This is a news reel from the Associated Press in Germany, April 6, 1933.

The headline is boycott of Jews is enforced by Nazis.

That same month in the US and the UK and anti-Nazi boycott began,

discouraging people from buying German products. Hitler was chancellor and had been building his case

against Jews and communists for months, calling them the quote,

enemies from within who had caused Germany devastating losses in World War I.

Later that year, IG Farben, the largest chemical company in Germany,

gave its American publicist a massive new contract.

That man was standard oil PR guy, Ivy Lee. He had been working for Farben in the US for about

$4,000 a year since 1929. In 1933, the German-parent company offered him $25,000 a year,

and his son, $33,000 a year for advice.

Standard oil was also working with Farben. By this point, they had formed a joint venture

to work on petrochemicals and synthetic fuels. They'd seen what Lee had done for standard oil

and the Rockefellers, and with the boycotts and growing anti-German sentiment in the US,

Farben wanted Lee's help. And the reason for the big raise soon became clear.

He wasn't just advising a German chemical company. He was advising the Third Reich.

Now as far as we can tell from various available documents, the point was not to sell the Nazi

regime and its ideas to America as is, but for Lee to convince the Nazi leadership to tone down

the rhetoric, to shift some of their thinking, make themselves more palatable to Americans.

One of the big things that Lee was focused on initially was getting them to drop the idea of

kicking the foreign press out of Germany, because that idea had been floated at the time,

and it was something Lee thought of as a clear indication of fascism. In January 1934,

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