Comment from a former employee of Shell Oil USA
John,
You have Shell’s dirty laundry hanging on line again.
I am certain Shell is very unhappy about the publication of that ‘Cease and Desist’ order, etc., for all Shell employees and loyalists to read.
U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION CEASE AND DESIST ORDER: ROYAL DUTCH SHELL BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION
I have also read much of your nine parts on Shell and the Nazis. This was a revisit to my history classes when I was in college. I am very familiar with much of what you published.
Nicely done.
I was not aware of the HUGE financial support that Deterding gave the Nazis. I have always wondered how they supported themselves in the early years of their rise to power. When I was studying this stuff none of the historians that wrote the text books really figured it out either. Now I know where they got much of their money and influence to keep functioning and to keep the legal authorities off their back. The Nazi’s were given an amazing amount of ‘freedom’ in the way they operated in the early years, considering their tactics, and that ‘freedom’ clearly came from influence in high places.
Deterding’s very substantial support was clearly crucial to the survival and rise of the Nazi Party. This gave Hitler a source of funding, and respectability within the European industrial establishment his ‘competition’ did not have. That connected ‘respectability’ was as important as the money, because Deterding’s support obviously led other major leaders of German industry to likewise give Hitler support, even if they had to hold their noses while doing so. It just wasn’t the money, it was the ‘connection’ with the very powerful and influential ‘Sir Henri’ that was important. I am certain Deterding’s influence led to a host of useful connections. This in turn gave Hitler, et al, the resources they needed to buy the ‘muscle’ and ‘protection’ they needed to intimidate the opposition. Deterding has got a lot of blood on his hands.
Shell should have a small swastika on its so very famous logo.
The article relating to Shell’s relationship with Germany’s IG Farben and slave labor has a familiar ring to it today. Shell’s new ethanol joint venture in Brazil with the Cosan group, which has been accused of using enforced slave labor, would be a modern day analog of Shell’s corporate amoral ethical culture similar in nature to that which pervaded the company in the days of Deterding and the Nazi’s. Obviously, Shell did not and still doesn’t care who they get into bed with as long as the venture makes money. This will be an interesting enterprise that the human rights watch groups should keep a close eve on.
I found your reference to Deterding being mentioned in Mein Kampf to be very interesting. Hitler was imprisoned in 1924 for his involvement in the 1923 Munich ‘Beer Hall Putcsh’, and it was there he wrote Mein Kampf. So, it appears that Deterding was involved with Hitler and the Nazi’s long before they came to power.
It is my guess that Deterding was very fearful of a communist take-over from a very weak Weimer German government and chose to throw in his lot with Herr Hitler and his mob in an effort to stop such action, and perhaps to launch some sort of effort to topple the Bolsheviks in Moscow. The Communist revolution was far from solidified in 1923. In fact, the country was going through a civil war.
In my rummaging around I found this:
On the morning of January 5, 1926, the London Morning Post published an extraordinary letter signed by Sir Henri Deterding. In this letter, Deterding proclaimed that plans were afoot to start a new war of intervention against Soviet Russia. Deterding declared:
. . . before many months, Russia will come back to civilization, but under a better government than the Czarist one. . . . Bolshevism in Russia will be over before this year is; and, as soon as it is, Russia can draw on all the world’s credit and open her frontiers to all willing to work. Money and credit will then flow into Russia, and, what is better still, labor.
A well-known French journalist of the Right, Jacques Bainville, commented in Paris: “If the President of the Royal Dutch has given a date for the end of the Soviet regime, it is because he has reason for doing so. . . .”
I have not looked it up but this quote makes it clear that Deterding wanted the Bolshevik’s heads, probably so he could get his hands back on the former Baku oil fields that RD Shell once controlled.
I bet Exxon is delighted they don’t have the equivalent of your website haunting them as well. They have some rancid skeletons in their closet too.
Staff meeting of the Shell oil factory in Hamburg Curio-Haus, 8 April 1935
Shell Blog RSS Feed
