Modern Companies that Collaborated with Nazis During World War 2

 

Would you buy products from a company that  collaborated with the Nazis during World War II?  

What if that company paid reparations, or  started a foundation as a way to apologize  

for their mistakes of the past? Or what  if the company refused to apologize,  

or admit they did anything wrong? Would you  still buy their products? We are about to  

look at several companies that had ties to the  Nazi party, or profited by selling products to  

the Nazis during World War II. All of  these companies are still around today,  

and we can almost guarantee you own one or more  of their products. Let’s find out which ones.

KODAK

If you’ve ever taken a picture using an old school  film you’ve probably bought a product from Kodak.  

For decades after World War II Kodak kept  a sinister secret from the public. They had  

been Nazi collaborators during the war. Kodak  had subsidiaries in Germany and across Europe.  

Even as Germany’s bold aspirations for  world domination grew in the 1930s,  

Kodak kept healthy business  relations with the Nazi party.

After all-out war broke out and the United States  joined the Allies, the U.S. government mandated  

that companies could no longer do business  with Axis nations. This was a problem for  

many companies operating internationally,  Kodak being one of them. Kodak allowed their  

German branch to become more self-sufficient, and  eventually, the Nazis took control of it. However,  

Kodak took things one step further to make a  profit. They began using their subsidiaries in  

neutral European countries, such as Switzerland,  to continue doing business with Nazi Germany.

                      The subsidiaries in Europe continued  selling photographic equipment and  electronics to the Nazis on behalf  

of Kodak. This meant that the Kodak corporation  was directly providing technology to the Nazis,  

and making a profit off it, all while hiding these  facts from the United States government. The heads  

of the Kodak company justified these actions by  citing the massive profits they were bringing in.  

Worst of all, the German branch of Kodak used  over 250 slave laborers from concentration camps.

After the war, Kodak reclaimed their German  subsidiary and collected on the large profits  

made by the slave laborers during the war.  Kodak ended up paying $500,000 into a fund  

that provided reparations to families of  people who worked as slaves under their  

Nazi controlled subsidiary… but the  company never actually apologized.

VOLKSWAGEN

Volkswagen is clearly a German word, and it  probably doesn’t surprise you that the company  

had ties to the Nazi party. However, what might  surprise you is that the company was actually  

started by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler himself laid  out the precursor to what would become Volkswagen.

The idea for the company started with Hitler  wanting to create a car for the common man,  

a “people’s car.” 

This is  how Volkswagen got its name:  “Volks” meaning people and “wagen” meaning car. 

 Hitler hired Ferdinand Porsche to develop the car.  

This initiative was where the classic  Volkswagen Beetle got its shape. But,  

the new head of the organization which would  eventually become Volkswagen had bigger plans.  

Porsche insisted that the company also make  military vehicles to support the Reich.

The most influential of these  vehicles was the Volkswagen Kübelwagen,  

which was a light military vehicle often seen in  World War II movies carrying around SS and Nazi  

officers. It had a boxy body and tire mounted  on the hood. During the time period that the  

Nazi party controlled Germany, more than 15,000  slaves from concentration camps were used to  

build the Volkswagen cars. The company even  helped build the Arbeitsdorf concentration  

camp near one of their main factories to ensure  a steady supply of slave labor was available.

In 1998, under pressure from human rights  organizations, Volkswagen agreed to create  

a fund that would benefit the victims and  their families that were used as slave labor.

JAB Holdings

`Other companies benefited from large profits  gained by working with the Nazis in a different  

way. Several companies were started, or  acquired, by wealthy individuals whose  

fortune started with the money made from  dealings with the Nazi party. For example,  

the Reimann family who owns JAB Holdings profited  greatly from Nazi abuses and slave labor.

You may be unfamiliar with JAB Holdings,  but you probably know the companies they own  

such as Krispy Kreme, Panera Bread,  and Pret a Manger. These companies were  

all created post World War II, however, their  financing was partly provided by JAB holdings,  

which unfortunately means they profited  indirectly from the atrocities of the  

Nazis. When this information was  made public, the Reimann family  

said they were planning to donate around 11  million dollars to “suitable organizations.”

COCO COLA

Coca-Cola is an American company. People around  the world associate Coke with being “American.”  

When you think of the soda, an image of American  families or friends enjoying an ice-cold beverage  

probably comes to mind. However, The  Coca-Cola Company had ties to the  

Nazi party during World War II. The drink  line Fanta, which includes commercials of  

people happily dancing to upbeat music,  was actually created for Nazi Germany.

As the Nazis came to power in 1933 Coca-Cola  was making enormous profits in Germany  

selling their products under the leadership of Max  Keith. He made the Coca-Cola brand more appealing  to the German citizen, which resulted in a boost  in sales. 

He also knew how to market the product  in a way that would make 

 people around the world  want to buy Coca-Cola. During the 1936 Berlin  

Olympics Max Keith made sure that everyone in  attendance had as much Coke as they could drink.

As the Nazis prepared for war, they started to  limit the number of foreign goods coming into  

the country.

 This included Coca-Cola syrup,  which began to hurt the company’s profits.  

So, the sneaky Coke executives used a third  party to open a dialogue with Hermann Göring,  

Hitler’s second in command. They convinced  him to allow the import of their syrup.

