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How the West supported the Nazis: finance, appeasement, and Cold War bargains

Western support for the Nazis was not one coordinated plot. It was a documented chain of credit, corporate technology, ideology, appeasement, neutral banking, and postwar recruitment that helped Nazi Germany at different stages.

Figures Adolf HitlerEdwin BlackHenry FordHjalmar SchachtJ. P. MorganReinhard GehlenThomas McKittrickWernher von Braun

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  2. The first channel was ideological. American antisemitic mass media gave Nazi leaders usable myths about Jewish finance and conspiracy.

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    Henry Ford spreads the Jewish finance myth in America

    also in Jews, moneylending, and the story of banking, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    The carmaker Henry Ford used his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to publish The International Jew, a series that recycled the Protocols and blamed Jews for controlling banking and corrupting society. Millions of copies spread the lie across the United States and abroad, and Ford was later praised by the Nazis for it. The claim that Jews control finance is not a fact with two sides; it is a debunked libel that Ford knowingly promoted.

  3. Race science was transnational before Hitler. US eugenics law and research gave Nazi racial hygiene a precedent it openly studied.

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    Harry Laughlin's Model Eugenical Sterilization Law

    also in Eugenics and forced sterilization in America, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    Eugenicist Harry Laughlin, of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, published a "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law" intended as a template for state legislatures. Virginia's 1924 sterilization act was drafted using Laughlin's model, and it was later cited by German officials drafting the Nazi sterilization law of 1933. Laughlin was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Heidelberg in 1936 in recognition of his eugenics work.

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  5. Finance rebuilt capacity before Nazism held power. US-led credit stabilized Weimar Germany and helped restore the industrial base the Nazis later captured.

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    The Dawes Plan loans to Germany

    The book quotes Quigley describing the Dawes Plan of 1924 to 1929, largely a J. P. Morgan production, under which Germany borrowed and owed more at the end than the start. It frames this as a debt trap that rebuilt German industry.

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    IG Farben becomes the industrial engine of the Reich

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    The chemical giant IG Farben, formed in 1925 from firms including BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst, grew into a pillar of the German war economy, producing synthetic fuel and rubber the military needed. It later built a plant at Auschwitz that used concentration-camp slave labor. After the war its executives were tried at Nuremberg and the combine was broken up.

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    Buck v. Bell upholds forced sterilization

    also in Eugenics and scientific racism, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that states could forcibly sterilize people deemed unfit, with Justice Holmes writing "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The decision led to tens of thousands of sterilizations and was cited by Nazi defendants at Nuremberg.

  9. Technology transfer mattered. Patent pools and corporate agreements moved fuel, rubber, and chemical knowledge across borders before the war.

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    Standard Oil and IG Farben share synthetic-fuel patents

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    Standard Oil of New Jersey and IG Farben struck agreements pooling patents and research on synthetic fuel and rubber. The ties continued into the late 1930s and drew sharp scrutiny in the United States during the war, when critics said they had slowed American synthetic-rubber development. The cooperation is documented in the companies' own records and later Senate hearings.

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  11. Foreign-owned subsidiaries became part of German production. Control during wartime varied, but the factories and output served the Reich.

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    Ford and General Motors build vehicles inside Germany

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    Ford ran a German subsidiary at Cologne, and General Motors owned Opel, the country's largest carmaker. Through the 1930s their German plants turned out cars and trucks, and after 1939 those factories produced vehicles for the German war effort. The parent firms' degree of control during the war has been argued over, but the production is documented.

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    Fritz Thyssen bankrolls Hitler and later writes 'I Paid Hitler'

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    The steel magnate Fritz Thyssen was one of the earliest big-business backers of the Nazi Party, giving money and lending his name in the years before 1933. He broke with Hitler over the war and fled Germany. The memoir published under his name, I Paid Hitler, describes that funding; Thyssen later distanced himself from parts of the ghostwritten text, so its details are attributed to him rather than taken as gospel.

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    The Nazis weaponize the Jewish finance lie legendary

    also in Curriculum, programming, and propaganda, Jews, moneylending, and the story of banking, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    Nazi propaganda made the myth of Jewish financial and world control a core message, casting Jews as the hidden power behind both banking and communism to justify persecution. This lie helped pave the road to the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered. The trope of international Jewish finance is not a harmless exaggeration; it was central to the deadliest genocide of the modern era and is false in every part.

  16. Domestic capital then fused with dictatorship. German business money helped consolidate Hitler after he promised rearmament and the destruction of labor power.

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    German industrialists back Hitler at a private meeting

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    Three weeks after Hitler became chancellor, some two dozen leading German industrialists met privately with him and Hermann Goering. Hitler promised to crush the labor movement and rebuild the military, and the businessmen pledged large sums for the coming election. The meeting, arranged with Hjalmar Schacht, tied big German business to the new regime.

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    IBM's German subsidiary supplies punch-card machines

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag leased and serviced Hollerith punch-card tabulating machines used in German censuses and record-keeping. In his book IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black argues this data technology helped the regime identify and track victims. Black's charge of knowing complicity is his interpretation; the machines and the business relationship are documented.

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    Nazi Eugenics Officials Praise the California Model

    also in Eugenics and forced sterilization in America, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    Nazi officials and eugenicists publicly credited American sterilization laws as their inspiration. Dr. Falk Ruttke, a Nazi legal official, and Dr. Fritz Lenz both praised California's program, and a German eugenics researcher wrote to Human Betterment Foundation co-founder Paul Popenoe that his organization's work "had been studied with great interest by the National Socialist Government." Historian Stefan Kuhl documented extensive correspondence and personal exchanges between American and German eugenicists in this period.

