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.
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.”
The United States, like many nations, has a complex history characterized by both social progress and troubling setbacks. While its advancements in civil rights, such as the abolition of slavery and the fight for women’s suffrage, are often celebrated, these achievements are also marred by darker chapters.
This historical complexity extends to the business world. Even today, global commerce frequently involves interactions with countries that have questionable human rights records. Looking further back, the Second World War saw American corporations form connections with the Nazi regime, a period that continues to raise ethical concerns.
The exact nature of these corporate-Nazi relationships has been debated, but it’s clear that some companies engaged in activities that supported the genocidal regime.
Chase-Manhattan Bank
During the 1930s and 40s, Chase National Bank, under Winthrop W. Aldrich, maintained operations in Nazi Germany, navigating through a morally ambiguous landscape of international finance. Chase managed branches in Paris and Berlin, dealing with Nazi officials and handling transactions that included looted assets from Jewish properties and payments for gold taken from Holocaust victims.
Post-war scrutiny revealed Chase’s entanglements with the Nazi regime, leading to debates over the bank’s role in supporting the war effort. By the late 20th century, as more details emerged, Chase Manhattan Bank faced legal and moral accountability, eventually contributing to settlements for Holocaust survivors. This history serves as a critical lesson on corporate ethics, highlighting the ongoing challenge of balancing profit with moral responsibility in global business.
From 1936 to 1941, an estimated $20 million was collected in the United States for Nazi Germany, facilitated largely through the sale of Rueckwanderer Marks by several American banks, with Chase emerging as a prominent player. These marks were sold to Americans of German heritage, where a portion of the funds was funneled back to Germany, with U.S. banks retaining a commission. This activity raised significant concerns, attracting the attention of the FBI, which compiled dossiers on the 7,300 individuals who bought these marks. Investigations led to arrests in cases where individuals were found engaging in activities supportive of Nazi ideology, such as celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Through these transactions, Chase earned approximately $1.2 million in commissions, directly benefiting from its financial dealings with the Nazi regime.
Chase National Bank the precursor of today’s Chase Manhattan Bank allegedly helped the Nazis plunder Jewish property in France during World War II, according to a published report.
The New York-based bank controlled by the Rockefeller family closed Jewish accounts even before the Germans ordered them to do so and did business with the Nazis while they were sending Jews to the gas chambers, Newsweek magazine reports in this week’s edition.
And while the U.S. was at war with the Nazis, Chase also apparently helped German banks do business with their overseas branches, the magazine reported.
Ford Motor Company
Henry Ford, the legendary American industrialist behind the Ford Motor Company, had a complex and often controversial relationship with Nazi Germany. Known for his pioneering work in automobile manufacturing, Ford’s connections to the Nazi regime are less celebrated but equally notable.
In the 1920s, Ford became an icon in Germany for his mass production techniques, which were admired by Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler even kept Ford’s portrait in his office and praised him in “Mein Kampf.” Ford’s anti-Semitic views, expressed through his newspaper “The Dearborn Independent,” resonated with Nazi ideology, further endearing him to the regime.
By the 1930s, Ford Motor Company had a significant presence in Germany, with the Ford-Werke plant in Cologne becoming one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in the country. Despite the rising tensions and eventual outbreak of World War II, Ford’s German operations continued, producing vehicles that were used by both the German public and the military, including trucks for the Wehrmacht.
Weekly updates in Ford’s newspaper about the Jews.
Henry Ford revolutionized American manufacturing, bringing automobiles to the masses and creating a foundation for America’s middle class by pioneering liveable factory wages.
But his broader social legacy is complicated. In addition to those accomplishments, Ford used his leverage as an employer to try and aggressively socially engineer workers’ lives and “Americanize” those who had immigrated from elsewhere. Ford bitterly opposed labor unions, which he frequently described as a global Jewish conspiracy.
Indeed, as a vocal antisemite, he used his status as one of America’s most well-known and trusted business leaders to systematically spread conspiracy theories about Jews. His screeds against Jewish people became so well-known at home and abroad that he is the only American whom Adolf Hitler compliments by name in Mein Kampf.
