There is a line in the movie "Gentle Killing": "America is a business." In fact, much of history can be seen as "buying and selling"—to some extent, wars have driven the course of human history, and it is precisely profit that has prompted wars to break out. Nowadays, when we talk about World War II, we always like to "turn over old accounts" and clearly calculate the love and hatred between Britain and France and Germany, China and the United States and Japan, in fact, World War II is not so complicated, it is also a "deal" in the final analysis, but the scale and courage of this transaction are greater.
There is a mysterious episode in history: On November 24, 1933, the New York Times mentioned a book called Sidney Warburg. The book was published in the Netherlands earlier that year, but was withdrawn within days of being on the shelves. Even so, Sidney Warburg was translated into English and spread around the world, not only as americans known for its existence, but also at one point in the British Museum. Soon, Sidney Warburg was brutally banned, and even professionals in the field had no access.
Just as the so-called "tree trick", "Sidney Warburg" is so mysterious that it has attracted people's attention. It has been suggested that Sidney, the author of the book, is a member of the Warburg family, a large American conglomerate, but the latter did not respond positively to this, but did not recognize a word of the book's contents. It turns out that the book is mainly about one thing, that is, how the big American entrepreneurs at that time made deals with the Nazi Fuehrer Hitler.
Some people are willing to spend a lot of money to buy a watch, some people have to enjoy expensive food every meal, look at each other, and may feel that each other's consumption concept is very strange; people's pursuits are different, thinking and behaving in different ways, and the same is true for countries.
No country does not want its people to become rich and strong, but only a small group enshrines hegemonism as the standard. After entering the 20th century, the fledgling United States began to work this road, however, the world at that time was still in the hands of Britain and France, most of the world's raw material production areas and important financial centers were almost controlled by the European powers, although the First World War made the traditional system loose, but the United States wanted to replace it, but also had to find a harder lever to pry the bigger incident.
In fact, as we often discuss, Sidney Warburg also mentioned that the president of the United States is actually the spokesman for the interests of the consortium, and sometimes the power of the president is not even as great as that of the consortium behind it. The Americans also applied this mentality to Germany, and it even became one of the key factors in provoking World War II.
After the end of the First World War, the "Versailles Peace Treaty" of the Anglo-French clique crushed Germany to the point of almost collapse, Britain and France wanted to maintain their hegemonic position, and Germany, which had struggled with it for centuries, was a truly terrible enemy, and the United States, which was far away from the sky and made a lot of money, had not yet attracted the attention of these two great powers. Britain and France's intention was clear, that is, to crush Germany for a lifetime, and it would be better to become their "cash machine". In the process, the United States developed a close cooperative relationship with the Nazis, but they soon ran into a big problem, and that was France.
It turned out that the United States injected a lot of capital into Germany and made a lot of money from it through financial operations. According to statistics, from 1924 to 1931, the total number of loans provided by the United States to Germany exceeded 130 billion marks, and how much interest alone would cost! However, such a huge amount of funds were circulating, and Britain and France could not find no clues, so the French government unilaterally froze a considerable part of the funds and took it for itself in the name of "war reparations". Simply put, this part of the money is basically a waste.
France's approach gradually caused dissatisfaction among many large american consortia, and in mid-1929, the major banks, the Morgan family, the Rockefeller family and the big men of the Federal Reserve sat together to discuss how to deal with France. We are no stranger to the outcome of this meeting — these great men believed that in order to break through the iron walls of the Anglo-French system, it was necessary to support a strong enough advocate for interests, and the Nazi leader Hitler was undoubtedly the ideal candidate.
It is worth mentioning that the Nazis at that time did not say that they would engage the Jews in the future, but promised the German people that Germany would become strong again and that everyone would get jobs. At that time, there was a "Nazi wave" in the world, and even the young Queen of England was learning to salute the Nazis and regard it as fashionable; even in December 1929, even Harvard University was conducting a study on the "National Socialist Movement" in Germany. It is clearly documented that Rockefeller was fascinated by the Nazi set; and when the Nazis began to persecute the Jews, Ford helped whitewash. Driven by these great men, the American capitalists decided to give Hitler and Germany a greater role.
