Jacques R. Pauwels , 2015

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US Imperialism and Nazi Germany
Jacques R. Pauwels, 2015
This essay challenges the predominant notion that the US was an enemy of Hitler’s
Third Reich. In reality, the relationship between the US and Germany from 1933–45,
more specifically between the US and the German imperialist systems, was complex
and ambiguous. It admittedly involved eager competition, sometimes bitter rivalry, and
ultimately war, but also intimate and mutually beneficial collaboration, especially at the
level of private enterprise. This collaboration was also furthered by a shared antagonism
toward the Soviet Union, the incarnation of anti-capitalist revolution and anti-imperialism
which, under Hitler’s auspices, German imperialism was expected to annihilate.
Nevertheless, the US and German imperialist systems did eventually stumble into war
against each other, with nothing less than supremacy within the restricted circle of the
Great Powers at stake. Ironically, it was the huge sacrifices made by the Soviet Union
that ensured US victory in the showdown at imperialism’s OK Corral. When the war
ended, German imperialism, defeated and therefore down but certainly not out, and
henceforth under ‘democratic’ rather than Nazi management, was reduced to the role of
a junior partner of US imperialism, willing and able to help the US establish its
supremacy in Europe and to fight and eventually vanquish the Soviet Union in a new,
‘cold’ war.
Like other imperialist powers, the US is always looking out for ways to serve the
interests of its big corporations and banks. In order to keep their profits at an acceptably:
perhaps better?: at a desirably high level, important raw materials such as oil must be
obtained as cheaply as possible, foreign markets must be opened up, and opportunities
must be created everywhere for the profitable investment of excess capital. Access to
cheap labour is also crucial, and labour must be kept cheap by combating unions and
working-class political parties. The interests of US imperialism in the face of competition
in the imperialist ‘rat race’ must be defended by all means, ranging from forging formal
or informal alliances with other imperialist powers to conflict and war. Last but certainly
not least, the system of which imperialism is a manifestation, capitalism, must be
defended against any kind of unwanted change, above all revolutionary change,
throughout the world.
The US, itself a former colony, has traditionally avoided seeking to accomplish all
this by establishing direct political control over other countries (in other words, by
acquiring colonies), as its European rivals used to do. Its favourite approach has been
economic penetration, combined with the greatest possible amount of indirect political
control. This strategy has typically required the collaboration of local comprador elites
ruling via democratic or, if necessary, dictatorial regimes. Much of Latin America has
been penetrated in this manner by US imperialism. Like colonial control, economic

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penetration has usually been associated with ‘developing’ countries, especially when it
involves crude forms of indirect political control via regimes that could be defined as
‘neo-colonial’ or ‘semi-colonial’, such as the Pinochet regime in Chile or the Suharto
regime in Indonesia. Economic penetration can also target fully developed countries,
however, including other imperialist powers. And this kind of penetration is of course
likely to have a great influence on formal and informal relations, not only at government
level, with the affected power. Let us examine the case of the relationship between the
imperialisms of the US and Nazi Germany from 1933–45; that is, the dozen years during
which, under Hitler’s stewardship, German imperialism first flourished, then nearly
collapsed, but – with US help – would manage to survive.
The First World War had been an imperialist war, fought by imperialist powers
with imperialist objectives in mind: a reality that was semantically obscured by claims
that it was a ‘war to end all wars’, a ‘war for democracy’, and similar hypocritical
nonsense. At the end of that war, Germany’s imperialist ambitions received a major
setback. On the international stage, however, Germany remained a major player with a
considerable imperialist appetite, which was to become obvious for all to see when Hitler
came to power in 1933. To the US, this development posed a challenge but also created
opportunities. In the context of the ongoing competition among imperialist powers, the
US and Germany were competitors engaged in a rivalry that had the potential to explode
into war, but they also stood to gain from a close collaboration; if not between their
respective governments, then at least between their leading corporations and banks.
During the First World War, a huge amount of capital had built up in the vaults and
accounts of ‘corporate America’, which therefore looked out for investment opportunities
abroad. For this kind of activity, Germany, which needed to disgorge hefty reparation
payments to France and Belgium, proved to be a promised land. The result was that a
wave of US direct investment flooded into Germany. In 1929, General Motors (GM) thus
took over Germany’s largest car manufacturer, Adam Opel AG, based in the town of
Rüsselsheim. In the same year, Ford built a huge new factory in Cologne, soon to be
known as the Ford-Werke. The result: a large share of the German auto industry was
henceforth under US control. Other US corporations formed strategic partnerships with
German firms. This arrangement involved joint ventures and understandings concerning
access to raw materials, agreements concerning prices, etc. A spectacular example is
provided by the case of Standard Oil of New Jersey (later known as Esso, then Exxon),
which went to bed with the German petrochemical trust IG Farben. By the early 1930s,
an elite group of about 20 large US companies had some sort of German connection. A
number of large US banks were also involved in this German investment offensive, for
example J.P. Morgan & Co, which had made a fortune during the Great War. All these
banks had their own German partners, such as the Deutsche Bank. US law firms were
also involved in investments in Germany. The great specialist in these kinds of legal
affairs was Sullivan & Cromwell, a prestigious Wall Street law firm run by the brothers

