Koch history

I just was doing a Google of the Koch Brothers, and turned up this bit of history.  (Perhaps I had read about it before, but forgotten):

The Kochs may be following in the footsteps of their father Fred Koch.  As New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer has detailed, Koch Sr. made the family fortune by working for Stalin helping to build 15 Soviet oil refineries. The experience made him virulently anti-communist and anti-“big government” in general, but these beliefs did not seem to stand in the way of making money.

Fred Koch would later go on to help Hitler’s Third Reich build an important oil refinery that had to be taken out by the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II.

Going to the New Yorker article from 2010, I see that Fred Koch went from helping one of the worst Communists in history to being a anti communist to a nutty degree at home:

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

What a family dynasty, hey Jason?   His sons have more moderate views than their father - all they want to ensure they is that they can make money before their oil burning puts Florida, New York, Bangladesh, etc under 10 m of water....  



*A reference to their recent investment in a Chinese company, which is what the article is mainly about.