Current Major Companies that Helped the Nazi War Effort

Thinking about making a big purchase this Holiday season? Well, there are a few companies out there that you may want to avoid… unless you happen to be a neo-nazi, of course.

IBM – Designed a punch-card system for keeping track of populations in Concentration Camps. These machines required IBM to not only know the codes assigned to prison groups such as “Jew” (Prisoner Code 8 ) or “Gypsy” (Prisoner Code 11 ) but also codes for penitentiaries (Camp code 001 for Auschwitz, etc.) and “Status,” such as Status Code 5 for an execution by firing squad or Status Code 6 for death by Gas Chamber… These calculation machines also required regular maintenance by IBM technicians in Nazi-held territories and through a subsidiary company IBM “also calculated the rate of deaths per square kilometer due to progressive starvation and other arcane facts compiled to satisfy the Nazi’s lust for statistics…”

Hugo Boss – Designed Nazi SS uniforms and produced them using Jewish slave labor camps.

The Rockefeller Foundation – helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Bayer – A “sister company” to Nazi controlled IG Farben, Bayer not only created and gave heroin its name, but also created Zyklon B gas. And we all know what that was used for… but just in case Bayer would like to claim that Zyklon B was only sold as a “pesticide” and not as a chemical weapon, Bayer also to this day denies that Aspirin was created by Jewish Scientist Arthur Eichengrun, and instead claims that the pure form of the drug has its origins in the hands of Aryan scientist Felix Hoffmann. Baryer also employed one Josef Mengele (the guy really got around).

General Electric (GE)\Krupp – Partnered with former German munitions firm Krupp, GE “artificially raised the cost of U.S. defense preparations while helping to subsidize Hitler’s rearmament of Germany.The arrangement continued even after Nazi tanks smashed into Poland.” GE also bought a stake in Siemens right before the war (see below) and also had a relationship with Tokyo Electric during the same time. GE was forced to pay fines in 1946 over the fact that GE and Krupp artificially boosted the price of a tungsten carbide, a material used in cutting dies and machining metals. The total cost of helping the Nazis for GE? $36,000. It is estimated that GM and its subsidiaries made as much as $1.5 million in 1936 alone because of this deal. They did not break this partnership until the 1946 suit. Since giving up the manufacture of Nazi artillery shells and gas chamber components, Krupp now makes things like high-dollar coffee makers and washing machines… (Speaking of washing machines, Whirlpool helped make an ultra-effective chemical agent-covered flechette ammo for use by the US in Vietnam… slightly off topic, but still an intresting thing to take a look at).

Siemens – Ah, yes. Siemens, more than any other company, owes it all to the Nazis. Although the company has existed in one form or another all the way back to the 19th Century, Siemens was in deep trouble after WWI and the Great Depression… that is, until those crazy Nazi allowed Siemens to fill its factories full of slave laborers from the Camps. After that, Siemens is responsible for everything from Germany’s Railways, Communications, power generation, munitions manufacture, you name it. As Cracked.com puts it: “At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, it was not atypical for a slave worker to build electrical switches for Siemens in the morning and be snuffed out in a Siemens-made gas chamber in the afternoon.” Even the destruction of four fifths of the companies factories during WWII was not enough to keep Siemens down. Siemens has already been forced to settle a major lawsuit in 1998 brought by Holocaust survivors, but even with that $1.2 billion price tag in 2002 Siemens was in the news again, after it tried to trademark the term “Zyklon” (which means “cyclone” in German) to be used in products such as vacuum cleaners (Hmm…) and Gas Ovens (holy shit!) in Germany.

BMW – BMW, along with a number of other firms was named in the affidavit of Karl Sommer, an SS officer who was responsible for giving companies access to prisoners for slave labor. According to Sommer, “BMW admits to using to using 25,000 – 30,000 slave laborers, POWs and concentration camp inmates. If they were payed, their meager earnings (20 cents an hour) went into the SS treasury to further fund their own annihilation (information from The Ethnic Newswatch 03.31.98).” Other firms listed by Sommer include Ford, Volkswagen, Krupp, Siemens, Bayer, Porsche and Daimler-Benz (Mercedes).

Ford/GM – taken from this page:

“GM and Ford, through their subsidiaries, controlled 70 percent of the German automobile market when war broke out in 1939. Those companies ‘rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the Germany army,’ writes Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post.”

“‘When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken,’ observes Dobbs. ‘It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel — a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary — and flying Opel-built warplanes.'”

“It wasn’t all strictly business. Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, formed a kind of mutual admiration society with Adolf Hitler. The German dictator enthusiastically applauded American mass-production techniques. ‘I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,’ declared Hitler, who kept a life-size portrait of the American industrialist next to his desk. In 1938, Ford accepted the highest medal that Nazi Germany could award a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.”

“Ford [also] had a role in Nazi Germany’s prewar military buildup. U.S. Army Intelligence reported that the ‘real purpose’ of the truck assembly plant opened in Berlin in 1938 was to produce “‘troop transport-type vehicles for the Wehrmacht (German military).'”

“After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan commented that the Nazis’ behavior ‘should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors.’ The GM plant in Germany was highly profitable. ‘We have no right to shut down that plant,’ Sloan declared.”

“GM and Ford were vital components of the Nazi war effort. German Ford was the second largest producer of trucks for the Nazi military. GM’s plants built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe — while at the same time profiting from production of aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps.”

“‘The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion by GM and Ford of their Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks,’ according to a 1974 report printed by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. ‘On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored ‘mule’ 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as ‘the backbone of the German Army transportation system.’”

“‘General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland,’ says researcher Bradford Snell. “‘Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds, while GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM.”

~ by herodotuswept on December 19, 2008.