WWII Nazi/American corp. collaboration

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/rich/120298rich.html

A Frank Rich op-ed piece that puts the recent story of GM and Ford
collaborating with the Nazis into the larger context of a "marathon
conference co-hosted by the State Department and the Holocaust Memorial
Museum to speed the further restitution of Nazi loot, from gold to art" in
Washington this week.

"For all this activity, there's been one smaller but not insignificant
piece of the story that has received far less scrutiny than the malevolence
of the Germans, the Swiss, the French, et al. --  namely, any collaboration
between American corporations and the  Nazis. On Monday, just as delegates
were arriving in Washington for  their Holocaust conference, that silence
was broken by Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post reporter who last rattled
the capital with his revelation of Madeleine Albright's previously unknown
Jewish heritage. [...] When I read G.M.'s latest statement of denial to
Bradford Snell, a historian who is completing a book on the auto giant to
be published by Knopf, he laughed and dismissed it as "baloney." Mr. Snell
maintains that G.M.'s complicity with the Nazis was "pretty deep" -- and
far more important than that of Switzerland. In his book he will devote
"several hundred pages" to G.M.'s wartime  history -- a story he has
assembled over 20 years through interviews with former G.M. employees and
Albert Speer as well as  from documents in Nazi, British, Polish and U.S.
archives. G.M.,  though, has given him "zero" information to help set the
half-century-old record straight."

I'm not enough of a historian to know to what degree that information about
"cartels" that Pynchon delineated in GR might have been news to the reading
public.  Was Pynchon putting together, within his fictional context, the
secret history of WWII that wasn't widely known outside specialist circles?

-Doug