Recently, the 75th Anniversary of the invasion of Normandy was commemorated. But here are some little known facts about World War II.
The sixty or seventy million men, women and children didn’t die because of Adolph Hitler, they perished because the wealthy in the US and Western Europe empowered Adolph Hitler to make war.
The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War forced reduction of the strength of the German army from 4,500,000 in 1918 to 100,000. Its navy was not to exceed 15,000 men, including manning for the fleet, coast defenses, signal stations, administration, and other land services. Heavy weapons armored vehicles, submarines and capital ships were forbidden, as were aircraft of any kind. Compliance with these restrictions was monitored until 1927 by the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control.
1918 to 1929 was a already a time of low economic growth and mass unemployment. The Wall Street Crash during the autumn of 1929 had grave consequences for Germany. German unemployment brought suffering to 20 million people. All over Germany there were people desperate for money needed to feed, clothe and house their families. Many of the homeless were camping out in the parks of Berlin.
There is simply no way an impoverished and utterly demilitarised Nazi Germany, with no air force, a tiny navy, no armoured vehicles, no heavy weapons and a small army, could have on its own, built its armed forces up to the most powerful military in the world during the first six years of Hitler’s rule without the colossal and crucial investments in, and joint venturing by, top US corporations in low wage Nazi Germany—in outright violation of the Versailles Treaty prohibition of German rearmament. There is no way Hitler could have begun a world war and a multi-nation Holocaust when he did without the enormous financial and technical help he received from the United States of America. England and France also cooperated, especially in agreeing to allow the abandonment of the prohibitions on German rearmament. Western media defended the building up of Nazi Germany’s military as a ‘bulwark’ against the Soviet Union.
Hitler had emphasised Germany’s need for ‘Lebensraum’ (‘living space’), insisting Germany’s 19th century motto ‘Drang Nach Osten’ (‘push to the East,’ a slogan designating German expansion into Slavic lands), must become a reality. All this was strikingly proclaimed by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, which by 1939 had sold 5.2 million copies in eleven languages. [Britannica]
Hitler’s uncompromising lethal condemnation of communism and the very existence of Wall Street’s archenemy, the socialist Soviet Union, must have impressed the US and European wealthy, whose ‘rule’ was threatened by socialist fervor and riots at home, fuelled by the ongoing Great Depression that had rendered millions unemployed. Newsreels of massive and violent riots in many US cities can be seen on YouTube at ‘Riots Across America – The Great Depression.’
Below is an excerpt from British American scholar Anthony B. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler ( Anthony Sutton was research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973):
The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities. For instance, in 1934 Germany produced domestically only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and less than 800,000 tons of synthetic gasoline. Yet, ten years later in World War II, after transfer of the Standard Oil of New Jersey hydrogenation patents and technology to I. G. Farben, Germany produced about 6 1/2 million tons of oil—of which 85 percent was synthetic oil using the Standard Oil hydrogenation process. . . .
Moreover, American assistance to Nazi war efforts extended into other areas. The two largest tank producers in Hitler’s Germany were Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (controlled by the J.P. Morgan firm), and the Ford A. G. subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Nazis granted tax-exempt status to Opel in 1936, to enable General Motors to expand its production facilities. General Motors obligingly reinvested the resulting profits into German industry. Henry Ford was decorated by the Nazis for his services to Nazism. Alcoa and Dow Chemical worked closely with Nazi industry with numerous transfers of their domestic US technology. Bendix Aviation, in which the J.P. Morgan-controlled General Motors firm had a major stock interest, supplied Siemens & Halske A. G. in Germany with data on automatic pilots and aircraft instruments. . . .
In brief, American companies associated with the Morgan-Rockefeller international investment bankers . . . were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry. It is important to note . . . that General Motors, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and the handful of US companies intimately involved with the development of Nazi Germany were—except for the Ford Motor Company—controlled by the Wall Street elite—the J.P. Morgan firm, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and to a lesser extent the Warburg Manhattan Bank.
Beginning in 1935, GM built a factory in Berlin for the purpose of manufacturing “Blitz” trucks for the Wehrmacht. Ford began building similar trucks around the same time, but GM was the number one producer of the vehicles that were vital for the quick conquests of Poland, France, and much of the Soviet Union. Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and war production, claimed that the rubber GM supplied was the key to the ability of the Germans to wage war the way they did. [Michael Dobbs, “Ford and GM Scrutinised for Alleged Nazi Collaboration”, Washington Post, November 30, 1998.]
In July 1938, before the outbreak of war, the German consul at Cleveland gave Ford, on his 75th birthday, the award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner. General Motors and Ford controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army. American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when US government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.[Ibid.] In 1998, it came out that the Third Reich was providing Ford’s factory in Cologne with 1,200 Russian slaves.[Simon English, “Ford ‘used slave labour’ in Nazi German plants”, The Telegraph, November 3, 2003.]
