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distribution as SKF chairman was Sven Wingquist, a dashing playboy friend of Goring and the
Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He was a prominent partner in Jacob Wallenberg's Stockholm
Enskilda, the largest private bank in Sweden -- a correspondent bank of Hitler's Reichsbank.
Wallenberg was large, athletic, impeccably Aryan -- comptroller of mining, shale oil, electrical
goods, munitions, iron mines -- virtually the whole industrial economy of his native country.
Sosthenes Behn and Wingquist were in partnership with Axel Wenner-Gren of U.S. Electrolux
in the gigantic Bofors munitions empire: Bofors supplied Germany with a substantial part of its
steel production in World War II.
As stated, American directors for the duration were Goring's second cousin by marriage Hugo
von Rosen, and William L. Batt. A hard-bitten and driving individualist, Batt was born in Indiana;
he began in railway shops, where he learned a machinist's trade from his father. He earned his
engineering degree at Purdue in 1907; next year he was employed in the ball-bearing plant of
Hess-Bright Manufacturing Co. of Philadelphia. When Hess-Bright amalgamated with SKF in
1919, he rose rapidly to become president of the company in 1923.
A big man, with the hands of a lumberjack, black patent-leather hair, a prominent nose and a
jutting cleft chin, Batt dressed in high fashion, and sported monogrammed silk handkerchiefs
and Sulka ties. His SKF factory in Philadelphia rivaled the giant sister factories in Goteborg in
Sweden and Schweinfurt in Germany. SKF Philadelphia was the subject of glowing articles in
The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine, its products reaching a staggering $21 million
a year by 1940.
With war approaching, and the fear of America entering the conflict, Hugo von Rosen and
fellow board members traveled to their German and Italian plants, which were jointly owned
with Germany and Italy, and promised their managers that if it proved difficult to ship ball
bearings to Nazi or Italian affiliates in Latin America through the British blockade, Philadelphia
would take over whether or not Roosevelt declared war. Simultaneously, the SKF directors
protected their associated chemical company, I.G. Farben's Bosch, with the aid of John Foster
Dulles. Batt was president of American Bosch. Dulles, the Bosch/General Aniline and Film
attorney, set up a voting trust to protect the company with himself and Batt as trustees after
Pearl Harbor. He was thus enabled to save the company from being seized until the spring of
1942, five months after America was at war.
Dulles also proved helpful in setting up similar protections for SKF: protections that lasted until
the end of the war. He helped organize a deal whereby Batt became the nominal majority
shareholder with trustee voting rights. Since American-owned companies could not be seized
by Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley, this proved to be a protection.
With the outbreak of war, Roosevelt appointed Batt vice-chairman of the War Production Board,
whose chairman was Sears, Roebuck's Donald Nelson. Batt worked from 8 A.M. until after
midnight, so busy that his lunch consisted of apples and milk eaten in the middle of meetings
while he kept relighting his cold pipe with a lighter in the form of a cannon.
From the moment he took up his position on the War Production Board, Batt instituted the
famous motto "Patch and pray." Ignoring the fact that his fellow Fraternity members had
caused these very shortages, and that he was wartime majority trustee shareholder for
companies collaborating with the enemy, he blasted the public on the radio for being
extravagant with rubber and scrap metal. He insisted that housewives turn in their tin cans, old
tires, tubes, leaky hot water bottles, rubber gloves, and aprons. He called for all old
newspapers to be sent for packing ammunition; he enforced voluntary surrender of rags, used
wool, and even fats for glycerin. At the same time, he cheerfully overlooked the fact that scrap
had gone to build the bombs that were rained on Pearl Harbor. He moved smoothly between
that whited sepulcher of Republicanism, the Union League Club of Philadelphia, and the New
Dealers on Capitol Hill. He was smart enough to express admiration of the Red Army when he
went to Russia on the famous Averell Harriman mission. It was convenient for him to be called
a "pink" while maintaining his Nazi connections.
During his period with the War Production Board, which lasted for the duration, Batt's behavior
was largely in the interests of The Fraternity. He was ideally situated to turn a blind eye to von
Rosen's trade with Proclaimed Listees, given his immense influence and the fact that he had
innumerable government employees on his staff throughout North and South America and
neutral Europe. Because of war and the blockade, it was difficult for SKF in Sweden to
supply its Proclaimed List customers south of the Panama Canal. As a result, von Rosen saw
to it that those same companies were supplied direct from Philadelphia.
Von Rosen was under direct orders from Stockholm to supply the Latin American Nazi-
associated firms irrespective of the fact that there was an overwhelming demand for all
available ball bearings in the United States. He was to base his sales on the principle of
Business as Usual rather than on the needs of the war effort. Batt, accepting these
arrangements, could not use the excuse that he was in effect working for a Swedish company
and therefore had to obey neutral rules, since he himself as an American owned 103,439
shares of capital stock.
Under von Rosen's directorship and Batt's trusteeship, SKF production in wartime failed to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]