Shell’s toxic Nazi history catching up with the energy giant
By John Donovan
Information and evidence about Shell’s financial support for Hitler’s Nazi regime (and Shell’s anti-Semitism directed at its own employees), remained buried for decades in library books and newspaper archives gathering more and more dust.
Unfortunately for Royal Dutch Shell, it’s reputation, brand value (and shareholders), fast-evolving Internet technology, including digitalisation of newspaper archives, has transformed access, thereby making that toxic information instantly available everywhere. And spread by social media.
Take, for example, the latest innovation in Google image search.
If you run a Google image search for “Royal Dutch Shell” you are now offered a range of sub-options, including “history”.
Select “history” and further related search options are presented, including Royal Dutch Shell founder, “sir henry deterding”, “john donovan”, “adolf hitler “, Amazon etc.
All are populated with images we can safely assume Shell would have liked to have remained buried.
As they say, A picture is worth a thousand words.
It just needed someone with the motivation and steel to resist Shell’s legal threats, dig the evidence out and publish it online for pick up by search engines.
I knew nothing about the subject until I obtained, after making a legal application to Shell under the UK Data Protection Act, revealing Shell internal emails, some of which expressed anxiety about me “scrutinising the new Shell History” which was about to be published.
As a result of that own goal tipoff, I purchased the four-volume history book and discovered as a result of my own research, that Shell’s paid historians had drawn the wrong conclusion about the relationship between Deterding and Hitler.
They said his advances requesting a meeting with Hitler had all been spurned.
They could not have been more wrong. He had a number of meetings with Hitler, including a four-day summit as reported by The New York Times and other newspapers.
For more information visit shellnazihistory.com which has had, as of today’s date (8 Sept 2019), 20,369 blocked malicious login attempts. Proof that someone is not keen on the content.
