The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

A NEW REICH BEGINS 31book titled The International Jew. As Hitler worked on his book, MeinKampf, in 1924, he copied liberally from Ford’s writing and even referredto Ford as “one great man.” Ford became an admirer of Hitler, providedfunds for the Nazis, and, in 1938, became the first American to receivethe highest honor possible for a non-German: the Grand Cross of the SupremeOrder of the German Eagle.Ford’s son, Edsel, sat on the board of American I. G. Farben and GAF.In July 1940, at a meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, between ITT’sWestrick and the Fords, it was decided that rather than build aircraft enginesfor beleaguered Britain, the Ford company would build five-tonmilitary trucks for Germany, the “backbone of German Army transportation.”And the Fords were not alone in providing Nazi Germany with themeans to wage war. Bradford Snell told the Washington Post in 1998 thatNazi armaments minister Albert Speer once told him that Hitler wouldnever have considered invading Poland without the synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.One future American corporate giant provided the Nazis with themeans of registering, correlating, and assigning shipment schedules to themillions of Jews and others that were rounded up and sent to their deathsin concentration camps. According to author Edwin Black, Hitler’s desireto tabulate then eliminate these people was “greatly enhanced and energizedby the ingenuity and craving for profit of a single American companyand its legendary, autocratic chairman. That company was InternationalBusiness Machines [IBM], and its chairman was Thomas J. Watson.” Usingrecently discovered Nazi documents and the testimony of formerPolish workers, Black found that IBM technology was passed not onlythrough the company’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith MaschinenGesellschaft (Dehomag), but to a great extent through a subsidiary in Poland,Watson Business Machines in Warsaw, which reported directly tothe IBM New York headquarters.Watson kept in close contact with his German subordinates, travelingto Berlin at least twice a year from 1933 to 1939. Watson never sold IBMmachines to the Nazis. They all were merely leased. This meant that allmachines were dependent on IBM punch cards, parts, and servicing. Interestingly,IBM punch cards of that time were not standardized. Each