America's support of Nazi Germany?

[Krypto-Communist]

I was looking up some archived posts on this site and I came across a debate about America's role before and during World War 2.


The United States was enthusiastic about Mussolini for years, and Hitler was described as a moderate between left and right as late as 1937. The point of the U.S. going to war had nothing to do with liberating the world from anyone.

If you look at what U.S. planners actually said during these times, they didn't have any intentions of liberating anyone. The initial plan of the United States in regards to Germany was to stay out of the war and then become a colonial power when it ended, while controlling about half of Europe (Nazi Germany was going to have the other half).

After the war started, it was decided that Nazi Germany would be defeated, and the U.S. would control Europe and the rest of the world. That was the whole point of the aid to Britain. Just take a look at it, it was given in a way to specifically ensure that Britain can never come even close to fully recovering, meaning remaining a colonial power, but enough so Germany could not conquer it.

The same is true of the Soviet Union. Truman once said rather bluntly that if the Soviets appeared to be defeating the Germans (speaking after the German invasion of Russia), the U.S. should back the Germans, and if the Germans appeared to be winning, that the U.S. should back Russia.


What caught my eye was this remark:



"The same is true of the Soviet Union. Truman once said rather bluntly that if the Soviets appeared to be defeating the Germans (speaking after the German invasion of Russia), the U.S. should back the Germans, and if the Germans appeared to be winning, that the U.S. should back Russia."

Is this true??? Was the USA sympathetic to the Nazi regime? Did the USA actually debate whether or not they should support Hitler during WW2?

Though Harry S Truman was a man of Missouri and his times, and was known to have uttered unkind and (by today's standards) racist remarks about Jews and Blacks, I always kind of believed that Truman and the USA for that matter, proposed that the United States would back the forces of Nazi Germany if Soviet Russia seemed about to overrun Germany.

I would sincerly love to see the source of these statements.

A link to an article or a book reference would do.

[Iseult]

I always thought Truman was considered quite progressive when it came to race - After all, it was Truman who ordered that the Military be desegregated.

[Amusing Scrotum]

Originally posted by Krypto-Communist+--> (Krypto-Communist)Was the USA sympathetic to the Nazi regime?[/b]

Well, "the USA" is not a monolithic body; it compromises millions of people of different classes and political affiliations. So, "the USA", in and of itself, was neither "sympathetic" or hostile "to the Nazi regime".

The majority of the American bourgeois, however, were perfectly happy to maintain business relations with Nazi Germany. And there was a significant section of the American bourgeois that wanted to take a "neutral" position on WWII. These folks, if memory serves me correctly, were called the "Isolationists"....and the Kennedy family was amongst their ranks.

Essentially, the American bourgeois, and the individual actors that compromised it, had no ideological reasons for opposing Nazi Germany. Their opposition, when it happened, was purely based on the short term pragmatic interests of American capitalism.


Originally posted by Krypto-[email protected]
I would sincerly love to see the source of these statements.

I had a quick search on Google, and I found the following for you:


Socialist Worker Online
At Fulton Churchill was introduced by US president Harry Truman. Back in 1941, Truman had given one of the frankest accounts of US aims in the Second World War:

“If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”

1946: when the iron curtain was drawn (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=8424)

[Janus]

Certain individuals such as Ford were very supportive of the Nazis in general but the populace became more and more distanced from the Nazi regime as the war developed.

[Marukusu]

Have you guys heard of Fritz Kuhn and his american nazis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Kuhn_%28Nazi%29

[Noah]

I watched off the film 'The corporation' that the American corporation coca-cola created the brand 'fanta' so they could keep making money in Nazi Germany.

Also IBM and the car manfucturer Ford were operating in Nazi germany. IBM created a system to say how each jew was executed.

If you've not watched 'The Corporation' I recommend you watch it! It won't give you a full answer to your question but exposes some interesting things about America and Germany during that era.

[Red Rebel]

Is this true???

I'm going to go with no.


Hitler was described as a moderate between left and right as late as 1937.

Hitler was a nationalist revolutionary. How is that moderate?


The point of the U.S. going to war had nothing to do with liberating the world from anyone.

Pearl Harbor sound familar?


The initial plan of the United States in regards to Germany was to stay out of the war and then become a colonial power when it ended

America did plan to stay out of the war. But become a colonial power? Read up on FDR's Good Neighbor Policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Neighbor_Policy).


while controlling about half of Europe (Nazi Germany was going to have the other half).

Who was the US planning with? Nazi Germany? Because they wouldn't have tolerated a power right next to them.


the U.S. would control Europe and the rest of the world.

Who decided?


Just take a look at it, it was given in a way to specifically ensure that Britain can never come even close to fully recovering, meaning remaining a colonial power, but enough so Germany could not conquer it.

I fail to see the logic in that.


The same is true of the Soviet Union. Truman once said rather bluntly that if the Soviets appeared to be defeating the Germans (speaking after the German invasion of Russia), the U.S. should back the Germans, and if the Germans appeared to be winning, that the U.S. should back Russia.

Truman wasn't President until Hitler was in a bunker in Berlin get bombed to hell.

Overall this unsourced claim can be viewed as a fabrication.

[CheGregory]

Many German and American soldiers truely believed that Germany and the U.S. were going to ally against Russia.

What a shame, if Patton had been set loose...the Russians wouldn't have known what hit them. The Russians had meager supplies, no airforce, and very little gasoline.

[LSD]

What a shame, if Patton had been set loose...the Russians wouldn't have known what hit them.

How is that a "shame"?

