# William Rhodes Davis William Rhodes Davis (February 10, 1889 – August 1, 1941) was an American oil "wildcatter" and dealmaker who became, in the words of a federal prosecutor, a Nazi **"agent of influence"** — the man who supplied a meaningful share of the oil Hitler needed to start World War II, and who in 1940 funneled German money into a U.S. election in an attempt to unseat Franklin Roosevelt. In this KB he matters for one specific reason above all others: **Davis is the connective tissue between [[Fred C. Koch]] and the Third Reich.** It was Davis who brought Koch's firm [[Winkler-Koch Engineering]] in to design and build the [[Eurotank]] refinery in Hamburg — one of the largest refineries serving Nazi Germany — making the founding fortune of the Koch dynasty partly a product of business done for Hitler. ## Background - Born February 10, 1889, in Montgomery, Alabama, into a family of limited means - Entered the oil business in 1913, organizing a small company in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and working as a "wildcatter" — a speculative independent driller operating outside the major integrated oil companies - Spent the 1920s as a serial promoter with a checkered, litigation-heavy business record; he was variously described as a profiteer, a fixer, and a crook long before the Nazi association - By the mid-1930s he controlled a sprawl of roughly twenty companies headquartered in New York, with operations reaching into Mexico, Germany, and Sweden ## The Hamburg Refinery and the Koch Connection (1933–1935) Davis's central scheme in the early 1930s was to build an oil refinery inside Germany that would buy crude on the world market, refine it on German soil, and sell the products to a Reich that was desperate to reduce its dependence on the major foreign oil companies. Locked out of conventional Western financing because of his reputation, Davis pitched the project directly to the Nazi government and secured the **personal approval of Adolf Hitler**, with backing arranged through German banks and the Reichsbank apparatus. To build it he needed an engineer who could deliver a modern cracking unit and was not tied to the majors. He found [[Fred C. Koch]], whose firm [[Winkler-Koch Engineering]] had been frozen out of the U.S. market by patent litigation and was already taking its thermal-cracking technology abroad (most notably to Stalin's USSR). Beginning in **1934**, Winkler-Koch engineered and oversaw construction of the cracking plant at Davis's facility — **[[Eurotank]]** (Europäische Tanklager und Transport A.G.), a converted oil-storage site on the Elbe northwest of Hamburg. Under Koch's direction the unit was finished by **1935**, with a capacity of roughly 360,000 tons of oil a year. The complex became one of the largest refineries in Germany and a vital cog in the fuel supply of the Nazi war machine. The arrangement is the documentary basis for the claim that **the Koch family fortune has Nazi-era roots**: Davis owned the refinery and brokered the politics; Koch supplied the engineering that made it run. ## Mexican Oil and the Axis (1938–1940) Davis's second major maneuver followed the **[[Mexican Oil Expropriation]]** of 1938, when President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the foreign-owned oil industry. When the expropriated majors organized a global boycott of Mexican crude, Davis stepped into the gap as a broker, moving large volumes of cut-rate Mexican oil to Germany and Italy at a moment when the Axis powers were starved for petroleum and most Western suppliers would not deal with them. He became, in effect, a private back-channel keeping Axis fuel flowing as Europe slid toward war. ## Funneling Nazi Money into the 1940 U.S. Election By 1940 Davis had moved from selling oil to the Reich to running political errands for it. The Nazi calculation was simple: if Roosevelt could be replaced by a non-interventionist, U.S. entry into the European war could be delayed or prevented. [[Hermann Göring]] allocated roughly **$5 million** to Davis's schemes, with funds reportedly stashed at the German embassy in Washington. Davis's documented activity included: - Channeling around **$160,000** into a Pennsylvania Democratic organization to try to defeat Senator Joseph Guffey, a prominent critic of Nazi Germany - Arranging financing for labor leader [[John L. Lewis]]'s **October 23, 1940 national radio address**, in which Lewis attacked Roosevelt and endorsed Republican nominee [[Wendell Willkie]] — done without Willkie's knowledge - Trafficking on his friendship with Lewis, who was believed to influence millions of labor votes The plan largely failed. The Republicans nominated Willkie, who turned out to be an interventionist; with no isolationist on the ticket, the Nazi money had no effective vehicle. See [[1940 Presidential Election]]. ## Surveillance, Death, and Exposure Davis was under FBI surveillance and was suspected by British intelligence (the New York–based British Security Coordination under William Stephenson) of being a German agent. He **died of a heart attack in Houston on August 1, 1941**, at age 52. Because of the timing and his enemies, persistent speculation has held that he was assassinated by British intelligence; no proof has ever surfaced, and the heart-attack account is the documented one. The full scope of his political operation became public only in **1957**, when the U.S. government released captured Nazi documents showing how Davis had funneled Reich funds into the 1940 campaign. The fullest account is Dale Harrington's biography *Mystery Man: William Rhodes Davis, Nazi Agent of Influence* (2001). ## Why Davis Matters 1. **He is the missing link in the Koch origin story.** The Koch fortune's two foreign roots — Stalin's refineries and Hitler's refinery — both run through deals that, on the Nazi side, only happened because Davis assembled them. The [[Fred C. Koch]] page is incomplete without him. 2. **He is an early template for [[Foreign Election Interference]].** Decades before contemporary debates over the subject, Davis ran a hostile foreign power's cash into a U.S. presidential cycle through domestic intermediaries — labor, a state party organization, sympathetic media buys. 3. **He is a case study in the amorality of the "neutral" middleman.** Davis was not an ideologue in the manner of the [[America First Committee]] isolationists; he was a profiteer who discovered that the most profitable customer of the late 1930s was the Reich, and followed the money into outright agency for it. ## See Also - [[Fred C. Koch]] — the engineer Davis brought in to build the Hamburg refinery - [[Eurotank]] — the Hamburg refinery itself; the physical node of the Koch–Nazi connection - [[Winkler-Koch Engineering]] — Koch's firm, the contractor on the Eurotank cracking unit - [[Hermann Göring]] — funded Davis's 1940 election scheme - [[John L. Lewis]] — labor leader whose anti-Roosevelt radio address Davis financed - [[1940 Presidential Election]] — the target of the Nazi-funded operation - [[Mexican Oil Expropriation]] — set up the boycott that routed Mexican oil to the Axis through Davis - [[Foreign Election Interference]] — the through-line his 1940 operation anchors - [[America First Committee]] — the broader non-interventionist current Davis exploited