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John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, whose German-connected clients included the
Rockefellers, owners of Standard Oil.
In the early 1930s, things did not go well for US investments in Germany. The
reason for this was the Great Depression, whose main characteristic was the
disharmony between supply, high because of increased productivity, and slumping
demand. This crisis affected all capitalist countries, but it hit Germany particularly hard.
At the German branches of US corporations, production and profits dwindled. To make
things worse, the political scene became extremely unstable, with Nazis and
communists battling each other in the streets of Berlin and other big cities. German
industrialists and bankers – and US ‘captains of industry’ with investments in Germany –
feared that the country was ripe for a ‘red revolution’ like the one which had put the
Bolsheviks in power in Russia in 1917. But then a miracle happened: thanks to the
generous political and financial support of German industrialists and financiers, including
many with partners in the US, Hitler came to power in January 1933, and soon the
situation changed politically as well as socially and economically. The German
subsidiaries of Ford, GM and others quickly returned to profitability. The reason was that
Hitler did what those who had brought him to power, Germany’s leading capitalists,
expected of him: he eliminated the threat of revolutionary change, embodied by
Germany's communists, throwing many of them into concentration camps; and he
dissolved other working-class parties and all labour unions, thus transforming the
hitherto militant German working class into a flock of impotent sheep, forced to work
‘harder and faster’ for the benefit of their employers, including the German subsidiaries
of foreign corporations. At Ford-Werke, for example, labour expenses declined from 15
per cent of the business volume in 1933, when Hitler came to power, to 11 per cent in
1938. Whenever workers displayed the slightest inclination to protest or strike, the
Gestapo intervened with an iron hand in favour of the employer. General Motors’ Opel
factory at Rüsselsheim benefited from such an intervention in June 1936. The owners
and managers of US corporations and banks with investments in Germany were in
seventh heaven and publicly sang the praises of Hitler. Among them were William
Knudsen, the chairman of the board of General Motors, Sosthenes Behn, the head of
ITT, and lawyer John Foster Dulles. (The story of US investments in Nazi Germany is
told in detail in Pauwels 2002; 2013.)
Hitler also found a way to lead Germany out of the doldrums of the Great
Depression. His remedy was essentially Keynesian or ‘demand-side’; that is, he
stimulated demand by means of government orders. But Hitler’s Keynesianism was of a
military nature: at his behest the German state ordered tanks, guns, submarines, trucks,
and planes in huge numbers. This was part of his great ambition, shared by Germany’s
industrialists and bankers, to rearm Germany so that, via a new war, it could finally
achieve the grandiose imperialist ambitions for which the Reich had already gone to war

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in 1914 against its imperialist rivals. (Fritz Fischer first demonstrated this continuity in his
famous book Germany’s Aims in the First World War, published in English in 1967.) War
was expected to bring wonderful results in terms of opening up sources of raw materials
and markets in the form of overseas colonies, of course, but also of territories in Eastern
Europe. It would obviously take quite a few years before Germany would be ready to
wage war successfully. In the meantime, Hitler’s rearmament revealed itself as a
bonanza of profits for Germany’s corporations and banks, as has been stressed in
studies of the economic history of the Third Reich, such as Adam Tooze’s The Wages of
Destruction (2006). The German subsidiaries of US corporations shared fully in the
‘profit explosion’ made possible by the armament boom. The Ford-Werke, for example,
which had suffered heavy losses in the early 1930s, benefited from massive state orders
for trucks. And so the annual profit of Ford’s German subsidiary climbed spectacularly
between 1935 and 1939. General Motors’ Opel factory, which had also suffered losses
in the early 1930s, did even better thanks to orders from the Nazi regime. Other big US
corporations that made a lot of money in Germany in the 1930s were: IBM, whose
German branch, called Dehomag, supplied the Nazis with perforated card machines, the
predecessors of the computer, which facilitated the automation of industrial production;
and ITT, whose German subsidiaries, including Lorenz AG, produced all kinds of
communications equipment for the Nazis, especially for the Luftwaffe. (IBM’s happy
adventures in the Nazi Wonderland have been described in great detail in a notorious
book by Edwin Black [2001].)
Hitler’s Germany was not only a low-wage Shangri-La for US investment capital,
but also became a significant market for the finished products of US industry. Ford, for
example, also exported truck parts from the US to Germany. Other US corporations, for
example, Pratt & Whitney, Boeing, and Sperry Gyroscope (now known as Unisys),
provided the Third Reich with ‘significant quantities of all sorts of material related to
aviation’ such as ‘automatic pilots … and artillery devices used in anti-aircraft defence’.
The US also exported raw materials of great strategic importance to Germany, including
copper and rubber, for which, in view of its preparations for a ‘motorised’ war, Hitler’s
Germany had a great need. In preparation for the kind of motorised war that would be
known as Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’), involving countless gas-guzzling trucks, tanks, and
planes, Germany also stockpiled enormous oil reserves, and much of that oil was
supplied by US trusts. The percentage of petroleum products imported by Germany from
the US quadrupled between 1933 and 1939. A corporation that earned huge profits from
this business was the Texas Oil Company, renamed Texaco in 1959. The German navy
obtained the oil it needed from a Texas oil magnate, William Rhodes Davis. And
Standard Oil assisted IG Farben in the production of synthetic fuel.
The profits made by US branches were for the most part reinvested in the ‘land of
unlimited possibilities’ that Hitler’s Germany appeared to be at the time, certainly in

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comparison to the US itself, which remained stuck in the mud of the Great Depression.
The ‘earnings’ were reinvested in the modernisation of existing infrastructure, the
building of new plants, and the purchase of government bonds. In 1935, for example,
GM built a new Opel plant in Brandenburg, near Berlin; it was the most modern truck
factory in the world. The value of US investments in Germany thus grew considerably.
The Ford-Werke and IBM’s Dehomag virtually doubled in value between 1933 and 1939.
As for Opel, by 1939 its worth was estimated at $86.7 million, that is, 2.6 times the value
of General Motors’ original investment in Germany, which had been $33.3 million. Under
Hitler’s auspices, the total value of US investments in Germany, involving a total of 553
companies, rose to $450 million at the formal declaration of war against the US in
December 1941. In the 1930s, then, US imperialism was profiting handsomely from
close collaboration with German imperialism, then under Nazi management.
The fact that Hitler was a racist and a virulent anti-Semite did not trouble the
owners and managers of US corporations active in Germany, many of whom were ‘white
supremacists’ and anti-Semites themselves. Henry Ford, for example, had personally
written an anti-Semitic tract in 1920 entitled The International Jew, which actually had a
great influence on Hitler. Both men, like most contemporary anti-Semites on both sides
of the Atlantic, subscribed to the theory of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, explained in detail in
Damien Amblard’s book Le ‘fascisme’ américain et le fordisme (2007). They considered
Marxist international socialism to be an invention of ‘international Jewry’, a strategy
developed by that supposedly inferior people to subvert the natural (or God-given) rule
of the superior ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ race. The Russian Revolution in particular was seen as
the evil work of Jews, and the Soviet Union, the first socialist state and a bastion of anti-
imperialism, was despised as ‘Russia ruled by Jews’. And it was believed that the Jews
would not rest until they had subverted the entire world with their labour-union agitation,
their socialism, or, worse, their communism. Ford and many other US industrialists and
bankers admired Hitler because he had exorcised this ‘red peril’ from Germany. And
they fervently hoped that he would soon proceed to fulfil his life’s big ambition as
outlined in Mein Kampf: namely, the total destruction of the Soviet Union, source of
inspiration and guidance for ‘Reds’ worldwide, also stateside, where the political left was
troublesome enough for the 1930s to be labelled the ‘red thirties’ by some historians.
And so it happened that US businessmen were unperturbed by Hitler’s anti-
Semitism and racism in general and happily helped him to prepare for war, a war whose
victim was supposed to be the Soviet Union. Indeed, as late as the spring of 1939, Hitler
was determined to wage war against the Soviets, as Rolf-Dieter Müller has convincingly
demonstrated in his 2011 book Der Feind steht im Osten. Hitler was convinced that ‘the
West’ – a codename for the imperialist powers – would not object to such a war and
would therefore remain neutral as a tertius gaudens. This was not an unreasonable
expectation, because the destruction of the Soviet Union was fervently desired by all

