By Staff
The Second World War, as most people understand it, began on
September 1, 1939, when German tanks crossed the Polish border. But
the real foundation of that war was poured years earlier, not in
Berlin, but in the marble lobbies and wood paneled boardrooms of
Manhattan's most prestigious financial institutions. Deals were
struck, loans were signed, partnerships were forged, all quietly
funneling billions of dollars into the industrial machine that Adolf
Hitler would use to set the world on fire.
This is not fringe speculation. This is documented history, buried
under decades of institutional silence and unearthed through
congressional hearings, declassified government documents and
investigations that the American press largely chose to ignore. The
names involved are not obscure. They are the founding names of modern
finance. Chase National Bank, J.P. Morgan, Brown Brothers Harriman,
Standard Oil, the Bank for International Settlements.
These institutions did not merely look the other way while fascism
rose. They actively participated. They funded the rearmament. They
transferred the technology. They laundered the gold. And when
American soldiers were dying on the beaches of Normandy, some of
these same institutions still had their doors open for business in
Nazi occupied Paris.
The question that haunts this history is not just how it happened
but why the architecture that made it possible was never dismantled.
And what that means for us today.
To understand how Wall Street became entangled with the Third
Reich, you have to go back to the end of the First World War. When
the guns fell silent in 1918, the victorious Allied powers gathered
in Paris to decide what to do with a defeated Germany. What they
decided would set the stage for everything that followed.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, imposed punishing terms.
Germany lost 13% of its territory, 15% of its agricultural land, a
quarter of its coal mines and three quarters of its iron production.
On top of that, the Allied Reparations Commission demanded 132
billion gold marks in war reparations, roughly $31.5 billion at the
time. For a nation already shattered by four years of war, this was a
death sentence disguised as justice.
Germany couldn't pay. By 1923, hyperinflation had driven the mark
to over 4 trillion to one against the dollar. People carried
wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread. The German middle class was
annihilated. When Germany defaulted on its reparation payments,
France and Belgium occupied the industrial Ruhr region to extract
payment by force. Europe teetered on the edge of total collapse.
Here is where Wall Street entered the picture. The United States
had loaned more than $10 billion to the Allied powers during the war
and Washington was determined to get that money back. The problem was
circular. Britain and France couldn't repay their war debts to
America unless Germany paid reparations to them. If Germany
collapsed, nobody got paid.
In 1924, an international committee led by American banker Charles
G. Dawes, a financier with deep Wall Street connections, produced the
Dawes Plan. On the surface, it looked like a reasonable economic
rescue package. Restructured reparation payments, a reorganized
German central bank and an initial loan of 800 million marks to
restart German industrial production.
But the Dawes Plan was not merely an economic rescue. It was a
structured, deliberate pipeline through which American capital flowed
directly into the beating heart of German industry. The loans were
underwritten by the most powerful banks on Wall Street. J.P. Morgan,
Dillon Read, and National City Bank, which would later become
Citibank. These banks floated massive bond offerings to American
investors and the proceeds were channeled into German industrial
conglomerates.
And not just any conglomerates. The money went to companies like
I.G. Farben, the enormous German chemical cartel and Vereinigte
Stahlwerke, the United Steelworks. These were the very companies that
would become the backbone of Hitler's war machine. I.G. Farben
produced the synthetic fuel that kept the Luftwaffe in the air and
the Wehrmacht on the move. It manufactured the explosives that armed
the German military. And in its most horrific contribution, it
produced Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the concentration camps to
murder millions of Jews and other victims of the Holocaust.
By the time the Young Plan replaced the Dawes Plan in 1929, U.S.
loans to Germany had exceeded 3 billion in1920s dollars, a staggering
sum equivalent to over 3 billion today. The money didn't just
stabilize the German economy. It rebuilt the German industrial base
from the ground up, making it stronger and more militarily capable
than it had been before the war.
Then came the 1929 crash. American banks, suddenly desperate for
liquidity, recalled their loans from Germany. The steady flow of
American capital that had kept the German economy afloat for five
years suddenly dried up. The effect was catastrophic. Banks failed.