Are you contending that an American (and German?) conquest of the Soviet Union would have been desirable? :o

Are you so deluded that you believe that "Uncle Sam" would have replaced Stalin with "democracy" or "benevolence"? If Patton had beaten the Red Army -- something which, by the way, he almost certainly couldn't have -- instead of 9 years of Stalinism, Russia would have enjoyed 30 years of Nazi proxy rule.

Russians are notoriously paranoid about the west and certainly wouldn't have taken an American invasion without a fight.

That would nescessitate a protracted engagement and close supply lines. After the war, Americans couldn't be bothered cleaning up their own mess, so in typical fashion, they would have subcontracted the job out -- probably to former Wehrmacht officers.

Don't kid yourself. Americans were more than happy to employ Nazi bureaucrats and no one had more experience running an eastern colonial empire than the Germans.

[ComradeOm]

Never mind desirable, it would have been impossible. In 1945 the Russian soldiers were the toughest set of bastards in the world. The average Russian soldier was a real veteran and his Generals had years of experience in armoured warfare. Patton and his Shermans would have been flattened.

This seemingly collective American assumption that Patton and his Third Army could walk on water is one that continues to mystify me.

[Comrade J]

Half of the material I've read on Patton seems to make me think he was awfully keen on 'rescuing' people that didn't particularly need rescuing, to please the High Command.
One of the best examples is perhaps shown in the series (and book) Band of Brothers, in which he cuts through the German flanks to rescue the 101st Airborne, who claimed for years after that they didn't require it.
Had Patton been ordered to go into Russia, I very much doubt he'd have beaten the Red Army, he wouldn't have had the support of the population and they'd be reluctant to give up fighting, especially defending their homeland.

[Das war einmal]

Originally posted by Ace [email protected] 31 2006, 03:44 AM

What a shame, if Patton had been set loose...the Russians wouldn't have known what hit them.

How is that a "shame"?

Are you contending that an American (and German?) conquest of the Soviet Union would have been desirable? :o

Are you so deluded that you believe that "Uncle Sam" would have replaced Stalin with "democracy" or "benevolence"? If Patton had beaten the Red Army -- something which, by the way, he almost certainly couldn't have -- instead of 9 years of Stalinism, Russia would have enjoyed 30 years of Nazi proxy rule.

Russians are notoriously paranoid about the west and certainly wouldn't have taken an American invasion without a fight.

That would nescessitate a protracted engagement and close supply lines. After the war, Americans couldn't be bothered cleaning up their own mess, so in typical fashion, they would have subcontracted the job out -- probably to former Wehrmacht officers.

Don't kid yourself. Americans were more than happy to employ Nazi bureaucrats and no one had more experience running an eastern colonial empire than the Germans.
Not to mention: The Russians beat a battalion of American Soldiers in the Russian Civil war. The Nazi's had some succes in the early stages of the war, but later on, they were defeated miserbly. Also, Zhukov had not known defeat with his campaign against the Japanese and would certainly defeat Pattons troops in the long run

[Free Left]

What a shame, if Patton had been set loose...the Russians wouldn't have known what hit them.

Hah, if Konev and Zhukov had been set loose Patton would have been blown back into the sea.

Also, many American arms suppliers made weapons and shells for Nazi Germany.

[Mesijs]

We really need sources to back that claim, beacuse it looks kind of ridiculous.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Hamburg-Amerika also played a more insidious role in events unfolding within Nazi Germany. Hitler's notorious Brownshirts -- the armed "citizen" platoons of the Sturmarbteilung, or SA -- who were providing so much of the violent thuggery associated with its rise to power, particularly in such events as Kristallnacht, were in fact being armed primarily with American weapons, many of them made by Remington Arms.

Samuel Pryor, the Remington Arms chairman, was also a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp., which was the company that controlled Hamburg-Amerika. In 1934, U.S. Senate investigators began examining the traffic in weapons from the United States to other nations where conflict was erupting, and they began looking into Remington after it entered into a cartel agreement with the German explosives firm I.G. Farben (which would go on to gain infamy for its notorious role in many of the Nazis' concentration camps, as well as in creating the Zyklon B poison gas that killed millions of victims in the Holocaust). Testimony produced in the so-called "Nye Committee" revealed that Remington guns were being unloaded from Hamburg-Amerika boats to the waiting arms of the SA.

A Col. William J. Taylor told the committee that "German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great."

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003/09/bush-...america_07.html (http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003/09/bush-nazis-and-america_07.html)

[Red Rebel]

FDR's 2nd Term (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDR#Second_term.2C_1937-1941)
Important points:

In October 1937, he gave the Quarantine Speech aiming to contain aggressor nations. He proposed that warmongering states be treated as a public health menace and be "quarantined." [24]Meanwhile he secretly stepped up a program to build long range submarines that could blockade Japan. When World War II broke out in 1939, Roosevelt rejected the Wilsonian neutrality stance and sought ways to assist Britain and France militarily. He began a regular secret correspondence with Winston Churchill discussing ways of supporting Britain.


In May 1940, a stunning German blitzkrieg overran Denmark, Norway, the Low countries and France, leaving Britain vulnerable to invasion. Roosevelt, who was determined to defend Britain, took advantage of the rapid shifts of public opinion. A consensus was clear that military spending had to be dramatically expanded. There was no consensus on how much the U.S. should risk war in helping Britain. FDR appointed two interventionist Republican leaders, Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox, as Secretaries of War and the Navy respectively. The fall of Paris shocked American opinion, and isolationist sentiment declined. Both parties gave support to his plans to rapidly build up the American military, but the isolationists warned that Roosevelt would get the nation into an unnecessary war with Germany. He successfully urged Congress to enact the first peacetime draft in United States history in 1940 (it was renewed in 1941 by one vote in Congress). Roosevelt was supported by the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and opposed by the America First Committee.

US-German alliance against the USSR was all in Hitlers mind.