Are the allegations of this article true?

magreen

Golden Member
Dec 27, 2006
1,309
1
81
I just read a shocking article in the jpost written by Edwin Black. Text

It alleges shocking facts about post-WWI American support given to budding Nazism and Hitler, and that some major American institutions were even the inspiration for Nazism. A quick summary of some of the points:
- Henry Ford presented the German Eagle, one of the highest medals of honor by Hitler's Third Reich for Ford's contributions to the Reich
- The Carnegie Institution creating Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific basis of a blue-eyed blond-haired Nordic/Aryan master race, and then paying millions of dollars in post-WWI Germany to inculcate those ideas in German society
- "Hitler was so steeped in American race science that he even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant, calling his writing 'my bible.'"
- Eugenics laws in 27 U.S. states
- 60,000 American people forcibly sterilized for racial reasons, supported by US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes -- "'It is better for all the world,' Holmes wrote, 'if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.'"
- The Rockefeller Foundation funded the heinous human medical experimentation of Hitler's twin experimentation programs on twins
- GM knowingly facilitated the blitzkreig -- 'Sloan and GM knowingly prepared the Wehrmacht to wage war in Europe. Detroit even secretly moved massive stores of spare Blitz parts to the Polish border in the days just before the September 1, 1939, invasion to facilitate the Blitzkrieg'.
- GM's chief executive, James Mooney, received the same medal as Ford, awarded for special service to the Reich
- IBM knowingly custom-designed punch cards, databases, and massive computers for Hitler and the Nazis to systematically identify, ghettoize, and destroy Germany's Jews.
- Nazi railroads to transport the Jews were managed by IBM punchcards. IBM systems designed to systematically tabulate the results of the genocide.
- IBM systems designed to match the labor skills of Jewish prisoners to the slavery needs of the labor camps in which Jews were worked to death.
- an IBM customer site in every concentration camp
- "Had it not been for the continued conscious involvement of iconic American corporations in Hitler's war against the Jews, the speed, shape and statistics of the Holocaust as we know it would have been dramatically different. No one knows how different, but the astronomical dimensions could have never been achieved."

The writer is The New York Times best-selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, and the just released Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust (Dialog Press). He can be reached at www.nazinexus.com.


I'm absolutely shocked. Are these things true? Anyone have any light to shed on this? I'm not one to believe conspiracy theory, and this certainly alleges collusion and cover-up by American companies. But there's just too much detail here for this to be a simple invention. Is this true?
 

Wheezer

Diamond Member
Nov 2, 1999
6,731
1
81
Originally posted by: magreen
I just read a shocking article in the jpost written by Edwin Black. Text

It alleges shocking facts about post-WWI American support given to budding Nazism and Hitler. A quick summary of some of the points:
- Henry Ford presented the German Eagle, one of the highest medals of honor by Hitler's Third Reich for Ford's contributions to the Reich
- The Carnegie Institution creating Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific basis of a blue-eyed blond-haired Nordic/Aryan master race, and then paying millions of dollars in post-WWI Germany to inculcate those ideas in German society
- "Hitler was so steeped in American race science that he even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant, calling his writing 'my bible.'"
- Eugenics laws in 27 U.S. states
- 60,000 American people forcibly sterilized for racial reasons, supported by US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes -- "'It is better for all the world,' Holmes wrote, 'if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.'"
- The Rockefeller Foundation funded the heinous human medical experimentation of Hitler's twin experimentation programs on twins
- GM knowingly facilitated the blitzkreig -- 'Sloan and GM knowingly prepared the Wehrmacht to wage war in Europe. Detroit even secretly moved massive stores of spare Blitz parts to the Polish border in the days just before the September 1, 1939, invasion to facilitate the Blitzkrieg'.
- GM's chief executive, James Mooney, received the same medal as Ford, awarded for special service to the Reich
- IBM knowingly custom-designed punch cards, databases, and massive computers for Hitler and the Nazis to systematically identify, ghettoize, and destroy Germany's Jews.
- Nazi railroads to transport the Jews were managed by IBM punchcards. IBM systems designed to systematically tabulate the results of the genocide.
- IBM systems designed to match the labor skills of Jewish prisoners to the slavery needs of the labor camps in which Jews were worked to death.
- an IBM customer site in every concentration camp
- "Had it not been for the continued conscious involvement of iconic American corporations in Hitler's war against the Jews, the speed, shape and statistics of the Holocaust as we know it would have been dramatically different. No one knows how different, but the astronomical dimensions could have never been achieved."

The writer is The New York Times best-selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, and the just released Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust (Dialog Press). He can be reached at www.nazinexus.com.


