Author Edwin Black is a child of Holocaust survivors. His new "Nazi Nexus" offers a compact and highly concentrated dose of history that powerfully demonstrates the deleterious effects of the convergence of avarice and ideology, American-style.
The author's premise is that American businesses were complicit with Hitler's rise to power, conquest of Europe and war against the United States and that many of their activities continued through the war.
In addition to doing business with the Nazis, philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, contributed the equivalent of millions of dollars in support of German institutions devoted to eugenics, which served to legitimize racism by attaching a "scientific" basis for it, according to Black. The ties between German and American researchers in this area are astounding.
Black writes that General Motors supplied Hitler with a fleet of vehicles that enabled the Nazi blitzkrieg across Poland and other nations. It was made possible, Black writes, by the close cooperation between the Germans and a wholly owned GM operation, Opel, which manufactured a light truck called the Blitz, hence "blitzkrieg," the lightning attack. Black says GM CEO Alfred P. Sloan collaborated with the Nazis.
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Black has done more than his share of books on the topic. If you missed his earlier books (including "IBM and the Holocaust," "War Against the Weak" and "Internal Combustion,") this is a great place to begin, and if you read one or two but not the rest, "Nazi Nexus" ties them all together succinctly — and frighteningly.
About the book
"Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust" by Edwin Black; Dialog Press, 192 pages ($19.95).