Nazi Capitalism: Colluding with Nazis economically while fighting them simultaneously.
We need to always understand that the underlying foreign American policy around the world is predicated by profit.......even as millions of innocent people die by their hands, or at the hands of their "business partners"......
To the American privileged capitalist oligarchy, the word, "Genocide", is just a nuisance, which is overlooked, justified, condoned, and at times purposely initiated, for the ultimate purposes of making cold, hard cash.
The distressing, disgusting and reprehensible aspect of this is that the average American just keeps going on as if it is of no consequence. Life goes on......AND they....WE.....keep patronizing these businesses. Business as usual. How does it escape us that we, as a Black (not to speak of more in the larger minority diaspora) collective, have $1.5 Trillion at our disposal annually, and this is what these companies keep targeting in their adverts? How do we keep falling for the false narratives and deceptive advertising?
From the profits accrued from millions of deaths of Africa during slavery, to the most recent brouhaha involving billions of dollars made from free labor in privatized American prisons, the largest in the world, run by the infamous Correctional Corporation of America, and everything in between, the mentality has not changed.
IBM directly supplied the Nazis with technology which was used to help transport millions of people to their deaths in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka. IBM was working in tandem with the Reich to liquidate Jews from Holland. IBM employees were training SS personnel how to use their machines to record the movement, sorting, and mass execution of large numbers of undesirables, at times right in the headquarters of death camps. These machines, however, remained IBM property at all times.
IBM executives at the firm's New York headquarters directly controlled a Polish subsidiary which leased punch-card machines used to "calculate exactly how many Jews should be emptied out of the ghettos each day" and to transport them efficiently on railways leading to the death camps.
The first edition of the book, "IBM and the Holocaust" prompted a group of death-camp survivors to launch a legal action against IBM, but it was dropped in case it might delay other compensation payments to the victims of the Nazi regime.
These are other examples of several American companies that collaborated with the Nazis.
1. Kodak:
Wilhelm Keppler, one of Hitler's top economic advisers, had deep ties in Kodak. When Nazism began, Keppler advised Kodak and several other U.S. companies that they'd benefit by firing all of their Jewish employees. (Source: The Nation)
2. Hugo Boss:
In the 1930s, Hugo Boss started making Nazi uniforms. The reason? Hugo Boss himself had joined the Nazi party, and got a contract to make the Hitler Youth, storm trooper and SS uniforms. This was a huge boon for Hugo Boss, as he got the contract just eight years after founding his company and that infusion of business helped take the company to another level.
The Nazi uniform manufacturing went so well that Hugo Boss ended up needing to bring in slave laborers in Poland and France to help out at the factory. In 1997, Hugo's son, Siegfried Boss, told an Austrian news magazine, "Of course my father belonged to the Nazi party. But who didn't belong back then?" (Source: New York Times)
3. Volkswagen:
Ferdinand Porsche, the man behind Volkswagen and Porsche, met with Hitler in 1934, to discuss the creation of a "people's car." (That's the German translation of Volkswagen in English.)
During the Holocaust, a German company called IG Farben manufactured the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi gas chambers. They also funded and helped with Josef Mengele's "experiments" on concentration camp prisoners.
IG Farben is the company that turned the single largest profit from work with the Nazis. After the War, the company was broken up. Bayer was one of its divisions, and went on to become its own company.Oh... and aspirin was founded by a Bayer employee, Arthur Eichengrun. But Eichengrun was Jewish, and Bayer didn't want to admit that a Jewish guy created the one product that keeps their company in business. So, to this day, Bayer officially gives credit to Felix Hoffman, a nice Aryan man, for inventing aspirin.
(Source: Alliance for Human Research Protection, Pharmaceutical Achievers)
5. Siemens:
Siemens took slave laborers during the Holocaust and had them help construct the gas chambers that would kill them and their families. Good people over there.
