Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

Germany, 1942.

The Third Reich is at the height of its power.

With the help of finance

from large corporations inside and outside of Germany,

Adolf Hitler has conquered almost half of Europe

in less than four years.

In the beginning of the war,

and even later for the Americans,

it was legal to do business with Germany.

When Hitler takes power in 1933,

there are a number of American corporations

that are already heavily invested

in the German market.

When the politics of Germany began to change,

they simply say, we can't withdraw

because we would lose too much of our investment.

And so American companies are therefore right at the heart

of the Third Reich's industrial machinery.

(dramatic music)

In every country they invaded,

the Nazis seized both state and private assets

in order to help pay for the war expenses of the Reich.

Much of the loot would also find its way directly

into the pockets of Hitler and his cronies.

You know, this is basically sort of profiteering

in a kind of mafia style.

This is just theft.

Neutral countries would not only turn

a blind eye to the looting of the continent

but would even, in some cases,

become complicit in the crime.

All these countries broke international law.

Nobody seemed to care at that time.

They wanted to be on the side

of who was going to be powerful in Europe.

Millions would be enslaved

for the growth of the Nazi war machine.

Even the bodies of their victims

would be turned by the Nazis into profit.

(suspenseful music)

Imagine how many people it takes to fill up crates

of teeth with gold filling,

and they would get these, they would extract the metal,

and smelt it into bars of precious metals,

be it silver, gold, or whatnot.

But in the end, what was it all for?

Hitler was a war junkie.

You know, the more he did war, the more he wanted war,

the more he wanted a finance war.

And as we know, you know, with all people

in those situations, you know, things get worse and worse,

and they did for Hitler.

(suspenseful music)

Paris, June the 23rd, 1940.

Adolf Hitler walks triumphantly

into the streets.

The City of Lights has been covered

by the dark blanket of Nazism.

Inside the same wagon where the German Imperial Army

had signed its capitulation in 1918,

it's now the French who will submit to the whims

of Europe's new overlord.

(suspenseful music)

Three days later, a group of prominent American businessmen

are having dinner in New York City.

They're celebrating the Nazi victory on the Western Front.

The group is hosted by German lawyer,

Gerhard Alois Westrick.

So Westrick is one of the most colorful figures

in the German economic and sort of political scene

in this period.

In the 1920s, he'd been an attorney

who'd worked with a number of American companies in Germany.

And in the 1930s, when Hitler takes power,

he becomes really a commercial attache

who's working on behalf of the Third Reich

in the United States.

In the years after Hitler was chancellor,

from '33 to '39, the beginning of the war,

and even later for the Americans,

it was legal to do business with Germany.

And Germany's one

of the major industrial countries in the world.

So naturally the banks

were doing all kinds of business with them.

In Germany, Gerhard Alois Westricks' law firm

represents an impressive list of clients,

including Ford, General Motors, Kodak, Texas Oil, and ITT.

From 1938, he also served as chairman

of ITT's German operation.

In 1940, these deep connections

to the American corporate establishment

prompt Nazi foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop,

to send Westrick on an extensive U.S. tour.

The tour was officially referred

to as a trade mission for the Reich,

but the real purpose of the mission was somewhat different.

(suspenseful music)

Westrick makes American businessmen a fascinating offer.

He says, look, if you can help prevent the U.S.

from getting into the war

and help Germany establish some sort

of a new order in Europe,

I can help you get your profits out of Nazi Germany.

It's a deal that many American businessmen

would have been very tempted by.

(suspenseful music)

In other words,

Westrick was hoping that the businessmen he met

could lobby President Roosevelt

to help make America a neutral peace broker

between the Reich and the European Allies,

while canceling the supply of weapons

to the British and the French,

whom the Nazi's regarded as fair game.

This proposal interested some of the businessmen

who wanted to improve

their long-term investments in Germany.

(suspenseful music)

But, as always with Hitler, there was a catch.

In this commitment to spur investment

and build up the industrial capacity of the country,

Hitler had introduced tariffs and economic measures,

designed to protect the deutschemark

and penalized foreign investors.

