From Nazi collaborator to Fortune 500 – companies that got rich on the Reich

Cracked has a list of five Fortune 500 companies that profited greatly by their active collaboration with the Nazis, from IBM (punchcard tabulators to count the concentration camp dead) to Hugo Boss (designed the Nazi uniforms) and others — check out how incredibly evil Siemens is:


Siemens was the major player in the Nazification of Germany. The company, run by Werner's son, Carl, and then his grandson, Hermann, struggled in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression and had to earn some dough fast. When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, it was the signal for the Siemens executives to start building factories, and nowhere was the real estate better than near the homey neighborhoods of Auschwitz and Buchenwald…

At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, 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…

Well, 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.

Link

(via Plastic Bag)