Letters from Vienna #42
1942
“It is unacceptable” Michael Brunner (see letter #4) said, “that the unvaccinated population continues to be criminalised and put under pressure”[1]. In the past, being Jewish was sufficient reason. To avoid the obvious resemblance, the authorities have now reversed the procedure: in the past one had to wear a Star of David to show one was Jewish; now there’s the “vaccine passport” to show one has had the jab.
On 15th September 1941 Victor Klemperer noted in his diary: “The Jewish armband, the Star of David, will come into force on September 19th. In addition, a ban on leaving the city limits. Mrs. Kreidl Sr. was in tears, Frau Voss had a heart attack. Friedheim said this was the worst blow yet, worse than the wealth levy. I myself feel devastated, can’t regain my composure yet... The reason given by the newspapers: After the army has got to know the cruelty etc. of the Bolshevik Jews, the Jews have to be deprived of every possibility of camouflage in order to spare their fellow countrymen any contact with them. – The real reason: fear of Jewish criticism…”[2]
Two days later he wrote: “Roosevelt decree: every German submarine that attacks or endangers an American transport between the USA and Iceland will be shot at (but no declaration of war from either side!)”[3]
The Americans were preparing for war but most Germans didn’t realise it quite yet. “In autumn 1941,” Adam LeBor wrote, “McKittrick (the American president of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) from 1940 to June 1943) gave Puhl (the director and vice-president of Germany’s Reichsbank) a tutorial on the Lend Lease program, under which the United States supplied the Allies the arms, ammunition and other war material. The act, passed in March of that year, effectively marked the end of the United States policy of neutrality. McKittrick later recalled the conversation. Puhl asked the BIS president: “What does this Lend Lease thing mean? We don’t understand it. Is there anything you’d be willing to tell me about it?” And I (McKittrick) said, “Yes, I’ll give you this. It’s my own idea but there’s no reason I shouldn’t tell it to you. I think that America is going to be in the war; something will happen to get us in. Just the way it did in the first war. And what is happening is that we’re getting our industrial organisation into shape for our own entry into the war.” I’ve never seen a man’s face drop more than his did. I thought he was going to faint or something. He said, My God. If you’re right, we’ve lost the war.””[4]
Yet the carefully pre-planned conflagration wasn’t designed to liberate the likes of Victor Klemperer from Nazi oppression. On the contrary: the British and Americans had financed Hitler to begin with and, in April 1943, at the Bermuda Conference, they decided that Jews like Klemperer should be abandoned to their fate.
What the war was intended to do was to strengthen America’s imperial position, make the US economy thrive, and to paper over domestic social tensions, which had taken a revolutionary turn.
“…as far back as his tenure as Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy,” Gerald Colby wrote “Roosevelt had maintained a firm commitment to defend America’s overseas trade routes…During his first term in the White House Roosevelt increasingly saw the need of a system of corporate expansion overseas as the basic means of economic recovery…he announced the good Neighbour Policy to encourage Latin American resistance to German corporate trade and investment. By imposing economic sanctions and by sending thirty Navy warships around Cuba to harass the nationalist government of President Grau San Martín, however Roosevelt emphasised that good neighbours do not rock the boat, especially where $3 billion of US corporate investment is concerned. When it came to Bolivia’s and Mexico’s seizure of Standard Oil concessions, again U.S. economic sanctions were imposed, and in 1937 Roosevelt sanctioned the bloody suppression of the Puerto Rican independence movement when 171 people were shot down by police as they peacefully assembled for a pro-independence parade.”
“In 1935…Roosevelt explained his foreign policy: “The full measure of America’s high productive capacity is only gained when our businessmen and farmers can sell their surplus abroad…Foreign markets must be regained if America’s producers are to rebuild a full and enduring domestic prosperity for our people. There is no other way if we would avoid painful economic dislocation, social readjustment, and unemployment.””
“Throughout the Thirties this position led to increasing antagonisms with the expanding Axis powers. “We’re just going to wake up and find inside of a year,” declared Treasury Secretary Morgenthau in December 1937, “that Italy, Germany and Japan have taken over Mexico.”[5]
War had the obvious advantage of ridding America of unwelcome competition. Thus, Roosevelt had no interest in peace in Europe and took full advantage of Hitler’s mistake in 1939 (see letter #39).