Unemployment exploded. By 1932, six million Germans were out of work.
The Weimar Republic buckled under the weight of economic despair. And
into that void walked Adolf Hitler.
But here is the part that makes this story truly disturbing. Even
as Hitler rose to power, even as his intentions became unmistakably
clear, American financial institutions didn't pull away. They leaned
in. When Hjalmar Schacht, the head of the Reichsbank and Hitler's
financial architect, traveled to the United States in May of 1933,
just months after Hitler became chancellor, he was received like
visiting royalty. He met with President Franklin Roosevelt and with
the most powerful bankers on Wall Street. And when he returned to
Germany, new American loans totaling approximately $1 billion
followed him across the Atlantic.
Let that sink in. Four months after Adolf Hitler took control of
Germany, after the Reichstag fire, after the Enabling Act that
effectively ended German democracy, after the first boycott of Jewish
businesses and after the opening of the Dachau concentration camp,
Wall Street opened its checkbook even wider.
To understand the scale of American financial involvement in Nazi
Germany, you need to understand one institution above all others, the
Bank for International Settlements, or the BIS.
The BIS was established in 1930 in Basel, Switzerland, ostensibly
to facilitate German reparation payments under the Young Plan. It was
created with the direct involvement of New York's most powerful
bankers, including Thomas W. Lamont of J.P. Morgan. On the surface,
it was a neutral international bank, a clearing house for central
banks around the world. What it became during the war was something
far more sinister.
The BIS operated from an unmarked building in Basel. There was no
sign identifying it, no flag flying outside, just a quiet office
where the world's most powerful central bankers could meet in
private, away from the public eye. Throughout the entire Second World
War, the BIS kept operating. American, British, German, and Japanese
bankers all maintained their relationships through this institution,
even while their nations were killing each other's soldiers on
battlefields across the globe.
As the author John Strauss wrote, via the BIS, American and
British bankers maintained a mostly secret friendship with their Nazi
and Japanese counterparts straight through the war, while thousands
upon thousands of American and British soldiers were being killed and
maimed in the fight to defeat those very same enemies.
During the war, the BIS effectively became Hitler's private wealth
manager and head money launderer. When Germany annexed Austria in
1938, Austria's gold reserves were looted and shipped through the BIS
to the Reichsbank. When Germany absorbed Czechoslovakia, SS officers
held the directors of the Czech National Bank at gunpoint and
demanded all their gold. That gold too was routed through the BIS.
Post war investigations revealed that the BIS received 3.7 tons of
remelted gold as interest payments from the Reichsbank during the
war. Critics argue that this was just the tip of the iceberg. The BIS
helped launder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Nazi assets
by remelting gold bars to hide their origins, effectively erasing the
evidence that some of that gold had been stripped from the teeth, the
jewelry, and the personal belongings of concentration camp victims.
At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the American government
backed a resolution calling for the liquidation of the BIS. There was
too much evidence that it had been complicit in financing the Nazi
war effort. But the resolution was never enforced. The BIS survived
the war, survived the investigations and continues to operate to this
day, still in Basel, still convening central bankers in private,
still enjoying a level of secrecy and legal immunity that would make
any sovereign government envious.
Underneath the BIS umbrella, individual American financial
institutions were doing their own deals with the Nazi regime.
Chase National Bank, the precursor to today's J.P. Morgan Chase,
stands as one of the most flagrant examples. One of Chase's major
shareholders was John D. Rockefeller, whose family had directly
funded Nazi eugenics experiments before the war. But the financial
connections went far deeper than ideological sympathy.
Between 1936 and 1941, Chase and other U.S. banks helped the Nazi
government raise over 20 million through a mechanism called
Ru¨ckwanderer marks, or return marks. Conceived by Hjalmar Schacht,
they were designed as a way to channel desperately needed U.S.
currency into Germany. In theory, they were for Germans living abroad
who planned to return to the fatherland. In practice, they functioned
as Nazi war bonds and Chase was one of the biggest brokers, pocketing
roughly 20 million through a mechanism called Rückwanderer marks, or
return marks. In practice, they functioned as Nazi war bonds and
Chase was one of the biggest brokers, pocketing roughly 500,000 in
commissions equivalent to several million dollars today.
