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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsInteresting read: How the right sold out to Russia
Now that Rep. Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee have opened an investigation into the Russia affair, and President Donald Trump has darkly warned in his State of the Union speech that America will never be a socialist country, it seems timely to recall a long-forgotten tale of revenge over unrequited love, in which members of the Koch family, which had helped build Joseph Stalins oil refineries, found their investments nationalized and themselves embittered.
In 1925, Fred C. Koch joined his MIT classmate Lewis E. Winkler to found the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company in Wichita, Kansas. After losing patent infringement lawsuits to more established oil and gas companies, they sought business overseas. Between 1929 and 1932, during Stalins first Five-Year Plan, Winkler-Koch built 15 thermal cracking units for Stalin, turning crude oil into gasoline.
Jane Mayer, in a book that grew out of a 2010 article in The New Yorker, an unauthorized assessment of the Koch familys spending habits, Dark Money (2016), quotes Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch: As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up.
Perhaps. But that did not stop Winkler-Koch, in 1934, from providing engineering plans and overseeing construction of a huge oil refinery near Hamburg under the direction of Adolf Hitler, whom Fred Koch approached directly, purportedly greeting him with: Heil Hitler. The Winkler-Koch factory became a major source of fuel for the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) and the mechanized tank and motorized attack forces that powered the Blitzkrieg into Belgium, Denmark, Poland and France. The factory was destroyed by Allied bombers late in the war.
https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2019/02/how-the-right-sold-out-to-russia/
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)loyalty.
paleotn
(17,911 posts)Mr.Bill
(24,282 posts)ck4829
(35,045 posts)UpInArms
(51,280 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,876 posts)Glad there are more than a few left who do understand and give a damn.
Xolodno
(6,390 posts)Russia's mixed economy is more socialist that ours. Even they know going hard right is a bad idea...and an idea they are willing to promote to anyone they consider adversarial for its self destruction.
ancianita
(36,023 posts)C Moon
(12,212 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,647 posts)hedda_foil
(16,372 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,876 posts)ck4829
(35,045 posts)rickyhall
(4,889 posts)Koch & Bush families both got rich off Hitler & the Holocaust.
And Bush had the nerve to complain about Joe Kennedy getting rich off Prohibition.
Koch built refineries, Bush helped finance Auschwitz
patphil
(6,169 posts)Greed makes strange bedfellows.
bucolic_frolic
(43,128 posts)They dared not tell the people. It was the 60s before info on aviation fuel was published, and only then in obscure high density tomes that few would read. My WWII dad always had a sarcastic comment for IGFarben, but I doubt he knew about American companies or politicians who were connected to funding and supplying Hitler's Nazi war materiel.
bucolic_frolic
(43,128 posts)now they're turning unfettered capitalism against everyone here
ck4829
(35,045 posts)rockfordfile
(8,702 posts)czarjak
(11,266 posts)Hotler
(11,416 posts)liberalla
(9,238 posts)K & R