“In April 1941 Roosevelt allowed Navy warships patrolling the Atlantic to pass on the whereabouts of German submarines to the British Royal Navy. In July U.S. troops occupied Iceland. All Japanese assets in the United States were frozen. On September 11 Roosevelt ordered U.S. warships to fire on German submarines on sight…In November he forced Japan’s hand by having Secretary of State Hull deliver an ultimatum to Tokyo calling for complete Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and China… The first offer for negotiation by the Japanese Prime Minister was rebuffed by the President, and even before Japanese negotiators arrived in Washington, on December 3, 1941, the US Navy had decoded the Japanese “winds” message calling for “war with the United States, war with Britain”. Four days later came the Pearl Harbor attack.”[6]
What Colby fails to mention is that Roosevelt knew perfectly well that the attack was coming and did nothing to prevent it. There are even those who argue that he provided a helping hand.
Klemperer was astonished. On the 9th of December he wrote: “Big news last night. 1) Japan declared war on USA on the 8th (or 7th?). Everything about it is inexplicable and indeterminable. Why? Why now?”[7]
While even today many still don’t understand the background of Pearl Harbor (and are consequently puzzled by 9/11) what is beyond question is that Roosevelt’s in-laws, the Du Ponts, were enjoying an extremely successful run, even before America officially entered the war: “In the boom year of 1941 Du Pont cleared $77 million in profits. The 1942 Annual Report announced the largest sales volume in the company’s 140-year history, $498 million, generating a profit of $35 million.”[8]
“On February 5, 1942,” wrote Charles Higham “almost two months after pearl Harbor, the Reichsbank and the German and Italian governments approved the orders that permitted Thomas H. McKittrick to remain in charge of the BIS until the end of the war.…McKittrick gratefully arranged a loan of several million Swiss gold francs to the Nazi government of Poland and the collaborative government of Hungary.”[9]
All news which ran contrary to official propaganda was declared to be (the then equivalent of) “fake news”, “conspiracy theory” or “misinformation” and for good reason.
“What would have happened” opined Charles Higham “if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey managers shipped the enemy’s fuel through neutral Switzerland and the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase bank in Nazi occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars’ worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with the authorisation from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler’s communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built Focke-Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Göring’s cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them?”[10]
The infamous military industrial complex, which is behind much of the mischief in the world today, whether bombing Yemen, Afghanistan, Gaza or now the Ukraine, is not an unintended consequence of World War Two. World War Two was the forge which created it in the first place. It was a carefully planned and skilfully executed precision instrument; and the true nature of the MIC is still being carefully covered up at the very minute I am writing.
“Fifty-four new plants at thirty-two locations around the country were built by Du Pont” Colby reported “with $1 billion of taxpayers’ money, the company investing only 5 percent. “Today,” wrote President Walter Carpenter in the 1942 Annual Report, “the company has performed for the government in two years nearly twice as much engineering design and construction work as it did for itself and its clients on all commercial projects between the close of the first world war and the outbreak of this one.” For one plant, the $350 million Hanford Engineer Works near Pasco, Washington, Du Pont’s construction fee was only $1, a feat of generosity which it heralds to this day What Du Pont rarely mentions is that from the other plants it reaped over $680,000 in construction fees alone, and operation fees ran into the millions.”
“The real money, of course, was not in the construction of plants, but in the powder sales they generated, and here Du Pont had more than adequate compensation for its troubles. The company produced 4.5 billion pounds of explosives, about 70 percent of the entire country’s total output during the war and three times Du Pont’s World War I output. More TNT was produced than ever before anywhere, totalling 1.5 billion pounds. Smokeless powder, DuPont’s old moneymaker, was another 2.5-billion-pound gold mine, production volume rising to a ton a minute. One plant in Indiana alone produced over one billion pounds, almost as much as Du Pont’s total output during the golden days of World War I. By June 1943 Lammot (Du Pont II) was able to boast that Du Pont was producing more explosives than were being made in the entire country at World War I’s peak of production in 1918. In one day, every day, Du Pont produced more explosives than it made for the Union throughout the four years of the Civil War.”
