
WALL STREET WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN THE FINANCING OF THE NAZIS After WW2, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau (Right below in a picture with FDR) was deeply disturbed by the implications of Wall Street in the rise of Nazi Germany. He prepared a memorandum to present to President Roosevelt. The final draft was completed and presented on may 29th after the death of FDR. It was too late to change the course of History and even FRD would not have dare to modify it. Wall Street was never prosecuted and some American financiers and tycoons got away with some of the meanest deeds of WW2 . |
| THE HENRY MORGENTHAU MEMORANDUM May 29, 1945 |
Lieutenant-General Lucius D. Clay, as Deputy to General Eisenhower, actively runs the American element of the Control Council for Germany. General Clay's three principal advisers on the Control Council staff are : * Ambassador Robert D. Murphy, who is in charge of the Political Division * Louis Douglas, whom General Clay describes as my personal adviser on economical, financial and governmental matters." Douglas resigned as Director of the Budget in 1934; and for the following eight years he attacked the government's fiscal policies. Since 1940, Douglas has been president of the Mutual Life Insurance Company, and since December 1944, he has been a director of the General Motors Corporation * Brigadier-General William Draper, who is the director of the Economics Division of the Control Council. General Draper is a partner of the banking firm of Dillon, Read and Company. Sunday's New York Times contained the announcement of key personnel who have been appointed by General Clay and General Draper to the Economic Division of the Control Council. The appointments include the following: * R.J. Wysor is to be in charge of the metallurgical matters. Wysor was president of the Republic Steel Corporation from 1937 until a recent date, and prior thereto, he was associated with the Bethlehem Steel, Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation and the Republic Steel Corporation * Edward X. Zdunke is to supervise the engineering section. Prior to the war, Mr. Zdunke was head of General Motors at Antwerp * Philip Gaethke is to be in charge of mining operations. Gaethke was formerly connected with Anaconda Copper and was manager of its smelters and mines in Upper Silesia before the war * Philip P. Clover is to be in charge of handling oil matters. He was formerly a representative of the Socony Vacuum Oil Company in Germany * Peter Hoglund is to deal with industrial production problems. Hoglund is on leave from General Motors and is said to be an expert on German production * Calvin B. Hoover is to be in charge of the Intelligence Group on the Control Council and is also to be a special advisor to General Draper. In a letter to the Editor of the New York Times on October 9, 1944, Hoover wrote as follows: " The publication of Secretary Morgenthau's plan for dealing with Germany has disturbed me deeply ... such a Carthaginian peace would leave a legacy of hate to poison international relations for generations to come... the void in the economy of Europe which would exist through the destruction of all German industry is something which is difficult to contemplate." * Laird Bell is to be Chief Counsel of the Economic Division. He is a well-known Chicago lawyer and in May 1944, was elected the president of the Chicago Daily News, after the death of Frank Knox. One of the men who helped General Draper in the selection of personnel for the Economics Division was Colonel Graeme Howard, a vice-president of General Motors, who was in charge of their overseas business and who was a leading representative of General Motors in Germany prior to the war. Howard is the author of a book in which he praises totalitarian practices, justifies German aggression and the Munich policy of appeasement, and blames Roosevelt for precipitating the war. So when we examine the Control Council for Germany under General Lucius D. Clay we find that the head of the finance division was Louis Douglas, director of the Morgan-controlled General Motors and president of Mutual Life Insurance. (Opel, the General Motors German subsidiary, had been Hitler's biggest tank producer.) The head of the Control Council's Economics Division was William Draper, a partner in the Dillon, Read firm that had so much to do with building Nazi Germany in the first place. All three men were, not surprisingly in the light of more recent findings, members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Were American Industrialists and Financiers Guilty of War Crimes? The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials proposed to select those responsible for World War II preparations and atrocities and place them on trial. Whether. such a procedure is morally justifiable is a debatable matter; there is some justification for holding that Nuremberg was a political farce far removed from legal principle.7 However, if we assume that there is such legal and moral justification, then surely any such trial should apply to all, irrespective of nationality. What for example should exempt Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, but not exempt Adolf Hitler and Goering? If the offense is preparation for war, and not blind vengeance, then justice should be impartial. The directives prepared by the U.S. Control Council in Germany for the arrest and detention of war criminals refers to "Nazis" and "Nazi sympathizers," not "Germans." The relevant extracts are as follows: You will search out, arrest, and hold, pending receipt by you of further instructions as to their disposition, Adolph Hitler, his chief Nazi associates, other war criminals and all persons who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes. Then follows a list of the categories of persons to be arrested, including Nazis and Nazi sympathizers holding important and key positions in (a) National and Gau Civic and economic organizations; (b ) corporations and other organizations in which the government has a major financial interest; (c) industry, commerce, agriculture, and finance; (d) education; (e) the judicial; and (f) the press, publishing houses and other agencies disseminating news and propaganda. Top American industrialists and financiers named in this book are covered by the categories listed above. Henry Ford and Edsel Ford respectively contributed money to Hitler and profited from German wartime production. Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, General Motors, and I.T.T. certainly made financial or technical contributions which comprise prima facie evidence of "participating in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises." There is, in brief, evidence which suggests: * cooperation with the Wehrmacht (Ford Motor Company, Chase Bank, Morgan Bank) * aid to the Nazi Four Year Plan and economic mobilization for war (Standard Oil of New Jersey) * creating and equipping the Nazi war machine (I.T.T.) * stockpiling critical materials for the Nazis (Ethyl Corporation) * weakening the Nazis' potential enemies (American I.G. Farben) * carrying on of propaganda, intelligence, and espionage (American I.G. Farben and Rockefeller public-relations man Ivy Lee) At the very least there is sufficient evidence to demand a thorough and impartial investigation. However, as we have noted previously, these same firms and financiers were prominent in the 1933 election of Roosevelt and consequently had sufficient political pull to squelch threats of investigation. Extracts from the Morgenthau diary demonstrate that Wall Street political power was sufficient even to control the appointment of officers responsible for the denazification and eventual government of post-war Germany. Did these American firms know of their assistance to Hitler's military machine? According to the firms themselves, emphatically not. They claim innocence of any intent to aid Hitler's Germany. Witness a telegram sent by the chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New Jersey to Secretary of War Patterson after World War II, when preliminary investigation of Wall Street assistance was under way: " During the entire period of our business contacts, we had no inkling of Farben's conniving part in Hitler's brutal politics, We offer any help we can give to see that complete truth is brought to light, and that rigid justice is done." F.W. Abrams, Chairman of Board Unfortunately, the evidence presented is contrary to Abrams' telegraphed assertions. Standard Oil of New Jersey not only aided Hitler's war machine, but had knowledge of this assistance. Emil Helfferich, the board chairman of a Standard of New Jersey subsidiary, was a member of the Keppler Circle before Hitler came to power; he continued to give financial contributions to Himmler's Circle as late as 1944. Accordingly, it is not at all difficult to visualize why Nazi industrialists were puzzled by "investigation" and assumed at the end of the war that their Wall Street friends would bail them out and protect them from the wrath of those who had suffered. These attitudes were presented to the Kilgore Committee in 1946: You might also be interested in knowing, Mr. Chairman, that the top I.G. Farben people and others, when we questioned them about these activities, were inclined at times to be very indignant. Their general attitude and expectation was that the war was over and we ought now to be assisting them in helping to get I.G. Farben and German industry back on its feet. Some of them have outwardly said that this questioning and investigation was, in their estimation, only a phenomenon of short duration, because as soon as things got a little settled they would expect their friends in the United States and in England to be coming over. Their friends, so they said, would put a stop to activities such as these investigations and would see that they got the treatment which they regarded as proper and that assistance would be given to them to help reestablish their industry." |