(Christopher speaking in German)

(suspenseful music)

Despite the challenges of moving assets and profits out

of the Reich, several foreign would keep

their businesses going in Germany,

either out of economic necessity or political sympathy.

(suspenseful music)

To avoid the punitive export tariffs,

some of these corporations would deal

in a direct barter system with the Nazi state,

supplying raw materials

in exchange for manufactured products.

These companies included Texas Oil,

under its pro-Nazi chairman, Norwegian-born Torkild Rieber.

He first gets on the radar of the American government

because he's expressing, it seems, some sympathies

with Nazi Germany, but more importantly,

when Gerhard Alois Westrick comes to the United States,

Rieber actually buys him a car and Westrick,

on the registration for his American driver's license,

puts the Texas Company's address as his residence.

And so there's a clear connection between Rieber

the Texas Company and Westrick.

And then certainly he's very happy to do business

with the Nazis.

Whether or not he's ideologically attracted to Nazism

I think is kind of a difficult question to answer,

but certainly he sees business potential in the Reich.

(suspenseful music)

During the Spanish Civil War,

Torkild Rieber and Texas Oil

supplied Franco's nationalists with oil on credit,

defying America's Neutrality Act of 1937.

Following Hitler's rise to power,

Rieber supplied the German, right with oil,

in exchange for tankers that were built

at the Deutsche Werft shipyard in Hamburg.

(suspenseful music)

But for some other American companies,

such as automotive giants Ford and General Motors,

this barter system wasn't so advantageous.

Hence, Westrick's transatlantic charm offensive.

(suspenseful music)

The problem with the barter system

for a lot of American automotive manufacturers

is their products are pretty sophisticated

and complicated things.

Cars are not the same as steel tubing

or even barrels of oil, in that sense.

And so the American automotive companies

have difficulty really getting goods out of Germany

that they find useful for their business, in that sense.

And so you can imagine Westrick walking

into this room of American CEOs and saying,

I can give you those profits that are piling up

in your German accounts

and Hitler's willing to release them,

and all we need from you is some sort of a political favor.

(suspenseful music)

Westrick's tour of the United States

would not go unnoticed by British intelligence.

Their agents could easily pass their information

to their American counterparts,

as well as leaking it to the press.

The American newspapers gleefully exposed the connection

between the Nazi agent Westrick and American businessmen

and their plans to influence President Roosevelt.

(dramatic music)

And there's hilarious accounts, actually,

in New York City newspapers in this period

where the press stakes out Westrick's home

and begins monitoring his movements,

really doing the FBI's job for them.

And the American press literally hounds Westrick

out of the country.

He's written about in the papers so much

that he can no longer fulfill his mission

and eventually departs the country via steamship for Japan

because he's become compromised by the American media.

(dramatic music)

(camera flashes clicking)

Westrick's mission failed

and he was recalled to Germany in disgrace.

Despite his departure,

the American businessmen who were linked with him

would suffer long lasting negative publicity

that would have significant ramifications.

At a Texas Company board meeting,

Torkild Rieber would be ordered to explain his connections

to the Nazi regime and ultimately forced to resign.

James D. Mooney was the next victim of this scandal.

He also resigned his position at General Motors,

after it was revealed that his service to the Nazi Reich

had earned him, in 1938,

the Order of the German Eagle, first-class.

In that same year,

on the occasion of his 75th birthday,

Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

Why did the Nazi regime confer

on both of these prominent American industrialists

such prestigious decorations?

(suspenseful music)

After the Nazis took power in 1933,

both companies had seized on the commercial opportunity

in supporting Hitler's rearmament plants.

Opel GM would build a new factory

in Brandenburg an der Havel,

to produce the Opel Blitz trucks for the Wehrmacht.

Ford's factories in the U.S.

would ship spare parts for heavy infantry trucks,

which would be assembled in a new plant in nearby Berlin.

But if these companies would ultimately

be unable to retrieve their profits,

why did they invest in these new factories?

(suspenseful music)

Probably there was no particular sympathy

and there may have been, you know, a fear of communism

and thinking that, well, this Hitler,

this dictator's not such a bad guy

because he's tough on the communists,

or it may just have been an economic motive.

