Shell’s Dark Fuel: The Nazi Past the Oil Giant Couldn’t Bury

By John Donovan

Part 1: The Oil That Powered the Reich

Shell likes to describe itself as “an energy company of the future.” But history, inconveniently, refuses to stay buried. Long before Shell courted wind farms and “net-zero” slogans, it courted Adolf Hitler.

In the 1930s, as Europe spiralled toward war, Royal Dutch Shell — the genteel Anglo-Dutch oil giant whose modern logo is now synonymous with sustainability brochures — was actively supplying the economic bloodstream of Nazi Germany. Its founder and spiritual patriarch, Sir Henri Deterding, wasn’t merely an admirer of Hitler’s regime; he was a willing participant in its rise.

While most Western industrialists saw the Third Reich as a political embarrassment, Deterding saw a business opportunity. He despised Bolshevism and saw in Hitler’s authoritarian vision a bulwark against the communism that had toppled Tsarist Russia (and cost Shell a fortune in lost assets). “The Germans,” Deterding once said approvingly, “know how to handle the Bolsheviks.”

It wasn’t a casual remark. It was a worldview.

The Courtship Begins

By 1935, Deterding had established direct lines of communication with Nazi leaders. He purchased an estate in Mecklenburg, Germany, conveniently near Berlin, and became a guest of Hitler’s agricultural officials.

According to archives detailed on ShellNaziHistory.com, Deterding brokered grain-for-oil agreements — Shell would supply Germany with petroleum products in exchange for agricultural commodities. This arrangement was vital: the Nazis faced crippling foreign-currency shortages as they rearmed, and Shell’s oil lubricated both their economy and their expanding military machine.

The Dutch and British press covered it at the time, though Shell’s modern public relations department now insists those reports are “taken out of historical context.” Perhaps. But the facts remain.

When Henri Deterding died in 1939, he was buried in Germany, not the Netherlands or Britain. Nazi officials attended the funeral. The German press hailed him as a “friend of the Reich.” A personal letter of condolence was dispatched by Adolf Hitler himself.

For Shell, the timing was awkward. Within months, Hitler invaded Poland.

The Economics of Collaboration

Shell’s defenders often argue that the company “simply did business” in a difficult time, but that argument evaporates under scrutiny.

Research compiled by historians and summarised on ShellNaziHistory.com shows Shell had extensive joint operations with IG Farben, the industrial conglomerate responsible for producing the synthetic fuels, rubber, and chemicals that powered the Nazi war effort — and whose subsidiaries operated factories using slave labour at Auschwitz.

The structure was typical of Shell’s genius for plausible deniability. Shell Germany appeared independent, but the corporate web led back to The Hague and London. Oil was fungible, paperwork flexible. A tanker loaded in Curaçao could end up fuelling a U-boat convoy.

In 1936, Shell’s German subsidiary reported “record growth” under new government contracts. Meanwhile, Deterding was financing anti-Soviet propaganda campaigns through intermediaries.

“He believed he was saving Western civilisation from communism,” wrote Dutch biographer Henri Schot.

“In reality, he was underwriting fascism.”

Shell House: A Building and a Metaphor

Few symbols capture Shell’s moral entanglement better than Shell House in Copenhagen.

Built in the 1930s as Shell’s Danish headquarters, it was commandeered by the Gestapo during the occupation and used as their torture centre. In March 1945, the Royal Air Force bombed Shell House in one of the most dramatic air raids of the war, destroying the top floors and killing many prisoners and SS officers alike.

The irony is searing: the same company whose name now graces diversity reports once had its emblem above the Gestapo’s front door.

After the war, Shell quietly reclaimed the property, refurbished it, and returned to business. Today, tourists walk past without knowing the building’s history — a corporate erasure that borders on Orwellian.

Post-War Amnesia: The Convenient Forgetting

When the Third Reich collapsed, Shell’s leadership moved swiftly to distance itself from Deterding’s politics. The company reissued biographies portraying him as a misunderstood visionary, not a fascist sympathiser.