In 1920, Ford began publishing a weekly series called “The International Jew: The World’s Problem” on the paper’s front page. The series was based on an antisemitic hoax known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to reveal a global Jewish conspiracy for money and power. (In 1921, the London Times debunked the Protocols as a plagiarism largely based on a French political satire that didn’t mention Jewish people.) Ford continued his antisemitic series for several years and extended its reach by distributing the paper in Ford car dealerships around the country and republishing it in four booklets.
Ford’s essays and booklets helped fuel antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad. Hitler was a fan of Ford’s antisemitic writing, mentioning the carmaker by name in his own 1925 anti-Jewish manifesto, Mein Kampf. In 1938, Germany awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the country’s highest medal for foreigners. Ford received the award for his “humanitarian ideals” and devotion “to the cause of peace, like [Germany’s] Führer and Chancellor has done,” according to the proclamation Hitler signed.
Ford’s name even came up during the Nuremberg trials when Baldur von Schirach, a former Reich youth leader of the National Socialist German Students League, described his own radicalization.
“The decisive antisemitic book which I read at that time and the book which influenced my comrades…was Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew,” he said at his 1946 trial.
Dow Chemical Company
Dow Chemical Company, during the era of Nazi Germany, found itself entangled in the web of international business ethics and wartime economics. As one of the leading chemical companies in the United States, Dow’s relationship with the Third Reich highlights the complex interplay between corporate interests and geopolitical realities.
In the 1930s and into the 1940s, Dow Chemical was known for its advancements in plastics and chemicals, which had applications far beyond U.S. borders. During this period, Dow, like many multinational corporations, had to navigate the challenges of doing business in a world increasingly dominated by totalitarian regimes, including Nazi Germany.
Dow’s connection to the Nazi regime primarily revolved around its chemical and industrial products. The company provided materials and technology that could have dual uses, both civilian and military. For instance, magnesium, a product Dow was heavily involved in producing, was crucial for aircraft construction, a sector that Nazi Germany’s war machine heavily relied upon.
Coca-Cola
Wartime Fanta advertising with Wehrmacht link.
Coca-Cola’s relationship with Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s offers a case study in how international businesses navigated the treacherous waters of global politics and ethics. Founded in the heart of Atlanta, Coca-Cola had already become a global brand by the time the Nazis rose to power.
In 1929, Coca-Cola established its first bottling plant in Germany, and by the early 1930s, it was expanding its presence there. However, with the advent of the Nazi regime, the company faced a significant challenge: how to continue operations in a country with increasingly restrictive racial and economic policies.
Coca-Cola adapted by creating a German subsidiary, “Max Wortmann & Co.,” which became the face of Coca-Cola in Nazi Germany. This allowed the company to maintain operations while appearing to comply with Nazi economic nationalism. The syrup formula was changed to accommodate local tastes and to utilize ingredients more readily available in Germany, including a version of the drink made from whey, known as “Fanta,” which was invented during this period.
Despite the war and the ideological divide, Coca-Cola’s German operations continued, producing beverages that were consumed by Nazi officials, soldiers, and civilians alike. This continuity of business, under the leadership of local managers who were often members of the Nazi Party, raised questions about the company’s complicity with the regime.
While Coke was storming through Europe in the 1940s supporting American GI’s , Coca-Cola GmbH (Germany) was busy collaborating with the Nazi regime. The company advertised in the Nazi press, thus financially supporting it. It built bottling plants in occupied territories. Then in 1941, when Coca-Cola GmbH could no longer get the syrup from America to make Coke, it invented a new drink specifically for the Nazi beverage market, out of the ingredients available to it.
IBM
Throughout Europe, numerous concentration camp prisoners were cataloged using standardized pre-printed Inmate Cards known as Haftlingskartei. These cards were designed to be compatible with IBM’s punch card system, featuring IBM’s control markings, facilitating the systematic processing and tracking of prisoners.