Ideology aside, Ford and GM

became deeply involved in the rearmament of Germany.

Their actions were a definitive contribution

to the insatiable Nazi war machine,

a machine that was about to start rolling

into the rest of Europe. (suspenseful music)

(suspenseful music) (artillery booms)

September 1st, 1939,

Hitler launches his Blitzkrieg against Poland.

Within days, Britain and France declare war on Germany,

making the start of the deadliest conflict

in the history of mankind.

But the Nazis expropriation to the Reich

of the property and industries of newly-occupied Poland

did not sit well with everyone.

The invasion of Poland, frankly, is not great news

for all of Hitler's financiers.

One of those who's probably the most sort of verbal

against it is, of course, Fritz Thyssen,

who has been supporting the party for a very long time.

And he says he does not wanna take part in this plunder.

In fact, in '37, two years before,

he had written a letter to Hitler protesting

against the persecution of Christians.

And after Kristallnacht, he actually resigns

from his Council of State

because of the violence against the Jews.

Of even greater concern to Nazi industrialists

than the invasion of Poland

was the non-aggression pact. Germany

had secretly signed weeks before

with their sworn ideological enemy:

the Soviet Union.

One curious fact is

that the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact actually evolved

from a trade agreement between the regimes.

So it starts out by Russia making the move

for the trade agreement,

which really, and it's so implacably anti Nazi,

they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.

So Hitler sees that as like, oh, hang on a minute,

this could be sort of a green light.

Maybe they're interested in a political agreement.

(Christopher speaking in German)

In exchange for these Soviet raw materials,

Nazi Germany agreed to export manufactured products

to the Soviet Union,

something which appalled Germany's leading industrialists.

(suspenseful music)

"The very possibility of an agreement

"between Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany

"seemed beyond belief.

"I had always warned industrialists,

"as well as military circles, against a rapprochement

"with communist Russia.

"For me, this regime was the enemy of Germany,

"and of Europe, as a whole."

Thyssen, one of the Nazi's earliest

and most committed industrialist supporters,

would protests through a telegram

to his closest ally in Hitler's inner circle.

Nazi Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering.

Obviously the Nazis aren't very happy with this

and they expel him from the Nazi party.

His industries are seized,

and he's going to be captured

by the Vichy government police

and delivered to the German authorities.

And he'll end up being locked in a cell

and he's gonna be spending the rest of the war

in concentration camps.

Although, frankly, he is a privileged inmate.

(suspenseful music)

As for those businessmen who remained loyal

to the Nazis through thick and thin,

any concerns over the deal with the Soviets

would be assuaged through a new organization established

by Hermann Goering.

Its purpose was to seize and liquidate the assets

of all Polish citizens, Jews and non Jews alike,

and transfer them over to German ownership,

directly into the pockets of the Nazi leadership

and their favorite partners.

(suspenseful music)

You've got smaller businesses

and companies are being closed

in order to actually give these cartels huge monopolies.

And you've got individual bank accounts,

you've got private real estate, personal vehicles,

and valuables like jewelry, art, antiques.

They can all be confiscated from many

of the wealthier citizens in the Third Reich.

So, you know, this is basically sort of profiteering

in a kind of mafia style.

This is just theft.

Anything deemed surplus to requirements

was sold abroad and turned into cash,

including so-called degenerate art

that was confiscated and officially declared

to be destroyed.

But what they actually did was they sold a lot of that art

in Switzerland and they sold it through a dealer.

They sent a dealer to New York City who set up a gallery

on 57th Street, who ended up selling a lot of that art

to the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

you know, at these like bargain basement prices

and then sending the money back to the Nazis

who used it, you know, for their war machine.

By this time,

a new American company developed a revolutionary technology

that enabled the Nazis

to catalog all the plundered loot from Poland.

It also used the same technology

to create a population census

for the entire greater German Reich.

That company would expand its operations

alongside the Nazi empire.

The company was called

the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

So in the 1920s, IBM had acquired a German company

called Dehomag, which was essentially building machines

somewhat similar to IBM's.

