DU PONT AND GENERAL MOTORS
(The Elkhorn Manifesto)
SHADOW OF THE SWASTIKA: Part 2
The Real Reason the Government Won't Debate
Medical Cannabis and Industrial Hemp Re-legalization
An Open Letter to All Americans
By R. William Davis
Documented Evidence of a Secret Business and Political Alliance
Between the U.S. "Establishment" and the Nazis -
Before, During and After World War II - up to the Present.
DU PONT AND GENERAL MOTORS
General Motors is included here because, by 1929, the Du Pont corporation had acquired controlling interest in, and had interlocking directorships with, General Motors.
Irenee du Pont, "the most imposing and powerful member of the clan," according to biographer and historian Charles Higham, "was obsessed with Hitler's principles." "He keenly followed the career of the future Fuhrer in the 1920s, and on September 7, 1926, in a speech to the American Chemical Society, he advocated a race of supermen, to be achieved by injecting special drugs into them in boyhood to make their characters to order." Higham's book on this subject, "Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949," is highly recommended.
Du Pont's anti-Semitism "matched that of Hitler" and, in 1933, the Du Ponts "began financing native fascist groups in America . . ." one of which Higham identifies as the American Liberty League: "a Nazi organization whipping up hatred of blacks and Jews," and the "love of Hitler.
"Financed . . . to the tune of $500,000 the first year, the Liberty League had a lavish thirty-one-room office in New York, branches in twenty-six colleges, and fifteen subsidiary organizations nationwide that distributed fifty million copies of its Nazi pamphlets. . . .
"The Du Ponts' fascistic behavior was seen in 1936, when Irenee du Pont used General Motors money to finance the notorious Black Legion. This terrorist organization had as its purpose the prevention of automobile workers from unionizing. The members wore hoods and black robes, with skulls and crossbones. They fire-bombed union meetings, murdered union organizers, often by beating them to death, and dedicated their lives to destroying Jews and communists. They linked to the Ku Klux Klan. . . . It was brought out that at least fifty people, many of them blacks, had been butchered by the Legion." (5)
Du Pont support of Hitler extended into the very heart of the Nazi war machine as well, according to Higham, and several other researchers: "General Motors, under the control of the Du Pont family of Delaware, played a part in collaboration" with the Nazis.
"Between 1932 and 1939, bosses of General Motors poured $30 million into I.G. Farben plants . . ." Further, Higham informs us that by "the mid-1930s, General Motors was committed to full-scale production of trucks, armored cars, and tanks in Nazi Germany." (6)
Researchers Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, in their book, "Power Inc.," describe the Du Pont-GM-Nazi relationship in these terms:
". . . In 1929, [Du Pont-controlled] GM acquired the largest automobile company in Germany, Adam Opel, A.G. This predestined the subsidiary to become important to the Nazi war effort. In a heavily documented study presented to the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly in February 1974, Bradford C. Snell, an assistant subcommittee counsel, wrote:
"'GM's participation in Germany's preparation for war began in 1935. That year its Opel subsidiary cooperated with the Reich in locating a new heavy truck facility at Brandenburg, which military officials advised would be less vulnerable to enemy air attacks. During the succeeding years, GM supplied the Wehrmact with Opel "Blitz" trucks from the Brandenburg complex. For these and other contributions to [the Nazis] wartime preparations, GM's chief executive for overseas operations [James Mooney] was awarded the Order of the German Eagle (first class) by Adolf Hitler.'"
Du Pont-GM Nazi collaboration, according to Snell, included the participation of Standard Oil of New Jersey [now Exxon] in one, very important arrangement. GM and Standard Oil of New Jersey formed a joint subsidiary with the giant Nazi chemical cartel, I.G. Farben, named Ethyl G.m.b.H. [now Ethyl, Inc.] which, according to Snell: "provided the mechanized German armies with synthetic tetraethyl fuel [leaded gas]. During 1936-39, at the urgent request of Nazi officials who realized that Germany's scarce petroleum reserves would not satisfy war demands, GM and Exxon joined with German chemical interests in the erection of the lead-tetraethyl plants. According to captured German records, these facilities contributed substantially to the German war effort: 'The fact that since the beginning of the war we could produce lead-tetraethyl is entirely due to the circumstances that, shortly before, the Americans [Du Pont, GM and Standard Oil] had presented us with the production plants complete with experimental knowledge. Without lead-tetraethyl the present method of warfare would be unthinkable.'" (7)
At about the same time the Du Ponts were serving the Nazi cause in Germany, they were involved in a Fascist plot to overthrow the United States government.