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imperialist powers. After all, that state was perceived as the incarnation of social
revolution, a ‘counter-system’ to the international capitalist order of things, and the
wellspring of anti-imperialist agitation worldwide. Moreover, via their infamous
appeasement-policy, London and Paris had actually encouraged Hitler’s great ambition
and facilitated its implementation, providing him with a Czechoslovak ‘springboard’
pointing east.
The US and German industrialists and bankers who backed Hitler had another
reason for looking forward to the war he would unleash. Hitler had to borrow vast sums
of money to finance his armament programme. Germany’s national debt was
mushrooming, and it was clear that only the loot resulting from a ruthless war of rapine
would enable him to pay back the creditors; that is, the banks and other investors and
purchasers of German government bonds, including US corporations and banks. Last
but not least, it was hoped that the destruction of the Soviet Union would facilitate the
recovery of the investments made by US corporations like Singer in the Empire of the
Tsar, lost on account of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Even though he was the dictator of a rival imperialist power, US capitalists were
as happy with Hitler as they would have been with any comprador dictator they might
have put in charge of some ‘banana republic’ in South America. Hitler, so the saying
went, was ‘someone you could do business with’. And great things were expected from
him in the future, above all the destruction of the Soviet Union. US and German
imperialism were on the same wavelength: they supported each other, they were
forming a partnership, admittedly not a formal political partnership, but certainly an
informal economic partnership; not a partnership at government level but a partnership
at corporate level. The US government kept a decent distance from the regime in Berlin,
which was despised by many ordinary Americans. But Washington certainly saw no
reason to go to war against a country where US investment was flourishing. In fact, in
the 1930s, the US had plans in the drawer for war against Mexico, Japan, and even
Great Britain and Canada, but no plans at all for war against Nazi Germany.
The owners and managers of US businesses with branches in Germany were
undoubtedly frustrated by the fact that, for reasons which cannot be elucidated here, the
war unleashed by Hitler in 1939 turned out to be a war against Poland and the ‘Western’
powers Great Britain and France, instead of a war against the Soviet Union. But this was
not very important. What was important was that this war opened up even more fabulous
opportunities for making money. When war broke out on 1 September 1939, the New
York Stock Exchange reacted enthusiastically and showed its biggest gains in more than
two years. Indeed, in order to wage ‘lightning war’ (Blitzkrieg) and thus achieve ‘lightning
victories’ (Blitzsiege) in 1939 and 1940, Hitler relied to a large extent on equipment and
fuel provided by US corporations, which made a lot of money supplying these goods.
For the benefit of all branches of the German armed forces, Ford-Werke and Opel

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cranked out not only trucks, but also planes, including the JU-88 bomber; ITT’s
subsidiaries manufactured radios and radar equipment as well as high-quality fighter
aircraft such as the FW-190; IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, provided technology
that allowed the Nazi war machine to operate ‘on a large scale, quickly and efficiently,’
as Edwin Black puts it; and the subsidiary of Singer, famous for its sewing machines,
mass-produced machine guns. In 1939 and 1940, Texaco and Standard Oil continued to
ship oil to Germany, much of it via neutral Spanish ports. Texas oil baron William
Rhodes Davis supplied Mexican oil, refining it in his own German subsidiary located in
Hamburg.
The military success of the Nazis was also the commercial success of US
corporations and banks; the triumphs of Germany’s Nazi imperialism were also triumphs
of US imperialism. Major players of both sides celebrated the Wehrmacht’s recent
victories in New York on 26 June 1940, during a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It
was organised by Gerhard Westrick, a German lawyer who represented Ford, GM,
General Electric, ITT, Standard Oil, and other US corporations with a German
connection. Many high-ranking executives of US corporations and banks attended. Five
days later the German victories were fêted again, this time during a party organised by
Rieber, the boss of Texaco, and attended by more big guns of US industry such as
Edsel Ford, Henry Ford’s son.
The de facto alliance of US and German imperialisms, not at government level
but certainly at the level of ‘private enterprise’, was also reflected in the happy and
optimistic comments of US executives such as Rieber, Thomas Watson, the big boss of
IBM, and oil baron William Rhodes Davis. They praised Hitler, his Nazi regime, and
fascism in general, and expressed the hope that their great and profitable relationship
might continue to yield fruit, for example in the shape of business to be done in the
countries occupied by Germany. Conversely, Hitler honoured US industrialists such as
Ford and Watson with prestigious decorations.
The fact that Hitler was a dictator and that many of his victims were democracies
did not bother these captains of industry. Typical of this attitude was a comment by
Alfred P. Sloan, chairman of GM, in June 1940, expressing satisfaction that the era of
the democracies with ‘their unintelligent, even stupid and limited leaders’ was finished,
and that the future belonged to Nazism and other forms of fascism, ‘an alternative
system … with leaders who are strong, intelligent, aggressive, [and] who make people
work longer and harder’. Corporate America’s spectacular demonstration of enthusiasm
and support for fascism in 1940 is one of many historical facts that contradict the ‘free-
markets-and-democracy’ notion; that is, the idea that the natural political partner of the
social-economic system of capitalism, often euphemised as the ‘free market’ system, is
democracy.

