Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (13 page)

subsidiaries were monetary contributors to Himmler's Circle of Friends —
i.e.,
the Nazi S.S.

slush fund. As late as 1944, Mix & Genest contributed 5,000 RM to Himmler and Lorenz contributed 20,000 RM. In short, during World War II International Telephone and Telegraph was making cash payments to S.S. leader Heinrich Himmler.
10 These payments

enabled I.T.T. to protect its investment in Focke-Wolfe, an aircraft manufacturing firm producing fighter aircraft used against the United States.

The interrogation of Kurt von Schröder on November 19, 1945 points up the deliberate nature of the close and profitable relationship between Colonel Sosthenes Behn of I.T.T., Westrick, Schröder, and the Nazi war machine during World War II, and that
this was a
deliberate and knowledgeable relationship:

Q. You have [told] us in your earlier testimony, a number of companies in Germany in which the International Telephone and Telegraph Company or the Standard Electric Company had a participation. Did either International Telephone and Telegraph Company or the Standard Electric Company have a participation in any other company in Germany?

A. Yes. The Lorenz Company, shortly before the war, took a participation of about 25 percent in Focke-Wolfe A.G. in Bremen. Focke-Wolfe was making airplanes for the German Air Ministry. I believe that later as Focke-Wolfe expanded and took in more capital that the interest of Lorenz Company dropped a little below this 25 percent.

Q. So this participation in Focke-Wolfe by Lorenz Company began after Lorenz Company was nearly 100-percent owned and controlled by Colonel Behn through the International Telephone and Telegraph Company?

A. Yes.

Q. Did Colonel Behen
[sic]
approve of this investment by the Lorenz Company in Focke-Wolfe?

A. I am confident that Colonel Behn approved before his representatives who were in close touch with him formally approved the transaction.

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CHAPTER FIVE: I.T.T. Works Both Sides of the War

Q. What year was it that the Lorenz Company made the investment which gave it this 25 percent participation in Foeke-Wolfe?

A. I remember it was shortly before the outbreak of war, that is, shortly before the invasion of Poland. [Ed: 1939]

Q Would Westrick know all about the details of the participations of Lorenz Company in Foeke-Wolfe, A.G. of Bremen?

A. Yes. Better than I would.

Q. What was the size of the investment that Lorenz Company made in the Focke-Wolfe A.G., of Bremen, which gave them the initial 25 percent participation?

A. 250,000 thousand RM initially, and this was substantially increased, but I don't recall the extent of the additional investments that Lorenz Company made to this Focke-Wolfe A.G. of Bremen.

Q. From 1055, until the outbreak of the European War, was Colonel Behn in a position to transfer the profits from investments of his companies in Germany to his companies in the United States?

A. Yes. While it would have required that his companies take a little less than the full dividends because of the difficulty of securing foreign exchange, the great bulk of the profits could have been transferred to the company of Colonel Behn in the United States. However, Colonel Behn did not elect to do this and at no time did he ask me if I could accomplish this for him. Instead, he appeared to be perfectly content to have all the profits of the companies in Germany, which he and his interests controlled, reinvesting these profits in new buildings and machinery and any other enterprises engaged in producing armaments.

Another one of these enterprises, Huth and Company, G.m.b.H., of Berlin, which made radio and radar parts, many of which were used in equipment going to the German Armed Forces. The Lorenz Company as I recall it [had] a 50-percent participation in Huth and Company. The Lorenz Company also had a small subsidiary which acted as a sales agency for the Lorenz Company to private customers.

Q. You were a member of the board of Lorenz Company's board of director, from about 1935 up to the present time. During this time, Lorenz Company and some of the other companies, such as Foeke-Wolfe with which it had large participations, were engaged in the manufacture of equipment for armaments and war production. Did you know or did you hear of any protest made by Colonel Behn or his representatives against these companies engaged in these activities preparing Germany for war?

A. No.

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CHAPTER FIVE: I.T.T. Works Both Sides of the War

Q. Are you positive that there was no other occasion in which you were asked by either Westrick, Mann [sic], Colonel Behn or any other person connected with the International Telephone and Telegraphic Company interests in Germany, to intervene on behalf of the company with the German authorities.

A. Yes. I don't remember any request for my intervention in any matter of importance to the Lorenz Company or any other International Telephone and Telegraph interests in Germany.

I have read the record of this interrogation and I swear that the answers I have
given to the question of Messrs. Adams and Pajus are true to the best of
knowledge and belief.
s/Kurt yon Schröder

It was this story of I.T.T.-Nazi cooperation during World War II and I.T.T. association with Nazi Kurt von Schröder that I.T.T.
wanted
to conceal — and almost was successful in concealing. James Stewart Martin recounts how during the planning meetings of the Finance Division of the Control Commission he was assigned to work with Captain Norbert A.

Bogdan, who out of uniform was vice president of the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation of New York. Martin relates that "Captain Bogdan had argued vigorously against investigation of the Stein Bank on the grounds that it was 'small potatoes.'"
11 Shortly

after blocking this maneuver, two permanent members of Bogdan's staff applied for permission to investigate the Stein Bank — although Cologne had not yet fallen to U.S.

forces. Martin recalls that "The Intelligence Division blocked that one," and so some information on the Stein-Schröder Bank-I.T.T. operation survived.

Footnotes:

1For an excellent review of I.T.T.'s worldwide activities, see Anthony Sampson,
The Sovereign State of I.T.T.,
(New York: Stein & Day, 1973).

2See also Sutton,
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, op. cit.

3
New York Times,
August 4, 1933.

4See also Chapter Nine for documentary proof of these I.T.T. payments to the S.S.

5
Elimination of German Resources,
p. 871.

6Ibid.

