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 Stalin’s 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 Stalin’s 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 family’s 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/
