From WWI to WWII
About
4/21/2016
Exploring the actions of US negotiators at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and show that their public accomplishments in diplomacy, reparations agreements and treaty conditions for the state department also benefitted the private corporations. We will continue to study the role of the American steel, oil and auto industries in the rapid, profitable militarization of germany in the 1920’s and 30’s that made the Third Reich a global superpower, and the continued support of American business even after 1939. Finally, we will examine the financial networks that intimately linked fascist German financiers with well known Wall Street bankers.
Re-Visit 1913 Quotations of Woodrow Wilson: “An invisible empire has been set up [in our nation] above the forms of democracy …a power so organized, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete and so pervasive that some of the biggest men in the United States in the fields of commerce, manufacture and government know that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of this group”, in his 1913 book The New Freedom, (p.13).
Keeping Wilson’s ominous quote in mind, we will explore the actions of US negotiators at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and show that their public accomplishments in diplomacy, reparations agreements and treaty conditions for the state department also benefitted the private corporations. We will continue to study the role of the American steel, oil and auto industries in the rapid, profitable militarization of germany in the 1920’s and 30’s that made the Third Reich a global superpower, and the continued support of American business even after 1939. Finally, we will examine the financial networks that intimately linked fascist German financiers with well known Wall Street bankers
Readings:
- Yeadon & Hawkins, The Nazi Hydra, p. 99 140
- Zeev Sternhell, Fascism, A Reader’s Guide, Laguer. p. 315 370;
- Alan Milward, Fascism and The Economy. Laguer, p. 379 412;