From Reich to Riches

Money, it's a crime.
Share it fairly
but don't take a slice of my pie
--Money, Pink Floyd

To call war the soil of courage and virtue
is like calling debauchery the soil of love
--George Santayana
_________

Following the previous Yad Vashem post I stumbled upon this via boingboing on five companies that went From Nazi Collaborators to Fortune 500. Actually, collaborate is not a strong enough term, as these companies actually exploited and then starved or killed their slave labor, sometimes via their own devices.

The author notes that while most partnering American business "took what can be generously described as a morally ambivalent stance on the whole Hitler thing" and cut ties with the Third Reich following the entrance of the U.S. into the war, "IBM on the other hand decided to stick around and see where he was going with this whole final solution thing."

"IBM claims they were a victim of circumstance. . . (but) IBM sent internal memos in their New York offices acknowledging that their machines were making the Nazis more efficient, and they made no efforts to end the relationship with the German branch.

"IBM has never made an apology or admitted any need to apologize at all, hoping instead that with time everyone would just forget about it. And, we pretty much have, because, hey, they make such awesome computers!"

At Siemens, "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."

"(A) few years ago, in an act of insensitive fuckery so colossal it could blot out the sun, Siemens tried to trademark the name Zyklon with the intent of marketing a series of products under the name. Including gas ovens."

The BBC reported Siemens already uses the "Zyklon" name in Germany, but Dr. Shimon Samuels, head of the European arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, said, "Siemens should have known better because it was directly complicit in the use of slave labor."

Designer Hugo Boss, Volkswagon and Bayer round out the list in this short piece.