Journalist Eva Schweitzer wrote about how the elite in the United States were closely aligned with the Nazis in her 2004 book Amerika und der Holocaust (Droemer/Knaur, 400 pages). From the first page of the foreword:
”Most Americans believe that they have always stood on the side of the anti-fascists. But that is not true. In reality, America’s industrial elite served both the anti-fascists and the fascists. The media downplayed the Holocaust, and the Nazis received financial and ideological support from the United States.”
Several academics, researchers, and journalists have documented how the elite in the United States were closely connected to the Nazis. This is not disputed today, even though it is not widely known. In addition to journalist Eva Schweitzer, researchers such as Charles Higham, Christopher Simpson, Eric Lichtblau, Antony C. Sutton, and John Loftus have written and conducted research on the subject.
Svenska Dagbladet has written about this in an article titled ”U.S. Elite Served the Fascists.” The industrial elite in the United States helped finance Hitler and the Nazi war machine, as historian Charles Higham demonstrated through a vast collection of documents he obtained through freedom of information laws. According to those documents, leading businessmen who held eugenic views, with Rockefeller at the forefront, continued to finance Hitler’s war effort even after the United States had declared war on the Axis powers, while American workers dressed as soldiers were being blown to pieces on battlefields across various fronts.
The Rockefeller family’s cold-blooded willingness to sacrifice its own workers in its own best interests can be seen in the events of September 26, 1913, when 9,000 workers at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, the largest mining company in the region, went on strike. People were forced from their homes and had to endure the harsh winter conditions in tents. On April 20, 1914, the Ludlow Massacre took place, one of the worst massacres of workers and their families in American history. Eleven children and two women were burned to death when soldiers from the Colorado National Guard, paid by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, attacked the tent colony where the company’s striking workers were living.
Another seven people were shot to death with machine guns during the nighttime attack. During the course of the strike, more than fifty people were killed by the company’s private army and the National Guard. The militia, hired by Rockefeller, entered the strikers’ camp and set the tents on fire, resulting in the deaths of two women and eleven children who had taken shelter from the gunfire in a pit beneath one of the tents. Ivy Lee, representing John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, attempted to circulate bulletins claiming that those who died were victims of an overturned stove, and tried to cover up the fact that they had actually been shot by the Colorado militia.
A U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR), chaired by labor lawyer Frank Walsh, conducted hearings in Washington and gathered information and testimony from all the principal parties involved, including John D. Rockefeller Sr., who testified that, even after learning that the guards he had paid had committed atrocities against the striking workers, he ”would not have taken any action to prevent his hired men from attacking them.” (Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 94.)
Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year racially pure Reich, together with the bankers’ own plans, led to a catastrophic world war in which more than 50 million people were killed and many more were injured. For the ruling elite in the financial and business world, however, it was simply ”business as usual.” They continued to profit from the flourishing war industry while simultaneously laying plans to shape the minds of the traumatized masses in the ”right” direction after the war.
While the ruling classes were focused on building an empire, they could not simply tell their working classes to go and die in the service of profit. Workers bitterly remembered the ”war profiteers” and the ”merchants of death” who had sent them to die in the trenches of the First World War. Thus, the United States and its allies sold their imperialist war by claiming that it was being fought to defend democracy. They systematically concealed their true motives. The Council on Foreign Relations published a series of studies to help define the United States’ objectives in the war. A history of the Council quotes one study warning that ”the formulation of statements of war aims for propaganda purposes is very different from formulating a statement that defines the true national interest.”
A CFR study stated:
”If war aims are expressed in terms that appear to be concerned only with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to the peoples of the rest of the world and will be vulnerable to National Socialist counter-promises. Such aims would also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the United States and Great Britain. The interests of other peoples should be emphasized—not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This would improve the effectiveness of the propaganda.”
(Memorandum E-B32, April 17, 1941, CFR, War-Peace Studies, NUL).
In much the same way that the industrial elite financed the Nazi war effort during the war between the United States and Nazi Germany, Antony C. Sutton wrote a detailed critique of U.S. technological assistance to the Soviet Union while the Soviets were helping the Vietnamese kill Americans. As Sutton put it:
”In a few words: there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost everything—perhaps 90–95 percent—came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. In fact, the United States and the members of NATO built the Soviet Union—its industry and its military capability. This massive construction project took 50 years, beginning with the Revolution of 1917. It was carried out through trade and the sale of plants, equipment, and technical assistance.”
Complete agreement confirming the general argument of this study comes from an excellent source: Joseph Stalin. In W. Averell Harriman’s June 1944 report to the U.S. State Department regarding a discussion between Eric Johnston and Stalin, the following important statement was made:
”Stalin praised the assistance rendered by the United States to Soviet industry before and during the war. He said that about two-thirds of the major industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with American assistance and technical aid.”
(Source: U.S. State Department Decimal File, 033.1161 Johnston, Eric/6-3044: Telegram, June 30, 1944).
