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Hitler 2

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oops see other node

see nazism

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RWW 1 26

Nick Fuentes unleashed an antisemitic rant in response to the controversy that erupted after he and several other far-right figures danced to Kanye West's "Heil Hitler" in a Miami Beach night club: "We do not care about the Holocaust!"

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MMA

Nick Fuentes: “Why is Hitler cool? I'll tell you why very simply. Because what Hitler represents is if white people didn't give a fuck.”

12/10/25

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  1. ### Sean Hannity criticizes “insane” Trump supporters who “praise Hitler”

12/08/25 7:39 PM EST

  1. ### Jesse Watters says criticizing boat strikes makes people sound “effeminate”

12/08/25 6:42 PM EST

  1. ### Nick Fuentes says Trump’s national security policy is “an explicit acknowledgement of white genocide”

12/08/25 5:51 PM EST

  1. ### Megyn Kelly Show guest: Comparing rhetoric of Trump officials to Nazis will give Nazism “a good name”

12/08/25 4:00 PM EST

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:{RWW

09/03/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

President Donald Trump raged at the ongoing focus on the Jeffrey Epstein files during an Oval Office Q&A alongside the president of Poland on Wednesday, which happened soon after Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) held their presser on trying to release the files.

Trump’s team said a video showing someone throwing things out a White House window was real but anodyne. The president preferred to falsely blame AI.

CrossPolitic has in recent weeks hosted pastors who have opposed liberal democracy and pushed authoritarian ideas.

Ryan Walters and PragerU teamed up to quiz teachers transferring from "woke" states. Their only goal is selling conservative talking points.

Connor Clegg, a former Fox News producer who was ousted from his school’s student government over accusations of racism, is working in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s communications department, according to a current and a former EEOC employee with knowledge and a screenshot of the agency’s personnel directory viewed by Talking Points Memo.

U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is under fire after telling the National Conservatism Conference that America “belongs to us, and only us,” drawing accusations of racism and historical ignorance.

A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II.

REF

The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guesttold Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.

Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl Cooper, whom he dubbed “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have been “the chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi Germany at best coming in second. The day after the episode aired, Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, writing on social media that the German leader had sought peace with Europe and merely wanted “to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” He did not explain why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place.

“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owensasked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s show, Owens defended him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote on X.

These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures. Carlson’s show ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before President Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice President J. D. Vance, who owes his office in part to Carlson’s advocacy. Owens has millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and X, and over the past six months, she has been interviewed by some of the nation’s most popular podcasters, including the comedian Theo Von and the ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith. Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over her repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man. Cooper, the would-be World War II revisionist, publishes the top-selling history newsletter on the entire Substack platform.

Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right

Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.

Before World War II, the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the Nazis prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.

The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never made it to a congressional vote. Many Americans worried, however illogically, that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly rare occurrence. Those with suspicions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggested in 1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under compulsion from the Nazis, “especially Jewish refugees.”

This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly consequences. In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion. “I thought of some of the stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was propaganda,” Sergeant Horace Evers wrote to his family in May 1945. “But no it wasn’t propaganda at all … If anything some of the truth had been held back.”

Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrowtold his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, latertestified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Americans began to understand themselves as the ones who’d defeated the Nazis and saved the Jews. Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism became un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned them—are passing away, and a wave of propagandists with a very different agenda has arisen to fill the void they left behind.

:{:{Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. The former Fox News host hasdescribed Ben Shapiro, perhaps the most prominent American Jewish conservative, and those like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about the country at all.” He has also promoted a lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory that has inspired multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. }:

Candace Owens has accused Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world. (Like many pushing such slanders, she has apparently discerned that replacing Jews with Israel or Zionists grants age-old conspiracy theories new legitimacy.) In March, an influencer named Ian Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media followers, and whose work has been shared by Elon Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular podcaster in America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”}:

Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such as the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father Charles Coughlin inveighed against the country’s tiny Jewish population, accusing it of controlling America’s institutions and dragging the U.S. to war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” Lindbergh declared of American Jews in 1941. “Why is there persecution in Germany today?” asked Coughlin after Kristallnacht. “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” For these men and their millions of supporters, behind every perceived social and political problem lay a sinister Jewish culprit.

Read: What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says

The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to turn back the clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as sensible rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they need to change how America talks about itself and its past. “The reason I keep focusing on this is probably the same reason you’re doing it,” Carlsontold Darryl Cooper, the amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of the destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”

Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has also denied that “a single Jew died in gas chambers.”) “Hitler was right about y’all,” said Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million followers across platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this fuckin’ bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within.” These influencers are less respectable than Carlson, but their views are precisely the ones that more presentable propagandists like him are effectively working to mainstream. After Carlson’s guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with Hitler,” Shields reposted the clip.

Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20 years ago, they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are dead, and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the Holocaust firsthand or heard about it from family and friends who did.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.

Yair Rosenberg

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.

Explore More Topics

Adolf Hitler, Europe, Germany, Nazi Party, The Holocaust, Tucker Carlson, World War II

The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee blamed the conspiracy theorist for the cancellation of a planned intelligence oversight meeting.

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rww

01/31/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

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AN 1 25

One local Republican group in Tennessee decided to promote its reading list of recommended books by including a quote from Adolf Hitler.

That's according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, which recently reported that the Tennessee Federation of Republican Women (TFRW) included the Hitler quote when arguing for the importance of influencing the next generation from an early age. The paper reported that the TFRW recommended books by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and former Second Lady Lynne Cheney, among others.

While the post on the group's website has apparently been deleted, an archived version of it shows that the reading list, which was entitled "Growing American Patriots Through Literacy," quotes the Bible immediately before quoting the Nazi dictator who ordered the murder of six millions Jewish people during World War II, and committed acts of genocide against other marginalized groups. The group referred to him an "intelligent leader."

READ MORE:**Maine GOP lawmaker doubles down on comments defending Nazis**

"Proverbs 22:6 teaches us that if 'we train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.' Hitler and all intelligent leaders throughout history have understood that the way to change a country was through the training of its youth, to get them while they are young," the TFRW wrote.

Patsy Henry, who is a TFRW member in the Chattanooga area, told the Times Free Press that the Hitler quote was unnecessary, and that the group could have made the same point about engaging with youth by instead quoting someone like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

"I don't know why they would use Hitler, I have no idea," Henry said.

TFRW President Sharon Boreing did not respond to the outlet's requests for comment. Former TFRW President Barbara Trautman has not addressed the controversy on her social media platform, nor has the group's official X account.

READ MORE:**'Let's talk about the Nazis': Republican opposing paramilitary activity ban bill under fire**

Click here to read the Times Free Press' article in its entirety.

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RWW

01/23/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

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August 19, 2024 rww

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an 1123

last week, X CEO Elon Musk endorsed a tweet accusing Jews of pushing “dialectical hatred against whites” and supporting “hordes of minorities … flooding their country.”

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied.

In parroting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and giving antisemites free rein on his site, Musk is emulating Henry Ford, a car mogul who bought a media platform to spread antisemitic libels.

The Great Replacement is the delusional belief that someone is trying to replace white people by championing liberal immigration policies and racial justice. As is typical, Musk cast the Jews in the role of racial puppet masters.

When fascists in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us,” they were referencing the myth of the Great Replacement. The following year, Robert Bowers accused the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HAIS) of perpetrating white genocide before his shooting spree at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh:

“HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people,” Bowers said. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

In 2019, a gunman killed 52 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. His manifesto was entitled “The Great Replacement.” The same year, a shooter cited the Great Replacement to explain why he took 23 lives at an El Paso Walmart. The Buffalo supermarket shooter was also a believer.

Jewish philanthropist George Soros is routinely cast in conspiracy theories for his foundation’s support of liberal causes, such as criminal justice reform and the Black Lives Matter movement.

During the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, American Jews played a prominent role in founding and funding major civil rights organizations. Many of the white student Freedom Riders were Jewish and 17 rabbis were arrested alongside Martin Luther King in St. Augustine in 1964. Segregationists spread their own conspiracy theories about Jews teaming up with Blacks to destroy the white way of life.

In fact, the image of the liberal Jew goes back at least as far as the French Revolution. In the prevailing spirit of liberalism, the revolutionary government became the first in Europe to grant citizenship to Jews in 1791. In keeping with this liberalizing ethos, various European countries emancipated their Jewish residents. This wave of emancipation vastly expanded opportunities for Jews in terms of where they could live, what jobs they could do, and how they could participate in politics, business and the arts. Not surprisingly, many Jews embraced liberal ideologies because liberal tolerance improved their lives.

It was during the 19th century that Europe’s longstanding Jew-hatred curdled into modern antisemitism. It was during this time that the myth of the international Jewish conspiracy was fully fleshed out.

Some scholars argue that conspiracy theories arethe defining characteristic of antisemitism. It’s wrong to hate someone for their religion, but the animosity is rooted in a real difference of opinion: Jews aren’t Christians, and some Christians have had a problem with that for centuries. Whereas, antisemitism is based on pure racial and political fantasy.

Modern antisemitism construes Jews as both the racial other and as agents of malignant modernity. Jews are identified with both communism and capitalism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most successful antisemitic tract of all time, was forged by agents of the Russian secret police in the late 19th century. It purports to reveal the secret deliberations of a group of rabbis gathered in Prague to take over the world. By some estimates, the Protocols have been republished more than any other book except the Bible.

