I’ve found another interesting book on this topic. It was written by US government bureaucrat James Stewart Martin in 1950, who was actually involved in investigating the links between the German Nazis and companies, people in the US both during and after WW II.
He was also actively involved in implementing the Morgenthau plan in which millions of Germans were starved to death (to make the world a better place of course) over which James Stewart Martin doesn’t display any kind of guilt.
Martin writes the information from the viewpoint that the US government was simply fooled. Maybe he didn’t know that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was financed by the same banksters that financed Hitler or Roosevelt’s good friend Ernst Frans Sedgwick “Putzi” Hanfstaeng, who was part of Hitler’s entourage.
There are even some interesting stories on Dutch companies...
Insurance policies – Zurich, Munich
During WW II, Martin found out that Germany gotten a hold of information on US corporations through reinsurance on ships and cargoes with the Zurich group. The Zurich group had a reinsurance treaty with the Munich reinsurance pool in Germany. In 1940 and early 1941, by the time a ship departed from New York or Baltimore harbour headed for a European port, the German intelligence service already had the sailing data in hand.
Another detail that should have raised suspicion was that the information that was cabled to Zurich (and wound up in Germany) included blueprints of the installation, description of the fire hazards and risks, and inventory of the contents of buildings.
In 1942, Martin’s group proposed that the Attorney General send a letter to each company warning that transmission of this type of marine and industrial information could violate the Espionage Act. Solicitor General Charles Fahy refused approval without consulting the other interested departments of the government.
They showed how informative inspection reports could be to an outsider, by sending similar data of US reinsurance firms on important European plants, like Philips lamp and radio-tube factories at Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Even after sending sensitive information for insurance abroad was restricted; Germany could still obtain this type of information through insurance inspector reports inside the US. Joe Borkin, who wasn’t in the insurance business, for example purchased this type of information.
In the summer of 1945, the files of the Munich Reinsurance Company and the German intelligence service confirmed that they had photographs, blueprints, and detailed descriptions of industrial developments in the US, many of them obtained through insurance channels.
Von Schroder - Dulles
Baron Kurt von Schroder was an important player in Nazi Germany. Heinrich Himmler repeatedly sent him letters asking for millions of money.
Until the 1929 crash, US companies sent dollars at an average rate of over $250 million to Germany. The 2 investment banks that handled the bulk of this private lending system were Dillon, Read & Company of New York, and the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation. Legal work on the Schroder Bank loans was handled in Germany by the firm of Albert & Westrick, and in the US by Sullivan & Cromwell, headed by John Foster Dulles.
The J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation and Sullivan & Cromwell handled the banking and legal business of the General Aniline firm from the time it was first set up as the American I.G. Chemical Corporation.
Throughout the war, Allen W. Dulles, a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell and until 1944 a director of the Schroder bank in New York, headed the European Mission of the Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland (the wartime predecessor of the CIA). V. Lada-Mocarski, vice president of the Schroder bank, was a US consul in Switzerland.
Another member of the family, Baron Bruno von Schroder, moved to London early in life but remained a German citizen until 1914 when he became a British subject. Bruno headed the banking firms J. Henry Schroder & Company of London, and the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation of New York until his death in 1940, when he was succeeded by his son, Helmuth W.B. Schroder.
When Martin and his team were zooming in on Von Schroder they were working in the Finance Division of General Wickersham's headquarters with Captain Norbert A. Bogdan, who was vice president of the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation of New York. Captain Bogdan argued vigorously against investigation of Von Schroder’s Stein Bank.
Kurt von Schroder was very good friends with Franz von Papen and Gerhardt A. Westrick. Westrick was a prominent German lawyer of the law partnership of Albert & Westrick. The senior partner of that firm, Heinrich Albert, was another of Von Papen's friends.
Albert went to the US in 1914, where he raised over $30 million to finance the espionage and sabotage activities in the US that were directed by Franz von Papen during World War II. They used these funds, for example, to buy up all the chemical stoneware produced in the US. Many American chemical plants were eventually shut down for lack of this stoneware.