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The war unleashed by Hitler was good for US imperialism, especially for the
corporations and banks with German branches. But the war also revealed itself to be
good for other corporations, namely all those, usually also ‘big boys’, that became
involved in the stateside production of planes, tanks, and other war equipment. The US
itself had been modernising its military for some time – the strategic bombers and
aircraft carriers did not wait until the 1940s to be designed and built – and from
Washington came increasing orders for trucks, tanks, planes, ships, etc. This increase in
military spending by the state bolstered economic demand enough to finally put an end
to the Great Depression. Furthermore, thanks to President Roosevelt’s famous ‘Lend-
Lease’ programme, US industry was also producing all kinds of military equipment for
Great Britain, thereby allowing the latter to continue the war against Hitler after the
defeat of France. Contrary to popular myth, Lend-Lease ‘aid’ did not amount to a free
gift, but was a complex system of loans and credits, generating gargantuan profits for
the US corporations and banks that were involved.
But Lend-Lease also promised long-term benefits for corporate America. The
scheme required London to dismantle the protectionist system of ‘imperial preference’
tariffs, which had not prevented but certainly limited US exports to Great Britain and its
dependencies; it served as a weapon for US products to conquer the British market, in
other words, to economically penetrate – and thus weaken – an imperialist rival.
Conversely, Lend-Lease drastically reduced the British share of the pie of the US
market, in that it forced the British to divest themselves of virtually all their considerable
stateside investments. Finally, on account of Lend-Lease, Great Britain found itself
saddled with a colossal debt, which would not be completely paid off until 29 December
2006. The war unleashed by German imperialism, informally but intimately associated at
the time with US imperialism, thus allowed the latter to clip the wings of its British rival in
the imperialist rat race. During the Second World War, British imperialism, once so
powerful but considerably weakened by the First World War, was reduced to the status
of ‘junior partner’ of US imperialism.
From the perspective of US imperialism, Hitler had been good for business, but
his war was nothing less than wonderful for business and strengthened the international
position of US imperialism. There was no need for the US to get involved in the war in
Europe, and the leaders of corporate America had no desire to see that war end soon.
To the contrary, they wanted the war to last as long as possible, as Henry Ford openly
admitted on one occasion. About the war in Europe, US industrialists regretted only one
thing: namely, that the Soviet Union, the incarnation of anti-capitalism and anti-
imperialism and therefore the arch-enemy of all imperialist powers, had not been the
victim of the furor teutonicus. On 22 June 1941, however, the Wehrmacht finally crossed
the Soviet border with tanks and trucks made by Ford or GM and with gas tanks
brimming with fuel provided by Texaco and other US oil trusts. If Hitler had attacked the

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Soviet Union ten, five, or even just one year earlier, the leaders of corporate America
would have applauded unanimously. But in 1941, their feelings were mixed. The sales to
Great Britain had been the source of unlimited profit for many corporations, and it was
obvious that their British customer’s chances of survival improved considerably when the
Nazis went for the throat of another enemy, especially when that enemy did not collapse
after a few weeks, as the experts in Washington, London, and obviously Berlin had
expected.
The Nazi regime’s economic policy also played an important role in the decline of
US enthusiasm for Hitler. US imperialism, like any other imperialism, wanted ‘open
doors’ all over the world for its exports and its investment capital. But, starting in the late
1930s and increasingly in the early 1940s, the Nazis – in other words, the contemporary
managers of German imperialism – moved to restrict access to the markets of Germany
and the European countries it conquered to all but the most indispensible foreign
products and raw materials such as oil. Most of Europe was thus converted into
something US businessmen detested, namely a ‘closed economic system’, difficult if not
impossible to penetrate economically. To US corporations with branches in Germany
itself, this development did not present a considerable problem, but US corporate
leaders who were not so privileged – and the many politicians convinced that US
prosperity depended on foreign trade – were very perturbed. Even more irritating was
the success of Berlin’s aggressive international trade policy in Latin America, considered
by US imperialism to be its exclusive commercial bailiwick. During the 1930s, the
German share of the import volume of countries such as Brazil and Mexico was growing
rapidly at the expense of the hitherto unthreatened US competition. Nazi Germany was
rapidly becoming the ‘most irksome competitor’ of the US in that part of the world, as the
German ambassador to Mexico put it in 1938 in a report to Berlin. Corporate America
thus lost a lot of the sympathy it had previously had for the Nazi regime. The friendship
between the US and German imperialist systems was cooling off rapidly. (Reference is
made to Uwe Lübken, 2004; the quotation of the ambassador is from Hallgarten and
Radkau, 1981, pp. 337-338.)
When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, many US industrialists wished
that neither side would win; they hoped that the conflict on the Eastern Front would last
very long, until the antagonists were both exhausted. More and more members of the
US power elite started to sympathize with the Soviets, if only because they worried that,
in case of a nazi triumph in the east, Hitler “might be unstoppable” (Smelser and Davies,
2008, pp. 9-11), in other words, that such a triumph might crown German imperialism as
the supremo of international imperialism – and a major threat to the US. Still, a hard core
of US businessmen remained resolutely pro-fascist and anti-Soviet and hoped that Hitler
would destroy the cradle of communism. In all likelihood, this was also what the great
majority of owners and managers of US corporations with German subsidiaries were

10. 10
looking for, because they produced the war materiel that enabled the Nazi legions to
head for Moscow in that hot summer of 1941. To their great regret, the Nazi host was
never to march triumphantly onto Moscow’s Red Square.
Success in this Blitzkrieg was not just a military but also an economic
precondition for a German victory in the Second World War. To win the war, Germany
had to win fast, lightning-fast. After the campaigns of 1939 and 1940, there was enough
fuel left only to wage war for about three or four months. But Berlin was confident that
the Red Army could be defeated in six to eight weeks. A lightning-fast victory would
make the abundant resources of the defeated Soviet Union available, particularly the oil
of the Caucasus, and that would turn Germany into an invincible world power. In other
words, victory over the Soviet Union would make German imperialism ‘number one’, not
only in Europe, but in the entire world. But on 5 December 1941, when the Red Army
launched a counter-offensive in front of the gates of Moscow, as devastating as it was
unexpected, Hitler himself and the generals of the German High Command realised that
the ‘lightning war’ in the East would not produce a ‘lightning victory’, and that Germany
was therefore doomed to lose the war. That day, 5 December 1941, was the real turning
point of the Second World War, but other than Hitler and his generals, hardly anyone
was aware of it. (Two ‘outsiders’ who were in fact aware of it were the Swiss secret
services and the Vatican.)
America’s ‘captains of industry’ did not have the vaguest idea what the failure of
the Blitzkrieg in the Soviet Union really implied, but it was henceforth obvious that the
Germans were going to have their hands full on the Eastern Front for quite some time.
This would allow the British to stay in the war, which meant that the profitable Lend-
Lease trade could continue for the foreseeable future. In other words, the success of the
Red Army was good for business. In the autumn of 1941, the New York Stock Exchange
recorded higher and higher stock prices as it became increasingly evident that the Nazi
crusade in the East was not going to result in the great triumph that had been expected.
The situation became even more advantageous when it appeared possible to do
business with the Soviets as well. In fact, in November 1941, when it became obvious
that the Soviet Union was not going to collapse anytime soon, Washington revealed
itself willing to extend credit to the Soviets, and a lend-Lease agreement was signed.
Thanks to that wonderful war in Europe, yet another foreign market opened up, at least
partially and temporarily, for the benefit of US imperialism. Moreover, via ‘reverse Lend-
Lease’, the Soviet Union also started to supply the US with important raw materials,
including chrome and manganese ore as well as platinum; on account of this, the US
even became a net beneficiary of wartime trade with the Soviets, at least according to a
Soviet historian, Pavel Zhilin.
Incidentally, it is a myth that the totally unexpected success of the Soviets against
Nazi Germany was only possible because of massive US aid. First, US aid never

