Nazi Concentration Camp Profiteering: Commercials You Won’t See

[Threadkiller]

From Did Krups, Braun, and Mercedes-Benz make Nazi concentration camp ovens? (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_078.html) Many big German companies used slaves during World War II. The most important was I.G. Farben, the German chemical monopoly. IGF had a substantial interest in one of the companies making Zyklon B, the poison used to gas the Jews. (The director of that company got five years; the heads of the other one were hanged.) The Allies ordered IGF broken up after the war but the pieces are still around, including such well known companies as Bayer and BASF.After reading this article during the run of BASF commercials (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafMZsKJONk) (‘At BASF we don’t make the [product]...We make it [faster, slicker, more desirable]’), my lightly warped brain couldn’t get the following to quit playing in my head:At BASF we didn’t make the Holocaust…We made it more profitable.

[Mijin]

I suppose we shouldn't hold current management responsible for crimes committed 50 years ago...


The "I suppose" makes it sound as though Cecil finds it difficult or is even reluctant to view existing management as innocent.

In my view, it's very simple: people shouldn't be held accountable, in any way, for crimes that they did not commit.

It's very natural for us to associate modern Germans with the war.
But natural does not make it right.

[irapm]

That both many German and Japanese escaped from or were otherwise given immunity to prosecution due to profit or other cold war "needs" ranks right up there with our present administration's justification for the slaughter of our sons and daughters as well as the countless innocent civilians caught up in this "manly" ignorance. Behavior of this nature sixty years ago or today is inhuman and disgusting. Our government and those who back these policies appear to me as being no better than those we hung. This may seem a harsh criticism but let us not forget that Germany and Italy as is the US today are and were then considered Christian countries.