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. Accused companies include General Motors, IT&T, and Eastman Kodak.

American manufacturers
American companies that had dealings with Nazi Germany included Ford Motor Company, Coca-Cola, and IBM. 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 U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found "destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire."

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. "General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland," according to Bradford Snell. "The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM." 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 US plants at home.

The Nazis reportedly made extensive use of Hollerith punch card and accounting equipment, and IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag), supplied them with this equipment starting in the early 1930s. The equipment was critical to Nazi efforts through ongoing censuses to categorize citizens of both Germany and other nations under Nazi control. The census data enabled the round-up of Jews and other targeted groups, and catalogued their movements through the machinery of the Holocaust, including internment in the concentration camps. Nazi concentration camps operated a Hollerith department called Hollerith Abteilung, which had IBM machines that also included calculating and sorting machines. The history community has long debated whether IBM was complicit in the use of these machines, whether the machines used were IBM branded, and even whether tabulating machines were used for this purpose at all. In December 1941, when the United States entered the war against Germany, 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.

General Motors
General Motors' Opel division, based in Germany, supplied the Nazi Party with vehicles. The head of GM at the time was an ardent opponent of the New Deal, which bolstered labor unions and public transport, and admired and supported Adolf Hitler. GM was compensated $32 million by the U.S. government because its German factories were bombed by U.S. forces during the war.

Eastman-Kodak
Kodak's European subsidiaries continued to operate during the war. Kodak AG, the German subsidiary, was transferred to two trustees in 1941 to allow the company to continue operating in the event of war between Germany and the United States. The company produced film, fuses, triggers, detonators, and other materiel. Slave labor was employed at Kodak AG's Stuttgart and Berlin-Kopenick plants. During the German occupation of France, Kodak-Pathé facilities in Severan and Vincennes were also used to support the German war effort. Kodak continued to import goods to the United States purchased from Nazi Germany through neutral nations such as Switzerland. This practice was criticized by many American diplomats, but defended by others as more beneficial to the American war effort than detrimental. Kodak received no penalties during or after the war for collaboration.

British, Swiss, US, 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.

"Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe," according to PBS. Switzerland resisted returning these funds, and the Washington Agreement of 1946 merely required the resitution of 12% of the stolen gold.

A forgotten document discovered in a Buenos Aires bank in the 1980s listed more than 12,000 accounts with Nazi ties, drawn up in 1938 after an investigation initiated by an anti-fascist government. The list shows transfers to an account at Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA), ancestor of Crédit Suisse. The account had which had ties to the Bank der, controlled by the Nazis.

In March 1939 the Bank of England surrendered to Germany 5.6 million pounds worth of gold that belonged to the National Bank of Czechoslovakia, six months before England entered World War II. "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."

Both the Bank of Canada and the US 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.

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. Universal Pictures edited All Quiet on the Western Front to remove scenes that had sparked outcry in Germany. 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. 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.

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.'"

The Associated Press (AP) supplied images for a propaganda book titled The Jews in the USA, and another titled The Subhuman. The news agency reached a formal agreement with the Nazi regime, hiring Nazi propagandists as reporters. 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.

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.

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

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