23Jul24 Roundup: You Can Do Business With Hitler

You’ve probably heard the news, and if somehow you haven’t, I’m afraid I can’t be a refuge from it today: President Joe Biden announced that he is ending his 2024 campaign for the presidency and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.

What this means for the upcoming election and our country remains to be seen. Regardless, the importance of this issue’s topic is unchanged. It’s pure coincidence that the main story for this issue is what it is, although I had planned for a much briefer commentary. 

I also planned to cover some other CX news and play Bad Job Bingo, but that will have to wait until later this week. Given the new political landscape we’re all going to have to navigate following President Biden’s announcement, addressing Tech’s embrace of Trump seems more urgent than ever.

~*~

The intersection between Tech and politics is not new, nor is the flirtation between businessmen, despots, and fascism.

“You can do business with Hitler” was a ubiquitous phrase in the 1930s, enough that Douglas Miller, the former Commercial Attaché at the United States Embassy in Berlin, felt the need to write his book You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, arguing that “American businesses should not be involved with Nazi Germany, as several infamously were.”

The extent to which American business facilitated the Nazi rise to power hasn’t so much been lost to time as it’s been deliberately forgotten to avoid dealing honestly with uncomfortable parallels in the present – not just in behavior, but in motive on the part of said businessmen.

There’s been a flurry of reporting recently about Tech’s slow-burn romance with Donald Trump, and for good reason: earlier this month, Elon Musk pledged to give $45 million a month to America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC also backed by the likes of the Winklevoss twins and Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital. He then endorsed first Trump and then Trump’s pick for running mate, JD Vance.

404 Media reported on the flurry of excitement from AI techno-optimists over Vance’s selection as a candidate for Vice President, and Wired published not one but two pieces on July 19th: “The Inevitability of Big Tech Backing Trump,” and “Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy.”

That second piece particularly caught my eye because of its subject: the latest episode of The Ben & Marc Show, “The Little Tech Agenda: Biden vs. Trump.” The episode cover proclaims, “2024 Election: Time to Choose!”

Well, if it is time to choose, I thought, then it is also time to remember.

~*~

It will likely come as no surprise that I’m not a listener of The Ben & Marc Show. The episode in which Andreessen and Horowitz endorse Trump is actually the first time I’ve paid the podcast any attention at all, and honestly, it tells me all I need to know about it.

However, I don’t believe in criticizing material I haven’t myself seen, so I did watch all 1 hour, 31 minutes, and 10 seconds of what can only be described as self-absorbed, ahistorical nonsense from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

I won’t bother pointing out why any number of the arguments they bandy about don’t make sense. Wired Author Stephen Levy does a better job of that than I ever will.

Not to mention that I find their claims about the harms to “Little Tech” so clearly absurd and self-serving on its face that it’s not worth wasting any more time on, given it’s coming from, again, the billionaire founders of a16z, a company with a portfolio of tech giants valued at, to their own estimation, $42 billion.

What’s striking about this episode is not that Andreessen and Horowitz spend over 90 minutes desperately trying to contort themselves and Tech into victims in trying to justify their endorsement of Trump – these two white male billionaires in their expensively tailored suits sitting comfortably in what I can only assume is their very own private recording studio – nor that it ends up being exactly as ridiculous (and, at times, darkly funny) as it sounds.

No, what’s striking is what they’re declaring out loud, and how it’s like a long-arriving, barely-decayed message from the past: 

You can do business with Trump.

What’s also remarkable is that Andreessen and Horowitz themselves both repeatedly invoke American business involvement in World War II in their arguments for why “Little Tech” must be protected, even if those invocations are conveniently devoid of context and, through either ignorance or intention, misleading.

It’s interesting to me that they chose to mention Ford as an example of a “little tech entrepreneur” who helped us win World War II. There are times in the episode when Andreessen and Horowitz stop and prompt each other, so clearly they prepared their major talking points beforehand, but surely they didn’t intend to volunteer such an obvious parallel to the business industry’s past bad behavior.

Surely they didn’t mean to conjure memories of the man who printed a horrifically anti-semitic, conspiracy-laden weekly column in his newspaper that he later had bound and distributed in a series of volumes called The International Jew. 

Surely they didn’t mean to reference that “in 1938, long after the vicious character of Hitler’s government had become clear, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners.”

And surely they didn’t mean to remind us that Ford “eagerly collaborated with the Nazis,” setting up a company in Germany in 1931 in which Ford maintained a 52 percent share throughout the war and which made roughly one-third of all trucks used by the motorized German Army, sometimes with slave labor.

~*~

Whatever they did or did not intend, it is certain that Andreessen and Horowitz know now about Trump what Ford Motors, IBM, General Motors, and an uncomfortable number of other American companies knew about Hitler in the run-up to World War II.

