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The Bankers Who Funded Hitler — And Were Never Punished ( WW2 ) — Transcript

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0:00Somewhere in Basel, Switzerland, in the
0:01spring of 1943,
0:03a well-dressed American banker boarded a
0:05German submarine escort vessel. He was
0:07traveling from Nazi territory back to
0:09neutral Switzerland, having just
0:10finished a series of meetings in Berlin
0:12with officials from the Reichsbank, the
0:14central bank of the Third Reich. His
0:15name was Thomas McKittrick, and he was
0:17not a spy, not a double agent, not a war
0:20criminal in any formal legal sense. He
0:22was the president of the most powerful
0:23international bank in the world. And
0:26while American soldiers were dying on
0:27battlefields across North Africa and the
0:29Pacific, he was having cordial sit-down
0:31meetings with the architects of the Nazi
0:33war machine. Now, here's what makes that
0:35even more disturbing.
0:37McKittrick had instructions waiting for
0:39him at home. The U-boats in the Atlantic
0:41had standing orders not to sink the ship
0:42carrying him back to Switzerland.
0:44Hitler's Germany, a country at active
0:46war with the United States, had
0:48explicitly guaranteed the safety of an
0:50American banker because he was too
0:51valuable to lose. This is a story most
0:53history books skip entirely. It's not
0:55about battles or generals or political
0:57speeches.
0:58It's about something quieter and far
1:00more unsettling. The men who sat in
1:02mahogany-paneled offices in New York,
1:04London, and Basel, who wore perfectly
1:05tailored suits, attended church on
1:07Sundays, and who, with the full
1:09knowledge of what they were doing,
1:10financed both sides of the deadliest war
1:12in human history. And what makes this
1:14story truly chilling isn't just that it
1:16happened. It's that most of these men
1:18were never prosecuted. Most of them were
1:20promoted after the war, and the systems
1:22they built to do it are still running
1:24today. To understand how the bankers
1:26funded both sides of World War II, you
1:28first have to understand how they funded
1:30the conditions that made World War II
1:31possible in the first place. When the
1:33guns finally went silent in 1918 after
1:35the First World War, the victorious
1:37Allied powers gathered in Paris and
1:38drafted one of the most financially
1:40punishing peace treaties in modern
1:41history, the Treaty of Versailles. Under
1:44its terms, Germany was declared solely
1:46responsible for the war and ordered to
1:48pay reparations totaling 132 billion
1:51gold marks, roughly 31.5 billion dollars
1:54at the time, which, in today's
1:55purchasing power, would be somewhere in
1:56the range of several hundred billion
1:58dollars.
1:59The total sum was staggering. It was
2:01designed not just to compensate the
2:02allies, but to permanently hobble
2:04Germany as a competitive industrial
2:06power. What followed was catastrophic.
2:09By 1921, the German government was
2:11printing money at a pace that defied
2:13comprehension. By November 1923, $1 US
2:16was worth 4.2 trillion German marks.
2:19Wheelbarrows of cash were needed to buy
2:21a loaf of bread.
2:22Middle-class savings built over
2:23lifetimes were wiped out overnight.
2:25Factories closed, unemployment exploded.
2:28And into that void of desperation and
2:29humiliation, extreme political movements
2:31began to grow. Movements that offered
2:33answers, however monstrous, to the
2:36question of why Germany had fallen so
2:38far. This mattered enormously to Wall
2:40Street, and not just philosophically.
2:42American banks had loaned enormous sums
2:44to the Allied powers during and after
2:45the war. France and Britain had borrowed
2:48billions to finance their military
2:49campaigns, and they needed Germany's
2:51reparation payments to service those war
2:53debts. If Germany collapsed
2:54economically, those payments stopped. If
2:56those payments stopped, France and
2:58Britain couldn't pay back New York. If
2:59New York didn't get paid back, the
3:01entire transatlantic financial system
3:03faced a crisis. So, in 1924, Wall Street
3:06moved in to save Germany, not out of
3:07compassion, out of financial
3:08self-interest. The instrument they used
3:10was called the Dawes Plan, named after
3:12Charles Dawes, an American banker and
3:14former army general who chaired the
3:16international committee tasked with
3:17restructuring Germany's reparations.