"Along with friends of the Morgan Bank and General Motors," in early 1934, writes Higham, "certain Du Pont backers financed a coup d'etat that would overthrow the President with the aid of a $3 million-funded army of terrorists . . ." The object was to force Roosevelt "to take orders from businessmen as part of a fascist government or face the alternative of imprisonment and execution . . ."
Higham reports that "Du Pont men allegedly held an urgent series of meetings with the Morgans," to choose who would lead this "bizarre conspiracy." "They finally settled on one of the most popular soldiers in America, General Smedly Butler of Pennsylvania." Butler was approached by "fascist attorney" Gerald MacGuire (an official of the American Legion), who attempted to recruit Butler into the role of an American Hitler.
"Butler was horrified," but played along with MacGuire until, a short time later, he notified the White House of the plot. Roosevelt considered having "the leaders of the houses of Morgan and Du Pont" arrested, but feared that "it would create an unthinkable national crisis in the midst of a depression and perhaps another Wall Street crash." Roosevelt decided the best way to defuse the plot was to expose it, and leaked the story to the press.
"The newspapers ran the story of the attempted coup on the front page, but generally ridiculed it as absurd and preposterous." But an investigation by the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities - 74th Congress, first session, House of Representatives, Investigation of Nazi and other propaganda - was begun later that same year.
"It was four years," continues Higham, "before the committee dared to publish its report in a white paper that was marked for 'restricted circulation.' They were forced to admit that 'certain persons made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country . . . [The] committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.' This admission that the entire plan was deadly in intent was not accompanied by the imprisonment of anybody. Further investigations disclosed that over a million people had been guaranteed to join the scheme and that the arms and munitions necessary would have been supplied by Remington, a Du Pont subsidiary." (8)
The names of important individuals and groups involved in the conspiracy were suppressed by the committee, but later revealed by Seldes, Philadelphia Record reporter Paul French, and Jules Archer, author of the book, "The Plot to Seize the White House." Included were John W. Davis (attorney for the J.P. Morgan banking group), Robert Sterling Clark (Wall Street broker and heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), William Doyle (American Legion official), and the American Liberty League (backed by executives from J.P. Morgan and Co., Rockefeller interests, E.F. Hutton, and Du Pont-controlled General Motors). (9)
THE US/NAZI CARTEL AGREEMENT
"On November 23, 1937," states Higham, "representatives of General Motors held a secret meeting in Boston with Baron Manfred von Killinger, who was . . . in charge of West Coast espionage [for the Nazis], and Baron von Tipplekirsch, Nazi consul general and Gestapo leader in Boston. This group signed a joint agreement showing total commitment to the Nazi cause for the indefinite future. . . ." (10)
Seldes describes the plotters as "the great owners and rulers of America who planned world domination through political and military Fascism" including "several leading American industrialists, members of the Congress of the United States, and representatives of large business and political organizations . . ."
He obtained the text of the agreement, and published it in his newsletter, "In Fact," on July 13, 1942. The plan "goes much further than the mere cartel conspiracies of Big Business of both countries," writes Seldes, "because it has political clauses and points to a bigger conspiracy of money and politicians such as helped betray Norway and France and other lands to the Nazi machine. The most powerful fortress in America is the production monopolies, but its betrayal would involve, as it did in France, the participation of some of the most powerful figures of the political as well as the industrial world." (11)
STANDARD OIL OF NEW JERSEY (Now Exxon)
"On February 27, 1942," according to Higham, "Arnold, with documents stuffed under his arms, . . . strode into the lion's den of Standard at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Just behind him were Secretary of the Navy Franklin Knox and Secretary of the Army Henry L. Stimson." They confronted Standard official William Farish and "Arnold sharply laid down his charges" that "by continuing to favor Hitler in rubber deal and patent arrangements," Standard Oil "had acted against the interests of the American government . . . suggested a fine of $1.5 million and a consent decree whereby Standard would turn over for the duration all the patents" in question.