To boost sales even further Keith began promoting  the Coca-Cola company as pro-Nazi in Germany.  

His plan was to reach out to the Hitler Youth  and win over the younger generation of Nazis.  

This worked for a time, but as war broke out  restrictions on imports became stricter again.  

Max Keith had a new syrup created  in Germany using local products.  

This new soda became Fanta, based off of the  German word “fantasie” which means “imagination.”

In 1941, when the United States joined the war,  

all official contact between the Coca-Cola company  and Max Keith's German branch was cut off.  

Keith continued to sell his supply of actual  Coca-Cola syrup to the Nazi party members  

and marketed the Fanta drink to the German  public. The German people quickly fell in  

love with the drink and Keith continued to  make large profits for the Coca-Cola company.

After the war ended, Coca-Cola took back control  of their German branch. They even reinstated the  

recently convicted Nazi collaborator, Max Keith,  as its leader. The profits made from the German  

branch during the years of the Nazi regime  were funneled back into the main company.

HUGO BOSS

If you are into high-end fashion than  you may be surprised that one of the  

most successful fashion companies in the world  has deep ties to the Nazi party. Hugo Boss set  

up a fashion label in Germany two years  before the Nazi Party came into power.  

Even before the Nazis gained control of the  country Hugo Boss was a Nazi collaborator.  

The company itself had produced early  Nazi uniforms in their factories.

In 1931 Hugo Boss made it clear where his  allegences lie when he officially joined the  

Nazi party. He became a sponsoring member of the  Schutzstaffel and made monthly donations. Hugo  

Boss and his company created many uniforms  for the Nazis, and made large profits on  

outfitting their soldiers. The company also  produced uniforms for the SS and Hitler Youth.

In order to keep up with demand Hugo Boss began  employing slave labor from the concentration  

camps. It was reported that the company used  140 slaves from the camps and 40 prisoners of  

war from France to make their products. The  worst part was that many of these workers  

were either worked to death, or later sent to  Auschwitz or Buchenwald to be sentenced to death.

After the war, Hugo Boss was tried  and convicted for being a “supporter  

and beneficiary of National Socialism,”  and his right to own a company was taken  

away. The company continued on under Boss’  son-in-law Eugen Holy. In 1999 the company  

finally agreed to pay into a fund that was  set up to compensate former slave laborers.

BAYER

If you’ve ever had a headache, or needed relief  from pain, you may have taken an Aspirin. Bayer,  

the company that makes the pain reliever,  may have one of the darkest histories when  

it comes to collaborating with the Nazi party.  In the 1930s Bayer was part of a company called  

IG Farben. It was a conglomerate made up  of several chemical companies in Germany.

As the Nazis swept through Czechoslovakia,  IG Farben worked closely with the party to  

capture chemical factories to be used by the  corporation. The chemists who worked for Bayer,  

and were employed by IG Farben, later went on to  create Zyklon B; the gas used in concentration  

camps to quickly kill large numbers of Jews and  other people the Nazis labeled as “undesirable.”

IG Farben also heavily used slave labor from  the same camps they provided Zyklon B to. It  

was a very messed up relationship between the  Nazis and IG Farben. They built a factory next  

to Auschwitz where they would use the prisoners  their product would later kill for slave labor.  

As the war came to an end, IG Farben was forced  to dissolve; the directors of the company were  

put on trial for war crimes. Unfortunately,  justice was never served, and Fritz ter Meer,  

who was the director of operations at the  IG Farben facility at Auschwitz, became the  

president of Bayer after the war. In 1995 Bayer  apologized for their role in the Holocaust.

IBM

If you are watching this video you most likely are  using a device that has components built by IBM.  

The company, International Business Machines, has  been around since 1911. In 1933 the president of  

the company, Thomas Watson, traveled to Germany  to oversee an IBM factory being built there.  

At this time IBM was using a subsidiary  called Dehomag to do their work in Germany.

IBM’s subsidary had been hired by the Nazi  party to carry out a nation wide census.  

The census itself was designed to identify  populations of ethnic groups that the  

Nazis found impure or undesirable.  This included populations of Jews,  

Gypsies, and any ethnic group that would dilute  the Arian bloodlines of the country. IBM supplied  

the Nazis with punch cards and a sorting system  that would make it easy for them to identify,  

locate, and track any people that  they would later sentence to death.

These same machines and cards were later converted  and used to coordinate the trains bringing people  

to death camps across Nazi controlled territories.  IBM has come a long way since punch cards,  

but at the time this technology was bringing  in massive amounts of money for the company.

IBM continued to conduct business with the Germans  even after the United States joined the war.  

High ranking members of IBM falsified  data from their European subsidiaries  

to make sure they could smuggle in punch card  materials and devices that were in high demand  

by the Nazis. For IBM at the time the Nazi  buisness of killing was highly lucritive.

During World War II Nazi Germany was IBM’s  largest territory after the United States.  

Now many computers and electronic devices use  parts created by IBM. The crazy part is that up  

until this day IBM has not appologized  for their complicity in the Holocaust.

A company’s main purpose is to  make money; but at what cost?  

It is important to never forget the past,  so we do not repeat the same mistakes.  

Collaberating with the Nazi party, and  being complicit in the attrocities they  

carried out during World War II, is a  steep price to pay to make a profit.