H. G. Wells: The Godfather of American Liberalism

After his customary denunciation of parliamentary politics as an anachronism, he let out his frustrations, calling for fascist means to serve liberal ends by way of a liberal elite as “conceited” and as power-hungry as its rivals. “I suggest that you study the reinvigoration of Catholicism by Loyola,” Wells said. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti.” It was also to Communism that “we shall have to turn—we outsiders, that is, the young people with foresight for enlightened Nazis; I am proposing that you consider the formation for a greater Communist Party; a western response to Russia.”

H. G. Wells: novelist, historian, authoritarian, anticapitalist, eugenicist, and advisor to presidents

City Journal | May 22, 2009

By Fred Siegel

A generation of American liberals, including Walter Lippmann, Margaret Sanger, and the editors of The New Republic, regarded Wells as a visionary. The Granger Collection

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led.

These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. G. Wells. Wells is best remembered today as the author of such late-nineteenth-century socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. But he was much more than that. His political writing achieved extraordinary influence in America, not just through his defense of liberal freedoms such as free speech but through his hostility to population growth, capitalism, and democracy itself.

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

But if these people were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” the “capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, Wells thought, redirect the Darwinian struggle away from a descent into savagery and toward a new and higher ground. Building on the social and sexual ideals of nineteenth-century utopian reformers, Wells generated a complete cosmology, a scientific socialism to compete with Marxism, which, he thought, reduced the complexities of life to simpleminded slogans of class war. Outflanking the Marxists on their own ground, he called for a different kind of struggle, a “revolt of the competent” against the confines of conventional middle-class morality.

The conventions of Anglo-American family life, Wells believed, blocked the path toward a more highly evolved future. On one side was a “normal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself” and encompasses “the great mass of men”—the bovine “Normal Life” of workers, clerks, and small businessmen. Opposite it stood an “ever advancing better world, pushing through this outworn husk in the minds and wills of creative humanity,” a “Great State” led by the creative class, a richly textured life that might be possible if only the new men of science could displace the vote-buying of electoral politics.

Well before Mussolini, still a revolutionary socialist in the early twentieth century, and at roughly the same time as Lenin, Wells—in the book that he called the “keystone to the main arch of my work”—gave up not only on democracy but on organized labor as a transformative force. All three men rejected what might be described as social democracy, that is, the attempt to use political means to redress the inadequacies of capitalism. Instead, each proposed a new class, a vanguard to carry forward a postcapitalist social order.

In A Modern Utopia, written in 1905, Wells updated John Stuart Mill’s culturally individualist liberalism in light of the horizons opened by Darwin and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Biologically, argues the book’s narrator, the “species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.” That means, he says, that the “people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.” Further, “the better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest freedom of public service.”

What provides the possibility for such freedom is eugenics. Wells has no use for the iron laws of Marxism, but he replaces them with the iron laws of Malthus and Darwin. “From the view of human comfort and happiness, the increase of population that occurs at each advance in human security is the greatest evil of life,” he writes. “The extravagant swarm of new births” that created the masses was “the essential disaster of the 19th century.” Man’s propensity to reproduce will always outstrip his productive capacity, even in an age of machinery. Worse, the “base and servile types,” who are little more than the “leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon,” are the most fecund.

In Anticipations, Wells had already argued horrifyingly that the “nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, or poisons its People of the Abyss” would be ascendant. For the base and servile types, death would mean merely “the end of the bitterness of failure.” It was “their portion to die out and disappear.” The New Republicans would have “little pity and less benevolence” for the untermenschen, “born of unrestrained lusts . . . and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity.”

In A Modern Utopia, Wells, stung by criticism of Anticipations, backed off, but only partway. “Idiots,” “drunkards,” “criminals,” “lunatics,” “congenital invalids,” and the “diseased” would “spoil the world for others,” Wells again argued. But their depredations required “social surgery,” not total extermination. That meant preventing people below a set income and intelligence from reproducing, as well as isolating the “failures” on an island so that better folk could live unfettered by government intrusion. Remove the unfit, and there will be no need for jails or prisons, which are places “of torture by restraint.” Illiberalism enables liberalism.

Wells’s “Samurai,” an updated version of the New Republicans, would keep track of their charges through a centralized thumbprint index of all the earth’s inhabitants. Latter-day Puritans in everything except sex, the Samurai would lead lives of irreproachable rectitude, abjuring tobacco, alcohol, trade, and games, which they could neither join nor watch. These elect, “the clean and straight” men and women capable “of self-devotion, of intentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour,” would rule in the name of the new godhead: Progress through Science. As Wells would later put it, science was to be “king of the world.”

Wells saw America, which wasn’t weighted down by ancient traditions, as the best chance for his ideas to come to fruition. A host of British visitors, from Fanny Trollope and Charles Dickens to Robert Louis Stevenson, could barely contain their disdain for their backwoods American cousins. But Wells—an anti–Henry James who saw himself as a self-made man—exulted in the absence of an established church, the embodiment of the irrational past. “Up to the point of its equality of opportunity,” he wrote, “surely no sane Englishman can do anything but admire the American state.” His 1904 nonfiction book Mankind in the Making welcomed a possible reunion of Britain and the United States based, as he saw it, on their common racial stock.

At the same time, Wells showed deep concerns about America. A socialist critic of American capitalism, he was revulsed by the “inhuman energy” of New York’s immigrant masses. In the Days of the Comet (1906) portrayed overproduction by a rapacious “gang of energetic, narrow-minded” American ironmongers as a threat to English social stability. Wells also thought that American democracy provided too much leeway to the poltroons who ran the political machines and the “fools” who supported them. The “immigrants are being given votes,” he argued, but “that does not free them, it only enslaves the country.”

In The Future in America, an account of his first trip to these shores in 1906 that was serialized in American and British magazines, Wells rightly pointed out that America was essentially “the central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head or the subjugated feet.” But that wasn’t a good thing, he claimed. In England, modern men of money “had become part of a responsible ruling class”; in America, the absence of an aristocracy had left the country without that sense of “state responsibility” that was necessary “to give significance to the whole.” The upshot was that “the typical American has no sense of the state. . . . He has no perception that his business activities, his private employments, are constituents in a larger collective process.” Further, Wells argued, America’s can-do commercialism was “crushing and maiming a great multitude of souls.” “The greatest work which the coming century has to do,” he wrote, “is to build up an aristocracy of thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of mercantilism” and its allies “materialism and Philistinism.”

