Eurasia Press & News
Chapter Three ‘Preparing War Profits’ – The ‘Good War’ Coverup Slogan Unmasked By Well Kept Business Records and Tax Documentation
That the Second World War was a ‘good war,’ a clear fight against what a madman had brought about, has been a major and fundamental deception solidified in Wall Street owned media and movies. The famous American historian Studs Terkel in his The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984), writes with unabashed cynicism, “While the rest of the world came out bruised and scarred and nearly destroyed, we came out with the most unbelievable machinery, tools, manpower, money … The war was fun for America. I’m not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us the war was a hell of a good time.”
The Nazi Counsel for the Defense at the Nuremberg Trials Said the Truth
The deception fostered in Wall Street war investors owned press and TV that the white people of the American, English, French and other racist European colonial empires were good guy heroes during the Second World War has been pervasive and universal. Even the outcry of the German Counsel for the Defense in his summation at the major Nuremberg trial, heard by the audience of millions that saw the block buster American documentary movie Judgement at Nuremberg, (with Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy and Marlena Dietrich) seems to have made little impression.
“Your Honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich? Did it not hear the words of Hitler’s broadcast all over the world? Did it not read his intentions in Mein Kampf, published in every corner of the world?…
Where is the responsibility of the world leader Winston Churchill…who said in an open letter to the London Times in 1938, Were England to suffer a national disaster, I should pray to God…to send a man of the strength of mind and will of an Adolf Hitler.’ In 1938! your honor,” repeats Schell shouting the date one year before Hitler invaded Poland. “Are we now to find Winston Churchill guilty? Where is the responsibility of the Vatican…who signed in the concordat with Hitler…giving him his first tremendous prestige? Are we now to find the Vatican guilty? Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?” shouts actor Maximilian Schell in defense of the Nazis on trial.
How many moviegoers are shocked when they hear “American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?”
Amazingly, in this American made movie, the German Counsel for the Defense is seen making the case that seventy to eighty-five million men, women and children[27] didn’t die because of Adolph Hitler. They perished because the wealthy in the US and Western Europe empowered Adolph Hitler to make war.
What the movie does not have the audience hear is Nuremberg Trial Chief Prosecutor US Justice Robert Jackson (played by Spenser Tracy) during his summation for the prosecution denounce the Nazis for rearming Germany as Jackson did in 1946 most incredibly without reference to the massive US investments and joint venturing of giant US corporations. Quoted here below is what Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson said at the trial in accusation of the Germans rearming without mention of American industrialists’ paramount role in Nazi Germany’s rearmament, nor mentioning the British and French permitting the rearmament while they had the military power to enforce the prohibitions against German rearmament in the Versailles Treaty.
“From the moment the Nazis seized power, they set about feverish but stealthy efforts, in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, to arm for war. In 1933 they found no air force. By 1939 they had 21 squadrons, consisting of 240 echelons or about 2,400 first-line planes, together with trainers and transports. In 1933 they found an army of 3 infantry and 3 cavalry divisions. By 1939 they had raised and equipped an army of 51 divisions, 4 of which were fully motorized and 4 of which were Panzer divisions. In 1933 they found a navy of 1 cruiser and 6 light cruisers. By 1939 they had built a navy of 4 battleships, 1 aircraft carrier, 6 cruisers, 22 destroyers, and 54 submarines. They had also built up in that period an armament industry as efficient as that of any country in the world.” [28]
In other words, Chief Prosecutor Justice Jackson covered up the absolutely essential and critical roll of US industrialists and bankers in the rearming of Germany against the prohibiting provisions in the Versailles Treaty which were not only ignored by the Americans investing and joint-venturing with the Nazi government in building Hitler’s Wehrmacht up to world’s number one military force in six years, but openly allowed by the US government and the governments of the British and French, which must be considered accessories after the fact to the crime of enabling Nazi Germany power to make a world war.
Arming Hitler’s Impoverished Low Wage Nazi Germany Was the Most Profitable Investment in History and Initially It Was Done Openly
World War Two was the most profitable business investment in history. Not only for the mega massive profits of US corporations during the preparations for war, and even during the war, but after the war they had made possible. When WW II ended, the only major industrial plant intact was that owned by Wall Street. Wall Street, and the US government Wall Street controlled, had become the first single world superpower in history. A further boon for Wall Street’s war investors was that the cities of Wall Street’s designated archenemy, socialist model USSR, lay half in ruins with twenty-eight million of its citizens dead, which represented nearly half of all the deaths during all of WW II in Europe, Africa and Asia. Does anyone outside of the Russians themselves have time or inclination to care?
