The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944. From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

Part 2: I.G. Economic Warfare & Traitors In High Places

The criminal behavior and lack of ethics illustrated by Watson's early career was pervasive between the wars. When the Nazis seized power, Watson saw an opportunity to expand in Germany. In the depths of the Great Depression, Watson increased IBM's investment in Germany by nearly a million dollars. Even more gratifying was the secret pact Watson concluded in October, 1933 which gave Dehomag commercial powers beyond the German borders. Previously, all IBM subsidiaries had been confined to a single country. With Dehomag now established as the defacto "IBM Europe," the Nazis were able to conduct statistical services throughout Europe. In effect, Watson had established a cartel much like I.G. Farben's.

In an attempt to justify Watson's, and IBM's dealings with the Nazis, many suggest that Watson was not a fascist, but simply a ruthless businessman. Evidence, however, suggests that if Watson was not a fascist, he was at the very least a great admirer of fascism. At a 1937 sales convention Watson said:

"I want to pay tribute(to the) great leader, Benito Mussolini. I have followed the details of his work very carefully since he assumed leadership. Evidence of his leadership can be seen on all sides. Mussolini is a pioneer…. Italy is going to benefit greatly."26

This is not the only evidence of Watson's support and admiration for fascism. He also had an autographed picture of Mussolini hanging in his living room for years. Watson was quoted saying:

"we should pay tribute to Mussolini for establishing this spirit of loyal support." 26

In a private letter to Reich Economic Minister, Hjalmar Schacht, Watson wrote:

"the necessity of extending a sympathetic understanding to the German people and their aims under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. 26

Watson wrote the letter years after Hitler seized power, and described Nazi aggression toward neighboring countries as a dynamic policy. The letter ended with:

"an expression of my highest esteem for himself (Hitler), his country and his people." 26

While Watson's praise for Hitler and Mussolini do not supply definitive proof that Watson was a fascist, it certainly confirms the conclusion of Harvard professor, Gaetano Salvemini, that corporate America was in sympathy with fascism.

The Roaring 20s and the Roots of American Fascism
Part 2: Economic Warfare & Traitors in High Places
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1920sp2.html

...Between the cartel agreements of I.G. and the monopolistic behavior of our own robber barons, the Dulles brothers had no shortage of investors willing to invest in Germany. In 1940, Professor Gaetano Salvemini of Harvard was quoted as saying that 100 percent of American big business was sympathetic towards fascism. Corporate America's support for fascism was so great that U.S. Ambassador to Germany William Dodd proclaimed:

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy." 21

Americans have never been told the truth about the extent of corporate America's involvement with the Nazis. The media has spoon-fed Americans into believing that only a handful of companies traded with the Nazis. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, well over 300 American corporations were arming Nazi Germany during the war in violation of the law.

Many of these corporations took extraordinary steps to maintain communication with their German offices and to conceal their Nazi involvement from the U.S. government. They could have severed all links with Nazi Germany, but instead chose to continue support a regime at war with their own country. In doing so, these corporations became willing accomplices to the Holocaust, traitors to their country and guilty of war crimes. Those responsible for such actions and crimes should have received justice at the end of a hangman's noose. Sadly, none were even charged.

Even the bluest of the "blue chips," IBM, actively sought business with the Nazis during the war. Dehomag, IBM's German subsidiary, supplied the Hollerith machines that played a prominent role in the Holocaust. Without Hollerith machines the efficiency with which the Holocaust was carried out would have been impossible. The roundup of the Jews would have been slowed to a snail's pace by forcing the Nazis to divert additional manpower to the task of locating their Jewish victims. Hollerith machines were located in every concentration camp and were serviced by Dehomag representatives under the full appraisal of the New York office.

The inclusion of IBM provides a look at the mindset of corporate America. Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust details the ruthlessness of corporate America in its pursuit of profits. 22 When the Nazis came to power, IBM was under the direction of Thomas Watson, who actively sought out a contract to provide the equipment for the Nazi census.

Up until then, Watson's career had been less than ethically stellar. Watson learned his business skills from John Patterson, the ruthless founder of the National Cash Register (NCR). Watson rose quickly in the ranks of NCR, learning to use frivolous lawsuits against competitors, as well as the threat of lawsuits against competitors' customers. At NCR, Watson was placed in charge of driving out competitors selling used equipment. He quickly adopted the tactics of the robber barons to establish a monopoly by using predatory pricing, threats of lawsuits, bribes and even smashed storefronts. On February 22, 1912, Watson was indicted for criminal conspiracy to restrain trade and found guilty. 23

The criminal behavior and lack of ethics illustrated by Watson's early career was pervasive between the wars. When the Nazis seized power, Watson saw an opportunity to expand in Germany. In the depths of the Great Depression, Watson increased IBM's investment in Germany by nearly a million dollars. Even more gratifying was the secret pact Watson concluded in October, 1933 which gave Dehomag commercial powers beyond the German borders. Previously, all IBM subsidiaries had been confined to a single country. With Dehomag now established as the defacto "IBM Europe," the Nazis were able to conduct statistical services throughout Europe. In effect, Watson had established a cartel much like I.G. Farben's.

In an attempt to justify Watson's, and IBM's dealings with the Nazis, many suggest that Watson was not a fascist, but simply a ruthless businessman. Evidence, however, suggests that if Watson was not a fascist, he was at the very least a great admirer of fascism. At a 1937 sales convention Watson said:

"I want to pay tribute(to the) great leader, Benito Mussolini. I have followed the details of his work very carefully since he assumed leadership. Evidence of his leadership can be seen on all sides. Mussolini is a pioneer…. Italy is going to benefit greatly."26

This is not the only evidence of Watson's support and admiration for fascism. He also had an autographed picture of Mussolini hanging in his living room for years. Watson was quoted saying:

"we should pay tribute to Mussolini for establishing this spirit of loyal support." 26

In a private letter to Reich Economic Minister, Hjalmar Schacht, Watson wrote:

"the necessity of extending a sympathetic understanding to the German people and their aims under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. 26

Watson wrote the letter years after Hitler seized power, and described Nazi aggression toward neighboring countries as a dynamic policy. The letter ended with:

"an expression of my highest esteem for himself (Hitler), his country and his people." 26

While Watson's praise for Hitler and Mussolini do not supply definitive proof that Watson was a fascist, it certainly confirms the conclusion of Harvard professor, Gaetano Salvemini, that corporate America was in sympathy with fascism.

Before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles, American corporations were rushing to invest and support Germany. The first to support what became the Nazi line was Henry Ford. In the early 1920s, Ford began publishing an anti-Semitic newspaper. Ford was also an early financial supporter of Hitler at a time when the Nazis were virtually unknown.

Another early backer of Hitler and the Nazis were the du Ponts. The power behind the du Pont throne in the 1920s was Irenee du Pont who, like Ford, was a supporter of Hitler before he was known outside Munich. Irenee du Pont followed Hitler's career avidly from the early 1920s on. Du Pont representatives traveled to Germany almost immediately after the armistice to renew their alliance with I.G.

In November 1919, mere months after the armistice was signed, representatives of du Pont and the Badische Company, the principal corporate identity of I.G. Farben in Switzerland, worked out a tentative agreement for the organization of a global corporation to exploit the Haber process for ammonia and nitrate production. Du Pont also sought technical help in the dyestuffs industry. Although a complete agreement was never reached on a grand alliance, the relationship between du Pont, Verinigte Koln-Rottweiler Pulverfabriken (VKR) and Dynamit Aktiengesellschaft (DAG) became closer. At one point, du Pont had roughly three million dollars invested directly in I.G. Farben 24

The most notable aspect of the November 1919 meeting and tentative agreement was the lightning speed with which the German cartels reestablished control over the all-important Haber process for ammonia and nitrate production. All parties had a stake in completing the agreement behind closed doors, sincethe very nature of the agreement was in violation of the armistice. For Germany, it meant control over explosives and fertilizer production, freeing the country from dependence on Chilean nitrates. For du Pont, it was a matter of profits. Before WW II, one of the most profitable periods for du Pont was WW I. During that war, du Pont's profits rose to $230,000,000. The profits from the war were used to buy a controlling share of General Motors. 27

On January 1, 1926, an agreement between du Pont, VCR and DAG was consummated, and was similar to the agreement of the same date between du Pont and Imperial Chemical Industries of Britain. This agreement, debated at length in the 1934 Nye Committee hearings, was found unsigned in du Pont files. It was a gentlemen's agreement detailing exchanges of patents and technical information that could be denied if discovered. In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles banning German companies from selling military explosives, the agreement provided a means by which du Pont could sell German produced explosives. The Nye report provides the best summary of the agreement:

"In other words, though German munitions companies cannot sell abroad, American companies can sell for them, and to our own government at that." 25

In effect, the agreement between du Pont, DAG and VCR reestablished the pre-war cartel between du Pont, Koln-Rottweiler Pulverfabriken and the British Nobel Dynamite Trust. Under the pre-war agreement, du Pont agreed not to erect any powder works in Europe, and the other signers agreed not to erect powder works in the United States. Technical information was exchanged among the signatories, and du Pont agreed to inform the others of the quantity, quality and requirements of all powder sales to the United States government. In 1910, the Justice Department found the agreement to be a violation of anti-trust laws, resulting in the breakup of du Pont powder works and the formation of Atlas Powder and Hercules Powder. Within a few years of the 1910 ruling, du Pont reorganized in Delaware because to the state's lax regulations of corporations.

An agreement between du Pont and Dynamit in 1929 controlled the production of tetrazine, a substance for greatly improved ammunition primers. When WWII began in 1939, Remington (controlled by du Pont) received huge British ammunition orders. Because of a clause in the agreement with I.G. Farben the British received an inferior cartridge lacking tetrazine. 34

"Fascism is on the march today in America. Millionaires are marching to the tune. It will come in this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive forces... A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America's largest financial corporations told me point blank that if the progressive trend of the Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism to America."
-former U.S. ambassador to Germany William Dodd in 1938

Bill O’Reilly on the Today Show:

These pin-heads running around going, “Get out of Iraq now” don’t know what they are talking about. These are the same people before Hitler invaded in WWII that were saying, “He’s not such a bad guy.” They don’t get it.
Video

Hitler sympathizers
November 30, 2005
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

...After all, let's recall just who those sympathizers were -- namely, the captains of America's mainstream conservative right who led what was called the America First Committee:

The AFC had its origins in 1940, when a Yale law student named R. Douglas Stuart Jr. organized a petition on campus to build opposition to intervention in the European wars then reaching a high pitch. He found a sponsor in Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board at Sears, Roebuck -- then and now the quintessentially middle-American company. Wood and a group of fellow Chicago businessmen (including former diplomat William R. Castle, who had been a high-ranking Hoover Administration official, and whose work appeared in Japanese and German propaganda publications; and William Regnery, founder of Regnery Publishing ... yes, that Regnery Publishing ...) helped Stuart form plans for a large-scale organization, which led to the naming and formation of the America First Committee in August of that year.