In the course of his visit to the U.S., Wells was befriended by Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens, who arranged for a visit to the White House. Teddy Roosevelt, an avid reader, was delighted to talk for hours with Wells about the growing class divisions in America, which had been exacerbated by the confluence of rapid industrialization and rapid immigration. Roosevelt had rightly read The Time Machine as an anticipation of deepened class divisions hardened over time into an overworld and an underworld. The president became “gesticulatory,” his voice “straining,” Wells remembered. “Suppose after all,” Roosevelt said slowly, “that should prove to be right, and that it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real”—Roosevelt’s reform effort to curb the power of giant monopolies, that is. “It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it—even then.”

“My hero in the confused drama of human life,” Wells wrote in The Future in America, “is intelligence; intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god imprisoned in mankind.” Three years before Herbert Croly’s pathbreaking book The Promise of American Life totemized Roosevelt as the incarnation of a new liberal politics that deployed Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends, Wells presented TR as the demigod incarnate, the very symbol of “the creative will in man.” Here was the man of the future—“traditions,” noted Wells, “have no hold on him”—a model of the Samurai. “I know of no other,” said Wells, “a tithe so representative of the creative purpose, the goodwill in men as he.”

Continues

Proposed law could make comparing Soviet rule with that of the Nazis a crime

A woman holds a portrait of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a demonstration in central Moscow on Victory Day, commemorating the end of World War II, on May 9. The Kremlin announced the creation of a special 28-member panel tasked with examining and combating examples of “historical revisionism” that harm Russia’s image. Alexander Natruskin/Reuters

A proposed law could make comparing Soviet rule with that of the Nazis a crime. Intellectuals fear a manipulation of Russia’s past.

Russia plans to battle attempts to ‘falsify history’ with a Kremlin commission that opponents say is part of a drive to silence those who dare to challenge Moscow’s view of the Soviet empire.

Christian Science Monitor | May 21, 2009

Russian history 2.0: Kremlin wants to ‘correct’ the record.

By Fred Weir

Moscow – A bitter joke from the Soviet-era has it that Russia is the world’s only country with an unpredictable past.

That jibe has come winging back in recent days, after the Kremlin announced the creation of a special 28-member panel tasked with examining and combating examples of “historical revisionism” that harm Russia’s image.

The committee, which has no legal power, is chaired by the head of President Dmitry Medvedev’s administration, Sergei Naryshkin, and includes a sprinkling of historians but also lawmakers, Kremlin officials, the armed forces’ chief of staff, and members of the FSB security service.

But a companion law, drafted by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and soon due to be introduced into the State Duma, will stipulate fines and prison sentences of up to five years for anyone found guilty of “denying the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal.”

This is a reaction to a growing body of historiography in former Soviet and Eastern European countries that depicts the long years of Soviet domination as similar in nature to the Nazi occupation, and suggests that for these nations, liberation arrived only when the USSR collapsed. Even more irritating for the Russians are perceived attempts in some places, like Ukraine and Latvia, to “rehabilitate” citizens who wore German uniforms during World War II to fight against the oncoming Red Army.

“It is high time to make a study of what is going on here, and to decide what kind of documents we need to dig up and publish to counter these new interpretations,” says Natalya Narochnitskaya, a historian, former Duma deputy, and member of the new commission. “If a nation is unable to come to a united view in interpreting its own past, it will be unable to formulate its national interests.”

Ms. Narochnitskaya insists that the panel’s brief is to study the problem and make recommendations, not to impose a Sovietesque party line. “All nations have this problem of balance and need to find their own path between humiliation and normal self-criticism,” she says.

Critics are alarmed by what they see as a blatant throwback to Soviet methods of intellectual control.

“You cannot struggle against falsifications of history by creating bureaucratic commissions,” says Sergei Solovyov, editor of Scepsis, a Russian quarterly journal that aims to promote cross-cultural debate. “Either it will be completely useless or it will become a tool for suppressing people with different points of view.”

Former Soviet states have a different view of the facts

The Kremlin has been infuriated by what it sees as attempts to “revise” the results of World War II in some Eastern European and former Soviet countries. The removal of Red Army war memorials in Poland and the Baltic states has drawn particular ire, as have street marches by Latvian SS veterans, a Lithuanian law banning the public display of Soviet symbols, and an Estonian prosecution of a decorated Soviet war veteran, Arnold Meri, on charges of genocide for his alleged role in postwar deportations of Estonians to Siberia. (Mr. Meri died two months ago, before the trial finished.)

Another sore point has been Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s public praise for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought a CIA-backed guerrilla war against the USSR for nearly a decade following the end of World War II, as well as official Ukrainian efforts to get world governments to classify as an act of “genocide” the mass famine caused by farm collectivization in the early 1930s, which killed millions of Soviet peasants and is known in Ukraine as the “Holodomor.”

In his recently launched blog, Mr. Medvedev recently complained that “such attempts [to revise history] are becoming more hostile, more evil, and more aggressive…. We find ourselves in a situation in which we have to defend the historical truth and once again prove facts that not long ago seemed most clear. But it is necessary to do.”

War history a touchy subject

A public opinion survey conducted last month by the state-run VTsIOM agency found that almost two-thirds of Russians agree that attempts to “deny the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War” should be outlawed, referring to the Russian term for World War II. Many older Russian historians appear to agree that the panel, and its brief of fighting revisionism, is a good thing.

“We had to do this long ago,” says General Makhmut Gareyev, a war hero and president of the official Academy of Military Sciences in Moscow. “One cannot tolerate historical falsifications, particularly of World War II. Once the state organs make their decision, some things will possibly be corrected in the near future.”

Roy Medvedev, a dissident historian from the Soviet period, told the independent Ekho Moskvi radio station that the commission is not an objectionable idea in principle – if it sticks to reviewing history and opening up archive access. But he added, “I have strongly protested against any measures for criminal prosecution for falsification because this would be a restoration of Soviet practices…. It will be very bad if publishing various kinds of theories and research ends up being banned.”

In search of a stable past

Russia’s own national identity has been in flux since the collapse of the USSR, along with its ideology and multi-ethnic empire. The early post-Soviet years were marked by excoriating self-criticism and widespread public demoralization. Vladimir Putin came to power nearly a decade ago amid a patriotic backlash, which aimed to banish that pervasive sense of national humiliation by restoring pride in Russia and recognizing the positive achievements of the Soviet years.

