In November 1941 only about 25% of Americans favoured involvement in the European war.
Check out some of the American corporations heavily involved with Nazi Germany.
In the 1920s many big American corporations enjoyed sizeable investments in Germany. IBM established a German subsidiary, Dehomag, before World War I; in the 1920s General Motors took over Germany’s largest car manufacturer, Adam Opel AG; and Ford founded a branch plant, later known as the Ford-Werke, in Cologne. Other US firms contracted strategic partnerships with German companies. Standard Oil of New Jersey — today’s Exxon — developed intimate links with the German trust IG Farben. By the early 1930s, an élite of about twenty of the largest American corporations had a German connection including Du Pont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, General Electric, Gilette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, IBM, and ITT. Finally, many American law firms, investment companies, and banks were deeply involved in America’s investment offensive in Germany, among them the renowned Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and the banks J. P. Morgan and Dillon, Read and Company, as well as the Union Bank of New York, owned by Brown Brothers & Harriman.
The Union Bank was intimately linked with the financial and industrial empire of German steel magnate Thyssen, whose financial support enabled Hitler to come to power. This bank was managed by Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Prescott Bush was allegedly also an eager supporter of Hitler, funnelled money to him via Thyssen, and in return made considerable profits by doing business with Nazi Germany; with the profits he launched his son, the later president, in the oil business.
Putting the Blitz in the Blitzkrieg
Germany’s military successes of 1939 and 1940 were based on a new and extremely mobile form of warfare, the Blitzkrieg, consisting of extremely swift and highly synchronized attacks by air and land.
To wage “lightning war,” Hitler needed engines, tanks, trucks, planes, motor oil, gasoline, rubber, and sophisticated communication systems to insure that the Stukas struck in tandem with the Panzers. Much of that equipment was supplied by American firms, mainly German subsidiaries of big American corporations, but some was exported from the US, albeit usually via third countries. Without this kind of American support, the Führer could only have dreamed of “lightning wars,” followed by “lightning victories,” in 1939 and 1940.
Many of Hitler’s wheels and wings were produced in the German subsidiaries of GM and Ford. By the end of the 1930s these enterprises had phased out civilian production to focus exclusively on the development of military hardware for the German army and air force.
This switch, requested — if not ordered — by the Nazi authorities, had not only been approved, but even actively encouraged by the corporate headquarters in the US. The Ford-Werke in Cologne proceeded to build not only countless trucks and personnel carriers, but also engines and spare parts for the Wehrmacht. GM’s new Opel factory in Brandenburg cranked out “Blitz” trucks for the Wehrmacht, while the main factory in Rüsselsheim produced primarily for the Luftwaffe, assembling planes such as the JU-88, the workhorse of Germany’s fleet of bombers. At one point, GM and Ford together reportedly accounted for no less than half of Germany’s entire production of tanks. (Billstein et al., 25,) 24
Meanwhile ITT had acquired a quarter of the shares of airplane manufacturer Focke-Wulf, and so helped to construct fighter planes. 25 Perhaps the Germans could have assembled vehicles and airplanes without American assistance. But Germany desperately lacked strategic raw materials, such as rubber and oil, which were needed to fight a war predicated on mobility and speed. American corporations came to the rescue.
As mentioned earlier, Texaco helped the Nazis stockpile fuel. In addition, as the war in Europe got underway, large quantities of diesel fuel, lubricating oil, and other petroleum products were shipped to Germany not only by Texaco but also by Standard Oil, mostly via Spanish ports. (The German Navy, incidentally, was provided with fuel by the Texas oilman William Rhodes Davis.) 26 In the 1930s Standard Oil had helped IG Farben develop synthetic fuel as an alternative to regular oil, of which Germany had to import every single drop. (Hofer and Reginbogin, 588–9)
[b]Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and wartime armament minister, stated after the war that without certain kinds of synthetic fuel made available by American firms, Hitler “would never have considered invading Poland.” 27 As for the Focke-Wulfs and other fast German fighter planes, they could not have achieved their deadly speed without a component in their fuel known as synthetic tetraethyl; the Germans themselves later admitted that without tetraethyl the entire Blitzkrieg concept of warfare would have been unthinkable.