We can be certain of this because it has been extensively studied and documented in countless publications, but today I’ll primarily pull from two: All Honorable Men (originally published in 1950) by James Stewart Martin¹ and “American Business and Germany, 1930-1941” (1962), an article published in The Western Political Quarterly by Gabriel Kolko.²

In All Honorable Men, Martin documents his team’s work in Germany to break up the German cartels that powered the Nazi machine and to investigate their ties to American industry in the aftermath of the war.

In “American Business and Germany,” Kolko argues very persuasively against the idea that American and German business behavior before and during the war had no effect on the course of the war or its ultimate brutality.

Here’s what Kolko had to say about what American business knew back then:

As for Andreessen and Horowitz, we can be certain they know Trump directed his supporters to attempt an insurrection against his own government; his speech doing so was key evidence in his second impeachment. 

We can be certain that they know Trump has illegally influenced American elections; he’s the first and only former American president to be a convicted felon (34 times over). 

We can be certain they know Trump’s created an environment of political violence that he himself has become a victim of; he’s been recorded making promises that if he’s not elected, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

But we can also be certain that Andreessen and Horowitz know Trump, because, like those Du Pont executives’ very pleasant meeting with those German gentlemen, they’ve met with him. They know his family.

It is abundantly clear to me that Andreessen and Horowitz’s endorsement of Trump is about building power and influence for themselves. Underneath all the name-dropping and brown-nosing of their political friends in the podcast are the bruised (and, in my opinion, panicked) egos of two men whose vast fortunes are not currying the power and favor with Democrats and President Biden’s administration to which they feel so entitled.

I’ve noted, and will continue to note, the close relationship between American businessmen and Nazi industry and Hitler’s government, but the relationship between Germany’s industry and the Nazi government is just as instructive on this point. 

For an illustrative example, consider this interesting context Martin provides about the calculated and mutually beneficial relationship between Hitler and German industrialists in the interwar period:

It would be more honest and expedient if we stopped allowing Andreessen and Horowitz to hide behind the pretense of caring about “Little Tech” or the “Second American Century” (which, by the way, is such an America First-sounding end to their "Little Tech Agenda" that I can’t help but wonder if it’s an intentional dog whistle to the far right).

If they care at all about startups or about continued “American technology, economic, and military leadership,” it’s only because those are excellent avenues for their own enrichment, both in a business sense and a personal sense, and they’ve correctly identified Trump as being the most expedient pathway to that enrichment.

This is well-tread ground.

~*~

Every time I came back to All Honorable Men while I was researching this piece, I was struck by the prescience of Martin’s insights. Martin is obviously writing from two very different but intertwined viewpoints: that of an investigator who’d been on the ground in barely post-war Germany to break up cartels and trying (and ultimately failing) to hold those cartels accountable; and that of a civil servant who’s had just enough time to gather some perspective on the U.S. government’s failures in its mission there. 

But truly, he could just as easily be remarking on the state and motivations of American business today.

As an illustration, take this absurd statement:

And put it together with this bit from “The Little Tech Agenda,” which is currently on the home page of a16z’s website:

Now read this account of Martin’s interview with Baron Georg von Schnitzler, a board member of IG Farben who had worked closely with businesses in the U.S. during World War II:

This is also not new, but it’s important to say it explicitly: Andreessen and Horowitz may claim that they see themselves as bipartisan, but what they really are is amoral. They’ve lost all connection with the real-world consequences of their actions and speech because their billions—thus far—have protected them from accountability.

And I can’t help but believe that Andreessen and Horowitz know this on some level, or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to justify themselves to their friends, family, and employees. 

And, just – my god, how difficult it must be for them to take this utterly unprincipled position. Let’s everyone spare a moment for these poor billionaires doing something no one is forcing them to do.

Okay, moment over.

If they were oblivious to their own power and privilege, they wouldn’t be bending over backward to explain to us little people exactly what kind of politics really matters, because otherwise they would have to contend with something the rest of us contend with every day: the reality that living in this country is inherently political and those politics are a matter of life and death. 

We don’t get to ignore literally every other thing about Trump that is inconvenient to our morality or business interests, because any one of those things is liable to hurt us, maybe even kill us.

All of the facts I laid out about Trump above have to do with the threat he poses to democracy, but that’s not all he’s known for. He’s a proven sex abuser. He’s virulently racist and anti-semitic and transphobic and xenophobic.

None of that matters to Andreessen or Horowitz, because it doesn’t have to matter. They can make the necessary contributions to causes without feeling personally involved at all.

The outcomes and consequences of Andreessen and Horowitz’s actions on other people and the country as a whole are as immaterial to them as it was to the American businessmen who helped the Nazi government flourish:

~*~

Of course, the parallels between Andreessen and Horowitz and the business interests powering the Nazi war machine don’t end here, but really, nothing beyond this matters:

Andreessen and Horowitz know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It has nothing to do with preserving the future of Tech or America and everything to do with preserving their bottom line. 

If Trump comes back to power with their help and people get hurt (as Trump has promised), Andreessen and Horowitz will not only be fine, but they’ll be standing in line to make a profit off it. 