What makes this even more appalling is what happened after
Kristallnacht. On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazi mobs across
Germany and Austria attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and
synagogues. Tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration
camps. Their property was confiscated. And in the aftermath of this
horror, Chase didn't pull back from its German business. It expanded.
Internal documents later revealed that Chase's Paris branch
manager, Carlos Niedermann, wrote to his supervisor in Manhattan in
May 1942, five months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, five
months after the United States had formally declared war on Germany,
boasting that the bank enjoyed very special esteem with top German
officials and was experiencing a rapid expansion of deposits. That
letter was written while American soldiers were fighting and dying to
defeat the very regime Chase was celebrating its relationship with.
When Germany occupied France in 1940, most American businesses
packed up and left. Chase and J.P. Morgan did not. They kept their
Paris branches open for the duration of the war. They did business
with and for the Nazi occupiers. They helped seize the accounts of
Jewish customers. A French government commission investigating the
seizure of Jewish bank accounts during the war later identified five
American banks as complicit, including Chase, J.P. Morgan, and
Guaranty Trust Company.
Recently declassified reports from the U.S. Treasury confirmed
what many historians had long suspected, that the Chase branch in
Paris worked in close collaboration with German authorities in
freezing Jewish assets. These weren't rogue employees acting on their
own. These were policy decisions approved at the institutional level,
driven by the calculation that it was more profitable to cooperate
with the Nazis than to resist them.
And then there was the firm of Brown Brothers Harriman, at the
time the largest private investment bank in the world. Brown Brothers
Harriman was intimately connected with one of Hitler's most important
early financial backers, a German steel and coal baron named Fritz
Thyssen.
Thyssen was one of the first major industrialists to throw his
financial weight behind the Nazi Party. Beginning in the mid 1920s,
he personally funded Hitler's rise to power, channeling money through
a network of shell companies and banks that stretched from Germany
through the Netherlands to New York. At the center of this network
was the Union Banking Corporation, or UBC. It was incorporated in New
York in 1924 and served as the American front for Thyssen's financial
empire.
The bank was set up by W. Averell Harriman, one of the richest men
in America and it was managed by a man named Prescott Bush, the
father and grandfather of two future American presidents. By the late
1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC had bought and shipped
millions of dollars worth of gold, fuel, steel, coal, and U.S.
Treasury bonds to Germany. They were feeding and financing Hitler's
military buildup in plain sight.
A 1941 front page article in the New York Herald Tribune revealed
that Thyssen had $3 million in cash sitting in Union Banking
Corporation's New York vaults. This prompted a congressional
investigation. And in October of 1942, nearly a full year after the
United States had entered the war, the government finally seized the
assets of the Union Banking Corporation under the Trading with the
Enemy Act.
The shares of the bank at the time were held by Prescott Bush, E.
Roland Harriman, and several members of the Nazi Party. Additional
assets were also seized from the Silesian American Corporation,
another company managed by Bush and his father in law, George Herbert
Walker. Declassified government documents later revealed that after
the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC
related assets were seized under the same act. The records also
showed that Bush and the Harrimans continued doing business with
Thyssen related concerns even after the war, moving assets through
Switzerland, Panama, Argentina, and Brazil, all critical outposts for
the flight of Nazi capital after Germany's surrender.
Despite all of this, Prescott Bush was never charged with a crime.
He was never prosecuted. He went on to become a United States
senator. His son became the 41st president of the United States. His
grandson became the 43rd. The affair had no lasting political
ramifications for the Bush family whatsoever.
But the banking connections were only part of the story. Running
alongside the financial flows was something equally important. The
transfer of industrial technology. And no relationship was more
consequential in this regard than the partnership between Standard
Oil and I.G. Farben.
Germany had a critical strategic problem. It had almost no
domestic crude oil reserves. For a nation planning a massive military
expansion, this was potentially fatal. Modern warfare ran on
petroleum. Tanks, trucks, aircraft, submarines, they all needed fuel.