Some ultranationalist thinkers, such as Alexander Dugin, who heads the influential International Eurasian Movement, suggest that the creation of a national myth that will unite Russians is a worthy goal.

“We should fix some limits to freedom of speech in order to establish a national consensus and preserve it for future generations,” Mr. Dugin says. “To have a myth that provides a stable point of reference for society is necessary to define our historical path. That’s not false.”

But critics have long complained that the downside of the Putin-era “feel good” approach to Russian history includes a tendency to minimize a multitude of past crimes, including mass murders carried out by Joseph Stalin’s NKVD security service.

“I don’t even think [the commission] is legal. Our Constitution forbids the establishment of a state ideology and mandates ideological pluralism in Russia,” says Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former independent Duma deputy. “You can debate history, but it shouldn’t be imposed by those who happen to be in power. For centuries, our history has been written and rewritten by czars and commissars. So, this new commission can only raise doubt and protest.”

Pope Benedict ‘never in the Hitler Youth’, says Vatican

London Times | May 12, 2009

The future Pope in his Hitler Youth uniform

Amid rising criticism of the Pope’s performance at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, the Vatican made a surprise denial today that the German pontiff had ever been a member of the Hitler Youth.

“The Pope has said he never, never was a member of the Hitler Youth, which was a movement of fanatical volunteers,” Franco Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman said.

Attention on the Catholic leader’s past has threatened to eclipse the message of peace and reconciliation he has been pushing during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Mr Lombardi said that the then Joseph Ratzinger, as a 16-year-old seminarian, had served in an auxiliary air defence squadron “that had nothing to do with Nazism or Nazi ideology.”

However, the Pope has said himself in past interviews that prior to serving as a Wehrmacht anti-aircraft gunner he had been conscripted, along with so many other German boys of his age, into the Hitler Youth, in which he had served reluctantly.

Venting frustration with the relentless focus on the Pope’s war years – a highly sensitive subject in a visit to the Jewish state – Mr Lombardi insisted the Pope “never was in this movement of young people ideologically linked to Nazism.” Mr Lombardi said that he felt compelled to respond “to the lies written by the media here and internationally” about the issue.

But in a series of interviews in the 1996 book Salt of the Earth, the Pope, then still a cardinal, said that he had been drafted into the Hitler Youth. “When the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join. I was still too young, but later, as a seminarian, I was registered in the HY. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back,” he said.

Many people thought that the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial commemorating the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, lacked the necessary remorse from a German with his background.

“All that was asked of you was to say a short, authoritative and moving sentence. All you had to do was to express regret. That’s all we wanted to hear,” the daily Yediot Aharonot said.

“After all, it is claimed that you appointed to your Church a priest who denies the Holocaust and as a boy, you were a member of the Hitler Youth.”

The controversy has been deepened by the Pope’s reinstatement of a British-born bishop who had denied the extent of the Holocaust. The Vatican also asked that the pontiff be allowed to sidestep a Yad Vashem exhibit criticising his war-time predecessor, Pius XII, for ignoring the plight of Europe’s Jews. The Vatican denies that interpretation of history, and is working to declare Pius XII a saint.

Behind the pomp and courtesy of the papal visit, tempers have been clearly fraying on both sides. Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of parliament, weighed in with his own criticism of the Pope’s speech at Yad Vashem, in which he had explicitly condemned the slaughter.

“With all due respect to the Holy See, we cannot ignore the burden he bears, as a young German who joined the Hitler Youth and as a person who joined Hitler’s army, which was an instrument in the extermination,” he said.

“He came and told us as if he were a historian, someone looking in from the sidelines, about things that should not have happened. And what can you do? He was a part of them,” Mr Rivlin added.

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the chairman of Yad Vashem who himself survived the Holocaust, also complained about the Pope’s speech, criticising his use of the word “millions” rather than “six million” and saying they had been “killed” rather than “murdered.” “There’s a dramatic difference between killed and murdered, especially when a speech has gone through so many hands,” he said.

But Mr Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, defended the Pope’s emotional speech at the hall of remembrance, saying he had mentioned his personal history on previous occasions. “He can’t mention everything every time he speaks.”

Secret report: Nazis planned Fourth Reich in a new European Union

Plotters: SS chief Heinrich Himmler with Max Faust, engineer with Nazi-backed company I. G. Farben

For now, the nation state endures. But these three typewritten pages are a reminder that today’s drive towards a European federal state is inexorably tangled up with the plans of the SS and German industrialists for a Fourth Reich – an economic rather than military imperium.

Daily Mail | May 9, 2009

Revealed: The secret report that shows how the Nazis planned a Fourth Reich …in the EU

By Adam Lebor

The paper is aged and fragile, the typewritten letters slowly fading. But US Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128 is as chilling now as the day it was written in November 1944.

The document, also known as the Red House Report, is a detailed account of a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944. There, Nazi officials ordered an elite group of German industrialists to plan for Germany’s post-war recovery, prepare for the Nazis’ return to power and work for a ’strong German empire’. In other words: the Fourth Reich.

The three-page, closely typed report, marked ‘Secret’, copied to British officials and sent by air pouch to Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, detailed how the industrialists were to work with the Nazi Party to rebuild Germany’s economy by sending money through Switzerland.

They would set up a network of secret front companies abroad. They would wait until conditions were right. And then they would take over Germany again.

The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire – but not just German.

The Red House Report, which was unearthed from US intelligence files, was the inspiration for my thriller The Budapest Protocol.

The book opens in 1944 as the Red Army advances on the besieged city, then jumps to the present day, during the election campaign for the first president of Europe. The European Union superstate is revealed as a front for a sinister conspiracy, one rooted in the last days of the Second World War.

But as I researched and wrote the novel, I realised that some of the Red House Report had become fact.

Nazi Germany did export massive amounts of capital through neutral countries. German businesses did set up a network of front companies abroad. The German economy did soon recover after 1945.

The Third Reich was defeated militarily, but powerful Nazi-era bankers, industrialists and civil servants, reborn as democrats, soon prospered in the new West Germany. There they worked for a new cause: European economic and political integration.

Is it possible that the Fourth Reich those Nazi industrialists foresaw has, in some part at least, come to pass?

The Red House Report was written by a French spy who was at the meeting in Strasbourg in 1944 – and it paints an extraordinary picture.

The industrialists gathered at the Maison Rouge Hotel waited expectantly as SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr Scheid began the meeting. Scheid held one of the highest ranks in the SS, equivalent to Lieutenant General. He cut an imposing figure in his tailored grey-green uniform and high, peaked cap with silver braiding. Guards were posted outside and the room had been searched for microphones.