In 1920, Henry Ford began publishing the Protocols under the header of “The International Jew” in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. At the time, the Independenthad a greater national reach and more influence than the Times. Hitler praised Ford by name in Mein Kampfas the “single great man” of the “American Union” standing against “the Jews.”

The Protocols were debunked as a crude forgery in 1920 and Ford was eventually forced to retract them and apologize after being sued for libel by an American Jewish lawyer whom Ford accused of furthering the conspiracy by founding farm cooperatives.

In endorsing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, Musk is partaking in an ancient and ugly tradition of twisting one of Judaism's proudest traditions – a commitment to social justice.

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say what you will

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/carl-paladino-adolf-hitler-leader/

https://www.mediamatters.org/eric-trump/hitler-promoting-antisemites-will-speak-trumps-miami-hotel-alongside-eric-trump-lara

ref mma 5 23

the Trump National Doral resort will host two antisemites who have promoted pro-Adolf Hitler propaganda and spread virulently antisemitic conspiracy theories. They will be speaking at an event in Miami alongside numerous Team Trump personalities, including Eric Trump, Lara Trump, and Devin Nunes. 

Trump Doral speaker Scott McKay, who has a streaming show on Rumble, has claimed that Jewish people orchestrated 9/11 and were responsible for the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and William McKinley. He has also said that Jewish people routinely torture children and eat their hearts.

He has praised Hitler for supposedly trying to take down a Jewish banking system and said, “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we're trying to take down today.”

Trump Doral speaker Charlie Ward, who also streams a show on Rumble, has shared posts praising Hitler for supposedly “warning us” about Judaism; claiming that “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made”; and attacking the alleged Jewish media for supposedly lying about the Holocaust. 

The two are featured speakers in the “ReAwaken America” tour, which is set to stop at  Trump’s Miami hotel on May 12 and 13. Scheduled to speak alongside McKay and Ward are numerous members of Trump’s orbit, including: Eric Trump, Lara Trump, former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former senior Department of Defense official Kash Patel, former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes, and Trump ally Roger Stone.

Numerous other far-right conspiracy theorists will be speaking, including Stella Immanuel, Mel K, Liz Crokin, Ann Vandersteel, Mike Lindell, and Patrick Byrne.

Media outlets have previously noted that the tour, which has been holding events across the country, has also featured QAnon supporters, conspiracy theories, and Christian nationalist rhetoric.

Michael Flynn co-founded the tour and also has a history of antisemitism.He stated on the tour that he wants the United States to “have one religion.” In 2016, he shared -- and then deleted -- a tweet stating “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” And in 2021, he criticized Holocaust victims, stating: “Jesus, how could somebody stand there and just allow these people to do that to them? And then knowing what they knew, how could they get on that train? I would have rather attacked that machine gun nest.”

During a recent appearance on a QAnon program, tour co-founder Clay Clark told viewers that  “Eric Trump is a good friend of mine” and said “it's exciting … that Trump's inner circle is now going, they're all reaching out to our tour, to the ReAwaken America tour, to Gen. Flynn, to myself, to Kash Patel. And they're all saying, hey, can we come to the tour?”

Team Trump is hosting and participating in the tour and associating with its Hitler-promoting speakers despite heavy criticism over Trump’s meeting last December with Ye and Nick Fuentes, who have similarly praised Hitler.

The Trump officials’ association with McKay and Ward is part of a larger Republican Party pattern, with numerous officials promoting or speaking alongside antisemites.

Scott McKay claimed Jewish people torture children and eat their hearts and “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we're trying to take down today”

[pix]From antisemitic commentator Scott McKay's Telegram page.

McKay, who also goes by Patriot Streetfighter, is a speaker at the Trump Doral event. He frequently makes antisemitic comments. Among the many examples:

For more on Scott McKay, go here.

Charlie Ward shared posts praising Hitler for “warning us” about Judaism, claiming “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made” 

[pix]

Ward is a speaker at the Trump Doral event. During a November ReAwaken America tour stop in Branson, Missouri, he said: “How many people in here know that more people have been killed by the jab than were killed in the Holocaust? And they're still doing it because nobody can stop them.”

He frequently promotes antisemitism and pro-Hitler content. Among the many examples:

For more on Charlie Ward, go here.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/i-love-nazis-kanye-west-repeatedly-praises-nazis-and-especially-hitler-in-wild-interview-with-alex-jones/

no lnx vid

‘I Love Nazis’: Kanye West Repeatedly Praises Nazis and ‘Especially Hitler’ in Wild Interview With Alex Jones

Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | December 1, 2022

Kanye West, the rap mogul who now goes by the name Ye, recently teamed up with Nick Fuentes, the racist, misogynistic, America-hating, Christian fascist leader of the white nationalist America First movement. Brought together by their mutual virulent antisemitism, the two recently had dinner with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort, andFuentes is reportedly playing a key role in planning West’s presidential campaign.

