pg 6 The Nazi - American Money Plot 1933-1949

excerpted from the book
Trading with the Enemy
The Nazi - American Money Plot 1933-1949
by Charles Higham
Delacorte Press, 1983
Preface

p xiii
...a number of financial and industrial figures of World War II
and several members of the government served the cause of money
before the cause of patriotism. While aiding the United States'
war effort, they also aided Nazi Germany's.

p xiv
It thus came as a severe shock to learn that several of the greatest American corporate leaders were in league with Nazi corporations before and after Pearl Harbor, including I.G. Farben, the colossal
Nazi industrial trust that created Auschwitz. Those leaders interlocked through an association I have dubbed The Fraternity. Each of these business leaders was entangled with the others through interlocking directorates or financial sources. All were represented internationally by the National City Bank or by the Chase National Bank and by the Nazi attorneys Gerhardt Westrick and Dr. Heinrich Albert. All had connections to that crucial Nazi economist, Emil Puhl, of Hitler's Reichsbank and the Bank for International Settlements. The tycoons were linked by an ideology: the ideology of Business as Usual. Bound by identical reactionary ideas, the members sought
a common future in fascist domination regardless of which world leader might further that ambition.
Several members not only sought a continuing alliance of interests
for the duration of World War II but supported the idea of a negotiated peace with Germany that would bar any reorganization of Europe along liberal lines. It would leave as its residue a police state that would place The Fraternity in postwar possession of financial, industrial, and political autonomy. When it was clear that Germany was losing the war the businessmen became notably more "loyal.'' Then, when war was over, the survivors pushed into Germany, protected their assets, restored Nazi friends to high office, helped provoke the Cold War, and insured the permanent future of The Fraternity.

p xv
To this day the bulk o~ Americans do not suspect The Fraternity.
The government smothered everything, during and even (inexcusably)
after the war. What would have happened if millions of American
and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas
stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey
managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland
and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public
had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after
Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business
with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan?
Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation
troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or
that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American
telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne
during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems
and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT
built the Focke-Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American
troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated
customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman
of the U. S. War Production Board in partnership with Goring's
cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short
of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington
and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?
For the government did sanction such dubious transactions-both
before and after Pearl Harbor. A presidential edict, issued six
days after December 7, 1941, actually set up the legislation whereby
licensing arrangements for trading with the enemy could officially
be granted. Often during the years after Pearl Harbor the government
permitted such trading. For example, ITT was allowed to continue
its relations with the Axis and Japan until 1945, even though
that conglomerate was regarded as an official instrument of United
States Intelligence. No attempt was made to prevent Ford from
retaining its interests for the Germans in Occupied France, nor
were the Chase Bank or the Morgan Bank expressly forbidden to
keep open their branches in Occupied Paris. It is indicated that
the Reichsbank and Nazi Ministry of Economics made promises to
certain U.S. corporate leaders that their properties would not
be injured after the Fuhrer was victorious. Thus, the bosses of the
multinationals as we know them today had a six-spot on every
side of the dice cube. Whichever side won the war, the powers
that really ran nations would not be adversely affected.
And it is important to consider the size of American investments
in Nazi Germany at the time of Pearl Harbor. These amounted to
an estimated total of $475 million. Standard Oil of New Jersey
had $120 million invested there; General Motors had $35 million;
111 had $30 million; and Ford had $17.5 million. Though it would
have been more patriotic to have allowed Nazi Germany to confiscate
these companies for the duration-to nationalize them or to absorb
them into Hermann Goring's industrial empire-it was clearly more
practical to insure them protection from seizure by allowing them
to remain in special holding companies, the money accumulating
until war's end. It is interesting that whereas there is no evidence
of any serious attempt by Roosevelt to impeach the guilty in the
United States, there is evidence that Hitler strove to punish certain
German Fraternity associates on the grounds of treason
to the Nazi state. Indeed, in the case of ITT, perhaps the most
flagrant of the corporations in its outright dealings with the
enemy, Hitler and his postmaster general, the venerable Wilhelm
Ohnesorge, strove to impound the German end of the business. But
even they were powerless in such a situation: the Gestapo leader
of counterintelligence, Walter Schellenberg, was a prominent director
and shareholder of ITT by arrangement with New York-and even Hitler
dared not cross the Gestapo.
As for Roosevelt, the Sphinx still keeps his secrets. That
supreme politician held all of the forces of collusion and betrayal
in balance, publicly praising those executives whom he knew to
be questionable. Before Pearl Harbor, he allowed such egregious
executives as James D. Mooney of General Motors and William Rhodes
Davis of the Davis Oil Company to enjoy pleasant tete-a-tetes
with Hitler and Goring, while maintaining a careful record of
what they were doing. During the war, J. Edgar Hoover, Adolf A.
Berle, Henry Morgenthau, and Harold Ickes kept the President fully
advised of all internal and external transgressions. With great
skill, he never let the executives concerned know that he was
on to them. By using the corporate leaders for his own war purposes
as dollar-a-year men, keeping an eye on them and allowing them
to indulge, under license or not, in their international tradings,
he at once made winning the war a certainty and kept the public
from knowing what it should not know.
p xvii
Why did even the loyal figures of the American government allow
these transactions to continue after Pearl Harbor? A logical deduction
I would be that not to have done so would have involved public
disclosure: the procedure of legally disconnecting these alliances
under the antitrust laws would have resulted in a public scandal
that would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread
strikes, and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services.
Moreover, as some corporate executives were never tired of reminding
the government, their trial and imprisonment would have made it
impossible for the corporate boards to help the American war effort.
Therefore, the government was powerless to intervene. After 1945,
the Cold War, which the executives had done so much to provoke,
made it even more necessary that the truth of The Fraternity agreements
should not be revealed.
***