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represented more than 4 or 5 per cent of the total Soviet production of war equipment.
Second, US supplies to the Soviets only began to make a difference long after the
turning point of December 1941. According to Adam Tooze, ‘the Soviet miracle owed
nothing to western assistance [and] the effects of Lend-Lease had no influence on the
balance of forces on the Eastern Front before 1943’ (2006). Third, the Soviets
themselves manufactured virtually all of their high-quality weapons, including the
excellent T-34 tank. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet
Union was at least neutralised by the unofficial, discreet, but nonetheless substantial,
assistance provided to the Germans by US corporations. Without these resources, the
Nazis would never have been able to attack the Soviet Union.
Viewed from the perspective of US imperialism, the war yielded all sorts of
benefits and opportunities but also some problems, challenges, and dilemmas. The
defeat of France and the Netherlands in 1940, for example, raised the question of what
would happen to their colonies in the Far East, namely Indochina and Indonesia, rich in
rubber and petroleum, respectively. With the ‘mother countries’ occupied by the
Germans, these colonies looked like ripe fruits ready to be picked by one of the
remaining competitors in the imperialist competition. But by which one? Perhaps the
Germans, if they were to win the war and impose a harsh, Versailles-style settlement on
the losers. But the prospects of a German triumph were fading fast as the Panzers had
to shift into reverse gear in front of Moscow. A more likely candidate was Japan, an
imperialist power with great ambitions in the Far East, and a keen appetite for rubber
and oil. But the US was also a candidate. With Japan, the USs had had strained
relations since the early 20th century when, following their conquest of the Philippines,
the US had become geopolitically interested in the Far East. Both powers had great and
conflicting ambitions with respect to China, a huge but powerless country that seemed
ripe to be economically penetrated and politically dominated by an imperialist power. To
America’s displeasure, Japan had already grabbed a sizeable piece of China in the
1930s, namely Manchuria. And now Indochina and Indonesia were up for grabs. The
tension was mounting in Tokyo and Washington; who would make the first move?
In Washington, plans for war against the Japanese, underestimated as an inferior
yellow race, had been ready for quite some time. They involved the use of aircraft
carriers and strategic bombers, providing Uncle Sam with a military arm long enough to
reach across the Pacific, where the Philippines, strategically situated close to Japan as
well as China, Indochina, and Indonesia, could serve as a useful base of operations.
(Hawaii, annexed by the US in 1898, was of course an equally convenient pied-à-terre
halfway across the Pacific.) In Washington, the President and his advisors felt it was
imperative to act before Tokyo had a chance to beat them to it and create a fait accompli
that might be impossible to undo. During the last few decades, more and more evidence
has built up indicating that, via measures such as an oil embargo, the US leaders

12. 12
deliberately provoked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor and knew that a Japanese strike
force was on its way to attack the US base there (see Robert B. Stinnett’s book Day of
Deceit [200].)
It was extremely important to make the Japanese attack the US, rather than vice
versa. Indeed, only a defensive war was acceptable to Congress and to the US public.
Moreover, an US attack on Japan would also have required Nazi Germany to come to
the aid of Japan under the terms of their alliance, while a Japanese attack on the US
would not. Tokyo was tricked into attacking Pearl Harbor just days after the strategic
aircraft carriers had conveniently sailed away from there, and so President Roosevelt
could easily ‘sell’ the war he wanted against Japan to Congress and to the US public.
There would be no need to account for Germany, which had not been involved in
Japan’s so-called ‘surprise’ attack, was under no obligation whatsoever to come to the
aid of its Japanese ally, and was known to be grimly focused on its war against the
Soviet Union.
But on 11 December 1941, a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and much
to Washington’s surprise, Hitler himself declared war on the US. Very likely, he hoped
that Tokyo would return the favour by declaring war on the Soviet Union, which would
have revived Berlin’s moribund hope for a victory on the Eastern Front. However, the
Japanese did not declare war on the Soviet Union, undoubtedly figuring that they would
have their hands full with their US enemy. Predictably, their armies swarmed out to the
south, to resource-rich Indochina and Indonesia and to the Philippines, the major US
bridgehead in the Far East.
US imperialism was now an enemy of German imperialism, a partner and even
friend not so long before, at least of corporate America. It was also an enemy of
Japanese imperialism, a long-time rival in imperialism’s Far Eastern hunting grounds.
On its side was British imperialism, in the process of becoming the ‘junior partner’ it has
remained ever since. And also on its side, rather surprisingly (if not shockingly), was
Soviet communism, in principle an arch-enemy of all forms of imperialism, but formally at
war only against German imperialism. The Soviet Union was a friend of the US and
Great Britain, but only ‘for the duration’; that is, on account of the principle that ‘the
enemy of my enemy is my friend’. That friendship was doomed to end as soon as the
common enemy was defeated.
The US and its British partner restricted their active participation in the war
against Germany to a minimum, finding excuses for not opening a second front in
Western Europe which would have provided considerable relief to the Red Army. While
the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ thus sat on the fence, the Soviets functioned as cannon fodder,
fighting titanic battles against the Germans at Stalingrad and elsewhere, inflicting huge
losses on the Wehrmacht. On the Eastern Front, Germany would end up with no fewer