There was a sharp intake of breath as he began to speak. German industry must realise that the war cannot be won, he declared. ‘It must take steps in preparation for a post-war commercial campaign.’ Such defeatist talk was treasonous – enough to earn a visit to the Gestapo’s cellars, followed by a one-way trip to a concentration camp.

But Scheid had been given special licence to speak the truth – the future of the Reich was at stake. He ordered the industrialists to ‘make contacts and alliances with foreign firms, but this must be done individually and without attracting any suspicion’.

The industrialists were to borrow substantial sums from foreign countries after the war.

They were especially to exploit the finances of those German firms that had already been used as fronts for economic penetration abroad, said Scheid, citing the American partners of the steel giant Krupp as well as Zeiss, Leica and the Hamburg-America Line shipping company.

But as most of the industrialists left the meeting, a handful were beckoned into another smaller gathering, presided over by Dr Bosse of the Armaments Ministry. There were secrets to be shared with the elite of the elite.

Bosse explained how, even though the Nazi Party had informed the industrialists that the war was lost, resistance against the Allies would continue until a guarantee of German unity could be obtained. He then laid out the secret three-stage strategy for the Fourth Reich.

In stage one, the industrialists were to ‘prepare themselves to finance the Nazi Party, which would be forced to go underground as a Maquis’, using the term for the French resistance.

Stage two would see the government allocating large sums to German industrialists to establish a ’secure post-war foundation in foreign countries’, while ‘existing financial reserves must be placed at the disposal of the party so that a strong German empire can be created after the defeat’.

In stage three, German businesses would set up a ’sleeper’ network of agents abroad through front companies, which were to be covers for military research and intelligence, until the Nazis returned to power.

‘The existence of these is to be known only by very few people in each industry and by chiefs of the Nazi Party,’ Bosse announced.

‘Each office will have a liaison agent with the party. As soon as the party becomes strong enough to re-establish its control over Germany, the industrialists will be paid for their effort and co-operation by concessions and orders.’

The exported funds were to be channelled through two banks in Zurich, or via agencies in Switzerland which bought property in Switzerland for German concerns, for a five per cent commission.

The Nazis had been covertly sending funds through neutral countries for years.

Swiss banks, in particular the Swiss National Bank, accepted gold looted from the treasuries of Nazi-occupied countries. They accepted assets and property titles taken from Jewish businessmen in Germany and occupied countries, and supplied the foreign currency that the Nazis needed to buy vital war materials.

Swiss economic collaboration with the Nazis had been closely monitored by Allied intelligence.

The Red House Report’s author notes: ‘Previously, exports of capital by German industrialists to neutral countries had to be accomplished rather surreptitiously and by means of special influence.

‘Now the Nazi Party stands behind the industrialists and urges them to save themselves by getting funds outside Germany and at the same time advance the party’s plans for its post-war operations.’

The order to export foreign capital was technically illegal in Nazi Germany, but by the summer of 1944 the law did not matter.

More than two months after D-Day, the Nazis were being squeezed by the Allies from the west and the Soviets from the east. Hitler had been badly wounded in an assassination attempt. The Nazi leadership was nervous, fractious and quarrelling.

During the war years the SS had built up a gigantic economic empire, based on plunder and murder, and they planned to keep it.

A meeting such as that at the Maison Rouge would need the protection of the SS, according to Dr Adam Tooze of Cambridge University, author of Wages of Destruction: The Making And Breaking Of The Nazi Economy.

He says: ‘By 1944 any discussion of post-war planning was banned. It was extremely dangerous to do that in public. But the SS was thinking in the long-term. If you are trying to establish a workable coalition after the war, the only safe place to do it is under the auspices of the apparatus of terror.’

Shrewd SS leaders such as Otto Ohlendorf were already thinking ahead.

As commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which operated on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1942, Ohlendorf was responsible for the murder of 90,000 men, women and children.

A highly educated, intelligent lawyer and economist, Ohlendorf showed great concern for the psychological welfare of his extermination squad’s gunmen: he ordered that several of them should fire simultaneously at their victims, so as to avoid any feelings of personal responsibility.

By the winter of 1943 he was transferred to the Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorf’s ostensible job was focusing on export trade, but his real priority was preserving the SS’s massive pan-European economic empire after Germany’s defeat.

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Speaker explains Nazi euthanasia, beginnings of eugenics

The Vista | Apr 30, 2009

By Caleb Williams, Staff Writer

The Nazi euthanasia programs, which used starvation, gas chambers and Phenobarbital overdoses to kill its victims, grew out of the pseudoscience of eugenics that did not come from Germany, but largely the United States.

Dr. Susan Benedict, from the University of Botswana, spoke Tuesday about the “steps to the final solution” in the Third Reich, and specifically about the sterilization and euthanasia programs that led to the death or concentration camps usually associated with the Holocaust.

“The handicapped were not only devalued but stigmatized greatly,” Benedict said. “So, more than 350,000 people were sterilized in Germany.”

In addition to sterilization models that were actually narrower in Germany than in the United States, Benedict described Commander of the Nazi Party Adolph Hitler’s plans to begin euthanasia in the event of war.

“He planned for it to coincide with war because people would be distracted by the war effort,” Benedict said, “and people would see the need to divert money away from institutionalized patients to soldiers in the war effort.”

Benedict said in his book “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote of eugenics: “People who are physically and mentally unhealthy or unworthy must not perpetuate the suffering on their children.”

After a few technical difficulties with her projector, Benedict showed some examples of the propaganda used by the Nazis to “socialize the people into expecting not only sterilization, but eventually euthanasia.”

One example Benedict showed was a math problem from a high school textbook that asked students to calculate how many houses could be built for the same amount of money that was used to build an institution, while another showed a strong Aryan German man holding up two deformed people.

“The right to live must be earned,” Benedict quoted from a written by a lawyer and a physician during this time.

“Destroying lives not worth living would be humane, and the elimination of these lives was not a crime, but was permissible and even beneficial,” Benedict said of the book’s themes.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Hitler began three phases of killing as part of his eugenics campaign.

The first, a children’s euthanasia program, began with a written request from the father of a deformed child to the Chancellor.

“From 1939 to 1945, between five and seven thousand children were killed,” Benedict said, adding that midwives who reported children with afflictions received an 80-cent bonus.

