Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (25 page)

5. Peter Hoglund is to deal with industrial production problems. Hoglund is on leave from General Motors and is said to be an expert on German production.

6. Calvin B. Hoover is to be in charge of the Intelligence Group on the Control Council and is also to be a special advisor to General Draper. In a letter to the Editor of the
New York Times
on October 9, 1944, Hoover wrote as follows:
The publication of Secretary Morgenthau's plan for dealing with
Germany has disturbed me deeply ... such a Carthaginian peace
would leave a legacy of hate to poison international relations for
generations to come... the void in the economy of Europe which
would exist through the destruction of all German industry is
something which is difficult to contemplate.

7. Laird Bell is to be Chief Counsel of the Economic Division. He is a well-known Chicago lawyer and in May 1944, was elected the president of the
Chicago Daily News,
after the death of Frank Knox.

One of the men who helped General Draper in the selection of personnel for the Economics Division was Colonel Graeme Howard, a vice-president of General Motors, who was in charge of their overseas business and who was a leading representative of General Motors in Germany prior to the war. Howard is the author of a book in which he praises totalitarian practices, justifies German aggression and the Munich policy of appeasement, and blames Roosevelt for precipitating the war.

So when we examine the Control Council for Germany under General Lucius D. Clay we find that the head of the finance division was Louis Douglas, director of the Morgan-controlled General Motors and president of Mutual Life Insurance. (Opel, the General Motors German subsidiary, had been Hitler's biggest tank producer.) The head of the Control Council's Economics Division was William Draper, a partner in the Dillon, Read firm that had so much to do with building Nazi Germany in the first place. All three men were, not surprisingly in the light of more recent findings, members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Were American Industrialists and Financiers Guilty of War Crimes?

The Nuremburg War Crimes Trials proposed to select those responsible for World War II preparations and atrocities and place them on trial. Whether. such a procedure is morally http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_11.htm (7 of 10) [8/4/2001 9:44:20 PM]

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II justifiable is a debatable matter; there is some justification for holding that Nuremburg was

a political farce far removed from legal principle.7 However, if we assume that there
is
such legal and moral justification, then surely any such trial should apply to
all,
irrespective of nationality. What for example should exempt Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, but not exempt Adolf Hitler and Goering? If the offense is preparation for war, and not blind vengeance, then justice should be impartial.

The directives prepared by the U.S. Control Council in Germany for the arrest and detention of war criminals refers to "Nazis" and "Nazi sympathizers," not "Germans." The relevant extracts are as follows:

a. You will search out, arrest, and hold, pending receipt by you of further
instructions as to their disposition, Adolph Hitler, his chief Nazi associates,
other war criminals and all persons who have participated in planning or
carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes.

Then follows a list of the categories of persons to be arrested, including:
(8) Nazis and Nazi sympathizers holding important and key positions in (a)
National and Gau Civic and economic organizations; (b ) corporations and
other organizations in which the government has a major financial interest; (c)
industry, commerce, agriculture, and finance; (d) education; (e) the judicial;
and (f) the press, publishing houses and other agencies disseminating news and
propaganda.

Top American industrialists and financiers named in this book are covered by the categories listed above. Henry Ford and Edsel Ford respectively contributed money to Hitler and profited from German wartime production. Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, General Motors, and I.T.T. certainly made financial or technical contributions which comprise
prima facie
evidence of "participating in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises."

There is, in brief, evidence which suggests:

(a) cooperation with the Wehrmacht (Ford Motor Company, Chase Bank, Morgan Bank); (b) aid to the Nazi Four Year Plan and economic mobilization for war (Standard Oil of New Jersey);

(c) creating and equipping the Nazi war machine (I.T.T.);

(d) stockpiling critical materials for the Nazis (Ethyl Corporation); (e) weakening the Nazis' potential enemies (American I.G. Farben); and,

(f) carrying on of propaganda, intelligence, and espionage (American I.G. Farben and Rockefeller public-relations man Ivy Lee).

At the very least there is sufficient evidence to demand a thorough and impartial http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_11.htm (8 of 10) [8/4/2001 9:44:20 PM]

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II investigation. However, as we have noted previously, these same firms and financiers were prominent in the 1933 election of Roosevelt and consequently had sufficient political pull to squelch threats of investigation. Extracts from the Morgenthau diary demonstrate that Wall Street political power was sufficient even to control the appointment of officers responsible for the denazification and eventual government of post-war Germany.

Did these American firms know of their assistance to Hitler's military machine? According to the firms themselves, emphatically not. They claim innocence of any intent to aid Hitler's Germany. Witness a telegram sent by the chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New Jersey to Secretary of War Patterson after World War II, when preliminary investigation of Wall Street assistance was under way:

During the entire period of our business contacts, we had no inkling of
Farben's conniving part in Hitler's brutal politics, We offer any help we can
give to see that complete truth is brought to light, and that rigid justice is done.

F.W. Abrams,

Chairman of

Board

Unfortunately, the evidence presented is contrary to Abrams' telegraphed assertions.

Standard Oil of New Jersey not only aided Hitler's war machine, but had knowledge of this assistance. Emil Helfferich, the board chairman of a Standard of New Jersey subsidiary, was a member of the Keppler Circle
before
Hitler came to power; he continued to give financial contributions to Himmler's Circle as late as 1944.

Accordingly, it is not at all difficult to visualize why Nazi industrialists were puzzled by

"investigation"
and assumed at the end of the war that their Wall Street friends would bail them out and protect them from the wrath of those who had suffered. These attitudes were presented to the Kilgore Committee in 1946:

You might also be interested in knowing, Mr. Chairman, that the top I.G.

