Us Corporate Greed Helps Germany In Wwii
U.S. Corporate Greed and WWII
There is something particularly noxious and repulsive about free market capitalists who earn money by providing the materials and services for war to an enemy of the United States, and of humanity. The American public now has indisputable evidence that companies, like ITT, IBM, GM, Ford, Standard Oil, to name just a few, continued their profitable commerce with Germany throughout WWII.
It would be the height of hypocrisy to condemn Hitlers genocide and the murder of American soldiers by the Third Reich while defending the right of U.S. corporations to arm the German hands that did the killing. And yet, there is evidence indicating that even Franklin Roosevelt knew what was happening and a loophole in the Trading with the Enemy Act permitted to the Treasury Department to issue licenses for such trading. Millions in commerce with the enemy was never made public for fear of causing strikes at home and loss of morale in the military.
Reparations litigation in U.S. Federal courts finally came at the end of the last century. Its now a matter of historical fact that Germany received considerable support from U.S. companies to finance and build its military machine.
Ford and GM controlled seventy percent of the German car market in 1939 and helped their subsidiaries to convert to military vehicle production. Opel, who was owned by GM, made the mule trucks that moved weapons and soldiers into Poland during the Blitzkreig. IBMs German subsidiary, DEHOMAG, produced and helped to program punch card tabulating machines, forerunners of the computer, to track and manage the transportation, imprisonment and extermination of Jews. ITT sold the German air force thousands of fuses used in the buzz bombs that destroyed London. Standard Oils fuel filled German tanks and planes. U.S. banks used affiliates and multiple transfers to move money into and out of Germany. To add insult to injury, Ford applied for and was paid reparation damages by the U.S. government after the war for a plant in Germany that was bombed by the Allies.
We dont know how many lives were lost as a direct result of U.S. corporate and bank collaboration with the Nazis but we know that corporate greed did kill? The reparations penalties, a half-century after unholy and secretive business-as-usual operations contributed to the deaths of innocent Jews, non-Jewish civilians and Allied soldiers, was only money a drop in the present value bucket for these companies and a small fee for what should have been called treason.
The real masterminds have died unpunished and left their wealth and moral values to subsequent generations of mega-businesses, leaving the public to wonder where the unremitting and untreated cancer of covert business greed hides in todays wars.
Thomas C. Peters is the co-author of KAREL The Lone Wolf Howls, an epic historical fiction book set in WWII Europe. His research and bibliography references on the above subject are available at http://www.karelsbestbook.com.
There is something particularly noxious and repulsive about free market capitalists who earn money by providing the materials and services for war to an enemy of the United States, and of humanity. The American public now has indisputable evidence that companies, like ITT, IBM, GM, Ford, Standard Oil, to name just a few, continued their profitable commerce with Germany throughout WWII.
It would be the height of hypocrisy to condemn Hitlers genocide and the murder of American soldiers by the Third Reich while defending the right of U.S. corporations to arm the German hands that did the killing. And yet, there is evidence indicating that even Franklin Roosevelt knew what was happening and a loophole in the Trading with the Enemy Act permitted to the Treasury Department to issue licenses for such trading. Millions in commerce with the enemy was never made public for fear of causing strikes at home and loss of morale in the military.
Reparations litigation in U.S. Federal courts finally came at the end of the last century. Its now a matter of historical fact that Germany received considerable support from U.S. companies to finance and build its military machine.
Ford and GM controlled seventy percent of the German car market in 1939 and helped their subsidiaries to convert to military vehicle production. Opel, who was owned by GM, made the mule trucks that moved weapons and soldiers into Poland during the Blitzkreig. IBMs German subsidiary, DEHOMAG, produced and helped to program punch card tabulating machines, forerunners of the computer, to track and manage the transportation, imprisonment and extermination of Jews. ITT sold the German air force thousands of fuses used in the buzz bombs that destroyed London. Standard Oils fuel filled German tanks and planes. U.S. banks used affiliates and multiple transfers to move money into and out of Germany. To add insult to injury, Ford applied for and was paid reparation damages by the U.S. government after the war for a plant in Germany that was bombed by the Allies.
We dont know how many lives were lost as a direct result of U.S. corporate and bank collaboration with the Nazis but we know that corporate greed did kill? The reparations penalties, a half-century after unholy and secretive business-as-usual operations contributed to the deaths of innocent Jews, non-Jewish civilians and Allied soldiers, was only money a drop in the present value bucket for these companies and a small fee for what should have been called treason.
The real masterminds have died unpunished and left their wealth and moral values to subsequent generations of mega-businesses, leaving the public to wonder where the unremitting and untreated cancer of covert business greed hides in todays wars.
Thomas C. Peters is the co-author of KAREL The Lone Wolf Howls, an epic historical fiction book set in WWII Europe. His research and bibliography references on the above subject are available at http://www.karelsbestbook.com.