This magic ingredient was produced by an enterprise named Ethyl GmbH, a daughter firm of a trio formed by Standard Oil, Standard’s German partner IG Farben, and GM. (Hofer and Reginbogin, 589) 28 Blitzkrieg warfare involved perfectly synchronized attacks by land and by air, and this required highly sophisticated communications equipment. ITT’s German subsidiary supplied most of that apparatus, while other state-of-the-art technology useful for Blitzkrieg purposes came compliments of IBM, via its German branch plant, Dehomag. According to Edwin Black, IBM’s know-how enabled the Nazi war machine to “achieve scale, velocity, efficiency”; IBM, he concludes, “put the ‘blitz’ in the krieg for Nazi Germany.” (Black, 208) [/b]From the perspective of corporate America it was no catastrophe that Germany had established its mastery over the European continent by the summer of 1940.
Some German subsidiaries of American corporations — for example the Ford-Werke and Coca-Cola’s bottling plant in Essen — were expanding into the occupied countries, riding the coat-tails of the victorious Wehrmacht. IBM’s president, Thomas Watson, was confident that his German branch plant would gain advantage from Hitler’s triumphs. Black writes: “Like many [other US businessmen], Watson expected” that Germany would remain master of Europe, and that IBM would benefit from this by “[ruling] the data domain,” that is, by providing Germany with the technological tools for total control. (Black, 212)
On 26 June 1940 a German commercial delegate organized a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York to cheer the victories of the Wehrmacht in western Europe. Many leading industrialists attended, including James D. Mooney, the executive in charge of GM’s German operations. Five days later, the German victories were again celebrated in New York, this time at a party hosted by the philo-fascist Rieber, boss of Texaco. Among the leaders of corporate America present were James D. Mooney and Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. 29
What a Wonderful War!
Nineteenfourty proved an exceptionally good year for corporate America. Not only did the subsidiaries in Germany share in the spoils of Hitler’s triumphs, but the European conflict was generating other wonderful opportunities. America herself was now preparing for a possible war, and from Washington orders for trucks, tanks, planes, and ships started rolling in. Moreover, initially on a strict “cash-and-carry” basis and then through “Lend-Lease,” President Roosevelt allowed American industry to supply Great Britain with military hardware and other equipment, thus enabling brave little Albion to continue the war against Hitler indefinitely.
By the end of 1940, all belligerent countries as well as armed neutrals like the US itself were being girded with weaponry cranked out by corporate America’s factories, whether stateside, in Great Britain (where Ford et al., also had branch plants), or in Germany. It was a wonderful war indeed, and the longer it lasted, the better — from a corporate point of view.
[b]Corporate America neither wanted Hitler to lose this war nor to win it; instead they wanted this war to go on as long as possible. Henry Ford had initially refused to produce weapons for Great Britain, but now he changed his tune. According to his biographer, David Lanier Lewis, he “expressed the hope that neither the Allies nor the Axis would win [the war],” and he suggested that the US should supply both the Allies and the Axis powers with “the tools to keep on fighting until they both collapse.” 30
On 22 June 1941 the Wehrmacht rolled across the Soviet border, powered by Ford and GM engines and equipped with the tools produced in Germany by American capital and know-how.
While many leaders of corporate America hoped that the Nazis and the Soviets would remain locked for as long as possible in a war that would debilitate them both, 31 thus prolonging the European war that was proving to be so profitable[/b]e experts in Washington and London predicted that the Soviets would be crushed, “like an egg” by the Wehrmacht. 32 The USSR, however, became the first country to fight the Blitzkrieg to a standstill.