I'm absolutely shocked. Are these things true? Anyone have any light to shed on this? I'm not one to believe conspiracy theory, and this certainly alleges collusion and cover-up by American companies. But there's just too much detail here for this to be a simple invention. Is this true?

yes, many things are true.

and this should not surprise you.....money talks and bullshit walks...it has always been that way and will always be.

 

sandorski

No Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
70,083
5,611
126
Don't know about all of it, but US industrial Nazi dealings were certainly true. Much of that is difficult to be angry about, because there was no way for them to know what was about to happen or the extent of what Hitler was doing. We can see clearly what was hidden from them.
 

yllus

Elite Member & Lifer
Aug 20, 2000
20,577
432
126
At a glance, most if not all of that is accurate. Eugenics was far from taboo at the start of the 1900s.
 

Atreus21

Lifer
Aug 21, 2007
12,007
572
126
The Carnegie Institution creating Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific basis of a blue-eyed blond-haired Nordic/Aryan master race, and then paying millions of dollars in post-WWI Germany to inculcate those ideas in German society.

This I know to be false. Eugenics was Thomas Malthus' creation. He believed that population grows exponentially, and food only arithmetically, and hence we had to preserve only the best of the species.

Correction: I don't know that he actually espoused eugenics. But I know much of the inspiration for eugenics came from his theory of food supply.

I suppose you could say that Nazism got its inspiration from Margaret Sanger, who was a student of Malthus. In that regard, you could say America was somewhat responsible.
 

Lenine

Senior member
Apr 19, 2003
371
0
0
I'd believe it. The man voted greatest Canadian of all time, Tommy Douglas:

His thesis entitled The Problems of the Subnormal Family was on eugenics, a way to "solve the problems of the Subnormal Family" by sterilizing mentally and physically disabled Canadians, and sending them to camps.[2] He briefly continued his graduate work at the University of Chicago but rejected this theory after his experiences of encountering the poor in Chicago and after a trip to Nazi Germany in 1938.
Note, it's from wikipedia but there's a citation to the university he studied at.

Eugenics was all the rage back then.

Racism was nothing abnormal either; it wasn't until the 60s that we had the civil rights movement.
 

magreen

Golden Member
Dec 27, 2006
1,309
1
81
@Atreus: I have to look again, but I don't remember if the article credited the Carnegie Institution with initially creating eugenics (as I wrote in my summary), or simply with massively funding, advancing, and propagating eugenics, even if eugenics was founded by somebody else. Are you just saying they didn't found it but they may have funded it and propagated it in America and Germany like the article says, or are you saying they never gave those millions of $ to fund it and inculcate it?
 

Genx87

Lifer
Apr 8, 2002
41,095
513
126
- Henry Ford presented the German Eagle, one of the highest medals of honor by Hitler's Third Reich for Ford's contributions to the Reich

True
- The Carnegie Institution creating Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific basis of a blue-eyed blond-haired Nordic/Aryan master race, and then paying millions of dollars in post-WWI Germany to inculcate those ideas in German society

Not sure about this connection to the Nazi's but they did erect a genetics research dept. During this time frame I assume this to mean Eugenics.

- "Hitler was so steeped in American race science that he even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant, calling his writing 'my bible.'"

Very possible, the Nazi's used the United States Eugenics programs as a basis for their own.

- Eugenics laws in 27 U.S. states
- 60,000 American people forcibly sterilized for racial reasons, supported by US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes -- "'It is better for all the world,' Holmes wrote, 'if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.'"

They also used these laws to sterilize people for mental retardation and criminal behavior. Many of these sterilization laws survived into the 1960's.

- The Rockefeller Foundation funded the heinous human medical experimentation of Hitler's twin experimentation programs on twins

I would like to see proof on this. That seems a bit far fetched. While our Eugenics programs were far from ideal. I dont believe they ventured into the studies and butchering the Nazis did in the name of science.

- GM knowingly facilitated the blitzkreig -- 'Sloan and GM knowingly prepared the Wehrmacht to wage war in Europe. Detroit even secretly moved massive stores of spare Blitz parts to the Polish border in the days just before the September 1, 1939, invasion to facilitate the Blitzkrieg'.

This sounds like BS to me. Germanys industry did fine supplying the Wermacht until the last year of the war.

- GM's chief executive, James Mooney, received the same medal as Ford, awarded for special service to the Reich

No idea

- IBM knowingly custom-designed punch cards, databases, and massive computers for Hitler and the Nazis to systematically identify, ghettoize, and destroy Germany's Jews.

I have heard this but question the intent if true.

