Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 3:
Washington and New York
The Rubber Crisis of 1942
The military situation of the Allied powers in 1942 was superficially a desperate
one. After the winter of 1941-1942, the German armies continued their advance
across Russia. The destruction of most of the American Pacific fleet at
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, had made the Pacific a virtual Japanese lake.
America was suddenly faced with a problem that was, for her, a strange one: lack
of a crucial raw material without which no war effort appeared possible. Japan
controlled what had been the source of ninety per cent of America’s rubber, Malaya
and the East Indies, and the source of the other ten per cent, Central and
South America, was hopelessly inadequate. 113
The manner in which America extricated herself from this grave situation will
go down as one of the great ironies of history. America, one would expect, could
not resolve this problem because nobody in America had thought in terms of “autarky.”
Standard Oil of New Jersey had the essentials of the I. G. Farben Buna rubber
process. This was on account of a series of agreements between the two companies,
commencing in 1927, covering technical cooperation and mutual licensing
arrangements. Standard was quite interested in Buna rubber because it could also
be made (more easily) from oil.
The cooperation continued, with the consent of the German government, right
up to the outbreak of war and even, to some extent, after the outbreak of war. The
American side benefited hugely from these arrangements, but the German side got
almost nothing out of them. 114
The outbreak of war in September 1939 between Germany on the one hand
and England and France on the other threw these arrangements between Farben
and Standard into a certain amount of legal confusion, which need not be explored
here. Farben wished to clarify the confusion, and so a meeting was arranged at the
Hague on September 22, at which certain legal arrangements were made. Standard
official Frank A. Howard was puzzled by all of this: 115
“I could not escape the conviction, however, that the Germans themselves
were the only people who could profit from a military standpoint by leaving
the relations between Standard and the I. G. in the situation into which the
war had thrown them.”
113
114
115
Howard, 4-7, 216; U.S. Special Committee, 24.
Howard, chapters 2-9.
Howard, 82-83.
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