7
New York Times,
July 20, 1936.

8Anthony Sampson reports a meeting between I.T.T. vice president Kenneth Stockton and Westrick in which the preservation of I.T.T. properties was planned. See Anthony Sampson, op. cit., p. 39.

9There is no substance to reports that Rieber received $20,000 from the Nazis.

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CHAPTER FIVE: I.T.T. Works Both Sides of the War

United States Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the.

Internal Security Act, Committee on the Judiciary,
Morgenthau Diary
(Germany),
Volume I, 90th Congress, 1st Session, November 20, 1967, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), pp. 316-8. On Rieber see also
Appendix to the Congressional Record,
August 20, 1942, p, A 1501-2, Remarks of Hon. John M. Coffee.

10See pp. 128-130 for further details.

11James Stewart Martin,
op. cit., p. 52.

BACK

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CHAPTER SIX: Henry Ford and the Nazis

CHAPTER SIX

Henry Ford and the Nazis

I would like to outline the importance attached by high [Nazi] officials to
respect the desire and maintain the good will of "Ford," and by "Ford" I mean
your father, yourself, and the Ford Motor Company, Dearborn.
(Josiah E.

Dubois, Jr,
Generals in Grey Suits,
London: The Bodley Head, 1953, p. 250.) Henry Ford is often seen to be something of an enigma among the Wall Street elite. For many years in the 20s and 30s Ford was popularly known as an enemy of the financial establishment. Ford accused Morgan and others of using war and revolution as a road to profit and their influence in social systems as a means of personal advancement. By 1938

Henry Ford, in his public statements, had divided financiers into two classes: those who profited from war and used their influence to bring about war for profit, and the

"constructive" financiers. Among the latter group he now included the House of Morgan.

During a 1938
New York Times
interview
1
Ford averred that:
Somebody once said that sixty families have directed the destinies of the nation.

It might well be said that if somebody would focus the spotlight on twenty-five
persons who handle the nation's finances, the world's real warmakers would be
brought into bold relief.

The
Times
reporter asked Ford how he equated this assessment with his long-standing criticism of the House of Morgan, to which Ford replied:

There is a constructive and a destructive Wall Street. The House of Morgan
represents the constructive. I have known Mr. Morgan for many years. He
backed and supported Thomas Edison, who was also my good friend ....

After expounding on the evils of limited agricultural production — allegedly brought about by Wall Street — Ford continued,

... if these financiers had their way we'd be in a war now. They want war
because they make money out of such conflict — out of the human misery that
wars bring.

On the other hand, when we probe behind these public statements we find that Henry Ford and son Edsel Ford have been in the forefront of American businessmen who try to walk both sides of every ideological fence in search of profit. Using Ford's own criteria, the Fords are among the "destructive" elements.

It was Henry Ford who in the 1930s built the Soviet Union's first modern automobile plant (located at Gorki) and which in the 50s and 60s produced the trucks used by the North http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_06.htm (1 of 7) [8/4/2001 9:44:15 PM]

CHAPTER SIX: Henry Ford and the Nazis

Vietnamese to carry weapons and munitions for use against Americans.
2

At about the same

time, Henry Ford was also the most famous of Hitler's foreign backers, and he was rewarded in the 1930s for this long-lasting support with the highest Nazi decoration for foreigners.

This Nazi favor aroused a storm of controversy in the United States and ultimately degenerated into an exchange of diplomatic notes between the German Government and the State Department. While Ford publicly protested that he did not like totalitarian governments, we find in practice that Ford knowingly profited from both sides of World War II — from French and German plants producing vehicles at a profit for the Wehrmacht, and from U.S. plants building vehicles at a profit for the U.S. Army.

Henry Ford's protestations of innocence suggest, as we shall see in this chapter, that he did not approve of Jewish financiers profiting from war (as some have), but if anti-Semitic

Morgan3 and Ford profited from war that was acceptable, moral and "constructive."

Henry Ford: Hitler's First Foreign Backer

On December 20, 1922 the
New York Times
reported4
that automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was financing Adolph Hitler's nationalist and anti-Semitic movements in Munich.

Simultaneously, the Berlin newspaper
Berliner Tageblatt
appealed to the American Ambassador in Berlin to investigate and halt Henry Ford's intervention into German domestic affairs. It was reported that Hitler's foreign backers had furnished a "spacious headquarters" with a "host of highly paid lieutenants and officials." Henry Ford's portrait was prominently displayed on the walls of Hitler's personal office:
The wall behind his desk in Hitler's private office is decorated with a large
picture of Henry Ford. In the antechamber there is a large table covered with
books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by
Henry Ford.
5

The same
New York Times
report commented that the previous Sunday Hitler had reviewed,
The so-called Storming Battalion.., 1,000 young men in brand new uniforms
and armed with revolvers and blackjacks, while Hitler and his henchmen drove
around in two powerful brand-new autos.

The
Times
made a clear distinction between the German monarchist parties and Hitler's anti-Semitic fascist party. Henry Ford, it was noted, ignored the Hohenzollern monarchists and put his money into the Hitlerite revolutionary movement.

These Ford funds were used by Hitler to foment the Bavarian rebellion. The rebellion failed, and Hitler was captured and subsequently brought to trial. In February 1923 at the trial, vice president Auer of the Bavarian Diet testified:

The Bavarian Diet has long had the information that the Hitler movement was
partly financed by an American anti-Semitic chief, who is Henry Ford. Mr.

Ford's interest in the Bavarian anti-Semitic movement began a year ago when
one of Mr. Ford's agents, seeking to sell tractors, came in contact with
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CHAPTER SIX: Henry Ford and the Nazis

Diedrich Eichart, the notorious Pan-German. Shortly after, Herr Eichart asked
Mr. Ford's agent for financial aid. The agent returned to America and
immediately Mr. Ford's money began coming to Munich.