Himmler TLS

 

TLS Heinrich Himmler to Emil Helfferic – Thanking

German American Petroleum Company (Esso)

Date: November 24, 1943

Location: Berlin, Germany

Medium: Typed letter signed (TLS)

Collection: Yavneh Klos Collection, Nazi Perpetrators Archive 

In this official letter, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler thanks industrialist Emil Helfferich for a RM 10,000 donation from the German-American Petroleum Company (Standard Oil subsidiary). These funds supported projects like the SS Ahnenerbe and medical atrocities, such as the “Jewish Skeleton Collection,” in which 86 Jewish people at Auschwitz were selected for execution by gas; their bodies were then shipped to Reichsuniversiteit Strassburg, where their bones were defleshed and then put on display. The letter starkly reveals the complicity of industrial elites in financing the Nazi extermination apparatus.

Heinrich Himmler’s Letter Thanking the German-American Petroleum Company for Financial Donations and Support

By Gabriella Pavon.

This document is a letter dated November 24, 1943, written and signed by SS leader Heinrich Himmler to German industrialist Emil Helfferich, who managed the German-American Petroleum Company (later Esso). Himmler thanks Helfferich for a donation of RM 10,000 ($5,800 USD at the time, roughly $102,000 today) to support Nazi research and initiatives. This letter reveals the troubling financial partnerships between Nazi leadership and global industrial corporations.

The German-American Petroleum Company operated within Germany but was largely owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil). Himmler, a key architect of the Holocaust, used these funds for SS programs and organizations like the Ahnenerbe—a pseudo-scientific institute promoting racial purity and conducting human experiments in concentration camps.

This letter also references the 'Circle of Friends of the Economy,' a network of powerful businessmen and Nazi supporters. Between 1936 and 1944, the group donated roughly one million marks annually to fund Himmler’s ‘special research,’ including the horrific Jewish Skeleton Collection, in which 86 Jews were murdered at Auschwitz and their remains displayed at the Reich University in Strasbourg.

This artifact exposes how economic interests and scientific legitimacy were used to mask genocide, underscoring the complicity of multinational industries in enabling Nazi atrocities.