POSTWORD Roosevelt died on April 12th 1945, a month before Morgenthau completed his memorandum. President Truman did nothing to squash Morgenthau's fears and Wall Street kept on with its business to finance Germany's reconstruction as it had financed Nazis enterprises. Both Word Wars were extremely profitable to Wall Street big finance houses. In July 1945, three months after the death of President Roosevelt, Morgenthau resigned as Treasury Secretary. He was then planning to turn post-war Germany into an agricultural concern. An idea that did not have the agreement of Wall Street nor of President Harry Truman. He was a very capable and honest man and spent the rest of his life using his influence to help the jewish cause. He died on February 6, 1967, in Poughkeepsie, New York State. |



| PRE-WORD TO THE MEMORANDUM Real history is always obliterated. It is written by the victors who do not want to look bad in the eyes of the future generations. Given the role of America and US military forces during WW2 in the destruction of Nazi Germany, official historians have developed a tendency to forget that before the war Nazis had supporters all over the world, in England and in America, and not only in Fascist Italy or Spain. The major role of American tycoons and Wall Street financiers in the rise of Hitlerism was thus totally swept under the carpet for many years. It is now totally forgotten -or it has even never been known by the public- but the main reason behind |
| General De Gaulle's dislike of the Americans was not their arrogance and their imperialism but the hypocrisy of a nation that forgot after 1945 her responsibility in the rise of Adolf Hitler, her contemptuous ignorance of France's concerns in the 30s and her willingness to forgo Germany's debts vis à vis the victors of WW1 by lending to Hitler billions of dollars to pay for Germany's reconstruction and war debts to France. The goal was evident : reinforce Germany's industrial potential and weaken France's ambitions. America has never wanted an Europe dominated by one single nation and was thus led to favorise the ambitions of post-WW1 weak Germany. This policy was not overtly "pro-Nazi" and all American financiers or industrialists were not "Nazis" but some were and others were just happy to do business with Hitler and his corrupt regime. |

| Postwar Germany was in rubbles and if Morgenthau would have had his say, it would have stayed so for a long time and the Communists would not have had any difficulty to take over an agricultural country resourceless. His father had 5 sons and he used to say that Henry was the imbecile of the family. The economic miracle of post-war Germany is largely due to his ideas : deprived of her old industrial equipment, Germany borrowed new equipments from the USA while France and Russia inherited the old obsolete pre-war german industrial assets. Stupidity is everywhere on this planet, notably among the victors of a war. |