3:19Dawes and his colleagues, including Owen
3:21Young, the head of General Electric and
3:23a major Wall Street figure, designed a
3:24framework that reduced Germany's
3:26immediate payments, reorganized the
3:28Reichsbank under foreign supervision,
3:30and most critically, opened the American
3:32capital market to Germany in a massive
3:34way.
3:35Under the Dawes Plan, starting in 1924,
3:38billions of dollars in long-term bonds
3:39and short-term loans began flowing from
3:41American investors into the German
3:43economy.
3:44By the end of the decade, Germany had
3:45received approximately 29 billion
3:48Reichsmarks in foreign loans. American
3:50bankers, with J.P. Morgan leading the
3:51way, provided roughly 70% of Germany's
3:54foreign capital intake during this
3:55period.
3:56By 1929, German industrial output had
3:58surged so dramatically that Germany was
4:00the second largest industrial economy in
4:02the world, but here's the critical
4:04detail that almost no one talks about. A
4:06substantial portion of that money did
4:07not go toward rebuilding schools,
4:09hospitals, or public housing.
4:11It went toward rebuilding Germany's
4:13military-industrial capacity. The loans
4:15allowed Germany to modernize its steel
4:17plants, expand its chemical industries,
4:19and develop technologies that would
4:20later be turned directly toward warfare.
4:22The Dawes Plan wasn't just rescheduling
4:24a debt, it was functionally
4:26pre-financing the Wehrmacht. And the
4:27money moved in a circular, almost absurd
4:30loop. America lent money to Germany,
4:32Germany used that money to pay
4:33reparations to France and Britain,
4:35France and Britain used those payments
4:36to service their war debts back to
4:38America. Everyone kept their books tidy,
4:40everyone collected their interest. And
4:42Germany, meanwhile, quietly rebuilt
4:44everything that the Treaty of Versailles
4:45had stripped away.
4:47In 1929, the Dawes Plan was replaced by
4:50the Young Plan, again designed by Owen
4:52Young, which further reduced German
4:53obligations and pushed the final payment
4:55date all the way out to 1988, 59 years
4:58into the future. That same year, the
5:00Wall Street crash hit. The loans dried
5:02up overnight. The German economy plunged
5:04back into depression. Unemployment
5:05soared again. And Adolf Hitler, who had
5:07spent years ranting on the political
5:09fringes, suddenly found millions of
5:11desperate, furious voters ready to
5:12listen.
5:13The bankers didn't intend to put Hitler
5:15in power, but they built the exact
5:17economic conditions that made him
5:18possible. By the early 1930s, a
5:20relationship had been quietly developing
5:22between America, its most powerful oil
5:24company, and Germany, its most powerful
5:26chemical conglomerate. A relationship so
5:28intertwined that when the war came, it
5:30would become nearly impossible to
5:32separate where one ended and the other
5:34began. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the
5:36successor to John D. Rockefeller's
5:38original empire, in which the
5:40Rockefeller family held a controlling
5:41interest, had been in a deep commercial
5:44partnership with I.G. Farben since the
5:45mid-1920s.
5:47I.G. Farben was Germany's industrial
5:49titan, a conglomerate of chemical
5:50companies that manufactured everything
5:52from synthetic rubber to dyes to
5:54explosives, and later to Zyklon B, the
5:57gas used to murder millions of people in
5:59Nazi concentration camps.
6:01The partnership between Standard Oil and
6:02IG Farben was centered on two
6:04technologies that would prove decisive
6:06for the coming war. The first was
6:08synthetic rubber.
6:09Germany had no natural rubber. Without
6:11synthetic rubber, German armored
6:12vehicles, aircraft tires, and military
6:14boots couldn't be manufactured at scale.
6:16The second was synthetic aviation fuel,
6:19the hydrogenation process that allowed
6:20Germany to convert its abundant domestic
6:22coal into gasoline.
6:24Without synthetic fuel, the Luftwaffe
6:26couldn't fly. Standard Oil held critical
6:28patents for both processes.
