That was before WW2 started, so this was not ‘trading with the enemy’ or anything that.
Lots of folks did business with the Germany and the Nazis. They were pretty popular as an alternative to Communism at the time.
Only if they did business after the start of the war, were they wrong (*cough*Standard Oil*cough*).
This is fairly common. Walter Duranty told the State Department that the New York Times had a similar agreement with Stalin.
Jordan Eason wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The News We Kept to Ourselves.” In it he explained how CNN intentionally distorts the news. In order to maintain access a reported must not offend Saddam Hussein.
No- they were never couched as an “alternative to Communism”... they were part and parcel in the FOLD of the US State Department, and multiple financial/industrialists who supported the Ruhr Valley industrialists and who had prior profiteered from WWI. For a “you are there” understanding of the attitude and level of deception and collaboration with the Weimar German elevation of herr hitler— going on in the State Department in first term of FDR. The time period before 1939, and yes, us firms (oil particularly) traded with the ascending nazis.
“In the Garden of the Beasts”— Eric Larson. FDR’s first ambassador to Germany, Amb. Dodd, and his whacked out family, daughter who was whore (slept with the first head of the Gestapo- protected by Goering). Understand that this was a world socialist, FDR, hands off of a national socialist (hitler) at the advice of the harvahhd and yalie pro-socialist/anti-semites and deep Soviet agents within the “Club” inside the State Department. All documented at this point and proven. The same prez who tried to stack the Supreme Court in his quest to be a dictator of the US. A socialist and democrat— world socialist who wrote an entire new additional bill of rights (that were never in the Constitution).