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Complete Hitler Paper
Pg. 431. As we probe into the behind-the-scenes German interwar history and the story of Hitler and Naziism, we find both Owen D. Young and Gerald Swope of General Electric tied to the rise of Hitlerism and the suppression of German democracy. That General Electric directors are to be found in each of these three distinctive historical categories i.e. the development of the Soviet Union, the creation of Roosevelt's New Deal, and the rise of Hitlerism, suggest how elements of big business are keenly interested in the socialization of the world, for their own purposes and objectives. General Electric profited handsomely from bolshevism, from Roosevelt's New Deal socialism, and from National Socialism in Hitler's Germany.
Pg. 431. Walter Rathenau managed the German General Electric Company, a firm his father founded. Like Owen Young and Gerald Swope, his counterparts in the U.S., he was a prominent advocate of corporate socialism. He spoke out publicly against competition and free enterprise. Rathenau and Swope both wanted protection and cooperation of the state for their corporate objectives and profit. According to Rathenau, in his hoped for new economy, there will be no state or government control, but private economy committed to civic power, which will certainly require state cooperation.
Pg. 432. Owen D. Young of General Electric was one of the three US delegates to the 1923 Dawes Plan meeting establishing the German reparations program. In the Dawes and the Young plans, we can see how some private firms were able to benefit from the power of the state. The largest single loans from Wall Street to Germany during the 1920s were reparation loans; it was ultimately the US investor who paid for German reparations. The cartelization of the German electrical industry as well as the steel and chemical industries was made possible with these Wall Street loans.
Pg. 432. In the summer of 1929 A.E.G., the firm representing the cartelization of the German electric industries, sold 14 million shares to General Electric, giving G.E. a 25% interest in A.E.G. A closer working agreement was signed between these two companies, providing the German company with US technology and patents. Five Americans now sat on the board of A.E.G. By 1930 General Electric had similarly gained an effective technical monopoly of the Soviet electrical industry, and was soon to penetrate even the remaining bastions in Germany, particularly the Siemens group.
Pg. 440. The taproot of modern corporate socialism runs deep into the management of two affiliated multinational corporations: General Electric company in the United States and its foreign associates, including German General Electric (A.E.G.), and Osram in Germany. We have noted that Gerald Swope, 2nd president and chairman of General Electric, and Walter Rathenau of A.E.G., promoted radical ideas for control of the state by private business interest.
Pg. 440. Walter Rathenau became director of the A.E.G. in 1899 and by the early 20th century was a director of more than 100 corporations. Rathenau was also author of the “Rathenau Plan”, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the “Swopes Plan”, i.e. FDR’s New Deal, but written by Swope of G.E. In other words we have the extraordinary coincidence that the authors of the New Deal like plans in the US and Germany were also prime backers of their implementers: Hitler and Germany and Roosevelt in the United States.
Pg. 444. The American policy of not bombing American owned factories in Germany during the war is illustrated here. The German General Electric company located in Nuremburg, pre war manufactured electric hot plates, stoves, toasters, radiators, etc. In 1942 the plant shifted to war production; bombs, mines, parts for searchlights, communication, and amplifiers. This plant was bombed only rarely and incidentally. The German war effort was not significantly hindered by lack of electrical equipment.
Chapter 4. Standard Oil Fuels World War 2
Pg. 448. In two years Germany will be manufacturing oil and gas enough out of soft coal for a long war. The Standard Oil of New York is furnishing millions of dollars to help. Report from the commercial attache, U.S. embassy in Berlin, Germany, January 1933 to the state department in Washington, DC.
Pg. 448. The Standard Oil group of companies, in which the Rockefeller family owned 1/4 (and controlling) interest, was of critical assistance in helping Nazi Germany prepare for World War Two. This assistance in military preparations came about because Germany's relatively insignificant supplies of crude petroleum were quite insufficient for modern mechanized warfare; in 1934 for instance about 85% of Germany's finished petroleum products were imported. The solution adopted by Nazi Germany was to manufacture synthetic gasoline from its plentiful domestic coal supplies. It was the hydrogenation process of producing synthetic gasoline and iso-octane properties in gasoline that enabled Germany to go to war in 1940-- and this hydrogenation process was developed and financed by the Standard Oil laboratories in the United States in partnership with IG Farben.
Pg. 453. Evidence presented to the Truman, Bone, and Kilgore committees after World War 2 confirmed that Standard Oil had at the same time “seriously imperiled the war preparations of the United States”. Documentary evidence was presented to all three congressional committees that before World War 2 Standard Oil had agreed with IG Farben in the so-called Jasco agreement, that synthetic rubber was within Farben’s sphere of influence, while Standard Oil was to have an absolute monopoly in the US only if and when Farben allowed development of synthetic rubber to take place in the US.
Pg. 453. Ethyl Lead for the Wehrmacht. Another prominent example of the Standard Oil assistance to Nazi Germany-- in cooperation with General Motors-- was in supplying ethyl lead. Ethyl fluid is an anti-knock compound used in both aviation and automobile fuels to eliminate knocking, and so improve engine efficiency; without such anti-knocking compounds modern mobile welfare would be impractical.
