UC Santa Barbara > History Department > Prof. Marcuse > Courses > Hist 133D Homepage > 133D Book Essays Index page > Student essay
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Black’s Nazi Nexus: Exploring the Significance and Justification of American Corporate Involvement in the Holocaust Book Essay
on:
Edwin Black,
Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust
by Douglas Wagoner for Prof. Marcuse's lecture course |
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& Abstract |
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Plagiarize! |
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About Douglas Wagoner Currently I am a second year junior at UC Santa Barbara, with a major in history and a minor in LGBTQ studies. Thus far my academic interests have revolved around questions of gender, sexuality, race, and social justice and although I do not have an extensive background in Holocaust history I have taken courses in both world history and western civilization. I chose to write on the topic of US corporate involvement in the Holocaust because of my interest in US human rights violations, the intersection of big business and the US government, and US culpability in the Nazi Holocaust. It was my hope that writing this paper would give me concrete insight into how US corporate corruption manifests itself and the related justifications for corporate involvement in atrocities such as the Holocaust. Abstract (back to top) Edwin Black’s Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to the Nazi Holocaust offers a shocking and vastly underwritten history on America’s direct involvement in the Holocaust. Black seeks to move away from traditional Germany and Nazi-centric analyses of the Holocaust by focusing on how General Motors (GM), International Business Machines (IBM), Henry Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller contributed to the Nazi war machine, antisemitic ideology, and eugenic theory. Beyond evincing the culpability of these corporations, Black attempts to uncover the nature of their involvement – some clearly being motivated by profit alone while others were undeniably motivated by antisemitism. Ultimately, by employing personal letters, contemporary journal articles, personal publications, and documentation of donations and business transactions, Black successfully highlights how these corporations contributed and were in fact indispensable to the evolution of the Nazi Holocaust. |
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Essay (back to top)
Without question, the Nazi Holocaust was Adolf Hitler’s brainchild – he popularized antisemitism, pushed the Nazi party into power, and mobilized the mass extermination of over 6 million people. However, Hitler could not have achieved such a massively effective campaign of genocide alone or even by relying on the domestic resources available to him in Germany. The degree of efficiency Hitler sought necessitated international support. In his book, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust, Edwin Black seeks to achieve a more globalized perspective of the holocaust by evincing how American ideology, technology, and corporate greed not only helped perpetuate the holocaust but in fact were essential to Hitler’s success. Using Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, GM, and IBM as examples, Black employs letters, written statements, and documentation of donations and business transactions to demonstrate how these corporations facilitated Hitler’s Holocaust. Black argues that without Ford’s dissemination of antisemitic thought, Carnegie and Rockefeller’s funding of eugenics, GM’s motorization of the Reich, and IBM’s data collection technology, the holocaust as history remembers it would never have been realized. Furthermore, Black explores the character of each corporation’s contribution, some clearly being motivated by antisemitic leaders within the organization while others were willing to sacrifice humanity in the name of wealth. Black’s overall thorough research and well-analyzed evidence culminates in a persuasive, if appalling, argument that leaves one convinced that the above five corporations were significant contributors to Hitler’s Holocaust. Beginning with the Ford Corporation, Black demonstrates Henry Ford’s use of corporate wealth to disseminate antisemitic discourse, his clever use of his own reputation to legitimize antisemitic publications, and the significant influence Ford’s antisemitism had on Hitler. As Ford’s personal antisemitic thought concretized in the mid-1910s he began attempting to popularize the idea that Jews were to blame for the world’s major problems. In 1920 with the recently purchased Dearborn Independent under his name, Ford began printing a book titled The International Jew which was, in effect, a “compilation of the hodgepodge Protocols [of the Learned Elders of Zion]”. Ford printed the book in “many languages” and distributed it worldwide (Black, 7-8). Although Ford did not write the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the fact that he was able to use his wealth to spread the antisemitic text globally undeniably highlights the connection between his personal antisemitism, his corporation, and his ability to perpetuate antisemitism as an ideology. Considering Ford’s international reputation and concomitant credibility, it is particularly