The chief point of agitation for the America Firsters was FDR's loosening of the arms embargo to Europe -- particularly for Britain and France -- shortly after Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the subsequent outbreak of war. In retrospect, of course, this not only helped pull the United States inexorably to war, it was the morally courageous -- and right -- thing to do. To have utterly abandoned Britain especially to the tender mercies of the Nazis would have been cowardice, and almost certainly would have wrought an unimaginable nightmare: complete and uncontested Nazi hegemony in Europe, a reign that may well have continued even to the present day. The idea that America First was in hindsight somehow "right" is both laughable and truly contemptible. Defenders of America First (including Patrick Buchanan) like to argue that Hitler's regime eventually would have collapsed under its own weight -- but the evidence they present for this is thin and quite unconvincing.

Nonetheless, in its origins at least, America First was in truth largely a mainstream response that was mostly isolationist, and not fascist, in nature. Its charter even specifically announced that Nazis, fascists and communists were not welcome.

But even in the beginning, there were warning signs: Among the first members of the committee were Henry Ford, who, as the publisher of the Protocols hoax-promoting text, The International Jew, was not only one of the foremost progenitors of anti-Semitism in America, but had an open and celebrated business and ideological connection with Hitler's war machine.

Also on that original national committee:

-- Avery Brundage, former Chairman of the American Olympic Games Committee when in Berlin 1936. Brundage's behavior in that episode had already earned its place in history as one of the low watermarks of cowardice and complicity in the Nazis' consolidation of their power.

-- Charles A. Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic and a household name even still, was to become the leading spokesman for the America First Committee -- as well as a notable anti-Semite.

The arc of Lindbergh's career in this period mirrored that of the America First Committee itself -- beginning, to all appearances, as mainstream isolationists and pacifists, but then rapidly devolving into something more sinister. The first real warning sign came at a May 29, 1941 rally in Philadelphia with 16,000 in attendance, when many audience members gave a Nazi salute. Lindbergh, while demanding the overthrow of the FDR regime, asked the audience: "Are we going to let Jews run this country?"

However, that remark received relatively little play, especially compared to the national firestorm that erupted after Lindbergh, on Sept. 11, 1941, gave a speech in Des Moines that blamed Jews for dragging the nation toward war:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.

No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

Of course, in retrospect, it is clear that on the basis of Hitler's plans for the Jews alone, America would have been justified in entering in a war against Germany on purely moral grounds. Not that this actually happened; if anything, American officials were in reality congenitally slow on the uptake about what was happening to the Jews in Europe.

In any event, Lindbergh's Des Moines speech created a national uproar, because its rather naked anti-Semitism -- especially the suggestion that American Jews were unpatriotic -- made plain for the first time what the underpinnings of America First were in reality about. Lindbergh had already raised eyebrows by accepting in October 1938 the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Herman Goering for his service in advancing the cause of aviation; Lindbergh had in fact helped advise the Germans on organizing the Luftwaffe. After the Des Moines speech, however, Lindbergh's reputation was so tarnished that even his hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota, removed his name from its water tower.

The connection to the Nazi agenda had indeed been gradually revealing itself for some time. On Jan. 22, 1941, Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich, made a short-wave radio broadcast that promoted the group, proclaiming: "The America First Committee is truly American and truly patriotic!"

Other America First spokesmen were likewise nakedly anti-Semitic. The most notorious of these was Father Charles Coughlin, the Protocols-promoting radio ranter with a weekly audience of millions, who continued to insist that Jews were trying to pull Americans into a war against "their own kind." In his magazine Social Justice, he wrote: "Stalin's idea to create world revolution and Hitler's so-called threat to seek world domination are not half as dangerous combined as is the proposal of the current British and American administrations to seize all raw materials in the world. Many people are beginning to wonder who they should fear most -- the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination."

Another famous aviator -- Laura Ingalls, the first woman to fly solo across the American continent -- was also a noted America First figure. She was also a raving anti-Semite who, it turned out later, was fully in the pay of the Germans. Ingalls received funds from Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, head of the Gestapo in the U.S. (his title was Second Secretary of the German Embassy in Washington). She also worked with Hans Thomson, German Charge' d'Affaires and Fritz Weidemann, the German Consul in San Francisco. In 1942, Ingalls was arrested by the FBI for failing to register as an agent of the Nazis and was sentenced to two years in prison.

While all this was going on at the top, the troops of the America First movement were also becoming increasingly Nazified. Members of the German-American Bund -- which received large amounts of funding from the Nazi regime -- moved quietly into the chapters of the America First Committee. Other proto-fascists likewise swelled the ranks of America First: William Pelley�s Silver Shirts, Coughlin's Christian Front, the KKK, White Russian Fascists. All this infiltration by mid-1941 led the American Legion in California to declare that the entire fifth column in the U.S. had joined the America First movement.

Smaller opposition groups tried to counter their propaganda by drawing public attention to the underlying agenda. The most notable of these was "Friends of Democracy," which produced the "Nazi Transmission Belt" cartoon as well as a pamphlet examining Lindbergh's Nazi ties. It also produced a flier that pointed out:

1) A large part of the audiences of many America First meetings are members of pro-Nazi organizations.

2) Nazi propaganda is distributed at many of these meetings.

3) Nazi organizations not only distribute the literature of the America First Committee but recruit members and raise money for the committee.

4) The Nazi press in the United States has stamped the program of America First with its approval.

5) The propaganda ministries of the democracy-hating Nazi and Fascist governments endorse the policies of the committee.

Another group, calling itself the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), published an article in May 1941 that observed:

The point is that un-American organizations have made appeals for contributions of money to America First. Un-American element crowd America First rallies. They applaud America First speakers. They boo the President of the United States. They do not boo Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin. . . Some of them belong to the Nazi Bund which is pro-Hitler. . . What Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and their friends in this country Applaud cannot be good for America.

All this came to a screeching halt on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war was cemented. America First's officials met on Dec. 8 and announced the organization was disbanding. At least publicly.

In secret, however, the leaders -- who were convinced America would lose the war -- kept the organization going, planning for the day when the Nazis took over. As Russ Bellant reported in Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and Their Effect on U.S. Cold War Politics:

After Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war on the United States, the America First Committee didn't go out of business as it officially declared on December 12, 1941. Five days later, a secret meeting of certain key leaders of America First took place in New York to plan for what they assumed (and hoped) would be the Axis victory in Europe and the Far East. "[T]he Committee has in reality gone underground," FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the White House. It began planning for the day when they would be the Americans with whom the victorious Nazis would negotiate a surrender. Finally, when the defeat of the Nazis by Allied powers was a foregone conclusion, the America First Committee secretly dissolved itself in 1944.

(Bellant's primary source, for those interested, was a Feb. 13, 1942 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to Major General Edwin M. Watson, Secretary to the President, which declared that America First had "gone underground.")

The meeting was held in the home of Edwin Sibley Webster, a wealthy Wall Street broker with Kidder, Peabody, and it featured a number of key American First members, including Lindbergh. The group reformed under a new name, Americans for Peace. One of the attendees, Horace Haase, left no doubt about the future activities of the gathering:

"It is obviously necessary for the leaders of the America First like Wood and Webster to keep quiet. But the organization should not be destroyed. I have never been in the limelight and have nothing to lose. I can remain active in a quiet way. I should like to offer to keep the files. We must get ready for the next attack which must be made upon this communistic administration."

The America Firsters' fantasies of serving as a future Vichy government in America gradually crumbled, of course, as the tide of the war turned. Americans for Peace quietly disbanded in late 1944.

Another significant American figure in the buildup of the Nazi war machine: Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current president and scion of the Bush family fortune. A fortune that was based, in no small part, on doing business with Hitler's war machine -- and in fact, funnelling large sums of American capital into German manufacturing -- during the 1930s.

In other words, those Hitler sympathizers who were claiming, "He's not such a bad guy," who "just didn't get it" (or rather, perhaps "got it" all too well), were in fact the same right-wing enablers who, in their 21st-century guise, are nowadays finding excuses for an incompetent and mendacious president who dragged his country into a war under false pretenses, claiming: "He's not such a bad guy."

This is not to compare Bush to Hitler, but rather, to point out that the corporatist impulse to support warmakers is deeply entrenched. The faction that made excuses for Hitler out of their own self-interest comprises today the same people who pooh-poohed so-called liberal organizations like Amnesty International when they raised concerns about America's continuing support for Saddam Hussein back in 1989. You know, the folks who now accuse devoted patriots who do not believe in wasting the lives of our soldiers of actually causing them harm. Talk about "just not getting it."

This particular line of attack on antiwar liberals is predicated on the notion that the war in Iraq has become the focal point of the "war on terror" -- when, in fact, nearly everyone with a sense of reality understands that it is in fact a terrible diversion from the real work of combating terrorism. Most of all, it obscures the real nature of those Hitler sympathizers, who were in the end the same corporate enablers of a warmongering leader with whom O'Reilly is clearly aligned, making excuses for the inexcusable.

And perhaps it's worth remembering, as well, that we've heard complaints similar to O'Reilly's current jihad about non-Christians wanting to "do away" with Christmas before. Long before. Why, back in the 1930s, none other than Henry Ford was making nearly identical complaints:

"And it has become pretty general. Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find. Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards."

Where was this text located? Why, in The International Jew, of course.

"The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem," by Henry Ford
by John Aravosis (DC) · 12/03/2005
http://www.americablog.com/2005/12/interna...s-foremost.html
From WikipediaWikipedia:

Henry Ford began publication of a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, in 1919. The paper ran for eight years, during which it republished "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which has since been discredited as an anti-Semitic forgery. The American Jewish Historical Society describes the ideas presented in it as "anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor, and anti-Semitic".

The Independent also published, in Ford's name, several anti-Jewish articles which were released in the early 1920s as a set of four bound volumes, cumulatively titled "The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem." These volumes were distributed through Ford's car dealerships. Denounced by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the articles nevertheless explicitly condemned pogroms and violence against Jews (Volume 4, Chapter 80), preferring to blame incidents of mass violence on the Jews themselves. None of this work was actually penned by Ford, though they required his tacit approval since he was the paper's publisher....