Parents were tricked into relinquishing their children, Benedict said, by nurses who promised excellent care for their children and a chance to “be able to go back to work.”

“After the children were admitted, they basically were starved to death,” Benedict said. “They would cut down their food until the children went into a coma. They would then notify the parents by mail that ‘your child died yesterday, but we had to go ahead and cremate your child because there was a hazard of contagious disease’” Benedict said. “The parents had no way of investigating.”

After the children’s euthanasia program, Germany instituted the T4 program – a similar program for adults.

Patients at the six killing centers were euthanized, as well as patients who were brought from over centers on buses with their windows painted over.

“The patients were never admitted to the hospital. They came in, they were given a very cursory examination by a doctor, and then they were taken outside to walk into the basement to the gas chamber,” Benedict said.

Benedict emphasized that doctors and nurses did not have to euthanize people, but were allowed to at their discretion.

Benedict said of one of the facilities that “there was no way people could not know something awful was going on there.”

“The children of the town and other towns would taunt each other with: ‘Be good, or you’ll get on the gray bus and you’ll go up the chimney’ because soon after the gray bus would arrive, black smoke would come up the chimney,” she said.

Following the death of 70,273 people, the T4 program ended and was succeeded by “wild euthanasia,” which did the same thing with a different method, Benedict said.

“Patients were killed individually,” she said. “[They] were taken one-by-one to the so-called ’special rooms’ and they were overdosed and buried on the grounds.”

Full Story

New film offers a chilling view of forced sterilization

Winston Salem Journal | Mar 29, 2009

By John Railey

War Against the Weak, which will be shown at a Durham film festival Thursday, shows how frighteningly easy it is for misguided scientists to fan flames of prejudice, enlist the powerful against the weak and land on the wrong side of history.

The film deals with the junk science of eugenics, and how it led to the forced sterilization of about 65,000 Americans in the 20th century, including more than 7,600 men, women and children in North Carolina. The lead editorial on the opposite page tackles our state’s fledgling effort to right the wrongs of its sterilization program, which ran from 1929 through 1974.

War Against the Weak, based on a book by Edwin Black, is produced by Peter Demas and directed by Justin Strawhand. It supplies a national context for the eugenics story. It chills you, from its opening interview with an elderly survivor of sterilization in Hitler’s Germany.

And before you can say, “It can’t happen here,” the film’s fast-moving shots sweeps you back to the dawn of the 20th century in America. As the first cars were hitting the road and the first planes were taking to the skies, “eugenicists” who considered themselves progressive were mapping ways to take control of Darwin’s “Natural Selection” and create their own master race, one that sterilization would rid of the “the Submerged Tenth,” which included the feebleminded, the blind, the deaf and the epileptic.

The movement swept the country, spawning best-selling books and its own newspaper. When the Supreme Court upheld sterilization in a Virginia case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The relatively few critics of the eugenics movement had a hard time being heard.

Good intentions degenerated to bullying the weak into sterilization. In limited cases, none of which have been reported as having occurred in North Carolina, the movement included euthanasia of babies.

Among those who embraced the American eugenics movement was Adolf Hitler.

Germans studied eugenics in America. American scientists financed by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation backed the work of the Germans, according to the film. American eugenicists visited programs in Germany, praising them even as the rest of the world began to realize just what a madman Hitler was. The film makes a strong argument that the German eugenics movement led to the Holocaust and all its crimes, including Josef Mengele and his atrocious “medical” experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

After World War II, when the horrors of Hitler’s Germany were revealed, most American states backed off their eugenics programs. But North Carolina accelerated its program. In Winston-Salem, prominent families helped to form a Human Betterment League. Some doctors at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine participated in the eugenics movement. The Wake Forest University School of Medicine apologized for the involvement of those doctors after it was revealed in a Journal investigative series in 2002.

There were occasional articles about the program and editorials in support of it in the Journal and other papers at the time. But for the most part, it operated under the radar and without controversy. The eugenics board, sitting in Raleigh, approved most of the petitions for sterilization for people they’d never seen. The reasons included “feeblemindedness,” a description that was often based on faulty intelligence testing. Some victims were sterilized just because they were promiscuous.

By the 1960s, the state program was targeting poor black women. Just as the national eugenics movement took hold during a time of major scientific advances, North Carolina’s backward movement continued through a time when many thought the state was progressive.

As we enter a world where there’s a fine line between gene therapy and gene enhancement, it’s useful to remember how easy it is get on the wrong side of history.

(War Against the Weak will be shown Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham. For more information, click on fullframefest.org)

US group re-creates Nazi death camp orchestra

In this undated photo provided by Andrea Barrist Stern, members of the Ars Choralis, from left, Deb Cavanaugh, Zoe Zak,and Marisa Tigue Trees rehearse in Woodstock, N.Y., Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009, as they portray the women’s orchestra of Birkenau, a group of musicians at the Nazi death camp who managed to survive because they could play a musical instrument. (AP Photo/Andrea Barrist Stern)

AP | Mar 25, 2009

By VERENA DOBNIK

NEW YORK (AP) — When Gustav Mahler’s niece greeted new arrivals at a Nazi death camp, she knew that any woman who stepped off the train with a musical instrument had a chance to live. Women in Alma Rose’s orchestra were forced to entertain SS officers at the Birkenau concentration camp. All the women survived — except Rose.

Now, an American chorus and orchestra is paying tribute to those musicians with concerts in the U.S. and Germany titled “Music in Desperate Times: Remembering The Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau.”

On Saturday, Ars Choralis will play at Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, whose Episcopal bishop had spoken against the persecution of Jews in Europe already in 1933.

During the 18 months the Birkenau orchestra existed, its musicians played pieces the German officers loved — Beethoven symphonies, Puccini arias, Chopin and Strauss waltzes. The women also had to play marches for emaciated, often sick prisoners as they struggled to walk to their forced labor jobs.

All around was death — people perishing outdoors, or in filthy barracks and gas chambers. More than 1 million disappeared in this place of horror.

When the Vienna-born Rose (pronounced roh-ZAY’) was sent to the camp, the SS guards realized she was Mahler’s relative and had conducted an all-women’s orchestra. She was asked to form one at Birkenau, for the pleasure of the Nazis.

“As the women came off transport trains, if they had a guitar, a violin, a recorder or a mandolin, they were put aside,” said Alice Radosh, who helped organize the Ars Choralis concerts. “People would hear classical music — and think, ‘How bad could this be?’”

