Thoughts about Americans and the Third Reich

by Marc Masurovsky

Volumes could be written about this vast and complex topic. Here are some elements to think about and jump-start the discussion:

1/ the United States and Germany have been joined at the hip since at least World War I. Lawyers, scholars, businessmen, entertainers, artists, art historians, museum directors, curators, government officials, religious figures, bankers, diplomats—their mutually beneficial ties and exchanges have run deep before, during and after the Third Reich (1933-1945). That might explain why J. Edgar Hoover, legendary former director of the FBI, was paranoid (he was about everything, actually) that a fifth column of spies, agitators, and subversives could easily form on American soil without being bullied into serving the Reich. (Note: this line of thinking applied just as well to the perceived "communist threat") In his view, there were more than enough volunteers who would either remain neutral or engage in activities that would support National Socialist policies. In a state of war, that was potentially treasonous behavior. Henry Morgenthau, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, thought alike. Well aware of the interlocking interests that bound American and German businesses, Morgenthau was convinced that the American private sector would have to be held on a tight leash to prevent it from aiding Nazi Germany and from profiting from its discriminatory policies.

2/ American banks and companies have invested heavily in Germany. At Hitler’s rise to power, there were well over 300 American companies active on German soil. By the time the United States entered WWII in December 1941, that number may have dropped somewhat but not by much, many businessmen preferring to “wait it out” and hope for the best. That display of business pragmatism towards National Socialism allowed those companies to continue producing for the Reich either as wholly owned subsidiaries of the American parent or as companies with a majority German interest on their boards. Since the German government forbade profits from being repatriated to the US—the enemy--, those profits were set aside or, in some cases, cleverly concealed and transferred with the connivance of German officials to holding companies established in “neutral” countries where the American company held an interest. After WWII, these same American businesses sent their representatives into the various Allied zones of occupation to inspect their subsidiaries and tally up accounts receivables. Business as usual.

3/ No one knows exactly how many American citizens remained in Europe after 1933 and especially after September 1939. The State Department, through its consular offices, received thousands of requests for exit visas, most of which were not honored for quota reasons. What happened to what we believe were thousands of Americans from all walks of life stuck in every country that fell to the Nazis and their Fascist allies? Special camps and detention facilities were established for Allied enemy nationals—British and American—in France (Vittel is the most well-known) while the concentration camp of Gross-Rosen had a sub-camp where American actors, singers, and musicians were deported to, most of whom were African-American. If you look closely enough, you will find the names of American citizens typed on deportation lists from Western Europe, Italy, Austria, and Eastern European nations.

4/ for those American citizens who remained relatively free of movement throughout the years of Nazi rule, we know very little about their activities. However, we do get hints of what they were up to, like in France, where some frequented the Paris auction house of Drouot and acquired art objects which were later donated to American museums. American banks like Morgan and Chase invested in joint ventures involving the French real estate market under Vichy as it was being aryanized.

5/ In the postwar years, the discourse on Americans and the Holocaust has been a truncated, highly sanitized story. American soldiers and officers, traumatized, returning from the front, have testified about the horrors they witnessed, or rather, their aftermath as their units liberated one camp after another.

6/ After 1945, US government officials might have been upset about the role that American businesses played during WWII, but it was essential, especially in light of the incipient Cold War, to keep the nation on an even keel and not penalize opportunistic businessmen too harshly, or at all, for their dalliances with Nazis and Fascists. That might explain why no American CEO or company was brought to justice in the postwar years for acts of collaboration and abetting plunder. Those whose behavior was most conspicuous received private reprimands, but no more (Chase Bank and Morgan, for instance.). In liberated countries of Western Europe, American subsidiaries might have incurred fines for “wartime illicit profits.” Coincidentally, no sooner than WWII had ended that American intelligence priorities (equal to those of the British and the French) focused in part at using the private sector as a Trojan horse of sorts against real and perceived threats, making businessmen and entrepreneurs, partners in intelligence collection.

7/ And what of non-Jewish American survivors of internment in Nazi concentration camps, prisons and makeshift "confinement centers" set up in Axis-occupied territories? It would be fascinating and very moving to hear the stories of the many jazz and blues musicians who endured and survived the nightmare of Nazi concentration camps.

8/ By the end of 1946, the US had lifted all of its wartime restrictions on trade with Europe and the Far East. By the early 1950s, the Allies had settled financial scores with the neutral countries for having profited from trade with the Axis powers, especially as pertains to the recycling of gold looted by the Third Reich. And then, business resumed.

And so it goes…

Monday diatribe: How to buy your way out of genocide accountability

by Marc Masurovsky


Chances are that not a month goes by without us buying a product, investing in a transportation company (railroads and a select group of airlines), buying insurance policies, or for those with more cash buying stocks in firms whose parent companies were around in the 1930s and 1940s. Do we ever ask ourselves how those companies reacted to the coming to power of Fascism in Italy, authoritarian governments in Southeastern Europe, National Socialism in Germany, and pro-Axis governments in Western Europe (France and the so-called neutrals—Spain and Portugal)? We probably don’t ask these questions any more than we ask ourselves where an art object came from which we admire in an art museum, a gallery, or at an auction.