Seven years before the outbreak of WWII, on the eve of this rearming of Germany with US government acquiescence if not support, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last wealthy aristocratic insider US President, wrote to his confidant Colonel House “as you and I know, this government has been owned by a financial element in the centers of power since the days of Andrew Jackson.”[28a] (Jackson was US president a hundred years earlier). FDR most certainly meant that they both knew that the “government owned by a financial element” included all three branches, Legislative, Executive and Judicial, and therefore Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency.
Roosevelt was permitted to tax the wealthy (one year as high as 94% of income over $ 200,000),[29] in order to enact socialist reforms like Social Security, Unemployment Compensation and have the government put the unemployed to work in Civilian Conservation Corps camps and the Works Projects Administration and thus quiet calls for revolution and provide a more livable America than what the economic depression had made American families suffer up to that time.
FDR Was Fully Aware His Cronies Were Investing in Hitler’s Military
Roosevelt, at the same time, had to have been aware that many of his cronies and most of his peers among the wealthy owners of America’s corporations were investing and joint venturing head over heels in and with Nazi Germany. In 1936, Senator James A. Reed of Missouri on the floor of the Senate accused Franklin D. Roosevelt himself as being a “hired man for the economic royalists” in Wall Street, and that the Roosevelt family “is one of the largest stockholders in the General Electric Company.”[30]
Quoting from Matt Stoller’s “Wall St. Was America’s First Foe in World War II – Breaking up monopolies was the first step in fighting Hitler” excepts from Matt Stoller’s Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. as published in Foreign Policy Magazine, 2019/10/28. [31]
What Roosevelt had in 1932 in confidence referred to the “unofficial … economic Government of the United States” had to be dismantled, and replaced with a more democratic means of wielding power. The system that monopolists such as J. Pierpont Morgan and Andrew Mellon had put together did not just wield power over government; it was a government in and of itself.
On the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had asked for larger Army and Navy budgets, but 85 percent of U.S. factory machinery dated from the 1920s or earlier, and to build a larger Army and Navy, vast supplies of steel, aluminum, copper, and other materials would be needed. The control of monopolists, who restricted supplies of these metals, would have to be broken.
This government of the monopolists had two separate layers of power. There were individual monopolies. Mellon’s aluminum giant Alcoa, for instance, was not only an aluminum producer, but the regulator of the aluminum trade itself. It controlled pricing, output, wages, and the buying of key inputs, such as electric power. As Morgan, and then Mellon, took a set of businesses and turned them into monopolies, power passed from the engineers, workers, and communities who created, invented, and produced, to financiers, salesmen, and lawyers who controlled, restrained, and manipulated.
The second layer was how these monopolies related to one another. An individual monopoly controlled just a single branch of trade. It became a political system when its power, the power of one boss, was combined with other monopolies, the power of many bosses. And this system—of big-business bosses monopolizing the key channels of trade and commerce—still lived on Wall Street.
Wall Street was where financiers moved resources around, through lending or borrowing money, and combined or split up companies. The task for the White House and the populists in Congress was to take this private government apart.
The US government financed an armaments buildup by lobbing Congress to charter a large public bank to lend money to build factories. Though it was controversial, Congress chartered what what it named the Defense Plant Corporation to begin the rapid buildup of the U.S. armaments industry. Because of the power of this financing, anti-monopolists ensured that the government owned the plants it financed and hired businesses leaders and engineers to run them.
