“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.

So what’s striking about Andreessen and Horowitz's endorsement of Donald Trump 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.

INTRO

Support Human Roundup, Issue 23 July 24: You Can Do Business with Hitler

FILED UNDER:

Roundup, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, a16z, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, World War II, History, Politics, Antisemitism, News, Boy that Communications degree is really coming in handy right about now, Thanks DU

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 that 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.

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 Friday, July 19th: “The Inevitability of Big Tech Backing Trump,” and “Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy.”

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 even paid the podcast any attention at all, and honestly, it really 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, in fact, 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. 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, either through ignorance or intention, misleading.

HOROWITZ: Well, and that strength was built through kind of little tech entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison, like Henry Ford, who kind of built these technologies and these companies and these manufacturing capabilities that ultimately help win us World War II and built the economy and so forth. These same entrepreneurs exist today or they're descendants, and these are the interests that we're concerned with and trying to protect.

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 into hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed in a series of volumes called The International Jew.

~*~

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.

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:

The German gentlemen discussed the political situation in Germany, with particular reference to the positive position of the Government against the Jews. They also explained how Herr Krupp had developed a scheme whereby industry could contribute to the [Nazi] party organization funds…Interviews in general with I. G. Farbenindustrie were of a very pleasant nature, and indicated the closer cooperation which is manifest between Du Pont and that company.”

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.

HOROWITZ: And a quick background, Marc and I have both gotten to know the family, particularly Jared and Ivanka and their kids, Arabella, Joseph and Theo. And in fact, like Ivanka and the kids were just at my house. We went to see David Copperfield, all that. [...]

ANDREESSEN: We, Ben and I had dinner with the former president 10 days ago at Bedminster, his golf club in New Jersey, and had a three-hour dinner. And so, you know, we were really quite literally just with him and kind of got to know him as a person.

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.

HOROWITZ: So we tried to meet with Gary Gensler, who's the... So he's the chair of the SEC. He's running this campaign against crypto.

We're the largest crypto investors, or largest blockchain investors in the world. And we've requested meetings with him at least a half a dozen times. I even was able to get in contact with his office mate at MIT who said, surely Gary will meet with you.

It's so important that he meets with you. You know all these things. And he couldn't get us the meeting.

He was appointed by all accounts, not really by Joe Biden, but by Elizabeth Warren, who refuses, similarly refuses to meet with us. The only senator who has refused to meet with us. And then of course we have been unable to get a meeting with the president himself.

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 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. Martin writes:

“The IG Farben New Order plan was initiated by the Farben management, acting on its own, to show the German High Command how the corporate expansion of IG Farben as a business proposition could be geared in with the interests of the German government in establishing German power all over the world. This close identity between the business interests of the company and the national interests of Germany was not accidental. It was the result of over twenty years of close working between the management of German industry and the German government.

Under this working arrangement, the laws of Germany had been gradually modified to give more and more assistance to the growth of organizations like IG Farben. Special tax concessions favoring the growth of combines [monopolies], modifications of the corporation law to give management a free hand, government subsidies for special projects, all strengthened the position of the combines in a geometric progression as their size increased. In return, the greater size and weight of the combines made them a more and more powerful instrument of German policy abroad.”

~*~

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:

HOROWITZ: “And it's gonna be tough, and I wish it wasn't this way. I wish it wasn't so drastic, and I wish we didn't have to pick a side, because we're generally bipartisan.”

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

“Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents.

Little Tech has run independent of politics for our entire careers. But, as the old Soviet joke goes, ‘You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.’ [...]

Our political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech. We do not engage in political fights outside of issues directly relevant to Little Tech.”

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:

“But actually in his own mind he need not have seen any inconsistencies between his post as an ‘unpolitical’ businessman who did not want to know about “government” business–poison gas, slave labor, Auschwitz and all that–and his record of steady contributions of at least $40 thousand a year to “Sonderkonto [special account] S.” In his own way he was speaking of a world in which one makes the necessary contributions to “causes” without feeling personally involved at all.”

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.

HOROWITZ: And the last thing I wanted for the firm, for our employees, for the companies we invest in and so forth, was us to be involved in this because it gets very emotional. It's tough, but like, we literally, like the future of our business, the future of technology, new technology and the future of America is literally at stake with some of these, I just say like really misguided and difficult policies. So here we are.