13. 13
than 10 million of its total 13.5 million men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner during the
entire war; and the Red Army would end up with the credit for 90 per cent of all
casualties in the German army. That was obviously to the advantage of the US and
Britain, which did not care that the Soviets themselves also suffered grievous losses. In
fact, it was hoped that the war in the east would end with both sides being totally
exhausted, so that the US, together with Britain, could decisively intervene in the end,
like a deus ex machina. (In similar fashion, the US had entered the First World War at a
very late stage, suffered minimal losses compared to Britain and France, and emerged
from the war in a much stronger position vis-à-vis allies who also happened to be
imperialist rivals.)
The Soviets would make the biggest contribution by far to the Allied victory over
Nazi Germany, but would indeed be bled white in the process. For each American who
gave his life, in the Second World War, no fewer than 53 Soviet soldiers gave theirs.
And while a total of approximately 300,000 Americans – and also approximately 300,000
British – were killed on all fronts, including the war against Japan, more than 13 million
Soviet soldiers were killed, virtually all of them while fighting the Germans on the
Eastern Front.
The informal partnership of US imperialism with German imperialism, and the
discreet but intimate collaboration between the two, had never existed at the
government level, but always at the corporate level, at the level of ‘private enterprise’.
(Which is why it has been virtually invisible to historians, who conventionally focus on
the role of the state, in other words, on events of a political and military nature.) When, in
December 1941, their governments suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves at war
with each other, this mutually beneficial corporate collaboration did not come to an end;
far from it. Business trumped patriotism, and making money proved more important than
winning the war. As far as US corporations and their German branches were concerned,
it was business as usual: ‘profits über Alles!’
The German branches of the big US corporations were not confiscated by the
Nazis after Pearl Harbor, as has often been suggested. Nazi intervention in their
management remained minimal, and the headquarters in the US maintained at least a
measure of control via trusted German managers and in some cases via branches in
neutral countries such as Switzerland. They continued to crank out the military
commodities desperately needed by Hitler to continue his murderous war long after he
had abandoned all hope of victory. The US branch plants were specialists in mass
production of this kind of material, and the Nazi leaders understood only too well that
interference in the management of Opel and others could jeopardise that production. US
branch plants continued to supply Nazi Germany not only with a huge quantity but also a
high quality of military equipment. This included trucks equipped with all-wheel drive,
radar systems, engines for the ME-262, the very first jet fighter, and turbines for the

14. 14
infamous V2 rockets. A US subsidiary also supplied sophisticated equipment that
assisted the Nazis in perpetrating their unprecedented crimes. We refer to the Hollerith
calculators, produced by IBM’s Dehomag, useful for ‘establish[ing] lists of Jews and
other victims with a view to deporting them’. Finally, at least some US corporations
continued to provide the Third Reich with fuel, without which much of this equipment
would have been useless. Via ports in the Caribbean and Spain, Standard Oil shipped
not only petroleum products to Germany, but also other raw materials essential for
waging war, such as tungsten and cotton.
It is true that, as apologists argue, the US branches in Germany had no choice but to
produce for the Nazis. But this defence obviously does not apply to corporations that
found ways to export oil and other commodities to Germany. And it is also true that the
managers of the branch plants and their stateside bosses did not have to be forced; in
fact, they proved very keen to produce for the Nazis. The reason was that producing for
the Nazis in Germany remained highly profitable until the very end of the war.
(Incidentally, the Nazi authorities paid the bills with money stolen from their Jewish
victims, with gold looted from the national banks of occupied countries like Belgium, and
with other riches yielded by their conquests and crimes; Swiss and international banks
based in Switzerland were happy to make the arrangements.) The earnings of the Ford-
Werke, for example, almost doubled between 1939 and 1943. Noteworthy determinants
of high profit rates were the regressive employment policy of the Nazi regime and the
massive use of forced labour. The Nazis froze the wages of German workers and
introduced considerably longer working hours. At Opel and Singer, workers protested in
vain as they had to labour 60 hours per week while their wages were reduced. Labour
costs were also lowered, and profits thus increased, by the use of forced labour in the
form of foreign workers, many of them deported involuntarily to Germany, as well as
prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. This amounted to a form of slavery, of
which the branch plants of US corporations were also able to take advantage.
Subsidiaries known to have benefited from such slave labour included Coca-Cola,
Kodak, Opel, which favoured POWs, and the Ford-Werke, which on one occasion even
employed inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp. (Reference could be made
here to the book by Billstein, Reinhold, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis,
Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor during the Second
World War, Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2000.)
The profits made by US branch plants continued to be reinvested mostly in
Germany, for example in the expansion of facilities and the acquisition of more modern
machinery, which increased the value of the enterprise. The value of the Ford-Werke
thus rose officially from R₥60.8 million in 1938 to R₥68.8 million in 1945, but in reality it
likely more than doubled during the war. It also seems that profits were repatriated via
banks in Switzerland, such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel. This

15. 15
financial institution – dominated and run by US and German bankers, even during the
war – is known to have assisted the oil magnate William Rhodes Davis in repatriating
some of the profits made by his German subsidiary. Before and after Pearl Harbor, the
BIS collaborated with representatives of both German and US corporations. On the US
side they included Allen Dulles, the representative in Berne of the US secret service
(OSS, forerunner of the CIA). According to a German historian, Jürgen Bruhn, the OSS
was ‘from a social point of view, an association of executives of big companies, stock
brokers and Wall Street lawyers [etc.]’. And indeed, before the war, Dulles, together with
his brother, John Foster, had been a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell, a Wall Street law
firm specialising in US investments in Germany and German investments in the US.
Dulles’s boss, the head of the OSS, was William Joseph Donovan, also a former Wall
Street lawyer and a good friend of Gerhard Westrick, Ford’s and Standard Oil’s German
lawyer, the man who had hosted the June 1940 celebration of the German victories in
New York. During the war, Westrick was the administrator of the German branches of
ITT and Kodak. Throughout the war, the BIS functioned as a kind of private club in which
German and US businessmen, their eminent lawyers, and their favourite bankers could
meet and do business. As the French writer Paul Valéry put it at the end of the First
World War, in war ‘people who do not know each other massacre each other for the
benefit of people who know each other but do not massacre each other’.
In the US, the public was not aware that branch plants of prestigious US
corporations were producing all sorts of weapons and other equipment for the Nazi
enemy. The US government, on the other hand, knew very well what was going on, but
chose to ignore this kind of ‘trading with the enemy’. This tolerant attitude had a great
deal to do with the fact that ‘big business’ has always had an enormous influence in the
halls of power in Washington and even managed to increase that influence considerably
during the war. A host of representatives of big business, including high-profile
executives, descended on Washington and took over important positions in the state
bureaucracy. They included William S. Knudsen, president of General Motors from 1938
to 1940, an admirer of Hitler, Edward Stettinius Jr., another former senior officer of
General Motors, and Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric, another firm with
major investments in Germany. The overwhelming majority of these volunteers
proceeded to advance the interests of their corporations, obtaining lucrative state
contracts, and, unsurprisingly, safeguarding the interests of their subsidiaries in
Germany. Thus, we can understand why the US government chose to piously ignore the
fact that the country’s big corporations were amassing fortunes in the land of the enemy.
There were, however, exceptions to this general rule. Legal action was taken against a
small number of corporations whose Nazi connections happened to be a public secret,
particularly Standard Oil and IBM, but that led to nothing more than a gentle slap on the
wrist. The fact that big business enjoyed unprecedented control over the US government
also explains why the German branch plants of US corporations, including the huge

