German-Soviet Military Relations, 1918-1941 That Led To WWII

The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed A Trail For Hitler, book by Nigel Jones

SOWING THE WIND: THE FIRST SOVIET-GERMAN MILITARY PACT AND THE ORIGINS OF WORLD WAR II, article by Ian Johnson

Germany–Soviet Union relations, 1918–1941 — Wikipedia

Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933-1941, book by Edward E. Ericson III 

The dramatic story of Hitler and Stalin’s marriage of convenience has been recounted frequently over the past 60 years, but with remarkably little consensus. As the first English-language study to analyze the development, extent, and importance of the Nazi-Soviet economic relationship from Hitler’s ascension to power to the launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, this book highlights the crucial role that Soviet economic aid played in Germany’s early successes in World War II. When Hitler’s rearmament efforts left Germany dangerously short of raw materials in 1939, Stalin was able to offer valuable supplies of oil, manganese, grain, and rubber. In exchange, the Soviet Union would gain territory and obtain the technology and equipment necessary for its own rearmament efforts.

However, by the summer of 1941, Stalin’s well-calculated plan had gone awry. Germany’s continuing reliance on Soviet raw materials would, Stalin hoped, convince Hitler that he could not afford to invade the USSR. As a result, the Soviets continued to supply the Reich with the resources that would later carry the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow and nearly cost the Soviets the war. The extensive use in this study of neglected source material in the German archives helps resolve the long-standing debate over whether Stalin’s foreign policy was one of expansionism or appeasement.

Devil’s Bargain: Germany and Russia Before WWII, article by James C. Corum

On A Field of Red: The Communist International and the coming of World War II, book by Anthony Cave Brown

During the 1920s, the WWI allies treated the Soviet Union as a diplomatic leper in reaction to the flagrant interference of the Comintern in western domestic political affairs and the increasingly brutal and antidemocratic character of the Soviet government. Germany, on the other hand, was defeated, friendless, economically prostate, and saddled by the Versailles Treaty with oppressive reparations payments and severe limits on German military power. Not surprisingly, these conditions drove the Germans to seek rapprochement with the other outcast, the Soviet Union. The 1922 Treaty of Rapallo provided the basis for the secret rebuilding of German military strength on Soviet territory and, quid pro quo, for German training and organization of the Red Army. Despite Rapallo, the Comintern continued to agitate for the proletarian revolution in Germany, undermining the Weimar government, and leading to the rise of Hitler.

A Century of Conflict: Communist Techniques of World Revolution, book by Stefan T. Possony

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, book by Stephan Koch

Professor Stephen Koch meticulously details the manipulation by the Soviets’ master propagandist Willi Munzenberg of thousands of European and American progressive intellectuals in the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s by his vast publishing network and interlocking front organizations under the covert direction of the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet secret services of the NKVD and the GRU.

He particularly concentrates upon the intellectual elite that fell under Munzenberg’s sway in this cultural war against the West.

This includes such persons as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Andre’ Malraux, Andre’ Gide, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, George Grosz, Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Bertolt Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

This volume shatters myth after historical myth of this critical period. It is one of the most important books I have ever read.

Münzenberg, Koch states, “developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is political.” 

The notion that – the ethical is the political – and that the highest form of ethical expression was “anti-fascism,” – with the Soviet Union as the publicly-identified, ideologically most dedicated opponent of fascism, thus holding the moral high ground.

This myth was actually built upon the basest of lies.

As Koch demonstrates, from the earliest days of the National Socialist regime in Germany, beginning with the Reichstag Fire less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, a sinister covert relationship existed between Nazi secret intelligence and their Soviet counterpart.

This clandestine cooperation continued throughout the decade: Hitler’s massacre of Ernst Rohm and his S. A. leadership in the Night of the Long Knives; Stalin’s terror purge of CPSU party members, feckless intellectuals, military officers (most notably Field Marshal Tukhachevsky’s betrayal by documents forged in a Gestapo laboratory), and the murder of tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, reaching its culmination in the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of August, 1939.

Publicly the Soviet Union and their international Popular Front network (of what were secretly designated “useful idiots” or “Innocents’ Clubs”) preached “anti-fascism.”

Covertly Stalin sought accommodation, appeasement, and eventual alliance with Hitler.

But there was something else sinister going on in this same period

The Best Enemies Money Can Buy: Antony C. Sutton — Documentary and reading list

Conjuring Hitler: How Britain And America Made the Third Reich, book by Guido Giacomo Preparata

Nazism is usually depicted as the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated. In this explosive book, Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he demonstrates that Hitler’s extraordinary rise to power was in fact facilitated — and eventually financed — by the British and American political classes during the decade following World War I. Through a close analysis of events in the Third Reich, Preparata unveils a startling history of Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the early twentieth century. He explains that Britain, still clinging to its empire, was terrified of an alliance forming between Germany and Russia. He shows how the UK, through the Bank of England, came to exercise control over Weimar Germany and how Anglo-American financial support for Hitler enabled the Nazis to seize power. This controversial study shows that Nazism was not regarded as an aberration: for the British and American establishment of the time, it was regarded as a convenient way of destabilising Europe and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia, thus preventing the formation of any rival continental power block. Guido Giacomo Preparata lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the British and American establishment who aided Hitler’s meteoric rise.