But because of the economic circumstances of Germany

in the 20s, was in dire financial straits.

So IBM and Thomas Watson come in

and acquire Dehomag at pennies on the dollar.

And now they have a huge entrance into the German market.

(suspenseful music)

Having been founded in Germany

in 1910 by Willy Heidinger to manufacture punch cards

for tabulating machines,

in 1923, 90% of the company was acquired

by American businessman, Thomas J. Watson,

who would merge it into a German subsidiary

of his company, IBM.

When Hitler gets nominated as chancellor in 1933,

IBM-Dehomag offers its services to the new Nazi government.

We have to understand the Nazis' obsession with numbers.

So Nazis see themselves as a technocratic regime.

They wanna know everything about their population

and they wanna know everything about the populations

of countries that they're going to be occupying

and territories that they see the need

for demographic shift in.

IBM's technology is used in Germany

to begin counting the population

and arranging it in certain ways,

for demographers, effectively.

And so we see a very clear lineage, essentially,

between the German government's efforts

to begin counting its citizens

and understanding the demographics religiously,

and, as they would see it, racially within the country

and the events that happened later on during the Holocaust.

(suspenseful music)

At a meeting in Berlin in 1937,

IBM chairman, Thomas J. Watson, was elected president

of the International Chamber of Commerce.

Like Henry Ford and James D. Mooney,

Watson was also awarded the Order of the German Eagle

for his services to strengthening relations

between the United States and Nazi Germany.

But when the Nazis start invading neighboring countries,

Watson, unlike Ford and Mooney,

denounced Hitler's regime and returned his medal.

When Watson actually gives back his medal,

Dehomag is outraged because this is obviously a slap

in the face to the German government

and it could definitely affect their business.

And so that's when we begin to see the separation

between the Dehomag in Germany

and IBM's sort of headquarters in the United States.

And it's a separation that actually will be very timely

for IBM because Dehomag will continue to do its work

for the German government.

Now, with the war raging,

Germany turns the full focus

of its economy and industry to military production.

And this would initially include harnessing

the production lines

of the American automobile giants, Ford and GM.

After the invasion of Poland,

both Ford and General Motors see

their factories gradually slipping out of their control.

They've installed more Nazi party officials

on their boards of directors.

They begin to really take control of the company,

and while they can still produce

some profitable automobiles,

much of GM and Ford's production in Germany

switches over to aircraft engines for the Luftwaffe.

And so both of these companies are making a contribution

to the German war economy,

and they really don't have a choice.

You've got Opel General Motors, Opel GM,

starting to build components for the Junkers 88 plane

at the Rüsselsheim factory throughout the war.

And that's gonna make enormous profits

during the Battle of Britain when it supplies bombers.

In a crowning irony,

although Opel GM converted its factories in Germany

to accommodate the increased demand of the Nazi war effort,

GM in the U.S. refused to consider adapting

its production lines

to anything other than the manufacture

of everyday motorcars.

Some months later, Henry Ford would personally

deny a request by Britain's Royal Air Force

for Ford to produce aircraft engines.

(plane rumbling)

Another case of the involvement of American businessman

in the German war effort would be Sosthenes Behn, the owner

of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.

ITT held shares in companies like Focke-Wulf

that built fighter plans for the Luftwaffe.

They also had a stake in Signalbau Huth in Berlin,

which built communication equipment for the Wehrmacht.

Behn would meet frequently with his German contacts,

Gerhard Alois Westrick

and Nazi banker Kurt Baron Von Schroeder in Switzerland.

Certainly, if your company is under Nazi occupation,

has a Nazi board of directors at that point,

it's difficult to convince them to do anything

when you're thousands of miles away.

But it certainly seems to be the case

that Ford and General Motors directors

didn't take the affirmative steps

they would have needed to in the period before the war

to ensure that those plants

were not available for German war production.

And that, I think, is where the real ambiguity lies here.

For heavy industrial businesses

within the Reich,

there was no option but to submit to Hitler's demands,

which were only going to grow as time went on.