significant that he printed The International Jew under his own name. For many people, “the fact that the anti-Semitic accusations bore the gold-plated name of ‘Henry Ford’ legitimized – even exalted – the anti-Jewish precepts” (Black, 8). Where some readers might have remained skeptical about the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy, re-packaging the Protocols under the reputable name of Ford intrinsically added merit to the otherwise outlandish claims and likely helped persuade hesitant antisemites. Certainly in the case of Hitler and many other Germans this proved true seeing as some “passages in Mein Kampf […] either emulated or invoked concepts he had read in Ford’s publications”, Hitler “admitted to a Detroit News reporter, ‘I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration’”, and that when the “Third Reich came to power, millions of Ford’s books were circulated in every school and party office in Germany” which “helped warp German minds in every corner of the Reich” (Black, 10). To suggest that Ford’s book was the sole source of Hitler’s antisemitism is perhaps an overstatement, but Hitler’s quote in the Detroit News is telling of the considerable influence the Ford had on Hitler. Moreover, if one accounts for the influence of Ford’s book amongst the German populace, especially amongst impressionable demographics like school children, then one can certainly argue that between influencing Hitler and German society Ford is, to some degree, responsible for the antisemitism in the holocaust. Having established Ford’s connection to German antisemitism, Black then suggests that the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller foundation funded German institutions and eugenic research that enabled the horrifying Nazi experiments conducted during the Holocaust. As Hitler ascended to power it became clear that under the Nazis, eugenics legislation and research would be propagated with far less restriction that in the US. Accordingly, American eugenic institutions that were funded by Carnegie began to build connections with German eugenicists. For example, the Eugenical News, a publication funded by Carnegie, began to publish German articles written by staunch antisemites and future medical murderers (Black, 26-29). Publishing the works of known antisemites in a Carnegie funded journal represents a distinct ideological shift between tacitly racist or antisemitic research, and blatant support of ideas akin to Nazism. This overlap becomes further self-evident when one considers the Nuremberg Laws. “When in 1935 Hitler demanded specific genetic fractions for” quantifying how Jewish someone was, “Carnegie racial math became the basis for the […] Nuremberg Laws” (Black, 42). Although the Nuremberg Laws were not likely the intended use for the “racial math” Carnegie developed, the fact that Carnegie funding and research contributed to the systematic repression of Jews is not surprising; eugenics, after all, is a field that is inherently intended to weed out “weaker” races. Rockefeller, too, contributed to German eugenics through funding. For its part, Rockefeller consistently donated massive amounts of money to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry, the Institute for Brain Research, and the Institute for Anthropology, Human, Heredity, and Eugenics. These Rockefeller funded institutions not only used slave labor, but they performed gruesome experiments on live prisoners and exterminated large quantities of people in order to harvest their corpses for research (Black, 33, 90-91). One could make argument that the “philanthropic” efforts of Rockefeller and Carnegie were focused more on eugenics than on blatant antisemitism – ostensibly they were both hoping to further the cause of a better humanity ruled by a “master race”. Regardless, eugenics, antisemitism, and racism are so closely and obviously intertwined that the actions of Carnegie and Rockefeller remain inexcusable. Inexcusable because in the end, the “philanthropy” of these two institutions resulted directly and/or indirectly in the extermination of Jews, twins, homosexuals, and gypsies. Unlike antisemitism or eugenics, which would have likely existed in the Reich at some level with or without the help of American corporations, the motorization of Nazi Germany spearheaded by General Motors was an invaluable asset to Nazi military power. Even before the war began, GM’s President Alfred Sloan had James D. Mooney, the director of GM’s German branch, begin negotiating a deal to motorize the Reich. “As Hitler embarked on a massive, threatening, re-armament program, GM was in position to make Germany’s military powerful, modern, and motorized” by bringing in thousands of much needed factory jobs, revenue through exports, and vehicles of war (Black, 99). In the wake of Germany’s post-WWI depression, the revenue and employment GM offered Germany was a crucial stepping-stone in the re-armament process. Sloan did Hitler an important service in helping to nurse the German economy back to health. Interestingly, Sloan’s personal qualms with the Roosevelt administration coupled with Nazi xenophobia positioned Opel, GM’s German division, to be unnaturally sympathetic to the Hitler regime. On the one hand “Sloan despised the emerging way of life being crafted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, [he] hated