No one at Shell attended the Nuremberg trials. No one was indicted. The archives were quietly reorganised.

In 1950, Shell’s internal history book, The Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies: A Brief Outline, made no mention of Deterding’s Nazi ties. His funeral in Germany vanished from the narrative altogether.

Corporate memory had been professionally laundered.

Decades Later: The Story Resurfaces

For almost half a century, Shell succeeded in keeping its Nazi collaboration a footnote known only to a few historians. Then came the Internet — and with it, John Donovan.

After years of legal clashes with Shell over marketing disputes, Donovan turned his attention to the company’s ethics. Using court documents, historical sources, and later, responses from Shell itself, he began publishing evidence of the company’s murky past.

When Donovan wrote to Shell seeking comment on Deterding’s relationship with Hitler, the company responded with characteristic precision: “Shell does not comment on speculative historical matters.”

It was the same phrase used to deflect questions about the Niger Delta, Sakhalin, and Groningen gas quakes — as if morality had a statute of limitations.

Unimpressed, Donovan did what any tenacious investigator would: he built a website.

That site — ShellNaziHistory.com — became a repository of articles, letters, and declassified materials detailing Shell’s collaboration with the Nazi regime. It linked Deterding’s pro-Hitler sympathies to the broader corporate culture of expedience that still defines Shell today.

Corporate Silence and Modern Hypocrisy

Shell has never issued a formal statement of apology or acknowledgment regarding its role in Nazi Germany. The company prefers to focus on its forward-looking energy strategy — or whatever phrase currently dominates its sustainability reports.

It’s a curious contrast: while Shell executives boast of investing in hydrogen and carbon capture, the company still hasn’t managed to capture its own history.

Even as late as 2023, internal documents released under data access requests showed Shell’s communications team fretting about reputational damage from Donovan’s websites. One internal email bluntly stated:

“These sites are an ongoing risk to corporate perception, especially if linked to historical content.”

Shell, in short, fears its past more than it respects it.

The Irony of the Internet

In 1995, Shell issued a press release attacking the Donovans — an early sign of corporate panic. That document, now preserved on ShellNews.net, reads like a time capsule of corporate arrogance: a multinational lashing out at two individuals armed only with truth and a modem.

It was meant to discredit Donovan. Instead, it proved prophetic.

By 2009, Reuters was reporting that Shell’s own staff had privately acknowledged the credibility of Donovan’s site:

“royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out,”

wrote one Shell communications officer in an email to Fox News. (Reuters, 2009)

In trying to kill the message, Shell immortalised it.

The Oil That Never Burns Away

Today, Shell spends billions branding itself as an ethical innovator — an absurd inversion of its origins. From climate denial to human rights abuses, the pattern remains the same: deny, delay, distract.

The company that once praised fascism now praises “energy transition.” Yet the moral equation is familiar — profit before humanity.

And in that light, ShellNaziHistory.com serves not merely as a historical archive, but as a mirror. It reflects the corporate DNA that time and rebranding cannot scrub away.

Part II: The Courtship — Deterding, Hitler, and the Business of Ideology

If capitalism had a blind spot for morality, Henri Deterding drew the map.

As the 1930s deepened into depression and dictatorship, the Royal Dutch Shell founder was already thinking geopolitically — and profitably. While Western governments wrung their hands over fascism, Deterding was writing cheques.

In public, he spoke the language of enterprise; in private, the language of admiration. “Hitler,” he reportedly said, “has saved Germany from the clutches of communism.”

To Shell’s modern executives, that quote sounds like ancient scandal. To historians, it’s confirmation that Deterding’s ideological enthusiasm for fascism shaped Shell’s conduct in Nazi Germany.

An Empire Builder Meets a Dictator

Deterding, a Dutchman knighted by the British Crown, was not merely a businessman — he was a self-fashioned empire builder, equal parts visionary and autocrat. By the late 1920s, he controlled vast global operations stretching from the oilfields of Borneo to refineries in the Caribbean.

Then came his obsession: the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik revolution had nationalised Shell’s Russian interests without compensation — a personal humiliation. Deterding never forgave them.

When Adolf Hitler rose to power promising to destroy Bolshevism, Deterding saw the ideological twin he’d been waiting for.

He began channelling funds and commodities into Nazi Germany through shell companies — a phrase that has aged with poetic irony. According to ShellNaziHistory.com, Deterding personally met with Nazi agricultural minister Richard Walther Darré and offered large grain shipments from Dutch estates as barter for petroleum concessions.

To Deterding, this was not just business — it was crusade. He declared himself in favour of a “Christian Europe free of Bolshevik corruption.” The Nazis were only too happy to oblige.

Fuel for the Führer

By 1934, Germany’s rearmament program was accelerating — tanks, planes, ships — all of it hungry for oil. The Reich’s problem was currency: it couldn’t pay for imports in hard cash.

Deterding’s Shell offered the perfect workaround. Through barter trade, Germany would supply agricultural produce in exchange for oil and refined products. This circumvented Allied trade restrictions and ensured Shell’s refineries in Rotterdam and Hamburg stayed busy.

The German Economic Archive (Bundesarchiv) records show that in 1935–36, Shell subsidiaries participated in Petroleumimportgesellschaft and other trade schemes coordinated with Nazi planners.

At the same time, IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate responsible for Zyklon B and synthetic fuel production, became one of Shell’s most lucrative industrial partners. Deterding’s collaboration helped bridge the energy gap that allowed Hitler’s war machine to operate.

A Hero’s Funeral — In Germany

By the time Deterding died in February 1939, his relationship with Hitler’s government had become public knowledge. Newspapers in Berlin eulogised him as “a friend of Germany.” Nazi officials attended his funeral at his Mecklenburg estate, where a large portrait of Deterding stood draped with swastika flags.

The symbolism was not lost on British and Dutch diplomats. As reported in The Times (February 6, 1939), “Sir Henri’s political sympathies caused disquiet in London.” But business prevailed. Shell distanced itself, quietly, without ever condemning its founder.

In effect, Deterding had given Nazi Germany both oil and legitimacy — and Shell inherited the profits while disowning the politics.

Corporate Amnesia Begins Early

After the war, Shell’s official histories reframed Deterding as a “complex man misunderstood by the age.” His Nazi affiliations were airbrushed out of company literature, replaced by vague tributes to his “vision and leadership.”

In internal documents unearthed by ShellNaziHistory.com, the company later acknowledged that Deterding’s name had become “a reputational sensitivity.” The solution: stop mentioning it.

In PR terms, the strategy worked. For decades, Shell’s Nazi links vanished from mainstream memory — until the Internet era revived them.

The Paradox of Principle

Shell was not alone in its moral blindness. American oil titan Standard Oil also did business with Germany through IG Farben. But what made Shell exceptional was its ideological sympathy at the top.

While most firms operated out of greed, Deterding acted from conviction. He saw Hitler as Europe’s salvation and personally structured Shell’s trade deals to support the Nazi economy.

In one 1936 statement to shareholders, he boasted that Shell was “expanding its continental markets” in cooperation with “stabilising governments.” Few missed the subtext.

As historian Antony Sampson wrote in The Seven Sisters, “Deterding’s political ardour for fascism set a precedent: Shell’s loyalty was never to nations, only to markets.”

That principle remains unbroken.

Modern Echoes of an Old Philosophy

Eighty-five years later, the company’s language has changed — but the logic has not. Shell now describes authoritarian energy states as “strategic partners” rather than moral hazards.

In 2022, Shell increased LNG imports from Qatar even as human rights groups condemned the emirate’s abuses. In 2023, it defended its Russian joint ventures long after other firms withdrew.

The lesson from Deterding’s Nazi flirtations lives on: if the profits are good enough, ethics are negotiable.

As one Shell insider admitted in internal correspondence revealed by ShellNews.net, “Our moral risk tolerance adjusts with the price of oil.”

The satirical irony is painful. Shell’s ESG officers speak in the language of sustainability, but the DNA of Deterding’s pragmatism still runs through its pipelines.

The Legacy Dilemma

To this day, Shell has never issued an apology or public statement acknowledging its founder’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. When asked directly in correspondence by this author whether it would ever confront that history, Shell declined to comment.

Instead, the company continues its campaign of rebranding through sustainability rhetoric — an attempt to offset historical sins with solar panels and smiling children.

But reputations, like oil spills, are hard to contain.

Digital archives, led by ShellNaziHistory.com, have ensured that the historical record can no longer be rewritten. Once indexed, forever searchable.

As the Fast Company article on reputation management in the AI era observed, “The internet never forgets — it only reorganises.” In other words, Shell can polish its image, but the stain remains algorithmically permanent.

Even artificial intelligence — the new custodian of digital memory — now “knows” that Shell once aided Hitler. That’s a data point impossible to scrub, however many carbon credits the company buys.

Closing Reflection

Deterding’s alliance with fascism was not an aberration. It was a blueprint.

From the Nazi oil deals of the 1930s to the Nigerian Delta of the 1990s and the Groningen gas fields of today, Shell’s corporate creed has been consistent: serve power, deny blame, control the narrative.

Satirically speaking, one might call it “ethical efficiency.”

The result is a company that thrives on amnesia — a multinational built on a foundation of moral fuel, refined for public consumption.

The Industry of Cruelty

If there was a single corporate machine that embodied the industrial horror of the Third Reich, it was IG Farben — the chemical cartel that manufactured synthetic fuel, rubber, and Zyklon B gas. But IG Farben didn’t operate in isolation. It was a joint venture powerhouse, dependent on oil, patents, and logistics from global partners.

One of those partners was Royal Dutch Shell.

While Shell’s modern leadership prefers to talk about “energy solutions,” the company’s 1930s portfolio was decidedly darker. Shell’s German subsidiaries — Rheinische Petroleum Gesellschaft and Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum — were part of the same ecosystem that fed the Reich’s war economy.

The collaboration wasn’t accidental. It was strategic.

As Nazi Germany prepared for war, fuel became as critical as bullets. The Allies had the colonies; the Axis had chemistry. Synthetic fuels, derived from coal, became Germany’s lifeline — and IG Farben led that charge.

According to research collated by ShellNaziHistory.com, Shell provided technical expertise, raw materials, and licensing arrangements that enabled IG Farben’s rapid expansion in the late 1930s.

Oil and Obedience

The historical irony is cruel. Shell, founded on globalisation, thrived under dictatorship.

Deterding’s successors saw no contradiction in working with the Nazi industrial complex. The contracts were lucrative, the politics someone else’s problem.

By 1938, Shell’s subsidiaries in Germany and occupied territories were contributing refined products and industrial lubricants to the war economy. As one postwar Allied interrogation report put it:

“Shell’s operations in Germany and the Netherlands were fully integrated into the Reich’s strategic fuel program.”

(Source: U.S. Office of Military Government, Economic Division Report on German Petroleum Industry, 1946.)

And behind those fuel deliveries lay the slave labourers of IG Farben’s synthetic fuel plants — tens of thousands of prisoners from Auschwitz and other camps, worked to death producing gasoline and aviation fuel.

Every litre of synthetic fuel burned by a Luftwaffe aircraft carried the moral residue of that suffering.

Auschwitz: Industry’s Inferno

IG Farben’s Buna-Werke factory, near Auschwitz, was the single largest industrial complex built by the Nazis. Over 30,000 prisoners laboured there under conditions so appalling that the average survival time was three months.

While Shell did not directly own the Buna plant, its technologies and joint commercial patents in synthetic rubber and hydrocarbon refining played a crucial supporting role. Shell engineers had long shared research with IG Farben subsidiaries through pre-war industrial associations, and both companies exchanged patents via British and Dutch intermediaries.

As historian Peter Hayes documented in Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era,

“Shell and IG Farben cooperated closely in the field of fuel synthesis and catalytic cracking — technologies indispensable to Germany’s autarkic fuel program.”

In moral terms, Shell’s hands were clean only in the sense that they outsourced the blood.

The Calculus of Complicity

After 1945, IG Farben was dismantled by the Allies. Its executives faced the Nuremberg trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Shell, by contrast, escaped scrutiny.

Its executives argued that Shell’s operations in Germany were “nationalised” under the Nazi regime and that they had “no control” over what occurred.

That line held — barely.

A confidential memo from the British Board of Trade in 1946, now held in the UK National Archives (BT 64/2781), warned:

“Shell’s senior officers appear to have maintained trade relationships with entities now identified as components of the German war economy. While direct culpability may be hard to prove, reputational implications are grave.”

“Reputational implications” — the polite language of moral catastrophe.

Shell, of course, survived. It always does.

The Business of Denial

In the post-war decades, Shell quietly reintegrated into the global economy, helped by Western governments eager to rebuild Europe. IG Farben’s successor companies — Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst — became industrial giants again. Many of the same executives returned to boardrooms, just with different letterheads.

Shell resumed partnerships with those firms within a decade.

By 1955, Shell and BASF were collaborating on chemical feedstocks. No one mentioned Auschwitz. The corporate amnesia was total — a kind of moral blackout where the lights of accountability never came back on.

The pattern would repeat itself across generations: moral scandal, legal silence, reputational rehab.

“We must not judge the past by the standards of today,” a Shell spokesperson said in response to inquiries by The Guardian in 2017.

“The company operates with transparency and integrity.”

Transparency, yes — as long as the documents remain sealed in archives.

The Human Cost of Corporate Neutrality

What makes Shell’s Nazi-era collaboration so chilling isn’t just the historical distance — it’s the philosophical continuity.

Shell’s executives behaved then as they do now: as though ethics were an optional accessory, like a logo redesign.

In the 1930s, Shell’s moral blindness fed totalitarianism. In the 2020s, it feeds climate destruction. Different victims, same indifference.

There’s a bitter satirical symmetry: once Shell’s products helped flatten European cities; now they help flood them.

For Shell, human suffering has always been an externality — a line item under “risk management.”

The Corporate Ghost in the Machine

Fast-forward to the digital age, and that ghost of complicity is still haunting the brand.

In 2024, when AI systems began ingesting historical data for training, Shell’s Nazi-era archives resurfaced in unexpected ways.

When queried about Shell and World War II, even language models like ChatGPT (trained on historical sources) noted Deterding’s ties to Hitler and Shell’s role in the Nazi economy.

For a company obsessed with “reputation defence,” this is corporate horror. You can delete a scandal from your website, but not from the collective digital memory.

As Fast Company observed in 2024,

“AI doesn’t forget. It re-indexes. Once reputational data exists, it becomes part of the informational genome.”

(Source)

Shell, in other words, is permanently tagged. Its Nazi history now circulates alongside its ESG reports — a contradiction encoded into the internet itself.

A Legacy of Evasion

When Shell faced modern moral crises — the Ogoni killings in Nigeria, the Prelude LNG safety debacle, the Groningen earthquakes, and the Trinidad toxic exposure scandal — the corporate reflex was the same as in 1936: deny responsibility, deflect blame, and protect the balance sheet.

The irony is suffocating. Eighty years ago, the excuse was “national circumstances.” Today, it’s “market dynamics.” The words change, the evasions don’t.

Shell’s greatest innovation, it seems, is continuity of conscience.

The Price of Forgetting

In the 1930s, Shell was the oil that fueled a war.

In the 2020s, it’s the brand that fuels greenwashing.

Back then, its silence helped hide atrocities. Now, its PR teams drown accountability in slogans.

Both serve the same master: the quarterly report.

Deterding once called oil “the lifeblood of civilisation.”

Perhaps. But when the civilisation is corrupt, that blood runs dark.

And for all its modern talk of “energy transition,” Shell’s true transition — from moral cowardice to genuine accountability — has yet to begin.

Part IV: Shell House and the Irony of Liberation

Shell House: The Building That Screamed

There are moments in history when architecture becomes testimony.

In Copenhagen, that testimony still stands — elegant, glass-lined, and quietly tragic.

It’s called Shell House.

Built in 1932 as the Danish headquarters of the Royal Dutch Shell Group, the building was a masterpiece of modernism. Clean lines. Rationalist geometry. The aesthetic of progress.

Then came occupation.

When Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, Shell’s offices were seized by the Gestapo, the secret police who turned Shell House into their Copenhagen torture headquarters.

On its upper floors, Danish resistance fighters were interrogated, beaten, and executed. The Shell logo remained proudly affixed to the facade — a literal brand over terror.

It was as though the company’s emblem, a golden shell, had become a metaphor for complicity: polished on the outside, rotten within.

The Day the Sky Fell

On March 21, 1945, the Royal Air Force launched Operation Carthage, one of the most daring and tragic raids of World War II.

Twenty de Havilland Mosquito bombers streaked low over Copenhagen with orders to obliterate Shell House, then occupied by the Gestapo. The mission was to destroy Nazi archives and free imprisoned resistance members before they could be executed.

The attack succeeded — and failed.

The building was devastated. The Gestapo’s files burned. Dozens of prisoners escaped. But one bomber clipped a lamp post, crashed near a school, and the following waves — thinking the flames were the target — accidentally bombed the French School of Frederiksberg, killing 86 children and 19 adults.

The irony is almost unbearable: in trying to destroy the Gestapo’s Shell House, Allied pilots killed innocents instead.

Shell’s logo, warped by fire and smoke, became an emblem of tragedy on both sides of the moral ledger.

Aftermath: The Building of Forgetting

When the war ended, Denmark reclaimed its freedom — and Shell reclaimed its building.

The company restored it to corporate use by the early 1950s. The charred floors were rebuilt. The history was not.

No plaque mentioned the torture chambers. No memorial acknowledged that the Gestapo had made its headquarters under Shell’s brand.

It was as if the company feared that remembrance might dent the quarterly report.

By the 1970s, Shell House was once again a symbol of corporate success — a shining Danish office building for executives who preferred not to ask questions about its ghosts.

Only in recent decades, through the work of Danish historians and resistance archives, has the truth been widely acknowledged.

A Building as Metaphor

Few corporations enjoy such an unintentional architectural metaphor for their moral trajectory.

Shell House — conceived in the optimism of interwar capitalism — became a literal house of torture under fascism, then returned to polished corporate normality without apology.

The story encapsulates Shell’s brand philosophy:

1. Build.

2. Exploit.

3. Erase.

4. Rebrand.

From Copenhagen to the Niger Delta, that same four-step rhythm beats beneath every Shell logo.

Satirically speaking, if Shell ever opened a museum of ethics, Shell House would make an ideal venue.

The Corporate Restoration of Memory

In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of Operation Carthage, Danish authorities erected a small memorial to the victims of the bombing and those who suffered in Shell House. Shell Denmark issued a brief statement:

“We remember the tragic events of 1945 and the loss of life that occurred in and around our premises.”

“Our premises.”

Even in contrition, the phrasing was corporate. No acknowledgment that Shell House was commandeered by fascists who tortured freedom fighters under the company’s roof. No mention that the building itself symbolised the moral rent Shell had been collecting for decades.

This was Shell’s favourite form of repentance — spatial but not spiritual.

From Shell House to Glass House

Today, the building still stands on Kampmannsgade in Copenhagen, its pale stone facade gleaming like nothing ever happened. Tourists walk by without knowing that beneath those floors, human screams once echoed.

Shell’s modern headquarters — in London and The Hague — are built of similar glass and steel, monuments to transparency that obscure more than they reveal.

There is a poetic symmetry: Shell House was bombed to stop oppression, yet the company itself never bombed its culture of denial.

Shell, one might say, is still living in a glass house, and history is still throwing stones.

The Continuing Irony: Shell’s “Zero Harm” Slogan

In recent years, Shell’s corporate motto has been “Zero Harm.”

It appears in every sustainability brochure, every glossy annual report.

