Business collaboration with Nazi Germany
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.
[13] 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.
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.
[15] On August 3, 1933, Adolf Hitler received Sosthenes Behn (then the CEO of ITT) and his German representative, Henry Mann, in one of his first meetings with US businessmen.
[16][17][18][need quotation to verify] In his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Antony C. Sutton claims that ITT subsidiaries made cash payments to SS-leader Heinrich Himmler.
In the 1960s, ITT Corporation won $27 million in compensation for damage inflicted on its share of the Focke-Wulf plant by Allied bombing during World War II.
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.
[24] "Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe," according to PBS.
[25] 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.
[36] 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.
[36] 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.
[37][38] Swiss companies including Oerlikon-Bührle, Tavaro, Hispano-Suiza and Dixi sold the Nazis antiaircraft guns, cannon, military precision instruments and ammunition.