In 1941, Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum in addition to owning a massive amount of America’s electricity production and other minerals. It sent so much of its aluminum product over to Germany that when the US involvement in the war began, there was a massive aluminum production shortage in America. Alcoa essentially sold the Axis powers much of the material to build their war machines. [Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins, The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century, Progressive Press, 2008.]
During the early 1930s, Fritz Thyssen ran a business that he used to help finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Brown Brothers Harriman was a subsidiary company that he used as a base of American operations. Prescott Bush, father of Ex-President George Bush and grandfather of Ex-President George W. Bush, was on the board of directors for BBH and his business dealings continued until his company’s assets were seized by the federal government in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. [Edwin Black, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust, Dialog Press, 2009.]
Dow Chemical was one of the companies that provided an insane amount of material to the Nazis, including not only raw materials but also American technological innovations in regards to oil refinery.
The Chase Manhattan Bank’s form of colluding with the Reich was particularly heinous. It functioned as the bank for foreign transactions for fascist Vichy France, and because Carlos Niedermann, Chase’s representative in Paris, had very good personal relations with the Nazis, he agreed to their request that the bank seize the assets of at least one hundred Parisian Jews.
How Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany even during World War II is detailed in Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933–1949 by Charles Higham, Delacorte Press, New York, 1983. Charles Higham is the son of a former UK MP and Cabinet member. Here is an excerpt from the cover blurb:
Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class to slaughter each other, war means business as usual for international capital. Higham starts with an account of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland—a Nazi-controlled bank presided over by an American, Thomas H. McKittrick, even in 1944. While Americans were dying in the war, McKittrick sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British and American executive staff to discuss the gold bars that had been sent to the Bank earlier that year by the Nazi government for use by its leaders after the war. This was gold that had been looted from the banks of Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia or melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, and wedding rings of millions of murdered Jews.
But that is only one of the cases detailed in this book. We have Standard Oil shipping enemy fuel through Switzerland for the Nazi occupation forces in France; Ford trucks transporting German troops; I.T.T. helping supply the rocket bombs that marauded much of London ; and I.T.T. building the Focke-Wulfs that dropped those bombs. Long and shocking is the list of diplomats and businessmen alike who had their own ways of profiting from the war.
After the war, I.T.T. and General Motors both received millions of dollars in compensation for the damage to their factories in Germany from Allied bombing.
Standard Oil shipped enemy fuel through Switzerland for the Nazi occupation forces in France. On September 22,1947, Judge Charles Clark delivered the final word on the subject. He said, “Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of its relationships with I.G. Farben—after the United States and Germany had become active enemies.” The appeal was denied. [“The Treason Of Rockefeller Standard Oil During World War II”, The American Chronicle, February 4, 2012.]
The bottom line is that, while British and US soldiers were dying at the hands of the Nazi war machine, and Jews were being exterminated in tens of thousands, British and US companies which had invested in post-WW I Germany continued to sympathise and trade with the Nazi regime. The bombs that levelled so many British cities and killed so many women and children may well have been manufactured in Germany, but it was largely British and US money that provided Hitler with the parts, and the fuel to dispatch them to allied targets. [Rodney Atkinson, Europe’s Full Circle, Compuprint Publishing, 1996.] Both at the Normandy landing and in Russia, many Nazi tanks had GM motors and downed German planes were found to have GE engines.
That the Second World War was a ‘good war,’ a fight against a madman who had brought it about, has been a major and fundamental deception spread by Wall Street owned media and movies. So pervasively universal is the deception that even the outcry of the German Counsel for the Defense while summing up his deposition at the Nuremberg trial, which can be heard in the blockbuster American movie Judgement at Nuremberg, has been largely ignored, “Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?”
Edwin Black, in his book IBM and the Holocaust raises the important question as to whether Hitler’s extermination of the Jews would have taken place on such a huge scale without the harvest of deadly information recorded by the Hollerith machines, on IBM punch cards. In 1933, International Business Machines began providing Germany with punchcard machines that functioned as precursors to modern computers and databases. Documents have since been uncovered that show that as late as 1941, IBM was working in tandem with the Reich to liquidate Jews in Holland. IBM employees were training SS personnel how to use their machines to record the movement, sorting, and mass execution of people, at times right in the headquarters of death camps. [Jack Beatty, “Hitler’s Willing Business Partners”, The Atlantic, April, 2001.]
The rearming of Germany made possible Hitler’s invasions of twenty-two countries and brought world war to Asia, for Japan would not have dared to attack and declare war on the United States of America without it being able to count on an alliance with an awesomely rearmed Nazi Germany, along with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania, all of whom declared war on the USA immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Second World War and the Holocaust, which made America the biggest power in the world, is estimated to have taken the lives of 60 to 70 million men, women and children. Within this total were 28 million citizens of the Soviet Union, which had been the target goal for the rearming of Germany by a consensus of the wealthiest American and European capitalists. A further plus for Wall Street was that half the cities of its archenemy, the USSR, lay in ruins.
