Third Reich to Fortune 500: Five Popular Brands the Nazis Gave Us
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IBM
IBM is one of the few IT companies whose history dates back to the 19th century, a time when information technology presumably involved putting a helmet on your carrier pigeon. On the one hand, this means they've been a Fortune 500 company since 1924, giving them a 60-year head start on the likes of Microsoft and Macintosh. On the other hand, over a century of history gives you a lot of opportunities to make some monstrous PR blunders. Job with Nazis: Actually, prior to the war, American business took what can be generously described as a morally ambivalent stance on the whole Hitler thing. American groups, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute, directly funded Nazi eugenics projects in the early '30s (where the goal was to find ways to breed a master race). Of course, once the war started, most American businesses cut ties with Hitler. IBM, on the other hand, decided to stick around and see where he was going with this whole final solution thing. And, this is the point where things take a horrific turn. To get through this, we're going to try to offset the horror with some kittens playing on computers. We'll just look at them while we type.
Back in those days, the only way to keep track of huge databases was with an extremely complicated system involving punch cards, and IBM was the best at constructing and maintaining those databases. IBM's punch card databases could keep track of anything: financial ledgers, medical records, Jews. OK, give us a moment here ...
OK. According to a book a guy wrote about it, as soon as the Nazis invaded a country, they would overhaul the census system using IBM punch cards. Then they'd track down every Jew, Gypsy and any other non-Aryan until they were all rounded up onto cattle carts. And, next stop wasn't Space Mountain. So how evil were they? That tracked people based on their religion, their location and even how they'd be executed. For instance, Prisoner Code 8 was Jew, Code 11 was Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz; Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was execution by order, and Code 6 was gas chamber. Holy shit, people. Seriously, IBM. What the fuck? Hold on, we're going to watch this video of a kitten fighting a laptop seven or eight times. These days, IBM claims they were a victim of circumstance. They had a subsidiary in Germany long before Hitler took over. They say the company just fell under Nazi control, like every other company over there at the time. The records show that's not completely true, though. 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! Bayer
Bayer, the massive pharmaceutical company that's most famous for making Aspirin, also is behind such wonder drugs as Levitra and, at one time in their history, heroin.
Yes, we can go on for ages about how wonderful aspirin is to stop heart attacks, or how Levitra can give you wood for weeks, but really, Bayer is most important for given heroin its name. The drug was promoted as having "heroic" properties, which is ironic since it by all accounts turns you into a shivering shell of a man. Bayer also lent its name to a German soccer team, and to be honest, we're not sure if it's such a good idea to have your team named after a company that sold smack. Just imagine what the mascot would have to look like. We're thinking a Pete Doherty decked out in a blue suit with furry antennae who passes out halfway through the chicken dance.
Job with Nazis:
After he oversaw the first use of chemicals in warfare, his wife killed herself in their garden with his service revolver in protest. Once Hitler took over, Haber decided to renounce Judaism to fit in, only to be told that he was still Jewish according to the Nazi rule book because his mother was Jewish. He died of a heart attack while fleeing the country he spent his life serving. The chemical he originally invented to kill insects was used to kill a number of his relatives in the Concentration Camps. You know what? We think we're going to just pack up and sail off to a deserted island somewhere. We'll just walk away from this whole humanity thing. Us and our kittens.
So how evil were they? Bayer, though, has continued some of its old douchebaggery into the modern era. First off, Aspirin was invented by a Jewish man, Arthur Eichengrun, whose name Bayer still refuses to acknowledge. To this day, the "official" history of the company denies Eichengrun's involvement in the invention of aspirin, and states that an Aryan invented the drug, because as we all know, Aryans are better at everything.
One such Bayer-employed Aryan was a nice, thoughtful fellow by the name of Josef Mengele, who Bayer sponsored to seek out medical discoveries in the important field of torturing people to death.
We have some hard questions for Bayer. Actually, just one question, which is, "What the fuck, Bayer? Dude." |
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I want a kitten!
The word is called Schutzstaffel, not Schultzstaffel! It's an article about German brands so please spell the few German words right...
Could the companies get in trouble now for what they did then? I'm sure most of the CEOs of said companies have all changed, but it was still basically treason.
You forgot to mention something about IBM, they also built the machines that did the calculations so that a ship firing it's cannons would hit it's target spot on, did I mention they sold those machines to the Nazis.
Here is where the propagandistic piece of s**t, The Corporation, gets it wrong. Corporations aren't run by people out for some shadowy political agenda, they're run by people out to make money, snort coke, and f**k thai hookers FULL STOP.
