A shocking, suppressed chapter in Koch family history was brought to light last week: Charles and David’s father, Fred Koch, helped build the “third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine” — a facility that Adolf Hitler personally approved.
As first reported by the New York Times, previewing revelations from Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” the Koch Industries founder’s ties to Nazi Germany are notably absent from the company’s otherwise-exhaustive official history. As details surrounding Koch’s German joint-project with Nazi-sympathizer William Rhodes Davis have continued to emerge, the omission has become increasingly understandable.
These are the four takeaways:
- The Koch family fortune was in-part “built with contracts from the authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the USSR.”
- Koch patriarch Fred C. Koch, himself involved in the founding of the far right-wing John Birch Society, collaborated with Nazi-sympathizer William Rhodes Davis to build a Hitler-approved oil refinery in Nazi Germany.
- So crucial was the Koch-built “cracking unit” to the Nazi war effort, that the facility — described as “a key component of the Nazi war machine” — was bombed by Allied forces during World War II, according to declassified documents obtained by Gawker.
- And “crucial” is not an overstatement. The facility was so essential to the Nazi’s military efforts that they rebuilt it after the bombing — with “Jewish slave labor from concentration camps,” according to the Huffington Post.
Despite this damning, very credible evidence, the Kochs are in full-on Denial Mode. Koch Industries President David L. Robertson meekly rebutted the revelations with what amounts to: “Well, it was pre-World War II Nazi Germany, so there’s that.”
It is breathtaking that Charles and David would shrug off their family’s abetting of Nazi Germany as not so bad, just because it pre-dated World War II.
How about that in 1933, the Nazis opened Dachau concentration camp near Munich, to be followed by Buchenwald, near Weimar, in central Germany; Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, in northern Germany; and Ravensbrück, for women.Dachau and Buchenwald were major concentration camps during the Holocaust. This isn’t a case of Hitler was “soon after” overseeing Holocaust… he was already setting the groundwork in 1933.
But is that all there is to this? What else are the elusive — and incredibly secretive — billionaire brothers hiding?
(U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey photo showing aerial view of the Koch-built plant, via Gawker)
(A letter showing that forced labor was done at the Koch-built plant, via the Huffington Post)
Here’s a run-down of coverage on the Koch family wealth’s ties to Nazi Germany:
Washington Post: New book: Father of politically active Koch brothers built a refinery for the Nazis
Paid for by American Bridge 21st Century Foundation