Without a reliable source of gasoline, Hitler's war machine would be
dead in the water before it ever started.
The solution was synthetic fuel. German scientists had developed a
process called hydrogenation, which could convert Germany's abundant
coal reserves into usable gasoline. But perfecting this technology
required enormous resources, advanced chemistry and years of
research. And this is where Standard Oil stepped in.
Standard Oil's laboratories in the United States developed and
financed the hydrogenation process in direct partnership with I.G.
Farben. They shared patents. They exchanged technical knowledge. They
built the infrastructure that allowed Germany to produce synthetic
gasoline from coal on an industrial scale.
A report from the U.S. commercial attaché in Berlin, sent in
January of 1933, the very month Hitler took power, stated plainly
that in two years, Germany would be manufacturing enough oil and gas
from soft coal for a long war and that Standard Oil of New York was
furnishing millions of dollars to help.
By 1944, nearly half of all German high octane gasoline was
produced directly by I.G. Farben and most of the rest came from
affiliated companies using technology that had been developed with
American help. Without the hydrogenation process, Germany simply
could not have waged modern mechanized warfare. The Panzer divisions
that swept across France, the bombers that rained destruction on
London, the U-boats that terrorized the Atlantic, all of them ran on
fuel that was made possible in part by American technology and
American money.
But it got worse. Standard Oil's arrangement with I.G. Farben went
beyond fuel. Under a cartel agreement known as the Jasco Agreement,
the two companies divided up the global market for synthetic
chemicals. Farben got control over synthetic rubber and Standard Oil
got a monopoly in the oil industry.
The practical effect of this was devastating. When the United
States desperately needed synthetic rubber after Japan cut off
natural rubber supplies from Southeast Asia, Standard Oil dragged its
feet. It refused to release its patents to American manufacturers,
even though it had freely shared those same patents with I.G. Farben.
As Senator Harry Truman's investigating committee later found,
Standard Oil had agreed that in return for Farbin giving Standard a
monopoly in oil, Standard would give Farbin complete control of
patents in the chemical field, including rubber.
American rubber manufacturers who approached Standard for licenses
were either refused or offered terms so unfavorable that they
couldn't possibly accept. Meanwhile, Standard had sent I.G. Farben
critical information about its new synthetic rubber. But even as the
Hitler government was refusing to share its own synthetic rubber
technology with the United States, Standard was giving away American
military advantages to the Nazis while simultaneously withholding
them from the American government.
Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold testified before
Congress that Standard Oil's activities had "seriously imperiled
the war preparations of the United States."
And then there was tetraethyl lead, the additive used in aviation
gasoline. Only Standard Oil, DuPont, and General Motors had the
rights to produce it. Without tetraethyl lead, high octane aviation
fuel was impossible to make. And without high octane aviation fuel,
the Luftwaffe could not fly. Standard Oil helped organize the sale of
500 tons of tetraethyl lead to I.G. Farben in 1938. The following
year, an additional $15 million worth was delivered. The result was
that Hitler's air force was rendered capable of bombing London, the
very city whose merchants had provided the supplies. And by supplying
Japan with tetraethyl lead through the same channels, Standard Oil
helped make it possible for the Japanese to wage war across the
Pacific.
It wasn't just the banks and the oil companies. American
automobile manufacturers were also deeply complicit.
The two largest tank producers in Hitler's Germany were Opel, a
wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors, which was controlled by
the J.P. Morgan firm and Ford AG, the German subsidiary of the Ford
Motor Company.
Henry Ford had been an outspoken antisemite for decades. He
published a newspaper called The Dearborn Independent, which ran a 91
issue series called The International Jew, filled with conspiracy
theories about Jewish control of finance, media, and government.
Hitler admired Ford so much that he kept a large portrait of the
automaker on his office wall. In Mein Kampf, Hitler singled Ford out
for praise, writing that among the 120 million Americans, only a
single great man, Ford, still maintained full independence from
Jewish influence.
