Written by Damien Crisp
Notorious Nazis Ilse Koch, her husband Karl Otto Koch and Erich Koch are the ghosts of Koch Industries, who seized the U.S. conservative political agenda years ago and seem capable of seizing the government in total through the Tea Party. Ilse Koch was the Nazi’s specialist in making objects from human skin; was the only woman charged with war crimes; and along with her husband was in charge of one of the most horrific horror camps in Nazi Germany.
Koch Industries is the child of the violence of Buchenwald, widely regarded as one of wartime Germany’s most notorious “death camps”.
Information connecting Ilse and Koch Industries is hard to find but is a string of fragments, pieces of information that connects the American and German Kochs and this connection gives us a clear image of the sentiment behind the Tea Party and conservative American politics since the 1950s.
Where is the connection between the German Koch’s and Fred Koch?
Besides evidence the American Koch was related to Ilse’s family, Erich Koch (a high level Nazi official in charge of Prussia) invites Fred Koch to sell his oil in Nazi Germany when he is banned from doing business in the US. After the fall of Nazi Germany, Erich Koch and Fred expand the oil empire to the Soviet Union. Erich Koch had been in charge of Prussia for Hitler so his ties to the Soviet Union ran deep. A few years later the Soviets took Fred Koch’s oil and prosecuted Erich for war crimes – Fred Koch returned to the US, became anti-communist, and was allowed to do business in the States again.
American Fred Koch, and through association the Kochs from Germany, establish the John Birch Society in the 1950s in NY, which becomes the policy center for American conservatives. The society was built on Fred Koch’s oil money in the 1950s and can be thought of as the center of neo-conservative politics as well as the Tea Party movement. The ideologies of each are not the same – but the Tea Party fits into the neo-conservative put for colonial corporate police state as a sort of consumer citizen of the neo-conservative strategy mad as hell at the government and the legacy of liberalism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, taxes….etc.
Notes on the Koch’s, Their Nazi Past, American Oil & The Foundation of Republican Ideology
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Erich Koch
Koch reported to Hitler that unemployment had been banished entirely from East Prussia, a feat that gained admiration throughout the Reich.
On September 1, Koch became Reichskommissar of Reichskommissariat Ukraine with control of the Gestapo and the police. His domain was extended from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea; he captured ethnic German, Polish, Belarus and Ukrainian’s declaring that “Ukraine children need no schools. What they’ll have to learn will be taught them by their German masters” and “If I meet a Ukrainian worthy of being seated at my table, I must have him shot..”.
Koch worked together with the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, providing the Reich with forced labor. Due to his brutal actions, Nazi rule in Ukraine was disturbed by a growing number. Before once more getting away himself, by escaping through this Baltic Sea port on April 23, 1945, on the icebreaker Ostpreußen. He faced charges of war crimes for the extermination of 400,000 Poles, but was never indicted for his crimes in Ukraine. He was sentenced to death on March 9, 1959 by the district court in Warsaw for having planned, prepared and organized the mass murder of civilians. Russians thought he possessed information about art looted by the Nazis during the war.
Years after the war, Koch stood trial in Poland and was convicted in 1959 of war crimes and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment a year later.
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Brother of Erich Koch, Karl Otto Koch
….(August 2, 1897 – April 5, 1945), a Standartenführer (Colonel) in the German Schutzstaffel (SS), was the first commandant of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald. On August 1, 1937 he was given command of the new concentration camp at Buchenwald. Investigation into his improper conduct at Buchenwald included corruption, fraud, embezzlement, drunkenness, sexual offenses and a murder. Koch’s orders to kill prisoners at the camp were revealed, as well as embezzlement of property stolen from prisoners.
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Ilse Koch
Koch married Ilse Köhler with whom he had a son and two daughters. Köhler later became known as “The ***** of Buchenwald. She was accused of taking souvenirs from the skin of murdered inmates with distinctive tattoos. She built an indoor sports arena, which cost over 250,000 marks, most of which were taken from the inmates arrested by the Gestapo for embezzlement of SS funds and the murder of certain inmates in an attempt to cover up these crimes.
She was tried for war crimes by an American military tribunal in 1947. Prosecuting her was future United States Court of Claims Judge Robert L. Kunzig. She was charged with ”participating in a criminal plan for aiding, abetting and participating in the murders at Buchenwald.” The tribunal found Koch guilty and sentenced her to life imprisonment.
After she had served two years, General Lucius D. Clay, the interim military governor of the American Zone in Germany, pardoned her. Owing to international condemnation, however, Koch was re-arrested in 1949 and tried before a West German court for instigation to murder in 135 cases. She was sentenced to life imprisonment on January 15, 1951. She committed suicide by hanging herself at Aichach women’s prison on September 1, 1967
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Fred Chase Koch
….(September 23, 1900 – November 17, 1967) chemical engineer and founded the TEXACO oil refinery firm that later became Koch Industries (Chevron). Koch and its customers were sued for patent infringement, process for turning crude oil into gasoline. Litigation effectively put Winkler-Koch out of business in the U.S. for several years. Koch turned his focus to foreign markets, including the Soviet Union and NAZI GERMANY, reportedly with the help of ERICH KOCH.
During his time in the Soviet Union, Fred Koch came to despise communism and Josef Stalin’s regime “a land of hunger, misery and terror”.
Fred C. Koch married Mary Robinson in Kansas City, Missouri in 1932. They had four sons, Frederick (b. 1933), Charles (b. 1935), David (b. 1940) and William (b. 1940). His sons are Charles de Ganahl Koch and David H. Koch.
Ilse and her husband Karl were tried by the SS before the war ended, accused of corruption. Her husband Karl Otto Koch was tried and sentenced to death in Nazi Germany. After the war, Ilse was arrested in the German American Zone, tried in front of a tribunal and sentenced, but was quickly pardoned by the American general appointed leader of the zone.
What is it with these Republicans and Nazism? Of course, if you go far enough to the right, as the Koch brothers have, you inevitably end up as a jack-booted fascist, which can also be said of those who go too far left — you become a tyrannical Stalinist, indistinguishable from a fascist. The Nazis, too, just like today’s Teabaggers, were selling ‘freedom’ for the German masses, especially freedom from minorities like gays, Jews and foreigners who were blamed for all the nation’s problems. (Except now it’s Muslims instead of Jews.) The Nazis prized their ‘right to free speech’ to shout down and initimidate the opposition, just like our current crop of Teabaggers. The Nazis also respected the rule of law, as long as they made the laws and controlled the judges, just like you know who. Unfortunately, the right-wing is blind to who they are emulating in their message and methods.
You know, I can understand having a dark past. But learning not just “nothing,” but learning the opposite lesson? All you need to do to head the same way is be more deceptive, more conniving? Can this sickness be congenital too?
The good thing is that it always falls apart, just as a house built by carpenters who don’t know how to build a house falls apart. What the conmen at the top are playing is the same game Wall Street and the banks are playing — stay one step ahead of the disaster and cash in before the whole thing collapses in a heap. In two years, a GOP majority of idiots and cynics in even one house of Congress could do a lot of damage to the country, and that’s what’s scary.
On the plus side, my SO volunteered to help a Dem candidate locally. They told her there have been more volunteers this year then there were in 2006 when the Dems took Congress. As mad as many voters rightfully are at Obama and the Dems, I think they took a look at the alternative and it freaked them out. As someone said a few weeks ago, all the GOP is offering is a tax cut and a prayer.