(suspenseful music)

What Hitler completely understands is

that the expropriation

of all these national financial reserves,

these industries, these infrastructures

in all these countries is only

gonna solve the German deficit on a temporary basis.

He's like a drug addict.

He knows he's gonna have to get more and more and more

to feed this credit habit that he's got.

(suspenseful music)

(suspenseful music)

For eight months after

the British and French declaration of war

against Nazi Germany, the world held its breath

and waited to see who would make the first move.

(suspenseful music)

On April the 9th, 1940 Hitler sent his troops

to occupy Denmark and Norway on the pretext

that they were protecting these countries

from Anglo-French aggression.

Then one month later, on May 10th,

Germany launched a surprise invasion

against the neutral Low Countries, Belgium and France,

while managing to skirt around

the well fortified Maginot Line.

But even with the protection of the Maginot Line,

by June 22nd, the French were bludgeoned into submission

and forced to sign a humiliating ceasefire

in the very same wagon

where the Germans had signed the surrender

at the end of the First World War.

With all of continental Western Europe

now under Nazi occupation,

Hitler had a wealth of riches at his command.

They levied quite a few taxes against the French.

The French had to pay something

like 20% of their gross national product to Germany.

They also created a system within this occupied zone,

you know, this Greater German Reich, all over Europe,

they created a system of exchange,

whereby they got favorable exchange to the German mark

from whatever currency they were transferring it in.

And this was really, they were really bad terms.

The Nazis hit upon a simple,

yet ingenious way, to extract the gold

and cash reserves of the countries they occupied.

They would actually take in gold bars.

They would resmelt them and put the German symbol on it.

There's so many crazy stories.

Belgian gold being sent to safe keeping in Africa

and the Nazis seizing the gold,

bringing it back through Switzerland

and resmelting the gold.

I mean, it was a huge operation.

It was a huge theft, but, I mean,

that they went to that much trouble

to conceal the theft is amazing to me.

(suspenseful music)

The Reich was also able to massively

increase their industrial resources and capacity,

as factories in the occupied territories

were forced to accept terms

and offers to fuel the German war machine.

(suspenseful music)

The whole process was orchestrated

by leading German industrialists,

sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

And so when the war began,

Krupp and two other industrialists sat around a board

and they had those little pins

with the red tops and green tops on them,

and they were sticking them in the factories of France

and the Low Countries.

This one's mine that one's yours.

These were the people that financed it

and they were being rewarded to these factories.

(woman singing in French) (upbeat music)

(Christopher speaking in German)

(suspenseful music)

Tellingly, the more men

that were sent to the battlefronts in Africa

and in the air war against Great Britain,

the weaker Germany's domestic workforce became.

The Reich desperately needed a plentiful supply

of low-cost labor.

Being the largest country on the planet,

the Soviet Union was the obvious source

of men and materials.

(suspenseful music)

On June the 22nd, 1941,

Hitler broke his treaty with Stalin

and launched Operation Barbarossa.

A new wave of economic pillaging

and plundering followed the rapid advances

of the Wehrmacht into Soviet territory.

Seize the iron ore and the nickel

in the mine of the Ukraine.

And these, of course, were given to German industrialists.

But Hitler said something very interesting

about the war and the advance in Russian.

He said, either I take Maykop and Grozny,

or I lose the war.

And these were the sources of oil.

Romanian oil was not going to be enough

to support the German war machine.

That's why they were trying

to develop the synthetic petroleum.

(suspenseful music)

I think what we can say about Operation Barbarossa

is that it does provide some oil, for example.

The Ukraine provides a lot of bread.

So, you know, there is some gains,

but, of course, it was enormously expensive

to keep this army in the field.

And mostly the army, you know, was still getting supplies

from Germany itself.

So on the balance sheet of, you know,

how much money did they make from Operation Barbarossa?

How much did it cost?

At the beginning, you could say there was a profit, yeah,

but as it started to get into a war of attrition,

like Stalingrad and afterwards, it started to be a loss.

(suspenseful music)

And even as German forces

were bidding to take control of the vast resources

of the Soviet empire,

on December 7th, 1941, its ally, Imperial Japan,

launched a sneak attack of the U.S. base

at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Four days later,

Hitler declared war against the United States.

