The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  The Rockefellers were closely tied to Farben through Standard Oil and other holdings. As a result, from 1929 onward, as the German combine came under increased criticism for its defense profiteering and fascist involvement, John D. Rockefeller assigned his public relations counsel, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, to help Farben clean up its image in America. In 1934 Lee testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee regarding his work for Farben. The congressional investigation revealed that the directors of American IG Chemical Corporation included some of the leading names in American finance and industry, such as Charles E. Mitchell, the director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and National City Bank, Paul M. Warburg, the first member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of Manhattan, and Edsel B. Ford of Ford Motor Company, as well as at least three German executives who later would be convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg.9 McCloy had close ties to all of them.

  Throughout the Nazi era, Farben and its American subsidiary were extensively involved in spying—so much so that many U.S. government investigators considered it an intelligence operation—and some of Farben’s competitors probably spied on them as well. By the late 1930s, McCloy’s legal work inside the shadowy world of espionage and fascist politics culminated when he conducted direct negotiations in the Black Tom munitions case with top leaders of the newly installed Third Reich, including Hermann Göring. (At the time, Göring, among various other positions, served as commissioner for raw materials and foreign exchange, and he also headed the Gestapo.) During the negotiations, in August 1936 McCloy attended the Berlin Olympics with Göring and Rudolf Hess as a guest in Hitler’s private box; McCloy and his wife also socialized with leading Nazis. McCloy later said that the connections had provided him “a window on the center of the Nazi régime.”10 His $50 million settlement with the German government, at the time one of the greatest civil awards in legal history, also represented a huge triumph that made McCloy a courthouse and boardroom celebrity, which would later lead to his appointment with the U.S. government.11

  Meanwhile, McCloy’s old college friend, fishing partner, and brother-in-law, Lewis W. Douglas, also occupied several noteworthy positions during the 1930s. After leaving Congress in 1933, Douglas—a conservative Democrat—briefly served as President Franklin Roosevelt’s federal budget director. But Douglas quickly turned against the New Deal for its liberal economic policies. He said privately that FDR had come under too much “Hebraic influence,” adding that, “most of the bad things which it [the administration] has done can be traced to it. As a race [the Jews] seem to lack the quality of facing an issue squarely.”12 Douglas made little effort to conceal his anti-Semitism and became an outspoken opponent of the New Deal. Upon quitting the Roosevelt administration, he received several offers from like-minded organizations, including the bankers who controlled Paramount Pictures and James B. Conant, the former army gas-warfare officer who had gone on to become president of Harvard University.13

  After weighing his options with McCloy and others, Douglas decided to go into the chemical industry. From 1934 to 1938 he was vice president and board member of American Cyanamid, America’s fourth-largest chemical company, which was secretly allied with Farben through a web of trade agreements. American Cyanamid’s president, the ultraconservative Quaker lawyer William B. Bell, served as chairman of the Republican National Finance Committee. A harsh critic of Roosevelt’s policies, Bell was also a stickler for formality. Peggy Zinsser privately referred to Bell as “Buttonshoes,” but her husband and his new boss never reached a first-name basis. After relocating to the corporation’s headquarters in New York’s Rockefeller Center, Douglas also became affiliated with several organizations, including the American Museum of Natural History and the Rockefeller Foundation, both of which were major players in the eugenics movement and other causes.14

  During Douglas’s tenure at American Cyanamid, while McCloy was serving as a lawyer for investment banking interests involving Nazi Germany and other clients, and as states throughout America were adopting lethal gas as their official means of execution and building gas chambers to carry out the death penalty, American Cyanamid was making cyanide. It manufactured Zyklon under license from the patent holders, DEGUSSA, and secretly made business pacts with IG Farben. Until 1938 the bulk of the Germans’ profits from distributing Zyklon came from abroad, particularly from the United States, and American Cyanamid was one of the fastest growing chemical concerns that thrived during the Great Depression.15

  Douglas served mainly as a troubleshooter and economic analyst for American Cyanamid, frequently traveling to inspect the company’s various operations and meeting with stockholders. In Great Britain he obtained audiences with Neville Chamberlain (the chancellor of the exchequer) and often met with his friend Winston Churchill. In the course of his professional and social activities Douglas also maintained close relations with many Nazi businessmen, some of whom were doubtless agents of the Gestapo. He traveled extensively in Germany and also widened his social and political connections at home, hoping someday to win national political office. An advocate for laissez-faire policies, he also continued to lash out against FDR’s programs, claiming they had unleashed forces that could lead to socialism.16 After one such speech that Douglas made at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, President Roosevelt drafted a response calling Douglas’s comments “reprehensible,” saying they came “very close to the kind of lack of patriotism which tends to the destruction of government. In time of war, that kind of lack of patriotism goes under the word ‘treason.’” Roosevelt opted not to make his comments public, however, and left it to Harold Ickes to assail the speech. Douglas also supported the radical American Liberty League, which had been organized by the du Ponts and other FDR adversaries, but he declined membership as the group was plotting a coup to overthrow the administration.17 Although Douglas was a contender for the 1936 U.S. vice presidential nomination under Alfred M. Landon, a bout of poor health hindered his campaign, and he failed to win the nomination.

  In the mid-1930s neither McCloy nor Douglas was as famous as their wives’ uncle, Dr. Hans Zinsser, a celebrated bacteriologist at Columbia and Harvard who was best known for authoring the best-selling book Rats, Lice and History, in 1935.18 In it the popular professor presented information about his study of typhus, still regarded as one of the world’s deadliest diseases, particularly in places where there were high concentrations of people, such as in army barracks and prison camps. Zinsser’s fascinating account explained that typhus was spread by rodent-borne lice.19

  A focal point of Zinsser’s study of typhus involved its outbreak among immigrants, especially Mexicans. Other observers were also following the subject very closely. The German military had begun using Prussic acid for delousing during the Great War. In Poland and other parts of Europe during the war’s immediate aftermath, efforts to thwart further typhus epidemics had increasingly involved the use of HCN gas to disinfect trains and other places where refugees had congregated, along with their clothes and other personal effects.20 The use of Zyklon-B on the United States–Mexico border was already a matter of intense interest to DEGESCH, the subsidiary of IG Farben’s DEGUSSA that controlled the licensing for Zyklon-B. In 1938 Dr. Gerhard Peters, DEGESCH’s general manager and the leading proponent of Zyklon-B, wrote an article in a German pest science journal, Anzeiger für Schädlingskunde, in which he called for its use in German Desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers), citing its extensive use in the United States and featuring photos of El Paso’s delousing chambers. In Germany on June 7, 1938, and in the United States on May 26, 1939, Peters applied for a patent for a new “exterminating agent for vermin,” explaining, “My invention relates to the extermination of animal pest-life of the most varied kinds, for instance, warm-blooded obnoxious animals and insects.” He also made a German-language film extolling the benefits of using Zyklon-B for pest extermination. In 1940–41 he also wrote an article recommending its use to kill typhus-bearing insects. (
Peters went on to supply much of the Zyklon-B to Nazi death camps. As a result, he was subsequently tried and convicted at Nuremberg, but later retried and found not guilty.)21

  The Nazis seized upon the typhus-related work by scientists such as Charles Nicolle and Zinsser to use in their argument equating Jews with vermin that needed to be exterminated. In August of 1935 thousands of Germans gathered at a Nazi rally in Berlin to hear anti-Semitic speeches calling for a future Germany “cleansed” of Jews. Such rhetoric was becoming more commonplace among Hitler’s followers.

  This notion of disinfection was demonstrated most graphically in the famous 1940 Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), directed by Fritz Hippler, who worked under propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Amplifying on a book and an exhibit of the same name, their presentation marshaled the persuasive emotional force of film to spread hysterical anti-Semitic ideas. A Nazi reviewer said the movie showed Jews as filthy, lazy, ugly, corrupt, vicious, and perverse subhuman creatures that lived like vile parasites.22 Shot partly in the squalid Lódź ghetto the Nazis had created, using some scenes of actual squalor and filthy living conditions (which, again, the Nazis had helped to construct), the film purported to show the Jews in their “natural habitat” without the “mask of civilization.” Images of repulsive-looking Jews were juxtaposed with footage of swarms of rats, said to be vectors of typhus and other diseases, suggesting that both pests needed to be eliminated from civilized society. The Jewish race was depicted as a sanitation problem, not a social or political problem, and thus requiring a hygienic solution. The film culminated in Hitler’s chilling warning to the Reichstag in 1939: “If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again,” he raged, “then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” The “documentary” helped turn ordinary Germans into Hitler’s willing executioners.

  The Jews were not the Nazis’ only target. Fed by the crackpot social science of Dr. Robert Ritter, the German psychiatrist and “race” expert, the Nazis also stereotyped European Gypsies (Roma) as biologically inferior, antisocial, and criminal. Starting in 1935 they incorporated Gypsies of mixed ancestry (Zigeunermischlinge) into Germany’s racial laws and decrees. As far as the Nazis were concerned, any classification of Gypsy had to be “scientific”—the catchall label of “nomadism” used by some American eugenicists such as Charles Benedict Davenport wasn’t sufficient—but once that determination was made, the subject was considered subhuman.23

  Even in parts of polite society in the United States in the early to mid-1930s, talk about gas-chamber “euthanasia” was becoming quite casual and respectable. Around the same time that Zinsser’s book about rats and lice appeared, the best-selling nonfiction book in the world was Man, the Unknown (1935, written in 1933), by Dr. Alexis Carrel, a French-American Nobel Prize–winning medical researcher from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and “father of human vessel and organ transplantation.” Carrel was strongly profascist. So was his laboratory assistant at the time, Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator whose first crossing of the Atlantic had made him one of the world’s most famous men (and who, in 1936, like McCloy, had also visited Hitler’s box at the Olympics). A fervent eugenicist, Carrel in his book championed an expanded use of the gas chamber for executions. “Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, [or] misled the public in important matters,” he wrote, “should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gases.” Echoing a long line of distinguished writers going back to W. D. McKim, the esteemed surgeon and author added, “A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.”24

  In 1939 Carrel left the United States to return to his native France, where he subsequently joined the profascist Vichy government, but he died before he could be brought to trial as a Nazi collaborator. Lindbergh also remained supportive of the Nazis; his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also published a controversial book, Wave of the Future (1940), in which she argued that democracy was dead and fascism was the “wave of the future.” But by 1941 the couple’s profascist activities suddenly caused them problems in the United States.

  From the time that Hitler assumed power as German chancellor on January 30, 1933, he never left much doubt about his repressive intentions. He instituted laws to exclude Jews and Gypsies from German life and utilized the most brutal measures to destroy his opponents. He smashed dissent, initiated sweeping compulsory sterilization and prohibitions against racial mixing, began building concentration camps, and ruled by terror. The only question was, how far would he go?

  The Germans had been closely following developments in the U.S. criminal justice system for years. In Weimar days, many leading German jurists had expressed shock over such high-profile cases as Sacco and Vanzetti, in part because of the protracted delay between the time of their trial and their execution, which many saw as an inexplicable flaw in American judicial methods.25 Under Nazi influence, the Germans had also closely examined such American criminal justice issues as the “third degree” (the use of police brutality and torture to extract confessions), corruption, the “war on crime,” intelligence-gathering and crime-fighting approaches by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, criminal identification techniques, centralized police operations, sentencing policies, and racial laws. American policies of racial exclusion, for example, were approvingly detailed in Heinrich Krieger’s book Das Rassenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten, published in Berlin in 1936.26

  Immediately prior to the rise of the Nazis, Germany had not been considered a highly punitive state; during the Weimar Republic, for example, the number of executions had dropped to only two or three a year between 1928 and 1932. Austria and Germany had virtually abolished capital punishment and rejected calls for a euthanasia law.27 But the National Socialists brought back the death penalty with a vengeance. Before 1933 the only capital crimes were murder and high treason, punishable in Berlin by beheading with the axe; other German states used the axe or the guillotine. But Hitler changed all that. In 1932, when President Paul von Hindenburg’s administration adopted new antiterrorist decrees that resulted in five Nazi storm troopers being sentenced to death for murdering a Communist worker near the Polish border, the Nazis rioted in protest.28 But upon taking power in 1933 they reinstituted capital punishment in Austria and Germany for “treason” and other offenses, seeking the death penalty in the prosecution of two American Communist organizers.29 Spurred by the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in America, they also adopted the death penalty for kidnapping. In April 1935 the Nazis declared they would expand executions in time of war or danger of war to exterminate pacifism and antimilitary organizations. The German Board of Jurisdiction announced that persons arranging such meetings as well as those attending them would be punished accordingly. At first, the number of known executions amounted to only sixty-four in 1933, seventy-nine in 1934, ninety-four in 1935, and sixty-eight in 1936. It would not be until the war started that the German nation would carry out capital punishment on such a massive scale. And it was not until the war that Hitler would order his aides to begin seriously pursuing various gassing options.30

  When Hitler’s regime began persecuting Jews, Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York and other prominent Jewish Americans responded by pleading for the United States to relax its tight immigration restrictions to allow more endangered German Jews into the country. One of their harshest opponents was retired general Fries, former head of the Chemical Warfare Service, who insisted the Nazis were merely persecuting known Communists and Communist sympathizers. Instead of backing loosened immigration quotas to admit more refugees, Fries urged that countless undesirable immigrants already residing in the country should be deported, in order to return America “to that homogeneity that we had in 1860, in 1776.”
Once again, Fries rallied veterans groups to his banner.31 And in large measure, they prevailed. Aiding the Jews was not a priority for Roosevelt or the Congress.

  Prior to the late 1930s, many prominent American eugenicists, rather than being ignorant of the Nazis’ increasingly radical racist actions, were keenly interested in and wholly supportive of what the Nazis were doing. Some of the Americans had been in frequent communication with their German counterparts for decades. The Germans were credited with achieving preeminence in the fields of genetic research and racial biology, and they cultivated especially close ties with the American foundations and researchers, who often reciprocated. German racial science, meanwhile, was said to have originated in the United States.32 In August 1932 the Third International Congress on Eugenics, held at New York’s fabled American Museum of Natural History, rammed home the theme that progress made by eugenicists was ushering in the “era of Supermen.”33 Racist themes dominated many of the exhibits and discussions.

  In August and September 1935, several German organizations held the World Population Congress in Berlin, showcasing recent moves by the “Fiihrer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler, whose far-seeing population policy based on racial hygiene and principles of heredity,” its hosts proclaimed, “will secure the future of the German Volk.” Several top Americans were among the honored attendees. They included Dr. Harry H. Laughlin of Long Island, the leading authority on eugenic sterilization, and Dr. Clarence G. Campbell of New York, honorary president of the Eugenics Research Institute. Campbell stood up and hailed “that great leader, Adolf Hitler,” and his racial policies. Afterward Laughlin returned to the United States to distribute Nazi propaganda films and received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg.34