In January of 1942, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold told congressmen at the House Military Affairs Subcommittee hearing, that there was Nazi influence over U.S. industry. “Before the war, we had an industry dominated by cartels” he said, “cartels that worked with Nazi companies. Indictments must make that sort of thing hazardous.” Standard Oil of New Jersey professed innocence about a deal with Nazi dye maker I.G. Farben to withhold production of synthetic rubber, but Standard Oil paid a fine and released its patents for all to use. Across the economy, U.S. firms rushed to break the cartel agreements they had with German firms. (Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy By Matt Stoller) [32]
The military blocked the Antitrust Division from prosecuting more suits while the war was going on. Since prosecution had to be suspended until the war was over, the Antitrust Division division started attacking international cartel arrangements. The Department of Justice went after optical goods (Bausch & Lomb’s tie-up with the German Zeiss corporation), tungsten carbide (General Electric and Krupp), electric lamps (General Electric and AEG in Germany), glass electric lightbulbs (Corning Glass and Phillips), potash and nitrogen (DuPont and Allied Chemical), chemicals and pharmaceuticals (Sterling and I.G. Farben, Schering Corporation and the Schering Corporation of Berlin), dyestuffs and photographic supplies (General Aniline and I.G. Farben), synthetic rubber, toluol (used to make the explosive TNT), and magnesium (Alcoa, Dow Chemical, and I.G. Farben). In March 1945, Alcoa lost its antitrust suit on appeal in federal court, and it was forced to license its patents on a royalty-free basis to competitors. Being an industrial monopoly had become illegal.” [32]
FDR had to have been aware of what America’s wealthy were up to as they counted on fascism and war to rescue and protect their profitable participation in the European empires plundering near world wide rule over human society. The six year cataclysm their profitable investments made possible would surpass the European empires’ record of lives lost in all of the previous five centuries of Caucasian conquering and plundering of Africa, Asia and the Americas. The Second World War, made possible by US corporations’ great investments in and joint-venturing with Nazi Germany’s military, brought death to approximately 3% of the Earth’s population at that time. In facilitating the genocide that was the Second World War, Americans led by their wealthy investment bankers, merely acted as they had since before the beginning of the United States nation, when the New England banks ran the slavery genocide to be followed by land banks fostered genocides in Native America nations, Mexico and the Philippines. Wall Street institutions favored the imperialist foreign policy that brought about the invasion of China and the lucrative sacking of Beijing that was soon followed by the newly created Federal Reserve banks [33] facilitating the mega loan sharked continuation of the First World War and requiring the eventual US armed forces’ entry. [33a]
From April 1934 through February 1936, the US Senate’s Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry chaired by Senator Gerald Nye investigated the financial and banking interests that underlay the United States’ involvement in World War I. The committee reported that between 1915 and January 1917, the United States lent Germany 27 million dollars. In the same period, it lent to the United Kingdom and its allies 2.3 billion dollars, almost 100 times as much. These payments were made during wartime: July 28, 1914 – November 11, 1918. Because of these facts Senator Nye, many war critics, and members of the American public concluded that the US entered the war for reasons of profit, not policy — because it was in American commercial interest for the United Kingdom not to lose.
Was this genocidal American history ever in any way, sobering for aristocratic President Franklyn Roosevelt to consider, especially during the years of the Nye Committee, early in the first term of his administration? In 1935, the most highly decorated US General ever at the time, Smedley Butler, wrote in his book, War is a Racket, “I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. …During those years I operated on three continents.”[34]
FDR’s high position enabled him to appreciate corporate governed America’s indispensable role in the empowerment of Hitler’s Nazi Germany for war, and forced FDR to wheel and deal politically around the various tight working connections between Wall Street and the Nazi Government as elaborated above in part by excepts from Matt Stoller’s Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
Roosevelt was equally aware of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity. Already in 1933 March 9-10, a wave of riots began against German Jews by the SA, so-called Storm Troopers of the Nazi Party, and Stahlhelm, a nationalist organization comprised of World War I veterans.
March 19, The Jewish War Veterans of America announces it will boycott German goods and services. March 27, A gigantic anti-Nazi protest rally, organized by the American Jewish Congress, was held in New York City. 55,000 people attended threatening to boycott German goods if the Germans carry out their planned permanent boycott of Jewish-owned stores and businesses.
Notes – Chapter Three
- The higher figure of 85 million includes deaths from war-related disease and famine
- Summation for the Prosecution by Justice Robert Jackson 2. “The Preparation and Waging of Wars of Aggression”, Nuremberg, Germany, July 26, 1946 EC-28 https://famous-trials.com/nuremberg/1933-jacksonsummation
28a. Letter to Col. Edward Mandell House (21 November 1933); as quoted in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945, edited by Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), pg. 373
- The Revenue Act of 1935, 49 Stat. 1014 (Aug. 30, 1935), raised federal income tax on higher income levels, by introducing the “Wealth Tax”. Roy G. Blakey, and Gladys C. Blakey. “The Revenue Act of 1935.” American Economic Review (1935): 673-690. online1] It was a progressive tax that took up to 75 percent of the highest incomes (over $1 million per year.)
- New York Times, October 6, 1936;
- This article is excerpted from Matt Stoller’s Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/28/wall-street-world-war-ii-democracy-monopoly/ “Wall St. Was America’s First Foe in World War II. Breaking up US Monopolies was the first step in fighting Hitler.” Excerpts Matt Stoller – FP foreignpolicy.com Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is writing a book on monopoly power in the 20th century also for Simon and Schuster.
- Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy By Matt Stoller, (Simon and Schuster)
- Anthony Sutton, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (February 5, 2014)
- Smedley D. Butler, WAR IS A RACKET (Feral Press, 1935)
