I read somewhere that several American companies sold goods to the Axis during World War II. I have several questions:
I was also curious about what happened to the members/leaders of the “Bund” when WWII started.
The laws of commerce have thier own, rather civlilized, protocols. Case in point: Vickers Co., of England produced machine guns for the English Army in WWI. A central part of its machinery was patented by the Maxim machine gun company of Germany. The patent royalties were held in escrow until the Armistice, and then duly paid.
The worship of Mammon does not tolerate conflicting loyalties.
Well of course it’s true. Ford, IBM, etc etc. They all sold goods to the nazis, and it was perfectly legal too…
You forget that for a good portion of the first bit of the war, America was neutral. Therefore, all it wanted was to make money. The americans sold weaponry to the russians and british too.
Keep in mind that Hitler’s rise acompanied the Great Depression. Ford, IBM, and Coca-Cola (widely bottled in Germany even during the war years) weren’t willing to just cut off Europe’s largest market during such uncertain times.
The United States did maintain an arms embargo toward nearly the entire world most of the 1930’s, to distance itself from potential conflicts. (This was known as the “Quarantine Policy”).
The United States was not “neutral”. All embargoes toward Allied nations were lifted in 1939, and by the end of 1940, the United States was lending war materiel to the British. In return, the United States had access to British bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland, and used naval vessels in British convoys. The Americans were fighting an undeclared war with Axis naval forces long before December 7, 1941.
Especially Ford had a large German branch based in Cologne. This factory produced automobiles for the Wehrmacht throughout the war, and some rumours claim the Ford managers convinced the allied air forces not to damage Ford facilities when bombing the city. This was not done secretly, it was well-known in America at the time that Ford’s German branch was producing for the Nazis. So did the Opel factories which had been bought by General Motors in the 20s.
Another aspect of American support for Nazi enterprises are American foundations generously giving money for German eugenics projects until the declaration of war in 1941.
Henry Ford’s anti-Semetic views were no secret. Neither was his personal friendship with Adolph Hitler. Right up until Hitler’s death, Ford was sending him $50,000 gifts every birthday.
As far as I know, Ford also was awarded Germany’s highest decoration a foreigner could be given.
It’s Adolf Hitler, btw.
There was recenty a book that came out on this topic. It’s called IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. The review I heard on NPR about it, made it sounds really interesting.
Prescott Bush, father of ex-president George Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush, was closely involved with Adolf Hitler.
He spent more than a decade helping his father-in-law George Herbert Walker finance Adolf Hitler from the Wall Street bank, Union Banking Corporation. Union Banking Corp. was eventually seized under the Trading With The Enemy Act.) Walker was one of Hitler’s most powerful supporters in the United States, and landed Prescott Bush a job as a director at the firm. From 1924 to 1936, Bush’s bank invested heavily in Germany, selling $50 million of German bonds to American investors. In 1934, a congressional investigation believed that Walker’s Hamburg-America Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi efforts in both Germany and the United States.
One of Walker’s employees, Dan Harkins,delivered testimony to Congressional leaders regarding Walker’s Nazi sympathies and business transactions. According to US Government Vesting Order No. 248, many of Union Banking’s assets had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had been used to support the German war effort. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian vested the Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares and also issued two other Vesting Orders (nos. 259 and 261) to seize two other Nazi-influenced organizations managed by Bush’s bank: Holland American Trading Corporation and Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.
Many major firms had dealings with Nazis in the years leading up to World War II, but relatively few engaged in such extended cooperation with Hitler’s Germany after Pearl Harbor. (The Secret War Against The Jews by John Loftus and Mark Aarons. New York; St. Martins Press, 1994.) More recently, both George W. Bush and his father, the former president, had been forced to deal with anti-Semitism in Poppy’s campaign, according to the Albion Monitor story:
“Nazism was more than a joke to George Bush when he was running for President… In the fall of 1988, Vice President Bush had to fire several neo-Nazis and anti-Semites from his Presidential campaign. The scandal erupted when Washington Jewish Week and other media outlets discovered that the Bush campaign harbored well known neo-Nazis, including Jerome Brentar, a Holocaust revisionist who claims that the Nazis never deliberately gassed victims of the Holocaust, and Akselis Mangulis, who was involved in the SS-influenced Latvian Legion during World War II. George W. Bush, the campaign’s hatchet man, fired the Nazis… After the election, four of these came back to work for the Republican Party according to USA Today. (Old Nazis, The New Right And The Republican Party by Russ Bellant. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991). In September of 1999, when many Republicans were calling for Pat Buchanan to resign from the Party for his seeming affection for Hitler and criticism of the US actions during World War II, the presidential front-runner remained silent.”
I’m surprised that this thread has gone for so long without mentioning Cecil’s column on the subject.
Meanwhile, doesn’t Godwin’s Law dictate that this thread should have been dead on arrival? 
Sorry, Chronos, I don’t understand what you mean by that. There aren’t any misspellings in the OP. 
Godwin’s Law is an old usenet maxim that as a thread goes on, the chance that someone makes a reference to Hitler or the Nazis approaches one, which kills the thread. Thus, there is a finite length a thread can reach.
It generally refers to the tendency in a debate for some idiot to call their opponent a Nazi or something, at which point no one wants to argue with that idiot.
It’s Gaudere’s Law that deals with misspellings.