Although this would sever trading relations

between the two nations,

many American industrialists were powerless

to stop their subsidiary operations in Germany

from producing and trading with the Nazi Reich.

So most of the American subsidiaries

simply continue their operations

as they existed in on December 1st, 1941.

There's really no major change that we see taking place.

Partially, this is because the German companies

themselves have largely broken free of American control

at that point.

The Nazi party has installed loyalists

onto their boards of directors.

They have mandated these companies engage

in the war effort in some way.

So a lot of these companies simply don't have a choice.

If they wanted to shut down their operations in Europe,

they couldn't have, at that stage.

(suspenseful music)

But there would be some American companies

that would willfully continue to deal with the Nazi Reich

in a clear violation

of the U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act.

Companies like Standard Oil.

A small, but dangerous minority of industrial managers,

who perhaps hold out for extra profits,

call for business as usual.

So by early 1942, the U.S. government

is increasingly concerned that American companies

are not only doing business with the Reich,

but that they're helping the German war effort.

And of course, that accusation is correct.

And so begin looking at all of this involvement,

all of this corporate involvement in the Reich,

and they pinpoint Standard Oil as one of the companies

that is probably still doing an appreciable amount

of business to help the German war effort.

(suspenseful music)

At that time,

the president of Standard Oil, James Walter C. Teagle,

was also a director of the American subsidiaries

of IG Farben.

The combined companies were known as Standard I.G.

They're sharing patents

and essentially helping IG Farben increase

the octane content of its gasoline.

Now, this is incredibly important later on

for the Luftwaffe and other German military establishments.

After the Pearl Harbor attack,

the U.S. Navy approached Standard Oil

to provide synthetic materials, vital

for the American war effort.

Incredibly, even after America's declaration of war

against Japan and Nazi Germany,

Walter C. Teagle refused to renege

on his existing deals with IG Farben.

(suspenseful music)

A congressional investigation was launched

and the chairman of the presiding special committee,

Senator Harry S. Truman, accused the corporation of treason.

And so Teagle makes a deal with the American government.

Effectively Standard Oil is such a big player

on the American economic scene

that you don't wanna punish it

during the Second World War, or so he argues.

And so Teagle agrees to give up his position

at Standard Oil a year before he's supposed to retire

and, effectively, the U.S. government agrees

that they won't pursue what they could have really done

against Standard Oil, which is antitrust cases

or other forms of punishment for the company.

Standard's is not the only oil company

that will enter this type of activity in Germany.

The Texas Company will continue to make shipments

to Germany throughout the 1930s,

and even after the start of the Second World War.

A Texas oil man named William Rhodes Davis actually

began selling cut rate Mexican oil to the Third Reich

and continues doing it as long as he can

until the British blockade cuts off his tankers

from getting to German ports.

And so we see the American oil industry

is able and willing to provide

this incredibly critical resource

to the Third Reich, even after the war has begun.

But in other cases,

the U.S. government successfully froze the assets

of many companies that dealt with the Nazis,

severing important links

in the German industrial supply lines.

Now, fighting a war on two fronts

against two of the world's largest

and best resourced countries,

Hitler needed his friends in industry

and finance more than ever.

(suspenseful music)

(suspenseful music)

Autumn, 1942.

The war begins to change for Hitler and the Nazis.

In Russia the Red Army counter attacks

against the Wehrmacht

and the myth of German military supremacy is shattered

in devastating defeats at Stalingrad and Leningrad.

In the early years of the war,

Hitler could count on the Soviet Union and U.S. companies

for the raw materials to feed his war machine.

But now, as his armies were bogged down in the east,

he could only rely on a few close allies

and fellow fascist regimes for those things.

The Portuguese were a neutral country,

but run by Antonio Salazar, who was a fascist dictator.

So the Nazis were buying wool from an other important

resources that they needed for their war machine.

(Christopher speaking in German)

You've also got chromite from Turkey,

and then you've got Spanish and Portuguese ports

that are being used

for shipments destined to the Third Reich.