And for a little tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice. And sorry mom, she's gonna be, I know you're gonna be mad at me for this, but like we had to do it. And that's our show for today.

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 single 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. Kolko writes:

“It is almost superfluous to point out that the motives of the American firms bound to contracts with German concerns were not pro-Nazi, whatever else they may have been. [...] Their consciousness of the world crisis was not that of the business press’, and to the extent that they were aware of the political implications of the German cartels they could not or chose not to see the direct relevance of their own actions to larger patterns and relationships.

. . to put the proposition rather bluntly, such matters should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors. According to my belief, it should subscribe to that philosophy, or else it should not do any export business at all. I will go so far as to say, if it did not subscribe to that philosophy it could not do any export business, or any to amount to anything....

... an international business operating throughout the world, should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the country in which it is operating.

As a Dow Chemical Company spokesman put it, "we do not inquire into the uses of the products. We are interested in selling them.”

~*~

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. Martin writes:

Propaganda has been turned out in an effort to convince people that the industrialists who backed the Hitler coup did not realize they were opening a Pandora's box. We are to believe that the troubles they set loose plagued them no less than the rest of mankind. On the contrary, from all that we could gather in talking with German industrialists, the big-industry group in Germany regrets the Hitler period only because the Nazis lost the war.

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.

“The economy needed a steady or growing development. Because of the rivalries between the many political parties in Germany and the general disorder there was no opportunity for prosperity. ... We thought that Hitler would give us such a healthy environment. Indeed he did do that. ... We Krupps never cared much about [political] ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”

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 advice stands as a guidebook for dealing with the Andreessens and Horowitzes of our world:

“Our government could not muster the determination and constancy of purpose to match the dogged persistence of the fraternity brothers. [...] Yet these powerful corporations which were able to frustrate the intentions of our government derive their powers by consent of the government.”

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. Again, Martin writes:

“The ecopolitical masters of Germany boosted Hitler and his program into the driver's seat at a time when the tide in the political fight between the Nazis and the supporters of the Weimar Republic was swinging against the Nazis. All of the men who mattered in banking and industrial circles could quickly agree on one program and throw their financial weight behind it. Their support won the election for the Nazis.

We must assume that the same thing is not yet true in the United States. We do have economic power so concentrated that it would lie in the power of a group of not more than a hundred men — if they could agree among themselves — to throw the same kind of combined economic weight behind a single program. They have not agreed yet.

[...] If the United States should run into serious economic difficulties, however, most of the conditions for a re-enactment of the German drama would already exist on the American stage. The slight differences within the camp of the fraternity then may be the only real barrier to the kind of integration of the financial and industrial community behind a single repressive program, like that which the financiers and industrialists of Germany executed through Hitler.”

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. As Martin writes:

“Our job now is to prepare for a future crisis before it happens. [...] [W]e have to reassert public goals in the United States which will prevent the already apparent concentration of economic power in our own country from reaching the end it did in Germany.

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.

“The moral of this is not that Germany is an inevitable menace, but that there are forces in our own country which can make Germany a menace. And, more importantly, they could create a menace of their own here at home, not through a deliberate plot to bring about a political catastrophe but as a calm judgment of "business necessity." The men who would do this are not Nazis, but businessmen; not criminals, but honorable men.”

~*~

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.

I’m quoting now from Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century:

“The danger we now face is of a passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity, from a naive and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy. The politics of inevitability is terribly vulnerable to the kind of shock it has just received. When something shatters the myth, when our time falls out of joint, we scramble to find some other way to organize what we experience. The path of least resistance leads directly from inevitability to eternity. If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.

I’m sharing this because, if you’re still listening at this point, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there’s nothing we can do as 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. Snyder writes:

“Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.”

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.

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:

LEO CHERNE: “There is a chronic failing in the American people which curiously enough gives me a great deal of encouragement. We have always been incapable of meeting a challenge when you would think a dummy would perceive it. We are always too late, always too little. But when the challenge is unmistakable, it is perfectly extraordinary how we turn around and, at least in the past, have somehow or other succeeded, prevailed.”

Go prevail.

Go vote.

FOOTNOTES

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

The music you heard in this episode is Building a Story by Evan MacDonald.

OUTTRO

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