In 1938, long after the true character of the Nazi regime was
clear to the entire world, Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the
German Eagle, the Nazi regime's highest honor for foreign citizens.
It was presented to him by German consular officials in a ceremony at
his home in Dearborn, Michigan, on his 75th birthday.
Ford Motor Company set up operations in Germany in 1925, opening a
plant in Cologne. Under the Nazi regime, the Cologne plant became an
arsenal for the German military. According to a 1945 U.S. Army
report, Ford's German subsidiary began producing vehicles of a
strictly military nature for the Reich even before the war started.
Ford supplied nearly one third of the trucks used by the Wehrmacht.
And in the mid 1930s, when the Nazi government blocked Ford from
buying raw materials with foreign currency, Ford headquarters in
Dearborn responded by shipping rubber and other critical materials
directly to the Cologne plant, an arrangement the Nazi government had
been counting on. The Nazis took a 25% cut of those imported raw
materials and gave them to other German manufacturers, and Dearborn
approved the arrangement.
By 1943, roughly half the workforce at Ford's Cologne plant
consisted of forced laborers. Among them were French prisoners of
war, Russian and Ukrainian civilians, and concentration camp inmates
from Buchenwald. As many as 10,000 men, women, and children were
pressed into working at Ford's German factory over the course of the
war.
And yet, when Germany surrendered in 1945, Ford representatives
from England and the United States traveled to Cologne, not to answer
for what had happened but to inspect the plant and plan for the
future. In 1948, Henry Ford II visited Cologne to celebrate the
10,000th truck to roll off the post war assembly line. The company
never faced criminal prosecution for its wartime collaboration.
General Motors told a similar story. Its Opel subsidiary in
Germany was granted tax exempt status by the Nazi government in 1936
to help expand its production facilities. General Motors obligingly
reinvested the profits into the German economy. Opel produced Blitz
trucks that were essential to the German military, as well as
aircraft engines and other war materials.
After the war, instead of being held accountable, General Motors
actually collected $33 million from the U.S. government as
compensation for bombing damage to its German factories. The same
factories that had been producing weapons for the enemy.
This pattern repeated itself across American industry. ITT, the
telecommunications giant, owned factories in Germany that produced
military equipment for the Nazis throughout the war. After Germany's
surrender, ITT collected $27 million in war damages from the American
government for Allied bombing of those same plants. DuPont supplied
critical materials and chemical technology to German industry through
its cartel agreements with I.G. Farben. And the list goes on.
But the question that haunts this entire story is not just how did
it happen but why did nobody stop it. The answer lies in the
intersection of ideology, profit, and political protection.
Many of the American businessmen who did deals with Nazi Germany
were not Nazi sympathizers in the ideological sense. They were not
trying to build a fascist state in America. Although it should be
noted that in 1933, a group of Wall Street financiers, including
associates of J.P. Morgan, were implicated in an alleged plot to
overthrow President Roosevelt and install a fascist government in the
United States, a scheme known as the Business Plot or the Wall Street
Putsch.
The plot was exposed by Major General Smedley Butler, one of the
most decorated Marines in American history, who had been approached
to lead the coup and instead reported it to Congress. A congressional
committee confirmed key elements of the conspiracy, but no one was
prosecuted.
For most of these financiers, the motivation was simpler and in
some ways more chilling. It was pure profit. Germany was one of the
largest industrial economies in the world. It was growing fast under
Nazi rearmament. The returns on investment were enormous. And the
moral cost of doing business with a fascist dictatorship was
something that the balance sheets could easily absorb.
There was also a political calculation. Many American
industrialists and bankers were deeply hostile to communism and saw
Hitler's Germany as a potential bulwark against the Soviet Union. The
fear of Bolshevism was so consuming in certain circles that fascism
looked like the lesser evil or even a desirable partner. This Cold
War logic, which would later define American foreign policy for
decades, was already operating in the 1930s, long before the Cold War
officially began.
And then there was the cover up. The U.S. government knew what was
happening. The Treasury Department had reports. The State Department
had cables from its own embassies documenting the financial flows.
