Chapter 2 ‘Weaponizing Nazis’
Contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations described as phenomenal and crucial to German military capabilities
With the world of the plundering Colonial Powers deep in the chaos of the Great Depression, a disastrous failure of rule by the banks of the capitalist countries, the United States internally threatened by local organizations of socialists, communists, anarchists, unionists and unpaid veterans, Nazi Germany was to be made into a loaded gun pointed, to be eventually fired, at the intolerably economically successful socialist Soviet Union, which had become a beacon of light for those calling for the overthrow of failed capitalism and plundering colonialism.
What follows in the paragraphs below is a historical review of well documented and published financial transactions and their meaning for the world then and now. It is not a thesis, but a well-documented compilation of facts carefully kept out of corporate owned mainstream media. There was nothing secretive or conspiratorial about it. It was a series of business decisions conducted openly that made sense in the context of the governing economic system, even though they stood in violation of prohibitions articulated in the Versailles Treaty that ended World War One. In light of the historical financial record that follows, one can ascertain that World War Two and the Holocaust could have never taken place without the well documented rearming of a prostrate Germany, but the author trusts the reader to come to his or her own conclusion. In any event, the failure of the American nation to reckon with this history ought to be unconscionable for all humanity to ignore.
Below are excepts from British American scholar Anthony B. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Chapter One – “Wall Street Paves the Way for Hitler.” (Anthony Sutton was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973.) and an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles.)
The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities. For instance, in 1934 Germany produced domestically only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and less than 800,000 tons of synthetic gasoline; Yet, ten years later in World War II, after transfer of the Standard Oil of New Jersey hydrogenation patents and technology to I. G. Farben, Germany produced about 6 1/2 million tons of oil — of which 85 percent was synthetic oil using the Standard Oil hydrogenation process.
Germans were brought to Detroit to learn the techniques of specialized production of components, and of straight-line assembly. The techniques learned in Detroit were eventually used to construct the dive-bombing Stukas …. I. G. Farben representatives in this country enabled a stream of German engineers to visit not only plane plants but others of military importance. Contemporary American business press confirm that business journals and newspapers were fully aware of the Nazi threat and its nature.
The evidence presented suggests that not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) — with full awareness that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.
Synthetic gasoline and explosives (two of the very basic elements of modern warfare), the control of German World War II output was in the hands of two German combines created by Wall Street loans under the Dawes Plan.[14]
The two largest tank producers in Hitler’s Germany were Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (controlled by the J.P. Morgan firm), and the Ford A. G. subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Nazis granted tax-exempt status to Opel in 1936, to enable General Motors to expand its production facilities. Alcoa and Dow Chemical worked closely with Nazi industry.
General Motors supplied Siemens & Halske A. G. in Germany with data on automatic pilots and aircraft instruments. As late as 1940, Bendix Aviation supplied complete technical data to Robert Bosch for aircraft and diesel engine starters and received royalty payments in return.
In brief, American companies associated with the Morgan-Rockefeller international investment bankers were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry. It is important to note ” that General Motors, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and the handful of U.S. companies intimately involved with the development of Nazi Germany were — except for the Ford Motor Company — controlled by the Wall Street elite — the J.P. Morgan firm, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and to a lesser extent the Warburg Manhattan Bank.
No one will regret the time spent in reading Anthony Sutton’s ‘Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler,’ 1976, available at https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_Hitler.pdf
Given the general public’s lack of awareness regarding Wall Street responsibility for WW II, due to the American public having been raised from youth with the mythologizing of WWII as a battle of the pure and good Americans, British and French versus evil Germans, these chapter headings from Sutton’s book will likely leave a great majority of readers flabbergasted:
Chapter 2 The Empire of I.G. Farben; The Economic Power of I.G.; The American I.G. Farben
Chapter 3 General Electric Funds Hitler; General Electric in Weimar, Germany; General Electric & the Financing of Hitler; Technical Cooperation with Krupp; A.E.G. Avoids the Bombs in World War II
Chapter 4 Standard Oil Duels World War II; Ethyl Lead for the Wehrmacht; Standard Oil and Synthetic Rubber; The Deutsche-Amerikanische Petroleum A.G.
