There is simply no way an impoverished and utterly demilitarized Nazi Germany, with no air force, a tiny navy, no armored vehicles, no heavy weapons and a tiny army, could have on its own, built its armed forces up to the most powerful military in the world during the first six years of Hitler’s rule of Germany in depression without the colossal and crucial investments in, and joint venturing by, top US
corporations
TEXT:
Seventy-five years ago, the Red Army liberated the survivors of the Auschwitz death camp, where more than a million of the approximately six million European Jews murdered by the Nazis perished.
Seventy-five years ago the Red Army liberated the then survivors of the Auschwitz death camp.
News Item:
Pence, world leaders mark 75th anniversary of freeing of Auschwitz death camp by Mark Moore, New York Post, Jan. 23, 2020.
Vice President Mike Pence was among the world leaders and Holocaust survivors who gathered in Jerusalem on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp], pledging that the Nazi atrocities will never be allowed to occur again.
There is simply no way an impoverished and utterly demilitarized Nazi Germany, with no air force, a tiny navy, no armored vehicles, no heavy weapons and a tiny army, could have on its own, built its armed forces up to the most powerful military in the world during the first six years of Hitler’s rule of Germany in depression without the colossal and crucial investments in, and joint venturing by, top US corporations in low wage Nazi Germany in outright evasion of the Versailles Treaty prohibition of German rearmament. There is no way Hitler could have begun a world war and a multi-nation Holocaust when he did without the mega enormous financial and technical help he received from the United States of America. England and France cooperated, especially in agreeing to allow the abandonment of the prohibitions on German rearmament, while Western media defended the building up of Nazi Germany’s military as only a ‘bulwark’ against the Soviet Union.
Hitler’s uncompromisingly lethal condemnation of communism and the very existence of Wall Street’s archenemy, socialist Soviet Union, would have to have impressed the US and European wealthy, whose racist capitalist colonial rule of most of the world was threatened by socialist fervor and riots at home for its failure to have prevented the ongoing Great Depression with tens of millions suffering even from lack of food. Newsreels of massive and violent riots in many US cities can be seen on YouTube at ‘Riots Across America – The Great Depression.’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78NWr2JEymg
Given the general public’s lack of awareness regarding Wall Street investors responsibility for WW II and the multi-nation Holocaust for the American public having been raised from youth by Wall St. owned and CIA supervised mainstream media mythologizing WWII as a battle of the pure and good Americans, British and French versus evil Germans, 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] Sutton was economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute from 1968 to 1973.
“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.” [https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_Hitler.pdf]
Both at the Allied Normandy landing and three years earlier in 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. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm]
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.”
Did American Investors and joint ventures with Nazis have responsibility for the Holocaust?
This archival research peoples historian working alongside former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who, for decades, has been dedicated to representing victims of the American post-World War II overseas killing machine, expects that the reaction of a good many readers to the affirmation that the ‘Holocaust COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED Without corporate USA rearming Germany to destroy the USSR,’ will be one of protest that although the elite of American industrialists did invest in and joint venture with the Nazis, rapidly building their Wehrmacht up to world’s number one military force in six years with the collusion of US and European government leaders permitting violation of the prohibitions in the Versailles Treaty,
that these titans of American industry, banking and government could not have imagined or expected Hitler’s 1941 orders for the mass murder of all Jews we have come to call the Holocaust.
No! This historian agrees. These wealthiest of investors and bankers on Wall Street and eminent CEOs of America’s major corporations could not have foreseen that their empowering Nazi Germany militarily (to attack the Soviet Union) would bring about Hitler’s 1941 orders to kill all Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, however they most certainly did know of the vicious, and often murderous, persecution of Jews in Germany that began immediately upon Hitler’s accession to power in 1933.
The root of anti-Jewish talk and discrimination in the US was located in the same void of morals and absence of humanity found in the divide-and-conquer profitable genocide for capital acquisition, economic power and domination championed by the basically white protestant Anglo-Saxon investor community of Wall Street and the few other centers of investor power that FDR had noted in a 1932 note to confidant Colonel House “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”[1]
Though the drive for money and capital accumulation might be paramount there are some other effects of the brutally ignorant white racism so prevalent throughout the subjugated world of imperialist empires, which are worth noting for being especially strong in America during the time of Hitler’s rule of Germany and his coming to command the world’s strongest military because of the massive investments of Americans.
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his “bible.”