The truth was, “we played with tears in our eyes and guns at our backs,” Radosh quoted accordion player Esther Bejarano as saying after the war.

They were still expected to play well — or face possible death.

“At Birkenau, music was indeed the best and worst of things,” wrote the late Fania Fenelon, a cabaret singer from Paris who wrote the book “Playing for Time,” which was turned into a television movie starring Vanessa Redgrave.

“The best because it filled in time and brought us oblivion, like a drug; we emerged from it deadened, exhausted,” Fenelon said, “and the worst because our public consisted of the assassins and the victims, and in the hand of the assassins, it was almost as though we too were made executioners.”

With the orchestra, Rose saved more than 50 women, including Fenelon, who died in 1983; three are still alive.

Exactly what killed the great composer’s niece remains a mystery. A document signed by Josef Mengele on April 4, 1944, shows that the Nazi SS physician who performed experiments on prisoners was summoned to a special private room where Rose lay, slipping in and out of consciousness from an undiagnosed illness. Mengele signed a form requesting medical tests for meningitis and pneumonia that came out negative.

Rose died the next day, her arms twisted in seizures. She was respectfully laid out atop a white cloth, with floral tributes sent by SS officers, according to Fenelon’s book.

Mourners filing by included her musicians and the orchestra’s protector, Maria Mandel, the camp’s sadistic chief of female wardens. Mandel was a fan of classical music and of the 37-year-old conductor, whom she mourned openly, according to the 2000 biography “Alma Rose, Vienna to Auschwitz” by Richard Newman.

In October 1944, the Jewish women in the orchestra were evacuated by cattle car to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany where Anne Frank died, according to Newman’s book. The non-Jews were sent from Birkenau to neighboring Auschwitz.

Although there was no chorus at Birkenau, the 48-voice Ars Choralis serves as a kind of “Greek chorus,” commenting on the human tragedy six decades ago at the death camp in Poland.

At Birkenau, the musicians performed in lavender scarves and white blouses, as do members of the Ars Choralis ensemble. Ars Choralis includes the usual violin, cello, flute and percussion, plus mandolin, accordion and recorder.

The upcoming program will combine music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Puccini with words read from the wartime musicians’ memoirs, as well as the “Song of Faith,” a Yiddish piece sung in camps, Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Solitude,” and Ben Steinberg’s “Shalom Rav,” a peace prayer.

“This is amazingly uplifting music,” Radosh said.

The not-for-profit Ars Choralis is itself a story, of how a small town in upstate New York — Woodstock — recruited singers representing a cross-section of the community, from teachers and nurses to gardeners and contractors. The orchestra and soloists are hired professionals.

The Birkenau story “reaches into the heart of the listener and opens it to human suffering, but also inspires somebody to do something about it, to respond and change things,” said Barbara Pickhardt, Ars Choralis’ founder and music director.

Ars Choralis will travel to Berlin for an April 17 concert at the city’s Heilig Kreuz Kirche, an ecumenical Protestant church that had been damaged by Allied bombs.

The group will also perform on April 18 and 19 for the annual liberation day ceremonies at Ravensbrueck, an all-women’s camp near Berlin.

The printed program for the concerts includes the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, saying that “the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent, whenever, wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.”

Israel frowns on China award’s Nazi SS-like logo

Agence France-Press | Mar 24, 2009

Israel’s embassy in Beijing said yesterday it wants to meet China’s quality watchdog over the logo of a brand award similar to the symbol of the SS, a Nazi unit infamous for its role in the Holocaust.

China Top Brand awards are handed out every year to deserving businesses, and the logo – which the firms display as a badge of quality – contains two blue zig-zags in a white circle that resemble the SS emblem.

The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was Nazi Germany’s elite security and military unit and administered the regime’s death camps.

“I have contacted China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) in order to get a meeting,” Israeli embassy spokesman Guy Kivetz said.

The secretariat of the committee that hands out the awards belongs to the AQSIQ.

“As we are well aware and understand the sensitivity and the association this logo can create, we intend to raise the matter with the organization as soon as possible in order to explain the sensitivity,” Kivetz said.

He would not comment on whether he wanted the watchdog to change the symbol, or what outcome he expected from the meeting.

But he was keen to emphasize that the Israeli embassy did not see the logo as an expression of anti-Semitism.

“It is important to understand that the Top China Brand Award, as well as the Chinese people in general, are not suspected of being anti-Semitic in any way or form,” he said.

“What is sensitive and problematic in the eyes of Israelis and Jews or even non-Jewish Europeans is not perceived as problematic to Chinese eyes because it does not in any way create the same associations.”

The website of the China Top Brand Award describes the logo as four number 1’s that partly symbolize the evaluation process – “science, fairness, openness, and justice.”

The badge of quality has been awarded to several famous Chinese companies, such as Haier, the world’s fourth largest white goods manufacturer, and Lenovo, the PC firm.

Secret Societies and The Military

“[Their god is] the Brotherhood. It’s very German, it has Masonic leanings. They’re all Masons. This Brotherhood — Opus Dei — they’re the Mob. The Marine Corps are the hit men. They’re mercenaries. They’ll work for anybody. They’ll switch hats. My husband said it’s no big deal. I’ll go work for the State Department.”

- Kay Griggs

The Kay Griggs Interviews

By Pastor Rick Strawcutter

Kay Griggs was a Southern divorcee who rented a room to Marine Corps colonel George Griggs in the late 1980s. She was impressed by his clipped manner, his education, his good looks. Two months later she married him. What she found out about world affairs as George Griggs’ wife was astounding.

Colonel Griggs was a Marine Corps Chief of Staff, as well as head of NATO’s Psychological Operations. He was also, his wife realized, entirely mind-controlled. Kay, a self-declared Christian, became privy to the real workings of the United States military, leadership training, drug-running and weapons sales, and the secret worldwide camps that train professional assassins.

These interviews with Pastor Rick Strawcutter of Adrian, Michigan were conducted in 1998, before September 11th and the installation of U.S. President George W. Bush. Kay Griggs’ report of world events and the power elite paints a picture that begins to explain the hows and whys of our current global scenario.

Quotes from Kay Griggs:

“They took with them the most perverted aspects of Nazi Germany and brought them over to the United States.”

“They get rid of the good guys. The Marine Corps are the assassins for the Mob. The military is run by the Mob. The military IS the Mob.”

“He told me what they did. They nurture–they cultivate–the sons of prominent families. They’re called “rising stars.” They rope them in. Then they “turn” them.”