6:30And through a series of cartel
6:31agreements negotiated in the late 1920s
6:33and early 1930s, those patents were
6:35shared with IG Farben, and by extension,
6:38made available to the Nazi rearmament
6:40program. An internal IG Farben
6:42memorandum captured after the war was
6:44remarkably candid about this. It stated
6:47that the agreements with Standard Oil
6:48were absolutely essential for IG Farben,
6:51and that without access to Standard's
6:53technical knowledge and financial
6:54backing, critical elements of German war
6:56production simply couldn't have
6:57happened.
6:58What makes this more than just a
6:59business story is what happened after
7:01war broke out. By 1940, the United
7:04States Department of Justice was
7:05investigating Standard Oil for its
7:07ongoing cartel arrangements with IG
7:08Farben. The evidence was damning.
7:11Standard had not only shared its
7:13synthetic rubber technology with
7:14Germany, it had actively withheld that
7:16same technology from the American
7:18military.
7:19The US Navy had wanted access to
7:20Standard's butyl rubber research.
7:22Standard's own executives deliberately
7:24stonewalled a Navy inspector to prevent
7:26him from getting a clear picture of the
7:27process.
7:28All while their German cartel partner
7:30was manufacturing rubber for tanks and
7:32aircraft that were killing Allied
7:33soldiers.
7:34When Senator Harry Truman's committee
7:36exposed the arrangement in 1942, the
7:38Justice Department threatened full
7:39prosecution. Standard Oil's Walter
7:41Teagle, the company's president and an
7:43IG Farben board director, went directly
7:45to President Franklin Roosevelt and
7:47argued that a lawsuit would disrupt war
7:48production.
7:49Roosevelt agreed to a settlement.
7:51Standard paid a fine of $50,000 against
7:53revenues of $2 billion and
7:56issued a formal statement. The war
7:58effort moved on. The executives were
7:59never jailed and through intermediaries
8:02in neutral countries, Spain, Switzerland
8:04and Vichy controlled territories in the
8:05Caribbean, Standard Oil continued to
8:07supply Germany with fuel throughout the
8:09war. Spain was re-exporting 48,000 tons
8:12of American oil per month to Germany as
8:14late as 1944. The ships carried goods
8:16that kept the Nazi war machine running.
8:18The ledgers in New Jersey recorded it
8:20all as legitimate commerce. While all of
8:22this was happening in the corporate
8:23suites of New York and New Jersey, there
8:25was a quieter, more refined operation
8:27running out of an unmarked building in
8:28Basel, Switzerland. So deliberately
8:30understated that it had no sign on the
8:32door, no nameplate visible from the
8:34street, no indication whatsoever that
8:36behind its walls operated what many
8:38financial historians would later call
8:40the most powerful financial institution
8:42on Earth. This was the Bank for
8:44International Settlements, known as the
8:45BIS. And to understand what it did
8:47during World War II, you first need to
8:49understand what it was designed to do.
8:51The BIS was founded in 1930 by the
8:54central banks of Europe and the United
8:55States
8:56with Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan among
8:58its key American architects.
9:00Its official purpose was to manage
9:02German reparations payments under the
9:03Young Plan. It's deeper purpose, as made
9:06clear in its founding statutes, was to
9:08foster cooperation between the world's
9:09central banks entirely outside of
9:11national governments.
9:13The founding documents explicitly stated
9:15that the bank's assets could never be
9:16seized, even in times of war. It was
9:19self-financing. It answered to no
9:20parliament, no president, no king. It
9:23was, as one of its early presidents
9:24boasted, completely removed from any
9:26government or political control.
9:29When World War II began in September
9:301939, the BIS faced an existential
9:33question.
9:34Do we shut down, go dormant, or keep
9:36operating?
9:37The board made the decision unanimously,
9:39keep operating, maintain neutrality.
9:42The logic was forward-looking. They'd
9:44need the institution intact for post-war
9:46reconstruction. The deeper reality was
9:48that international banking didn't need
9:50war to pause it, it just needed a
9:51different vocabulary. And so, while
9:53nations burned, the BIS stayed open. Its
9:56board included both Allied and Axis
9:58directors.
9:59Walther Funk, a senior Nazi official and
10:01Reich Minister of Economics, sat on the
10:03BIS board during the war.
10:05So did Hermann Abs,
10:07the chief executive of IG Farben, the
10:09same company manufacturing Zyklon B, and
10:11Baron von Schröder, whose private bank
10:13in Cologne was deeply embedded in Nazi
10:15financial networks.
