Yesterday (1/13), Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the story:
CALLER: The fact that ISIS doesn't hear Donald Trump.
RUSH: Hey, that's nothing. Have you heard...? Jane Mayer's got a book, and the New York Times picked it up. Are you aware that the father of the Koch brothers built the third largest oil refine for the Nazis?
CALLER: "Oh, yeah. What a great, quote/unquote, "recruitment tool."
RUSH: Well, but the fact is he didn't! They're totally making this up. They're making it up.
As a reminder, even the official corporate statement did not accuse Jane Mayer of “making it up” and actually acknowledged that:
Between 1928 and 1934, Winkler-Koch Engineering handled more than 500 projects. Of these, 39 involved signed contracts to build cracking units. One of those units was included in a refinery in the port area of Hamburg, Germany, built for Foreign Oil Co. of Boston.
…
Winkler-Koch’s contract with Foreign Oil was signed on Sept. 8, 1933, and the refinery became operational March 23, 1935. That signing was nearly six years before Germany invaded Poland.
So, even the company response was essentially that they only built part of the refinery in Nazi Germany, and that it was before Hitler invaded Poland.
To understand Rush Limbaugh’s over-enthusiastic defense of the Kochs, it might be helpful to note the the partially Koch-funded FreedomWorks allegedly was a sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s in the past. Politico’s Ken Vogel reported in 2014 on Limbaugh’s ties to FreedomWorks and the partially Koch-funded Heritage Foundation:
Rush Limbaugh: The Heritage Foundation at the end of January ended its five-year sponsorship of El Rushbo’s show, for which it had paid more than $2 million in some years and more than $9.5 million overall. In 2012, FreedomWorks paid at least $1.4 million to make him an endorser, though it’s not clear that the sponsorship is ongoing.
After the negative publicity those sponsorships received, it is possible that Koch-funded groups no longer have active relationships with Rush Limbaugh or his show. But, he certainly indirectly benefited from the money that was flowing through the network of partially Koch-funded political groups in the past.