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    Standard Oil fuel additives reach German aviation

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    Through joint ventures tied to the tetraethyl lead process, know-how for high-octane aviation fuel additives passed into German hands in the 1930s. The additive was important for military aircraft engines. The arrangement is documented in corporate records and later investigations, and is a business-history fact rather than a claim of intent.

  20. Appeasement was support by permission rather than cash. Elite diplomacy gave Hitler time, legitimacy, and room to test how much he could take.

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    Lothian meets Hitler

    Lord Lothian held a long conversation with Hitler in which Hitler reportedly proposed an England-Germany-US alliance giving Germany a free hand on the Continent. Quigley treats Lothian and The Times as advancing Anglo-German fellowship.

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    Cold Spring Harbor distributes Nazi eugenics film

    generate offspring for crime or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.'”137 In 1937, Laughlin and his Cold Spring Harbor office became the U.S. distributor of a two-reel Nazi euge

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    Halifax's conversation with Hitler

    Acting Foreign Secretary Halifax met Hitler and, Quigley says, left the German government convinced Britain saw Germany as a bulwark against communism and would accept the peaceful liquidation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

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    Chamberlain meets Hitler at Berchtesgaden

    On September 15, 1938, Chamberlain decided to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. After enduring several hours of Hitler's ranting about mistreatment of the Sudeten Germans, Chamberlain agreed to dismember Czechoslovakia, ceding all districts with populations more than 50-percent German.

    • Chamberlain decided to end the tension on September 15 by visiting Hitler. Hitler showed his disdain by choosing Berchtesgaden as the meeting place
      Diplomacy
    • Chamberlain and Hitler 1938
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    Chamberlain meets Hitler at Godesberg

    On 22 September Chamberlain carried the Czech acceptance of partition to Hitler at Godesberg, where he found the Führer in a vile temper receiving reports of alleged Czech atrocities; Hitler then raised new demands.

    • The next day, September 22nd, Chamberlain took the Czech acceptance to Hitler at Godesberg on the Rhine. He found the Führer in a vile temper, receiving messages every few minutes about the atrocities being inflicted on the Sudetens by the Czechs.
      Tragedy and Hope , p. 534-536
    • Chamberlain and Hitler 1938
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  26. Munich handed Hitler territory and Czech defenses without war. Czechoslovakia was excluded from the decision and forced to accept it.

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    Munich Conference dismembers Czechoslovakia

    On September 29, 1938, the four leaders (Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini) met in Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi Party. Chamberlain and Daladier accepted Mussolini's draft containing Hitler's Bad Godesberg program, with Czech representatives left languishing in anterooms while their country was being dismembered.

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    The Bank for International Settlements handles Reichsbank gold

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    The Bank for International Settlements, the Basel clearing house owned by central banks, transferred gold belonging to Czechoslovakia to the German Reichsbank after Germany seized the country in 1939. During the war it went on accepting Reichsbank gold, some of it looted. The transactions later became a case study in how a neutral financial body kept dealing with the Reich.

  30. Neutral finance kept channels open after conquest. The BIS and Swiss banking system became paths through which Reichsbank gold moved.

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    The Swiss National Bank buys looted Nazi gold

    also in Swiss neutrality: the vault and the wartime record

    Through the war the Swiss National Bank bought well over a billion francs of gold from Germany's Reichsbank, providing hard currency that helped Germany pay for war materials. Much of that gold had been looted from the central banks of occupied countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, and some came from the possessions of Holocaust victims. In the 1946 Washington Agreement Switzerland paid 250 million francs to the Allies without admitting wrongdoing; historians divide over whether the trade was active complicity or the pragmatism of a cornered small state.

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  34. After defeat, utility beat justice in specific cases. Scientists and intelligence assets with Nazi records were absorbed into the Cold War.

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    Nuremberg Doctors Cite Buck v. Bell in Their Defense

    also in Eugenics and forced sterilization in America

    At the Doctors' Trial, defendants and defense counsel invoked Buck v. Bell and American sterilization law to argue that Nazi Germany's sterilization program had followed an accepted legal and scientific precedent set by the United States. The tribunal rejected the comparison to Nazi mass murder and forced experimentation, but the episode underscored how directly American eugenics law had shaped Nazi policy a decade earlier.

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  39. The record supports many separate collaborations. The stronger claim of one coordinated Western plan is the contested part and should be labeled as such.

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    Sutton extends the thesis to Hitler's rise

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    In Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Sutton argues that some of the same Western financial and corporate interests also helped bring the Nazis to power. Taken with his Bolshevik book, his claim is that a single set of interests backed both communism and fascism as instruments of control. This coordinated-plan reading is Sutton's own, and it is the part historians reject.

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    Historians answer Sutton with a profit-not-plot reading

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    Mainstream historians accept the underlying record Sutton assembled: Western firms and banks did trade with and equip both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. What they reject is the idea of one coordinating hand. They see many separate companies and financiers chasing profit and markets, often in rivalry, not a single group steering both regimes as an experiment.

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    The 'same money funded both sides' idea is turned to propaganda

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler, Curriculum, programming, and propaganda

    The claim that the same financiers backed both communism and fascism has been misused to revive the antisemitic charge of a secret Jewish banking conspiracy. Historians and Sutton's own finance-focused account give no support to that reading. The documented story is one of banks, firms, and states pursuing profit and advantage, not any ethnic or bloodline cabal.

Further reading