If Trump fails to come back to power despite their help and people get hurt (as Trump has promised), Andreessen and Horowitz will regret it only insofar as they couldn’t find a way to benefit from it.

~*~

In the end, Martin wrote All Honorable Men precisely because his mission to break up the cartels and hold them accountable failed. They succeeded in dismantling only one cartel: IG Farben. The rest were, if not exactly preserved, at least left alone thanks to close ties with American and other Western industry, and thanks to America’s hopes that Germany could be rebuilt in time to aid the West in the rising conflict with Russia and communism.

The Nuremberg trials involving German industrialists were largely a mixed bag. In the IG Farben trial, 24 employees were indicted; of the 23 who made it to trial, 10 were acquitted and 13 were convicted. No one was given a sentence longer than 8 years, and all of the convicted were given credit for time already served. 

Alfried Krupp, whose family company supplied weapons and other supplies to the Nazis, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He’s quoted to have said in 1947:

Krupp was released after serving just 3 years and his wealth was eventually returned.

~*~

Martin was understandably angry about what he perceived as deliberate sabotage on the part of American businessmen in breaking up Nazi cartels. His anger hums through every page of All Honorable Men. 

But he was incensed to action, not complacency, and his insights stands as a guidebook for dealing with the Andreessens and Horowitzes of our world:

The government cannot shirk its duty of preventing corporate power from mucking about freely in our lives. Busting monopolies, holding CEOs accountable for the damage their companies have done to lives and the environment, backing labor, and yes, regulating the risks and excesses of new technologies like crypto and AI. All the things that are currently causing Andreessen and Horowitz to soil themselves and pant after a dangerous, wannabe dictator? 

It should keep doing that. It’s working.

For all that we wish it wasn’t true (and you know how much I do, considering I’ve just devoted 4500 words to saying so), corporations have enormous power. An outsized and irresponsible amount of power, some might say. (Me. I say.) And yet – Big Business has a role to play here.

If you, Joe and Jane CEO, Bob and Betty Billionaire have the power to throw around, you have a civic duty to throw it behind our Republic and the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency in 2024. 

If not for the good of the country, do it for self-preservation. Not everyone in the Nazi party was lucky enough to be an Alfried Krupp; some didn’t even make it to the start of the war. 

But really, do it for the country.

You don’t have to be like Andreessen and Horowitz and Ford and Krupp, hiding behind excuses and a perverse love for the country they’d really only love to dismantle and sell for spare parts. 

Character doesn’t inevitably evaporate with the application of wealth like the sun to water. That’s up to you.

~*~

At the beginning of All Honorable Men, an exhausted Martin asked why things had happened as they did. By the end, he had his answer.

~*~

There’s one last thing I want to say, and it’s this: there’s no point in talking about any of this if there’s nothing we can do about it.

That’s a passage from Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,³ and I’m sharing it because, if you’re still reading at this point, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there’s nothing we can do as regular people to counteract profit- and power-hungry billionaires like Andreessen and Horowitz.

First, it’s dangerous; apathy and learned helplessness only help Andreessen and Horowitz and Trump get what they want, which for Trump is unlimited power and, for Andreessen and Horowitz, is as much access to that power as their money can buy.

Secondly, it’s just not true.

We have to be responsible for what we can be. We must vote. Not only must we vote, but we must vote for whoever is the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. 

We cannot be divided on this – there is yet no force more powerful in this country than the power of citizens voting together. There is also no alternative. No one is coming to save us but us.

We must vote as if this is the last election we’ll ever have. Otherwise, it might be.

~*~

You know me, you know I don’t like leaving on a low note. Or maybe it’s not a low note so much as an anxious one.

I know how hard it is right now to be hopeful, but hope is a skill. You have to practice, and I have something I think will help. At least, it helped me.

When I was researching this piece, I came across a 1984 PBS interview with a man named Leo Cherne. Cherne himself was a businessman; he’d worked with the U.S. government during World War II to mobilize industry in support of the war and was part of the effort to rebuild Japan’s economy after the war ended.

He was a guest on Richard Heffner’s Open Mind because he was being awarded the Medal of Freedom for his work with the International Rescue Committee, but hardly any of the interview was about that. Instead, the majority of the interview was about how Cherne managed to be a realist while retaining his optimism. 

I don’t even remember how I came across it, but it’s a great interview, and I want to end with my favorite quote from it:

Go prevail. 

Go vote.⁴

1  Martin, J. S. (2016). All honorable men. Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. This really is a worthwhile read - it's relatively short and written in plain language. Also, the publisher has the ebook version on sale right now for $2.99, so it's very affordable, too.

2  Kolko, G. (1962). American business and Germany, 1930-1941. The Western Political Quarterly, 15(4), 713-728. https://doi.org/10.2307/445548

3  Snyder, T. (2017). On tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century. Tim Duggan Books.

4  Special thanks to Brian Levine, whose feedback on this piece was crucial to it ending properly. ^