10:16All three were later convicted of war
10:18crimes at Nuremberg, and all three had
10:20been welcomed BIS board members while
10:22the war was being fought. The BIS's
10:24wartime activities were not passive. The
10:26bank willingly accepted Nazi gold, gold
10:29looted from the central banks of
10:30Belgium, the Netherlands,
10:31Czechoslovakia, and from the personal
10:33possessions of murdered Jews, and
10:35processed it through its accounts.
10:37After Germany annexed Austria in 1938,
10:40Austrian gold reserves were stripped and
10:41shipped to the Reichsbank via BIS
10:43accounts.
10:44When Czechoslovakia was occupied, Nazi
10:46SS officers held Czech National Bank
10:49directors at gunpoint and demanded the
10:50transfer of the country's gold reserves,
10:53reserves that had been moved to the BIS
10:55for safekeeping, where they were
10:57presumed to be protected. The BIS
10:59forwarded them to Berlin. In total, the
11:01BIS received 3.7 tons of gold from the
11:04Reichsbank during the war that
11:05investigations later confirmed had been
11:07looted from Belgium and the Netherlands.
11:09The bank's post-war investigators
11:11eventually returned that gold to the
11:12Allied Commission in 1948, but during
11:15the war, it had been used as a
11:16functional component of Nazi Germany's
11:18wartime financial machinery, which
11:20brings us back to Thomas McKittrick, the
11:22man who ran all of this.
11:24McKittrick was appointed president of
11:25the BIS in May 1939, 3 months before
11:29Germany invaded Poland. He was an
11:31American lawyer with no central banking
11:32experience, but extraordinary
11:34connections. He knew people in
11:36Washington, on Wall Street, in London,
11:37and in Berlin. When the BIS's management
11:40decided to keep the bank running through
11:41the war under a declaration of
11:43neutrality, McKittrick became the public
11:45face and operational brain of that
11:47neutrality. What neutrality actually
11:49looked like was remarkable. McKittrick
11:50traveled freely in Nazi-occupied
11:52territory. He met regularly with
11:54Reichsbank officials in Berlin. He
11:56conducted foreign exchange transactions
11:57on behalf of the Nazi government. He
11:59recognized through BIS administrative
12:02procedures the Nazi occupation and
12:04forceful annexation of 10 European
12:06countries, including France, Belgium,
12:08Greece, and the Netherlands by accepting
12:10the transfer of those countries' BIS
12:12shares to their Nazi occupation
12:13governments.
12:15By the war's peak, Axis-controlled
12:16central banks held nearly 67% of BIS
12:19voting stock. The Reichsbank's Emil
12:21Puhl, who was personally responsible for
12:23processing dental gold stripped from
12:25concentration camp victims, a crime for
12:27which he was later convicted at
12:28Nuremberg, referred to the BIS privately
12:31as the Reichsbank's only real foreign
12:33branch.
12:35McKittrick was not an ideological Nazi.
12:37He almost certainly found the
12:38extermination camps abhorrent. But he
12:40was something arguably more dangerous, a
12:42banker who had made the decision that
12:44international finance existed on a plane
12:46above national wars, above human rights,
12:49above the moral obligations that applied
12:50to everyone else fighting and dying in
12:52the conflict raging around him.
12:55He had access to detailed intelligence
12:56about German war plans. He passed some
12:58of that along to Washington contacts. He
13:01used both relationships simultaneously,
13:03serving as an intelligence asset for the
13:04Allies while keeping the financial
13:06machinery running for the Axis. When the
13:08war ended and the full scope of what the
13:09BIS had done became clear, the United
13:12States pushed hard at the 1944 Bretton
13:14Woods conference to have the BIS
13:16liquidated.
13:17The resolution passed. The liquidation
13:19never happened. The central bankers
13:21quietly killed the motion. McKittrick
13:23stepped down as BIS president in 1946.
13:26He was immediately appointed a vice
13:27president of the Rockefellers Chase
13:29National Bank in New York in charge of
13:31foreign loans. That same year, the
13:33Belgian government decorated him with
13:34the Royal Order of the Crown. The BIS
13:36still exists today. It is still
13:39headquartered in Basel.
