"For
the government did sanction such dubious transactions -- both before and after
Pearl Harbor. A presidential edict,
issued six days after December 7, 1941, actually set up the legislation whereby
licensing arrangements for trading with the enemy could officially be granted. Often during the years after Pearl Harbor the
government permitted such trading. For
example, ITT was allowed to continue its relations with the Axis and Japan
until 1945, even though that conglomerate was regarded as an official
instrument of United States Intelligence.
No attempt was made to prevent Ford from retaining its interests for the
Germans in Occupied France, nor were the Chase Bank or the Morgan Bank
expressly forbidden to keep open their branches in Occupied Paris. It is indicated that the Reichsbank and Nazi
Ministry of Economics made promises to
certain U.S. corporate leaders that their properties would not be injured after
the Fuhrer was victorious. Thus, the
bosses of the multinationals knew that whichever side won the war, they would not be adversely affected. (Why gamble and risk billions when you don't
have to?)
"It
is important to consider the size of American investments in Nazi Germany at
the time of Pearl Harbor. These amounted
to an estimated total of $475 million (which would be many hundreds of billions
in today's dollars). Standard Oil of New
Jersey had $120 million invested there;
General Motors had $35 million; ITT had $30 million; and Ford had $17.5
million -- invested in Nazi Germany! ....
It
is interesting that whereas there is no evidence of any serious attempt by
Roosevelt to impeach the guilty in the United States, there is evidence that
Hitler strove to punish certain German Fraternity
associates on the grounds of treason to the Nazi state. Indeed, in the case of ITT, perhaps the most
flagrant of the corporations in its outright dealings with the enemy, Hitler
and his postmaster general, the venerable Wilhelm Ohnesorge, strove to impound
the German end of the business. But even
they were powerless in such a situation:
the Gestapo leader of counterintelligence,
Walter Schellenberg, was a prominent director and shareholder of ITT by
arrangement with New York -- and even Hitler dared not cross the Gestapo.
"As
for Roosevelt, the Sphinx still keeps his secrets. That supreme politician held all of the
forces of collusion and betrayal in balance, publicly praising those executives
whom he knew to be questionable. Before
Pearl Harbor, he allowed such egregious executives as James D. Mooney of General Motors and William Rhodes Davis
of the Davis Oil Company to enjoy pleasant tete-a-tetes with Hitler and Goring,
while maintaining a careful record of what they were doing. During the war, J. Edgar Hoover, Adolf A. Berle,
Henry Morgenthau, and Harold Ickes kept the President fully advised of all internal
and external transgressions. ....
Why did high-level officials of the American
government allow these transgressions to continue after Pearl Harbor?
Not to have allowed them
would have involved public disclosure;
then the procedure of legally
disconnecting these alliances under the antitrust laws would have resulted in a
public scandal that would have drastically affected public morale, caused
widespread strikes, and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services. Moreover, as some corporate executives were
never tired of reminding the government, their trial and imprisonment would
have made it impossible for the corporate boards to help the American war
effort. Therefore, the government was powerless to intervene. After 1945, the Cold War, which the executives had done so much to
provoke, made it even more necessary that the truth of The Fraternity agreements should not be revealed.
Quite
significantly, Lauchlin Currie, of Roosevelt's White House Economics Staff, was
banished to Bogota, Colombia, and his citizenship stripped from him in 1956,
for exposing American-Nazi connections."
Higham's entire book, Trading With the Enemy , fully documented, can be read online (or downloaded).
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