Pg. 454. In 1924 the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation was formed in New York City, jointly owned by the Standard Oil company of New Jersey and General Motors Corporation, to control and utilize US patents for the manufacture and distribution of tetraethyl lead and ethyl fluids in the US and abroad. Up to 1935 manufacture of these products was undertaken only in the United States. In 1935 Ethyl Gasoline Corporation transferred this know-how to Germany for use in the Nazi rearmament program. This transfer was undertaken over the protest of the US government. The Ethyl Company was advised by the Army Corps that “under no circumstances should you or the board of directors of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation disclose any secrets or ‘know-how’ in connection with the manufacture of tetraethyl lead to Germany”. Contrary to its pledge to the Army Air Corps, Ethyl subsequently signed a joint production agreement with IG Farben in Germany to form ethyl GmbH and with the Montecatini in fascist Italy for the same purpose.
Pg. 455. Standard Oil of New Jersey and Synthetic Rubber. The transfer of ethyl technology for the Nazi war machine was repeated in the case of synthetic rubber. There is no question that the ability of the German war machine to fight World War 2 depended on synthetic rubber-- as well as on synthetic petroleum-- because Germany had no natural rubber, and war would not have been possible without Farben’s synthetic rubber production. As in the ethyl technology transfers, Standard Oil of New Jersey was intimately associated with IG Farben’s synthetic rubber. A series of joint cartel agreements were made in the late 1920s aimed at a joint world monopoly of synthetic rubber. Hitler’s Four-Year Plan went into effect in 1937 and in 1938 Standard provided IG Farben with its new butyl rubber process. On the other hand Standard kept the German buna process secret within the United States and it was not until June 1940 that Firestone and US Rubber were allowed to participate in testing butyl and granted the buna manufacturing licenses. Even then Standard tried to get the US government to finance a large scale buna program-- reserving its own funds for the more promising butyl process.
Chapter 5. I.T.T. Works Both Sides of the War
Pg. 458. While ITT Focke-Wolfe planes were bombing allied ships, and ITT lines were passing information to German submarines, ITT direction finders were saving other ships from torpedoes. Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State of ITT.
Pg. 458. The multinational giant International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) was founded in 1920 by Virgin Islands born entrepreneur Sosthenes Behn. During his lifetime Behn was the epitome of the politicized businessman, earning his profits and building the ITT empire through political maneuvering rather than in the competitive marketplace. ITT was a Morgan controlled company; and we have previously noted the interest of Morgan controlled companies in war and revolution abroad and political maneuvering in the United States.
Pg. 460. There is no record that ITT made direct payments to Hitler before the Nazi grab for power in 1933. On the other hand, numerous payments were made to Heinrich Himmler in the late 1930s, and in World War 2 itself, through ITT German subsidiaries. The first meeting between Hitler and ITT officials, so far as we know, was reported in August 1933, when Sosthenes Behn and the ITT German representative Henry Manne met with Hitler in Berchesgaden. ITT gained access to the profitable German armaments industry. These armaments operations made handsome profits, which could have been repatriated to the United States parent company. That they were reinvested in German rearmament suggests that Wall Street claims it was innocent of wrongdoing in German rearmament and indeed they even did not even know of Hitler's intention, were fraudulent.
Chapter 6. Henry Ford and the Nazis
Pg. 467. In 1938 Henry Ford, in his public statements, had divided financiers into two classes: those who profited from war and used their influence to bring about war for a profit, and the constructive financiers. While Ford publicly protested that he did not like totalitarian governments, we find in practice he knowingly profited from both sides of World War 2, from French and German plants, producing vehicles at a profit for the Wehrmacht, and from US plants building vehicles at a profit from U.S. Army.
Pg. 467. On December 20, 1922, the New York Times reported that automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was financing Adolf Hitler's nationalist and anti-Semitic movements in Munich. Simultaneously, the Berlin newspaper Berliner Tageblatte appealed to the American ambassador in Berlin to investigate and halt Ford’s intervention into German domestic affairs. Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew, earlier circulated by the Nazis, was translated by them into dozens of languages, and Hitler utilized sections of the book verbatim in writing Mein Kampf. Hitler's backing in the late 20s and early 30s came from the chemical, steel, and electrical industry cartels, rather than directly from individual industrialist.
Pg. 474. In July 1942 word filtered back to Washington from Ford of France about Ford's activities on behalf of the German war effort in Europe. The incriminating information was promptly buried and even today only part of the known documentation can be traced in Washington. We do know however that the US consul general in Algeria had possession of a letter from Morris Dollfuss of French Ford, who claimed to be the first Frenchman to go to Berlin after the fall of France, to Edsel Ford about a plan by which the Ford Motor could be contributing to the Nazi war effort. French Ford was able to produce 20 trucks a day for the Wehrmacht.
Pg. 475. In France during the war, passenger automobile production was entirely replaced by military vehicles and for this purpose three large additional buildings were added to Ford's Poissy factory. The main building contained about 500 machine tools, “all imported from the United States and including a fair sprinkling of the more complex types, such as Gleason gear cutters, Bullard automatics and Ingersoll borers”.