In a short 2009 book titled Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust, author Edwin Black describes how a number of bosses of major U.S. corporations, and their companies, collaborated with Hitler’s plans to conquer Europe and the Soviet Union in World War II (1936-1945). Indeed, Hitler himself admitted that without GM’s provision of trucks, the German army would never have been able to inflict the blitzkrieg (literally lightning war) against Czechoslovakia, Poland, and all the other countries in Europe that came under the thumb of the Nazi war machine.
The bosses Black names include GM’s Alfred Sloan, IBM’s Thomas Watson, Henry Ford, and the foundations created by Andrew Carnegie, the Harriman family, and John D. Rockefeller, and more. This is a veritable list of the founders of modern U.S. capitalism. At that time Sloan and Ford headed the auto industry, and Carnegie had created the industry-dominating U.S. Steel Corp. Rockefeller and his family not only dominated the oil industry but also major banks. Harriman built one of the largest rail empires. Watson’s IBM practically created the modern office machine industry.
The first two-thirds of Black’s book deals with the U.S. eugenics movement (a fake science calling for “purification” of the “white race” by various means) in the early 20th century. The Nazi Holocaust killed millions of Jewish, and Roma peoples and others. Not only did the Nazis racist ideology support this “cleansing,” but the Nazi war machine used them as forced labor to build their weapons. The Holocaust had another purpose as well: by imprisoning and killing communists and other working-class leaders, they aimed to keep workers from rebelling and overthrowing them. This unmitigated horror rested firmly on the U.S. eugenics movement that large numbers of intellectuals and major capitalists promoted and that Hitler so admired. Ford, Carnegie, Harriman, and Rockefeller were major funders of this movement.
Eugenics was a racist attempt to either exclude immigrants from a number of countries or sterilize or kill those deemed unfit, such as those who were forced to commit petty crimes to survive or those with mental illnesses. The premise was that by selective marriage and breeding — backed by laws passed in many states — a master race could be developed that would rid the country of the elderly, weak and disempowered, and particularly the black, brown, and Jewish working class. In addition, immigrants from many countries were deemed inferior by this movement, including Irish, Italian, and Eastern European workers. Hitler’s Holocaust was patterned on the eugenics movement, to which many German bosses and intellectuals contributed and for which Hitler gave high praise.
Early in his career in the 1930s, Hitler awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle prize to racist Henry Ford, multibillionare industrialist, particularly for his contributions to the fascist vilification of Jewish people. Ford published The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. World War II saw the killings of tens of millions of workers and others. The Nazis’ ability to pull this off was due in no small part to the build-up of racism in mid-20th century U.S. and Europe. Through the eugenics movement, racism helped to disarm, divide, and weaken the working class, world over, except in the Soviet Union.
The last portion of the book describes the material support to the Nazi’s war machine by GM, through its German subsidiary Opel. When GM was accused of aiding the enemy, Sloan hid behind the claim that it was a German company that provided the blitzkrieg trucks, yet Opel was wholly owned and operated by GM.
Black’s final chapter features the story of IBM’s development of the recording system that the Nazis used to keep track of whom they had killed and whom they had yet to kill in the death camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and scores of others. They admitted that without IBM’s help they could not have carried out such a systematic and monumental plan of gruesome and horrendous murder and genocide. Black earlier wrote a much longer book about this episode, titled IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (2001).
None of the capitalists involved in aiding the enemy in this fashion ever paid for their crimes. And their present-day counterparts continue the same racist and fascist actions today, only without openly supporting Nazi-like ideology. Now, as then, only a communist revolution can bring the working class to power and end this horror once and for all.