13:40It still operates outside any national
13:42government's jurisdiction. It is still
13:44one of the most powerful and least
13:45understood financial institutions in the
13:47world. McKittrick's relationship with
13:49Chase was fitting because Chase National
13:51Bank had already established its own
13:52extraordinary record of wartime
13:53accommodation to the Nazi regime.
13:56Not from the comfortable distance of
13:57neutral Switzerland, but from inside
13:59occupied Paris itself.
14:01When Germany rolled into France in June
14:031940 and established the
14:04collaborationist Vichy government, most
14:06American businesses in France shut their
14:08doors and left. Chase National Bank
14:10stayed open, so did J.P. Morgan.
14:13While American diplomats were being
14:14expelled and American citizens were
14:16being interned, Chase's Paris branch
14:18continued to operate doing business with
14:20the Nazi occupiers, seizing and freezing
14:22the accounts of Jewish customers on Nazi
14:24orders.
14:25And according to internal documents
14:26later reviewed by the US Treasury, doing
14:28so in what its own Paris branch chief
14:31described as a spirit of enthusiastic
14:33cooperation. A confidential note written
14:35by Carlos Niedermann, the Chase branch
14:37director in Paris to his superiors in
14:39Manhattan in May 1942, 5 months after
14:42Pearl Harbor with the United States now
14:44officially at war with Germany,
14:45described the bank as enjoying very
14:47special esteem with senior German
14:49officials and noted a rapid expansion of
14:51deposits.
14:53He was reporting this as good news.
14:54Business was growing. Under Nazi
14:56occupation, the branch was thriving. Six
14:58months before Germany invaded Poland in
15:001939, Chase wired $25 million to Germany
15:03to help finance its military build-up.
15:06A French government commission
15:07investigating wartime banking practices
15:09later found that five American banks,
15:11Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan, Guaranty
15:13Trust
15:14Company of New York, Bank of the City of
15:15New York, and American Express had
15:17participated in the handover of
15:19approximately 100 Jewish-held accounts
15:21to Nazi occupation authorities in
15:23France. None of these banks faced
15:25meaningful criminal prosecution. Several
15:27paid civil settlements decades later.
15:29The executives moved on to distinguished
15:31careers. The banks grew larger. The BIS
15:34and Chase operated on a vast
15:35institutional scale. But the story of
15:37how American banking money reached the
15:39Nazi war machine also played out in
15:41smaller, more personal, more human scale
15:43arrangements. One of the most striking
15:45involves a Yale-educated investment
15:46banker from Connecticut named Prescott
15:48Bush, who would later become a United
15:50States Senator, whose son George Herbert
15:52Walker Bush would become the 41st
15:53President of the United States, and
15:55whose grandson George Walker Bush would
15:57become the 43rd.
15:59In the 1920s, Prescott Bush became a
16:01partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, a
16:03private investment bank that, by its own
16:05description, was the largest in the
16:06world. His father-in-law, George Herbert
16:09Walker, had helped establish an
16:11important financial relationship with
16:12Fritz Thyssen, the German steel and coal
16:14magnate who was, through the 1930s, one
16:17of Adolf Hitler's most significant early
16:19financiers.
16:20Thyssen had personally given millions of
16:22marks to the Nazi Party before Hitler's
16:23rise to power, and he needed an American
16:25banking operation to help him move
16:27assets across the Atlantic. The
16:29mechanism for doing this was the Union
16:30Banking Corporation, a New York
16:32investment bank incorporated in 1924,
16:34which functioned as a clearinghouse for
16:36Thyssen's extensive American financial
16:37interests.
16:39Prescott Bush was a managing director of
16:40Union Banking Corporation.
16:42Through it and related entities, Brown
16:44Brothers Harriman transferred funds,
16:46bonds, gold, coal, oil, and steel
16:48between the United States and Germany
16:49throughout the 1930s and well into the
16:52war period. The German steel trust
16:53connected to Thyssen and Union Banking,
16:55the United Steel Works, produced fully
16:57half of Germany's steel and more than a
16:59third of its explosives during the war
17:01years.