- Nazi railroads to transport the Jews were managed by IBM punchcards. IBM systems designed to systematically tabulate the results of the genocide.
- IBM systems designed to match the labor skills of Jewish prisoners to the slavery needs of the labor camps in which Jews were worked to death.
- an IBM customer site in every concentration camp

I'd like to see more proof. For starters FDR would have IBM liquidated if it were helping the enemy during war.

- "Had it not been for the continued conscious involvement of iconic American corporations in Hitler's war against the Jews, the speed, shape and statistics of the Holocaust as we know it would have been dramatically different. No one knows how different, but the astronomical dimensions could have never been achieved."

I really dont believe that. The Nazi's used Germanys industry to carry out their eugenics programs. They were systematic in their approach and very well organized. Placing labor camps near industry and execution camps at key points out of the way so people didnt know.

A lot of people dont realize the United States had quite an active Eugenics program going in the 1920s-40s. We had immigration laws which tries to restrict southern European catholics from immigrating. We had forced sterilizations. We had racial marriage laws. Science taken to an extreme.
 

OCGuy

Lifer
Jul 12, 2000
27,227
36
91
Is there anything that has happened in the world in the last 200 years that isnt the fault of the US?



:roll:


The author takes facts that may or may not be true, and then jumps to a rather absurd conclusion.

But here we are talking about it, so I guess he got what he wanted.
 

Atreus21

Lifer
Aug 21, 2007
12,007
572
126
Originally posted by: magreen
@Atreus: I have to look again, but I don't remember if the article credited the Carnegie Institution with initially creating eugenics (as I wrote in my summary), or simply with massively funding, advancing, and propagating eugenics, even if eugenics was founded by somebody else. Are you just saying they didn't found it but they may have funded it and propagated it in America and Germany like the article says, or are you saying they never gave those millions of $ to fund it and inculcate it?

I don't know anything about what the Carnegie foundation did, but I know the the idea of eugenics didn't start with them.
 

microbial

Senior member
Oct 10, 2008
350
0
0
100 years from now in some political forum someone will ask is it true that back in the early 21st century the US did __________(fill in the blank).

Like a pre-emptive, unprovoked strike. That's going to be hard to explain to the 2100s
 

Atheus

Diamond Member
Jun 7, 2005
7,313
2
0
Ford was a blatent fascist - Hitler only read two books in prison and one of them was Ford's. This is well known. I'm not sure about 60,000 people sterilized for racial reasons... certainly that many people or more were forcibly sterilized in the US but I was under the impression most of them were mentally disabled or simply poor and working class. Not that that's any better. It's still Naziism. On the other hand can anyone name a country or people who are not responsible for something horrible at some point in recent history?
 

AreaCode707

Lifer
Sep 21, 2001
18,440
101
91
Some true, some false, most with an incredibly blatant negative spin, all with an inappropriate lack of context.

OMG we did business with Germany before we entered into the war! OMG, Germany used our business dealings to do terrible things! OMG, some people somewhere had a inkling of what Germany was doing! OMG, Germany awarded US citizens medals! (Hint: Germany really wanted us in the war on their side and tried pretty hard to make that happen before we joined with the Allies.)
 

sandorski

No Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
70,083
5,611
126
Originally posted by: Lenine
I'd believe it. The man voted greatest Canadian of all time, Tommy Douglas:

His thesis entitled The Problems of the Subnormal Family was on eugenics, a way to "solve the problems of the Subnormal Family" by sterilizing mentally and physically disabled Canadians, and sending them to camps.[2] He briefly continued his graduate work at the University of Chicago but rejected this theory after his experiences of encountering the poor in Chicago and after a trip to Nazi Germany in 1938.
Note, it's from wikipedia but there's a citation to the university he studied at.

Eugenics was all the rage back then.

Racism was nothing abnormal either; it wasn't until the 60s that we had the civil rights movement.

Not sure if that's accurate about Tommy Douglas, but it certainly could be. Back in his day Eugenics was popular in North America and especially Western Canada(not sure about the East). A Provincial political party I used to vote for, until they went tits up, was big on Eugenics in its' distant past. They were the Social Credit Party, a Right of Centre Pro-Business party that once dominated Albertan and British Columbian Politics.
 

MikeMike

Lifer
Feb 6, 2000
45,885
66
91
Originally posted by: Genx87


- GM knowingly facilitated the blitzkreig -- 'Sloan and GM knowingly prepared the Wehrmacht to wage war in Europe. Detroit even secretly moved massive stores of spare Blitz parts to the Polish border in the days just before the September 1, 1939, invasion to facilitate the Blitzkrieg'.

