Black - Nazi nexus: Americas corporate connections to Hitlers Holocaust

W riting Nazi Nexus was inspired by two unexpected events. For years, I had been lecturing at universities, museums, churches, and synagogues on my various books and investigative articles. These include IBM and the Holocaust, War Against the Weak, The Transfer Agreement, Banking on Baghdad, Internal Combustion, and such syndicated investigations as Hitlers Carmaker. I had always spoken on just one of those books at a time.

That changed in November, 2006, when I was invited to deliver two back-to-back Kristallnacht presentations. Neither venue wanted me to speak on just one of my books. They each wanted me to tie together all my major research about American corporate complicity in the Holocaustfrom the Ford Motor Company to Carnegie to Rockefeller to General Motors and, of course, IBM. Each of these corporations had a direct involvement in the actual genocide perpetrated by Hitler against the Jews. I found myself speaking and answering questions for hours.

I decided then to connect all the dots of my prior research and portray the scope of the Nazi Nexus. I started with a chapter for a German-language anthology entitled Das Heilige Nichts (Nothing Sacred); other contributors included Pope Benedict XVI. That gave me the determination to synthesize into a single compact book the cold-hearted complicity of some of Americas most iconic corporate entities. I limited myself to those frms knowingly engaged in major support for the Holocaust itself, omitting many frms merely engaged in trading with the enemy. Hence, I did not include other guilty parties such as Coke which invented Fanta to enliven Nazi soldiers, Standard Oil which contributed mightily to the Luftwaffe, Eastman Kodak, or hundreds of others which regularly traded with the Reich during the War.

This volume will shock, sadden, and shake many as they look at the monetized evil constructed by the intersection of American corporate force and German geno-cidal desire. But Nazi Nexus should not emerge as a standalone revelation as much as a frightful invitation to further investigate the thick volumes upon whose shoulders Nazi Nexus stands. Behind each chapter is a copiously documented book or investigation. This book is not for spot checking. If you cannot read this entire book, do not read it at all. The monster must be viewed completely to be comprehended.

N azi Nexus is a compilation of prior scholarship. Several dozen pages of acknowledgements can be found in each of my original volumes, listing the scores of research assistants, historians, archivists, and eye witnesses who have shared their labors and their hearts to help bring this information to life. Their names are forever enshrined in the original books. The sources for Nazi Nexus are primarily drawn from my other voluminously footnoted, published works. They are preserved in those editions in exhaustive detail.

However, some thanks are in order. First, I would like to thank the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for refusing to include any of this information in its various exhibits. There is an unwritten taboo at the USHMM about exploring the complicity of American corporations and the Holocaust. This has made my work all the more energized and appreciated by those who want the unvarnished truth.

I would also like to thank the many well-paid Holocaust historians for hire who have been sponsored by implicated corporations to dress up, obscure, spin and/or divert attention away from the towering culpability of these companies. The shame of these frms needs to be illuminated by independent investigation without the flter of bought-and-paid for corporate history. If anything, Nazi Nexus is a cry to independent investigative journalists and historians everywhere to independently document this final frontier of Holocaust accountability. The centers of such inquiries must not only be Detroit, New York, or Berlin, but also many centers of corporately endowed academia. After all, Hitlers war against humanity was always wrapped in pseudo-academics, falsely medicalized, coated with fallacious race science and twisted intellectualism.

Ironically, most of these corporations have admitted their crimes and apologized. This includes Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller and even General Motors. Only IBM has remained silent a decade after the revelations of its genocidal conduct first became known.

Now is a good time to remind the world that the Holocaust would have always occurred with or without assistance from America. But the assistance the Hitler regime did receive enormously magnifed the astronomical dimensions and statistics of that genocide. Equally important, we must never defect blame for the true perpetrators of the Holocaust: Hitler, the Nazis and Nazi supporters and henchmen throughout Germany and in many lands.

Hitler did it. But Hitler had help. Nazi Nexus chronicles the type of indispensable help Hitler did receive.

It would be wrong not to mention the events of late 2008 swirling in the background as Nazi Nexus finalized. During those months, America and the world witnessed American big business melting down after years of deception, avarice, and lack of accountability. Companies that will go to any lengths to further their misconduct at home find the pathway to misconduct in foreign lands a very short footbridge. Some of the modern day culprits are the same villains that collaborated with Germany during the Reich years. Above all, Nazi Nexus is a call to arms for young executives, emerging entrepreneurs, and refective captains of industry to never again allow their corporate muscle, their technology, and their sheer business prowess to affict innocent civilians.

Edwin Black

Washington, D.C.

January 1, 2009

P ersecution of Jews and Jew-hatred have been the bane of Jewish existence for centuries.

Since their expulsion from Judea by the Romans in the first century A.D., Jews have wandered the world in disconsolate if hopeful dislocation and relocation. Denied land or even equal social standing in most of the regions they settled, Jews adopted the only lifestyles available to themthe portable professions. Finance and moneylending, buying and selling itinerantly or in shops, the arts and trades, transport, matters of intellect, and middlemanship of all things. These were the roles Jews were allowed to assume. These were the roles Jews did assume, and ones in which they generally achieved success.

Although the Jewish niche was small compared to the larger society, as outsiders they were often the first to be blamed by local populations when well water went bad, when plague arrived, when economies collapsed and, really, when anything adverse occurred. Germany was no exception; anti-Semitism had become part of the social grain as far back as the Reformation when in 1543, the leader of the Protestant movement, Martin Luther, published On the Jews and Their Lies.

Because Jews refused to convert, Luther exhorted the volatile population to fear and destroy their Jewish neighbors. Luthers solution: First to set fire to their synagogues or schools... Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them that they are not masters in our country as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God. Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. Luther went to demand, Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay at home. Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that, as said above, they have no other means of earning a livelihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess.