The Koch Brothers & Their Dark Money
In his review of “Dark Money,” Jane Mayer‘s new book about the Koch brothers, Charles Kaiser writes: ‘Lots of American industrialists have skeletons in the family closet. Charles and David Koch, however, are in a league of their own. The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.’