This sounds like BS to me. Germanys industry did fine supplying the Wermacht until the last year of the war.

- GM's chief executive, James Mooney, received the same medal as Ford, awarded for special service to the Reich

No idea


During the time that Germany ramped up... you have to realise GM owned Opel... one of the largest manufacturers at that time in germany... thus they supplied...

GM was global before global was in.
 

chess9

Elite member
Apr 15, 2000
7,748
0
0
The stuff about IBM is TRUE. Watson was a believer in eugenics and it's corrolaries. One of the reasons the USA was so slow to get involved in WWII (and Germany declared war on US first) was because many Americans were pro Germany prior to about 1939. The Republicans were especially cozy with the Nazis.

-Robert
 

ProfJohn

Lifer
Jul 28, 2006
18,251
8
0
Don't forget that most people saw the commies as a bigger threat than the Nazis prior to Germany going expansive.

Hitler saved Germany from economic ruin and perhaps a communist revolution and a LOT of people in the US saw him as putting a stop the expansion of communism in Europe.
 

Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
38,548
348
126
There is a lot of truth to a lot of people being a lot more favorable and helpful to the Nazis than many are aware.

The King of England who had abdicated, among others, was a big fan of them, literally going and clicking his heels in respect.

A bit of this early on can be written off with the 'it wasn't entirely clear where the Nazis were headed' explanation. However, much cannot. It became clearer over time, and many remained happy to partner with the Nazis even after the Nazis had started invading Czechosolvakia and Poland. Basically, the sort of amoral, 'business is business' approach was not uncommon, and some businesses were openly friendly to the fascists - seeing things they liked compared to the liberal policies of FDR. I think there's a real lesson to be learned about the amorality that can happen with corporations and the need for tight democratic oversight, lest they become a menace people don't pay attention to.

George Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, infamously was involved in banking for Nazi leaders, helping to protect their assets, for which the US seized his bank. Of course, it shouold be noted his son, George Bush, was a pilot in the war fighting the Nazis, to balance that.

JFK's father, Ambassador to England Joseph P. Kennedy was perhaps the man most likely to succeed FDR as President in 1940 if FDR did not run for a third term; some speculate FDR ran for the third term specifically to prevent that, as Kennedy had said in effect 'England is done for, get used to the Nazis', which came to end his political career (and not help his son's). It should also be noted his son Joe Jr. fought the Nazis and was killed on a dangerous volunteer mission.

Again, there was a sort of ugly ideology about business then that it was ok to work with the Nazis.

It wasn't the first or last time that a business was happy to profit from both sides.

The example in the list of the car manufacturers, here's a link with a lot of interesting info.

Link on US automakers and Nazis

Excerpts:
"General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland," said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades researching a history of the world's largest automaker. "Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."

Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company's German operations were "highly profitable."

The internal politics of Nazi Germany "should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors," Sloan explained in a letter to a concerned shareholder dated April 6, 1939. "We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization.

After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. James Mooney, the GM director in charge of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler in Berlin two weeks after the German invasion of Poland.

When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler's role in the German rearmament effort was much less significant.)

The simple fact is that the Ford and GM subsidiaries, with full support from the US owners until the law prohibited it, played a crucial role in the arming of the Nazis. And yes, IBM sold its technology to the Nazis, and its use included running the holocaust, despite the speculative denial from a poster above. There's a book on it, 'IBM and the Holocaust' - a description:

IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.

But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.

IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.

IBM and the Holocaust takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries -- all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction.

Just as compelling is the human drama of one of our century's greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit.

Only with IBM's technologic assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust.

The danger wasn't in the companies being Nazis, 'liking' Nazism, generally, but rather in how easy it is for them to simply 'follow the money'.

This is why Lenin said, about the amoral pursuit of money of such corporations, "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

He had a figurative point. We - not our government, but some of our leading corporations - did sell Nazis significant tools with which they attacked us.

Finally, do recall that some of the leading corporatists had also conspired to remove FDR in a coup.

There's a reason Eisenhower warned of the excesses of the 'military-industrial(-congressional) complex. There's a reason why JFK believed that he was one more Bay of Pigs away from risk of a coup himself. While such talk has become 'crazy talk' now, it's not as if the corporations haven't largely determined our foreign policy for their own interests, caused our tax dollars to pay for thug dictators and death squads who give away the resources of other nations to our corporations, literally assassinate leaders who won't be puppets, and corporations have only increased their globalization in recent decades.