An interesting letter concerning how W. Averell Harriman pushed illegal projects through behind the back of the U.S. government in 1925, when he invested millions in developing Soviet manganese deposits, and which Evan E. Young advised his colleagues at the highest levels of the State Department not to investigate, clearly demonstrated the State Department’s powerlessness—that it could neither challenge nor dared to challenge the power behind the scenes. (How the Order Creates War and Revolution, Antony C. Sutton, p. 58.)
Political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote:
”For impressive evidence of the West’s participation in the early phase of the Soviet Union’s economic growth, see Antony C. Sutton’s Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1917–1930, where it is argued that ’Soviet economic development during 1917–1930 depended primarily on Western technological assistance’ (p. 283), and that ’at least 95 percent of the industrial structure received this assistance’ (p. 348).”
Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1970).
H. G. Wells, who had close ties to the elite, wrote in his book The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933) regarding the One World movement’s involvement in Russia:
”The method of treaty-making {that is, international agreements} and a modus vivendi were already in operation in the case of Russia. It was indeed difficult to say whether the Communist Party or the Modern State movement had control; so far had the process of assimilation gone.”
(Wells referred to his One World movement as the Modern State movement.)
As Joseph E. Persico, the military historian, NATO official, and principal speechwriter to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, explained, the Rockefeller network—which, as we know, was assisted by J.P. Morgan and their control over Wall Street—derived its real strength from far more than the money involved, because they had built an enormously powerful center of influence in the United States and around the world. James Stewart Martin came into contact with this network and testified about it, and it is these networks that prevent the rule of law from being upheld. This remains true in the modern era and has now been studied and clearly identified by leading researchers such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, Janine R. Wedel, Dino Knudsen, among others.
James Stewart Martin was an antitrust lawyer who headed the Economic Warfare Section of the U.S. Army, whose mission was to break up Germany’s industrial cartels in order to prevent the revival of the National Socialist war machine. In 1950, James Stewart Martin published his book All Honorable Men, describing his experiences as head of the Department of Justice’s Economic Warfare Section investigating National Socialist industry. Martin claimed that American and British businessmen secured appointments to key positions in the postwar investigation in order to divert, delay, and weaken the investigation of National Socialist industrialists, thereby concealing their own involvement. A British officer was court-martialed and sentenced to two years in prison for protecting a National Socialist, and several American officials were reassigned.
During the course of the investigations, Martin’s team made a number of surprising discoveries, including: that Germany had begun laying the foundations for rearmament long before Hitler came to power; that German companies, following a plan devised before the First World War, had used patents as weapons of war; that American businessmen played a key role in helping Germany rearm; that Hitler was controlled by the German business elite as much as he controlled them; that American bankers helped the National Socialists conceal their war loot as the collapse of Greater Germany approached; and that, in the end, the German power structure remained virtually intact, thanks to assistance from British and American business interests.
Martin came to Europe from Washington in 1945 with his investigative team to protest to G-2, the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ODCSINT), about the General Motors–Nazi connection. He arrived at the U.S. military headquarters at Bushy Park, London, only to discover that Graeme K. Howard of General Motors was a colonel above him in the chain of command. He managed to find a copy of Howard’s book America and a New World Order, in which Howard expressed sympathy for the Nazis. Fearing a public outcry, the Army sent Howard back to the United States. Martin and his team were soon blocked from carrying out the investigations they wanted to pursue. He wrote the following in his book All Honorable Men:
”We had not been stopped in Germany by German activity. We had been stopped in Germany by American activity. The forces that stopped us operated from the United States, but they did not operate in the open. We were not stopped by an act of Congress, by a presidential decree, or by a change in policy approved by the President… In short, whatever it was that stopped us was not ’the government.’ But it clearly commanded the channels through which the government normally works. The relative powerlessness of governments in the face of growing economic power is, of course, nothing new… National governments stood in the spectator seats while larger players arranged the affairs of the world.”
Martin went on to describe a global trend in which corporations, granted certain powers by governments to pursue their own interests, had merged on an international scale and ”built a private world government.” This new order, he wrote, extended far beyond the borders of any nation and ”operates under no law except the private law of its secret agreements.”
Nine years before James Stewart Martin discovered this secret order of the American industrial elite, U.S. Ambassador to Germany William Dodd warned about these industrialists in a 1937 letter to President Roosevelt, in which he wrote:
”A clique of U.S. industrialists is determined to bring about a fascist state to replace our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had many opportunities in my post in Berlin to witness how closely some of our American ruling families are connected with the Nazi regime. A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations told me outright that he was prepared to take definite steps to bring fascism to America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had much to do with bringing fascist regimes into power in both Germany and Italy. They gave assistance to help fascism seize the seats of power, and they are helping to ensure that it remains there. Propagandists for fascist groups are trying to dismiss the fascist threat. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress, they will seek to use a fascist state when the institutions of our government force them to comply with those laws.”