16. 16
Ford-Werke just outside frequently bombed Cologne, were only lightly bombed by the
Allies (if at all), despite the fact that they were of vital importance to the Nazi war effort.
The failure of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in the Soviet Union in December 1941 had been
the real turning point of the war, but until the end of 1942 everything still seemed
possible. After the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, however, the whole world
knew that the German army had received blows from which recovery was impossible.
The Red Army was henceforth on the march to Berlin; slowly, perhaps, but surely. In
Washington and London, this caused alarm bells to ring. If nothing were done to prevent
it, the Soviets might singlehandedly defeat the Nazis, occupy Germany, and liberate all
of Europe. That would mean not only the end of German imperialism, but also a
catastrophe to imperialism in general, because the Soviet Union embodied the anti-
capitalist, anti-imperialist revolution. Such an outcome would be particularly traumatic to
US imperialism, which had invested heavily in German imperialism. US imperialism not
only intended to maintain its profitable German connection in the coming post-Nazi era,
but also looked forward to using it as a bridgehead for the economic penetration,
combined with indirect political control, of the rest of Europe. In other words, US
imperialism had a stake in the survival of German imperialism, albeit in a new, non-Nazi
reincarnation.
Defeating German imperialism and not destroying it as the Soviets purported to
do, but subordinating it to the status of a junior partner, combined with the hoped-for
elimination of that pesky competitor in the Far East, Japan, was generally expected to
bring about what the publisher of Life, Henry Luce, had already predicted in 1941:
namely, that the 20th century would be ‘the American century’ – one during which, as
US writer Lewis Lapham predicted, the US would ‘inherit the earth’. On the other hand, it
was feared that US imperialism could get into deep trouble if Germany and Europe could
not be brought into its orbit. The demand stimulated by war had pulled the US economy
out of the slump of the Great Depression and even created a boom, but the war would
soon end, so economists, journalists, and politicians expressed fear that the country
might slide back into a depression, bringing unemployment and other social problems,
and possibly demand for radical change. It was believed that this daunting scenario
could be prevented if US industry could find ways to market its products all over the
world. Some spokesmen of the US power elite even declared dramatically that the
preservation of the capitalist system in America depended on a considerable expansion
of overseas trade and investment. It is in this context that the US sought to achieve a
worldwide system of free trade via the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 and the
creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, supposedly
international organisations that have in fact been dominated from the start by the US. All
countries were henceforth supposed to provide an ‘open door’ to US exports and
investment capital, and henceforth Washington actively supported governments that

17. 17
were favourable to such an arrangement and fought – openly or covertly - those that
were not. In countries which the US itself liberated, for example Italy and France, the
left-leaning resistance, planning all sorts of radical reforms of an anti-capitalist nature,
was thus excluded from power in favour of elements embracing economically liberal and
politically conservative ideas, often including former fascists such as Italy’s Marshal
Badoglio. The US hoped, moreover, that in the other countries of Europe, namely not-
yet-defeated Germany and the East European states in the process of being liberated by
the Red Army, governments would come to power after the war that favoured the kind of
liberal economic policies from which the US expected such high dividends.
After the summer of 1943, the Red Army was on the move to Berlin, but it was
still fighting deep in Russia itself and continued to face ‘the overwhelming bulk’ of the
German army. In order to be able to compete with the Soviets in an unspoken ‘race to
Berlin’ the US and Britain now hastily made plans to land troops in France. This project
would be implemented in June 1944 with the landings in Normandy, destined to be
wrongly glorified in the West as the great turning point of the Second World War. Later
that same summer, Operation Market Garden was launched with the aim of crossing the
Rhine, taking Berlin before the Soviets could do so, and defeating and occupying most
of Germany before the end of that year. In Germany, a fait accompli favourable to the
US (and British) cause was thus supposed to be created, an arrangement which the
exhausted Soviets would be unable to challenge. Similar situations, favourable to the
Western powers and unfavourable to the Soviets, local communists, and other anti-
fascist and anti-imperialist forces with plans for radical if not revolutionary reforms, had
already been created in Italy in 1943 and were created again in France and Belgium in
the summer of 1944. But Market Garden was a fiasco, and the Allied advance from
Normandy petered out near Germany’s western border. In December 1944, the US was
even temporarily forced onto the defensive by a German counter-offensive in the
Belgian Ardennes, and it was only with difficulty that the ensuing Battle of the Bulge was
eventually won. In early 1945, the Western Allies were still stuck more than 500km from
Berlin, while the Red Army resumed its offensive and advanced to Frankfurt (Oder),
located a mere stone’s throw from the German capital.
The hope of occupying most of Germany before the arrival of the Soviets had to
be abandoned. Washington and London were therefore extremely gratified that at the
Yalta Conference of 4–11 February 1945, Stalin agreed to a (presumably temporary)
post-war division of Germany into occupation zones. This agreement assigned only the
smaller and economically less important eastern third of the country, and only the
smaller eastern third of Berlin, to the Soviets; however, when, during the last months of
the war, the German resistance on the Western Front melted like snow under the sun,
allowing US troops to advance across the agreed-upon demarcation lines into the zone
assigned to the Soviets, the Yalta agreements were suddenly no longer advantageous