Finian Cunningham’s has written an excellent article detailing the great deception manufactured by the media about WW II. He writes
European fascism headed up by Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, was not some aberrant force that sprang from nowhere during the 1920s–1930s. The movement was a deliberate cultivation by the rulers of Anglo-American capitalism. European fascism may have been labeled “national socialism” but its root ideology was very much one opposed to overturning the fundamental capitalist order. It was an authoritarian drive to safeguard the capitalist order, which viewed genuine worker-based socialism as an enemy to be ruthlessly crushed.
This is what made European fascism so appealing to the Western capitalist ruling class in those times. In particular, Nazi Germany was viewed by the Western elite as a bulwark against possible socialist revolution inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917.
It is no coincidence that American capital investment in Nazi Germany between 1929–1940 far outpaced that in any other European country . . . The industrial rearmament of Germany (despite the strictures of the Versailles Treaty signed at the end of World War One, which were ignored) was indeed facilitated by the American and British capitalist ruling classes. When Hitler annexed Austria and the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, it was ignored. This was not out of complacent appeasement, as widely believed, but rather out of a far more active, albeit secretive, policy of collusion. British Conservative leader Neville Chamberlain and his ruling cohort were intent on giving Nazi Germany a “free hand” for eastward expansionism.
The real target for the Western sponsors of the Nazi war machine was an attack on the Soviet Union in order to destroy, in their view, the source of international revolutionary socialism. In the 1930s, the very existence of capitalism was teetering on the edge amid the Great Depression, massive poverty and seething popular discontent in the US, Britain and other Western countries. The entire Western capitalist order was under imminent threat from its own masses. This is the historical context for the Western-backed rise of European fascism.
Look at some of the undisputed figures from the Second World War. . . . Some 14 million Red Army soldiers died in the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany, compared with less than 400,000 military each from the US and Britain. These figures tell us where the Nazi German war effort was primarily directed towards—the Soviet Union, as the Western imperialist rulers had hoped in their initial sponsoring of Nazi and other European fascist regimes during the 1930s. [Finian Cunningham, “World War II Continues… Against Russia”, PressTV, May 13, 2014.]
Why did Soviet leaders and writers, even when the West was spreading lies about the Soviet Union during the Cold War, not hold the West responsible for WW II by having rearmed Germany, with the declared intention of the destruction of the USSR? This has been a mystery to this peoples historian. All the investments and joint venturing of US (and European) corporations in building up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to the world’s number one military in only six years are documented in both business records and tax records of US, Germany and other nations and are in great part available on the Internet with quite comprehensive statistics, a modest amount of which are presented in this essay.
The only plausible answer for this is the shame for the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. However, given the fact that the Western powers were openly arming Nazi Germany so to make it a “bulwark against communist Soviet Union,” and had refused all entreaties of the Soviets to form a protective alliance in the face of Hitler’s ever increasing power and belligerence, Stalin’s signing of a non-aggression pact with Germany was probably a last resort defense of Russia.
In his book, Mission to Moscow, (later made into a film too), Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938, chronicles the desperation of the Russians in 1937 for not being able to get England and France to agree to a defensive alliance. They were fully aware that the rearming of Germany was directed at the Soviet Union. By the surprise non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin derailed for the moment the West’s plan to have Hitler invade the USSR. This gained the Soviet Union the time to build the tanks that would later defeat the Nazi invasion.
Recently, in 2014, the Russian President Vladimir Putin in a comment on the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in 2014 put the blame for the Nazi-USSR pact on the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which France and Britain appeased Adolf Hitler by acquiescing to his occupation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
The arming of Nazi Germany for an attack on the Soviet Union was a continuance of the colonial powers policy of total destruction of the Soviet Russia since it’s inception. In 1917, after suffering more deaths than the other empires in a colonial powered First World War, the Russians had overthrown their Tsar and their capitalists, and had declared a socialist government. Almost immediately, fourteen armies of twelve capitalist nations, many of them former WW I allies of Russia, invaded Russia in a bid to overthrow the revolutionary regime. The US sent two armies, one to Murmansk, the other to Vladivostok. Their attempt failed, but the war took the lives of millions.
The Western corporate arming of Hitler was in all probability the continuation of the destructive efforts of the US and other colonial powers since 1919 to strangulate the Soviet Union. (Churchill had declared that Bolshevism must be “strangled in its cradle.”)
That the Second World War Was A ‘Good War,’ ‘Good’ Triumphing Over ‘Evil,’ has been a Gargantuan Deception, Ominously Conditioning All of Humanity to Tolerate Profitable Genocide Ad Infinitum!
(Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, presently residing in New York.)