Roosevelt’s New Deal, and admired the strength, irrepressible determination and sheer magnitude of Hitler’s vision” (Black, 102). On the other “Nazis condemned anything foreign owned or foreign-made […] Sloan and Mooney both made efforts to obscure Opel’s American ownership and control” (Black, 105). The result was that Sloan actively defied the US Government in variety of ways: by joining anti-Roosevelt organizations such as the American Liberty League (which was conveniently antisemitic), and by supporting the Reich via avenues that the US War Department disapproved such as providing vital ethyl technology, playing Hitler’s speeches in the factories, and refusing to hire Jews in accordance with Nazi law (Black, 108-109). It remains true that Sloan’s principle reason for involvement with the Nazi’s was profit, but his compliance with antisemitic laws marks GM’s shift from an already odious business of producing war vehicles for Nazis to actually playing the dance of Nazism in the name of profit. Overtime, Sloan’s distaste for the American government, the imperative to maintain a façade of German control over Opel, and his continued avarice only resulted in further Nazi-sympathizing. By the 1930s, as per Hitler’s command, Opel began producing vehicles exclusively for military use and the factories started producing ammunition for the Reich in addition to the trucks that were used to transport weapons and/or round up Jews (Black, 112, 114, 124). Beyond a shadow of a doubt, GM acted as a shameless Nazi collaborator before and during the holocaust, providing the Nazis with indispensable tools of war. Without re-employment, the creation of revenue, the production of fleets of vehicles and stores of munitions, Nazis would never have been able to round up and transport massive numbers of Jews. For this odious and deliberate facilitation of the Nazi war machine, the GM Corporation and Alfred Sloan are forever to blame. Similar to GM, International Business Machines (IBM) offered a service to the Nazis that no other corporation could, and with huge profits at stake IBM single-handedly facilitated the data collection and subsequent tracking of millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Using cutting edge Hollerith punch card technology, Hitler, in partnership with IBM, “was able to substantially automate and accelerate all six phases of the twelve-year Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination” (Black 130). By employing IBM technology, Nazis could efficiently organize data in regards to who was Jewish, what profession they held, how many people were in a single concentration camp at one time, among a gamut of other information. Shortly after IBM implemented the census of 1933, Germany “became IBM’s largest overseas customer”, the whole affair being “approved by company president Thomas J. Watson” (Black, 130, 134). Being at the head of a data collection business, Watson was absolutely privy to the type of information his corporation was instructed to collect and the implications of what the Nazi’s were asking IBM to do. Nonetheless, like Alfred Sloan the prospect of profit quickly overcame any guilt Watson might have held. Supporting the assertion that Watson understood the gravity of his actions is the fact that he “insisted that, as much as possible, the company deal with the Reich via untraceable oral agreements” (Black, 136). However, it is interesting to note that it was legal to do business with Nazi Germany until the US declared war in December 1941 (Black, 155). Thus, IBM was evidently a major contributor to the logistical success of the Nazis and without their business Hitler never would have been able to orchestrate any of his six phases with the degree of efficiency that he did. In this paper, I argued that through effective employment and analysis of letters, written statements, and business documentation, Edwin Black effectively argues that Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, General Motors, and IBM were all major contributors to Hitler’s Holocaust through their ideology, funding, and technology; respectively. Beyond all other lessons to be drawn from Nazi Nexus I believe it is simply the fact that corruption and evil exist all around us, and we are touched by it in the cars we drive, philanthropies we think we believe in, and technology we use. We, as citizens of this world have to be willing to check ourselves but also check those who try and hide behind power, because it is those large corporate leaders like those described in Nazi Nexus who have the ability to manipulate governments, bend laws, and have the audacity to forsake humanity in the name of profit.
I certify that this essay is my own work, written for this course and not submitted for credit for any other course. All ideas and quotations that I have taken from other sources are properly credited and attributed to those sources. Douglas E. Wagoner
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Annotated Bibliography and Links (back to top)(links last checked 3/23/10) Book Reviews
Books and Articles
Relevant Websites
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Any student tempted to use this paper for an assignment in another course or school should be aware of the serious consequences for plagiarism. Here is what I write in my syllabi:
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