In the years between the wars, Henry Ford supported Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. His support abated as the United States entered WWII. There is also some evidence that Henry Ford gave Adolf Hitler direct financial backing when Hitler was first starting out in politics. This can in part be traced to statements from Kurt Ludecke, Germany's representative to the U.S. in the 1920s, and Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, who said they requested funds from Ford to aid the National Socialist movement in Germany. However, a 1933 Congressional investigation into the matter was unable to substantiate whether contributions were actually sent. Regardless of whether direct financial support was provided, Ford repeatedly voiced his overt approval of Hitler's theories.

Ford's indirect financial backing of the Nazis was also undeniable, as Ford Motor Company was active in Germany's military buildup prior to World War II. In 1938, for instance, Ford assisted to construct an assembly plant in Berlin, the purpose of which was to supply trucks to the Wehrmacht. Forced labor was employed to produce 78,000 trucks and 14,000 track vehicles. In July of that year, Ford was awarded (and accepted) the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle (Großkreuz des Deutschen Adlerordens). Ford was the first American and the fourth person given this award, at the time Nazi Germany's highest honorary award given to foreigners. The decoration was given "in recognition of [Ford's] pioneering in making motor cars available for the masses." The award was accompanied by a personal congratulatory message from Adolf Hitler. [Detroit News, July 31, 1938.] A portrait of Ford was hung at the Nazi party's headquarters in Munich.

(Note from John: You'd think Ford would recognize it's unique historical burden to remember the wrongs of the past and not cave yet again to the prejudiced whims of jack-booted bigots. You'd think that. But you'd be wrong.

The War Years: Part 5: Corporate Traitors
by Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins
Nazi Hydra In America

The large corporations faced other problems with the end of the war. Many of these corporations attained their large size because cartel agreements with German firms gave them exclusive production rights within the United States while the German firms held the patents. Center to Truman's plan to remove Germany's ability to wage war and to break up I.G. Farben was the removal of patents from German hands. One executive of US Steel Corporation with extensive ties to Schmitz and Krupp attempted to reverse Truman's policy. The executive called for an immediate opening of the German Patent Office and for prohibiting inspections. The opening of the patent office, along with a ban on searches, would have been disastrous for the decartelization and de-Nazification programs.86

The end of the war would also reveal the many crimes of a corporate America willingly supplying the Nazis with war munitions. The dealings between corporate America and the Nazis during the war occurred with the direct knowledge of the American corporate headquarters and often times at the direction from the head office. Forget the rubbish that these poor corporations were forced to cooperate with the Nazis. Generally, nothing could be further from the truth. Many of these corporations went to extraordinary measures to remain in control of their assets in Germany fully cooperating with the Nazis even if it was a violation of the law and all moral principles.

Once again, the media would play a central role in concealing from the American people the truth about corporate America. Perpetrating another red scare on the country would conceal the truth. The words of Charles Wilson during the Allis-Chalmers strike spoke of only two problems unions and communism. These two issues would frame the issues in the media into the next decade. Union members would be forced to sign loyalty oaths, as would government employees and even teachers. Russia was a new menace and there would be no reports in the media of Ford building trucks for the Nazis or of any other American corporation aiding the Nazis. .

Up until recently the media has led the American people to believe that only a handful of American corporations ever invested in Germany or dealt directly with the Nazis. But a recent article puts the number of American corporations involved with supplying the Nazis at more than 300. However, even this article while particularly damaging for Chase Bank as well as to Ford and General Motors, is shamefully apologetic to corporate America and plainly inaccurate on other accounts. It shamefully tries to exonerate one of the most notorious fascists in America during the war, the du Ponts by suggesting they did not invest in Nazi Germany after the 1930s. The reality is that the du Ponts had several cartel agreements with the Nazis and were openly pro-fascist supporters in this country.

Another recent article coming from German investigators states that 26 of the top 100 firms in the U.S were guilty of serious war crimes. One report is particularly damaging for Ford and General Motors indicating that US lawyers now have direct evidence of the companies both knowingly using slave labor and having closely collaborated with the Nazis. The lawyers are currently considering filing a possible class action suit.56 Additionally, this news wire substantiates that many of the links between corporate America and the Nazis began in the 1920s (as presented in an earlier chapter).

The first article mentioned above details the actions of John Foster Dulles and Sullivan & Cromwell, that helped conceal Nazi ownership of the U.S. subsidiary of Bosch. They concealed the real ownership by drafting a voting trust agreement making the Wallenbergs' Enskilda Bank a dummy owner. Here is another example of I.G. Farben�s practice of tarn. The fraud worked throughout the war, but in 1948 Bosch's American subsidiary was forced onto the auction block. This is but one of many such frauds involving the actions of Sullivan & Cromwell, as well as both of the Dulles brothers.

These articles provide good examples of unlawful conduct on the part of the American corporations. The use of slave labor by Ford and General Motors and the seizure of Jewish accounts by the Paris branch of Chase Bank are typical of the crimes corporate America committed during the war. To understand fully how such crimes against humanity have gone unpunished for half a century, one needs to follow the money trail beginning with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Such a look at international financial intrigue paints a vivid picture of the dangers of the World Trade Organization and how it currently imperils freedom globally.

The world's central banks originally, including the Federal Reserve created the BIS in 1930. The BIS was originally inspired by Hjalmar Horce Greeley Schacht who later became the Nazi Minister of Economics and president of the Riechsbank. Schacht was raised in Brooklyn and retained powerful Wall Street connections. He foresaw the rise of Hitler and the advent of WWII. Even before Hitler rose to power, Schacht pushed for an institution that would retain communication and collusion with the world's financial leaders in the event of war. Thus, it was written into the BIS's charter that BIS would be immune from seizure even if its owners were at war.

One of the owners Of BIS was the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York. The Morgans had extensive connections with the BIS. The BIS established purpose upon its founding was to provide the Allies with reparations from WWI as part of the Young Plan. Owen Young was a Morgan banker. The Morgans were involved in the fascist plot against FDR in the 1930s. In addition, Wendell Willkie was on the BIS board of directors and Willkie was the candidate of choice among the native fascists group to unseat Roosevelt.

Here is the crux of the power. Immune from seizure, the bank was free to act as it wished under whomever retained control of it. Citizens of other countries and indeed even the governments of other countries were powerless to oppose the bank or its actions. Instead, the bank was free to hold the world at the mercy of its knighted financial autocrats.

Granting such powers to any institution is foolhardy at best and a mistake that should never be repeated. However, after more than fifty years, the world has yet to learn. Currently the world's financial knights are once again reengineering the BIS in the form of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), GATS and other free trade agreements. In effect, all of these so-called free trade agreements would override the Bill of Rights and hold a country responsible for any loses a corporation would receive by any legal action initiated by the country or its citizens. Further, these trade agreements prevent a country from withdrawing from it by assessing penalties for lost income for up to twenty years after a nation withdrew. Again, the media is playing the role of an obedient lap dog for its corporate masters. The media has done such a good job in killing the story on MAI and its ramifications that most Americans have not heard of it. The reader is urged to become informed of the negative consequences of the MAI and the other free trade agreements and oppose them before another fascist institution can unleash it horrors on an unsuspecting world.

The danger of NAFTA and other so-called free trade agreements can best be conveyed by the example of the Metalclad suit against Mexico. Metalclad, a U.S. waste disposal company had bought a closed dump site in the north-central state of San Luis Potos that had been plagued in the past with problems. The purchase included an agreement for the cleanup of the past problems and leaks. The site sat atop an underground aquifer that provided water for a good deal of this arid region. The governor of San Luis Potos had an environmental audit conducted on the site. The audit concluded that the site would contaminate the underground water supply and, therefore, refused to let Metalclad reopen the site.52

Metalclad then filed suit against Mexico for $90 million dollars under Chapter 11 of NAFTA. The tribunal set up under NAFTA awarded Metalclad $16.7 million dollars. The crux of the ruling is that under these free trade agreements, the cost of environmental regulations are shifted from the corporations to the governments and to bypass the legal system in the signature countries. In other words, the cost of environmental regulations and clean up was socialized, freeing corporations from their costs. These free trade agreements are unconstitutional as they set up a tribunal of corporations as the final arbitrator in any dispute and fail to recognize the court system in any of the signature countries.

By the outbreak of war, the BIS was under the control of Hitler. Directors of the BIS included: Thomas McKittrick, an associate of the Morgans; Herman Schmitz, head of I.G. Farben; Kurt von Schroder, head of the J. H. Stein Bank of Cologne and leading financier of the Gestapo; Walther Funk, president of the Riechsbank; and Emil Puhl, vice president of the Riechsbank. In May 1946, at the Nuremberg Trials, Walter Funk testified that Puhl had been offered a major post at Chase in New York shortly before Pearl Harbor. Such an offer by Chase to a leading Nazi banker reveals the callous disregard of any moral principles by Chase. Surely at such a late date with Europe already embroiled in war Chase could not been oblivious to Nazi atrocities and aggression.

The first president of the BIS was Gates McGarrah formerly of Chase National Bank. During the first two years after Hitler's assumption to power, McGarrah was instrumental in financing the Nazis through the BIS. In 1940, McKittrick held a meeting at the Riechsbank with Kurt von Schroder and the Gestapo discussing means to continue doing business if war broke out. On February 5, 1942, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Riechsbank and the German and Italian governments approved orders that permitted McKittrick to remain in charge of the BIS. One of the documents of authorization simply stated, "McKittrick's opinions are safely known by us." 57 In response, McKittrick gratefully arranged a loan of several million Swiss Francs to the Nazi puppet governments of Poland and Hungary. On September 7, 1942, McKittrick issued the first annual report after Pearl Harbor read it to an empty room. In doing so, he could report to Washington that no Nazi directors were present. The report was purely Nazi propaganda assuming an immediate peace in favor of Germany with a sizable distribution of American gold to stabilize the German Mark. In the spring of 1943, McKittrick traveled to Berlin in violation of U.S. law after meeting with Leon Fraser of the First National Bank of New York and the heads of the Federal Reserve. His mission was to provide Emil Puhl with secret intelligence on financial problems and high-level attitudes in the United States. 57

On March 26, 1943, liberal California Congressman Jerry Voorhis entered a resolution in the House of Representatives calling for an investigation of the BIS. Congress failed to consider the matter. Voorhis was a liberal Californian representative and supporter of the New Deal and a relentless opponent of fascism. In 1945, Voorhis attacked the policy of placing men who had been officers of American companies tied to I.G Farben in the Office of military Government (OMG). OMG was tasked with the destruction of I.G. Farben. One such person assigned to OMG was Colonel Frederick Pope. Before the war Pope had been a director or top official of more than one of I.G. Farben's American affiliates.50

Obviously, if either the BIS or I.G Farben were opened to investigations in Congress, the risk was that many American corporations would be exposed to trading with the Nazis. Those supportive of the Nazis had but one choice--- Voorhis had to be eliminated. The cabal of Nazi supporters selected Richard Nixon to run against Voorhis in the 1946 election.