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims. [See: The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics By Edwin Black [ ] http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html]
“In 1904, the Carnegie Institution had established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation’s social service agencies and associations. The Rockefeller Foundation helped funded the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”Most of the ‘inferior’ people sterilized in America in the name of racial purity were in fact simply the uneducated poor. This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’s words in their own defense. (Yet a tv crew that went back decades later and interviewed the offspring of couples where sterilizations were unsuccessful showed that the offspring appeared to have as good or better intelligence as anyone else.)
Eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, “You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 — almost $4 million in 21st-Century money — to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Given all the above documentation, readers may decide for themselves which adjectives best describe America’s capitalists investing in, and joint venturing with the Nazis and Hitler. Was it collaboration, collusion, co-conspiring, consorting or ‘merely’ cooperating with the Nazis and Hitler in order to facilitate war against Communist Russia that accepted the murderous treatment of German Jews which would intensify into the Holocaust?
A shocking account of IBM’s complicity with the Nazis is a reminder that people bear moral responsibility for the actions of corporations. IBM founder Thomas Watson was in Berlin in July, 1935, when Black Shirts rampaged through the streets smashing the windows of Jewish stores, and forcing his Jewish friends to sell their department store for next to nothing, and escape to Sweden. Watson had seen the broken windows, taken tea with a German official at a fine home that he told Watson was once the property of a Jew who had fled Germany, but still, Watson accepted a medal from Hitler “in recognition of his services to the Third Reich.” [6]
Edwin Black, in his ‘IBM and the Holocaust’ raises the important question of whether Hitler’s destruction of the Jews would have happened as rapidly and claimed as many victims without the harvest of deadly information recorded by the Hollerith machines, on IBM punch cards, made by IBM/Dehomag employees working for the Nazi death bureaucracy. In 1933, International Business Machines began providing Germany with punchcard machines that functioned as precursors to modern computers and databases. Documents have since been uncovered that show that as late as 1941, IBM was working in tandem with the Reich to liquidate Jews from Holland. IBM employees were training SS personnel how to use their machines to record the movement, sorting, and mass execution of large numbers of undesirables, at times right in the headquarters of death camps.[Hitler’s Willing Business Partners, by Jack Beatty, April, 2001, Atlantic Monthly]
Similar to IBM and GM’s automotive rivals, General Motors was sued by Holocaust survivors for assisting the Nazi war machine. During the trials at Nuremberg after the war it came out in testimony that the German translation of Henry Ford’s ‘The International Jew’ was required reading for the Hitler Youth. [find documentation in Minority Perf long jj piece]
One wonders if any of this description of US – Nazi business and manufacturing collaborations is at all noted in any of the Holocaust Museums.
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 Americans would feel uncomfortable and ashamed or at least disappointed with this travesty of humanity by their fellow Americans in the past. Would it have made Americans and their confidants less gullible about what they were told by monopolized mainstream media to justify USA’s post Second World War anti-Communists genocidal bombings, invasions, covert violence and brutal sanctions?
But back to the anniversary of 23 January 1945 Red Army liberation of Jews at Auschwitz!
News Item:
Prince Charles joins world leaders for Auschwitz anniversary in Israel The Times, UK, Jan. 23, 2020 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/charles-joins-world-leaders-for-auschwitz-anniversary-in-israel-pplbpkgcg
The Prince of Wales has begun his first state visit to Israel. …will deliver a speech at the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem in which he will say that “the lessons of the Holocaust are searingly relevant to this day”. The meeting at the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre will include about 40 world leaders.
During the years leading up to his abdication in 1936, the King of England and the British Empire was for certain a greater follower of Hitler than most Germans. During the occupation of France, the then Duke of Windsor (who had been forced to abdicate his kingship over disapproval of his marriage to an American divorcee), asked the German forces to place guards at his Paris and Riviera homes – and they did. His pro-Hitler statements, while Governor of the Bahamas during the war had to be hushed up. Even as late as 1970 he spoke affectionately of Hitler.[see 1997 titled The Windsor File, Written by Paul Sweet, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and historian involved in the eventual publication of the papers, details the duke’s Nazi associations and the long, ultimately unsuccessful effort at suppression. See also: How Britain covered up the friendship between Hitler & Edward VIII By Andrew Morton, New York Post, March 1, 2015]
Then during much of Hitler’s rule there was the world wide colonial empire of France, in large part fascist Vichy France in Vietnam, French Africa and elsewhere.
