Better Hitler than ‘Rosenfeld’

Throughout the ‘dirty thirties,’ corporate profits in the US itself remained depressed, and firms like GM and Ford could only dream of the kind of riches their branch plants in Germany were accumulating thanks to Hitler. In addition, at home corporate America experienced problems with labour activists, Communists, and other radicals. What about the vicious trademarks of the Fuhrer’s personality and regime? Did they not disturb the leaders of corporate America? Apparently not much, if at all. The racial hatred propagated by Hitler, for example, did not overly offend their sensibilities. After all, racism against non-Whites remained systemic throughout the US and anti-Semitism was rife in the corporate class. In the exclusive clubs and fine hotels patronized by the captains of industry, Jews were rarely admitted; and some leaders of corporate America were outspoken anti-Semites. In the early 1920s, Henry Ford cranked out a vehemently anti-Semitic book, The International Jew, which was translated into many languages; Hitler read the German version and acknowledged later that it provided him with inspiration and encouragement. Another notoriously anti-Semitic American tycoon was Irenee Du Pont, even though the Du Pont family had Jewish antecedents.

Corporate America’s anti-Semitism strongly resembled that of Hitler, whose view of Judaism was intimately interwoven with his view of Marxism, as Arno J. Mayer has convincingly argued in his book Why Did the Heavens not Darken? Hitler claimed to be a socialist, but his was supposed to be a ‘national’ socialism, a socialism for racially pure Germans only. As for genuine socialism, which preached international working-class solidarity and found its inspiration in the work of Karl Marx, it was despised by Hitler as a Jewish ideology that purported to enslave or even destroy Germans and other ‘Aryans.’ Hitler loathed as ‘Jewish’ all forms of Marxism, but none more so than communism (or ‘Bolshevism’) and he denounced the Soviet Union as the homeland of ‘Jewish’ international socialism.

In the 1930s, the anti-Semitism of corporate America likewise revealed itself to be the other side of the coin of anti-socialism, anti-Marxism, and red-baiting. Most American businessmen denounced Roosevelt’s New Deal as a ‘socialistic’ meddling in the economy. The anti-Semites of corporate America considered Roosevelt to be a crypto-Communist and an agent of Jewish interests, if not a Jew himself; he was routinely referred to as ‘Rosenfeld,’ and his New Deal was vilified as the ‘Jew Deal.’ In his book The Flivver King, Upton Sinclair described the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford dreaming of an American fascist movement that ‘pledged to put down the Reds and preserve the property interests of the country; to oust the Bolshevik [Roosevelt] from the White House and all his pink professors from the government services … [and] to make it a shooting offense to talk communism or to call a strike.’ Other American tycoons also yearned for a fascist saviour who might rid America of its ‘reds’ and thus restore prosperity and profitability. Du Pont provided generous financial support to America’s own fascist organizations, such as the infamous ‘Black Legion,’ and was even involved in plans for a fascist coup d’etat in Washington. (Hofer and Reginbogin, 585-6)

Why Worry about the Coming War?

It was quite obvious that Hitler, who was rearming Germany to the teeth, was going to unleash a major war sooner or later. Whatever misgivings America’s captains of industry may initially have had in this respect soon dissipated, because the cognoscenti of international diplomacy and business in the 1930s widely expected that Hitler would spare western countries, instead attacking and destroying the Soviet Union as hinted in Mein Kampf. To encourage and assist him in the task that he considered his great mission in life, was the hidden objective of the infamous appeasement policy pursued by London and Paris, and tacitly approved by Washington. Corporate leaders in all western countries, including most emphatically the US, loathed the Soviet Union because that state was the cradle of the communist ‘counter system’ to the international capitalist order of things, and a source of inspiration to America’s own Reds. Furthermore, they found particularly offensive that the homeland of communism did not fall prey to the Great Depression, but experienced an industrial development that has been favourably compared by an American historian, John H. Backer, with the widely celebrated ‘economic miracle’ of West Germany after World War 11.

The appeasement policy was a devious scheme, whose real objective had to be concealed from the British and French publics. It backfired spectacularly because its contortions eventually made Hitler suspicious about the real intentions of London and Paris, which caused him to make a deal with Stalin, and thus led to Germany’s war against France and Great Britain rather than the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the dream of a German crusade against the communist Soviet Union on behalf of the capitalist West refused to die. London and Paris merely launched a ‘Phoney War’ against Germany, hoping that Hitler would eventually turn against the Soviet Union after all. This was also the idea behind quasi-official missions to London and Berlin, undertaken by GM’s James D. Mooney, who tried very hard — as did the US ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy — to persuade German and British leaders to resolve their inconvenient conflict, so that Hitler could devote his undivided attention to his great eastern project. In a meeting with Hitler in March 1940, Mooney made a plea for peace in western Europe, suggesting ‘that Americans had understanding for Germany’s standpoint with respect to the question of living space’ — in other words, that they had nothing against his territorial claims in the East. (Billstein et al., 37-44) These American initiatives, however, did not produce the hoped-for results. The owners and managers of American corporations with subsidiaries in Germany undoubtedly regretted that the war Hitler had unleashed in 1939 was a war against the West, but in the final analysis it did not matter all that much. What did matter was this: helping Hitler to prepare for war had been good business and the war itself opened up even more extravagant prospects for doing business and making profits.

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