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I now have a personal copy of this book.Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham.Copyright 1983.quoting from preface "several members (business 'Fraternity') sought a continuing alliance of interests for the duration of World War II but supported the idea of a negotiated peace with Germany that would bar any reorganization of Europe along liberal lines. It would leave as its residue a police state that would place The Fraternity in postwar possesson of financial, industrial, and political autonomy. When it was clear that Germany was losing the war the businessmen became notably more 'loyal." Then, when war was over, the survivors pushed into Germany, protected their assets, restored Nazi friends to high office, helped provoke the Cold War, and insured the permanent future of The Fraternity. pp xv "As for Roosevelt, the Sphinx still keeps his secrets. That supreme politician held all of the forces of collusion and betrayal in balance, publicly praising those executives whom he knew to be questionable. Before Pearl Harbor, he allowed such egregious executives as James D.Mooney of General Motors and William Rhodes Davis of the Davis Oil Company to enjoyu pleasant tete-a-tetes with Hitler and Goring, while maintaining a careful record of what they were doing. During the war, J.Edgar Hoover, Adolf A. Berle, Henry Morgenthau, and Harold Ickes kept the president fully advised of all internal and external transgressions. With great skill, he never let the executives concerned know that he was on to them. By using the corporate leaders for his own war purposes as dollar-a-year men, keeping an eye on them and allowing them to indulge, under license or not, in their internationall tradings, he at once made winning the war a certainty and kept the public from knowing what it should not know. pp xvii I will reread this and the book-- Drawing the line: The American decision to divide Germany, 1944-1949 by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg (1996) to see how much of Higham's research she has picked up.
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