IBM’s relationship with Nazi Germany, particularly its role in facilitating the Holocaust, represents one of the most chilling examples of how technology can be harnessed for heinous purposes. During the 1930s and into World War II, IBM, through its German subsidiary Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (Dehomag), provided the Nazi regime with punch card technology critical for tracking and organizing genocide.
IBM’s technology was used to create detailed records, categorize individuals, and streamline the logistics of not just the Holocaust but also the broader administration of Nazi Germany.
IBM’s involvement wasn’t merely passive; there’s documentation that suggests direct oversight from IBM’s New York headquarters. Executives like Thomas J. Watson Sr. continued to support and expand operations in Germany even as the scale of the Holocaust became known.
Post-war, IBM faced minimal immediate repercussions for its actions. It wasn’t until decades later that the full extent of IBM’s collaboration came to light, prompting legal actions and moral reckonings. The company eventually settled lawsuits with Holocaust survivors, acknowledging, albeit indirectly, its role in these atrocities.
At the vanguard of Hitler’s intellectual shock troops were the statisticians. Naturally, statistical offices and census departments were Dehomag’s [IBM’s German subsidiary] number one clients. In their journals, Nazi statistical experts boasted of what they expected their evolving science to deliver. All of their high expectations depended on the continuing innovation of IBM punch cards and tabulator technology. Only Dehomag could design and execute systems to identify, sort, and quantify the population to separate Jews from Aryans.
Because of the almost limitless need for tabulators in Hitler’s race and geopolitical wars, IBM NY reacted enthusiastically to the prospects of Nazism. While other fearful or reviled American businessmen were curtailing or canceling their dealings in Germany, Watson embarked upon an historic expansion of Dehomag. Just weeks after Hitler came to power, IBM NY invested more than 7 million Reichsmarks — in excess of a million dollars — to dramatically expand the German subsidiary’s ability to manufacture machines.
IBM and the Holocaust is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling shocker–a million copies in print–detailing IBM’s conscious co-planning and co-organizing of the Holocaust for the Nazis, all micromanaged by its president Thomas J Watson from New York and Paris. This Expanded Edition offers 37 pages of previous unpublished documents, pictures, internal company correspondence, and other archival materials to produce an even more explosive volume. Originally published to extraordinary praise in 2001, this provocative, award-winning international bestseller has stood the test of time as it chronicles the story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides nothing less than a chilling investigation into corporate complicity. Edwin Black’s monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
These were merely a few of the American corporations that were involved in various dealings with Nazi Germany, supplying the regime with crucial materials, technology, and even ideological backing. Some businesses directly supported the Nazi war effort, while others publicly expressed sympathy or alignment with the regime, like Ford, which resisted U.S. intervention against Germany.
The harsh truth is that for many, the pursuit of profit often overshadowed the sanctity of human life during this period. The lure of financial gain prompted numerous companies to turn a blind eye to the Holocaust, favoring economic advantage over ethical principles.
This chapter of history serves as a sobering lesson on how financial interests can sometimes override moral judgments. Even in the United States, celebrated for its freedoms, certain companies engaged with one of history’s most tyrannical regimes, illustrating a troubling readiness to disregard human suffering for financial benefit.
During the 1930s and 40s, Chase National Bank, under Winthrop W. Aldrich, maintained operations in Nazi Germany, navigating through a morally ambiguous landscape of international finance. Chase managed branches in Paris and Berlin, dealing with Nazi officials and handling transactions that included looted assets from Jewish properties and payments for gold taken from Holocaust victims.
IBM and the Holocaust is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling shocker–a million copies in print–detailing IBM’s conscious co-planning and co-organizing of the Holocaust for the Nazis, all micromanaged by its president Thomas J Watson from New York and Paris. This Expanded Edition offers 37 pages of previous unpublished documents, pictures, internal company correspondence, and other archival materials to produce an even more explosive volume. Originally published to extraordinary praise in 2001, this provocative, award-winning international bestseller has stood the test of time as it chronicles the story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides nothing less than a chilling investigation into corporate complicity. Edwin Black’s monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.