| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
Top 10 Businesses that Collaborated with Nazis
For a relatively brief time in the late 1930s and 1940s, the entire world was focused on Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Hitler redefined immorality and became the personification of evil during his own generation and likely for generations to come. Hitler and his National Socialist Party (or Nazi Party) ruthlessly controlled Germany and much of Europe and, therefore, also had control of its businesses. As is well documented, the Nazi Party stopped at nothing to exercise its power and achieve its nefarious aims. No level of brutality was too great. It may be unfair, then, to condemn the European businesses that collaborated with Nazis. An argument can be made that they had no choice, though some showed uncommon enthusiasm for collaboration. Some businesses were not under the rule of arguably the most evil regime in modern history and their collaboration is harder to fathom. Most corporations that collaborated with the Nazi party saw astronomical profits and many continue to flourish today. Below is a list of the top 10 businesses still in existence that collaborated with the Nazis.
10. Coca-Cola
Fanta, the fruit-flavored soft drink brand made by Coca-Cola, comes in over 100 flavors but is primarily known for its orange soda in North America. The brand came into existence in 1941, as a result of the difficulty Coca-Cola had importing its syrup into war-torn Germany. The giant soft drink manufacturer’s head of operations in Germany, Max Keith, faced with the possibility that Coke would not be able to be distributed in Germany, devised a new drink that could be made with available local ingredients.
9. Bayer
Bayer was founded in Germany in 1863, and became a household brand name in North America after it isolated aspirin and marketed it as a painkiller. Today the company is a powerhouse in both the over-the-counter and prescription drug market. How many of us have a Bayer product in our medicine cabinet? And how many of us know that Bayer’s head was responsible for Nazi atrocities? In 1956 Bayer named a new chairman of its board, chemist Fritz TerMeer. Ter Meer was a convicted war criminal, having been sentenced to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials for carrying out experiments on unwilling human subjects interned at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He served only 5 years of his sentence and was never apologetic about his role in the Nazi holocaust.
8. Bertelsmann A.G. (Random House publishing, Doubleday Publishing, Bantam Books)
The brand Bertelsmann A.G. is not a household name, but the names of its subsidiaries, Random House, Doubleday and Bantam Books, are. Under the Nazis, Bertelsmann published propaganda and Nazi pamphlets with titles like “Sterilization and Euthanasia: A Contribution to Applied Christian Ethics.” Ironically, it even published works by book-burning advocate and Nazi supporter Will Vesper. In 1997 Random House again made news for its Nazi ties when it updated the Webster’s dictionary entry for Nazi with “a person who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specified activity, practice, etc.” The Anti-Defamation League called the addition “outrageous” and added that it “trivializes and denies the murderous intent and actions of the Nazi regime.”
7. Louis Vuitton Malletier (more commonly known as 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.
6. Boss
The fashion house Hugo Boss, founded in Germany in 1924, became a global fashion icon in the 1990s and is still among the most profitable fashion labels in the world. It boasts several clothing lines, a perfume line and upscale specialty boutiques. The Boss label was among the first, in the 1980s, to market expensive designer sunglasses. The company’s earlier history, however, is less illustrious. Hugo Boss himself designed the Nazi party’s uniforms. Seeing an opportunity for advancement and enrichment, Boss even joined the Nazi party and was rewarded with contracts to design the uniforms of both the S.A. and the SS.
Read More
Recent Posts
