Latest Library book order: Germany's Master Plan was an Economic Offensive! 1943 expose

 https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

Borkin was a 30-something antitrust attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice when he published his first book, Germany’s Master Plan: The Story of Industrial Offensive, detailing the ingenious methods of economic warfare Farben had used to produce the worldwide commodities shortages that guaranteed Hitler’s early victories. The populist tome was a 1943 bestseller, widely viewed by Roosevelt-era trustbusters as a blueprint for unwinding the international warmonger cartel. By 1945, however, Farben co-conspirators Dow Chemical and Standard Oil were pressuring Borkin’s publisher to retract his findings, and by the following year he was gone, with news reports casting the resignation of “the man who had more than any other to do with making ‘cartel’ a horrid word in American politics” as “the final admission … that an era has come to an end.”

Joseph Borkin

Title of Book:

Germany's master plan; the story of industrial offensive In the analysis of the late Farben historian Joseph Borkin, the company broke “from the conventional economics of slavery in which slaves are traditionally treated as capital equipment to be maintained and serviced for optimum use and depreciated over a normal lifespan. Instead, I.G. reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted.” The exec who personally sold Zyklon B to the SS’s chief disinfection officer (a lifelong anti-Nazi, it turned out, who had infiltrated the SS to investigate the disappearance of a family member) got his conviction overturned after just three years. As Borkin would later explain, the Farben executives “were among the industrial elite of Germany, not Hitler’s black- and brown-shirted hooligans. They represented a combination of scientific genius and commercial acumen unique in a private industrial enterprise.” The reality that they also represented the most staggering and unprecedented evil the human race had ever known was somehow … not a thing. Following his four-year sentence, the old Farben CEO would be named to the board of Deutsche Bank. The executive who ran the Monowitz operation got gigs advising Dow Chemical, the U.S. Army, the company that sold thalidomide as a tonic for morning sickness and, for three decades, the killer asbestos giant W.R. Grace, which was recently taken private in a $7.1 billion private equity buyout backed by Apollo.