A Bank for All Reasons
p1

On a bright May morning in 1944, while young Americans were dying on the
Italian beachheads, Thomas Harrington McKittrick, American president of
the Nazi-controlled Bank for International Settlements
in Basle, Switzerland, arrived at his office to preside over a
fourth annual meeting in time of war. This polished American gentleman
sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British, and American
executive staff to discuss such important matters as the $378
million in gold that had been sent to the Bank by the Nazi government
after Pearl Harbor for use by its leaders after the war. Gold
that had been looted from the national banks of Austria, Holland,
Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, or melted down from the Reichsbank
holdings of the teeth fillings, spectacle frames, cigarette cases
and lighters, and wedding rings of the murdered Jews.
The Bank for International Settlements was a joint creation
in 1930 of the world's central banks, including the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York. Its existence was inspired by Hjalmar Horace
Greeley Schacht, Nazi Minister of Economics and president of the
Reichsbank, part of whose early upbringing was in Brooklyn, and
who had powerful Wall Street connections. He was seconded by the
all-important banker Emil Puhl, who continued under the regime
of Schacht's successor, Dr. Walther Funk.
Sensing Adolf Hitler's lust for war and conquest, Schacht,
even before Hitler rose to power in the Reichstag, pushed for
an institution that would retain channels of communication and
collusion between the world's financial leaders even in the event
of an international conflict. It was written into the Bank's charter,
concurred in by the respective governments, that the BIS should
be immune from seizure, closure, or censure, whether or not its
owners were at war. These owners included the Morgan-affiliated
First National Bank of New York (among whose directors were Harold
S. Vanderbilt and Wendell Willkie), the Bank of England, the Reichsbank,
the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other central banks.
Established under the Morgan banker Owen D. Young's so-called
Young Plan, the BIS's ostensible purpose was to provide the Allies
with reparations to be paid by Germany for World War I. The Bank
soon turned out to be the instrument of an opposite function.
It was to be a money funnel for American and British funds to
flow into Hitler's coffers and to help Hitler build up his war
machine.

p7
By 1939, the BIS had invested millions in Germany while Kurt von Schroder
and Emil Puhl deposited large sums in looted gold in
the Bank. The BIS was an instrument of Hitler, but its continuing
existence was approved by Great Britain even after that country
went to war with Germany ...
***

The Chase Nazi Account
p20
The Rockefellers' Chase National Bank (later the Chase Manhattan) was the
richest and most powerful financial institution in the
United States at the time of Pearl Harbor. The Rockefellers owned
Standard Oil of New Jersey, the German accounts of which were
siphoned through their own bank, the Chase, as well as through
the independent National City Bank of New York, which also handled
Standard, Sterling Products, General Aniline and Film, SKF, and
ITT, whose chief, Sosthenes Behn, was a director of the N.C.B.
Two executives of Standard Oil's German subsidiary were Karl Lindemann
and Emil Helfferich, prominent figures in Himmler's Circle of
Friends of the Gestapo-its chief financiers-and close friends
and colleagues of the BIS's Baron von Schroder.

p21
the lawyer Creekmore Fath wrote in the introduction to a book
entitled Patents for Hitler by Gunther Reimann
"Since the middle thirties, whenever a German business
group wanted to make an agreement with any business concern beyond
the borders of Germany, it was required first to submit a full
text of the proposed agreement to the Reichsbank. The Reichsbank
rejected or rewrote until \ the agreement met its approval. The
Reichsbank approved no agreement which did not fit into the plans
of the Nazi State and carry that state another step toward its
goal of world domination. In other words, any American firm which
reached an agreement or dealt with a German firm . . . was dealing
... with Hitler himself.
As war approached, the links between the Rockefellers and
the Nazi government became more and more firm. In 1936 the J.
Henry Schroder Bank of New York had entered into a partnership
with the Rockefellers. Schroder, Rockefeller and Company, Investment
Bankers, was formed as part of an overall company that Time magazine
disclosed as being "the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin
Axis. " The partners in Schroder, Rockefeller and Company
included Avery Rockefeller, nephew of John D., Baron Bruno von
Schroder in London, and Kurt von Schroder of the BIS and the Gestapo
in Cologne. Avery Rockefeller owned 42 percent of Schroder, Rockefeller,
and Baron Bruno and his Nazi cousin 47 percent. Their lawyers
were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell.
Allen Dulles (later of the Office of Strategic Services) was on
the board of Schroder. Further connections linked the Paris branch
of Chase to Schroder as well as the pro-Nazi Worms Bank and Standard
Oil of New Jersey in France. Standard Oil's Paris representatives
were directors of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, which had
intricate connections to the Nazis and to Chase.
Six months before the war broke out in Europe, Joseph J. Larkin
brought off his most audacious scheme in the Nazi interest, acting
in collusion with the Schroder Bank. Aldrich and the Schroders
secured no less than $25 million American for the use of Germany's
expanding war economy and accompanied it with a detailed record
(supplied direct to the Chase Bank in Berlin for forwarding to
the Nazi government) of the assets and background of ten thousand
Nazi sympathizers in the United States. The negotiations were
engineered with the help of Dr. Walther Funk and Emil Puhl.
In essence, the Nazi government through the Chase National
Bank offered Nazis in America the opportunity to buy marks with
dollars at a discount. The arrangement was open only to those
who wished to return to Germany and would use the marks in the
interest of the Nazis. Before any transaction could be made, such
persons had to convince the Nazi embassy in Washington that they
were bona fide supporters of German policy. They were told in
pamphlets sent out by the Chase National Bank in Manhattan that
Germany could offer glorious opportunities to them and that marks
would provide a hedge against inflation and would have much increased
value after victory b in the expected war.
As a result, there was a rush on marks. On February 15, 1939,
there was a summit meeting at the Chase in New York of representatives
of both Chase and Schroder banks on what was known as the Ruckwanderer
(Reimmigrant) scheme. Alfred W. Barth was the personal representative of
Winthrop Aldrich and Joseph J. Larkin, while E. H. Meili of
J. Henry Schroder represented that side of the association. At
the meeting the members discussed a proposal that the Reichsbank
should send a special representative to the Nazi consulate in
New York, which served as the headquarters of the Gestapo and
had its accounts at the Chase. The American group decided that
they should not take such a risk because their importing such
a person ` might reveal to the American public that they were
supporting Nazis. The minutes show that it was decided to
"let well enough alone and to conduct future business on behalf of
Berlin through "the employment of numerous agents and sub-agents who
operate through the country. These agents and sub-agents in cooperation
with their respective principals, ourselves, can go a long way
towards educating Germans in exile and those sympathetic to the
Nazi cause through extensive newspaper advertising campaigns,
radio broadcasts, as well as through literature, etc. .
It is unanimously felt that it would be to the greatest advantage
of everyone concerned if . . . Berlin would instruct the various
consulates in the United States that all inquiries about . . .
transactions should be referred to ourselves, whose name should
be supplied not only to the various consular offices in the U.S.
but also to those who inquire at the consulates in respect to
the procedure."
The bankers agreed that special attention should be focused
;~ shopkeepers, factory workers, and others with little money
but great potential for Germany. They should be able-bodied young
men and women of pure Aryan stock. Above all, the present meeting
must never come to the attention of the American government. The
minutes of the meeting state:
"The ensuing publicity and the agitation that has been
furthered in certain quarters of this country [against similar
schemes] might possibly compel our Department of State to enforce
a clearing system between Germany and America, under which monies
due to American citizens such as inheritances, etc., would have
to be cleared. The results are too obvious: firstly, no benefits
are likely to accrue to Germany; secondly, the final outcome might
prove disadvantageous from Germany's standpoint."
Thus, the Chase directors and the barons von Schroder were
afraid that if Morgenthau discovered the true facts, the U.S.
government might take measures detrimental to the German government.
It was an act of total collaboration with the Nazis.