POTSHOT #19: Chapter 16: Rockefeller-Farben Ties

By 1941 Standard Oil of New Jersey was the largest oil company in the world, controlling 84 percent of the U.S. petroleum market. Its bank was Chase and its owners were the Rockefellers. After the Rockefellers, the next largest stockholder in Standard Oil was I.G. Farben. (68) The Rockefeller - Farben relationship went back as far as 1927. (69)

The planes that made up the Luftwaffe needed tetraethyl lead gasoline in order to fly. Before World War II, only Standard Oil, Du Pont, and General Motors had the ability to produce this vital substance. In 1938, Walter C. Teagle, then president of Standard Oil, helped Hermann Schmitz of I.G. Farben to acquire 500 tons of tetraethyl lead from Ethyl, a British Standard subsidiary. A year later, Schmitz returned to London and obtained an additional 15 million dollars worth of tetraethyl lead which was to be turned into aviation gasoline back in Germany.

Exxon's early tetraethyl lead work

After the war began in Europe, the English became angry about U.S. shipments of strategic materials to Nazi Germany. Standard Oil immediately changed the registration of their entire fleet to Panamanian to avoid British search or seizure. These ships continued to carry oil to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where they refueled and siphoned oil to German tankers for shipment to Hamburg. (70)

Soon-to-be-president Harry S. Truman said the Rockefeller-Farben relationship "approaches treason." (71) "Approaches"? It seems to be sitting on treason's lap to me.

Frankfurt 1945

IG headquarters

At war's end, when the American doughboys sloughed into Germany and reached the industrial city of Frankfurt, they were amazed to find intact all of I.G.'s buildings and their huge plant. American aviators, pinpointing their targets, had demolished every other structure in town.

Robert P. Patterson

What the doughboys didn't know as that the Secretary of War, one Robert P. Patterson, was a Rockefeller lawyer, appointed by President Roosevelt upon Rockefeller orders, fresh out of Dillon, Read and Company. The Dillon-Read concern was a Rockefeller subsidiary - and the banking house that financed I.G. Farben. (72)

CBS News war correspondent Paul Manning reported that on August 10, 1944, the Rockefeller-Farben partners moved their "flight capital" through affiliated American, German/French, British and Swiss banks. Bayer and Hoechst were reorganized in 1951 under the direction of the Allied High Commission, largely influenced by U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy - a lawyer and banker from Philadelphia, with intimate ties to Rockefeller banking and oil interests. (73)

John J. McCloy visits Hoechst (today Aventis) in 1950

Esso = S.O. = Standard Oil

WW II German Luftschutz Helmet with I.G. Farben Logo - A "gladiator" style helmet of three-piece construction as used throughout the 2. World War. Helmet is in extremely good condition bearing the unusual logo of the German company I.G. Farben.