I used to have a kitten similar to the one featured we named Junior. He grew up and became 23lb Maine Coon goofball.
Unfortunely, there are point to both sides of the arguements. On one side these companies did do evil things in the past and should face punishment. The other side is this was way in the past and if they actually admitted wrongdoing they'd be slapped with so many lawsuits that it would 100 years to make it through the courts.
Probably the best thing the companies could do is support anti-holocaust and WW II museums and such.
@Rasalom: Ummm, I don't think you get it. World War II was not so long ago. There are still people who are alive today that experienced it. My own grandfather had to flee from Europe to Uzbekistan to escape the Nazis during the war, and he only died last year. It's not really "something your ancestors did" if many of said ancestors are still alive...
Additionally, a lot of the issue is the fact that many American companies, IBM especially, were in violation of American laws by dealing with the Third Reich while we were at war with them, which is, by all accounts, treason. Yet they've never had to pay for their crimes.
Unfortunately about the kittens... http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1598#comic
While I was reading this article my little black kitten recognized my great need for his cuteness and proceeded to walk back and forth across the keyboard before finally collapsing in a purring pile on my chest. God bless kittens, goddamn Nazis.
@Pacey & a few others: After reading through the comments a bit I think it's pretty stupid of someone to want an apology from anyone because of something their ancestors did, whether it's for slavery(White people just bought the slaves, the people sold as slaves were actually captured & sold by other blacks so get pissed at everyone still in Africa's ancestors for selling your ancestors to white people. Also, slaves were used for thousands of years in Rome, Egypt, etc. before they were ever shipped to the Americas, so why is it black people only ever get pissed off at white people?), killing Jews, whatever.
Now I wanna read more about WWII atrocities and hug my cat.
I had no idea the numbers on the arms of concentration camp inmates were from a code that would designate how they would die. Christ.
sliderr21, if you seriously consider everyone before the twentieth century to be too stupid to have noticed that some people who stood around people with diseases or who handled their artifacts might also get sick, then please explain the isolation of plague victims going back to at least the Romans. Furthermore, there are documents indicating that intentional infection with smallpox via blankets was carried out by British commanders during the French and Indian War (lord Jeffrey Amherstm researcher: d'Errico).
Also, as DunatadaMan explained, corporations are artificial people, so if it makes you feel better, imagine that they're suing a really old guy names Siemens, because legally, they are. And I assure you that every capitalist you ever meet wants corporations to be considered artificial individuals and will call you a commie pinko for suggesting otherwise. It's that status that provides legal protection to the humans making up this artificial individual.
sliderr21: The reason people can still sue these companies, and the reason these companies still have to pay isn't because the people in charge of the company should be held responsible, it's because corporations are individually considered an entity in and of themselves.
That entity is considered ethically and legally responsible for its action into eternity, even if those responsible for the actions are no longer with the company.
If the company wants to be separate from the actions of those within it, then that unfortunately makes those within it responsible for their own actions. Something that would lead them to getting personally sued into poverty for giving people cancer.
While I agree the people in charge of these companies have no responsibility for the past, if they want the protection of the company for their current actions, they have to also accept those responsibilities.
@kai5757: sorry to rain on ur little speech, but i really felt like relieving myself. First of all, are you f*****g serious? biological warfare on such a massive scale 200 years ago when most people believed they could cure diseases with snake oil? The belief that the government handed out blankets laden with smallpox is not only incredibly false, but also IMPOSSIBLE. Im going to skip all the atrocities committed by the natives here or else id be as long winded as you. So how about, if your so sorry, give them your land, your house, your money, an for god's sake your f*****g computer. Finally, the idea that people or companies should be responsible for the actions of their forbears is just crazy. The current representatives of these companies didn't do s**t, they didnt make those decisions, they didn't make those mistakes, why the hell should they be held accountable? You want to us people's tax money to prosecute people who were not in control of the company at the time of the war? and most likely were not old to even be a part of the company? Some 50 year old guy becomes CEO of one of these companies and you want to sue the s**t out of him because of something the company did when basically there was a completely different EVERYBODY working there? really?
