I couldn't resist sending on this gem, also, although it isn't new.
90. During the rise of Nazism, did Wall Street investment in Germany
decrease, stay the same, or increase?
Prescott Sheldon Bush's early business efforts, like those of his grandson
George W. Bush, tended to fail. He married the daughter of a very rich man
named George Herbert Walker who installed Prescott Bush as an executive in
Thyssen and Flick. From then on, Prescott's business dealings went better,
and he entered politics. The Thyssen in the firm's name was a German named
Fritz Thyssen, a major financial backer of Hitler referred to in the New
York Herald-Tribune as "Hitler's Angel." Many Wall Street executives viewed
the Nazis as enemies of communism. American investment in Germany increased
48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940 even as it declined sharply everywhere
else in continental Europe. Major investors included Ford, General Motors,
General Electric, Standard Oil, Texaco, International Harvester, ITT, and
IBM. Bonds were sold in New York in the 1930s that financed the Aryanization
of German companies and real estate stolen from Jews. Many companies
continued doing business with Germany through the war, even if it meant
benefitting from concentration-camp labor. IBM even provided the Hollerith
Machines used to keep track of Jews and others to be murdered, while ITT
created the Nazis' communications system as well as bomb parts and then
collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damage to its German
factories. U.S. pilots were instructed not to bomb factories in Germany that
were owned by U.S. companies. When Cologne was leveled, its Ford plant,
which provided military equipment for the Nazis, was spared and even used as
an air raid shelter. Henry Ford had been funding the Nazis' anti-Semitic
propaganda since the 1920s. His German plants fired all employees with
Jewish ancestry in 1935, before the Nazis required it. In 1938, Hitler
awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, an
honor only three people had previously received, one of them being Benito
Mussolini. Hitler's loyal colleague and leader of the Nazi Party in Vienna,
Baldur von Schirach, had an American mother and said her son had discovered
anti-Semitism by reading Henry Ford's The Eternal Jew. The companies
Prescott Bush profited from included one engaged in mining operations in
Poland using slave labor from Auschwitz. Two former slave laborers later
sued the U.S. government and Bush's heirs for $40 billion, but the suit was
dismissed by a U.S. court on the grounds of state sovereignty. Until the
United States entered World War II it was legal for Americans to do business
with Germany, but in late 1942 Prescott Bush's business interests were
seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Among those businesses involved
was the Hamburg America Lines, for which Prescott Bush served as a manager.
A Congressional committee found that Hamburg America Lines had offered free
passage to Germany for journalists willing to write favorably about the
Nazis, and had brought Nazi sympathizers to the United States.