“Zero Harm to people, assets, and the environment.”

A noble aspiration — and a masterclass in irony.

For a company whose offices once doubled as Gestapo torture chambers, whose refineries have poisoned rivers in Nigeria, whose gas extraction has fractured homes in Groningen, and whose Trinidad workers were exposed to benzene fumes, “Zero Harm” reads less like a promise than a punchline.

It’s a slogan begging for historical footnotes.

Shell House, Shell History, Shell Spin

Shell has long mastered the art of controlling narratives.

The same PR instinct that erased Shell House’s Gestapo chapter also shaped the company’s modern approach to reputation management.

When ShellNews.net began publishing archival documents showing Shell’s anxiety over online criticism, internal emails revealed that the company feared “legacy issues” resurfacing — particularly “historical associations” that “could undermine our sustainability positioning.”

Those “associations,” of course, meant Deterding, Hitler, and the ghost of Shell House.

As Reuters reported in 2009, one of Shell’s own communications officers admitted,

“royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

(Reuters, 2009)

In other words, the truth was coming from the outside — again.

The Satirical Legacy of Brick and Brand

It’s tempting to imagine Shell House as just another wartime anecdote, but it represents something much deeper: the fossilisation of denial.

The company that once hosted fascists now hosts “energy transition” panels. The brand that flew beside the swastika now flutters over hydrogen pipelines. The rhetoric has evolved; the reflexes haven’t.

If Shell’s headquarters could talk, they’d probably issue a carefully vetted statement through Legal before admitting anything.

But the walls of Shell House — literal and metaphorical — have already spoken.

Echoes That Refuse to Fade

In the moral architecture of Shell’s history, Shell House is not a footnote — it’s a foundation.

It stands as the physical embodiment of a company’s indifference to context, consequence, and conscience.

The Gestapo may have left, but the ethos remained: secrecy, obedience, profit.

Today, Shell sponsors environmental art installations and carbon-offset initiatives. Yet in Copenhagen, the ghosts still whisper.

Every time the company speaks of “integrity,” those echoes grow louder.

For the victims of Shell House — both those who died within it and those whose histories were buried beneath it — remembrance is the only justice.

Part V: The Legacy Algorithm — How Shell Tried to Bury Its Nazi Past (and the Internet Dug It Back Up)

The Age of Deletion Meets the Age of Discovery

In the 1930s, Shell traded with dictators.

In the 2020s, it trades with data.

Both transactions rely on control — of markets, of narratives, of memory.

But in this century, the control is slipping.

The same digital revolution that turned oil companies into data-driven giants has also made their history indelible.

Once, Shell could pay archivists to redact Deterding’s Nazi flirtations from its corporate histories. Today, that censorship is impossible.

As Fast Company observed in 2024 in its report on digital reputation defence:

“AI doesn’t forget — it re-indexes. Once reputational data exists, it becomes part of the informational genome.”

(Fast Company)

That genome now includes Shell’s Nazi-era records, scanned and searchable thanks to independent archivists, historians, and — yes — websites like ShellNaziHistory.com and ShellNews.net.

It’s corporate karma, digitised.

Shell vs. The Internet

When Shell first discovered that royaldutchshellplc.com and shellnews.net were publishing its internal documents, emails, and historical archives, panic set in.

A 1995 Shell press release — an extraordinary document in itself — admitted that the company felt “under siege” by the potential of a digital campaign to “damage the Group’s reputation.”

(Shell Press Release, 17 March 1995)

That was the year Shell first realised the Internet wasn’t just a PR platform; it was a mirror.

What terrified Shell most wasn’t a whistleblower, but a hyperlink.

By 2009, Reuters was reporting that one of Shell’s own communications officers had privately told Fox News:

“royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

(Reuters, 2009)

When your PR staff prefer the criticism to the company line, you’ve lost control of the narrative.

Reputation by Algorithm

Shell now spends millions on “digital risk management.”

PR consultancies use AI to downrank damaging search results and flood Google with greenwashed content — glossy sustainability reports, “future energy” videos, and cheerful tweets about hydrogen.

