In 1937, John D. Rockefeller died, but his legacy of using oil money to grease the wheels of fascism continued. That year, as the Spanish Civil War raged, Texas Co. (later called Texaco) fueled Franco’s fascists. (In 1936, Texas Co. and Standard Oil California formed California Texas Oil (later Caltex) to combine Texas Co’s marketing network in the Middle East with Standard’s operations there.) Texas Co. also continued shipping oil to Germany during WWII. In 1938, Brown Brothers, Harriman, the Wall Street investment firm (with senior partners
Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker) was involved in funding the supply of leaded gas for the Nazi Luftwaffe. Chevron and Texas Co. created Aramco in 1939, to pump Saudi oil for the Nazi war machine. In 1940, Texaco provided an office, in their Chrysler Building, for a Nazi intelligence officer, Dr. Gerhardt Westrick. Executives of Standard Oil’s German subsidiary were “Prominent figures of Himmler’s Circle of Friends of the Gestapo – its chief financiers – and close friends and colleagues of the Baron von Schroder” a leading Gesatpo officer and financier (Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy). Just before WWII, the Rockefeller’s Chase Bank collaborated with the Nazi’s Schroder Bank to raise $25 million for Germany’s war economy. They also supplied the German government with names and background information on 10,000 fascist sympathizers in America. Throughout WWII, Rockefeller’s Chase Bank stayed open in Nazi-occupied Paris, providing services for Germany’s embassy and its businesses.