Chapter 5 I.T.T. Works Both Sides of the War; Baron Kurt von Schröder and I.T.T. Westrick, Texaco, and I.T.T.; I.T.T. in Wartime Germany
Chapter 6 Henry Ford and the Nazis; Henry Ford: Hitler’s First Foreign Banker; Henry Ford Receives a Nazi Medal; Ford Assists the German War Effort
Chapter 7 Who Financed Adolf Hitler? Some Early Hitler Backers; Fritz Thyssen and W.A. Harriman Company; Financing Hitler in the March 1933 Elections; The 1933 Political Contributions
Chapter 8 Putzi: Friend of Hitler and Roosevelt; Putzi’s Role in the Reichstag Fire; Roosevelt’s New Deal and Hitler’s New Order
Chapter 9 Wall Street and the Nazi Inner Circle; The S.S. Circle of Friends; I.G. Farben and the Keppler Circle; Wall Street and the S.S. Circle
Chapter 10 The Myth of “Sidney Warburg;”Who Was “Sidney Warburg”? Synopsis of the Suppressed “Warburg” Book; James Paul Warburg’s Affidavit; Some Conclusions from the “Warburg” Story
Chapter 11 Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II; American I.G. in World War II; Were American Industrialists and Financiers Guilty of War Crimes?
Chapter 12 Conclusions: The Pervasive Influence of International Bankers; Is the United States Ruled by a Dictatorial Elite? The New York Elite as a Subversive Force; The Slowly Emerging Revisionist Truth.”
Beginning in 1935, GM built a factory in Berlin for the purpose of manufacturing “Blitz” trucks for the Wehrmacht. Ford began building similar trucks around the same time, but GM was the number one producer of the vehicles that were vital for the quick conquests of Poland, France, and much of the Soviet Union. [15] Albert Speer, the Nazi minister of armaments and war production, claimed that the rubber GM supplied was the key to the ability of the Germans to wage war the way they did. [15]
Both at the Allied Normandy landing and three years earlier during the Nazi invasion of Russia, many, or often nearly most, disabled Nazi tanks were found to have GM motors. When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel — a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary — and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler’s role in the German rearmament effort was much less significant.) See “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration,” Washington Post, Michael Dobbs, 11/30/1998.
The following is excerpted from a report printed by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974:
“The activities of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler prior to and during World War II…are instructive. At that time, these three firms dominated motor vehicle production in both the United States and Germany. Due to its mass production capabilities, automobile manufacturing is one of the most crucial industries with respect to national defense. As a result, these firms retained the economic and political power to affect the shape of governmental relations both within and between these nations in a manner which maximized corporate global profits. In short, they were private governments unaccountable to the citizens of any country yet possessing tremendous influence over the course of war and peace in the world. The substantial contribution of these firms to the American war effort in terms of tanks, aircraft components, and other military equipment is widely acknowledged.” Less well known are the simultaneous contributions of their foreign subsidiaries to the Axis Powers. In sum, they maximized profits by supplying both sides with the materiel needed to conduct the war.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Big Three automakers undertook an extensive program of multinational expansion…By the mid-1930’s, these three American companies owned automotive subsidiaries throughout Europe and the Far East; many of their largest facilities were located in the politically sensitive nations of Germany, Poland, Rumania, Austria, Hungary, Latvia, and Japan…Due to their concentrated economic power over motor vehicle production in both Allied and Axis territories, the Big Three inevitably became major factors in the preparations and progress of the war. In Germany, for example, General Motors and Ford became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts. GM’s plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps.