Farben people and others, when we questioned them about these activities,
were inclined at times to be very in. dignant. Their general attitude and
expectation was that the war was over and we ought now to be assisting them
in helping to get I.G. Farben and German industry back on its feet. Some of
them have outwardly said that this questioning and investigation was, in their
estimation, only a phenomenon of short duration, because as soon as things got
a little settled they would expect their friends in the United States and in
England to be coming over. Their friends, so they said, would put a stop to
activities such as these investigations and would see that they got the treatment
which they regarded as proper and that assistance would be given to them to
help reestablish their industry.
8

Footnotes:

1
Morgenthau Diary (Germany).

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CHAPTER ELEVEN: Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II 2
Ibid.

3
Ibid.

4
Ibid., pp. 800-2.

5James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men, op. cit., p. 75.

6Morgenthau Diary (Germany), p. 1543. Colonel Graeme K.

Howard's book was entitled, America and a New World Order,
(New York: Scribners, 1940).

7
The reader should examine the essay, "The Return to War
Crimes," in James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints, (Colorado:
Ralph Mules, 1971).

8
Elimination of German Resources, p. 652.

BACK

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CHAPTER TWELVE: Conclusions

CHAPTER TWELVE

Conclusions

We have demonstrated with documentary evidence a number of critical associations between Wall Street international bankers and the rise of Hitler and Naziism in Germany.

First: that Wall Street financed the German cartels in the mid-1920s which in turn proceeded to bring Hitler to power.

Second: that the financing for Hitler and his S.S. street thugs came in part from affiliates or subsidiaries of U.S. firms, including Henry Ford in 1922, payments by I.G. Farben and General Electric in 1933, followed by the Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiary payments to Heinrich Himmler up to 1944.

Third: that U.S. multi-nationals under the control of Wall Street profited handsomely from Hitler's military construction program in the 1930s and at least until 1942.

Fourth: that these same international bankers used political influence in the U.S. to cover up their wartime collaboration and to do this infiltrated the U.S. Control Commission for Germany.

Our evidence for these four major assertions can be summarized as follows: In Chapter One we presented evidence that the Dawes and Young Plans for German reparations were formulated by Wall Streeters, temporarily wearing the hats of statesmen, and these loans generated a rain of profits for these international bankers. Owen Young of General Electric, Hjalmar Schacht, A. Voegler, and others intimately connected with Hitler's accession to power had earlier been the negotiators for the U.S. and German sides, respectively. Three Wall Street houses — Dillon, Read; Harris, Forbes; and, National City Company — handled three-quarters of the reparations loans used to create the German cartel system, including the dominant I.G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, which together produced 95 percent of the explosives for the Nazi side in World War II.

The central role of I.G. Farben in Hitler's
coup d' état
was reviewed in Chapter Two. The directors of American I.G. (Farben) were identified as prominent American businessmen: Walter Teagle, a dose Roosevelt associate and backer and an NRA administrator; banker Paul Warburg (his brother Max Warburg was on the board of I.G. Farben in Germany); and Edsel Ford. Farben contributed 400,000 RM directly to Schacht and Hess for use in the crucial 1933 elections and Farben was subsequently in the forefront of military development in Nazi Germany.

A donation of 60,000 RM was made to Hitler by German General Electric (A.E.G.), which had four directors and a 25-30 percent interest held by the U.S. General Electric parent company. This role was described in Chapter Three, and we found that Gerard Swope, an http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_12.htm (1 of 11) [8/4/2001 9:44:21 PM]

CHAPTER TWELVE: Conclusions

originator of Roosevelt's New Deal (its National Recovery Administration segment), together with Owen Young of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Clark Minor of International General Electric, were the dominant Wall Streeters in A.E.G. and the most significant single influence.

We also found no evidence to indict the German electrical firm Siemens, which was
not
under Wall Street control. In contrast, there is documentary evidence that both A.E.G. and Osram, the other units of the German electrical industry — both of which had U.S.

participation and control —
did
finance Hitler. In fact, almost all directors of German General Electric were Hitler backers, either directly through A.E.G. or indirectly through other German firms, G.E. rounded out its Hitler support by technical cooperation with Krupp, aimed at restricting U.S. development of tungsten carbide, which worked to the detriment of the U.S. in World War II. We concluded that A.E.G. plants in Germany managed, by a yet unknown maneuver, to avoid bombing by the Allies.

An examination of the role of Standard Oil of New Jersey (which was and is controlled by the Rockefeller interests) was undertaken in Chapter Four. Standard Oil apparently did not finance Hitler's accession to power in 1933 (that part of the "myth of Sidney Warburg" is not proven). On the other hand, payments were made up to 1944 by Standard Oil of New Jersey, to develop synthetic gasoline for war purposes on behalf of the Nazis and, through its wholly owned subsidiary, to Heinrich Himmler's S.S. Circle of Friends for political purposes. Standard Oil's role was technical aid to Nazi development of synthetic rubber and gasoline through a U.S. research company under the management control of Standard Oil.

The Ethyl Gasoline Company, jointly owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey and General Motors, was instrumental in supplying vital ethyl lead to Nazi Germany — over the written protests of the U.S. War Department — with the clear knowledge that the ethyl lead was for Nazi military purposes.

In Chapter Five we demonstrated that International Telephone and Telegraph Company, one of the more notorious multi-nationals, worked both sides of World War II through Baron Kurt von Schroder, of the Schroder banking group. I.T.T. also held a 28-percent interest in Focke-Wolfe aircraft, which manufactured excellent German fighter planes. We also found that Texaco (Texas Oil Company) was involved in Nazi endeavors through German attorney Westrick, but dropped its chairman of the board Rieber when these endeavors were publicized.