Siemens also has the single biggest post-Holocaust moment of insensitivity of any of the companies on this list. In 2001, they tried to trademark the word "Zyklon" (which means "cyclone" in German) to become the name a new line of products... including a line of gas ovens.
Zyklon, of course, being the name of the poison gas used in their gas chambers during the Holocaust.
A week later, after several watchdog groups appropriately freaked out, Siemens withdrew the application. They said they never drew the connection between the Zyklon B gas used during the Holocaust and their proposed Zyklon line of products. (Source: BBC)
6. Coca-Cola specifically Fanta:
(Remember the role Coca-Cola play in Apartheid South Africa?)
Coke played both sides during World War Two...they supported the American troops but also kept making soda for the Nazis. Then, in 1941, the German branch of Coke ran out of syrup, and couldn't get any from America because of wartime restrictions.
So they invented a new drink, specifically for the Nazis: A fruit-flavored soda called "Fanta". That's right: Long before Fanta was associated with a bunch of exotic women singing a god-awful jingle, it was the unofficial drink of Nazi Germany. (Source: New Statesman)
7. Ford:
Henry Ford is a pretty legendary anti-Semite, so this makes sense. He was Hitler's most famous foreign backer. On his 75th birthday, in 1938, Ford received a Nazi medal, designed for "distinguished foreigners." When Hitler pays tribute to you in his biography and keeps a portrait of you in his office, it will be hard for you to claim that you did not have some connection to him. However, Henry Ford didn’t seem particularly inclined to distance his company or himself from the Nazis anyway, since he accepted Germany’s highest honor freely and never returned the award while Hitler was alive.
He was a committee member of the America First Association which advocated America to stay out of World War II. In 1998, it came out that the Third Reich was providing Ford’s factory in Cologne with 1,200 Russian slaves, as a potential form of compensation. Henry Ford profiteered off both sides of the War as he was producing vehicles for the Nazis, AND for the Allies. Remember that every time you watch a Ford Car commercial.
I'm wondering if, in a completely misguided piece of logic, Allianz points to the Detroit Lions giving Ford the naming rights to their stadium as a reason why they should get the rights to the Meadowlands. (Source: Reformed Theology)
8. Standard Oil:
The Luftwaffe needed tetraethyl lead gas in order to get their planes off the ground. Standard Oil (Owned by Rockefeller), was one of only three companies that could manufacture that type of fuel. So they did.
Without them, the German air force never could've even gotten their planes off the ground.
When Standard Oil was dissolved as a monopoly, it led to ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, all of which are still around today. But, much like most atrocities of white privilege, their parent company's past decision to make incredible profits off of war did not rub off them. (Source: MIT's Thistle)
9. Chase bank:
A lot of banks sided with the Nazis during World War Two. Chase (Owned by Rockefeller and Rothschild) is the most prominent.
The Chase Manhattan Bank’s form of colluding with the Reich was particularly heinous. Because Carlos Niedermann, Chase’s representative in Paris, had very good personal relations with the Nazis, he agreed to their requests that the bank seize the assets of at least one hundred Parisian Jews that were considered especially worth pursuing by the Reich. This doubtless helped the Gestapo capture those people.
Chase Manhattan was hardly alone in this, though. In 1998, the company was part of a suit demanding reparations from J. P. Morgan and Citibank for the millions of dollars stolen. In the end, the payouts were $200 a month. The survivors and descendants had to fight to not have large amounts of the payments eaten up by wire transfer fees.
(Source: New York Times)
10. IBM:
IBM custom-build machines for the Nazis that they could use to track everything... from oil supplies to train schedules into death camps to Jewish bank accounts to individual Holocaust victims themselves.
In September of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the "New York Times" reported that three million Jews were going to be "immediately removed" from Poland and were likely going to be "exterminat[ed]."
IBM's reaction? An internal memo saying that, due to that "situation", they really needed to step up production on high-speed alphabetizing equipment. (Source: CNet)
11. Random House Publishing:
Random House's parent company, Bertelsmann A.G., worked for the Nazis; they published Hitler propaganda, and a book called "Sterilization and Euthanasia: A Contribution to Applied Christian Ethics".