"Farish rejected the proposal on the spot. He pointed out that Standard" was also selling the U.S. a "high percentage" of the fuel being used by the Army, Navy, and Air Force "making it possible for America to win the war. Where would America be without it?"
Blackmail? Yes, says Higham. And effective. Arnold was finally reduced to asking the oil company official "to what Standard Oil would agree. After all, there had to be at least token punishment. . . . Arnold, Stimson, and Knox soon realized they had no power to compare with that of Standard."
The price Standard Oil "agreed" to pay for its crime? A modest fine of a few thousand dollars divided up among ten defendants. "Farish paid $1,000, or a quarter of one week's salary, for having betrayed America."
In New Jersey, charges of "criminal conspiracy with the enemy" were filed against Standard, then "dropped in return for Standard releasing its patents and paying the modest fine." But Arnold, and his ally, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, weren't finished with Standard Oil just yet. They approached Senator Truman, chairman of the Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program. "With great enthusiasm Give 'em Hell Harry embarked on a series of hearings in March 1942, in order to disclose the truth about Standard."
Between the 26th and the 28th of March, 1942, Arnold "produced documents showing that Standard and Farben in Germany had literally carved up the world markets, with oil and chemical monopolies all over the map," according to Higham. (12)
Mintz and Cohen describe the confrontation:
"Four months after the United States entered World War II, the Justice Department obtained an indictment of Exxon and its principal officers for having made arrangements, starting in the late 1920s with I.G. Farben involving patent sharing and division of world markets. Jersey Standard agreed not to develop processes for the manufacture of synthetic rubber; in exchange, Farben agreed not to compete in the American petroleum market. After war broke out in Europe, but before the attack on Pearl Harbor, executives of Standard Oil and Farben, at a meeting in Holland, established a 'modus vivendi' for continuing the arrangements in event of war between the United States and Germany - although the arrangements interfered with the ability of the United States to make synthetic rubber desperately needed after it entered the war in December 1941. Rather than face a criminal trial, Exxon and the indicted executives entered no-contest pleas - the legal equivalent of guilty pleas - and were fined the minor sums which were the maximum amounts permitted by law. A few days later, on March 26, 1942, the Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program held a hearing at which Thurman Arnold, chief of the Antitrust Division, put into the record documents on which the [criminal] indictment had been based, including a memo from a Standard Oil official on the 'modus vivendi' agreed to in Holland. After the hearing, the committee chairman, Harry S. Truman, characterized the arrangements as treasonable." (13)
Another source book on this subject of US / Nazi corporate activities is "The Secret War Against the Jews," by Mark Aarons and John Loftus. Here is their version of the events:
"Before the war Standard of New Jersey had forged a synthetic oil and rubber cartel with the Nazi-controlled I.G. Farben," which "worked well until the United States joined the war in 1941. . . . Next to the Rockefellers, I.G. Farben owned the largest share of stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey. Among other things, Standard had provided Farben with its synthetic rubber patents and technical knowledge, while Farben had kept its patents to itself, under strict instructions from the Nazi government."
Evidence which Thurman Arnold turned over to the Truman Committee, which Truman would declare "treasonous," included "Standard's 1939 letter renewing its agreement, which made it clear that the Rockefellers' company was prepared to work with the Nazis whether their own government was at war with the Third Reich or not. Truman's Senate Committee on the National Defense was outraged and began to probe into the whole scandalous arrangement, much to the discomfort of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Suddenly, however, the whole matter was dropped.
"There was a reason for Rockefeller's escape: blackmail. According to the former intelligence officers we interviewed on this point, the blackmail was simple and powerful: The Dulles brothers [John Foster, later Secretary of State, and Allen, later director of the CIA] had one of their clients threaten to interrupt the U.S. oil supply during wartime."
