In a not entirely dissimilar way, key figures seem to have been operating explicitly in Bavaria for some time. The origins of this can be traced back to the end of World War II, when the later CIA director Alan Dulles, who was operating not far from Switzerland at the time, decided to negotiate with Nazi generals in the south long before the Germans surrendered. After the Allied landings in Normandy, the U.S. Army turned its attention to Munich, Berlin was supplied with paratroopers just in time for a few photo shootings with the Russians, who were doing most of the work in the East.

Munich in Bavaria thus became the secret capital, not because the very Catholic capital Bonn, which had long been manageable, and much later Berlin, were unattractive, but because US secret services such as the CIC and the OSS felt comfortable there, and also because the Russian army was far away. Declassified CIA documents and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice in the 1980s prove that the SS officer Klaus Barbie, who had once been involved in the most brutal murders in the French south, was not brought before the Nuremberg court, but was first hidden with his entire family in the Bavarian towns of Memmingen and Kempten under the name of Klaus Altmann, only to be put on the payroll of the CIA - which was newly founded in 1948 with the help of former Nazi generals. Ironically, with the help of his French network, Barbie spied from Bavaria for a full four years none other than the French on behalf of the then U.S. intelligence agency - and in full knowledge of the High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG) John J. McCloy.

Later CIA director Allan Dulles, who was still in Switzerland at the time, also gave his blessing. Dulles also agreed to promote a direct subordinate of Nazi murderer Adolf Eichmann named Emil Augsburg directly from the CIC to the BND's predecessor organization, the Gehlen Organization. In 1951, Klaus Barbie, alias Altmann, was transferred to South America, where he was allowed to continue murdering on behalf of the U.S. intelligence services while being on the payroll of the U.S. government. From there, and also with the help of priests and the Vatican in Europe, he smuggled many former Nazis to South America, including the so-called "Nazi Angel of Death" Josef Mengele.

As early as around 1950, there was an explicit Catholic Nazi help underway via a Croatian priest named Draganovic, who used his Vatican connections to ensure that Klaus Barbie was literally transported under the European Alps to the Italian port town Genoa via a secret transport route for onward shipment to South America. Draganovic's contact in the Vatican was the Austrian anti-Semite and Bishop of Graz of the Vatican Collegium Teutonicum Alois Hudal, a confidant of Popes Pius XII and Paul VI. Hudal worked with Draganovic in a decidedly JR Ewing fashion to ensure that Eichmann and other Nazis were provided with papers. The two Catholic wolfs in sheep clothes also ensured that the Red Cross and various border guards were persuaded to turn a blind eye here and there, oftentimes even both.

From then on, the Catholic presence was not only enhanced in South America, but also quickly re-established in Bavaria. Around the same time after 1945, a strange pact within the conservative and mostly Catholic post-war CDU party, favored by the Americans at the time, was created only in Bavaria. Officially for very Bavarian reasons, only a so-called "sister party", the "Christian Social Union" (CSU), was to appear on Bavarian ballots instead of the "Christian Democratic Union" (CDU), which appeared everywhere else in Germany. Unofficially, however, it was the Americans who wanted to continue to operate largely unmolested from outside of their secret Bavarian capital of Munich, without any major political or social obstacles in their way. The CSU grew rapidly after its founding in September 1945, with 33,000 members in 1953 and about 190,000 in 1990. Today, with about 125,000 members, the CSU is the third largest political party in Germany.

Considering that three-quarters of all CSU members are Catholic and that CSU membership fees are the party's second-largest source of income, just behind government donations, one is almost inclined to perform some kind of round-tripping exorcisms. In 2017, the CSU's membership fees amounted to a whopping 10 million euros, about 8 million of which were generated by very Catholic labor sweat. Germany is one of the very few countries in the world to have a church tax; the Catholic and Protestant churches benefit massively from this, receiving hundreds of millions in statutory tax contributions every year. Some go so far as to say that without the flow of tax money from the very Catholic south of Germany, from Switzerland, and from parts of the United States, the holy lights in the Vatican could quickly go out. The Catholic Archdiocese of Munich and Freising disclosed its assets a few years ago, as of 2016 there was a total of over 5.5 billion (not million!) euros in the books. For the overwhelmingly Catholic political party CSU, state donations are the party's largest source of income, as already mentioned. In 2017 alone, the party received almost 12 million euros in state funding, this in addition to the 10 million euros in predominantly Catholic inspired membership fees.