18. 18
to the West, thus generating the myth that at Yalta too many concessions had been
made to Stalin.
In any event, it looked as if Washington would have to allow the Soviet Union to
reap its fair share of the fruits of a common victory, a victory to which the Soviets had
made the greatest contribution and for which they had made the greatest sacrifices.
These fruits would include hefty reparation payments from Germany as well as the
installation of governments in Eastern European countries like Poland that would not be
hostile to the Soviet Union. From the perspective of US imperialism, this was not a
pleasant prospect. Indeed, it meant that the Soviet embodiment of anti-capitalism and
anti-imperialism would be able to recuperate from the trauma of Nazi aggression and
resume, possibly successfully, its construction of a socialist ‘counter system’ to
capitalism. German reparations to the Soviet Union also meant that, in future, the profits
made by the German branch plants of US corporations would flow to the Soviets instead
of into the pocketbooks of US shareholders.
And so Washington considered a number ways to prevent this scenario. Serious
consideration was given to the ‘Junker Option’. This scheme called for the replacement
of the Hitler regime in Berlin by a junta of supposedly respectable Wehrmacht generals,
mostly conservative Prussian aristocrats known as Junkers, who would then make the
remainder of the German armed forces available for a joint operation against the
Soviets. General Patton enthusiastically advocated such a common ‘crusade’ and
offered to spearhead a drive to Moscow. With an eye on their possible utilisation against
the Soviets, hundreds of thousands of German troops who had rushed into US and
British captivity were allowed to keep their arms and uniforms and remain under the
command of their officers. For the same purpose, countless Nazi spies and other
‘experts’ on warfare against Russia, many of them war criminals, as well as Ukrainian
and other Eastern European Nazi collaborators, were ‘debriefed’ and then provided with
false documents that allowed them to escape to a new life in South (and even North)
America. Patton’s proposed push to Moscow did not materialise, however, mainly
because US soldiers and civilians made it abundantly clear via demonstrations and even
strikes that they would not put up with such a cynical renversement des alliances.
When the war in Europe ended in early May 1945, US imperialism found itself on
top of the world. It had achieved a triumph over German imperialism, originally an
informal partner but then formally an enemy, which would have been a formidable rival
had it not been defeated – ironically enough by the Soviets, with only minimal help from
allies such as the US. It was indeed thanks to the Soviets that US imperialism could
eliminate German imperialism as a contender for imperialist supremacy, place it under
new and presumably democratic management, turn it into another junior partner, and
with its help, economically penetrate and attain indirect political control over all of
Western Europe. During the years following the end of the war, this US control would be

19. 19
solidly anchored in international organisations firmly controlled by Washington, such as
the IMF and that reliable warhorse NATO, and also the emerging European Union (EU).
The emergence of the EU as a US scheme to control Europe indirectly but securely, via
a reliable German partner, has been described in detail in a recent book by the French
historian Annie Lacroix-Riz (2014). Lacroix-Riz also explains how French imperialism,
still a major player before the war but subordinated to German imperialism from 1940 to
1944, was happy to switch allegiance and become a junior partner of US imperialism
upon the liberation of the country; it did so to prevent implementation of the plans for
radical social-economic change formulated by the predominantly left-wing resistance
movement. It was likewise in the context of the contemporary widespread popular
support, throughout Europe, for anti-fascist and mostly anti-capitalist political and socio-
economic changes, that German imperialism itself – personified by industrialists,
bankers, and clerical and conservative elements in general – was happy to settle for the
role of junior partner to US imperialism. Indeed, only US imperialism appeared able to
rescue German imperialism from obliteration at the hands of Germany’s resurgent (and
radical) anti-fascist forces and the anti-imperialist Soviets.
In any event, by the spring of 1945, German imperialism had been eliminated as
a challenger to the US. Great Britain had already been reduced irrevocably to the role of
junior partner, and French imperialism had just reported for duty as yet another
subservient paladin. Moreover, it was clearly only a matter of time before Japanese
imperialism would be vanquished and turned into another moon circling the US Jupiter.
The US had become the supremo of international imperialism, the uncontested leading
power of international capitalism. The struggle for hegemony within the imperialist camp,
which in many ways had begun in earnest in 1914, was settled.
Nevertheless, imperialism still faced a challenge: the Soviet Union. That irritant
state enjoyed influence over an admittedly small part of Germany and over most of
Eastern Europe, denying the US an ‘open door’ for its exports and investment capital as
well as any form of political control there. Having emerged from the terrible ordeal of war
as the world’s second most powerful country, the Soviet Union also enjoyed enormous
prestige, even in the ‘Western’ world. More particularly, it served too as a source of
inspiration, guidance, and support for anti-imperialist movements everywhere. Inspired
by its example, social and national liberation movements in China and Vietnam would
even prevent the US from enjoying an unchallenged hegemony in the Far East, which
had been the unspoken US war aim in the conflict against Japan.
The war against Japan ended with mushroom clouds rising over the ruins of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it did not have to be that way. Japan would have
capitulated without the use of the atom bomb, mainly because on 8 August 1945, a
declaration of war by the Soviet Union had robbed Tokyo of its last hope of attaching
some minor conditions to its inevitable surrender. The atom bomb was really used to

20. 20
terrorise the Soviet Union into withdrawing from East Germany and Eastern Europe.
(The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 had served a similar purpose.) But this
‘atomic diplomacy’, chronicled in great detail by the US historian Gar Alperovitz, was
unsuccessful, because the Soviet leaders responded by entrenching the Red Army in
Europe as far west and as close to the US and British troops as possible, and by
installing pro-Moscow regimes all over Eastern Europe.
And so, in the heat of the infernos of Dresden, and then Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the Cold War was born. From the perspective of US imperialism, the Second World War
had been a war against ‘the wrong enemy’, Nazi Germany and fascism in general,
imperialist rivals but also fellow imperialists and fellow anti-Soviets; and alongside ‘the
wrong ally’, the anti-imperialist Soviet Union. The Cold War would be the ‘right’ war in
the sense that it would be fought against ‘the right enemy’ of US imperialism, and of
imperialism in general: the anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist Soviet Union.
In that war, the US would arrange to have, as ‘the right ally’, a supposedly ‘new’ and
‘democratic’ state established in the western part of Germany, ruled by an assemblage
of deeply conservative men, including many former Nazis, who shared a pro-capitalist
and anti-Soviet ideology. We cannot go into the details of the history of the Cold War,
but that conflict would end in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of US imperialism. The US, since 1945 the
undisputed leader of the imperialist camp, was henceforth the only superpower in a
‘unipolar’ world. But even that triumph would be far from complete, as US imperialism
found itself confronted by new challenges such as the greatly increased might of China,
a new great rival in the form of Putin’s Russia, anti-imperialist movements in Venezuela
and elsewhere in Latin America, and huge social, economic, and financial problems in
the imperialist metropolises, including those of the US itself.
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21. 21
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