The World’s 169th richest person says that if you kinda get what the Nazis were going for, you’ll be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams
Theobald Winthrop Morgenthal is a dreamer. The sole heir to his grandfather’s hominid ivory fortune, he could have retired at 30 and lived an unreasonably comfortable life. But that wouldn’t have been Morgenthal.
It’s a breezy Monday in Manhattan’s upper west side when I arrive at Morgenthal’s workweek pied-à-terre. After waiting for five or thirty minutes by the door, a servant greets me without eye contact and ushers me into the 6 bedroom, 44 bathroom townhome. Entering the living room, I see the legend himself seated in a tall, leather armchair. He motions toward an identical throne to his left, designating it mine for the duration of the brief morning meeting. As I sit, I’m caught off guard by the somewhat disconcerting comfort of it. It’s as though I can’t tell where the exposed flesh of my lower arms terminates and where the soft leather of the seat begins.
I take a break from being thoroughly impressed by a chair to lay my eyes upon Morgenthal, who’s looking at me with a sort of forced half-smile. Each of my questions to him meanders its way past his look of quiet contemplation, one I can tell isn’t focused on me or my visit. I can’t blame him. From the imposing workweek townhome to the uniquely comfortable armchair to the visage of the man himself, he’s the spitting image of success. Why wouldn’t his mind be elsewhere?
When he steps aside to answer a phone call (important, I imagine), I let my eyes wander around the immaculately-decorated study. Books and artifacts from all over the world line the walls from floor to ceiling. There’s a lot to see, but I can’t help but find my attention drawn to one article in particular: a human skeleton decorated with a cane in one hand and wearing what appears to be an ivory hat atop his head. He’s posed permanently in a sort of dance, raising the cane with one hand and using the other to tip his hat. As Morgenthal reenters, he catches my gaze, still firmly set upon the rarity.
“He was a Burmese.” he says in a voice as nonchalant as it is wistful. “This was a gift from my father for my eighteenth birthday. The hat and cane, they were made from the bones of his cats.” He nods as he sits down again opposite me.
The hour I have allotted with Morgenthal, which I’d secured in part through business connections and in part by agreeing to spend its duration supplying a quantity of my blood to his Personal Youthfulness Initiative, feels unjustly brief. You can imagine my anticipation when my questions were delayed even further by the pauses spent watching my own sanguine fluid collect in a crystal decanter before being routed through a second tube that led directly to the chest of the man sat beside me. His responses are occasionally interrupted by the faint shudder and light moan that accompany a new deposit of my life essence. I don’t want to be rude, so I sit quietly through these moments.
“You read the book?” Morgenthal asks me, coming out of his financial reverie.
“I did. Cover to cover.” I’m telling the truth, of course. Truth to power is my mission as a journalist, and Morgenthal is just about as powerful as it gets.
“You’re not a liberal, are you?”
I smile. The meeting goes swimmingly, exactly to my expectations. Morgenthal informs me that a conspiracy of globalist publishers have banded together to stop his words from reaching the outside world. Morgenthal’s knowledge, he lets me know, has the potential to turn the world economy on its head.
I’m speaking, of course, of the industry titan’s debut tell-all, Accounting for Auschwitz, published by Amazon from July 13th to July 22nd and by Stormfront House thereafter. In it, Morgenthal addresses truths the rest of us would rather prefer untouched. In particular, he dissects our human discomfort with death. Most of us are put off by reminders of our own mortality and avoid memento-ing our mori wherever possible. Not Morgenthal. He’s embraced life’s endings.
From here, our conversation begins in earnest. “Seven miles south of Leopoldville.” He tells me, pointing as we stand beside a massive, antique white globe. I alternate my gaze between it and the floor, watching so as not to trip over the long IV cords sprawled over the Persian rug. “That was where grandad set up his first plant.”
Morgenthal describes his grandfather to me in great detail: a cunning industrialist with a famously-large penis whose success was broad but limited by his own lack of ambition.
“He never understood Asians.” the man’s grandson explains. This, to Morgenthal, was his grandfather’s fatal flaw. “The Nazis…” he begins, taking a breath, “were they perfect? No. I’d say not. But they understood the great truth.” That truth being that you don’t have to know people well at all to kill them. “They all have blood,” the final sentence of the book’s pivotal chapter begins, “they all have bone.” He looks at me, as though to challenge my own comprehension. But I understand. I’m about to share that understanding when an odd-looking alarm clock begins rattling on the table beside the man I hope I can now call my friend. He makes a sort of clicking sound, and in comes his nurse, a woman who simply shook her head rapidly when I asked her her name. She dutifully unhooks us from the transfusion apparatus and motions me out. Another moan escapes Morgenthal’s lips, but as I look back, I see he seems to have lapsed into a dream. What do you dream about, I wonder, when you have everything you could ever want?