The Smedley Butler (the Marine General who exposed the coup plot against FDR) quote about how prevalent this was even in the early 20th century helps here:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

Between Richard Nixon being vice-president and president, he was a lawyer for Pepsi, and it was Pepsi's CEO who, on behalf of their own interests and other US corporations who were facing the loss of corrupt agreements in Chile because of the rising newly elected Chilean President, Salvadore Allende, called Nixon and said they wanted something done - and Nixon promptly directed Kissinger to do something to prevent Allende reaching office. They tried and failed, and the directive then became to remove him from office - and they tried and succeeeded, installing Pinochet as dictator, with the Milton Friedman student running the nation's economy with brutal corporatists policies.

In fact, the Ford factory in Chile - to tie this back to the thread's theme - cooperated with the Pinochet forces who would have soldiers patrol the factories as virtual prison camps, and terrorize the workers, sometimes hauling someone off the line for any 'subversive' talk, and literally torture them to death just outside the wall, where the workers could all hear the screams.

We Americans are kept feeling pretty safe from any such things; we are lucky enough to be in the sort of 'cash cow' position in the world, funding the machine.

We're lucky not to be its 'farm animal' component, the masses who are exploited, and instead to have the sort of 'egg layer' role, more comfortable.

Of course, we're also a lot better off than the people in Stalin's Russia or Mao's China, slaughtered by the millions.

But it's good for people to understand the real history on these things - that's how we can help prevent the abuses. Policies of dictatorships, policies like apartheid, did not just end on their own, it was by the public getting informed and battling them that they went out of fashion. And it's how we could help keep our corporations from repeating the history of helping a regime like the Nazis.

Note how many people deny the history even in this thread. 'Oh, the Nazis had their own factories, they didn't need any help'. Ignorance is bliss...
 

chess9

Elite member
Apr 15, 2000
7,748
0
0
Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Don't forget that most people saw the commies as a bigger threat than the Nazis prior to Germany going expansive.

Hitler saved Germany from economic ruin and perhaps a communist revolution and a LOT of people in the US saw him as putting a stop the expansion of communism in Europe.

Right. We still call them REPUBLICANS!

-Robert
 

rudder

Lifer
Nov 9, 2000
19,441
85
91
Originally posted by: sandorski
Don't know about all of it, but US industrial Nazi dealings were certainly true. Much of that is difficult to be angry about, because there was no way for them to know what was about to happen or the extent of what Hitler was doing. We can see clearly what was hidden from them.

Plus we made up for it by building tanks for Russia to stop Hitler. Ooops... maybe we shouldn't have helped Russia either... look how that turned out.
 

ProfJohn

Lifer
Jul 28, 2006
18,251
8
0
Originally posted by: chess9
Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Don't forget that most people saw the commies as a bigger threat than the Nazis prior to Germany going expansive.

Hitler saved Germany from economic ruin and perhaps a communist revolution and a LOT of people in the US saw him as putting a stop the expansion of communism in Europe.

Right. We still call them REPUBLICANS!

-Robert
Go back and read Craig's post.

Both sides supported him, Republicans and Democrat.
 

chess9

Elite member
Apr 15, 2000
7,748
0
0
Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Originally posted by: chess9
Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Don't forget that most people saw the commies as a bigger threat than the Nazis prior to Germany going expansive.

Hitler saved Germany from economic ruin and perhaps a communist revolution and a LOT of people in the US saw him as putting a stop the expansion of communism in Europe.

Right. We still call them REPUBLICANS!

-Robert
Go back and read Craig's post.

Both sides supported him, Republicans and Democrat.

Well, yes, a few Southern Dems especially were pro Nazi. But, they were really SHEEP in WOLVE'S clothing. Republicans at heart.

Joe Kennedy's musings mean nothing. But, yes, my grandmother (A Swiss JEW) thought Hitler was fine in the EARLY 30's. She was a Democrat for life after 1932. :)

-Robert

 

XMan

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
12,513
49
91
Originally posted by: Atreus21
The Carnegie Institution creating Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific basis of a blue-eyed blond-haired Nordic/Aryan master race, and then paying millions of dollars in post-WWI Germany to inculcate those ideas in German society.

This I know to be false. Eugenics was Thomas Malthus' creation. He believed that population grows exponentially, and food only arithmetically, and hence we had to preserve only the best of the species.

Correction: I don't know that he actually espoused eugenics. But I know much of the inspiration for eugenics came from his theory of food supply.

I suppose you could say that Nazism got its inspiration from Margaret Sanger, who was a student of Malthus. In that regard, you could say America was somewhat responsible.

Founder of . . . wait for it . . . Planned Parenthood. Yup. Planned Parenthood was orginally (or still is?) a means to further eugenics within the United States.