And these are being conducted by American corporations,

using neutral flags on their ships.

So, you know, it looks neutral, but it ain't neutral.

Even after the Pearl Harbor attack,

less scrupulous American businessmen

would hold secret meetings with German trade delegations

in these so-called neutral countries

where they would establish shell companies

in a bid to continue to benefit

from the growth of the Nazi war machine.

Some influential players in American industry and commerce

saw Imperial Japan, rather than Germany,

as their real enemy.

So they just did this in secret

by setting up all these LLCs,

but all of these shell companies

that you couldn't trace back to the Nazis,

but that they were controlled by them.

And that's how they hid what they were doing.

(suspenseful music)

But if visits to nearby Spain

and Portugal provided the perfect cover

for business meetings between Nazi government officials

and their Western industrial and commercial counterparts,

the most popular stopping off point to hide

their own stolen loot

was undoubtedly neighboring Switzerland.

So you had a lot of high-ranking Nazis

with Swiss bank accounts.

Hitler had a bank account at the Union Bank of Switzerland

where he deposited the royalties to "Mein Kampf."

I mean, go figure.

Like everybody was using Swiss banks.

It was a thing.

(Christopher speaking in German)

The SS, the most brutal and pervasive

of all the Nazi Party militias,

played a key role in the plundering

and pillaging of occupied countries,

which drastically impaired the productivity

of their economies.

For the most part,

the SS was in charge of the systematic pillaging.

Once the Wehrmacht had passed through a country,

the civilian administration reverted to the SS

and the operations in the rear

and the SS would be in charge of looting, let's say.

But also suppressing partisans or whatnot,

including rounding up suspect populations,

above all the Jews, and sending them to their death.

Just as the deportations were starting,

in the fall of 1941,

they introduced the 11th decree to the Reich Citizenship Law

and this meant that when Jews were deported

and crossed the borders of the German Reich,

their property was legally confiscated

the moment they left the borders of the German Reich.

In this way was automatic legal confiscation

as soon as the trains left and crossed the border.

Between 1942 and 1945,

millions of Jews would be identified

and sent to concentration and death camps.

The logistics and coordination of that process

was assisted by the tabulating technology provided

by IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag.

Most of the camps were built

for the sole purpose of extermination,

with the use of Zyklon B gas pellets provided by IG Farben.

Before meeting their demise,

the prisoners would be disposed of any possessions

they were able to carry with them,

which would be melted down and processed

for return to the Nazi Reich. (suspenseful music)

So it was a grim process of collecting assets

or valuables the Jews managed to take

with them to the concentration camps.

Everything was taken from them,

including anything they could hide

in any kind of body cavities.

Their gold teeth were extracted.

I mean, hair, everything,

the Nazis took advantage of everything.

I mean, skin was used to make lamps.

I mean, it's really, really kind of gross,

but nothing was wasted.

(suspenseful music)

There are a number of different ways

the Nazis exploited Jewish property.

A lot was used obviously for the Nazi party's coffers,

and especially to bump up the war economy.

And they were particularly concerned

for anything they could use for foreign currency.

So diamonds, fur coats, also stocks and shares,

and these were marketed in Switzerland

or Sweden through intermediaries

so that they could get hard currency for their war effort.

(suspenseful music)

This widespread process of theft

and murder was particularly prolific in Poland,

where the systematic extermination of over 3 million Jews,

between October, 1941 and November 1945,

code named Aktion Reinhard,

was overseen by SS and police leader, Odilo Globocnik.

According to documentation

from Aktion Reinhard, Globocnik sent 178 million Reichsmark

to the Reich treasury

which was all the money collected

from the Aktion Reinhard camps.

This included receipts from hair

that was was recycled,

from all sorts of clothing and shoes

and even gold bars and other valuable items

that were sent to the Reichsbank in Berlin

An equally significant

and inhumane contribution by the SS

was the way they organized the slave labor force

for the benefit of the German economy and its war effort.

In the mid 1930s, the SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler,

formed a close relationship with architect, Albert Speer.