At the time Nixon was an unknown outside of California and only a bit player within California. Yet Nixon received financial support from the Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell.65 With a large financial backing Nixon easily defeated the Congressmen branding him a communist. Nixon later offered the following to a Voorhis supporter.

"Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn't a communist, but I had to win. That's the thing you don't understand. The important thing is to win."51

The early financial backing of Nixon and Nixon's cover-up of Nazi war criminals will be detailed further in a following chapter. In January of the following year, Washington Congressman John Coffee introduced a resolution similar to Voorhis�s resolution. Despite the continued protests calling for the dissolution of the BIS, it survived. As for McKittrick, he was amply rewarded for his treasonous behavior following the war with an appointment as vice president of Chase National Bank.

Two of the largest U.S. banks had extensive dealings with Nazi Germany, the Rockefeller- owned Chase Bank and the Morgan-controlled National City Bank of New York. Both banks handled accounts for many of the American corporations that traded with Nazi Germany during the war such as Standard Oil, Sterling Products, General Aniline & Film, and ITT.

In charge of European affairs for Chase was Joseph Larkin, a member of the Knights of Malta and a fascist sympathizer. (An abnormal number of Nazi and their supporters were members of the Knights of Malta.) Larkin, like McKittrick has a long history of aiding the Nazis. Perhaps the first example of Larkin aiding the fascist was in 1936, when he refused a $4 million account for the Loyalist of Spain. When a similar account was opened in the Paris branch, he had the Paris branch withdraw the deposit. However, Larkin gladly accepted accounts by Franco and the Riechsbank.

With the approach of war, the ties between the Rockefellers and the Nazi government solidified even more. In 1936, the Schroder Bank of New York entered into a partnership with the Rockefellers forming the Schroder, Rockefeller and Company Investment Bank. Time magazine described the partnership as the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Both Allen and John Foster Dulles were lawyers for the resulting firm. Allen Dulles was also on the board of Schroder. Six months after the start of the war in Europe, Larkin secured $25 million dollars for the use of the Nazi government. Accompanying the money was a detailed account of the assets and backgrounds of ten thousand Nazi sympathizers in the United States. In essence, the Nazi government was offering the sympathizers a chance to buy marks with dollars at a discounted rate through the Chase Bank. This scheme was only open to those willing to return to Germany, a rush on the German mark resulted.

Chase's support of the Nazis went even further--- to outright defiance of the U.S. government and treason in the fullest extent of the word. In May 1940, New York diamond merchant Leonard Smit began smuggling industrial-grade diamonds to Nazi Germany through Panama. Roosevelt had issued a freeze on all monies sent to Europe. A few days later at Smit's request, Chase unblocked his account and allowed the funds to flow to Panama and then on to Nazi Germany.

In another instance on June 17,1940, as France was collapsing the head of the Treasury Department, Moregnthau issued an order with FDR's approval to block the French accounts in this country to prevent the Nazis from looting those funds. Within hours, Chase officials unblocked the accounts and the funds went to South America and then to Nazi Germany.

On June 23, 1941, the FBI reported to Morgenthau that its monitoring of funds through Chase banks showed several payments to American oil companies from the Nazis. There was overwhelming evidence of Standard Oil receiving money from the Nazi government. The pro-Nazi publications from The German-American Commerce Association disclosed connections between Chase Bank, Emil Puhl and the Riechsbank throughout 1940. Additionally, the publications revealed that the Riechsbank maintained accounts with both Chase and National City banks.

Larkin went to extreme efforts to ensure that the Paris branch stayed open even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Throughout the war, Larkin allowed known Nazi collaborator Carlos Niedermann to manage the Paris branch. By May 1942, Harry Dexter White had uncovered evidence that Niedermann was enforcing Nazi restrictions on the withdraw of Jewish funds.

White was arguably one of the government's most important post-war economists. He was the architect of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, due to his liberal economic policies as well as his relentless pursuit of the financial dealings of large corporations with the Nazis, he had to be removed. By 1948, White was unjustly branded as an agent of the Soviet Union. One of his chief accusers was Whittaker Chambers, who may have been a Nazi agent. Even with the recently released Venona tapes, no conclusive evidence exists of White being a Soviet agent as claimed in several books. White died of a heart attack three days after testifying before the HUAC committee.89

Additional evidence shows that Larkin was directing the actions of the Paris branch at least six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In fact, the Paris branch had the American accounts blocked while maintaining Nazi accounts. A Treasury report dated December 20, 1944 revealed that Niedermann was a Nazi collaborator and that the fact was known by Larkin. The report further revealed that Larkin was aware of the Nazis plan to use these accounts following the war as an instrument of German policy in the United States.

With Larkin's full knowledge, the Paris branch of Chase handled the account of Otto Abetz, the Nazi ambassador to Paris. Abetz's account was used as a funnel to pour vast amounts of money into several French companies that were collaborating with the Nazis. The money in some cases was used to support the torture of the French people. Constant communications were maintained between the Paris branch and the New York office. The following quote from a letter from Albert Bertrand of the Chase Vichy branch to Larkin in 1942 attests to the communication and shameless collaboration between Chase and the Nazis.58

"The present basis of our relationship with the authorities in Germany is as satisfactory as the modus vivendi worked out with the German authorities by the Morgans. We anxiously sought and actually obtained substantial deposit of German funds...which funds were invested by Chase in French treasury banks to produce additional income."59

After the war, Morgenthau's investigators in Paris found further shocking evidence of Chase's collaborations with the Nazis. They found that at the time of the fall of Paris in June 1940, S.P. Bailey, and an U.S. citizen and manager of the Paris office offered to immediately liquidate the branch in a patriotic gesture to Larkin. Larkin promptly fired Mr. Bailey and appointed a known Nazi collaborator. In 1946, Larkin appointed the collaborationist Albert Bertrand to the board of Chase in Paris.

In addition to the already mentioned dealings of Standard Oil with the Nazis Major Charles Burrows of Military Intelligence reported to the War Department on July 15, 1941 that Standard Oil was shipping oil from Aruba in the Dutch West Indies to the Canary Islands. Part of his report follows.

"Standard...is diverting about 20 percent of the fuel oil to the present German Government. About six ships operating on this route are reputed to be manned mainly by Nazi officers. Seamen have reported to the informant that they have seen submarines in the immediate vicinity of the Canary Islands and have learned that the submarines are refueling there. The Informant also stated that Standard Oil Company has not lost any ships to date by torpedoing as have other American companies whose ships operate to other ports."60

By 1941, it was well known that Standard Oil was supplying the Nazis with vital fuel. The British blockade ran the entire length of North and South America, stopping ships bound for Germany wherever possible. To elude the British blockade, Farish sent the fuel to Russia and then transported it across Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Hitler's waiting Panzers. Another route Farish devised to elude the blockade was to ship the oil to Vichy North Africa once Hitler invaded Russia.

William La Varne, a dedicated employee of the Department of Commerce, uncovered the details of Standard Oil's dealings with the Nazi airline, LATI. LATI was not subject to boarding searches by the British blockade and was used to ferry spies into the Americas, as well as to transport large quantities of propaganda and drugs into Latin America--- all addressed to Sterling Products. Only Standard Oil could make these flights possible, as the trip from Europe to South America required refueling unless the airline had the high-octane fuel controlled by Standard Oil. To supply the airline, Farish changed the registration of many of his ships from German to Panamanian. Under Secretary of the Navy and vice president of General Aniline & Film (another company with extensive dealing with the Nazis), James Forestal promptly granted them immunity.

Summer Welles, a State Department employee presented a detailed report of refueling stations for Nazi vessels in South and Central America on March 31, 1941. Chief among the suppliers was Standard Oil of New Jersey and California. On May 5, 1941, the U.S. Legation in Managua, Nicaragua, that reported Standard Oil subsidiaries were distributing Nazi propaganda. Further investigations by John Muccio of the U.S. Consulate revealed that Standard Oil was distributing Nazi propaganda around the world. 61 Such were the dealings of Standard Oil at a time when Nelson Rockefeller was at his post of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, an intelligence agency with the mission to stop the Nazi influence in South America.

By 1944, America was seriously short on oil. The upcoming D-Day invasion would require an even greater amount and a stable supply. Lack of oil would cancel the planned invasion or imperil the troops ashore if it was not forthcoming. At the time, it cost ten cents a barrel to bring the oil up and another fifteen cents for royalties to the Sheikh of Bahrain or 20 cents for drilling in Arabia and another twenty-one cents for the royalties to Ibn Saud. However, prior to the invasion, W.S.S. Rodgers of Texas Company and Henry Collier of Standard Oil of California informed Ickes that the price for the government would be $1.05 a barrel. This was almost double the current price. The offer was take it or leave it. Ickes was forced to accept. 62 The threat of an interruption of supply if the U.S. government should intervene was explicit. Even more grievous was the fact that Rodgers and Collier paid no income tax on their ill-gotten profits because they had registered their company in the Bahamas. Their profit of $120 million dollars was made on a $1 million dollar investment.

Such behavior is not only criminal; it is treasonous. Standard put its own self-interest ahead of the country�s interest. It willingly to put the lives of GIs in danger and even ran the risk of a defeat in Europe. In effect, Standard Oil blackmailed FDR's administration for private gains. No charges of war profiteering were ever filed. Like Seldes said, the big boys are immune from prosecution.

The large faction of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathizers within the State Department made such deals possible. One of the Nazi sympathizers with a large degree of influence in the State Department was William Bullitt. He conducted a personal vendetta against the previously mentioned Summer Welles. Welles was the most powerful force within the department against fascism and was unrelenting in his pursuit of Nazis. Welles, however, had one weakness that Bullitt would exploit; he was bisexual. Bullitt conspired with Hoover in 1940 to investigate Welles. In September, Hoover hired two Pullman porters to flirt with Welles once he was drunk aboard a train back to Washington after attending the funeral of William Bankhead. Hoover's agents then noted his drunken conversations and sexual acts. It would take until 1943 before FDR would call for his resignation under pressure from Bullitt. Welles�s dismissal allowed the Nazi sympathizers full reign in the State Department and derailed his promising career. Once again, a staunch opponent of fascism was removed from power. However, FDR was so outraged at Bullitt that his influence was rendered impotent.