Congressional committees investigated Standard Oil, Chase National
Bank and the Ford Motor Company. Senator Harry Truman's committee was
particularly aggressive in exposing the Standard Oil and I.G. Farben
cartel.
But at every stage, the investigations were limited. The
prosecutions were non existent. The consequences were negligible.
After the war, the focus shifted from accountability to
reconstruction. The Cold War demanded that Germany and Japan be
rebuilt as bulwarks against Soviet expansion. The same industrial
infrastructure that had powered the Nazi war machine was now needed
to power the Western alliance. And the same American bankers and
industrialists who had financed that infrastructure were the obvious
partners for the job.
The Nuremberg trials prosecuted some of I.G. Farben's directors
for war crimes. Several were convicted of plunder, spoliation and
some for the use of slave labor. But the American companies that had
been their partners, the banks that had financed them, the oil
companies that had shared their patents, none of them faced trial.
The veil of corporate neutrality was pulled back just far enough
to satisfy public curiosity. And then it was drawn shut again.
The legacy of this collaboration is not just historical. It is
structural. Many of the institutions that profited from their
dealings with Nazi Germany went on to become the foundations of the
modern global financial system.
J.P. Morgan Chase, the largest bank in America today, carries the
DNA of both Chase National Bank and J.P. Morgan, both of which kept
their Paris operations open under Nazi occupation. In 1998, a class
action lawsuit was filed against Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan on
behalf of Holocaust victims, accusing them of seizing Jewish accounts
during the Nazi occupation of France and refusing to return assets
after the war. The suit alleged that Chase "collaborated with
the German authorities and displayed an excessive zeal in its
enforcement of anti Jewish laws" and that J.P. Morgan had earned
the reputation of an "international Aryan organization."
Chase called the lawsuit "unnecessary" and said it was
already negotiating with Jewish leaders. The banks eventually settled
but no executives faced personal consequences.
ExxonMobil, one of the world's largest oil companies, traces its
lineage directly back to Standard Oil, which fueled the Luftwaffe
with synthetic gasoline technology developed in its own laboratories.
Ford Motor Company and General Motors, same names, same corporate
entities, same families, never faced criminal prosecution for their
wartime use of slave labor.
The Bank for International Settlements still operates from Basel,
still convenes central bankers in private, still enjoys legal
immunities that sovereign governments don't possess. As the
journalist and author Adam LeBor has written, the BIS is "an
opaque, elitist and anti democratic institution, out of step with the
twenty first century." Its staff enjoy legal immunity and tax
free earnings. Swiss authorities are not allowed to enter its doors
without permission. All bank officials are immune under Swiss law for
life for all acts unless they do something "obviously criminal."
The BIS today has 63 member states representing roughly 90% of the
world's GDP. Every two months, all member banks meet. The meetings
are closed to the public. No official reports are released of what
happens in Basel. And the BIS hosts other bodies, the Basel Committee
on Banking Supervision, the Financial Stability Board, that thrash
out measures to make the financial system more "resilient."
These bodies have no democratic mandate. They answer to no
electorate. They shape the regulatory future of global finance from
behind a thicket of legal immunities and protections.
This brings us to the present moment. The United States is now at
war with Iran, a conflict that began in March 2026. And the same
pattern, the same architecture, is visible in real time.
The parallels are not subtle. They are structural.
When President Trump met with major defense contractors at the
White House in March 2026, the companies agreed to quadruple
production of what Trump called "exquisite class" weaponry.
The meeting was attended by the CEOs of RTX, formerly Raytheon,
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, L3Harris
Missile Solutions and Honeywell Aerospace, all sitting on billions of
dollars of order backlogs that dwarf the GDPs of many nations.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that the Pentagon had
sent the White House a request for $200 billion in additional
funding, stating that the money was needed to ensure the country's
stockpile of ammunition is "not just refilled, but above and
beyond." His justification: "It takes money to kill bad
guys."
Each THAAD interceptor missile costs roughly 12.7million. Each
Patriot PAC3 interceptor costs about 3.7 million. That's millions of
dollars going up in smoke each time they're fired and billions
flowing directly to the contractors who manufacture them.