Bertelsmann still owns and operates several companies. I picked Random House because they drew controversy in 1997 when they decided to expand the definition of Nazi in Webster's Dictionary.
Eleven years ago, they added the colloquial, softened definition of "a person who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specified activity, practice, etc." (Think "Soup Nazi".)
The Anti-Defamation League called that expanded definition offensive...especially when added by a company with Nazi ties. They said it, quote, "trivializes and denies the murderous intent and actions of the Nazi regime... it also cheapens the language by allowing people to reach for a quick word fix... [and] lends a helping hand to those whose aim is to prove that the Nazis were really not such terrible people." (Source: New York Observer, ADL)
12. BMW:
Guenther Quandt, whose family owns the BMW had used forced laborers in their weapons factories.
In May 1,1933, Guenther had joined the Nazi Party, it was only a month after Hitler had the supreme control in Germany. He was awarded many lucrative state contracts afterwards. The company had grown their business during the war. They had acquired several Jewish companies through the “Aryanisation” of firms.
In 1937, Guenther was bestowed with the title "Wehrwirtschaftsfuhrer", a title given to a leader of armament economy. An execution area where found in of the plants of BMW in Hannover. It was in the execution area that forced laborers who displeased their masters were eliminated.
13. Audi:
Audi used thousands of forced laborers from concentration camps. The company had an arrangement that they will hire 3,700 individuals from the concentration camps. Aside from the concentration camps, another 16,500 slaves had also worked in their plant.
This information was gathered when Rudolf Boch, an economic historian in the University of Chemnitz and Martin Kukowski, head of history department of Audi had the study. They had received access for the Audi archives for the reason of house cleaning the firm’s history.
The study had revealed more than twenty thousand forced laborers had worked in the Auto union for Saxon works and that includes almost one-fifth of the population of the concentration camps.
The condition in concentration camps in Zwickau City was very appalling. Most of slaves from France had lived in unheated barracks.
The disabled workers were then sent to Flossenburg concentration to be eliminated and the numbers will be replaced by the prisoners.
Before the war ended, 688 prisoners of war from Zwickau were sent to death march, which half of them were already dying. Audi had acknowledged its wartime guilt and had paid millions to a fund for the slave workers and descendants.
14. Daimler-Benz:
From, 1937, Daimler maker of luxury car Mercedes Benz had produced aircraft engines of DB 601 and armament items like LG3000 truck. The plant of Daimler where aircraft engines were made was located in a concealed forest in south of Berlin.
In 1942, the productions centers on the manufacture for components that were used for navy, air force and the army. Repair of military vehicles were also on the rise at that time, thus requiring many workers.
In the beginning, Daimler-Benz had recruited women to fill the work but it was still not enough. Daimler-Benz had used forced laborers to work for them. Prisoners of war, abducted individuals and even detainees of concentration camps where locked closed to the plants.
These prisoners were locked in barrack camps, which had bad conditions. Concentration camp detainees were observed by SS and they were given very inhumane conditions. They were then loaned to other companies for money. The Daimler-Benz had 63,610 forced laborers were civilians who either were prisoners of war or was from concentration camps.
After the war, Daimler had "admitted its past link with the Nazis" and they had actively participated in the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”, an initiative of German Industry Foundation whose aim is to provide humanitarian aid for forced laborers during the war
15. Deutsche Bank:
According to five-commissioned committee from Israel, Germany, Britain and the United States, the Deutsche Bank had bought 4,446 kilograms of gold from Reichsbank. It was the central bank during the war. That time, the gold was valued at more than five million dollars.
One of those purchases, Deutsche Bank had acquired 744 kilograms of “Melmer gold”. Melmer gold were taken away from the prisoners of concentration camps and which was later recast to bullion bars as directed by SS officer Bruno Melmer.