Early in 1942, the Standard Oil representative in Berlin, Karl Lindermann, held a series of urgent meetings with the two directors of American ITT in Germany, Walter Schellenberg and Baron Kurt von Schroder. Schellenberg was also the head of the Gestapo's counterintelligence and von Schroder was a director of the BIS. As a result of these meetings, Gerhardt Westrick, the CEO of ITT in Nazi Germany flew to Madrid to meet with Sosthenes Behn the founder of ITT. The meeting centered on how links with the Gestapo and ITT could be improved and how ITT could improve the entire Nazi telephone system and a host of war munitions. Westrick was also an associate of John Foster Dulles. He not only represented ITT but also served as an agent for Ford, GM, Standard Oil, the Texas Company, Sterling Products and the Davis Oil Company, all of which were guilty of trading with the Nazis.

The fascist government aided Behn because of his system of assuring politicians "promising plums" on his boards of directors. One such example was his Spanish chairman, the Duke of Alba, a major supporter of Franco and Hitler. Behn was closely connected with the Circle of Friends of the Gestapo through Henry Mann of the National City Bank. Behn increased his donations to the Circle of Friends after Pearl Harbor. Besides owning ITT Behn acquired a 28-percent share of Focke-Wulf company. With the aid of ITT, Focke-Wulf was able to improve the accuracy of the German bomber squadrons and later had a hand in the V2 that menaced England.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor Behn, entered into an agreement with the Nazi government, which was essentially a partnership of an American corporation with the Nazis. The agreement prohibited the Nazis from acquiring the shares of ITT, but made the Nazis administrators of those shares. Behn and his directors made repeated requests for licenses to allow his companies in neutral countries to trade with the Nazis. Morgenthau refused all attempts, but in open defiance to the U.S. government Behn proceeded anyway.

Besides providing as many as 50,000 fuses a month for artillery shells and bombs for Nazi Germany, Behn operated a worldwide communications network that continued to serve as a conduit for Nazi propaganda throughout the war. ITT's operations in South America were infested with Nazis, who oftentimes were in charge. However, perhaps the most grievous act of ITT during the war was in providing with Nazis with highly sophisticated communications equipment. This equipment allowed the Nazis to break the U.S. diplomatic code. In 1945, a special Senate committee on international communications was set up with Burton Wheeler as chairman. In the appendix to the report, an extensive dossier revealed the co-ownership of RCA and ITT with Germany and Japan. No one noted the significance of the report. As always, the big boys supporting Nazis were immune from prosecution. In fact, shortly after the war Behn receive millions in payment for his war-damaged plants in Nazi Germany---the very same plants that manufactured artillery shells that rained down on the GIs at Normandy and throughout the war.63

One cannot discuss Nazi Germany without mentioning I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm responsible for the manufacture of Zyklon gas used in the concentration camps. In 1929, Hermann Schmitz, and joint chairman of I.G. Farben along with Max Ilgner, Walter Teagle, Edsel Ford and Charles Mitchell of National City Bank set up the American Farben organization. In 1931, Herbert Hoover hosted Schmitz in the White House sharing his view that Russia must be crushed. Hoover had lost his extensive oil holdings in the Russian revolution. Schmitz was able to sell $13 million dollars of debentures through National City Bank in one morning, a large feat in the middle of the depression.

In 1932, Schmitz joined forces with Kurt von Schroder of the BIS. Schroder was a fanatical Nazi and director of the private bank J.H. Stein. Schroder was also an SS man linked closely with Wintrop Aldrich of Chase Bank, Walter Teagle of Standard Oil and Behn of ITT. Schroder was also the person who set up the meeting between Hitler and von Papen that led to Hitler's appointment as chancellor. Schroder was also instrumental in setting up the Circle of Friends of the Economy, a fund for the Gestapo under Himmler's control. Representatives of ITT and Standard Oil were also members.

American I.G. owned General Aniline & Film and Ozalid a blue print firm. General Aniline & Film supplied the army with the khaki dye it used and supplied the navy with the blue dye it used. This gave Schmitz's salesmen the perfect cover for spying on U.S. military bases. Also connected through General Aniline were Agfa and Ansco, a huge film corporation. This later firm provided the army and navy with their private training films and photographs of secret installations. Every blueprint from Ozalid was sent to Berlin. In 1939, with war raging in Europe all references to I.G. were dropped and the company was transposed into I.G. Chemie, a Swiss corporation controlled by Schmitz's brother-in-law with the aid of the National City Bank of New York and Chase Bank. The board of the new corporation still included William Weiss of Sterling Products, Edsel Ford and in the place of Teagle, James Forestal, who was soon to become the Undersecretary of the Navy. Another board member was former Attorney General, Homer Cummings, and leading defense lawyer for the newly transformed corporation. Cummings supplied Thomsen, the Nazi government's Chare d� Affaires with Roosevelt's plans for Germany. In a telegraph marked "Top Secret" to Germany from Thomsen, Cummings had revealed the plans of FDR to deal with Germany. Eventually the firm was placed under government control for the duration of the war. General Aniline & Film was placed under the directorship of Leo Crowley a friend of big business and big money.

Norman Littell, an antitrust lawyer in the Attorney General's office, pursued Sterling Products relentlessly. It particularly galled him that Sterling withheld the Bayer patent for atabrine, a quinine substitute. Thousands of GIs died needlessly from malaria for the lack of quinine or atabrine. Quinine became especially scarce after the Japanese seizure of the Dutch East Indies. However, atabrine was freely available to those on the list of Proclaimed Customers in South America but Crowley refuse to release it for use by American soldiers.

Like many strident anti-Nazis, Littell's enemies eventually forced FDR to dismiss him. However, just prior to Roosevelt's death he asked to meet with Littlell in the Oval Office. FDR told Littell that he would like to see Biddle impeached for treason but in his present weaken physical condition, the task would be too difficult. In 1945, Littell found support for an investigation of Sterling Drug in Congress. Al Smith of Wisconsin and Jerry Voorhis of California entered Littell's charges into the Congressional Record and demanded a full-scale investigation. The investigation never took place. Within a few days of the resolution, Biddle quietly resigned and ironically took the post of prosecutor at Nuremberg.64

Thus, Littell faced the same fate as many of the other anti-Nazis within the Roosevelt administration who were forced to resign with careers ending in a shipwreck due to pressure from unseen forces. The process of purging the stringent anti-fascists from government continued into the 1950s, climaxing perhaps with the trial of Alger Hiss.

Yet most of the pro-Nazis successfully managed to rehabilitate themselves thanks to the same unseen forces with more power than the President. As already noted in this chapter, many of the pro-Nazi bankers received choice promotions following the end of the war. Many pro-Nazi Congressmen remained in office for years after the war. Even the pro-Nazi publisher Dewitt Wallace was rewarded with an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom during Nixon's administration for his pro Nixon slant in the Reader's Digest as well as his large campaign donations. (Note the Republican's silence of this during Clinton's terms.) Wallace personally gave Nixon more than a hundred thousand dollars. Meanwhile, Wallace's rag managed to contribute even more by smuggling the money in through the Bahamas. 66

Not a single American corporation or American businessman guilty of supplying Hitler's war machine during the war has ever seen trial in over fifty years since the end of the war.

Ford and the Fuhrer: New Documents Reveal the Close Ties Between Dearborn and the Nazis.
Ken Silverstein
The Nation.com

We have sworn to you once,
But now we make our allegiance permanent.
Like currents in a torrent lost,
We all flow into you.

Even when we cannot understand you,
We will go with you.
One day we may comprehend,
How you can see our future.
Hearts like bronze shields,
We have placed around you,
And it seems to us, that only
You can reveal God's world to us.

This poem ran in an in-house magazine published by Ford Motor Company's German subsidiary in April of 1940. Titled "Fuhrer," the poem appeared at a time when Ford maintained complete control of the German company and two of its top executives sat on the subsidiary's board. It was also a time when the object of Ford's affection was in the process of overrunning Western Europe after already having swallowed up Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the East.

I found "Fuhrer" among thousands of pages of documents compiled by the Washington law firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, which sought damages from Ford on behalf of a Russian woman who toiled as a slave laborer at its German plant. This past September, a judge in New Jersey, Joseph Greenaway Jr., threw the case out on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. Greenaway, who did not exonerate Ford, did accept the company's argument that "redressing the tragedies of that period has been--and should continue to be--a nation-to-nation, government-to-government concern."


Ford argues that company headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, lost control of its German plant after the United States entered the war in 1941. Hence, Ford is not responsible for any actions taken by its German subsidiary during World War II. "We did not do business in Germany during the war," says Lydia Cisaruk, a Ford spokeswoman. "The Nazis confiscated the plant there and we lost all contact." She added that Ford played a "pivotal role in the American war effort. After the United States entered the war, Ford threw its entire backing to the war effort."

That Ford and a number of other American firms--including General Motors and Chase Manhattan--worked with the Nazis has been previously disclosed. So, too, has Henry Ford's role as a leader of the America First Committee, which sought to keep the United States out of World War II. However, the new materials, most of which were found at the National Archives, are far more damning than earlier revelations. They show, among other things, that up until Pearl Harbor, Dearborn made huge revenues by producing war materiel for the Reich and that the man it selected to run its German subsidiary was an enthusiastic backer of Hitler. German Ford served as an "arsenal of Nazism" with the consent of headquarters in Dearborn, says a US Army report prepared in 1945.

Moreover, Ford's cooperation with the Nazis continued until at least August 1942--eight months after the United States entered the war--through its properties in Vichy France. Indeed, a secret wartime report prepared by the US Treasury Department concluded that the Ford family sought to further its business interests by encouraging Ford of France executives to work with German officials overseeing the occupation. "There would seem to be at least a tacit acceptance by [Henry Ford's son] Mr. Edsel Ford of the reliance...on the known neutrality of the Ford family as a basis of receipt of favors from the German Reich," it says.

