Older generations will remember the famous US TV series 'Dallas', in which the Ewing family tries to defend their oil company against all kinds of dirty takeover attempts. The character of JR Ewing in particular shocked many TV viewers of the time, as the show's producers attributed almost breathtaking actions to this villain. JR Ewing schemed and slandered from left to right and back again to secure his own advantage in family and business matters with the most radical actions.

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 future CIA director Alan Dulles, who was not far away in 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, and Berlin was quickly supplied with paratroopers, just in time to get a few photos of the Russians doing the real work there. Munich and Bavaria thus became the so-called "secret" capital, not because Berlin was unattractive, but because the US secret services such as CIC and SIS felt comfortable there, and the Russian army was far away. As a result for example, the "Butcher of Lyon", SS officer Klaus Barbie, responsible for some of the most brutal murders in the south of France, was not brought before the Nuremberg Tribunal, but hidden in Memmingen under a new name, only to be put on the payroll of the CIA, which was newly founded in 1948 also with the help of former Nazi generals. Barbie was soon transferred to South America, where he was allowed to continue killing on behalf of the CIA and help organising the transport escape routes of many former Nazis, all while being paid by the United States government.

It was also around this time that a strange Bavarian-only pact was struck within the conservative and, at the time, mostly Catholic post-war party favored by the Americans, the CDU. Officially, for allegedly very "Bavarian reasons", only the sister party "Christian Social Union" (CSU), was to appear on the ballot papers in Bavaria instead of the "Christian Democratic Union" (CDU), which exclusively appeared everywhere else in Germany. Unofficially, however, it was the Americans who wanted to continue to operate largely unchallenged from their secret Bavarian capital of Munich, without any major political or social obstacles in their way, of course.



- In progress -

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