Author Charles Higham, in a shocking expose of American corporate greed, has revealed a disgraceful if not criminal collaboration of some of America’s largest corporations with Nazi Germany not only before but during World War II.
Higham documents his claims with information gathered through the National Archives and the Freedom of Information Act. His book, Trading with the Enemy, gives evidence that such industrial and financial giants as DuPont, Rockefeller, Ford, Chase Manhattan Bank, I.T.T., General Motors, and Standard Oil purposely collaborated with the Nazi’s either for monetary gain or because they were Nazi sympathizers hoping for a German victory.
Higham claims that, among other examples, Standard Oil supplied fuel for German U-boats through neutral Spain. It continued providing such supplies until 1944 and in the process caused great loss of life to American merchant seamen.
ITT was the willing supplier of communications and other equipÂment for the buzz bombs that plummeted into London.
Ford maintained a motor plant in Vichy France that turned out tanks and troop carriers from the Third Reich.
Chase Manhattan Bank trafficked in the gold market through the Nazi-controlled Bank for International Settlement in Basel. The source for some of the gold it bought and sold: dentures and wedding rings from death camps.
Most of the above concerns were interlocked with the German industrial giant I. G. Farben, the company that produced the poison gas for the death camps and that ran the largest camp, Auschwitz, for its slave labor.
On the surface, it would appear that this material has the makings of a major international news story. Surely the information available to Higham is equally available to our major news media.
Nor can the media be ignoring the story because it is dated. Earlier this year, the press widely publicized a Nazi war criminal by the name of Klaus Barbie.
If Barbie and his alleged wartime mass murders are worthy of front page news coverage in our newspapers, is the alleged collaboraÂtion of leading American corporations with the Nazi’s any less worthy of front page coverage?
SOURCE:
San Francisco Chronicle, 2/9/83, Carl Vogel review of Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-Money 1933-1949, by Charles Higham,      Delacorte Publishing, N.Y.