When confronted by Arnold on the Standard - Farben arrangement "Standard executives made it clear that the entire U.S. war effort was fueled by their oil and it could be stopped. . . . The American government had no choice but to go along if it wanted to win the war." (14)
July 13, 1944, Ralph W. Gallagher, attorney for Standard Oil, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government's seizure of the contested patents. "On November 7, 1945, Judge Charles E. Wyzanski gave his verdict," according to Higham. "He decided that the government had been entitled to seize the patents. Gallagher appealed. On September 22, 1947, Judge Charles Clark delivered the final word on the subject. He said, 'Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of its relationships with I.G. Farben after the United States and Germany had become active enemies.' The appeal was denied." (15)
One aspect of this Standard - I.G. Farben relationship, revealed in testimony during the Patents Committee hearings, chaired by Senator Homer T. Bone in May 1942, is of interest to those who seek direct evidence of a conspiracy by big oil companies to suppress development of synthetic substitutes to petrochemical products such as industrial chemicals, aircraft lubricants and fuel, all of which can be made from hemp:
"On May 6th, John R. Jacobs, Jr., of the Attorney General's department, testified that Standard had interfered with the American explosives industry by blocking the use of a method of producing synthetic ammonia. As a result of its deals with Farben, the United States had been unable to get the use of this vital process even after Pearl Harbor. Also, the United States had been restricted in techniques of producing hydrogen from natural gas and from obtaining paraflow, a product used for airplane lubrication at high altitudes. . . ."
On August 7th, "Texas oil operator C.R. Starnes appeared to testify that Standard had blocked him at every turn in his efforts to produce synthetic rubber after Pearl Harbor. . . ."
On August 12th, "John R. Jacobs reappeared in an Army private's uniform (he had been inducted the day before) to bring up another disagreeable matter: Standard had also, in league with Farben, restricted production of methanol, a wood alcohol that was sometimes used as motor fuel." (16)
The restriction against methanol production apparently did not apply to the Nazis, however. "As late as April 1943," Higham reveals, "General Motors in Stockholm [Sweden] was reported as trading with the enemy. . . . Further documents show that, as with Ford, repairs on German army trucks and conversion from gasoline to wood-gasoline production were being handled by GM in Switzerland." (17)
The use of hemp as a source of methanol was known to the Nazis, revealed in the pamphlet "The Humorous Hemp Primer," published in Berlin, also in 1943. This document, recently re-published in the 1995 edition of "Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy: The Emperor Wears No Clothes," by veteran hemp conspiracy researcher Jack Herer, states that:
"Crops should not only provide food in large quantities, they can provide raw materials for industry. . . . Among such raw materials of especially high value is hemp . . .
"The woody part of this large plant is not to be thrown out, since it can easily be used for surface coatings for the finest floors. It also provides paper and cardboard, building materials and wall paneling. Further processing will even produce wood sugar and wood gas. . . .
"Anyone who grows hemp today need not fear a lack of a market, because hemp, as useful as it is, will be purchased in unlimited amounts." (18)
The Nazis obviously considered hemp a vital war material that could be used to produce methanol, or "wood gas," at the same time, in 1943, that Du Pont-controlled General Motors in Switzerland was "converting from gasoline to wood-gasoline production." This, taken into consideration along with the earlier statement that Standard Oil-I.G. Farben had "restricted production of methanol" and the GM-Standard Oil-I.G. Farben joint venture, Ethyl, Inc., whose profitability depended on the production of lead-tetraethyl for oil-based petrochemical gasoline - in direct competition with the alternative methanol, or "wood gas," certainly opens new avenues of investigation into the existence of a conspiracy against hemp as an alternative, and competing, industrial raw material, by these very same corporations which sold America out to the Nazis for profit and control of world resources and markets.
"Just after Pearl Harbor," writes Seldes, "the Assistant Attorney General, Mr. Thurman Arnold, issued a sensational report of the sabotage of the national [war production] program, the first report naming the practices which were later to be referred to as the treason of big business in wartime. Said Mr. Arnold:
"Looking back over 10 months of defense effort we can now see how much it has been hampered by the attitude of powerful basic industries who have feared to expand their production because expansion would endanger their future control of industry.
"Anti-trust investigations during the past year have shown that there is not an organized basic industry in the United States which has not been restricting production by some device or other in order to avoid what they call 'ruinous overproduction after the war'." (19)
By "ruinous overproduction," of course, they meant free-market competition. So, to question the existence of an industrial conspiracy against competition, during the 1930s and 1940s, is pointless. It has long been totally documented by volumes of evidence, available in the public record. And among this list of convicted corporate conspirators are murderers, racists, pro-Nazi collaborators, blackmailers and American Fascists who plotted at least one armed take-over of the U.S. government. And the list is not yet complete.
THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY
Henry Ford, writes Higham, "admired Hitler from the beginning, when the future Fuhrer was a struggling and obscure fanatic. He shared with Hitler a fanatical hatred of Jews."
"Ford's book 'The International Jew' was issued in 1927. A virulent anti-Semitic tract, it was still being distributed in Latin America and the Arab countries as late as 1945. Hitler admired the book and it influenced him deeply. Visitors to Hitler's headquarters at the Brown House in Munich noticed a large photograph of Henry Ford hanging in his office. Stacked high on the table outside were copies of Ford's book. As early as 1923," when Hitler heard that Ford was planning to run for President, he "told an interviewer from the 'Chicago-Tribune,' 'I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help'."
As late as 1940, Ford Motor Company "refused to build aircraft engines for England and instead built supplies of the 5-ton military trucks that were the backbone of German army transportation." (20)
The Ford Motor Company was also aware of the potential of hemp as an alternative industrial resource, devoting many years research to the subject.
In a 1989 ABC Radio broadcast, Hugh Downs reported that in the 1930s, "the Ford Motor Company also saw a future in biomass fuels. Ford operated a successful biomass conversion plant that included hemp at their Iron Mountain facility in Michigan. Ford engineers extracted methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch, ethyl acetate, and creosote - all fundamental ingredients for modern industry, and now supplied by oil-related industries. . . . Henry Ford's experiments with methanol promised cheap, readily-available fuel." (21)
As reported in "Popular Mechanics" in December, 1941, Ford's research represented "an industrial revolution in progress . . . a revolution in materials that will affect every home." (22)
So, it is possible, even likely, that Ford and General Motors conversion "from gasoline to wood-gasoline production" for Nazi Germany, as earlier reported by Higham, involved at least some consideration of hemp as a resource, if not actual production of "wood-gas" from hemp. After all, Ford had already committed several years and significant research dollars to the subject.
The implication of methanol fuel patents, hemp industry research and production facilities, all in the hands of this cabal of Nazi-allied American corporations, during a proven period of anti-competition conspiracies, and wartime blackmail against the U.S. government, should provide additional support for the hemp conspiracy theories. The fact is that Nazi Germany recognized hemp as a vital war material - one which, just before America's entrance into World War II, was positioned to compete in the free-market against the products controlled by the Pro-Nazi American corporations. Unrestricted expansion of United States industrial hemp production threatened not only the profits of these treasonous corporations, but the degree of their control over America's production of vital war materials.
This view of hemp, not as a "dangerous drug" but as a vital war material, was acknowledged by the Kentucky Legislature a little over 100 years before the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1841, according to Professor James F. Hopkins, author of "A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky," published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1951:
"When the farmers of Woodford County [KY] assembled in October, 1841, to consider a program of hemp production for the navy, they only went as far as to express an opinion that the government should employ a rope spinner in Kentucky for the purpose of converting the fiber into yarns, which could be transported much more cheaply and safely than the bulky raw material. The Committee on Agriculture of the Kentucky House of Representatives inquired into the matter early in 1842 . . .
"Both houses of the General Assembly sent to the Senators and Congressmen from Kentucky a request that they use their 'best exertions' to have established in the state one or more agencies for the inspection and manufacture of hemp for the navy. A select committee of Congress, appointed to consider the resolutions from Kentucky, reported three resolutions of its own: that the navy be directed to construct a factory at Louisville 'for the purpose of depositing and manufacturing . . . such hempen fabrics of domestic water-rotted hemp as the public service may require'; that inspectors be appointed to test the fiber that might be offered for sale; and that, after due notice to the public, purchase of the necessary amount of fiber be made at the factory. The Committee contended that its plan would build up during peacetime a source of hemp which would be vitally important in case of war, encourage American agriculture and manufactures, and decrease the unfavorable balance of trade." (23)
[NOTE: For many years we Kentuckians have had a good deal of our heritage and history buried beneath a thick layer of propaganda from a source of power and control in this country which knows neither honor nor justice. Now, we are learning the truth. Our history as a state built upon the foundation of a long- and dishonestly- outlawed industry endures.]