Hitler’s American Business Partners – Documentary

This documentary uncovers the unholy alliance between Nazi Germany and some of the biggest corporations in the US — companies which were indispensable for Hitler to wage war. Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer; James D Mooney, the General Motors manager; and Thomas Watson, the IBM boss were all awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle — the Nazi’s highest distinction for foreigners for their services to the Third Reich. Of course, many American corporations were also actively engaged in building up the Soviet military-industrial complex during the interwar period. War is the health of the State (and its corporatist adjuncts).

Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaustbook by Edwin Black.

Nazi Nexus is the long-awaited wrap-up in a single explosive volume that details the pivotal corporate American connection to the Holocaust. The biggest names and crimes are all there. IBM and its facilitation of the identification and accelerated destruction of the Jews; General Motors and its rapid motorization of the German military enabling the conquest of Europe and the capture of Jews everywhere; Ford Motor Company for its political inspiration; the Rockefeller Foundation for its financing of deadly eugenic science and the program that sent Mengele into Auschwitz; the Carnegie Institution for its proliferation of the concept of race science, racial laws, and the very mathematical formula used to brand the Jews for progressive destruction; and others.

Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust — Edwin Black C-SPAN presentation

Author Edwin Black talked about his book Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust (Dialog Press; February 25, 2009). In his book Mr. Black looks at the U.S. corporations that were directly involved with the Holocaust and how they allowed for its enormous scope. He synthesized the information detailed in his previous specific works such as IBM and the Holocaust and War Against the Weak.

Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, book by Charles Higham

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, book by Antony C. Sutton

Makes Every Previous Book on World War II Obsolete.

Finally, a distinguished scholar has penetrated the cloak of falsehood, deception, and duplicity that for more than thirty years has protected one of the most incredible secrets of World War II: the support from key Wall Street financiers and other international bankers in subsidizing Hitler’s rise to power.

Professor Antony C. Sutton proves that World War II was not only well planned, it was also extremely profitable—for a select group of financial insiders.

`The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to the German military.

The Nazi Hydra in America, book by Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins

A piercing study of the tenacious roots of American fascism in our plutocracy, from robber baron days to Reichstag fire to the WTC atrocity and “Homeland Security.” This sweeping, 700-page documentary of the American oligarchy’s century-long project for world dictatorship is bound to be a landmark in the writing of American history. Includes a blow-by-blow account of the successful fascist assault and takeover of America’s media.

The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, book by Christopher Simpson

A disturbing report on how US bankers, lawyers, and diplomats responded to the Armenian massacres of WW I and the Holocaust. Simpson (Blowback, 1988) has double expertise for this comparative study, since he’s a member of the national advisory board of the Armenian Genocide Archive and also served as research director for Marcel Ophuls’s documentary of Klaus Barbie, Hotel Terminus. During WW I, Simpson tells us, America and its European allies saw the recently drafted Hague and Geneva Conventions fail when the Turkish government killed one million Armenians–and when, at the Versailles peace conference, the victors allowed Turkey to escape punishment in hope of obtaining Middle Eastern oil. Hitler cited the Armenian genocide as the prototype of his own larger, more systematically organized crimes–although Simpson, by using newly released documents, suggests that the Nazis could not have conducted their hideous slaughter without Western bungling: in one ease, through American concerns such as Ford Motor Co. and John Foster Dulles’s Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, whose European trading partners looted Jewish businesses in the Nazi “Aryanization” program; and, in another case, through State Department bureaucrats who buried intelligence reports on the Final Solution. Further, Simpson shows how prominent Nazis, such as oil chief Karl Blessing and SS general Karl Wolff, escaped judgment at Nuremberg with the assistance of these State Department functionaries and of John Foster Dulles’s brother Allen (then an OSS agent who helped clear German businessmen). The motive: to aid Nazi industrialists who had spied for the US during the war, or who might help rebuild Germany as an anti-communist bulwark in Europe. Except for its simplistic conclusion (that the lax US war-crimes posture contributed to the souring of American-Soviet relations): revelatory and shocking investigative scholarship of a high order.

I have an autographed copy of this important volume.

Banking With Hitler — Documentary

371 Swiss banks stand accused of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. This was suspected at the time by by U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who began investigating this collaboration. He found the Swiss were not alone. His archives reveal that both British and American bankers continued to do business with Hitler, even as Germany was invading Europe and bombing London.

 

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3:33 pm on June 14, 2021