I think a few of the commenter’s below don't realize the full extent of the American efforts of Genocide against the Native peoples of North America. It was full scale and plotted well for the time period it took place in. Some of the first recorded acts of germ warfare were committed then, when the US army gave blankets from polio and small pox outbreaks to the Native Americans, knowing they had not biological defense against these European diseases. Killing off MILLIONS of buffalo to try to starve out the Native Americans, and making them then dependant on US "aid". Marching them across many states on foot to God-forsaken places on the earth like North Dakota... waiting for the men to go out on hunting parties and then attacking all the elderly, women, and children. This was the ARMY killing civilians, and the weak. Can you imagine coming home and finding your whole family slaughtered? In Southern California, there are parks and schools named after the "Great American Hero" Kit Carson! This guy led many massacres against women and children and elderly. This is genocide folks. You can’t sugar coat it into just a dispute over land rights. And let’s not forget that the US government double-crossed the Native Americans on EVERY “peace treaty” ever signed. The Shoshone Nation still have a legal deed to half of So Cal and Nevada. Our US government has been blocking them in court for a century! Why shouldn’t they be paid reparations? There is a group of Navajo in AZ being starved out of their land because the US government has found huge coal deposits there, and they want at it. This is still going on today!
The Germans used technology to do the most systematic human slaughter in known history. They kept impeccable records of their activities. They were incredibly detailed. Which is why I find it amazing that there are still some fools in the world who try to say it never happened. There are more German created documents about the Holocaust than you can count. And yes the companies that helped in those atrocities need to be held accountable - in court and with our almighty dollar. I make decisions every day about the products I am going to buy, and the companies are listening. That is why you see things changing on the shelves. And yes even though the employees today of those companies were not involved in the decisions of the 1930's and '40's, the companies and governments are still responsible. They did make a profit by the actions they did with the Nazi’s – which enabled them to continue to be in business for many years later. They PROFITED by the killing of Jews, Gypsies, handicapped persons, etc. They could have chosen not to do what they did. They had the freedom of choice. The Jews did not.
The sad thing is that humans never seem to change. There is genocide going on all over the world even today. The governments try to make it sound less horrific by calling it "ethnic cleansing" like it's the newest face wash to get rid of pimples. It's not. It's Genocide. The mass-scale murder of a race of people. Look at Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, etc. We have to talk about it because we have to make sure it doesn’t keep rearing its ugly head. And now more than ever, as our planet continues to change, and access to clean water, food supplies, fuel, and land become more and more stressed, governments will continue to de-humanize certain populations of people in order to keep the resources under their own control.
We therefore can never forget. I suggest to some of you folks that can’t relate, to visit one of the Holocaust museums. See the lamps made out of SKIN - Jewish human skin - and proudly used on the desks of SS officers. The emaciated bodies, the experiments - horrific experiments, the mountains of shoes, the babies and children murdered.... All while the general population looked away. Let's also not forget that Hitler put some of the wealthiest Jews from Germany on a boat and offered them to different countries to test if he would be reprimanded, and everyone, including the US turned them away. That was Hitler's "green light" for all the hell that followed. EVERYONE has a stake in that horror. The US didn’t even want to get involved in the war about Jew's. If it wasn’t for Pearl Harbor, who knows if the US would have ever gotten involved. What a stain on our US history! If Germany had Oil or something, I am sure we would have been glad to go over there and bomb them.
Things to think about folks.
Humility, I think we should vote you ruler of the world.
I think unique cultures cause more problems then they are worth. I actually see no value in culture, but since so many people make a big fuss about it, it has to be important.(Like how so many people made a big fuss over celebrities not getting the special treatment they obviously deserve.)
I don't know how to eliminate cultures though.
what a complete ripoff of excerpts from "50 things the government doesnt want you to know". but thanks for making it more public, i guess?
what about fanta?!
Nogrentain,
i wasnt trying to compare the natives problems with the jews problems. but if you wanna, the only reason we are still around is probably because they didnt have the technology. also we were pretty hard to round up. the nazis had industrial size death machines. they had to try and wipe us out the old fashioned way. and i suppose around 2060 we can just not care about the holocaust anymore? im just saying that these things are dangerous to remember but also dangerous to forget. as long as there are different races there will be irrational hatred. personally, i dont care about race. it means almost nothing these days. good and evil depend on how we were raised. the nazis didnt sit there cackling and twisting their curvy beards. they believed in what they were doing. the white settlers werent snidely f****n whiplash. they did what they thought was right. we cant hate a whole race of people for doing what they thought was right. well, we can, but what will that solve? surely we will all be lost to history in the long run.
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no, actually heroin does give u heroic properties. its just everyone else that sees u that thinks ur a shivering hobo ready to urinate on them at the drop of a nickel