Wall Street & the Rise of Hilter [Paperback]

Many Wall Street firms floated the loans to the German firms, allowing them to build their cartels which would later cost Americans and their allies many billions of dollars and millions of lives. The fact that there were Americans, some of them Jews like the Warburgs, on the Board of Directors of these same cartels that formed the Nazi war machine is mentioned. Sutton asks the obvious question. Why weren't the American members of these firms brought up on war crime charges like their German colleagues? I guess the obvious answer is that their American counterparts had influence in the conquering governments.

Sutton also shows how ITT(International Telephone and Telegraph), G.E., Ford, and Standard Oil had no problem supplying both sides of the war. International financiers, of course, had no problem floating loans to both sides either. I guess that this should come as no surprise. Businessmen are motivated by profits first and patriotism second, if at all.

This book is yet another demonstration of what Carroll Quigley meant by the close-knit ramifications of international financial capitalism. For critics of foreign aid and other such pracitces, here is another example of how it can come back to haunt the citizens of the lending country, while the elites laugh their way to the bank.

This book is the third in a trilogy. The two other books chronicle Wall Street's involvement in the rise of FDR and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies of businessmen like Henry Ford is no secret, so it's surprising that this subject gets so little play. Given modern leftist thought on big business, one would think that they would leap at the chance to link Wall Street to the Nazis. The reason they don't is no doubt due to Sutton's larger effort at showing that Wall Street supported "corporate socialism" not only in Germany, but in Russia and the U.S. as well. Since leftists still idealize FDR and the brutal regime that arose to become the U.S.S.R., they probably prefer to forget about the businessmen who connect them all. Sutton himself is no anti-business left-winger, instead he is a conservative concerned with the actions of an "unelected power elite", controlling events/governments/societies behind the scenes, to the detriment of freedom everywhere.

It makes for rather dry reading, but Sutton goes into extensive details about the persons, funds and timelines that show the deep connection between certain American Big Businesses and the Nazis. Why would Big Business embrace such a horrid political movement? Although Sutton does not go into details about motivation, there is a good case to be made that many businesses were not fond of the untrammeled free market and instead yearned for the security of government guaranteed profits, regardless of the expense to others in terms of loss of freedom. These businesses saw themselves as the contractors running the government machinery of what was thought to be the inevitable march to socialism. Sutton doesn't mention it, but many in the early twentieth century thought that some form of socialism was unavoidable, and that it was a choice between that and corporate domination through monopoly. Thus these businesses saw themselves as merely working towards what was almost pre-destined to happen, and ensuring that they would be the ones running the show and reaping the benefit.

The book turns a bit conspiratorial in the end. Sutton invokes the Kennedy Assassination, the Korean War and Vietnam War and the Council on Foreign Relations all in an attempt to suggest that we are being ruled by an unelected power elite, bent on societal domination at all costs, in the name of profit. There's no need to invoke conspiracy, though. The selfish acts of business men, tempted by access to the levers of power, is as good an explanation as any.

The case that Sutton makes is compelling. If his evidence is able to withstand scrutiny, it's hard to come to any other conclusion than that Big Business was willing to deal with the worst of the worst in order to profit via the coercive powers of government.