Corporate America - Arming Both Sides for Seventy Years

the FACTS:

AMERICAN CORPORATIONS COLLABORATING WITH THE NAZIS
THE GEHLEN ORGANIZATION
RECRUITING NAZIS
COMPENSATING HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

AMERICAN CORPORATIONS COLLABORATE WITH THE NAZIS

In 1998, the Justice Department declassified documents which showed that 300 American companies continued doing business in Germany during the war. Additionally, there have been allegations that Ford and General Motors' subsidiaries in Germany used slave labor. German factories also constructed factories and railroads throughout South America. Several of these corporations continued to keep subsidiaries in Germany during the war.
Approximately 50 corporations employed slave and forced labor during World War II. These included American companies -- Bayer, BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler-Chrysler -- which reached agreement in December 1999 to establish a $5.1 billion fund to pay victims. Opel, General Motors' German subsidiary, announced it would contribute to the fund. Other American companies operating in Germany during the war included General Motors and the Ford Motor Company.http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/BOOK3Ch2.html


Two weeks ago CNN announced that Halliburton had only recently broken ARMS trading ties with Iran. It is ILLEGAL to deal with Iran for everyone it seems but the imperial corporate Halliburton, who also moved most of their companies offshore where they pay no tax to support the American military.

That Ford and a number of other American firms-including General Motors and Chase Manhattan-worked with the Nazis has been previously disclosed. So, too, has Henry Ford's role as a leader of the America First Committee, which sought to keep the United States out of World War II. However, the new materials, most of which were found at the National Archives, are far more damning than earlier revelations. They show, among other things, that up until Pearl Harbor, Dearborn made huge revenues by producing war materiel for the Reich and that the man it selected to run its German subsidiary was an enthusiastic backer of Hitler, German Ford served as an "arsenal of Nazism" with the consent of headquarters in Dearborn, says a US Army report prepared in 1945.


Moreover. Ford's cooperation with the Nazis continued until at least August 1942-eight months after the United States entered the war-through its properties in Vichy France. Indeed, a secret wartime report prepared by the US Treasury Department concluded that the Ford family sought to further its business interests by encouraging Ford of France executives to work with German officials overseeing the occupation. "There would seem to be at least a tacit acceptance by [Henry Ford's son] Mr. Edsel Ford of the reliance...on the known neutrality of the Ford family as a basis of receipt of favors from the German Reich," it says.
The new information about Ford's World War II role comes at a time of growing attention to corporate collaboration with the Third Reich. In 1998 Swiss banks reached a settlement with Holocaust survivors and agreed to pay $ 1.25 billion. That set the stage for a host of new Holocaust-related revelations as well as legal claims stemming from such issues as looted art and unpaid insurance benefits. This past November NBC News reported that Chase Manhattan's French branch froze Jewish accounts at the request of German occupation authorities. Chase's Paris branch manager, Carlos Niedermann, worked closely with German officials and approved loans to finance war production for the Nazi Army. In Germany the government and about fifty firms that employed slave and forced labor during World War II-including Bayer, BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler-Chrysler-reached agreement in mid-December to establish a $5.1 billion fund to pay victims. Opel, General Motors' German subsidiary, announced it would contribute to the fund. (As reported last year in the Washington Post, an FBI report from 1941 quoted James Mooney, GM's director of overseas operations, as saying he would refuse to do anything that might "make Hitler mad.") Ford refused to participate in the settlement talks, though its collaboration with the Third Reich was egregious and extensive. Ford's director of global operations, Jim Vella, said in a statement, "Because Ford did not do business in Germany during the war-our Cologne plant was confiscated by the Nazi government-it would be inappropriate for Ford to participate in such a fund."


...Ford vehicles were crucial to the revolutionary Nazi military strategy of blitzkrieg. Of the 350,000 trucks used by the motorized German Army as of 1942, roughly one-third were Ford-made. The Schneider report states that when American troops reached the European theater, "Ford trucks prominently present in the supply lines of the Wehrmacht were understandably an unpleasant sight to men in our Army."

Indeed, the Cologne plant proved to be so important to the Reich's war effort that the Allies bombed it on several occasions. A secret 1944 US Air Force "Target Information Sheet" on the factory said that for the previous five years it had been "geared for war production on a high level."
While Ford Motor enthusiastically worked for the Reich, the company initially resisted calls from President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to increase war production for the Allies. The Nazi government was grateful for that stance, as acknowledged in a letter from Heinrich Albert to Charles Sorenson, a top executive in Dearborn. Albert had been a lawyer for German Ford since at least 1927, a director since 1930 and, according to the Treasury report, part of a German espionage ring operating in the United States during World War I. "The 'Dementi' of Mr. Henry Ford concerning war orders for Great Britain has greatly helped us," Albert wrote in July of 1940, shortly after the fall of France, when England appeared to be on the verge of collapse before the Führer's troops.

Excerpt from: Corporations and Hitler at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporations/Ford_Fuhrer.html

...And not much has changed today. American corporations, devoid of patriotism themselves, sell to and arm both sides prior to attacking. Germany was built up and armed by US corporations in preparation for WWII. The CIA in concert with various corporate black ops are constantly terrorizing other countries and stealing their natural resources. The hatred of America throughout South and Central America for the narcissistic psychopathic funding of Pinochet in Chile (after assassinating an elected leader Allende because he was a socialist) is legendary, but the corporate owned news media in the USA suppress the truth of America's puerile pillaging abroad. In fact the news media in the USA is now nonexistent. It has become the corporate drone of the paid off, plasticizied news journalist who will say and do anything for a buck. While the who, what, where, why and how of journalism and history is left to us - let us be certain our democracy is restored and this scourge on humanity is exposed and brought to justice. Funding terror and war is just as despicable as doing the deed, it is time we addressed the source.