ON ASSASSINS: “What my husband does for a living is train mercenaries — young boys from countries like Romania, Dominican Republic, Haiti. They’re training them to be murderers, and the taxpayers’ dollars are paying for this. They psychologically profile them. The profile is similar to my husband’s and Lee Harvey Oswald’s and [Timothy] McVeigh’s, and others who were all part of this program. Jeffrey Dahmer was part of this program. They’re all Army. They were all picked out because they were perverted or twisted. [The military profiles for] strong mother, weak father, no father, poor. Because these guys are looking for security, so they will stay in the military and do anything for that security.” (Interviews, Disk 1)

“When you work in the White House, you work under the Army. The Marines have no overlord, as such. They can float. They’re run out of New Orleans, just like Oswald was. Oswald was homosexually recruited by Jack Rubinstein, who was Jack Ruby. All of the funding for these operations goes through the “joint” — the Mob. Oswald was a loner, brilliant — and a perfect candidate. His [profile] and my husband’s profile almost look alike.” (Interviews, Disk 2)

ON TRUTH TELLERS: “St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, like the Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, has Army intelligence people in there. They’re targets — people who have decided to tell the truth. People who believe in the American dream, who are Christians, who are trying to get things straightened out. If they transgress that line where they upset somebody in high command — just like in Germany — they all of a sudden move from being a person to being a target. Therefore, the enemy. Why are good people silenced, why are their papers gone through?” (Interviews, Disk 3)

ON THE CIA: “This CIA thing, from my experience, is bogus. Every person I’ve known who was in the CIA was in military intelligence first. For example, my husband. He works under the Army. He’s a Marine Corps high-level intelligence officer, but he’s under all these Army people.” (Interviews, Disk 3)

ON LOYALTY: “Now these generals in the Marine Corps and Army, according to my husband, they are ordered. My husband, being Chief of Staff, told his men it was like this: It’s the Marine Corps first — the Brotherhood, the Cherry Marines, the bonding that goes on. The Marine Corps comes before God, before Jesus Christ, before the country. My husband is not a Christian, he’s an existentialist, and most of these guys are. [Their god is] the Brotherhood. It’s very German, it has Masonic leanings. They’re all Masons. This Brotherhood — Opus Dei — they’re the Mob. The Marine Corps are the hit men. They’re mercenaries. They’ll work for anybody. They’ll switch hats. My husband said it’s no big deal. I’ll go work for the State Department.

“The Marine Corps is just a smoke-and-mirrors thing. On [my husband's] level, he said we’ve never been an enemy to the Soviet Union. They work with these Communists. The man who started this whole intelligence operation — OSS [Office of Strategic Services] — he was recruiting known Communists who were involved in subverting Spain. They’re not Americans. They’re not Christians. They’re German existentialists. Now what are they doing running our nation? They have more affinity for the State of Israel than they do our nation. They don’t care about American citizens. The judges now in the courts are all military officers following chain-of-command orders. They’re not independent judges.” (Interviews, Disk 4)

______

Related

Kay Griggs Homepage

American Corporate Complicity Created Undeniable Nazi Nexus

Cutting Edge News | Mar 9, 2009

This article is based on the just released book, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connection’s to Hitler’s Holocaust (Dialog Press).

By Edwin Black

Adolf Hitler was completely responsible for the Holocaust. But Hitler had help.

When zealous Nazis were motivated to wage war against an imaginary generation-to-generation Jewish conspiracy… when Nazis created ghastly extermination plans to help ensure their master race would rule the world… when the German military was enabled to smash across Europe with lightning speed in heavy Blitz trucks, bomb mercilessly from the air in advanced JU-88s, and create carnage across the seas with deadly torpedoes… when Josef Mengele saw the scientific need to undertake heinous medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz… when the Reich was enabled to identify the Jews everywhere in Europe and then systematically pauperize and destroy them… when all these terrible things were done, the shape and scope of the horror was pivotally determined by major American industrial giants.

Now the dots can be connected. They create an undeniably Nazi nexus between iconic American corporations and the greatest crime of the twentieth century: the Holocaust.

Who gave Hitler the initial basis for transmogrifying centuries of outgroup religious hatred into a new twentieth century political anti-Semitism? It was Henry Ford, acting directly through the Ford Motor Company. In 1920, the gullible but mercurial Ford acquired a forged typescript convincing him of an evil international Jewish cabal determined to subjugate the world through devious manipulation of the world’s governments, newspapers, and economic systems. The revelations were contained in the notorious and fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

To purvey this new brand of Jew hatred to the world, Ford purchased a failed newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which serialized The Protocols for 91 weeks. His company then published the series as a book, The International Jew. Using the techniques of mass production, Ford was able to escalate the Protocols from a negligible, randomly circulated irritant to a national sensation of 500,000 copies. Devoting the national sales force and the assets of the Ford Motor Company to the task hatred made Henry Ford the first to organize political anti-Semitism in America. Indeed, he was the hero of anti-Semites the world over.

In Germany, where Ford was venerated, The International Jew was translated and published in February, 1921. It enjoyed six editions in two years with thousands of copies in print. Ford’s book quickly became the bible of German anti-Semites and early incarnations of the Nazi party. Nazis shipped the work throughout the country “by the carload.”

Among the many Germans massively influenced by the book was Adolf Hitler. Der Führer read the work at least two years before Mein Kampf was written. It shows. In Mein Kampf, chapter 11, Hitler wrote, “The whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie [as] shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion… With positively terrifying certainty, they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and … their ultimate final aims.” Hitler described Ford as his hero. No wonder Ford received Hitler’s German Eagle medal in a lavish Berlin ceremony. The medal was reserved for foreigners who rendered special service to the Reich.

Who gave Hitler the pseudo-scientific medical rationales to justify a war to achieve a blond, blue-eyed master race with the duty to obliterate all other races deemed inferior? It was the Carnegie Institution, the philanthropic incarnation of America’s greatest steel fortune that propagated the deadly American race science of eugenics. Beginning in 1911, Carnegie Institution scientists argued successfully that millions worldwide who did not conform to a blond, blue-eyed Nordic stereotype were unworthy of existence on earth.