Ford was also active in Nazi Germany’s prewar preparations. In 1938, for instance, it opened a truck assembly plant in Berlin whose “real purpose,” according to U.S. Army Intelligence, was producing “troop transport-type” vehicles for the Wehrmacht. That year Ford’s chief executive received the Nazi German Eagle (first class).
The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion by GM and Ford of their Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks…. On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored “mule” 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as “the backbone of the German Army transportation system.”….
After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by their Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing… Ford received a little less than $1 million, primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne. “General Motors… was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants.”
Due to their multinational dominance of motor vehicle production, GM and Ford became principal suppliers for the forces of fascism as well as for the forces of democracy. It may, of course, be argued that participating in both sides of an international conflict, like the common corporate practice of investing in both political parties before an election, is an appropriate corporate activity. Had the Nazis won, General Motors and Ford would have appeared impeccably Nazi; as Hitler lost, these companies were able to re-emerge impeccably American. In either case, the viability of these corporations and the interests of their respective stockholders would have been preserved. (Joshua Karliner, “Ford & the Nazi War Efforts,” CorpWatch)[16] [17]
In July 1938, only a few months before the outbreak of war, the German consul at Cleveland presented Henry Ford, on his 75th birthday, the award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner. General Motors and Ford controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army. American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.[17] In 1998, it came out that the Third Reich was providing Ford’s factory in Cologne with 1,200 Russian slaves.
If the facts concerning the involvement of American Corporations in funding the Nazi machinery of war had been included in every high school history textbook since WWII, how many motorists would feel uncomfortable driving a Ford or General Motors automobile?
In 1941, Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum in addition to owning a massive amount of America’s electricity production and other minerals. It sent so much of its aluminum product over to Germany that when the US involvement in the war began, there was a massive aluminum production shortage in America. Alcoa essentially sold the Axis powers much of the material to build their war machines.[18a]
During the early 1930s, Fritz Thyssen ran a business that he used to help finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Brown Brothers Harriman was a subsidiary company that he used as a base of American operations. Prescott Bush, father of Ex-President George Bush and grandfather of Ex-President George W. Bush, was on the board of directors for BBH and his business dealings continued until his company’s assets were seized by the federal government in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.[18b]
Dow Chemical was one of the companies that provided an insane amount of materials for the Nazis, including, not only raw materials, but also American technological innovations in regards to oil refinery. [19]
The Chase Manhattan Bank’s form of colluding with the Reich was particularly notorious. It functioned as the bank for foreign transactions for fascist Vichy France.[19]
In 1935, as the U.S. government began defense preparations, tungsten carbide (at General Electric’s prices) was regarded as too expensive. There was no tungsten carbide to meet military needs. There were no independent manufacturers — GE had crippled them. [20]
By 1939, the German electrical equipment industry was concentrated into a few major corporations linked in an international cartel and by stock ownership to two major U.S. corporations, International General Electric and International Telephone and Telegraph.[20] According to U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports, A.E.G. and I.T.T. plants were not targeted for bombing in World War II and rarely hit only incidentally in area raids.[21] Germany’s war effort was never hindered in any important manner by any shortage of electrical equipment.”[21A]
In 1940, with the American defense moves in full swing, GE was still reporting to the Nazi representatives, now stationed in Zurich, Switzerland, how much tungsten carbide was being used in the United States. GE paid royalties to the Nazis on every pound used here. That was money for the Hitler war chest. In other words, Hitler was getting 12 pounds of tungsten carbide at the price the U.S. government was getting one pound. For every pound of the material sold in the U.S., Hitler through Krupp was getting royalties with which he bought more munitions.
