setting up a foundation to help disperse his mountain of money. “No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them,”
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- "In the case of the Koch family, there’s plenty of misconduct to investigate - "
As Jane Mayer documents in her indispensable 2016 book Dark Money, the father of the Koch brothers, Fred Koch, built the family fortune in the 1930s by helping build oil refineries,
briefly for Stalin’s USSR and over the better part of a decade in Hitler’s Germany. Koch’s work for Germany played a major role in allowing the Nazi regime to achieve its goal of economic autarky,
freeing it from dependence on foreign oil and making possible Hitler’s military adventurism.
(And this explains the castle in Austria - a getaway I didn't understand until I read this)
A fierce anti-communist, Fred Koch seems to have regretted his quondam alliance with the Bolsheviks. He was more favorably disposed to the
other major dictatorship he worked for. “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany,
Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he wrote to a friend in 1938. Nazi Germany, Fred Koch felt, offered a salutary alternative
to the “feeding at the public trough” of the New Deal. These ideas might explain why the wealthy oil executive hired a Nazi governess to raise his sons.
Link: https://www.thenation.com/article/even-david-kochs-philanthropy-was-toxic/