[5] By means of this subterfuge the money used for buying machines and goods in the West looked like being the outcome of proletarian support, in reality it came directly from the Kremlin, confiscated from Russia's rich and the Church.

[5] Established in Berlin in the 1920s, Aschberg's "Guarantee and Credit Bank for the East" was charged with repayment of the WIR workers' loans, although he had not been very fond of it from its very beginning on and had even contributed to abolish it soon after its launch.

Aschberg had already gained the Soviet leaders' favor, by being one of the main connections in the early years after 1917 in evading the international boycott on gold robbed by the Bolsheviks, which he offered on the Stockholm market after having the bullions melted down and given new markings.

[7] Due to his Jewish background, he was endangered when France was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940 and fled with his family to the United States in January 1941 via Lisbon when the Vichy government set him free.

In 1946 he started publishing his memoirs in three volumes (En vandrande jude från Glasbruksgatan, Återkomsten, and Gästboken) and he invited Margarete Buber-Neumann to write Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler.