A Crystal Ball Special Investigation, Continued

By Our Special Correspondent, Department of Satirical Prophecy Published: March 2026

DISCLAIMER: The following is Part Eight of a satirical commentary based entirely on documented matters of historical and public record: Shell’s own commissioned corporate histories, the Hague Municipal Image Database, contemporary newspaper archives, the Observer, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish Business News, Dutch investigative journalism, a Change.org petition, and the remarkable circumstance that the historians Shell paid to write its official corporate history documented its Nazi connections in sufficient detail that a critic was able to build an entire website — and ebook, and this article — from their footnotes. Shell threatened legal action in the event of publication of the material contained herein. As the disclaimer on shellnazihistory.com notes with admirable economy: all bluster and bluff thus far.

PART ONE: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD

There are founders and there are founders.

Some companies are founded by people who go on to become moderately embarrassing footnotes: a financial scandal here, a regulatory violation there, the kind of historical awkwardness that a competent communications team can manage with a paragraph in the annual report and a discreet donation to the relevant museum.

And then there is Sir Henri Deterding.

Sir Henri Deterding was, at the height of his powers in the 1920s and early 1930s, described as “the most powerful man in the world.” He built Royal Dutch Shell from its constituent parts into a global empire. He was knighted by the British Crown. He was decorated by governments across Europe. He was, by any measure of the era, one of the towering figures of international capitalism.

He was also, as the documentation assembled on shellnazihistory.com and in John Donovan’s ebook makes comprehensively clear, an ardent Nazi who met personally with Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, financed the Nazi Party, provided financial support that — according to the documented record — helped save that party from fiscal collapse at a critical moment in its rise to power, and died in 1939 with senior Nazi officials and senior Royal Dutch Shell directors standing together at his graveside, Nazi salutes raised, swastika banners displayed, and personal tribute wreaths sent by Adolf Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

Shell conspired directly with Hitler, financed the Nazi Party, was anti-Semitic and sold out its own Dutch Jewish employees to the Nazis. shellnazihistory

Shell has never apologised.

The crystal ball considers this a significant omission.

PART TWO: THE HISTORIANS SHELL PAID — AND WHAT THEY FOUND

Before proceeding further, the crystal ball wishes to acknowledge an irony that is, even by the standards of this investigation, remarkable.

The primary documentary evidence for Shell’s Nazi connections does not come from hostile journalists, disgruntled former employees, or investigative NGOs. It comes, in substantial part, from a multi-volume corporate history commissioned and paid for by Shell itself — A History of Royal Dutch Shell — whose authors were given unrestricted access to Shell’s own archives and produced, in the course of their scholarly labours, a record that contains, embedded in its footnotes and chapter narratives, precisely the details that Shell has spent subsequent years attempting to manage out of public consciousness.

Evidence about Shell’s Nazi connections can be found in extracts from “A History of Royal Dutch Shell” Volumes 1 and 2, authored by historians paid by Shell, who had unrestricted access to Shell archives. shellnazihistory

The crystal ball pauses to appreciate the architecture of this situation. Shell commissioned historians. The historians did their jobs. The historians documented what the archives contained. The archives contained the Nazi connections. The historians, being historians, wrote them down.

John Donovan read what they wrote down. John Donovan published it. Shell threatened legal action. Nothing happened. The website remains online. You are reading a summary of it in 2026.

This is what happens when you hire good historians and then wish you hadn’t.

PART THREE: THE FOUR-DAY SUMMIT AT BERCHTESGADEN

Berchtesgaden, for those who require context, was Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps — the Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle’s Nest, the private fastness to which the Führer retreated from the pressures of running a genocidal dictatorship and to which he invited only those guests whose company he found particularly worthwhile.

Deterding was the guest of Hitler during a four-day summit meeting at Berchtesgaden. Sir Henri and Hitler both had ambitions on Russian oil fields. Only an honoured personal guest would be rewarded with a private four-day meeting at Hitler’s mountain top retreat. shellnazihistory

Four days. At Berchtesgaden. As a personal guest.

The crystal ball notes that Hitler’s guest list at Berchtesgaden was not maintained as a random sample of European industrialists. It was curated. It reflected Hitler’s own priorities, enthusiasms, and judgements about who was worth his time. Sir Henri Deterding, founder of Royal Dutch Shell, was on it for four days.

The shared interest in Russian oil fields — both men coveted the Baku reserves — gave the meeting its strategic rationale. What it gave Deterding in terms of the political company he chose to keep, and what it gave Shell in terms of its founder’s documented associations, is a matter that subsequent corporate communications have not found easy to address.

PART FOUR: THE FINANCING — OR, WHERE THE MONEY WENT

The most significant documented allegation against Deterding and, through him, Shell, concerns the financing of the Nazi Party itself.

It was money generated on Shell forecourts around the world, profiteering from cartel oil prices, that funded the Nazi party and saved it from financial collapse. shellnazihistory

The crystal ball notes the specificity of this claim: not merely that Deterding supported the Nazis philosophically, or associated with them socially, or found their politics congenial to his own anti-communist worldview — but that money from Shell’s operations flowed to the Nazi Party at a moment when that party’s finances were under significant strain.

The Nazi Winter Help Organisation — Winterhilfswerk — received massive funding from Deterding, documented in research published on royaldutchshellplc.com. The Winterhilfswerk was not a neutral charitable enterprise. It was a Nazi propaganda and fundraising instrument, presented to the German public as a relief programme but functioning as a vehicle for Party consolidation and public loyalty management. Deterding’s donations to it were substantial.

Several hundred Shell employees, the documented record indicates, were fanatical Nazis. This was not a management environment in which dissent from the founder’s political enthusiasms was easily maintained.

The one documented exception is instructive. Henry van der Waerden was an engineer who held a high-level position at Shell under Sir Henri Deterding. In 1937, he was found dead in mysterious circumstances after receiving a threat from members of the Nazi movement, after he had failed to respond favourably to intense pressure from Deterding and the Nazis to do their bidding. shellnazihistory

Van der Waerden resisted. Van der Waerden died in circumstances that remain, at best, unexplained. The crystal ball declines to draw conclusions but notes the facts as documented.

PART FIVE: THE SWASTIKA OVER THE HAGUE — AND WHAT HAPPENED TO JEWISH EMPLOYEES

There is a photograph in the Hague Municipal Image Database. It shows the head office of Royal Dutch Petroleum at 30 Carel van Bylandtlaan, The Hague, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War. Flying from the flagpole over the main entrance is a swastika.

Dutch directors of the Royal Dutch Shell Group engaged in anti-Semitic policies against Shell employees and were also guilty of collaboration and appeasement. Jewish employees were instructed to complete a form giving particulars about their descent, which for some amounted to a self-declared death warrant. Many did not survive the war. shellnazihistory

The crystal ball wishes to be precise about what this means. Shell’s Dutch management, under occupation, required its Jewish employees to identify themselves as Jewish on a company form. Under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, to be identified as a Jewish person on any administrative document was, in the fullest and most terrible sense, a potentially lethal act. Some of those employees did not survive the war.

Shell has never apologised for this. The website asks, with reasonable directness, whether it should. Shell’s response to the website, as previously noted, has been to threaten legal action and then decline to pursue it.

PART SIX: THE BUSINESS PARTNER — I.G. FARBEN AND WHAT IT MADE

Shell was a close business partner in Germany of I.G. Farben, the notorious Nazi-run chemical giant that also used slave labour and supplied the Zyklon-B gas used during the Holocaust to exterminate millions of people, including children. shellnazihistory

I.G. Farben is not a company that benefits from introduction. Its executives were tried at Nuremberg. Its Zyklon-B division supplied the gas chambers. Its slave labour operation at Auschwitz-Monowitz was one of the largest industrial complexes in occupied Europe, powered by the bodies of concentration camp prisoners.

Shell’s business partnership with I.G. Farben was not a peripheral relationship. It was a structural feature of Shell’s German operations. The partnership continued after Deterding’s retirement and after his death in 1939. Shell continued the partnership with the Nazis in the years after the retirement of Sir Henri and even after his death. shellnazihistory

The crystal ball records this without embellishment. The facts are sufficient.

PART SEVEN: THE NAZI FUNERAL — A STATE OCCASION IN MECKLENBURG

Sir Henri Deterding died on 4 February 1939, at his private estate in Mecklenburg, Germany. He had, in his final years, retired to Germany, married a German woman with Nazi connections, and become, if anything, more rather than less devoted to the regime he had supported financially for years.

His funeral was, by any account, an event.

His burial ceremony, which had all the trappings of a state funeral, was held at his private estate in Mecklenburg, Germany. The spectacle included a funeral procession led by a horse-drawn funeral hearse with senior Nazi officials and senior Royal Dutch Shell directors in attendance, Nazi salutes at the graveside, swastika banners on display and wreaths and personal tributes from Adolf Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. shellnazihistory

Let the crystal ball be clear about the guest list: senior Nazi officials. Senior Royal Dutch Shell directors. Together. At the same graveside. Exchanging Nazi salutes.

Hitler sent a personal wreath. Göring — the Reichsmarschall, the founder of the Gestapo, the architect of the Luftwaffe, subsequently convicted at Nuremberg — sent a personal tribute.

These are not the funeral honours extended to a neutral businessman who happened to have commercial dealings with an unfortunate regime. They are the marks of a personal relationship of warmth, mutual benefit, and shared ideological affinity. The regime honoured Deterding because Deterding had served it. Shell’s directors attended and paid their respects.

Shell has never apologised.