The new information about Ford's World War II role comes at a time of growing attention to corporate collaboration with the Third Reich. In 1998 Swiss banks reached a settlement with Holocaust survivors and agreed to pay $1.25 billion. That set the stage for a host of new Holocaust-related revelations as well as legal claims stemming from such issues as looted art and unpaid insurance benefits. This past November NBC News reported that Chase Manhattan's French branch froze Jewish accounts at the request of German occupation authorities. Chase's Paris branch manager, Carlos Niedermann, worked closely with German officials and approved loans to finance war production for the Nazi Army. In Germany the government and about fifty firms that employed slave and forced labor during World War II--including Bayer, BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler-Chrysler--reached agreement in mid-December to establish a $5.1 billion fund to pay victims. Opel, General Motors' German subsidiary, announced it would contribute to the fund. (As reported last year in the Washington Post, an FBI report from 1941 quoted James Mooney, GM's director of overseas operations, as saying he would refuse to do anything that might "make Hitler mad.") Ford refused to participate in the settlement talks, though its collaboration with the Third Reich was egregious and extensive. Ford's director of global operations, Jim Vella, said in a statement, "Because Ford did not do business in Germany during the war--our Cologne plant was confiscated by the Nazi government--it would be inappropriate for Ford to participate in such a fund."

The generous treatment allotted Ford Motor by the Nazi regime is partially attributable to the violent anti-Semitism of the company's founder, Henry Ford. His pamphlet The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem brought him to the attention of a former German Army corporal named Adolf Hitler, who in 1921 became chairman of the fledgling Nazi Party. When Ford was considering a run for the presidency that year, Hitler told the Chicago Tribune, "I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help." (The story comes from Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy, which details American business collaboration with the Nazis.) In Mein Kampf, written two years later, Hitler singled Ford out for praise. "It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union," he wrote. "Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence." In 1938, long after the vicious character of Hitler's government had become clear, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime's highest honor for foreigners.

Ford Motor set up shop in Germany in 1925, when it opened an office in Berlin. Six years later, it built a large plant in Cologne, which became its headquarters in the country. Ford of Germany prospered during the Nazi years, especially with the economic boom brought on by World War II. Sales increased by more than half between 1938 and 1943, and, according to a US government report found at the National Archives, the value of the German subsidiary more than doubled during the course of the war.

Ford eagerly collaborated with the Nazis, which greatly enhanced its business prospects and at the same time helped Hitler prepare for war (and after the 1939 invasion of Poland, conduct it). In the mid-thirties, Dearborn helped boost German Ford's profits by placing orders with the Cologne plant for direct delivery to Ford plants in Latin America and Japan. In 1936, as a means of preserving the Reich's foreign reserves, the Nazi government blocked the German subsidiary from buying needed raw materials. Ford headquarters in Dearborn responded--just as the Nazis hoped it would--by shipping rubber and other materials to Cologne in exchange for German-made parts. The Nazi government took a 25 percent cut out of the imported raw materials and gave them to other manufacturers, an arrangement approved by Dearborn.

According to the US Army report of 1945, prepared by Henry Schneider, German Ford began producing vehicles of a strictly military nature for the Reich even before the war began. The company also established a war plant ready for mobilization day in a "'safe' zone" near Berlin, a step taken, according to Schneider, "with the...approval of Dearborn." Following Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland, which set off World War II, German Ford became one of the largest suppliers of vehicles to the Wehrmacht (the German Army). Papers found at the National Archives show that the company was selling to the SS and the police as well. By 1941 Ford of Germany had stopped manufacturing passenger vehicles and was devoting its entire production capacity to military trucks. That May the leader of the Nazi Party in Cologne sent a letter to the plant thanking its leaders for helping "assure us victory in the present [war] struggle" and for demonstrating the willingness to "cooperate in the establishment of an exemplary social state."


Ford vehicles were crucial to the revolutionary Nazi military strategy of blitzkrieg. Of the 350,000 trucks used by the motorized German Army as of 1942, roughly one-third were Ford-made. The Schneider report states that when American troops reached the European theater, "Ford trucks prominently present in the supply lines of the Wehrmacht were understandably an unpleasant sight to men in our Army." Indeed, the Cologne plant proved to be so important to the Reich's war effort that the Allies bombed it on several occasions. A secret 1944 US Air Force "Target Information Sheet" on the factory said that for the previous five years it had been "geared for war production on a high level."

While Ford Motor enthusiastically worked for the Reich, the company initially resisted calls from President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to increase war production for the Allies. The Nazi government was grateful for that stance, as acknowledged in a letter from Heinrich Albert to Charles Sorenson, a top executive in Dearborn. Albert had been a lawyer for German Ford since at least 1927, a director since 1930 and, according to the Treasury report, part of a German espionage ring operating in the United States during World War I. "The 'Dementi' of Mr. Henry Ford concerning war orders for Great Britain has greatly helped us," Albert wrote in July of 1940, shortly after the fall of France, when England appeared to be on the verge of collapse before the Fuhrer's troops.

Ford's energetic cooperation with the Third Reich did not prevent the company's competitors from seeking to tarnish it by calling attention to its non-German ownership. Ford responded by appointing a majority-German board of directors for the Cologne plant, upon which it bestowed the politically correct Aryan name of Ford Werke. In March of 1941, Ford issued new stock in the Cologne plant and sold it exclusively to Germans, thereby reducing Dearborn's share to 52 percent.

At the time, the Nazi government's Ministry of Economy debated whether the opportunity afforded by the capital increase should be taken to demand a German majority at Ford Werke. The Ministry "gave up the idea"--this according to a 1942 statement prepared by a Ford Werke executive--in part because "there could be no doubt about the complete incorporation, as regards personnel, organization and production system, of Ford Werke into the German national economy, in particular, into the German armaments industry." Beyond that, Albert argued in a letter to the Reich Commission for Enemy Property, the abolition of the American majority would eliminate "the importance of the company for the obtaining of raw materials," as well as "insight into American production and sales methods."

As 1941 progressed, the board of Ford Werke fretted that the United States would enter the war in support of Britain and the government would confiscate the Cologne plant. To prevent such an outcome, the Cologne management wrote to the Reich Commission that year to say that it "question[ed] whether Ford must be treated as enemy property" even in the event of a US declaration of war on Germany. "Ford has become a purely German company and has taken over all obligations so successfully that the American majority shareholder, independent of the favorable political views of Henry Ford, in some periods actually contributed to the development of German industry," Cologne argued on June 18, 1941, only six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In May of 1942, the Superior Court of Cologne finally put Ford Werke in "trusteeship," ruling that it was "under authoritative enemy influence." However, the Nazis never nationalized Ford's German property--plant managers feared it would be turned over to Mercedes or the Hermann Goering Werke, a huge industrial network composed of properties seized by the Reich--and Dearborn maintained its 52 percent share through the duration of the war. Ford Werke even set aside dividend payments due to Dearborn, which were paid after the war. Ford claims that it received only $60,000 in dividend payments. It's not possible to independently verify that--or anything else regarding Dearborn's wartime economic relationship with Cologne--because Ford of America was privately held until 1956, and the company will not make available its balance sheets from the period.

Labor shortages caused by the war--millions of men were at the front and Nazi ideology was violently opposed to the idea of women working--led the Reich to deport millions of people from occupied lands to Germany to work in factories. German companies were encouraged to bid for forced laborers in order to meet production quotas and increase profits. By 1943 half of Ford Werke's work force comprised foreign captives, including French, Russians, Ukrainians and Belgians. In August of 1944 a squad of SS men brought fifteen prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp to Ford Werke. The German researcher Karola Fings, co-author of Working for the Enemy, a book on Nazi slave- and forced-labor programs, to be published this spring, says Ford's worker-inmates toiled for twelve hours a day with a fifteen-minute break. They were given 200 grams of bread and coffee for breakfast, no lunch and a dinner of spinach and three potatoes or soup made of turnip leaves.

An account by Robert Schmidt, the man appointed to run Ford Werke in 1939, states that the company used forced laborers even before the Nazis put the plant in trusteeship. His statement, sent to a Ford executive in England immediately after Germany's surrender, says that as of 1940 "many of our employees were called to the colours and had to be replaced by whatever was available.... The same applies to 1941. Some 200 French prisoners of war were employed." In a statement to the US Army in 1945, Schmidt said that the Gestapo began to play an important role at Ford Werke after the first foreign workers arrived. With the assistance of W.M. Buchwald, a Ford employee since the mid-thirties, the Gestapo carefully monitored plant activities. "Whenever there was the slightest indication of anti-Nazi feeling, be it amongst foreigners or Germans, the Gestapo tramped down as hard as possible," Schmidt told the Army.

Meanwhile, Ford Werke offered enthusiastic political support for Hitler as well. The fraternal ties between Ford and the Nazis is perhaps best symbolized by the company's birthday gift to the Fuhrer of 35,000 Reichsmarks in April of 1939. Ford Werke's in-house publication couldn't have been more fanatically pro-Nazi if Josef Goebbels had edited it. "Fuhrer," the poem printed at the top of this story, ran in the April 1940 issue, which celebrated Hitler's 51st birthday by running his picture on the cover. The issue carried an excerpt of a speech by Hitler in which he declared that "by natural law of the earth, we are the supreme race and thus destined to rule." In another section of the speech, the Fuhrer declared that communism was "second in wretchedness only to Judaism." The issue from April of the following year--this at roughly the high point of the Third Reich's military victories--featured a photograph of a beaming Hitler visiting with German soldiers on the front lines. "The management of the Ford-Werke salutes our Fuhrer with grateful heart, honesty, and allegiance, and--as before--pledges to cooperate in his life's work: achieving honor, liberty and happiness for Greater Germany and, indeed, for all peoples of Europe," reads the caption.

Robert Schmidt so successfully converted the plant to a war footing that the Nazi regime gave him the title of Wehrwirtschaftsfuhrer, or Military Economic Leader. The Nazis also put Schmidt in charge of overseeing Ford plants in occupied Belgium, Holland and Vichy France. At one point, he and another Cologne executive bitterly argued over who would run Ford of England when Hitler's troops conquered Britain.

Schmidt's personal contributions to Ford Werke's in-house organ reflect his ardently pro-Nazi views. "At the beginning of this year we vowed to give our best and utmost for final victory, in unshakable faithfulness to our Fuhrer," he wrote in December of 1941, the same month as Pearl Harbor. "Today we say with pride that we succeeded if not in reaching all our goals, nevertheless in contributing to a considerable extent in providing the necessary transportation for our troops at the front." The following March, Schmidt penned an article in which he declared, "It depends upon our work whether the front can be supplied with its necessities.... therefore, we too are soldiers of the Fuhrer."