In 1940, with Europe at war, Krupp arranged to have its royalties from GE collected by a Swiss go-between. [20]As late as August 1940, nearly a year after Hitler attacked Poland, GE was seeking renewal of its monopoly agreement with Krupp. But the GE-Krupp deal came to an end as a result of a lawsuit — and an embargo the U.S. government clamped on shipment of money to the Nazis. [22][20]
The trial resumed in New York on Jan. 26 1947. Under indictment were GE Vice Pres. Zay Jeffries; Pres. W.G. Robbins of the Carboloy Co., and Walter M. Stearns, former GE trade manager. Gustav Krupp, held as a war criminal in Germany, was not present, although he, too, was indicted. Reports on the trial and conviction were buried or ignored by many newspapers.[see UE Incriminating Documents report endnote] [20][23]
America’s Wealthy Put Their Money Where Hitler’s Mouth Was
By their intense investing and joint venturing to arm Germany to the teeth, America’s wealthy were, albeit mostly silently, showing a positive attitude regarding Hitler’s announced hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils, communism and Judaism, by putting their money where Hitler’s mouth was, so to speak.
The single greatest act of Nazi support in the US film industry was done by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after the invasion of Poland in 1939. It donated prints of eleven of their films to the German Relief Effort after the war with Poland began. [24]
Even Coca-Cola, with its hundreds of bottling plants, was a major presence in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t until 1942 that the company’s great profiting in the nation was seriously threatened.[19]
How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany even throughout World War II is detailed in Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham; Hale, London, 1983. (Charles Higham was the son of a former UK MP and Cabinet member.)
“Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class in Europe to slaughter each other, war means business as usual for international capital.”
Higham continues with an account of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland – a Nazi-controlled bank presided over by an American, Thomas H. McKittrick, even in 1944.
While Americans were dying in the war, McKittrick sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British and American executive staff to discuss the gold bars that had been sent to the Bank earlier that year by the Nazi government for use by its leaders after the war. This was gold that had been looted from the banks of Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia or melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, and wedding rings of millions of murdered Jews.
I.T.T. helped supply the rocket bombs that marauded much of London; and I.T.T. built the Focke-Wulf fighter planes that dropped those bombs. Long and shocking is the list of diplomats and businessmen alike who had their own ways of profiting from the war. After the war, I.T.T. and General Motors both received tax deductions for the damage to their factories in Germany from Allied bombing
The bottom line is that, while British and US soldiers were dying at the hands of the Nazi war machine, and Jews sere being exterminated in their thousands, British and US companies, which had invested in post-WW I Germany, continued to sympathize and trade with the Nazi regime. The bombs that leveled so many British cities and killed so many women and children, may well have been manufactured in Germany, but it was largely British and US money that provided Hitler with the parts, and the fuel to dispatch them to allied targets.
ITT continued to supply Germany with advanced communication systems after Pearl Harbor, to the detriment of the Americans themselves, whose diplomatic code was broken by the Nazis with the help of such equipment. Until the very end of the war, ITT’s production facilities in Germany as well as in neutral countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain provided the German armed forces with state-of-the-art martial toys. (Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham)
Standard Oil shipped enemy fuel through Switzerland for the Nazi occupation forces in France. On September 22,1947, Judge Charles Clark delivered the final word on the subject. He said, ‘‘Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of its relationships with I.G. Farben after the United States and Germany had become active enemies.” An appeal was denied. [25]
IBM prospered so greatly in Germany and in the occupied countries because it sold the Nazis the technological tools required for identifying, deporting, ghettoizing, enslaving, and ultimately exterminating millions of European Jews, in other words, for organizing the Holocaust. (IBM and the Holocaust, Irwin Black)[26]
End Notes for Chapter Two
Chapter Two – In Retrospect Greatest Genocidal Crime
In an agreement of August 1924, the main points of The Dawes Plan were: 1. The Ruhr area was to be evacuated by foreign troops 2. Reparation payments would begin at one billion marks the first year, increasing annually to two and a half billion marks after five years. U.S. banks continued to lend Germany enough money to enable it to meet its reparation payments to countries such as France and the United Kingdom. These countries, in turn, used their reparation payments from Germany to service their war debts to the United States. In 1925, Dawes was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his plan’s contribution to the resolution of the crisis over reparations. (From Office of the Historian US Department of State).
Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich(Avon, New York, 1970), 734p.
Joshua Karliner, “Ford & the Nazi War Efforts”, Published by CorpWatch11/1/1998https://corpwatch.org/article/ford-nazi-war-efforts
Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer, “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration” November 30, 1998; Page A01
“Ford ‘profited from Nazi slave labour”- BBC News, Feb 23, 1998 ; Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor during the Second WorldWar, ( New York: Berghahn, 2000) p.41
18a. Yeadon, Glen with John Hawkins The Nazi Hydra in America. Suppressed History of a Century – Wall Street and the Rise of the Fourth Reich, (Progressive Press, 2008)
18b. Edwin Black, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust (Paperback – February 16, 2009)
“Ten American Companies That Colluded With Nazi Germany During WW2” by Baxter, Dmitry, (NewPunch, 12/13/2017) https://newspunch.com/american-companies-nazi-germany/
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, UE News Feature: Fred Wright (©UE 1946) “Nasty Nazi Business – Corporate Deals”
General Electric Company (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG)21a. “The United States Strategic Bombing Survey” German Electrical Equipment Industry/]Report, (Equipment Division, January 1947), p. 4.
The Firth-Sterling Steel Co., which sought to sell shell turning blanks to the U.S. Army, Frankford Arsenal, ran afoul of GE’s price levels and complained to the U.S. Justice Dept.] In September 1940, the UE NEWSreported that two federal anti-trust indictments had been returned against GE and the Krupp company, charging them with having conspired to maintain worldwide monopoly in the production and sale of tungsten carbide. U.S. entry into World War II interrupted the proceedings.
During the trial GE attorneys bitterly fought the introduction of German documents seized by the U.S. military. In one such document, indicted GE conspirator Walter Stearns was quoted as telling the Germans that while GE intended to fix prices, “this must never be expressed in the contract itself or in any correspondence which might come into the files of GE.”The court also heard testimony from U.S. companies pressured by GE not to buy from competitors. The president of one company, Union Wire Die, testified that Dr. Jeffries had warned him: “We’ll either buy you out or break you.”
GE, its subsidiaries and company officials were found guilty on five counts of criminal conspiracy with Friederich Krupp A.G. of Essen, Germany.
Summing up his opinion on one of the five counts, Judge John C. Knox declared: “Competitors were excluded by purchase and by boycott; prices on unpatented products were fixed, future patent rights were forced into the pool, world markets were divided, and on occasion prices were fixed beyond the scope of any asserted patent protection…”
Judge Knox concluded: “defendants did unlawfully monopolize.”
WRIST-SLAPPING
However, the court declined the Justice Department’s request for heavy penalties, including jail time. Stearns and Jeffries were fined $2,500 each and Robbins $1,000. GE and Carboloy were fined $20,000 each and International GE only $10,000 — even though the profits GE made through its conspiracy with Krupp must have run into many millions of dollars.
The UE NEWS (with a circulation of more than 700,000) was the only newspaper courageous enough to cover the trial consistently and dig out the facts of the story.
“While the working people of America were giving everything to the anti-fascist war effort, that effort was being hindered by international cartel agreements of big business,” write Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais in Labor’s Untold Story.
(This article was written and researched by UE NEWS Managing Editor Peter Gilmore, with research and consultation by UE Research Dir. Lisa Frank and UE Archivist David Rosenberg. Much of the article, however, is based on the reportage of retired UE NEWS Managing Editor James Lerner, who covered the GE-Krupp conspiracy trial.]
General Electric’s Support of Hitler’s Third Reich, The Constantine Report, 1/21/2012
“The Chilling History of How Hollywood Helped Hitler” by Ben Urwand, Hollywood Reporter, 7/31/2024a. In his book Charles Higham offers specifics.
“The Treason Of Rockefeller Standard Oil During World War II” By The American Chronicle, February 4, 2012
Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaustpp. 212, 253, and 297–9