Another role of Deutsche Bank in the Nazi war was the loan given to Adolf Hitler. The loan was used to construct the Auschwitz death camp located in Poland. From the period of August – November 1942, 363,211 Jews were killed in Auschwitz concentration camp.
In 1998, Deutsche Bank AG had accepted its moral responsibility for its dealings during “darkest chapters in its history”. The bank had "expressed its regrets for any injustices".
16. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer:
Prior to World War II, Germany had been one of America’s most important film markets (as implied in the above entry, Germans had a bit of an obsession with a heavily romanticized vision of America), and as such, American film studios were willing to bend over backward to appease the German government. Even Warner Brothers, who developed a reputation for being the most anti-Nazi of major studios at the time, ordered that the word “Jew” be taken out from their movies and invited Nazi dignitaries to visit their studio.
But the single greatest act of Nazi support was one done by MGM after the invasion of Poland in 1939. They donated prints of eleven of their films to the German Relief Effort after the war with Poland began. These bewildering dreams of maintaining a market in Germany only died off after France and Britain’s markets threatened to die out too in response to all this collusion with their enemy.
17. Dow Chemical:
It’s not too much of a stretch for many people to imagine oil companies collaborating with evil people. We are used to the mental image of oil companies being willing to prop up evil dictators to have access to petroleum and similar atrocities.
Dow Chemical was one of the companies that provided an insane amount materials for the Nazis, including not only raw materials but also American technological innovations in regards to oil refinery.
The contributions were so extreme that it allowed the Nazis to forgo their previous quotas to accommodate the influx. This indicates the Nazis were taken by surprise in regard to how much material they received from these American companies! No wonder they were able to achieve the massive armament build-up that they did.
18. Brown Brothers Harriman:
During the early 1930s, Fritz Thyssen ran a business that he used to help finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Brown Brothers Harriman was a subsidiary company that he used as a base of American operations. This collusion is of particular note because it was integral to the basis of the claim that Prescott Bush, father of Ex-President George Bush and of course grandfather of Ex-President George W. Bush, supported the Third Reich.
He was on the board of directors for BBH and in 1942, the company’s assets were seized by the federal government. Suspicions then arose that some assets were taken as part of the Bush family fortune. These, among other reasons, came to light in 2003 as part of the presidential campaign, and make it appear that the Bush family owed their fortune to Nazi activities. It really does seem like the sort of discovery an opposing campaign team would dream about making in regards to their opponent (not that it ultimately helped much).
19. Woolworth:
In 1933, 1.25% of the company’s entire inventory came from Germany, but mostly it was in the form of trinkets, like Christmas decorations. At the time, even that led to protests in America because news was coming from Germany that the Reich was beginning its public persecution of the Jews. When Woolworth conceded to public pressure and removed the offending items from its stock, it caused protests over in Germany over the abuse of their “hospitality.”
What was significant about Woolworth’s interaction with the Nazis was a horrible thing that Woolworth did, that ultimately lent legitimacy to their notorious anti-semitism. Woolworth fired all of its Jewish employees. This won them the designation “Adefa Zeichen,” an award reserved for companies that were “pure Aryan.” Most likely Woolworth doesn’t advertise their products with that seal of approval.
20. Alcoa:
Alcoa is now the third largest aluminum producer in the world. Back in 1941, it was much more powerful. It had a monopoly on aluminum in addition to owning a massive amount of America’s electricity production and other minerals. Before America declared war on Germany, it sent so much of its aluminum product over to Germany that the country made upwards of sixty percent more aluminum products than America.
When the US’s involvement in the war began, there was a massive aluminum production shortage in America, in no small part because of Alcoa’s monopoly. Alcoa essentially sold the Axis powers much of the material to build their war machines and a reprieve from the American war machine.