Stock prices for major arms producing companies have all risen
since the war began. Over the three years from March 2023 to March
2026, RTX stock has risen 110%, Northrop Grumman 60%, General
Dynamics 57%, Lockheed Martin 37%.
Between 2020 and 2024, private firms received 2.4 trillion in
Pentagon contracts, more than half of the department′s
discretionary spending. One third of that, 2.4 trillion in Pentagon
contracts, more than half of the department's discretionary spending.
One third of that, 771 billion, went to just five companies: Lockheed
Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.
The banks are cashing in as well. The six largest U.S. investment
banks, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley,
Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo, collectively earned nearly $48
billion in profits in the first three months of 2026 alone, as war
driven market volatility translated into higher trading revenues and
fees.
JPMorgan Chase, the same institution whose predecessor banks kept
their doors open under Nazi occupation, reported a 13% increase in
profits, with net income of $16.5 billion in a single quarter.
Saudi Aramco's first quarter 2026 profits rose by 25% to 32.5
billion. BP reported first quarter profits of 32.5 billion. 3.2
billion, more than double the previous year. Tanker operators saw
revenues surge as war risk premiums for vessels transiting the Strait
of Hormuz increased five fold.
What happened between Wall Street and Nazi Germany was not a
failure of the system. It was the system working exactly as designed,
maximizing returns, externalizing costs, and treating human suffering
as a line item on a balance sheet.
The lesson the system taught itself in the 1940s was clear. If
you're powerful enough and profitable enough, the rules do not apply
to you. Not the rules against arming the enemy. Not the rules against
funding genocide. Not the rules against using slave labor. Not the
rules against laundering looted gold.
And the corollary lesson, which we are watching play out in real
time in 2026, is equally clear. War is the most profitable business
there is and the institutions positioned to profit from it are the
same ones that have been profiting from catastrophe for a century.
The names on the letterhead have changed. Chase became J.P. Morgan
Chase. Standard Oil became ExxonMobil. The individuals died and were
replaced. The Bushes occupied the White House and then receded from
it.
But the fundamental architecture, the secrecy of the BIS, the
revolving door between government and finance, the legal immunities,
the primacy of profit over any other consideration, the capacity to
absorb moments of public attention without being meaningfully
altered, all of it remains exactly where it has always been.
Hiding in plain sight. Operating in broad daylight. And waiting,
as it always does, for the next opportunity to profit from
catastrophe.
The Second World War killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people.
Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Entire nations were
destroyed. And running beneath all of that horror, like an
underground river of money, was the steady, quiet flow of American
capital into the heart of the machine that made it possible.
The question that haunts this history is not just how it happened.
It's whether anything has actually changed, or whether the same
institutions, using the same playbook, are simply waiting for the
next catastrophe to monetize.
If the evidence from 2026 is any indication, the answer is already
clear.
Sources:
JPMorgan Chase Nazi
ties lawsuit controversy
Chase,
JP Morgan face Holocaust suit - UPI Archives upi.com
J.P.
Morgan, Chase Sued For Nazi Ties themoscowtimes.comChase
bank sued for alleged Nazi ties - UPI Archives upi.com
Searched for Bank
for International Settlements secrecy criticism modern
How
a secretive central bankers’ club responds to crises - SWI
swissinfo.ch swissinfo.ch
A
century of power and secrecy: What the world's most powerful
financial institution is planning next | Kitco News kitco.com
[PDF]
the quiet central bank diplomacy at the bank for international
settlements ... ipea.gov.br
Searched for
corporate war profiteering modern examples 2020s
Iran
War May Give Defense Contractors $200 Billion Windfall time.com
Which
US and Israeli military companies are profiting from the Iran war? |
US-Israel war on Iran News | Al Jazeera aljazeera.com
Who
has profited most from the war on Iran? | US-Israel war on Iran News
| Al Jazeera aljazeera.com
American Banks
Helped Build Hitler’s War Machine And Made Millions Doing It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHl-ZG9bMxc
