By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

Corporate leaders in all western countries, including most emphatically
the US, loathed the Soviet Union because that state was the cradle of
the communist "counter system" to the international capitalist order of
things, and a source of inspiration to America's own "reds."
Furthermore, they found particularly offensive that the homeland of
communism did not fall prey to the Great Depression, but experienced an
industrial revolution that has been favourably compared by American
historian, John H. Backer with the widely celebrated "economic miracle"
of West Germany after World War II. 22

The appeasement policy was a devious scheme, whose real objective had to
be concealed from the British and French publics. It backfired
spectacularly because its contortions eventually made Hitler suspicious
about the real intentions of London and Paris, which caused him to make a
deal with Stalin, and thus led to Germany's war against France and
Great Britain rather than the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, the dream of a German crusade against the communist Soviet
Union on behalf of the capitalist West refused to die. London and Paris
merely launched a "Phoney War" against Germany, hoping that Hitler
would eventually turn against the Soviet Union after all. This was also
the idea behind quasi-official missions to London and Berlin, undertaken
by GM's James D. Mooney, who tried very hard — as did the US ambassador
in London, Joseph Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy — to persuade
German and British leaders to resolve their inconvenient conflict, so
that Hitler could devote his undivided attention to his great eastern
project. In a meeting with Hitler in March 1940, Mooney made a plea for
peace in western Europe, suggesting "that Americans had understanding
for Germany's standpoint with respect to the question of living space" —
in other words, that they had nothing against his territorial claims in
the East (Billstein et al., 37–44) 23 Continued