VGF, AKU Holding company - Van Vlissingen
In July 1929, AKU was formed in the Netherlands by an agreement between the shareholders of the Dutch firm Enka and the shareholders of the German VGF. AKU became the owner of 99% of the stock of VGF.
Dutch AKU held the controlling shares in 3 of the largest rayon firms in the US: American Enka, North American Rayon, and American Bemberg. The Alien Property Custodian proposed to seize these firms; but the Dutch government in exile successfully protested.
When Martin travelled to the Netherlands after WW II to investigate AKU, he was stonewalled. Dutch officials made it impossible to talk to the involved bankers, let alone examine their books.
Instead an officer of the Dutch Military Administration simply made up a "report" a few weeks later that 70-75% of the AKU shares were owned by Dutch interests. There was a special class of 48 "priority" shares that gave the owners the right to name candidates for the board of directors. In 1929, 22 of these 48 shares were allocated to the German VGF, 22 to the Dutch group, and the remaining 4 to the British firm of Courtaulds, Ltd., which with VGF co-owned Glanzstoff-Courtaulds GmbH of Cologne.
From 1929 onward, the AKU board of directors consisted of chairman Fentener van Vlissingen, 2 other Dutchmen, and 6 Germans, including Baron von Schroder, Hermann Abs, Ernst Viu, and Johannes Kiehl of Deutsche Bank.
In 1937, Fentener van Vlissingen was decorated with the Merit Cross by Adolf Hitler.
On 5 July 1940, after the Dutch surrender to the Germans, Van Vlissingen became chairman of the Dutch National Committee for Economic Collaboration.
In June 1945, Van Vlissingen was already heading the commission appointed by the Dutch Military Administration to purge certain “collaborators” from the Dutch government and important positions in industry.
Philips Intelligence
The Dutch N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken (Electric Lamp Works), Eindhoven, the Netherlands played a very dubious role throughout WW II.
Before Germany invaded the Netherlands, they split control over the Philips international in 5 parts. They drew up the trust agreements so that the Dutch Philips executives kept the power to control properties and affairs of the combine anywhere in the world, both inside and outside Axis territory.
The head office at Curacao controlled the Philips subsidiaries in the Dutch Antilles, Surinam, Sweden and Switzerland.
The Midland Bank of London took control over the companies in the British Empire.
The Hartford Bank and Trust Company controlled Philips companies in North and South America, Spain and Portugal.
Philips properties in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were placed under a trusteeship of a German holding company headed by Dr. Karl Mey, who had previously served as director of German Osram (also a big manufacturer of electric lamps).
Frits Philips, stayed in Eindhoven to manage the properties in the Netherlands.
Philips Eindhoven had been a cogwheel between German firms and their American partners, like General Electric, for a long time. In 1935, for example H.F. van Walsem of Philips had written to head of International General Electric, Clark Minor, for an international “gentlemen’s agreement” to violate US antitrust laws, which Philips did on a regular basis.
Philips officials in the US during the war enjoyed the protection of what amounted to diplomatic immunity.
The US Military Intelligence somehow agreed to give Philips executives permission to ship materials through the blockade into Axis territory.
In Portugal, the Philips subsidiary got supplies from the US and England. It also received patent applications from Eindhoven and filed them in Portugal to obtain patent protection in Portugal on behalf of the Dutch (part of the) company.
The Portuguese branch sent reports to New York on agreements between the Dutch Philips company and German industrialists. It also received reports from New York on Philips activities in the US and Latin America.
I don’t think that it goes too far to conclude that Philips executives were acting as double spies for the Allies and the Axis.
James Stewart Martin – All honorable men (1950):
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-ZqtX7a7 ... n_djvu.txt
(PDF version:
https://ia902602.us.archive.org/22/item ... %20Men.pdf)