Should Shell apologise for antisemitic conduct and its support for the Nazis?

I strongly believe that Royal Dutch Shell should be held accountable for its outrageous antisemitic actions against its own employees, which cost some of them their lives. The same applies to Shell’s huge financial support for Nazi Germany that contributed to the deaths of some 50 million victims in WW2, including those poor souls who perished in the Holocaust. Shell’s leader, Sir Henri Deterding, was an ardent Nazi feted by Adolf Hitler. Shell has never apologised or expressed any remorse.

The achievements of the Dutch founder of the mighty Royal Dutch Shell Group, Sir Henri Deterding described in a biography as “The Most Powerful Man In The World” deserved that accolade. He was rewarded with a knighthood after helping the British in WW1.

For many decades Shell has not flinched about getting into bed with a succession of toxic regimes, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa, the corrupt Abacha regime in Nigeria, and currently, the corrupt and violent Putin regime in Russia.

The greed driving Shell’s willingness to deal directly with murderous regimes goes back even further, to Nazi Germany.

Shell has had advance sight of this information and of my new website ShellNaziHistory.com, a follow-up to my February 2016 Amazon ebook,  Sir Henri Deterding and the Nazi History of Royal Dutch Shell. The website provides a vast amount of irrefutable historical evidence assembled from Shell’s own archives and from many independent, verifiable sources, including Reuters news reports.

Some of the information comes from a weighty four-volume set, “A History of Royal Dutch Shell,” written by eminent historians hired by Shell. I obtained via a SAR legal request, “privileged and confidential” Shell internal correspondence dated four months before publication of the four-volume set. The emails expressed raising concern about me seeing the content. The last internal Shell email sent under the subject heading: “Online Issue Management – Group Strategy,” anticipated “another broadside from Donovan when our History book comes out…”

I had no idea whatsoever (until I read the four-volume set), about the vast financial support given to Nazis Germany by Shell’s Dutch leadership. It became obvious what all of the pre-publication jitters were about. If Shell had asked the hired historians to remove any mention of the Nazi connection, that might have sparked an outcry.

Senior people at Shell were plainly deeply concerned about my reaction. I later learned from other Shell contemporaneous internal emails, that I had been made a target of Shell corporate espionage, involving global electronic surveillance.

The fact that you are reading this now means that Shell decided against following up on the threats later issued to me in writing by a top lawyer and company official at Royal Dutch Shell Plc in an effort to prevent publication of my findings about these matters. Shell has had ample opportunity to take legal action but has not done so. The last thing Shell wants to do is draw attention to these toxic matters.

The evidence confirms the following facts:

• Dutch directors of Royal Dutch Shell engaged in anti-Semitic policies against Shell employees.
• Shell employees were guilty of collaboration and appeasement.
• Dutch employees of the Group were instructed to complete a form that, for some, amounted to a self-declared death warrant. Many did not survive the war.
• Jewish directors at a Shell subsidiary company, Rhenania-Ossag, were forced to resign.
• Several hundred Shell employees were fanatical Nazis. There is photographic evidence of them in Nazi regalia.
• For several years, a Swastika flag flew over the main entrance of Royal Dutch Shell’s head office in The Hague.
• Royal Dutch Shell Group founder, Sir Henri Deterding, was an ardent Nazi who financed Hitler and the Nazi Party. He gave a Heil Hitler salute at a filmed Shell sporting event, had a four-day meeting with Hitler and was later feted by him as being a great friend of Nazi Germany.
• Sir Henri married a German lady sharing his fascist views, moved to a mansion near Berlin and was buried in Germany in a spectacular Nazi funeral attended by numerous senior Nazi officers and Royal Dutch Shell directors. Hitler sent a wreath expressing condolences on behalf of Nazi Germany.
• Before the outbreak of WW2 directors of the Royal Dutch Shell Group collaborated in the annexation and occupation of sovereign countries by the Nazis – Austria and Czechoslovakia.

My website is focused on Shell’s close partnership with the Nazis and the German Chemical giant IG Farben, which supplied the Zyklon-B gas used in the Holocaust to murder millions of people.

I am also drawing the new website to the attention of various Jewish organisations in the UK and in Israel. This approach proved helpful in drumming up support for my successful petition to change the name of the world’s biggest ship, hired by Shell for a major project, even though named after a senior Waffen-SS officer, Peiter Schelte Heerema.

To learn much more about Shell’s past and current activities, please visit ShellNaziHistory.com or its sister sites, royaldutchshellplc.com and royaldutchshellgroup.com, both of which domain names Shell failed to seize in legal proceedings.

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan - more information here. There is also a Wikipedia segment.