Franz-Josef Strauß, the colorful founding figure of the CSU and head of the Bavarian government, was of course also a close friend and colleague of Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi general and early founder of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), initially based in Pullach near Munich. It was only in the 1970s that it became known that Reinhard Gehlen had compiled extensive dossiers on all kinds of politicians. The dossier on Franz-Josef Strauß was particularly thick, because the former BND director wanted to "help the Bavarian Prime Minister in difficult situations", as Gehlen himself once put it. By the way, the current Bavarian Prime Minister of the CSU, Dr. Markus Söder, is also a very open admirer of Franz-Josef Strauß and could be the subject of a file almost as thick as Gehlen's file on Franz-Josef Strauß of politically underhanded stunts of all kinds.

Of course, in order to get ministerial posts in Berlin, the uber-CSU'ers have to win votes in order to then claim political leadership - also in Bavaria. What is still astonishing, however, is that any conservative-Catholic Bundestag election majority with the CDU ahead usually results in not just one, but several nationwide Berlin ministers from explicitly Bavarian CSU ranks. In the last federal election in 2021, the CSU received exactly 2,788,048 votes nationwide. Of all the votes cast in Germany, the CSU thus had a share of 5.9%, just barely clearing the five percent hurdle if the CSU would be considered an independent political party - which makes perfect sense. With 4.5% of all eligible voters in the last federal election, the CSU even fell below that 5% mark.

Since the CSU is not particularly connected to the people and voters in Germany considering around 5% of the vote, it has been devoting itself instead much more to lobbying for industries and global corporations in the past. One of the Bavarian CSU ministers who took high office in Berlin was Andreas "Andy" Scheuer, Federal Minister of Transport and Infrastructure from 2018 to 2021. Minister Scheuer, from Passau in Bavaria, announced the introduction of tolls on German highways with great fanfare, all infrastructure change agent industries applauded immediately. After millions of euros had already been spent by Andy Scheuer on mostly German companies for analyses, pilot projects and more, the entire Scheuer project was cancelled by the EU in 2019. However, the millions that were happily distributed to companies were no reason for Andy Scheuer to regret the whole affair. Shortly after the toll fiasco, the post-divorce Bavarian Andy fell in love with the Bavarian head of another Bavarian office in Berlin: that of Germany's then CSU Digital Minister Dorothee Bär. After a few Scheuer-Bär phone calls, his new Bavarian girlfriend, who later became his wife, was immediately promoted to a high position at the then Silicon Valley titan Facebook: she started working as a European lobbyist for Facebook's interests.

The current Bavarian Minister President Dr. Markus Söder also has the Bavarian sense of practicality in his genes. The fact that Söder's family home in Nuremberg-Schweinau is described as conservative Protestant, and that he was a research assistant for the Chair of Constitutional, Administrative and Canon Law (!) after completing his law studies, may also help in some way. As a baptized Protestant Lutheran, Söder's path was certainly filled with very special touchstones before he was elected the first Protestant chairman of the CSU in a kind of religious-political revolution in January 2019. A good year earlier, Söder had already replaced Horst Seehofer as Bavarian Prime Minister. After Seehofer's resignation, Dr. Markus Söder became the new Prime Minister on March 16, 2018, with an absolute majority in a parliamentarian-only vote in Munich - without a direct previous state election. However, Horst Seehofer kept the chairmanship of the CSU party to himself for almost another year, a fact that is quite indicative of the political preferences within Bavaria.

