Buchenwald, D-Day, Communists, Hitler's Backers, Capitalism and Media

World War II, the Holocaust petrifying and incomprehensible extermination of six million Jewish Europeans and the  non-Jewish victims of the death camps, which, while never denied, are certainly less often mentioned - all three of these connected events should be studied in the context of the many eminent American and European industrialists and bankers who made fortunes backing German rearmament under Hitler.

Descendants of important investors in Nazi Germany are among America’s wealthiest and most powerful political figures, for example the son and grandchildren of Prescott Bush, who had his company's assets seized in 1942 by President Roosevelt under the Trading with the Enemy Act. More than sixty years later, in Germany, two former slave labourers at Auschwitz filed a civil action for damages against the Bush family. [The Guardian, Saturday 25 September 2004]

From a strictly business point of view, the  initial, long-term, and deep investments of  prestigious captains of American industry and finance in Nazi Germany made sense for the huge profits that these investment ties  made before, during and after the Second World War Hitler that brought about.

President Obama's noted categories of murderous intolerance at Buchenwald,  “racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism”, with an obvious and probably  deliberate passing over mention of ‘communism.’ Communists, if one takes the deaths of both communist political prisoners and Soviet soldiers together, would probably easily represent the greatest number of inmates murdered  at Buchenwald under a single category.

 One supposes that a U.S. president, who believes in capitalism, would not wish to give attention to the Communist dead, though they were America’s allies and bore the brunt of Hitler’s military power.

CNN detailed part of the breakdown of inmates murdered at Buchenwald as part of the coverage of Obama address there.

“Total deaths = 56,000
Jewish deaths = 11,000”
to complete:
Soviet soldiers deaths = 8,000
Communists, Poles, Gypsies, Cripples, Homosexuals, etc. 37,000

In any case, more often than not, it is Jewish deaths that are most remembered, which is very understandable, given the pre-war prejudice that Jews suffered throughout America and Europe that made their citizens feel horribly ashamed when the ghastly reality of death camps came to be graphically witnessed in 1945.

In 1947, trying to make up for their belatedly realized complicity in Hitler’s demonic and horrific brutal persecution, torture and mass murder of European Jews, the world powers in contrition, awarded the survivors, lands in the colonial occupied Middle East holy to their religion.

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