“In non-explosives Du Pont production and operating profits were even larger. Throughout the war Wilmington proudly claimed that Du Pont’s production of explosives was a smaller percentage (25 percent) of its total output than in the last world war (80 percent). But much of its nonexplosive production also went to feed the face of the god Mars. Du Pont nylon replaced Japanese silk in parachutes, took the place of Chinese pig bristles in paintbrushes, and was used in everything from glider tow ropes to tropical mosquito screens. Du Pont paints coated the hulls of whole naval fleets, Du Pont dyes were used in uniforms, Du Pont antifreeze kept army trucks going in winter, and Du Pont cellophane wrapped rations, drugs, and supplies. A single Du Pont factory turned out eighty-six products that went into the Superfortress bomber alone. The war economy consumed 50,929 miles of Du Pont 35mm film, 38 million miles of nylon parachute yarn, 92.9 million pounds of cellophane, and 11 million pounds of DDT, Du Pont’s insecticide wonder that has since been linked to cancerous tumours.”
“For four hectic years Du Pont’s nylon plants, given over exclusively to military purposes for government contracts, produced at full capacity. Artificial rubber also enjoyed a boost: by May 1941 Du Pont was producing 6,000 tons of neoprene each year; 168 million pounds of “Cordura” rayon found a new market in tires for bombers and heavy trucks. Whole new series of products were made after Pearl Harbor: insecticides; food preservatives; fire extinguishing fluids; transparent plastic hoses for aircraft; camouflage paints that could not be detected by infrared photography; explosive rivets for aircraft to speed up production; cellophane wrapping for dehydrated foods; smoke screens; adhesives to replace rubber cement; preservatives for wood, textiles, and metal; even cold- and heat-resistant clothing that would keep a heavy man afloat in water.”[11]
War was especially profitable for California, where Lockheed, Boeing and Douglas employed thousands.
“In 1939 defence spending had accounted for 1.5 per cent of the Gross National Product, and unemployment was running at seventeen per cent; by 1944 defence was forty-five per cent of the GNP, and unemployment was only 1.2 per cent. But in California, the change was more dramatic than elsewhere.”
“North of Hollywood, the Lockheed factories were now dwarfing the film studios all around them: by June 1943 Lockheed was employing 94,000 people.”[12]
Since 2001 these companies have been flourishing like never before: “The benefits of the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending have been highly concentrated. One-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years have gone to just five major weapons contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. These five companies received over $286 billion in contracts in Fiscal Year 2019 and Fiscal Year 2020 alone. From FY 2001 to FY 2020 these five firms alone split over $2.1 trillion in Pentagon contracts (in 2021 dollars). To put these figures in perspective, the $75 billion in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in FY 2020 is well over one and one-half times the entire budget for the State Department and Agency for International Development for that year, which totalled $44 billion.”[13]
All ideals set aside about “liberating the Ukraine” or “defending the Ukraine” these companies will literally make a killing, just as they made a killing in Afghanistan.
[1]https://www.oe24.at/oesterreich/politik/impfpflicht-aus-reicht-der-mfg-noch-nicht/513085919?fbclid=IwAR2sM6-qrE5fFYd8Fv8ncF_M5RKcBzYxSTRZ6rzrE-DkkNWZHvLxR2p7tw0
[2] p.663 Victor Klemperer, Tagebücher 1933-1941
[3] p.667 Ibid
[4] p.66 Tower of Basel, Adam LeBor
[5] pp.381-382 Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, Gerard Colby
[6] pp.387-388 Ibid
[7] p.693Victor Klemperer, Tagebücher 1933-1941
[8] pp. 389-90 Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, Gerard Colby
[9] p.9 Trading with the Enemy, Charles Higham
[10] xv, Ibid
[11] pp. 388-390 Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, Gerard Colby
[12] p.96 The Arms Bazaar Anthony Sampson
[13]https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/Profits%20of%20War_Hartung_Costs%20of%20War_Sept%2013%2C%202021.pdf