The Ford family and company executives in Dearborn repeatedly congratulated the management of Ford Werke on the fine work they were doing under the Nazis. In October of 1940 Edsel Ford wrote to Heinrich Albert to say how pleased he was that the company's plants in occupied lands were continuing to operate. "It is fortunate that Mr. Schmidt is in such authority as to be able to bring out these arrangements," said Edsel, who died of cancer during the war. The same letter indicates that Ford was quite prepared to do business with the Nazis if Hitler won the war. Though it was difficult to foresee what would happen after the fighting ended, Edsel told Albert, "a general rearrangement of the ownership of our continental businesses may be required. You will no doubt keep as close to this subject as possible and we will have the benefit of your thoughts and suggestions at the proper time."

"To know that you appreciate our efforts in your and the company's interests is certainly a great encouragement," Albert replied the following month. He went on to praise Schmidt, who had been forced to shoulder immense responsibilities after war broke out. "In fulfilling his task his personality has grown in a way which is almost astonishing." Indeed, Schmidt grew to such a great degree that the Nazis kept him in charge of Ford Werke after they put the company in trusteeship. In February of 1942, when the question of who would run the Cologne plant was still up in the air, a local Nazi official wrote to Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin to put in a good word for Ford's man. The official said he saw "no reason to appoint a special custodian for the enterprise" since Schmidt was "a Party member [who] enjoys my confidence and...the confidence of the German Armed Forces."

Ford's behavior in France following the German occupation of June 1940 illustrates even more grotesquely its collaborationist posture. As soon as the smoke had cleared, Ford's local managers cut a deal with the occupation authorities that allowed the company to resume production swiftly--"solely for the benefit of Germany and the countries under its [rule]," according to a US Treasury Department document. The report, triggered by the government's concern that Ford was trading with the enemy, is sharply critical of Maurice Dollfus, a Ford director in France since 1929 and the company's manager during the Vichy period. "Mr. Dollfus was required by law to replace directors, and he selected the new directors exclusively from the ranks of prominent collaborationists," says the Treasury report. "Mr. Dollfus did this deliberately to curry favor with the authorities." The report refers to another Ford employee, a certain Amable Roger Messis, as "100% pro-German."

The Treasury Department found that Ford headquarters in Dearborn was in regular contact with its properties in Vichy France. In one letter, penned shortly after France's surrender, Dollfus assured Dearborn that "we will benefit from the main fact of being a member of the Ford family which entitles us to better treatment from our German colleagues who have shown clearly their wish to protect the Ford interest as much as they can." A Ford executive in Michigan wrote back, "We are pleased to learn from your letter...that our organization is going along, and the victors are so tolerant in their treatment. It looks as though we still might have a business that we can carry on in spite of all the difficulties."

The Ford family encouraged Dollfus to work closely with the German authorities. On this score, Dollfus needed little prodding. "In order to safeguard our interests--and I am here talking in a very broad way--I have been to Berlin and have seen General von Schell himself," he wrote in a typed note to Edsel in August of 1940. "My interview with him has been by all means satisfactory, and the attitude you have taken together with your father of strict neutrality has been an invaluable asset for the protection of your companies in Europe." (In a handwritten note in the margin, Dollfus bragged that he was "the first Frenchman to go to Berlin.") The following month Dollfus complained about a shortage of dollars in occupied France. This was a problem, however, that might be merely temporary. "As you know," he wrote Dearborn at the time, "our [monetary] standard has been replaced by another standard which--in my opinion--is a draft on the future, not only in France and Europe but, maybe, in the world." In another letter to Edsel, this one written in late November of 1940, Dollfus said he wanted to "outline the importance attached by high officials to respect the desires and maintain the good will of 'Ford'--and by 'Ford' I mean your father, yourself and the Ford Motor Company, Dearborn."

All this was to the immense satisfaction of the Ford family. In October of 1940, Edsel wrote to Dollfus to say he was "delighted to hear you are making progress.... Fully realize great handicap you are working under." Three months later he wrote again to say that Ford headquarters was "very proud of the record that you and your associates have made in building the company up to its first great position under such circumstances."

Dearborn maintained its communication with Ford of France well after the United States entered the war. In late January of 1942, Dollfus informed Dearborn that Ford's operations had the highest production level of all French manufacturers and, as summed up by the Treasury report, that he was "still relying on the French government to preserve the interests of American stockholders."

During the following months, Dollfus wrote to Edsel several times to report on damages suffered by the French plant during bombing runs by the Royal Air Force. In his reply, Edsel expressed relief that American newspapers that ran pictures of a burning Ford factory did not identify it as a company property. On July 17, 1942, Edsel wrote again to say that he had shown Dollfus's most recent letter to his father and to Dearborn executive Sorenson. "They both join me in sending best wishes for you and your staff, and the hope that you will continue to carry on the good work that you are doing," he said.

As in Germany, Ford's policy of sleeping with the Nazis proved to be a highly lucrative approach. Ford of France had never been very profitable in peacetime--it had paid out only one dividend in its history--but its service to the Third Reich soon pushed it comfortably into the black. Dollfus once wrote to Dearborn to boast about this happy turn of events, adding that the company's "prestige in France has increased considerably and is now greater than it was before the war."

Treasury Department officials were clearly aghast at Ford's activities. An employee named Randolph Paul sent the report to Secretary Henry Morgenthau with a note that stated, "The increased activity of the French Ford subsidiaries on behalf of the Germans received the commendation of the Ford family in America." Morgenthau soon replied, "If we can legally and ethically do it, I would like to turn over the information in connection with the Ford Motor Company to Senator [Harry] Truman."

Lydia Cisaruk, the Ford spokeswoman, says that Ford Werke's pre-Pearl Harbor support for the Third Reich was largely unknown to company headquarters. Neither of the two Dearborn executives on Ford Werke's board, Edsel Ford and Charles Sorenson, attended board meetings after 1938. "By 1940, Dearborn was becoming less and less involved in day-to-day operations," she says. "There was a gradual loss of control." Asked about Ford Werke's political support for the Nazis, as seen in its in-house newsletter, she replied: "Looking at the years leading up to the war, no one could foresee what was going to happen. A number of countries were negotiating with Germany and Germany was repeatedly saying that it was interested in peaceful solutions. The United States was talking to Germany until the two countries went to war." She concedes that some "foreign" labor was employed at the plant beginning in 1940, but says Dearborn had no knowledge of that at the time. Ford is currently conducting an exhaustive investigation into Ford Werke, she says. When the research is completed this year, the company will make available all of the documentary evidence it has accumulated, including financial records. While Ford did not take part in the German slave-labor talks, Cisaruk says it is in preliminary discussions with Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat to establish a humanitarian US-based fund for Holocaust survivors. "We do want to help people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis," she says.

Production at Ford Werke slowed at the end of the war, in part because of power shortages caused by Allied bombing runs, but activity never came to a halt. Soon after Germany's capitulation, Ford representatives from England and the United States traveled to Cologne to inspect the plant and plan for the future. In 1948 Henry Ford II visited Cologne to celebrate the 10,000th truck to roll off the postwar assembly line there. Two years later, Ford of Germany rehired Schmidt--who had been arrested and briefly held by US troops at the war's end--after he wrote a letter to Dearborn in which he insisted that he had fervently hated the Nazis. He was one of six key executives from the Nazi era who moved back into important positions at Ford after 1945. "After the war, Ford did not just reassume control of a factory, but it also took over the factory's history," says historian Fings. "Apparently no one at Ford was interested in casting light upon this part of history, not even to explicitly proclaim a distance from the practices of Ford Werke during the Nazi era." Schmidt remained with Ford until his death in 1962.

The high point of Ford's cynicism was yet to come. Before its fall, the Nazi regime had given Ford Werke about $104,000 in compensation for damages caused by Allied bombings (Ford also got money for bombing damages from the Vichy government). Dearborn was not satisfied with that amount. In 1965 Ford went before the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the US to ask for an additional $7 million. (During the hearings, commission attorney Zvonko Rode pointed to the embarrassing fact--which Ford's attorney did not dispute--that most of the manufactured products destroyed during the bombings had been intended for the use of the Nazi armed forces.) In the end, the commission awarded the company $1.1 million--but only after determining that Ford had used a fraudulent exchange rate to jack up the size of the alleged damages. The commission also found that Dearborn had sought compensation for merchandise that had been destroyed by flooding.

Ford's eagerness to be compensated for damages incurred to Ford Werke during the Nazi era makes its current posture of denying any association with the wartime plant all the more hypocritical. These new revelations may force Ford to reconsider its responsibilities with regard to slave labor. In the meantime, new legal developments could also create problems for the company. Last year California passed a law that extends the statute of limitations on Holocaust-related claims. In November Senator Charles Schumer of New York introduced a bill in Congress that would do the same thing at the federal level.

Stabbed in the Back!
The past and future of a right-wing myth
July 14, 2006. Originally from June 2006
By Kevin Baker.
Harpers.org

First drink, hero, from my horn:
I spiced the draught well for you
To waken your memory clearly
So that the past shall not slip your mind!

—Hagen to Siegfried
Die Gotterdammerung

Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being perpetuated. To understand just how this strategy is likely to unfold—and why this time it may well fail—we must return to the birth of a legend.

* * *

The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation’s stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told the National Assembly, “As an English general has very truly said, the German army was ‘stabbed in the back.’”

Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the-back myth, this claim was disingenuous. The “English general” in question was one Maj. Gen. Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal Erich von Ludendorff—the force behind Hindenburg—was characterizing the German army’s alleged lack of support from its civilian government.

“Ludendorff’s eyes lit up, and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone,” wrote Hindenburg biographer John Wheeler-Bennett. “‘Stabbed in the back?’ he repeated. ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.’”

Ludendorff’s enthusiasm was understandable, for, as he must have known, the phrase already had great resonance in Germany. The word dolchstoss—“dagger thrust”—had been popularized almost fifty years before in Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. After swallowing a potion that causes him to reveal a shocking truth, the invincible Teutonic hero, Siegfried, is fatally stabbed in the back by Hagen, son of the archvillain, Alberich.

Wagner had himself lifted his plot device from a medieval German poem, which was inspired in turn by Old Norse folklore, and of course the same story can be found in a slew of ancient mythologies, whether it’s the fate of the Greek heroes Achilles and Hercules or the story of Jesus and Judas. The hero cannot be defeated by fair means or outside forces but only by someone close to him, resorting to treachery.