21. General Motors:
Similar to their automotive rivals, General Motors was sued by Holocaust survivors for assisting the Nazi war machine. Beginning in 1935, GM built a factory in Berlin for the purpose of building “Blitz” trucks for the Wehrmacht. Ford began building similar trucks around the same time, but GM was the number one producer of the vehicles that were vital for the quick conquests of Poland, France, and much of the Soviet Union.
Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and war production, claimed that the rubber GM supplied was the key to the ability of the Germans to wage war the way they did. Inevitably when America declared war on Germany, the Reich seized GM’s German production facilities.
Although neither Ford nor General Motors ever fully conceded that they had willingly participated in the use of slave labor, they both were massive contributors to a fund started in 2000 for Holocaust survivors.
22. Louis Vuitton Malletier (a.k.a. Louis Vuitton):
Synonymous with opulence and conspicuous luxury, French fashion house Louis Vuitton was founded in the mid-19th century and has since branched out from its original line of luggage to become one of the most successful luxury clothing and accessory lines in the world. Until 2004, the company’s relationship with France’s Nazi-aligned Vichy government was not well known. In that year a journalist working on a book about the history of LV came across documents that showed that members of the Vuitton family actively courted Vichy officials. The company even set up a factory specifically to produce busts of Marshal Petain, the puppet head of the Vichy government. The Vuitton family has not denied its involvement with Nazism but has refused to comment on if for the last 10 years.
23. General Electric:
The American multinational conglomerateis one of the most lucrative business in history. It is currently ranked by Forbes Magazine as the 4th largest company in the world and the 14th most profitable. In 1946 GE was fined by the US government for its illicit wartime activities. During the war, in partnership with Krupp, a German manufacturing firm, General Electric artificially raised the price of tungsten carbide, a material that was vital to the manufacture of machining metals needed in the Allied war effort.
The company paid a total fine of only $36,000, which pales in comparison to the $1.5 million it made in 1936 alone from its price-fixing swindle. It is impossible to calculate how much money and blood was lost as a result of GE’s hampering the war effort. GE also became a major shareholder of Siemens stock before the start of the war, making it complicit in the use of slave labor to build the same gas chambers where many of the laborers were murdered.
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This is the predominantly American, Western privileged system that surrounds us with venom daily, the system which has demonized us, while profiting from our labor. This is the system which gave birth to those who murdered close to a hundred million Africans for economic profit, before making sure generations of the victims descendants would be eternally marginalized in the history of America. These are the people whose descendants created the KKK, who embody the meaning of mass murderers, who control the main stream mass media, who make up the 1 percenters.
Many people of other national origins who reside in America (as well as the descents of African slaves who just get up and live their lives everyday), do not readily have access to this information, they buy into the crap they see on the news. Their understanding of what Black culture is about comes from BET (check the ownership before you swallow everything you watch on it), Jerry Springer (among a host of other talk shows), World Star Hip-Hop (in their eagerness to watch the worst us make assess out of ourselves). They cannot see the best of us, they cannot see the virtues of the majority of decent, honest, hardworking, objective, Black people, because it is easier for them to simply kiss the asses of those from whom they get a pay check.
Understand the nature of the society in which you reside. Open your eyes, and ask yourselves the pertinent questions. Question EVERYTHING. Do your due diligent research and ask yourself why so much relevant historical content is hidden, obscured, deleted, or simply "not available". Don't keep being afraid of the smoke-and-mirrors phantom that this putrid system has created. Research how the majority of your everyday creature comforts were created, and by who.......
Perhaps this article will help explain White guilt, the guilt that eats away at the White American privileged class. Perhaps it helps explain why there are close to 600 Jewish museums in America, dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust, an atrocity that claimed 6 million Jewish lives......but ironically it also exposes the lack of humanity in them as only 1 privately-owned African Slave museum exists in America, dedicated to the massacre, torture, murders and extortion of over 100 million Black people. You be the judge.
Challenge your intellect.....push the limits of your knowledge......or remain a slave of the system.....and prisoner to your worst fears.
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