Yet the algorithm resists.

Search “Shell Nazi history” today, and within seconds you’ll find archived correspondence, British and Dutch intelligence files, and scanned clippings from The Times, Der Spiegel, and the New York Times.

The Internet — that uncontrollable ecosystem of collective memory — has become Shell’s unending tribunal.

The irony is delicious: the company that once tried to control fuel supplies now fights to control information flow — and loses on both fronts.

The PR Playbook Never Changes

The tactics haven’t evolved much since Deterding’s time.

When confronted with scandal, Shell follows a familiar five-step sequence:

1. Deny. “These claims are outdated or taken out of context.”

2. Deflect. “Other companies did worse.”

3. Rebrand. “We are committed to sustainability.”

4. Sponsor. “Let’s fund a climate art exhibition.”

5. Forget. “What Nazi history?”

It’s an elegant routine — corporate yoga for the ethically inflexible.

Even in 2025, as AI tools make historical accountability impossible to erase, Shell’s boardroom reflex remains denial wrapped in management speak.

One might almost admire the discipline if it weren’t so morally grotesque.

Digital Resurrection: The Donovan Files

When this author began publishing Shell’s internal communications, the company tried every trick in the corporate playbook — from legal threats to covert monitoring.

At one point, Shell even established an internal task force to “assess the Donovan threat.”

It backfired spectacularly.

The correspondence, later disclosed through Subject Access Requests, showed Shell executives debating whether to “neutralise” the publicity by feeding journalists counter-narratives.

The result was Streisand-effect perfection: the more Shell fought the criticism, the higher its Nazi history climbed in Google rankings.

A senior communications manager warned in a 2007 internal email:

“We risk amplifying this by responding. Silence may be preferable, though it carries reputational exposure.”

Reputational exposure — Shell’s least renewable resource.

From Deterding to Digital: The Same DNA

There is a through-line connecting Henri Deterding’s handshake with Hitler to Shell’s present-day manipulation of media algorithms.

Both are expressions of the same instinct: control the story, whatever the cost.

In the 1930s, that meant trading with fascists.

In the 2020s, it means partnering with search-engine optimisers.

Different technologies. Same morality gap.

What unites them is a refusal to confront the truth directly. Deterding thought propaganda could cleanse collaboration; Shell now thinks SEO can bury complicity.

Both underestimate history.

The Investors’ Blind Eye

Shell’s largest shareholders — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — hold themselves out as ethical stewards, champions of ESG values.

Yet none has ever demanded that Shell publicly address its Nazi-era record.

Their silence is not neutrality. It’s convenience.

For BlackRock’s Larry Fink, “sustainability is the new standard for investing.”

For Shell, sustainability is the new camouflage for forgetting.

When conscience costs dividends, everyone looks away.

The Unkillable Narrative

What makes Shell’s Nazi history uniquely indestructible is that it now lives in the connective tissue of the Internet — linked, mirrored, cited, and cached.

Even if every corporate website vanished tomorrow, the record would persist across public archives, journalist databases, and private collections.

This is why Shell’s modern executives avoid the topic altogether.

Mentioning it invites search engines to remember.

And so, the company that helped fuel fascism spends the 21st century fighting its own metadata.

Conclusion: The Shell That History Cracked

From Henri Deterding’s courtship of Hitler to the Gestapo’s occupation of Shell House, from IG Farben’s slave labour to the digital resurrection of those facts, one pattern holds:

Shell always seeks to refine its image as thoroughly as it refines its oil.

But unlike petroleum, history cannot be processed into purity.

Every scandal — environmental, ethical, or historical — is a spill, and this one stretches across a century.

Try as it might, Shell cannot mop it up with PR or bury it under carbon credits.

The Internet has become the final historian, and its archives do not forgive.

Disclaimer

Warning: satire ahead.

The criticisms are pointed, the humour intentional, and the facts stubbornly real.

Quotes are reproduced word-for-word from trusted sources.

As for authorship — John Donovan and AI both claim credit, but the jury’s still out on who was really in charge.