#85 Nazi Sterilisation, the American Way -  Ep 4 Trading with the Enemy

[photo] Junkers JU88 bomber, from 'Edelweiss' 3rd Squadron of Bomber Wing 51, in France executed a wheels-up landing at Buckholt Farm, as fuel ran out. The crew survived.

General Motors made trucks and parts for Junker bombers
 
After buying the German company Opel in 1929, General Motors seems to have co-operated with the Nazi government even more freely than Ford, at least before the war.

In 1935 the German military demanded Opel build a new truck factory south of Berlin. It became the largest and most efficient truck factory in Europe and was soon selling exclusively to the German armed forces, turning out 24 000 Opel Blitz trucks in 1939 alone. From 1938 it was also making parts for Junkers bombers.
 
When Germany occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and then part of Poland 1938-39, its military rolled out in General Motors and Ford cars and trucks and its planes were using General Motors and Ford parts.

They were also burning American fuel. In 1974 a US Senate Committee heard that, in 1935 and 1936 GM had shared its secret patents for synthetic fuel with the German government. Faced with no oil supplies of its own, it was a key breakthrough for the German war machine. Meanwhile, Standard Oil of New Jersey – S.O., ‘Esso’ to the British - was not only importing oil into Germany but also obtaining tetraethyl lead from London – an essential additive to gasoline – and importing that into Germany for Luftwaffe planes.
 

[photo] Replicated photographs of patients found in files from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for eugenics studies

US eugenics research was used to frame the Nazis’ anti-semitic and sterilisation policies
 
John D Rockefeller, who owned Standard Oil was among the richest men in the world. He ran a foundation that supported deserving causes. But among the causes Rockefeller considered ‘deserving’ was the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbour on Long Island. Rockefeller was in fact its main sponsor.

Its research was based on a distorted interpretation of Darwin – the belief that only the fittest human races survive. Of course scientifically there is only one human race. But eugenicists believed that there were many human ‘races’ and they were doomed to compete with each with other to the death.
 
Research produced by the Rockefeller-sponsored Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbour on Long Island was directly used by the Nazis in 1935 to frame their anti-Semitic Nuremburg laws and to launch their own campaign to sterilize those considered to have mental illness. Also, in the end, to exterminate supposedly competing peoples, notably the Jews.

Harry Laughlin, managing director of Rockefeller’s Eugenics Record Office, told a friend that he was ‘thrilled’ with Hitler’s speeches.
 
In 1933 – the year Hitler came to power – Rockefeller himself gave the Munich Institute for Psychiatric Research a generous ten-year grant. Another eugenics outfit.