Kreugeriana:
Kreuger loved flowers. In his Park Avenue Winter Garden he had a greenhouse on top of the
skyscraper. In his Paris apartment by the Grand Palais the florists always were
busy and on top of the new Kreuger & Toll building on Place Vendôme
he were, until his last day, busy planning a Japanese Winter Garden and a
pergolia, above his private apartment, facing Versailles and St Dennis. In
his Berlin apartment, at Pariser Platz, his Schlesien hausfrau
arranged flowers whether Kreuger was there or not. Nobody knew when he might come home.
On his island in the archipelago off Stockholm he planted rare
flowers. In "Larksta´n" in Stockholm, Kreuger had exiting
telecommunication equipment embedded in flowers. "Lilla Skuggan" was his
Djurgarden retreat - in the oak forest by the Stockholm waters and the
song of the black bird.
Further out in the archipelago of Stockholm he
found his "Island of Felicity" were he laid out a rose garden
and in the short summers night exercised tango dancing.
Kreugeriana:
Technical gadgetry interested him in it´s avant-garde aspects, art and design interested
him, especially in its industrial shapes. He was a keen collector of the most perfect man
made things on Earth.
He himself was a creative genius
in that respect that he inspired artists and designers to accomplish more then they ever
thought was possible - by giving them his prompt confidence; by writing a
check or making an even faster down payment in cash!
Kreuger collected the art of old Dutch masters but he also
supported the living masters of the young century. In the Park Avenue apartment he exposed
the priceless etchings of Rembrandt, (in room without daylight), he owned a
impressive collection of Zorns´ best works, he owned works of Constable, Liljefors,
Grünewald, Munch and Larsson, the famous self portrait by Courbet
together with sculptures of Jönsson, Hasselroth, Rodhin and Milles - his favorite.
In his New York Winter Garden, the silver were of Jensen and Ängman.
He had a planetarium there - with avant-garde lightning equipment - the Room of the Sun.
He installed a glowing
glass sculpture - it was possible to change the intensity and color of
the light from a control panel at the dinner table.
He had the first hands free telephone in the world, made by L.M.Ericsson
engineers - he could hang the receiver onto the
fundament of the telephone, with a loudspeaker installed, and listen to
the other end, free to walk to and fro in the room, or making notes.
He had a great library and he knew his ways in literature and
studied the work of Svante Arrhenius as well as that of Giordamo Bruno. He
could bring Marois, Emil Ludwig, Stefan Zweig, Arnold Bennet, Theodor
Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Selma Lagerlöf and Gaston Boissier with him on Atlantic crossings.
He had in his
possession the private writings of Napoleon Bonaparte, while, ironically, his arch enemy
in USA, J P Morgan, owned the original scripts of the one and Only canonized Scandinavian
saint, Holy Bridget!
In periods he worked together with Aristide
Briand (Nobel Peace Price, 1926, The Pan European Plan, 1930), Fridtjof
Nansen (Nobel Peace Price, 1924), Jean Monnet (father of the post war
Unity of Germany and France), Coudenhove Kalergi (a well known pacifist of
the thirties), de Monzie (head of The French – Russian Committee)...
In his work for peace Ivar Kreuger most certainly met Albert Einstein who
in February 1932 held speeches in the USA (St. Barbara, Pasadena)
proposing a sudden disarmament of all national states and the foundation
of a super national peace keeping force.
At exactly the same time Ivar Kreuger met President Hoover in the White
House discussing the moratorium for the still democratic Germany,
explaining his plan for the peaceful European recovery and reconstruction
after the devastating First World War.
He were invited to speak at the Genève Peace Conference to be held in the
summer of 1932, while Europe still were possible to save for democracy and
the Weimar Republic still was alive.
Kreugeriana:
He was interested in all sorts of information and was able to get the best information
money could buy. Together with his associés he was on his way to establish the Kreuger
Trust outside and above the "fluctuations of the market" - a position unheard of
in the political and financial world.
But, as economical kreugeriana, when most people think
about Kreuger they think about the Kreuger Crash, they think about the stock market crash
beginning on Wall Street in New York on the 12:Th of march 1932, the day of the death of
Ivar Kreuger. Sometimes they think about the earlier crash there, at the 24:Th of October
1929 called "the black Thursday" and the following week when thousands of
investors lost everything.
The day before this unexpected crash Kreuger had announced his
famous $ 125 mil. loan to Germany which was an offence to fascists, nazis, communists
and other investors in the arms race which was at stake, due to the stabilizing effects of
many different Kreuger engagements.
Yes, crash and disaster is what comes in mind
when most people hear the name Ivar Kreuger. His enemies has succeeded in
their pursuit to present him as a swindler and someone associated with
disaster, while he in reality tried to prevent the economical disasters
leading to the Second World War and was much less a swindler then they
were.
A few people remember something vague about his suicide in a hotel room in Paris. But that
is all.
In fact he lived in a beautiful apartment opposite Grand Palais and owned several
buildings, that Kreuger&Toll had
constructed, in the most exclusive parts of central Paris.
At Place Vendôme, above Banque
du Suède et Paris, he had fitted up Paris most luxurious apartment where he intended to live his Paris
life together with his wife!
Yes, the world's richest bachelor, as the tabloids of the
twenties loved to write, had finally decided to marry his Finnish fiancé and take
residence in the heart of Paris.
A lot of facts indicate that he was murdered instead.
More Kreugeriana:
After his death, Kreuger was heralded as a finical genius and the newspapers all over the
World published necrologies praising the man who tried to use constructive force and
ingenious thinking for the global benefit of people.
Thus working on a very basic level - in the
development of the new technologies in the fields of telecommunication, energy,
construction, mining and pulp industry, design and finance.
In his pursuit Kreuger acted
completely outside the military complex to the astonishment of the moguls of world Finance
who always have at least one foot in the workshop of blacksmith Regin and the Business of
War.
Because of the success of the "Kreuger plan" implementation with precise
actions for the stabilization of the European national markets with capital transfer from
USA, the enemies was dangerously offended. American investors trusted Kreuger and engaged
in the reconstruction of Europe. And as long as investments yielded a Good and safe
profit, everything was OK - war or peace!
In the view of the enemies, tragically enough, this was all counter productive. Kreuger
had to be stopped - once and for all.
And in a sudden shift, after his death, the newspapers began to call their own
hero a swindler.
How this expired is what the motion picture script "Kreuger"
and the book script by Tomas Brusell "The burned diaries of Ivar Kreuger" is
all about.
Ivar Kreuger in his archepelago.
Photo by Ingeborg Eberth.