(Federated Press, January 7, 1938. The Tragedy of Henry Ford, by Jonathan Norton Leonard.)
This helps explain what historian Christopher Simpson documented, also through a vast collection of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act:
Simpson, C. 1988. Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
After the war, the U.S. government created the American intelligence service by recruiting tens of thousands of former Nazis. Many Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe, leaders of fascist groups and governments in Eastern Europe, and leaders of pro-fascist émigré organizations from Eastern Europe soon became politically active in the United States and gained remarkable access to America’s most powerful intelligence chiefs, politicians, business organizations, and media moguls.
One of the most important Nazi assets acquired by the CIA was Reinhard Gehlen, a major war criminal who, during the Second World War, served as head of military intelligence on the Eastern Front (Fremde Heere Ost). According to declassified U.S. government documents, ”the Gehlen Organization worked directly with Army Intelligence immediately after the war, then became the responsibility of the CIA, which continued the relationship until 1956.” What happened in 1956? ”The Gehlen Organization became the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s foreign intelligence service,” when the CIA transferred the Gehlen Organization to the West Germans.
The CIA thus ensured that one of the worst Nazi war criminals, along with his organization, became West Germany’s foreign intelligence service. The ruling elite of the United States not only created the CIA by recruiting tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, but also ensured that the country whose Nazi government had plunged the world into a war of extermination continued to be governed by the same Nazis after the war.
On June 6, 2006, The New York Times reported the following:
”The CIA took no action after receiving information in 1958 about the alias and whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. This is according to CIA documents that shed new light on the agency’s use of former Nazis as informants after World War II. The CIA learned from West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name ’Clemens’—a minor variation of his actual alias, Klement—but withheld the information from Israel because of German concerns that former Nazis in the Bonn government would be exposed, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents. Two years later, Israeli agents kidnapped Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.”
For those unfamiliar with the history of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann was the chief architect of Adolf Hitler’s ”Final Solution,” Nazi Germany’s program for the extermination of Europe’s Jews. What The New York Times reports is that the CIA protected Eichmann after he had fled. The CIA learned of Adolf Eichmann’s whereabouts in 1958. This was two years after the CIA had transferred the Gehlen Organization, headed by Reinhard Gehlen, to the West Germans. ”The former Nazis in the Bonn government” therefore included the Nazis whom the CIA had recently installed in West Germany to run its intelligence service. We therefore learn that the CIA protected not only Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust, but also the CIA’s own Nazis in West Germany.
Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has acted through proxies either to suppress left-wing revolutions or to overthrow ”hostile” governments, such as states that Washington and the multinational corporations it serves consider to be ideological competitors.
Historically, the U.S. unconventional warfare (UW) doctrine developed from Nazi experience in dealing with ”freedom fighters” in various European countries during the Second World War. As analyst and researcher Michael McClintock explains in his important study of the subject, American unconventional warfare borrowed extensively from the methods used by the Wehrmacht and the SS to terrorize civilian populations and, perhaps more importantly, to take control of local factions in order to combat resistance movements.
The Department of the Army’s A Study of Special and Subversive Operations (November 1947) was an early assessment of the lessons drawn from the Second World War with regard to the Cold War. (Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counterterrorism, 1940–1990, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, p. 59.)
But the United States did more than translate captured Wehrmacht and SS documents: it recruited many Waffen-SS veterans, often with the assistance of high-ranking officials in the Vatican. Tens of thousands of war criminals were smuggled out of Europe along ratlines into American hands for covert warfare against the new enemy: the Soviet Union and the international left. Pathological killers such as SS veteran Klaus Barbie, the ”Butcher of Lyon,” are said to have been key figures when the CIA and Argentina’s death-squad generals carried out the ”Cocaine Coup” in Bolivia in 1980. Together with agents linked to the CIA, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, and existing Nazi networks, Barbie ”reorganized” Bolivia’s intelligence service to reflect the ”changing reality” in the southern part of South America. (For background, see Robert Parry’s excellent series, Dark Side of Rev. Moon, The Consortium for Independent Journalism.)
In an article entitled The CIA as the Empire’s Mass-Murdering Muscle, I will explain the background of the CIA, why it has forfeited all of its legal right to exist, and how it has an extraordinarily extensive history of drug trafficking, assassinating politicians in other countries, and overthrowing democratic governments in order to install fascist dictatorships that promote the CIA’s agenda. I will also explain how, among others, American presidents and members of the CIA itself have fought to shut down the agency because it has gone completely off the rails (the CIA openly stated that it is not legally bound by the laws of war when carrying out drone strikes, a position protested by Human Rights Watch) and has become the greatest threat to the free world and to genuine forms of democracy, or to modern technocratically moderate-inspired and adapted constitutional republics that guarantee the rule of law.
The struggle for the twentieth century, Part 5 – The industrial elite’s financing of warfare for imperialist objectives
