Business collaboration with Nazi Germany

A number of international companies have been accused of having collaborated with Nazi Germany before their home countries' entry into World War II, though it has been debated whether the term "collaboration" is applicable to business dealings outside the context of overt war. The accused companies include General Motors, IT&T, and Eastman Kodak, and a number of American manufacturing companies, such as the Ford Motor Company,[1][2] Coca-Cola,[3][4] and IBM.[5][6][7]

American manufacturers

American companies that had dealings with Nazi Germany included Ford Motor Company,[8][9] Coca-Cola,[10][11] and IBM.[12][13][14] Ford Werke and Ford SAF (Ford's subsidiaries in Germany and France, respectively) produced military vehicles and other equipment for Nazi Germany's war effort. Some of Ford's operations in Germany at the time were run using forced labor. When the United States Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found "destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire." The German government seized control of these Ford plants by force and locked executives out. Henry Ford had no control over his factories at this time. [15]

Like Swiss banks, American car companies deny helping the Nazi war machine or profiting from forced labor at their German subsidiaries during World War II.[15] According to researcher Bradford Snell, "General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland. ... The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."[15] In some cases, GM and Ford agreed to convert their German plants to military production when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls for military production in U.S. plants at home.[15]

In December 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II, 250 American firms owned more than $450 million of German assets. Major American companies with investments in Germany included General Motors, IT&T, Eastman Kodak, Standard Oil, Singer, International Harvester, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Westinghouse, and United Fruit.

British, Swiss, U.S., Argentinian and Canadian banks

German financial operations worldwide were facilitated by banks such as the Bank for International Settlements, Chase and Morgan, and Union Banking Corporation. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. acted for German tycoon Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler's rise to power.[23]

In March 1939 the Bank of England surrendered to Germany 23 tons worth 5.6 million pounds of gold that belonged to the National Bank of Czechoslovakia, six months before England entered World War II by transferring it between accounts of the BIS ; transfer of 27 tons of gold of the National Bank held in its own name with the Bank of England was blocked.[24] According to an article in The Sydney Morning Herald, "The documents released by the Bank of England are revealing, both for what they show and what they omit. They are a window into a world of fearful deference to authority, the primacy of procedure over morality, a world where, for the bankers, the most important thing is to keep the channels of international finance open, no matter what the human cost."[24]

Between 1941 and 1943, anti-Nazi Argentinian president Roberto Marcelino Ortiz compiled a list of 12,000 Nazis in Argentina during the 1930s and early 1940s that shared a single account worth about USD $40.5 million (2025 currency) at Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, the Swiss bank that became Credit Suisse.[25] It names organizations such as IG Farben, which produced Zyklon B, and the Nazi-controlled Bank der .[26][27][28] In 1943, Nazi sympathizer Juan Perón's United Officers' Group destroyed all known copies of the list, but a copy was discovered in 1984.[25][27] The Simon Wiesenthal Center asserts that Nazi plunder was sent to South America then deposited in Switzerland in order to withdraw exchangeable, non-German currency.[29] Overall, Swiss banks were used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of Nazi loot, including plundered gold from German-occupied central banks of Europe. Switzerland resisted the Allies' call to return the wealth, while the Washington Agreement of 1946 required the restitution of $60 million to the Tripartite Gold Commission, assigned to return gold to the European banks.[30]

Both the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank helped to launder Nazi gold by transferring it from a Swiss account to one held by neutral Portugal. A single transaction in June 1942 by the Canadian bank moved 4.02 metric tons of gold.[31]

Hollywood

Major Hollywood studios have also been accused of collaboration, in making or adjusting films to Nazi tastes prior to the U.S. entry into the war.[32] Universal Pictures edited All Quiet on the Western Front to remove scenes that had sparked outcry in Germany.[33] Georg Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles in 1933, threatened the American film studios with a German film regulation known as "Article 15": A company that distributed an anti-German picture anywhere in the world could see all its movies banned in Germany, a large market for American cinema.[33] He was unable to use this tactic against The Mad Dog of Europe, produced by an independent company that did not do business in Germany, but successfully prevented it from being made by telling the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America that if the movie were made, the Nazis might ban all American movies from Germany.[33][34]

Other

Robert A. Rosenbaum writes: "American companies had every reason to know that the Nazi regime was using IG Farben and other cartels as weapons of economic warfare"; and he noted that"as the US entered the war, it found that some technologies or resources could not be procured, because they were forfeited by American companies as part of business deals with their German counterparts.[35]"

The Associated Press (AP) supplied images for a propaganda book titled The Jews in the USA, and another titled The Subhuman.[36] The news agency reached a formal agreement with the Nazi regime, hiring Nazi propagandists as reporters.[37] For example when the Germans discovered mass killings by the Soviets after entering Lviv, SS propagandist Frank Roth sent AP photos of those bodies, but refrained when the Nazis carried out a pogrom against Jews.[37]

Spain and Portugal sold tungsten to Germany, which needed it to refine iron ore into steel for tanks and bombers; it also bought oil from Romania, chromium from Turkey and ball bearings from Sweden.[38][39]

Swiss companies including Oerlikon-Bührle, Tavaro, Hispano-Suiza and Dixi sold the Nazis antiaircraft guns, cannon, military precision instruments and ammunition.[40]

After the war, some of those companies reabsorbed their temporarily detached German subsidiaries, and even received compensation for war damages from the Allied governments.

See also

• Adolf Hitler Fund of German Trade and Industry
• Black market in wartime France
• Carlingue
• Charles Bedaux
• The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler
• Forced labour under German rule during World War II
• German American Bund
• Joseph Joanovici
• Henri Lafont
• Hugo Boss
• IBM and the Holocaust
• IBM and World War II
• It Can't Happen Here
• List of companies involved in the Holocaust
• Nazi Billionaires
• Pierre Bonny
• Swedish iron-ore industry during World War II

Sources

Further reading