According to the YoungPlan, the rockefeller foundation and other institutions sent funds to Germany to rebuild the Weimar Republic, but I am afraid that we know where this money is really spent. Sidney Warburg records many of Sidney's conversations with Hitler, in which it was mentioned that the latter would need hundreds of millions of marks at a time to seize power, which Wall Street flatly refused, claiming that "the transfer of funds of this scale would shake the entire financial market", and later negotiated that the funds were paid to the Nazis in batches, up to 15 million. According to the book, even the infamous "Congressional arson" was orchestrated with the support of American capital.
Many friends in this history may not be unfamiliar with it, and it was with the help of the United States that Germany easily broke through the Anglo-French blockade and once again established a strong armed force. But in fact, Germany's prosperity at that time was only an illusion based on overdraft development, except for the military industry, most of the other industries were on the verge of bankruptcy, the huge financial black hole could not be filled, and the foreign exchange was consumed. Some people think that Hitler was a war maniac, and objectively speaking, starting a war at that time to divert contradictions was almost his only choice. At this point in the deal, Hitler seized power and re-emerged on an equal footing with Britain and France, while the American consortium made a lot of money, seeing it as a "win-win", but the Americans found the possibility of grabbing greater benefits.
In the process, one side was passively involved in the transaction, and that was the Rapid Rise of the Soviet Union in its own unique way.
It is believed that the Soviet Union at that time tried to invade Germany with arms and set off a new round of expansion with a positive posture. In fact, looking back at that period of history, it is not difficult to find that from the middle and late 20th century onwards, the Soviet Union actually showed a certain degree of austerity in strategy -- Stalin first called off the Comintern, then abandoned the world proletarian revolutionary plan, and in May 1941, the Soviet Union also held a military parade to show off its muscles to avoid war. The reason why they were stationing troops on the western border was because strategists could clearly see that there would be a war between the Soviet Union and Germany, and if it could not be avoided, they would attack first.
The rise of the Soviet Union panicked Britain and France, even more than the current german recovery; when Stalin's Second Five-Year Plan ended, the French had to admit that the Soviet Union was the real European land power. By the mid-1930s onwards, the effect of American support for Germany had become more pronounced, which also made Britain and France see additional value in Germany - to resist the westward expansion of the red forces. At this point in time, the two major forces of Britain, France and the United States want to use Germany, the former wants Germany to use as a gun against the Soviet Union, and the latter wants to use Germany to provoke the whole world pattern and fish in muddy waters. On the eve of the outbreak of World War II, Britain tried every means to lead the disaster to the east, and even did not hesitate to install a large number of spies to spread rumors around the world, just to achieve this goal.
At that time, it is not difficult to understand the friendship between the Soviet Union and Germany: both sides were oppressed by the Anglo-French bloc, hoping to find like-minded allies, and naturally hit it off. In fact, the Soviet Union also helped a lot in the process of the re-emergence of the German armed forces: the Soviet Union opened a large number of military academies in Kazan and other places to help the German army train talents, and Guderian, as we know it, visited the Soviet Union at that time. Similarly, later in the deal, Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union all miscalculated: Britain and France did not expect Germany to strike back, Germany did not expect that the invasion of Poland would provoke such a large reaction from the Anglo-French bloc, and the Soviet Union did not expect that the anti-water of the "allies" would come so suddenly; only the United States had always put itself in a favorable position - the more chaotic Europe was, the happier the United States and the big conglomerates behind it would be. The outcome of World War II was just as the United States had expected: Germany removed Britain and France from the altar, and the United States established a new "empire where the sun never sets."
Of course, just as the so-called "often walk by the river where there are not wet shoes", the United States is not always satisfactory.
Let us first ponder a question: Why did the United States treat Japan so harshly that even Japanese civilians in the United States were not spared and put in concentration camps? The answer is that Japan hates disobedience. At the same time, Japan also received considerable support from the United States, and in the American strategy, Japan played the same role as Germany in Europe. What the United States did not expect, however, was that the ambitions of the Japanese went far beyond reason, and they made a strategic decision that their national strength could not support — this carefully bred sheepdog in the United States ended up biting itself.