Dr. Markus Söder knows the world of media and public relations, having worked as an editor-in-chief at the state-funded Bavarian Broadcasting Station or Bayerischer Rundfunk for some time in 1994, where he was involved in the creation of television shows. Still until 2003, Söder was head of corporate communications at his own father-in-law's Baumüller Holding. Somehow, though, the Bavarian premier still seems to enjoy marketing tactics from and for corporations. Particularly striking are his most recent messages on the short messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in which the Bavarian premier misuses his account, which can certainly be described as privileged, for delicately concealed messages with pretty pictures that are clearly recognizable to the experienced as simple advertising. Generally, such mass-distributed advertising messages at the highest political levels go hand in hand with sometimes considerable monetary rewards.


The fact that Bavaria seems to be in urgent need of funding also became clear in early fall of 2024, when Söder turned to his Bavarian media to explain it was a scandal and even considered "Bavaria bashing" to reject an application to the red-yellow-green federal government in Berlin for an additional injection of federal funds for a delicate and promising high-tech start-up company called Lilium, which operates under Bavarian wings. However, a glance at Lilium's board of directors quickly revealed the presence of Germany's entrepreneurial high-flying overachiever per se - a man named Dr. Thomas Enders. Enders was head of the Airbus Group for a long time and sits on a large number of supervisory boards and in many top management chairs of various multinational companies and important transatlantic organizations. What the Bavarian State Chancellery initially called "Bavaria bashing" quickly turned out to be more of a political Enders pulling, the villain JR Ewing in the TV show Dallas could not have arranged any better.

Even U.S. President Donald Trump has ties to Bavaria that are relatively unknown to most people today. Donald Trump's grandfather Frederick Trump originally came from Germany, as did his 11 years younger wife Elisabeth Christ, Donald Trump's grandmother. Born in 1869 in the days of the German Empire in the small Palatinate town of Kallstatt between Mannheim and Kaiserslautern, Frederick or Fred Trump was a true Bavarian according to the then still valid laws dating back to the times of the Holy Empire of German Nations. The Electoral Palatinate for also Kallstatt had been in the possession of the Wittelsbach kings since the 13th century and was officially part of the Kingdom of Bavaria from 1805 until 1946, when the German states were redivided after the end of the Second World War. As late as in 1956, a referendum was held to reunite this Electoral Palatinate with the rather distant and separated Bavaria, but it failed.

Frederick Trump emigrated to the USA in 1885 at the age of 16 and made a considerable fortune in America's wildest northwest during the Yukon Gold Rush, where Frederick or Fred Trump opened a successful restaurant in Whitehorse, Canada. He also ran a popular brothel right next to his place to eat that was open 24 hours a day. Apparently, America's women were not the real deal for good old Fred, Trump's grandfather returned to Kallstatt in 1901 with plenty of U.S. dollars in his pockets, which is where he met Elisabeth, 11 years younger than him, whom he married in August 1902. The couple moved to New York. After 2 years in the USA and the birth of a daughter, Frederick's wife became extremely homesick, the young family moved back to Germany in 1904. Due to several mobilizations of the German Empire during Frederick's absence in the U.S., Donald Trump's grandfather's Bavarian citizenship was revoked just one year later in 1905, which is why Frederick went to the USA for the third time - a second time now with second time pregnant Elisabeth. In the same year, 1905, Donald Trump's own father, Frederick Christ Trump, was finally born a true American in New York City. Donald Trump's grandfather Friedrich died in 1918 at the age of 49, leaving his wife Kallstatt and their young New York son Frederick Christ to massively expand the family business.


Children and grandchildren of real emigrants often report that they develop strange nostalgic ideas about their ancestors' places of origin. Perhaps similar to father Jock of the evil JR Ewing character in the TV series Dallas. The first also went to Alaska during the gold rush, where he made a fortune before Jock Ewing returned to Texas. There he stole the longtime fiancée of his best friend and business partner - Jock Ewing married her himself. This fictional marriage gave birth to the even more fictional villain with a heart JR Ewing in the fictional TV series Dallas.

Any similarities to real people or places are purely coincidental. Almost like in Bavaria.