Here's a simple statistic that should be easy to absorb: There were at least 300 American companies with subsidiaries operating in Nazi Germany until Pearl Harbour came and went on December 7, 1941. In other words, for eight years, American businessmen consorted and traded with their German counterparts from the moment that Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, until that fateful morning in the Hawaiian islands which cost more than 3000 American lives and the near-total destruction of the US Pacific fleet.

The Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War would have been greatly hampered and impeded had it not been for the active participation of the private sector—industries, banks, traders, merchants—and professional groups—lawyers, accountants, finance personnel, cultural officials, brokers of all kinds, chemists, doctors, civil servants, and the list goes on.

Persecution, internment, deportation, extermination, are acts which require money and infrastructural support—human, and otherwise.


Since the end of WWII, few companies have been held accountable for “aiding and abetting” acts of persecution, internment, deportation, and extermination, except for the most egregious ones—IG Farben and Krupp being the standouts, as well as leading German bankers who were tried at the International Military Tribunal of Nurnberg and who lived like destitute princes under house arrest at Landsberg Prison until their release was ordered by the Americans.

In Europe only a small number of corporate executives and bankers went to prison or were fined for their wartime role as "collaborators."  None were punished in the United States, Canada, Great Britain or in the so-called neutral countries. And yet… tens of millions of documents are stocked on shelves in archives in the United States and Europe which illustrate and quantify the gory details of how the private sector was allowed to enrich itself off of persecution and genocide. Yes, crime does pay again and again and again.

There were a handful of punishments (if you want to call them that) meted out against companies in the past two decades.


Leading Swiss banks agreed to pay 1.25 billion dollars instead of the ad minima sum of 10 billion dollars that had been requested by the plaintiffs in order to settle class action lawsuits for their "mishandling" of financial assets deposited in their facilities by Jewish owners who fell victim to Nazism. The settlements paved the way for a groundbreaking merger of two of the three defendant Swiss banks.

JP Morgan and Chase National Bank were asked to donate a small sum of money to Holocaust survivors in exchange for authorization to merge into a megabank. They both had tripled their profits in German-occupied France in part through the Aryanization and reselling of Jewish-owned companies and real estate.

Ford Motor Company underwrote the ad-free screening on American television of “Schindler’s List” and contributed a token sum of money to charitable causes dealing with the Holocaust in exchange for being left alone about its role as an employer of Jewish and other slave labor during the Third Reich.

Barclays Bank settled for an absurdly small amount to wriggle its way out of litigation that linked its wartime activities to the fleecing of Jews living in occupied territories.

Slave labor settlements negotiated with Jewish organizations enabled multibillion dollar German companies to contribute sums that would help needy Holocaust survivors in exchange for "Holocaust peace."

The Italian insurer, Generali, was “fined” 100 million dollars out of the billions that it stole from Holocaust victims, the worst settlement on record dealing with Holocaust-era profiteering.

And the list goes on. For every company named above, there are hundreds, no, thousands that went about their business in the postwar era, unmolested, same executives, same corporate offices.

It’s hard to imagine how one can discuss the Holocaust without thinking that the most important financial, commercial and mercantile pump to the international wartime and postwar economic order came from the stolen and recycled wealth and assets of the victims of the New Order, mostly Jewish but also from non-Jews. Jewish assets were restructured, comingled with "non-Jewish" assets, Jewish-owned companies were merged into new holding companies and joint ventures through aryanization schemes that were, in fact, wholesale thefts of corporate assets. No one has been held accountable and especially not the armies of lawyers, accountants, and "notaires" who were indispensable for establishing these new "Aryan" entities and facilitating these thefts.

That stark reality explains why restitution in the postwar years was a dead letter no sooner had the word "restitution" been uttered and printed on official Allied documents.

Reparations became the token expression of what the victorious Allies and postwar governments in Europe refused to do, which was to hold the private sector fully accountable for its complicity in crimes against humanity. Had there been such justice, our ethical and moral fibers might be playing different tunes today and we might all be the better for it.

With so much cynicism about our capacity as a species to tolerate and endure mass murder and wholesale persecution around the globe, it is difficult to react except with the usual disgust at the news that a company like the French Railroad Company (SNCF) implicated in the deportation of Jews from German-occupied France has been trying to convince state governments and Holocaust remembrance institutions in the United States to accept charitable donations in order to help it cleanse its  wartime record... and facilitate its bids for contracts to provide high-speed train technology to the US. The public relations departments are working overtime to spin these fake expressions of contrition and repentance into genuine ethical moments that we are asked to savor.