Concentration Camp Inmates Had To Rebuild A Nazi Refinery The Koch Brothers' Dad Helped Construct

[WillyT]

Concentration Camp Inmates Had To Rebuild A Nazi Refinery The Koch Brothers' Dad Helped Construct
The fascist regime used slave labor from Auschwitz.
Paul Blumenthal - HuffPo
01/19/2016 05:03 pm ET


The EuroTank oil refinery site, partially constructed by Fred Koch's Winkler-Koch company, is pictured in a confidential military document detailing the U.S. bombing of the facility in 1944 and 1945.
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey

<snip>

A new book by New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer about billionaire oligarchs Charles and David Koch reveals that the initial Koch fortune accrued by their father, Fred Koch, was built with contracts from the authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the USSR.

It's been known for some time that Fred Koch lived, worked and made millions in the USSR during Josef Stalin’s reign. He would tell people later in life that his experience with the repressive Communist regime was what led him toward his hard-right political views, and to the eventual co-founding of the John Birch Society.

What's new in Mayer’s book, Dark Money, is that Winkler-Koch (now known as Koch Industries) worked with American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, beginning in 1934, to construct part of an oil refinery in Nazi-controlled Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler. The refinery was the third-largest in Germany and played a vital role in fueling the Nazi war machine that ravaged Europe while industrializing genocide. (Winkler-Koch was also engaged in hundreds of other building projects in countries across the world at the time.)

The Europaeische Tanklager und Transport A.G. refinery, also known as EuroTank, was such an important piece of Hitler's war machine that the United States and its allies bombed the Hamburg facility six times in 1944 and 1945, according to documents published by Gawker.

Additional documents held by the U.S. Holocaust Museum and provided to The Huffington Post show that the Nazi regime responded to the U.S. bombing raids by importing Jewish slave labor from concentration camps to rebuild the facility originally constructed by Winkler-Koch.

U.S. bombing of Hamburg industrial sites, including the EuroTank facility, began in June 1944. As part of the Geilenberg Program to decentralize oil production and protect it from bombing raids, Hitler authorized the SS special police to use slave labor from concentration camps to rebuild damaged sites and construct elaborate underground fuel production sites impervious to Allied attacks.

In July, approximately 1,000 Hungarian and Czech Jewish women held in Auschwitz were transported to...

<snip>

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/koch-refinery-nazis_us_569e9870e4b00f3e9863266c