Free Republic

The Texan oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty was at the heart of a conspiracy to provide support to Hitler's Germany early in the Second World War, according to newly released intelligence documents. The file links Getty to a shadowy network of financiers who supplied the Nazis with fuel in defiance of a British blockade and accuses him of gathering spies and traitors around him at his fashionable Hotel Pierre in New York. It records that he returned from Berlin in 1939 "talking breezily of his old friend Hitler" and that his business contacts included Serge Rubinstein, a notorious fraudster who...

LONDON (Reuters) - Billionaire U.S. philanthropist John Paul Getty II died at a London hospital on Thursday at the age of 70, his doctor said in a statement. Getty, who developed a love of Britain bordering on the fanatical, lived in the country for nearly 30 years and even built a replica of London's Oval cricket ground at his 2,500-acre Wormsley Lodge estate in southern England. He was admitted to the London Clinic on Monday with a recurrent chest infection, Dr John Goldstone said. "Sadly Sir Paul Getty passed away at 1040 a.m. today, Thursday..," he added in the statement....