17:02This was not a marginal operation. This
17:04was the backbone of Germany's military
17:05production capacity, and it was
17:07partially financed through a New York
17:08banking operation whose managing
17:10director would go on to represent
17:11Connecticut in the United States Senate.
17:13On October 20th, 1942, nearly a year
17:16after the United States formally entered
17:18the war at Pearl Harbor, the US
17:19government seized the assets of Union
17:21Banking Corporation under the Trading
17:23with the Enemy Act. Five related
17:25Bush-Harriman entities were seized
17:26around the same time. The documents
17:28confirming these seizures, later
17:29declassified and reviewed by journalists
17:31and researchers, established clearly
17:33that Prescott Bush continued working for
17:35and representing the Thyssen financial
17:37network after America went to war with
17:39Germany. No prosecution followed. No
17:42public scandal of lasting consequence
17:43emerged in Prescott Bush's lifetime. He
17:46was elected to the Senate in 1952. He
17:48served two terms. His family went on to
17:50occupy the White House for 12 years
17:52across two generations. Of all the
17:54financial dynasties that played both
17:55sides of World War II, perhaps the most
17:58architecturally sophisticated operation
18:00belonged to the Wallenberg family of
18:01Sweden.
18:03A dynasty whose banking and industrial
18:04empire was so deeply embedded in Swedish
18:06society that in the 1970s their
18:09businesses employed 40% of Sweden's
18:11industrial workforce and represented 40%
18:14of the total value of the Stockholm
18:16stock market. Sweden was officially
18:18neutral during World War II, but
18:20neutrality, as the Wallenbergs
18:22understood it, was not the same as
18:23non-participation. It was an
18:25opportunity. The family's flagship
18:27institution was Stockholm's Enskilda
18:29Bank. During the war, the bank's two
18:31dominant brothers, Jacob Wallenberg and
18:33Marcus Wallenberg, positioned themselves
18:35on opposite sides of the conflict
18:37simultaneously. Jacob handled trade
18:39negotiations and commercial
18:40relationships with Nazi Germany. Marcus
18:42cultivated ties with the Allied powers,
18:44particularly Britain and the United
18:46States. Between them, the family
18:48maintained financial relationships in
18:50both directions, extracting profit from
18:52each while committing fully to neither.
18:54One of their more documented wartime
18:55operations involved the Bosch Group, the
18:58German engineering and manufacturing
18:59conglomerate that was producing critical
19:01components for the Nazi war effort.
19:03When Allied pressure threatened to
19:04expose Bosch's Nazi affiliations and
19:07potentially compromise its international
19:08subsidiaries, Stockholm's Enskilda Bank
19:11stepped in and acquired those
19:12subsidiaries on paper,
19:14creating the fiction that they were now
19:15neutral Swedish-owned assets, not German
19:17ones. The American Bosch Corporation was
19:20one of these. The US government,
19:22suspicious from the start, seized the
19:23American operation in 1942 as enemy
19:26property. By the time the war ended,
19:28American investigators had worked
19:29through captured German corporate
19:31documents and traced the web of
19:32ownership back through the Wallenberg
19:34bank.
19:35In August 1945, the US Treasury
19:37Department declared Jacob and Marcus
19:39Wallenberg personally blacklisted
19:41special blocked nationals,
19:43and the bank was subjected to a
19:44financial blockade from doing business
19:46in the United States that lasted until
19:471947. The Wallenbergs were summoned to
19:50Washington for committee hearings that
19:51lasted throughout the autumn of 1945.
19:54The investigators concluded that the
19:55bank had not only concealed the true
19:57ownership of these assets, but had lied
19:59about it under examination. No criminal
20:01charges were filed.
20:03Thomas McKittrick, the American who ran
20:05the BIS during those same years,
20:06described Marcus Wallenberg as his most
20:08important mentor and teacher during the
20:10early period of his BIS presidency.
20:13McKittrick had learned from Wallenberg
20:14how to navigate between opposing
20:16European powers. He had applied those
20:17lessons to the most powerful secret bank
20:19in the world.
20:21After the blockade was lifted, the
20:22Wallenberg family resumed business as
20:24normal. They invested. They expanded.
