owns a Wickes DIY distribution depot in Hemel Hempstead, a 
hotel in Reading and practically all of the Isles of Scilly. The main 
aim of the estate is to generate cash to fund the Prince's lavish lifestyle.

The scale of land deals currently being driven through in the Prince's 
name is revealed in the Treasury documents, which show that the Duchy 
sold £88million of property in the past four years and spent £53 million on new acquisitions.

Meanwhile, the Duchy is exempt from capital gains tax, an agreement that independent tax consultant Richard Murphy estimates is worth up to £11million to the Duchy on property disposals alone.

And how does Charles and his Duchy fare as a landlord? Do they live up 
to their image that they are generous and sympathetic to the people who inhabit the estate? Some of those who scrape a meagre livelihood in Cornwall disagree.

The Duchy still benefits from a feudal tax known by its Latin name 
'fundus'. It means the Duchy owns the riverbed under some of Devon and 
Cornwall's major estuaries. 'So what?' you might say. The Duchy manages to extract an annual income of £250,000 from fundus.

It also owns the foreshore around Cornwall and part of south Devon, and every boat in major harbours such as Salcombe, Dartmouth and Catwater off Plymouth has to pay a mooring charge with ten per cent going to the Duchy.

The boats bobbing in Dartmouth harbour are worth about £100,000 a year 
to Charles, Catwater adds another £80,000 to his coffers and Salcombe a further £65,000. In return, he helps fund a local government 
conservation officer's salary and gives to several local conservation 
charities.

Steve Smith, a ferryman at Salcombe, says: 'It's a huge amount of money for small, rural places like this. But for Prince Charles, he earns £14million a year, he's got all these servants in his house, there just seems to be a more sensible way to spend that money.'

In the Scilly Isles, Charles - or at least the Duchy - owns the freehold to almost everything.

We have found letters from the Duchy to an elderly couple who were Duchy tenants on the Scilly island of Bryher. The Duchy asked if they would surrender the leasehold of a cottage formerly occupied by their farm managers to help the chronic shortage of accommodation for local people.

Hoping to help the community, the couple agreed. A local family moved in for 18 months. The Duchy then decided the property needed a £300,000 overhaul. The work was done, but the estate then decided the only way to recoup their investment was to let the house out to holidaymakers. It is now rented out at £1,750 a week in peak season.

Meanwhile, the chronic shortage of accommodation for Scilly natives 
remains. Council housing costs about £70 per week. Duchy houses cost 
twice that. Local councillor Gordon Bilsborough has one word for the 
Duchy's property business on the islands: 'Immoral'.

The Prince's office response is that they receive only minimal return 
from the Scilly Islands and that the Duchy effectively contributes a 
large financial subsidy to the islands.

(...)



2. Prince Charles - and the Nazi company he keeps 
http://groups.google.com/group/pepis

These two short quotes should prove to those who don't already know that show Prince Charles is a great admirer of the Nazi Architect Albert Speer. I first came across that fact in a brilliant BBC4 documentary 'Jerry Building' by Jonathan Meades, so it was with absloute horror that I read the following article in last week's Daily Mail, knowing that most people wouldn't realise that our future King (and antichrist if you believe Tim Cohen's book 'The antichrist and a cup of tea') is such a devoted disciple of Speer. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Meades#TV_works 
Going so far as to get one of Speer's biggest dvotees to design Poundbury, Charles' massive 'sustainable town of the future' in Dorchester. 

No doubt Charles will be sending someone to the Bonhams auction on the 
27th March to buy these letters, saving them from public scrutiny much as the allegedly threatening letters from Prince Philip to Princess Diana have been 'disappeared' for him by the Metropolitan police. 

quote 1 - "Still, Prince Charles, who has built his own version of the 
past in the form of the ghastly Poundbury, is sure to love it. For 
Charles is not only a huge fan of Tolkien but also of Poundbury 
designer Leon Krier, who has written a book defending the architecture 
of Albert Speer. Interesting to know where those piffling opinions 
come from." 
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/12/whod_buy_a_house_in_hobbiton... 

quote 2 - "... two and three (so similar they can be discussed 
together) dealt with a potpourri of incidents and issues, some past 
and some present, that Kasher considered to be related to Hitler's art 
programs. Here we saw material about Philip Johnson's and Mies van der 
Rohe's flirtations with the Nazi party in the early '30s, about Baron 
Thyssen's and Peter Ludwig's postwar patronage of Arno Breker, and 
about Prince Charles's admiration for the architecture of Albert 
Speer. Kasher stretches his subject to include hostility to avant- 
garde art in more general terms: he invokes Harry Truman's befuddled 
critique of those "nutty modern artists" as well as (predictably) 
Jesse Heims's campaign against "pornographic" contemporary art." 
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n10_v81/ai_14488116 


Speer did know of Holocaust
8th March 2007 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_arti... 
For years Hitler's architect and arms minister Albert Speer claimed he 
was unaware of plans to exterminate the Jews. 
His avoidance of blame for the genocide is thought to have spared him 
the noose at the end of the Second World War. 
But a newly-discovered letter shows Speer knew the Nazis' mass murder 
was plotted by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and Gestapo. 
Speer - one of the most important men in the Reich after Hitler - 
confessed his guilt to the wife of a Belgian resistance leader killed 
by the Nazis in a letter dated 1971. 
He told Helene Jeanty: "There is no doubt: I was present when Himmler 
announced on October 6, 1943 that all Jews would be killed." 
Speer wrote to Mrs Jeanty, who wrote a book he admired, after serving 
a 20-year sentence for war crimes - mainly for the use of slave 
labour. 
Previously Speer claimed that while he was at the conference where 
Himmler revealed the Final Solution, he had left before the 
announcement was made. 
Speer denied involvement in the Holocaust in his best-selling book 
Inside The Third Reich, and later in extensive interviews with the 
author Gitta Sereny - who spent 12 years writing a book about him. 
The unpublished letters between Speer and Mrs Jeanty, written between 
1971 and Speer's death in 1981, have surfaced from an anonymous 
British source. 
They are expected to fetch up to £4,000 at Bonhams in London on March 
27. 

see also the spin version of Prince Charles in today's Sunday Express 
CHARLES: HOW I'LL RULE 
http://www.express.co.uk/news_detail.html?sku=1362