Maybe this is what's behind the Koch brothers' mission to destroy the U.S. government as we know it—the government started it way back in 1944 when U.S. bombers destroyed an oil refinery built by their father, Fred Koch, in Nazi Germany. Yes, Koch money came in part from Nazi Germany, and that's not all. All of this is detailed in a new book from investigative reporter Jane Mayer, and examined more deeply by Gawker.
Mayer reveals Fred Koch’s involvement in the refinery in an early section of Dark Money detailing the making of the Koch patriarch's—and thus the Koch family's—vast wealth. "Fred Koch's willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family's early fortune," she writes, referencing refineries Fred Koch previously constructed in Joseph Stalin's U.S.S.R. The implication is clear: the fortune of one of the American right's most influential families was built in part on work performed under oppressive regimes.
Europaeische Tanklager, or Eurotank, was a converted oil storage facility that sat on the Elbe River, about seven miles northwest of the industrial city of Hamburg. According to Mayer, Eurotank was owned by William Rhodes Davis, an American businessman and Nazi sympathizer, who contracted Koch's company Koch-Winkler to provide its engineering plans and oversee construction. Construction on the plant began in 1934, about a year after the establishment of the Third Reich, she writes, and its primary client was the German military, to which it sold high-octane gasoline for use in fighter planes and bombers during World War II.
Eurotank was "a key component of the Nazi war machine," according to Dale Harrington, a Davis biographer whom Mayer quotes in Dark Money. Evidently, the allied forces agreed with that analysis. In September 1945, an expert panel called the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey published a 78-page report on a series of six attacks on Eurotank by the U.S. Air Force and Royal Air Force beginning June 18, 1944, and ending April 10, 1945. The introduction to this formerly confidential document, which was provided to Gawker this week, calls the facility "one of the largest modern oil refineries in Germany," and estimates that the hundreds of bombs dropped by the allied air forces destroyed 80 percent of Eurotank's buildings, tankage, and equipment. The attacks also killed one person and injured another, though the casualties "did not affect operations," the report alleges.
The refinery was destroyed before it could provide a great deal of support to the Nazi war effort, but if it hadn't been bombed, the Kochs equipment "could have more than doubled Eurotank’s production, refining an estimated 250,000 tons of oil between 1944 and 1945." It was Fred Koch's invention of "a better thermal cracking process for converting heavy oil to gasoline, one that was less expensive, provided higher yields, and involved less downtime than competitive processes," as Charles Koch described in his book Good Profit (yeah, how about the irony in that one?) that would have made Eurotank so dangerous to the Allies. That is if Germany had enough access to imported crude oil.
But hey, all oil money is apparently "good" money, if you're a Koch. They are slightly embarrassed by the connection, if a letter penned from a senior executive of Koch Industries to employees is any indication. His letter seeks to minimize the role Fred Koch played when his company—Winkler-Koch Engineering—designed and constructed the refinery. Besides, David L. Robertson (the executive) told employees, the Kochs had been working with the Nazi regime for a long time before World War II. Somehow that doesn't really help.