Tacitus' Agricola
"We must first gain complete power if we want to crush
the other side completely,"
Adolf Hitler
"When I recognised the Jew as the leader of the Social
Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached
its conclusion."
(Mein Kampf).
"Fascism has opened up the depths of society for
politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there
lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred
million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs
and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous
transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who
pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their
sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and
savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; Fascism has given them a
banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism
in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of
society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking
up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism."
From What Is National Socialism? by Leon Trotsky.
The publication of this book could not be more prescient as
the possibility that once more German tanks could roll into Russian soil for a
second time. A book that examines the bankrolling of the first fascist
onslaught against the former Soviet Union, is very timely.
In Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's
Wealthiest Dynasties, published in late May of this year by Dutch financial
journalist David de Jong shows that the current German ruling class owes its
power and wealth to the Fascists and their billionaire supporters during the
rise of the Nazi era.
Adolf Hitler at a reception of the laureates of the national
awards for science and art in 1938 Germany. To his left stands Ferdinand Porsche,
one of the co-founders of the Porsche sports car company. (Ullstein Bild /
Getty Images)
De Jong's book differs from previous books on Nazi
billionaires in that it examines five oligarch families unfamiliar to the
general reader. Also, given that the book's author is still relatively young,
he may be forgiven for targeting his book at today's generation who do not know
about these Nazi billionaires. Many of whose Nazi past has only recently become
public.
The book is a forensic study, densely researched, it took De
Jong took four years to research. He carried out archival research throughout Germany,
the EU, and the US using various primary sources - diaries, memories,
newspapers - and academic studies on the families. The result is a fast-paced and extremely readable book. De
Jong's book stands on the shoulders of other works such as the 1985 work,
German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, by professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr.,
whose book has been the standard text on Hitler's early relationships with the
German bourgeoisie.
De Jong is no Marxist, but it is hard not to draw the main
thrust of his book that these Nazi Billionaires financed Hitler's
dictatorship to prevent a revolutionary uprising of workers in Germany. These
billionaires are as much responsible for the mass destruction and mass murder
as the Nazi dictatorship. As Ela Maartens and Verena Nees point out, "Most
survived the denazification process unscathed—or, as Ferdinand Porsche wrote to
a friend, "I was entbräunt [denazified] free of charge."
Only a few, like Krupp and Flick, were convicted, albeit released a short time
later. Friedrich Flick was convicted at Nuremberg of using forced and slave
labour, bankrolling the SS and looting a steel factory. But he was released in
1960 and eventually became the controlling shareholder of Daimler-Benz, then
Germany's biggest car manufacturer. Deutsche Bank bought the Flick conglomerate
in 1985, turning his descendants into billionaires. Even the old leadership
personnel were reinstated despite their Nazi past. The Quandts family also
survived denazification unscathed. Günther Quandt was classified as a
"Mitläufer" (a passive follower) after one and a half years of captivity
in American camps. Like the other Nazi-era corporate patriarchs listed by de
Jong, except for Friedrich Flick, he was never brought to trial."[1]
De Jong shows that even before the Nazis came to power, they
cultivated a very intimate relationship with the growing number of billionaires
who saw the Fascists as a bulwark against the revolutionary movement of the German
working class. As early as 1931, they met with Nazi leaders at the Kaiserhof
Hotel in Berlin. August von Finck, son of Wilhelm von Finck, a Bavarian banker,
promised over five million Reichsmarks to arm the SA "as a stay against a
putsch, which might devolve into civil war."
While many thoughts go through the readers' minds reading
this book, one overriding thought is how the hell Germany's richest business
dynasties, which made fortunes by supporting Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship
eight decades later, are still not being held accountable, let alone punished. German
companies, such as BMW and Porsche, and
others that own US brands, such as Krispy Kreme and Pret A-Manger, have blood
on their hands.
De Jong states, "What struck me was this is a country
that's so cognisant of its history in many ways, but seemingly the most
economically powerful actors do not engage with that. That was why I wrote the
book, and it's an argument in favour of historical transparency. You have BMW
and Porsche, particularly the families that control them, conduct this
whitewashing or leaving out of history where they celebrate the business
successes of their founders or saviours but leave out the fact that these men
committed war crimes."I never got an answer whether it's because they are
afraid it would hurt the bottom line or share prices of the companies to be
fully transparent about the history or whether it's just because they derive
their entire identity from the successes that their fathers and grandfathers
had and, by being transparent about them, it's kind of disavowing their own
identity. It's probably a combination of both."
From the standpoint of historiography, De jong's book is a rebuff to the current wave of historical revisionism that has taken a very malignant form. Led by the right-wing political commentator and convicted criminal Dinesh D'Souza, who stupidly wrote that Nazis were called "National Socialists," that the fascist movement was a left-wing movement and that Adolf Hitler was a product of "statism" gone wrong. Not only does De Jong's book counteract this infantile historiography, his book, while not downplaying politics and ideology, concentrates on the importance of economics in the rise of German Fascism. For a long time, most historiography on the rise of German Fascism has focused on politics and ideology to the detriment of research into the significance of economic issues in the rise to political prominence and power on the part of the National Socialists.
Asa Adam Tooze writes, "The originality of National
Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a
global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries,
Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount
an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the
globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its imperial
hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East, it would create the
self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to
prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States... The
aggression of Hitler's regime can thus be rationalised as an intelligible
response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global
capitalism. These tensions are, of course, still with us today."[2]
To Conclude De Jong has performed a vital public service
with this book. He states "I think people should be more aware of these
histories and history in general, particularly when it comes to consumption and
the continuing whitewashing of history by these consumer brands and families
that control them.". I heartily recommend this book, and it continues to
get a wide readership.
Further reading
1.
Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification,
Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany Paperback – March
31, 2019, by Christoph Vandreier
2.
The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany-Leon
Trotsky 1st edition-
3.
Paperback (December 31 1971)
