Quotes from Christopher Simpson

By the time the genocide has ended, it is usually clear that the ordinary, integrative institutions of society remained centers of power during the killing and shared responsibility for it.

Thus, Ford was willing enough to participate in Nazi anti-Semitism if it turned a profit.

Mental patients and disabled people appear to have been the first ones the Nazis actually gassed; they killed at least 50,000 in an experimental euthanasia program code-named Aktion T4 that began in the fall of 1939.

The path of scientific discovery in U.S. communication research was not decided in advance by the government or anyone else, of course. Although government funding did not determine what could be said by social scientists, it did play a major role in determining who would do the "authoritative" talking about communication and an indirect role in determining who would enjoy access to the academic media necessary to be heard by others in the field.

New German conglomerates built mainly on the seizure of Jewish-owned companies sold bonds on the international market to raise capital to Aryanize still more companies at fire-sale prices.

As director of the German Credit and Investment Corporation of New Jersey, he specialized in U.S. investments in Hitler-era Germany. After the war, Draper was to become U.S. economics chief in occupied Germany.

According to a 1936 report from Ambassador William Dodd to President Roosevelt, a half-dozen key U.S. companies—International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and du Pont—had become deeply involved in German weapons production, in part because of difficulties in repatriating profits from more conventional business.

In fact, Allied bombing may have taken a disproportionately high toll of Jewish lives, because the air raids often targeted factories and docks where the Reich had concentrated thousands of forced laborers.

Flick beat all but one of the slave labor and plunder charges, because three prominent U.S. judges concluded that the director and owner of a corporation should not be held accountable for slavery and looting by his companies, unless the prosecution could prove that he personally ordered each particular crime to be carried out.

The state created the legal framework within which Jews could be exploited with impunity, but the profits from this form of looting flowed almost exclusively to private German interests.

On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of Turkey's regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a worthy model for his own government.7

The number of the Jews murdered in a beastly fashion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithuania is put at 300,000.

That month, the state announced a new tax, the Suhneleistung, or "atonement payment," designed to tax Jews for the damages of the Kristallnacht pogroms that the Nazis had themselves instigated. The collection of this new payment was reported to have been administered by the Deutsche Bank.

Less than two and a half years after that, the new U.S. high commissioner for Germany, John McCloy, granted clemency to every single industrialist who had been convicted at Nuremberg.

First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units.

There were 5 million Jews to murder in the Nazi-occupied USSR, according to his list, and 2.3 million more in the former territories of Poland. Long-range plans called for the SS to eliminate all 4,000 Jews in Ireland once the German troops arrived.

Hitler's government, the Deutsche Bank, and most of Germany's large corporations regarded the absorption of Austria into the Reich as a test case for managing the emerging German empire in Eastern Europe. The theft of Jewish assets that had taken years in Germany was carried out in Austria in months.

The "legalization" established at Wannsee (and in related laws and decrees) achieved a relatively smooth linkage between the surface world of wartime life and the officially denied world of mass extermination.

But the business elite could not make even that claim. For them, cooperation in years of genocide became simply a matter of doing business.

Genocide has been a basic mechanism of empire and the national state since their inception and remains widely practiced in "advanced" and "civilized" areas.

Genocidal societies also show a marked tendency toward what psychologists call "just-world" thinking: Victims are believed to have brought their suffering upon themselves and, thus, to deserve what they get.3

Put bluntly, the Nazis succeeded in genocide in part through offering bystanders money, property, status, and other rewards for their active or tacit complicity in the crime.

Pell thought both aristocrats and big businessmen to be "totally selfish," as Arthur Schlesinger, jr., has put it, "but the aristocrat at least thought of his grandsons, while the bourgeois thought only of himself."2

Hackworth focused on what had long been the most active aspect of international law, the impact of war on commercial relations.