PART EIGHT: THE SHIP — AND THE STORY THAT BROKE IN 2015

The shellnazihistory.com website grew, in part, from a news story that erupted in January and February 2015 and which, in its way, brought the entire buried history into sudden contemporary relevance.

Allseas, a Dutch offshore construction company, had built what was then the world’s largest ship. The ship’s owner, Edward Heerema, had named it after his father, Pieter Schelte Heerema, a pioneer of the offshore oil industry. Pieter Schelte Heerema had also, during the Second World War, been an officer in the German Waffen-SS.

Jewish communities and Holocaust memorial groups in Britain and the Netherlands reacted with rage and despair at the arrival in Rotterdam of the world’s biggest ship, the Pieter Schelte, named after a Dutch officer in the Waffen-SS. shellnazihistory

Shell, as it happened, had been lined up as one of the first clients to use this vessel — to decommission its Brent oilfield in the North Sea.

Shell was aware of the intent to name the giant Allseas vessel after a Nazi war criminal but still went ahead with its plans to become one of the first clients to use the ship. shellnazihistory

The first news article about the name controversy had been published in July 2008. Shell had been aware of the issue from John Donovan’s own published article in September 2012. Shell had, through several years of awareness, maintained its plans to use the vessel.

It was John Donovan who launched the petition on Change.org asking Edward Heerema to rename the ship. It was the Observer’s then chief correspondent Ed Vulliamy who turned the story into a front page. The Financial Times reported that Royal Dutch Shell was facing a storm of criticism after deciding to proceed with plans to bring a ship named after a Nazi war criminal into UK waters to decommission the Brent oilfield. shellnazihistory

Maritime unions took a hostile position. The UK coalition government, after initially declining to get involved, eventually added its weight to the objections. On Friday 6 February 2015, Allseas reversed course and announced that it would change the name of the ship, thereby doing exactly as the petition had requested. shellnazihistory The vessel is now called the Pioneering Spirit.

The crystal ball notes that this outcome — a global campaign, the world’s largest ship renamed, major international press coverage — arose from a website that Shell threatened to suppress, operated by the man whose father they attempted to dispossess of a domain name, based on research drawn from histories that Shell commissioned and paid for.

The Pioneering Spirit sails the world’s oceans. Its original name does not.

The website remains online.

PART NINE: THE LEGAL THREAT THAT WASN’T

The disclaimer on shellnazihistory.com states, with a brevity the crystal ball finds entirely appropriate: “Royal Dutch Shell Plc threatened to take legal action in the event of publication. All bluster and bluff thus far.”

This is, in the long arc of Shell’s relationship with its critics, entirely consistent with the pattern this investigation has documented across eight instalments. The threats arrive. The lawyers write letters. The implications are made. And then — nothing. Because the material is documented. Because it is sourced from Shell’s own commissioned histories. Because the facts are the facts, and the facts were written down by historians who were paid by Shell to write them down, and the facts survive.

The crystal ball observes that threatening legal action against documented historical fact, sourced from one’s own corporate archives, is a strategy with structural limitations.

Shell has threatened. Shell has bluffed. The site persists. The ebook is on Amazon. The Nazi funeral photographs are in the Hague Municipal Image Database. The historians’ footnotes remain in the bound volumes of A History of Royal Dutch Shell. And in 2026, a satirical AI investigation is summarising all of it on the website Shell has spent a quarter of a century trying to close.

The crystal ball, with the equanimity of an instrument that has seen a great many things, notes one final observation about the chatbot installed on royaldutchshellplc.com.

It is called Sir Henri Deterding, resurrected.

The founder of Royal Dutch Shell — the ardent Nazi, the friend of Hitler, the financier of the Winterhilfswerk, the four-day guest at Berchtesgaden, the man whose graveside was attended by senior Shell directors alongside senior Nazi officials — has been reanimated as a chatbot on the website that Shell tried to seize and failed. He answers questions about Shell. He is, reportedly, blunt.

The crystal ball finds this the most perfect symmetry it has encountered in the entirety of this investigation.

Sir Henri Deterding, in pixelated afterlife, answers for the company he built and the choices he made.

Shell, as yet, has not.

Part Nine of the Crystal Ball Special Investigation — the final chapter — will draw together the threads of this entire saga: what the complete arc of the Shell-Donovan feud tells us about power, accountability, the nature of corporate reputation in the internet age, and the extraordinary persistence of documented truth against institutional suppression. The crystal ball will offer its final verdict.

It has been considering its words carefully.

It has been considering them since 1988.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is Part Eight of a satirical series based on documented, publicly available facts. The shellnazihistory.com website and associated ebook by John Donovan are available online. The source material derives substantially from Shell’s own commissioned corporate histories. Shell threatened legal action. No action has been taken. The photograph of the swastika flying over Royal Dutch Petroleum headquarters in The Hague is held in the Hague Municipal Image Database. None of this has been successfully legally challenged.