The Siegfried legend in particular, though, has nuances that would mesh perfectly with right-wing mythology in the twentieth century, both in Germany and in the United States. At the end of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the downfall of the gods is followed by the rise of the Germanic people. The mythological hero has been transformed into the volk, just as heroic stature is granted to the modern state. Siegfried is killed just after revealing an unwelcome truth—much as the right, when pressed for evidence about its conspiracy theories, will often claim that these are hidden truths their enemies have a vested interest in concealing. Hagen, as a half-breed, an outsider posing as a friend, stands in for something worse yet—the assimilated Jew, able to betray the great warrior of the volk by posing as his boon companion.

It was an iconography easily transferable to Germany’s new, postwar republic. Hitler himself would claim that while recuperating behind the lines from a leg wound, he found Jewish “slackers” dominating the war-production bureaucracy and that “the Jew robbed the whole nation and pressed it beneath his domination.” The rape imagery is revolting but vivid; Hitler was already attuned to the zeitgeist of his adopted country. Even before the war had been decided, a soldier in his company recalled how Corporal Hitler would “leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns, victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.”

It didn’t matter that Field Marshal Ludendorff had in fact been the virtual dictator of Germany from August of 1916 on, or that the empire’s civilian leaders had been stunned by his announcement, in September of 1918, that his last, murderous offensives on the western front had failed, and that they must immediately sue for peace. The suddenness of Germany’s defeat only supported the idea that some sort of treason must have been involved. From this point on, all blame would redound upon “the November criminals,” the scheming politicians, reds, and above all, Jews.

Yet it was necessary, for the purging that the Nazis had in mind, to believe that the national degeneration went even further. Jerry Lembcke, in his brilliant work, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, writes of how the Nazis fostered the dolchstosslegende in ways that eerily foreshadowed returning veteran mythologies in the United States. Hermann Goring, the most charismatic of the Nazi leaders after Hitler, liked to speak of how “very young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore the insignia off our best front line soldiers and spat on their field gray uniforms.” As Lembcke points out, any insignia ripping had actually been done by the mutinous soldiers and sailors who would launch a socialist uprising shortly after the war, tearing them off their own shoulders or those of their officers. Goring’s instant revisionism both covered up this embarrassing reality and created a whole new class of villains who were—in his barely coded language—homosexuals, sexually threatening women, and other “deviants.” All such individuals would be dealt with in the new, Nazi order.

* * *

The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations—supported by many liberal Republicans—had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.

Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly—even suicidally—maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” and the right’s enduring presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, America First, and opposed the nation’s first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chiang Kai-shek’s worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. “The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up,” Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951.

This sort of determined naivete had Taft and his movement teetering on the brink of political irrelevance. They saved themselves by grabbing at an unlikely rope—America’s very own dolchstosslegende, the myth of Yalta. No reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta conference that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy. Yalta was, in fact, originally considered the apogee of the Roosevelt Administration’s accomplishments, ensuring that the hard-won peace at the end of World War II would not soon dissolve into an even worse conflict, just as the botched peace of Versailles had led only to renewed hostilities in the years after World War I. The conference, which took place in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, was the last time “the Big Three” of the war—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—would meet face-to-face. The U.S. negotiating team went with specific goals and was widely perceived at the time as having achieved them. Agreements were reached on the occupation of the soon-to-be-defeated German Reich, the liberation of those Eastern European countries occupied by or allied with Germany, the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, and, most significantly in Roosevelt’s eyes, on the structure of a workable, international body designed to keep world peace, the United Nations.

FDR’s presentation of these agreements before a joint session of Congress that March met with almost universal acclaim. This was not surprising. Roosevelt, who had been at Versailles as a junior member of the Wilson Administration, was preoccupied with making sure that his vision for the postwar world did not founder on any partisan bickering with Congress. Before leaving for Yalta, he had briefed a group of leading senators from across the political spectrum on what he hoped to accomplish, and solicited their opinions and questions. The delegation he took with him to the Soviet Union was a bipartisan team of senior diplomats, advisers, and military men, and he continued to cultivate support from all quarters on his return to the United States. Such prominent Republican figures as Arthur Vandenberg, the once-isolationist senator from Michigan turned internationalist, and Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s fierce opponent in the 1944 presidential race, expressed general support for the results of the Yalta conference. Taft and the right wing of the Republican Party were more skeptical, but offered no substantial criticisms.

Save for a few congressmen, newspaper publishers, and columnists on the extreme fringe of the right, this early Cold War consensus would survive until 1948. Then, Dewey’s and the Republicans’ stunning losses in the elections that fall, combined with a confluence of American setbacks abroad, served to revivify the right.

Not only did the Republicans lose a presidential election against a badly divided, national Democratic Party; they also lost the congressional majorities they had just managed to eke out in 1946, following fourteen years in the political wilderness. It now seemed clear that the Republicans would never return to power merely by supporting Democratic policies, or by promising to implement them more effectively, and the right wing gained traction within the party.

Meanwhile, the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent followed, in relatively rapid succession, by the fall of Czechoslovakia’s coalition government to a Soviet-backed coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb, and the victory of Mao’s Communists over Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang regime in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt. Never mind that the right’s own feckless or muddled proposals for fighting the Cold War would not have ameliorated any of these situations. The right swept them into the memory hole and offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how suddenly their nation’s global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta.

A growing chorus of right-wing voices now began to excoriate our wartime diplomacy. Their most powerful charge, one that would firmly establish the Yalta myth in the American political psyche, was the accusation that our delegation had given over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. According to “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” an essay written for Life magazine shortly before the 1948 election by William Bullitt—a former diplomat who had been dismissed by Roosevelt for outing a gay rival in the State Department—FDR and his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, were guilty of “wishful appeasement” of Stalin at Yalta, handing the peoples of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states over to the Soviet dictator.

The right wing’s dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy, engineered through “secret diplomacy” at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right’s purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual right down to his name—and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy, Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.

Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn’t matter; specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt and an equally flamboyant opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, “will not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made in moments of war’s extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps mortally scared State Department advisers.”

The idea of the “dying President” at Yalta was plausible to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the right wing—which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including Hopkins, were “secret Jews” and Soviet agents—it all made perfect sense. To the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.

All of this, of course, falls apart under the most cursory examination. Hiss was a “technician” at Yalta, relied upon mostly for his expertise regarding the planned United Nations, and—already suspected of espionage—he had played no policymaking role in a large, bipartisan delegation that included most of the nation’s military and diplomatic leadership. Roosevelt was in severe physical decline and would die from a massive stroke some two months later, but his mind was still active and engaged. Chip Bohlen—who actually was at Yalta and who went on to become a leading Cold War statesman under both Republican and Democratic administrations—would echo many other observers in reporting that while Roosevelt’s “physical state was certainly not up to normal, his mental and psychological state was certainly not affected. He was lethargic but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp.”

Far from handing over anything to anyone, Roosevelt had actually persuaded Stalin to sign onto a “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that affirmed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and committed the Big Three “to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people.” More was not possible. The salient fact about Eastern Europe at the end of World War II was that the Red Army enjoyed an immense numerical advantage there. To dislodge it, the United States would have had to embark immediately upon another epic struggle, a vast new war for which the American people, already clamoring for demobilization, showed absolutely no enthusiasm. It is likely that the United States would have eventually prevailed in such a struggle, but only at a cost of American lives that would have dwarfed the total lost in World War II itself, and the further devastation of the very European countries we had sought to liberate.


As Bohlen told a Senate committee in 1953, “I believe that the map of Europe would look much the same if there had never been a Yalta conference at all.” Why this should have been surprising, and how it possibly reflected a failure of American foreign policy, is a mystery in any rational analysis of the situation. But any such analysis could never be made by the heroic state. Instead, Roosevelt and the nation he represented had to have been betrayed. The previous, disastrous policies advocated by the Republican right—ignoring the growing Axis threat, then leaving Western Europe defenseless while plunging into war in China—could be safely forgotten.

* * *

Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang’s defeat, conservatives in Congress demanded to know “Who lost China?” and Robert Taft, discarding his much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt against the Truman Administration, urging him to “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another.” Yet it would take another hot war—and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende—to permanently enthrone the idea of a vast, treasonous left-wing conspiracy in the American psyche.

The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 was disturbing enough, but the defeat of General Douglas MacArthur that winter by invading Chinese forces sent shock waves throughout the United States. More than anyone else, MacArthur had brought about his own defeat, launching his troops up the Korean peninsula in separate columns, divided by mountain ranges, ignoring both orders from the White House to halt and plentiful signs that a massive Chinese force had already infiltrated the Korean peninsula. But while his subordinates scrambled to rally their reeling men, MacArthur moved swiftly to salvage his military reputation and his hopes for the presidency.

What the general proposed was a massive escalation of the war. U.N. troops would not only “blockade the coast of China” and “destroy through naval gunfire and air bombardment China’s industrial capacity to wage war” but would also “release existing restrictions upon the Formosan garrison” of Chiang Kai-shek, which might lead to counter-invasion against “vulnerable areas of the Chinese mainland.” Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer than thirty-four atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as “retardation targets” in Manchuria, including critical concentrations of troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient. MacArthur later added that had he been permitted, he not only would have launched as many as fifty atomic bombs but also would have used “wagons, carts, trucks, and planes” to create “a belt of radioactive cobalt” that would neatly slice the Korean thumb from China. “For at least sixty years,” he said, “there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north.”

MacArthur insisted the “only way to prevent World War III is to end the Korean conflict rapidly and decisively”—as if a massive, atomic attack upon the world’s most populous nation would not, in itself, constitute World War III. When the Truman Administration rejected his proposals, the general announced that he was not being allowed to win—“An enormous handicap without precedent in military history.” The U.N. had to “depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea” and accept his strategy to “doom Red China,” an opponent “of such exaggerated and vaunted military power.”

MacArthur conveyed similar sentiments to his conservative allies in Congress, writing House Minority Leader Joseph Martin that he was only trying to “follow the conventional pattern of meeting force with maximum counter-force, as we have never failed to do in the past,” and concluding: “There is no substitute for victory.” Martin gleefully aired the great man’s views in a speech in Brooklyn, thundering, “If we are not in Korea to win, then this Administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of American boys.” He added that “the same State Department crowd that cut off aid” to Chiang in 1946 now opposed invading China because this would show up their earlier mistakes. The only way to “save Europe and save Asia at the same time” was “to clear out the State Department from top to bottom.” After Martin repeated MacArthur’s views on the House floor, Truman finally removed the general from his command. But the move seemed only to confirm that something was very wrong.

The right seized the opportunity to renew—and expand—its charges of dolchstoss. Republican Senator William Jenner of Indiana bellowed from the floor of the Senate that “this country today is in the hands of a secr