Bilderberg: Where Politics, Finance, and Media Meet Outside the Public Record

From 29 to 31 May 1954, seventy-five Europeans and North Americans met at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands chaired the gathering. The Second World War had ended only a few years earlier. The Cold War was dividing Europe, and the United States wanted Western Europe tied more closely to North America. That meeting gave its name to a private conference that has continued for decades.

The first guests came from government, business, academia, diplomacy, and transatlantic organisations. The 1954 programme covered communism and the Soviet Union, economic policy, European integration, and the European Defence Community. These subjects directly concerned war, budgets, and alliances.