Today, West and Fuentes joined far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones live in studio, where West, shielded behind a face mask, spent hours delivering bizarre rants, attacking Jews, and repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Jones, West, and Fuentes were joined later in the program by far-right activists Laura Loomer and Ali Alexander.

West kicked things off by boldly declaring that he sees good things in every person, “especially Hitler.”

Jones, who grew increasingly uncomfortable with West’s praise for Hitler and the Nazis as the show went on, repeatedly tried to downplay West’s comments. But at every turn, West doubled down, openly insisting that people need to stop criticizing the Nazis all the time.

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“I love Nazis,” West stated at one point,prompting Jones to respond, “well, I disagree with that.”

In a final, desperate effort to help West extricate himself from the potentially career-ending debacle the interview had become, Jones tried to get West to admit that he did not, in fact, love Hitler. But West was having none of it: “There a lot of things that I loooooooove about Hitler. A lahhhhhhhht of things.”

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-big-business-bailed-out-nazis

How Big Business Bailed Out the Nazis

A tragic tale of what can go wrong when profits are entangled with politics.

Ciara Torres Spelliscy

The views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the Brennan Center for Justice.

Considering the outcome of this year’s presidential primaries, where the best-financed candidates were defeated, I’ve been asked repeatedly whether corporate money in politics really matters. And I’ll grant, corporate money so far mostly gone to losing candidates. But history may give us some greater perspective on how corporate money in politics can prove decisive.

It’s a largely forgotten piece of history, but in 1932 the German Nazi Party was facing financial ruin. How did the Nazis move from being broke to being in control of the German government just a year later? The Nazi Party was bailed out by German industrialists in early 1933.

The industrialists who led the way were two huge German firms, I.G. Farben and Krupp. Leaders of both of companies were among the few civilians who were later charged with war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. These trials placed the story of their financial and moral support of the Nazis into the historical record. Krupp was a huge arms manufacturer. I.G. Farben was a vast chemical company which made everything from Bayer aspirin to Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers.

According to The Arms of Krupp, the Nazi Party was essentially bankrupt in late 1932. Joseph Goebbels, who would later become the Minister of Propaganda, complained, “[w]e are all very discouraged, particularly in the face of the present danger that the entire party may collapse….The financial situation of the Berlin organization is hopeless. Nothing but debts and obligations.”

Regardless of the party’s financial problems, Hitler was named Chancellor in late January 1933. He called for elections in early March. With less than two weeks left before the vote, Herman Goering sent telegrams to Germany’s 25 leading industrialists, inviting them to a secret meeting in Berlin on February20, 1933. Attending the gathering were four I.G. Farben directors and Krupp chief Gustav Krupp. Hitler addressed the group, saying “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”  He also told the men that he would eliminate trade unions and communists. Hitler asked for their financial support and to back his vision for Germany.

According to Robert Jackson, the former Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, “[T]he industrialists…became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise three million Reichsmarks worth about [$30 million today] to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power.”

Gustav Krupp was the first executive to speak at the Berlin meeting, and pledged one million marks. As the United Nations summarized in a 1949 report, Krupp was a key financier for the Nazi Party, including through his corporation:

It was clear from the evidence that Gustav Krupp embraced Nazism shortly prior to the seizure of power by the Nazi Party and continued his allegiance thereafter.He played an important part in bringing to Hitler’s support other leading industrialists and through the medium of the Krupp firm… from time to time made large scale contributions to the [Nazi] Party Treasury.

Hitler awarded Krupp the title of Fuhrer of Industry later in 1933.

Krupp acted in concert with other businessmen, including the directors of I.G. Farben, then Europe’s largest corporation. I.G. Farben’s full name was Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft which translates to “Community of Interest of the Dyestuffs Industry, Incorporated” or as one of the Nuremburg prosecutors, Josiah DuBois Jr. in his book, The Devil’s Chemists, put it, the name was “like the cross between a service club and Easter eggs.”  But what I.G. Farben did with the Nazis was no laughing matter, including using slave labor at a specially-constructed plant at Auschwitz called Monowitz. 

In the opening of the tribunal against the directors of I.G. Farben, prosecutor U.S. Gen. Telford Taylor stated: “The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility for visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war in human history. It accuses them of wholesale enslavement, plunder, and murder.”

At the February meeting, the I.G. Farben executives gave the Nazis 400,000 marks, and a total of 4.5 million marks by the end of 1933, according to The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. This infusion of corporate cash saved the Nazi Party from financial disaster. The rest, as they say, is history — tragic, tragic history.

As the book Hell’s Cartel explains, the history of the German industrialists’ support of Hitler shows “what can go wrong when political objectives and the pursuit of profit become dangerously entwined.”  One can only surmise what might have happened if the businessmen had simply said “no” to Hitler that night.