American eugenics believed such social traits as poverty, prostitution, and laziness were genetic. The continuation of racially inferior bloodlines— a broad swath encompassing some 90 percent of humanity—was to be combated by various methods. These methods included organized identification, seizure of assets, marriage prohibition or nullification, forced surgical sterilization, segregation into camps, and publicly operated gas chambers. Various eugenic notions were enacted into law in 27 states. Ultimately, some 60,000 persons were forcibly sterilized, thousands more incarcerated in state camps, and untold numbers unmarried and in some cases subjected to organized lethal medical neglect. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes enshrined these policies as the law of the land when he ruled such acts justified. “It is better for all the world,” Holmes wrote, “if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

The Carnegie Institution and its sponsored movement spent millions to propagate American eugenic theories in post-WWI Germany, financing race science programs in universities and official institutions. These included the idea that Jews must be eliminated.

While in prison, Hitler closely studied American eugenics. In Mein Kampf, Hitler insisted, “There is today one state, in which at least weak beginnings toward better conception… are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” Hitler proudly told his comrades, “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” Hitler merely exchanged the American term “Nordic” for the Nazi term “Aryan” and then medicalized his pre-existing virulent anti-Semitism and fascist nationalism, to formulate the concept of the blond, blue-eyed Master Race he deified in Mein Kampf.

Hitler was so steeped in American race science that he even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant, called his writing “my bible.”

The Third Reich implemented all American eugenic principles with great ferocity and velocity backed up by a conquering army. “While we were pussy-footing around,” fawned Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, “the Germans were calling a spade a spade.” As Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess insisted, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”

Who gave Hitler’s odious medical eugenic experimentation the wherewithal to commit unspeakable crimes against innocent twins? It was the Rockefeller Foundation, the philanthropic incarnation of Standard Oil. The foundation acted as a full partner with Carnegie in establishing eugenics across America and in Germany. In the quest to perfect the master race, millions of Depression-era dollars were transmitted by Rockefeller to Hitler’s most anti-Jewish doctors. In this quest, one specimen was desired above all: twins.

Rockefeller funded Hitler’s chief raceologist Otmar Verschuer and his insatiable twin experimentation programs. Twins, it was thought, held the secret to industrially multiplying the Aryan racial type, and quickly subtracting biological undesirables. Verschuer had an assistant, Josef Mengele. Rockefeller funding stopped during WWII. But by that time, Mengele had transferred into Auschwitz to continue twin research in a monstrous fashion. Ever the eugenicist, he sent precise clinical reports weekly to Verschuer.

Who took Hitler off the horse and put his killing armies into trucks to wage Blitzkrieg or lightning war against Europe? It was General Motors which built the Blitz truck for the Blitzkrieg. As the Reich’s largest car and truck maker, GM became an indispensible partner in Hitler’s war. From the first weeks of the Third Reich, GM president Alfred Sloan committed the company and its German division, Opel, to motorizing a substantially horse-drawn Germany, preparing it for war. Prior to this, Germany had been a nation devoted to legendary automotive engineering but only one vehicle at a time built by craftsman. GM brought mass production to the Reich, converting it from a horse-drawn threat to a motorized powerhouse.

Sloan and GM knowingly prepared the Wehrmacht to wage war in Europe. Detroit even secretly moved massive stores of spare Blitz parts to the Polish border in the days just before the September 1, 1939 invasion to facilitate the Blitzkrieg.

Using a charade of interlocking boards and special executive committees, Sloan kept GM’s role secret as long as possible. Where Opel lacked parts or foreign currency, Detroit ordered other international subsidiaries to stealthily assist.

In addition to motorizing the military, Sloan launched massive re-employment programs to help revive the Nazi economy—this at a time when the company declined to put Depression-wracked Americans back to work. GM’s success led to the need for the Autobahn. GM’s chief executive in Germany James Mooney received the same medal Ford was awarded, for special service rendered to the Reich.

Who custom-designed and co-planned the Nazi solutions to Jewish existence? It was International Business Machines, inventor of the Hollerith punch card, precursor to the modern computer. IBM enjoyed a monopoly on information technology. Under the micromanagement of its president, Thomas Watson, and advertising itself as “a solutions company,” IBM in 1933 reached out to the new Hitler regime. It offered to organize and systemize any solution the Reich desired, including solutions to the Jewish problem.

With IBM as a partner, the Hitler regime was able to substantially automate and accelerate all six phases of the twelve-year Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination.

As it did with any other customer, IBM simply asked the Hitler regime what result was desired. Then company engineers devised custom-tailored punch card systems to deliver the results. First, who was Jewish and where did the Jews live–exactly. IBM solution: a customized racial and religious census designed and tabulated by the company. Second, once identified, systematically expel Jews from all segments of society. IBM solution: create databases cross-tabulating ordinary organizational and community directories from association membership rosters to lists of marriages, deaths and births.

Third, confiscate Jewish assets. IBM solution: all banks and financial institutions were run by IBM cards which could be programmed to seek out the Jewish names and their accounts for seizure. Fourth: ghettoize the Jews. IBM Solution: cross-match families from their existing residences into crowded dilapidated slums so that in a single day, thousands of people could be efficiently transferred from point A to point B. Fifth, deport the Jews to camps. IBM solution: most of the railroads in Europe were routed by IBM punch cards. Create special depots to ensure that trains with cattle cars were made available to transport Jews to camps. Inbound, these trains were crowded with helpless humans. Returning, they were empty.

Sixth: the Jews were to be systematically and industrially murdered. IBM Solution 1: establish different codes for each classification of concentration camp prisoners. Prisoner Code 8 designated a Jew. Status Code 6 designated killed by gas chamber. In this way, the Reich always knew how many Jews it was killing. In extermination camps, almost all Jews were murdered upon arrival in an IBM-aided system that metered victims from ghettos to train to death camp in murderous synchrony. IBM Solution 2: create the “Extermination by Labor” program using custom IBM punch card programs that matched the skills of Jewish prisoners wherever they were to Reich labor needs wherever they were. Once moved to the labor site, Jews were worked to death. There was an IBM customer site in every concentration camp.

Had it not been for the continued conscious involvement of iconic American corporations in Hitler’s war against the Jews, the speed, shape and statistics of the Holocaust as we know it would have been dramatically different. No one knows how different, but the astronomical dimensions could have never been achieved. For their part, American corporate collaborators have long tried to obscure or hide the details of their collusion using the well-known tools of corporate misinformation, financial contributions, and bought and paid for historian reviews. But in era when people no longer believe big corporations, the dots can be fully connected to unveil the outlines of an indispensible Nazi nexus.

Edwin Black is the New York Times best selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, and his just released book, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust (Dialog Press 2009), which can be see at www.nazinexus.com.