Many got to keep the riches they acquired through their part on an act of genocide.

Meanwhile, historians grappling with the war through the "#Historikerstreit" drew invidious comparisons between communism and fascism, equating the two ideologies and tacitly excusing the torture and killing of political prisoners (this tale is still told today - in America! My kid's AP history course made this exact point last year).

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The refusal to consider that extreme wealth, inequality, and the lust for profits - not blood - provided the Nazis with the budget, materiel and backing they needed to seize control in Germany is of a piece with the decision not to hold Germany's Nazi-enabling plutocrats to account.

The impunity for business leaders who collaborated with the Nazis on exploiting slave labor is hard to believe.

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Take #IGFarben, a company still doing a merry business today. Farben ran a rubber factory on Auschwitz slave labor, but its executives were frustrated by the delays occasioned by the daily 4.5m forced march from the death-camp to its factory:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

So Farben built #Monowitz, its own, private-sector concentration camp. IG Farben purchased 25,000 slaves from the Reich, among them as many children as possible (the Reich charged less for child slaves).

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Even by the standards of Nazi death camps, Monowitz was a charnel house. Monowitz's inmates were worked to death in just *three months*. The conditions were so brutal that *the SS guards sent official complaints to Berlin*. Among their complaints: Farben refused to fund extra hospital beds for the slaves who were beaten so badly they required immediate medical attention.

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Farben broke the historical orthodoxy about slavery: until Monowitz, historians widely believed that enslavers would - at the very least - seek to maintain the health of their slaves, simply as a matter of economic efficiency. But the Reich's rock-bottom rates for fresh slaves liberated Farben from the need to preserve their slaves' ability to work.

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#JosephBorkin - a US antitrust lawyer who was sent to Germany after the war as part of the legal team overseeing the denazification program - wrote a seminal history of IG Farben, "The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben":

https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben

Borkin's book was a bestseller, which enraged America's business lobby.

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The book made the connection between Farben's commercial strategies and the rise of the Reich (Farben helped manipulate global commodity prices in the runup to the war, which let the Reich fund its war preparations). He argued that big business constituted a danger to democracy and human rights, because its leaders would always sideline both in service to profits.

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US companies like #StandardOil and #DowChemicals poured resources into discrediting the book and smearing Borkin, forcing him into retirement and obscurity in 1945, the same year his publisher withdrew his book from stores.

When we speak of Germany's denazification effort, it's as a German program, but of course that's not right. Denazification was initiated, designed and overseen by the war's winners - in West Germany, that was the USA.

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Those US prosecutors and bureaucrats wanted justice, but not *too much* of it. For them, denazification had to be balanced against #anticommunism, and the imperatives of American business. Nazi war criminals must go on trial - but not if they were rocket scientists, especially not if the USSR might make use of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

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Recall that in the USA, the bizarre epithet #PrematureAntifascist was used to condemn Americans who opposed Nazism (and fascism elsewhere in Europe) too *soon*, because these antifascists opposed the authoritarian politics of big business in America, too:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/premature-antifascist-and-proudly-so/

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