20:27They became architects of post-war
20:28Swedish industrial power. Today, their
20:31investment vehicle, Investor AB,
20:33controls stakes in companies including
20:34Ericsson, AstraZeneca, Atlas Copco, ABB,
20:38and Saab. Its market capitalization sits
20:40around $60 billion.
20:43One of the most startling things about
20:44the wartime activities of these banks
20:46and bankers is not just that they
20:48happened, but how deliberately and
20:50systematically they were concealed, not
20:52only by the institutions themselves, but
20:54by the governments that were nominally
20:55at war with the countries being
20:57financed.
20:58Charles Higham, a former New York Times
21:00reporter, documented this in his 1983
21:02book Trading with the Enemy, The Nazi
21:05American Money Plot.
21:07Drawing on declassified government
21:08files,
21:10Higham described how the Roosevelt
21:11administration was fully aware of the
21:13activities of Chase Standard Oil and
21:14other firms doing business with the Nazi
21:16regime and made a deliberate policy
21:17decision not to prosecute them. The
21:19reasoning as Higham reconstructed it
21:21from internal memos was blunt.
21:23Prosecuting major American corporations
21:25for wartime collaboration would cause a
21:27public scandal large enough to shake
21:29civilian morale, potentially trigger
21:30labor strikes, make it impossible for
21:32those same corporate boards to cooperate
21:34in producing material the military
21:36needed to actually win the war.
21:38The corporate infrastructure was too
21:40important to sacrifice for the principle
21:42of wartime loyalty. So, the government
21:44looked away. Standard Oil paid a nominal
21:46fine. Chase continued operating.
21:48Prescott Bush, his assets were seized as
21:50a technical matter, but the man himself
21:52remained in banking and politics.
21:54McKitrick received an award from the
21:56Belgian government and a vice presidency
21:57at Chase.
21:59The deliberate suppression of these
22:00stories extended into the post-war
22:02period.
22:03When the Nuremberg trials were
22:04organized, American prosecutors made a
22:06judgment that pursuing the American
22:08corporate participants in Nazi financing
22:10would complicate the political
22:11landscape. IG Farben was tried at
22:14Nuremberg. Its American partner,
22:15Standard Oil, was not mentioned in the
22:17proceedings in any serious way. Looking
22:19back across all of this, the Dawes Plan,
22:22the Standard Farben Cartel, the BIS,
22:24Chase in Paris, Union Banking, the
22:26Wallenbergs, a pattern becomes visible
22:28that is more unsettling than any
22:30individual scandal.
22:31The bankers who funded both sides of
22:33World War II were not, for the most
22:35part, ideologically sympathetic to
22:36fascism. They were not Nazis. They were
22:39not even particularly cruel men in their
22:40personal lives. What they were was
22:42ideologically committed to something
22:43else entirely. The idea that capital
22:46exists above politics,
22:48that financial systems are neutral
22:49instruments that transcend the
22:51particular moral catastrophes of
22:52particular historical moments,
22:54and that the duty of a banker is to the
22:55health of the system itself, not to the
22:57human beings caught in the gears of the
23:00political violence that system helps to
23:01enable.
23:02This is what made it possible for
23:04McKittrick to have cordial meetings in
23:06Berlin while American boys were dying in
23:08the Pacific. It's what made it possible
23:10for Chase's Paris branch to freeze
23:11Jewish accounts and report growing
23:13profits to New York in the same memo.
23:15It's what made it possible for Prescott
23:17Bush to continue representing Thyssen's
23:19interests after America was at war with
23:21the country Thyssen had helped arm. In
23:23each case, the men involved had
23:24constructed an internal moral
23:26architecture in which their role was
23:28simply to keep the financial plumbing
23:29functional and in which the political
23:31violence occurring outside the building
23:33was in some fundamental sense someone
23:35else's responsibility. The lesson
23:37history offers here is not a simple one.
23:39These men were not cartoon villains.
23:41They operated within legal frameworks
23:42that they themselves had helped to
23:44shape. They functioned within a system
23:46that rewarded their behavior and in most
23:47cases ultimately protected them from its
23:49consequences.
23:51The most dangerous actors in any
23:53financial catastrophe are rarely the
23:54ones who want destruction. They are the
23:56ones who simply want the machine to keep
23:58running and who have convinced
24:00themselves that keeping the machine
24:01running is, by definition, a moral act.