Speer had a very close bond with Hitler

and designed numerous projects for his vision

of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Those projects included the Olympic Stadium in Berlin,

the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, the Reich's Chancellery,

and the design for Hitler's Hall of Glory,

where he intended to celebrate his victory in World War II.

In March, 1942, Adolf Hitler surprised everyone

by nominating Albert Speer

to the post of minister of armaments and war production.

Well, what's interesting about Speer

is he's a kind of technocrat, you know,

he's one of these guys so he learns on the job.

And he becomes ready excellent in this role

of armaments minister,

and armament production under Speer doubles within one year.

Able-bodied German workers

had been routinely conscripted to fight on the front lines.

This created a shortage of workers in the armament industry.

Speer relied on the SS to provide both materials and labor

from the prison camps to maintain the production lines

crucial to the Nazi war effort.

As a result, the main concentration and death camps

were situated close to major industrial hubs.

(melancholy music)

Farben went to Himmler,

and this is after the fall of Poland,

and they said there's a spot right here,

and they pointed to the map,

three rivers converge.

There's a source of coal nearby.

We intend to build the largest synthetic rubber

and synthetic petroleum plant in the world here.

You supply us with slave labor.

That was the origin of Auschwitz.

(melancholy music)

A strict distinction was made

between forced and slave labor.

Slave labor consists of the work

of concentration camp prisoners

and others who were treated

like concentration camp prisoners,

and especially all Jews,

as they faced almost certain death working for the Nazis.

Forced labor refers mainly to the Eastern laborers

and also Western laborers

who were brought to Germany to work in factories.

The rate of death among those forced laborers

was only about 10%, mainly from Allied air raids.

This meant that German companies involved

in producing armaments,

whether German domestic companies,

or former subsidiaries of American companies,

needed to pay the SS for use of forced or slave labor.

As the German war effort grew weaker and more vulnerable,

so this labor became more and more expendable.

(melancholy music)

Initially, prisoners would be marched

from the concentration camps

to nearby factories and were used there

and would march back at the end of the day,

but this proved to be quite inefficient.

And, as the war went on,

increasingly sections of concentration camps

or sub-camps were set up in various large factories

and the prisoners remained there all the time,

working for those companies. (suspenseful music)

We know that, in 1945,

when the Allies come in and liberate the Opel plant

and the Ford plant in Cologne,

they find starving and shivering slave laborers there

who have not only had been forced

into manufacturing aircraft parts

and other war supplies

for the Third Reich against their will,

but have also been subjected to Allied bombing,

because the Allies see

that these are essential production facilities

that need to be taken out of circulation.

But in the end,

slave labor caused many industries to lose money

because the quality and pace of production suffered.

It's not more profitable.

It's less efficient.

A German manager didn't think in terms of profit

from slave labor, they thought in productivity costs

and the productivity costs are much higher

for an unskilled, unmotivated slave laborer.

Even if you pay them much less

than for a skilled German worker,

especially on an assembly line

for something like airframe manufacture.

(suspenseful music)

Despite Albert Speer's best efforts,

the challenges to German production and supply lines

became insurmountable.

As the German losses on the Eastern Front quickly grew

and the prosperity and success the Germans once enjoyed

became a distant memory,

support for Nazi warmongering and fanaticism

from within Germany was, at last, on the wane.

(suspenseful music)

Economic historians are now clear,

wars don't actually make money.

And the reason they don't make money is

they cost a huge amount to stage.

So you've gotta build all these weapons

and it's not really a great idea,

is it, to build a huge airplane

and then it crashes from the sky

or a tank that gets blown up or ammunition

which just goes out of the gun and is lost

and can't be used again.

So there's an enormous cost in wars

and the longer they go on, the more they cost.

So in the end, you could say

that you need a lot of money, capital, actually,

not just being able to occupy countries.

You need a lot of capital.

And, in the long run, the Americans

and the British had more capital

so they could go on financing

this war forever more, if you like.

And the Americans, British, and Soviets

would soon have the means

and momentum to launch their final assault

into the Reich and force Nazi Germany

to a final desperate reckoning,

for which they had neither the soldiers nor the resources.

Hitler's hourglass was running out of sand.

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)