News Item:
“French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday told world leaders commemorating 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz that anti-Semitism is “once again rearing its violent head” but underscored that the Holocaust must not be used to “justify” hatred and division.” [Text by France 24 issued Jan. 23, 2020
https://www.france24.com/en/20200123-live-commemoration-of-the-75th-anniversary-of-auschwitz-liberation-as-world-leaders-visit-jerusalem
Article Item:
France Confronts the Holocaust
Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Brookings
Dec. 1, 2001
On 8 November 2001, a New York judge threw out a legal suit filed in New York against the S.N.C.F., France’s state-owned railway company. Filed in September 2000 by Holocaust survivors, the legal suit sought compensation for the company’s role in transporting 76,000 French Jews to German labor and extermination camps under Vichy, the collaborationist government that ruled France during German occupation from 1940 to 1944. It was only the latest of a number of cases filed in US courts against French companies that profited from the plight of Jews during World War II. In December 1998, a court in Brooklyn New York opened a class action suit against seven major French banks (Banque Paribas, Credit Lyonnais, Societe Generale, Credit Commercial de France, Credit Agricole Indosuez, Natexis and Banque Nationale de Paris) as well as two American banks, JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan, for not opening their financial records on the war period to Jewish complainants. The case followed a similar suit filed in US courts against Swiss banks holding Holocaust-era assets.
Addendum Regarding The Continued Post War Persecution of the Jews of Europe, Survivors of the Holocaust.
A REAFFIRMING OF THE BARE TRUTH:
If no rearming of a weak Nazi Germany by USA’s largest corporations breeching the Versailles Treaty’s prohibitions of German rearmament,
then no Second World War
If no Second World War,
then no multination Holocaust of nearly six million Jews among a Holocaust total of about eighteen million Europeans:
If no multination genocide of Jews, then no 250,000 displaced Jewish survivors refused refuge even in the spacious United States of America (where, by the way, most survivors wished to go).
What uncomfortable realization of the enormity of American and European society’s complicity in the Holocaust there was, formed a backdrop for additional basic business considerations entertained by many of the same influential U.S. politicians beholden to Wall Street’s avarice and economic crime in rearming Germany. Highly placed villainous capitalist gangsters saw an imperialist opportunity to make genocidal use of the plight of a quarter million ‘undesirable’ Jewish Holocaust survivors to create a client colony of Europeans in the midst of oil rich Muslim countries.
AngloAmerican power over an incipient United Nations of only 51 nations, produced a genocidal stratagem of torching the Holy Land with a phony, never expected nor intended to be implemented resolution for a crazy quilt partition of Palestine into seven noncontiguous areas; the Arab areas entirely noncontiguous; the Jewish areas contiguous by a thread, its major area containing more Arabs than Jews [see UN provided map of recommended partition.] meant to provoke a civil war prepared for, planned and expected by the Colonial Powers supported revisionist Zionists leadership. From Wikipedia, Map of the UN resolution for partition:
In an Address by Albert Einstein at the Manhattan Opera House to the National Labor Committee for Palestine, as reported in the January 11, 1946,
Einstein spoke what he saw as the basic human problem in Palestine, namely, colonialism, British Empire colonialism.
Testimony Before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, Washington , D.C.
“I wish to explain why I believe the difficulties in Palestine exist. First, the difficulties between the Jews and Arabs are artificially created, and are created by the English…Of course the English had two interests. First was to have raw materials for their industry. Also the oil in those countries. I find everywhere there are big landowners who are exploiters of that race of people. …The British are always in a passive alliance with those land possessing owners which suppress the work of the people in the different trades. It is my impression that Palestine is a kind of small model of India… Now how can I explain otherwise that national troublemaking is a British enterprise? I believe that the Palestinian people, under severe influence of the United Nations, will be able to create a better state of affairs. But with the British rule as it is, I believe it is impossible to find a real remedy. … The Irishmen have for a long time suffered under your rule. … The state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected to many difficulties and a narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad… If people are united with each other and they come to the idea that they do not need the foreign rule, then they want to make themselves independent.”
A few days later, Einstein again made his position clear, “I am in favor of Palestine being developed as a Jewish Homeland but not as a separate state. It seems to me a matter of simple common sense that we cannot ask to be given political rule over Palestine where two thirds of the population are not Jewish.” [January 19, 1946 Letter to Maurice Dunay]
In August 1945, Einstein was sharply and publicly critical of the Jewish underground paramilitary groups, such as the Irgun and the Stern Group. In his words, “I regard it [the Irgun] as a disaster”( Interview with I. Z. David). Also “I am not willing to see anyone associated with those misled and criminal people.” [letter to Shepard Rifkin).
>> Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Minority Perspective, UK and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which Dissident Voice supports with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.
End Notes
1. Letter to Col. Edward Mandell House (21 November 1933); as quoted in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945, edited by Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), pg. 373.