24:04In the immediate aftermath of the war,
24:06there were gestures toward
24:07accountability. The US government had
24:09seized Union Banking Corporation under
24:10the Trading with the Enemy Act. The BIS
24:13was supposed to be liquidated. Several
24:15I.G. Farben executives went to Nuremberg
24:17and received prison sentences, the
24:19longest being eight years, which
24:20amounted to roughly one year of prison
24:22per million people murdered. Chase
24:24eventually reached civil settlements
24:25with Holocaust survivors over the
24:27seizure of their Paris accounts. But the
24:29institutions themselves, the banks, the
24:31central banking frameworks, the
24:33international financial architecture,
24:35emerged from the war largely intact and
24:37in many cases stronger than before. The
24:39BIS, which a UN conference had voted to
24:41liquidate, kept operating and became the
24:44central coordinating institution for
24:46post-war European currency
24:47reconstruction. Chase National Bank
24:49merged and grew into what is today J.P.
24:52Morgan Chase, one of the largest banks
24:54in the world. The Wallenberg family's is
24:56empire expanded into a multi-industry
24:58powerhouse that still operates at the
25:00center of Swedish and global capitalism.
25:02And the principle at the heart of all of
25:04it, the idea that capital is a neutral
25:06force that financial systems float above
25:08political morality, that the men who
25:10manage those systems bear no special
25:11responsibility for what those systems
25:13enable, that principle was never
25:15seriously challenged. It was folded back
25:18into the standard operating assumptions
25:19of international finance, where it has
25:21remained ever since. The story of the
25:23bankers who funded both sides of World
25:24War II is ultimately a story about the
25:27architecture of power, about how money
25:29moves through institutions, across
25:31borders, and above the level at which
25:32ordinary moral categories apply.
25:35It's a story about how the same
25:36financial mechanisms that fund schools
25:38and hospitals can, with only minor
25:40adjustments to paperwork and
25:41jurisdiction, fund genocide. It is not a
25:44conspiracy theory. Every institution
25:46named in this story, the BIS, Chase
25:48National Bank, Standard Oil, Brown
25:50Brothers Harriman, Stockholms Enskilda
25:52Bank, is a matter of historical record.
25:54The documents are in the National
25:55Archives, in German war records
25:57repositories, in declassified Treasury
25:59memos, and the minutes of Nuremberg
26:01proceedings.
26:02The facts are not in dispute among
26:03serious historians. What is in dispute
26:06is what they mean, what obligation they
26:08create for us to think clearly about who
26:10controls money, who benefits from that
26:12control, and what moral weight attaches
26:14to operating the financial machinery of
26:15atrocity while claiming that finance is
26:18neutral. The bankers who ran the BIS
26:20during the war genuinely believed they
26:22were serving a higher institutional
26:23purpose than either side in the
26:25conflict. They genuinely believed that
26:27keeping the machinery of international
26:28settlement alive was, in some long-term
26:31view, a gift to humanity. They may even
26:33have been right about the long-term
26:34value of those institutions, but the
26:36cost of keeping them running was paid by
26:38the people whose gold was melted down,
26:40whose accounts were seized, and whose
26:41deaths were, in no small part, made
26:44possible by the capital that flowed
26:45through those pristine marble lobbies.
26:48That's the part of the story that never
26:49quite makes it into the official
26:50histories, the part where profit and
26:53atrocity share the same ledger.
26:55The part where some of the most
26:56respected men of their generation looked
26:58at the worst catastrophe in human
26:59history and asked not how to stop it,
27:01but how to make sure the books balanced
27:03when it was over. If you found this
27:04story as disturbing as I did, I'd really
27:06appreciate it if you hit subscribe. It
27:09genuinely helps this channel reach more
27:10people who want to understand the world
27:12as it actually works. Not just as the
27:14textbooks describe it. And if there's a
27:16particular dynasty, institution, or
27:18hidden chapter of financial history you
27:20want me to dig into next, drop it in the
27:22comments. I read every one of them. This
27:24is what economic history actually looks
27:25like, and the more of it we understand,
27:28the harder it becomes for the same
27:29patterns to keep repeating themselves
27:30without anyone noticing.

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