Whilst reading Wikipedia’s article on German WW2 aircraft manufacturer Focke-Wulf I noticed this tiny little fact-ette buried away towards the end:
ITT Corporation, which had acquired a 25% stake in the company prior to the war, won $27 million in compensation in the 1960s [from the US government] for the damage that was inflicted on its share of the Focke-Wulf plant by WWII Allied bombing.
And there are other sources, too; Google books throws up the 23 April 1973 issue of New York magazine, which goes on to say that:
Most remarkable of all, ITT now presents itself as the innocent victim of the Second World War, and has been handsomely recompensed for its injuries. In 1967, some 25 years after the events, ITT actually managed to obtain $27 million in compensation from the American government, for war damages to its factories in Germany, including $5 million for damage to Focke-Wulf plants - on the basis that they were American property bombed by Allied bombers.
I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense, and I can see why the US government might not want to tell ITT to get lost - they were great mates - but it seems potty. Was this common? Did other companies in the US and Britain sue their respective governments for damages to partnerships in Germany or Japan during WW2? The only other one that springs to mind is Ford, but the few sources I can find seem vague about that.
I wonder if it has happened more recently, e.g. during the Gulf wars, or the former Yugoslavia. There was famously a McDonalds in Belgrade even during the Cold War (for example).
The author of the New Yorker article is Anthony Sampson, the same author as the source for the wiki article. So I’m not sure it really counts as “another source”. A brief googling doesn’t seem to reveal any source that isn’t tracable back to Sampson, who wrote a book about ITT’s more nefarious doings.
I’m kinda sceptical of the story, as I find it hard to believe that the US wouldn’t have a law on the books protecting it from liability for stuff blown up in the normal course of a declared war. I’d need a second independent source to buy that there wasn’t at least more to the story.
Reading further, it appears that the US required the Axis powers to pay recompense to US owners of Axis companies that suffered damage during the war. There was also a federal insurance fund set up to pay for war damages on US soil (in Pearl Harbour for example).
I can’t find anything not from Simpson about ITT in particular, but exactly who got money from the Axis, who was paid from the US War Damages Corporation and who just ate the loss seems to have been a pretty active area of litigation in the late 40’s and 50’s.
I suspect the ITT suit was one of these, regarding how moneys collected from Axis gov’ts were distributed, rather then based on some principal that the US gov’t should itself pay for damages done in Axis countries during the war.
What about GM? GM owned Adam Opel AG, the German car manufacturer. Did GM get compensation for its losses?
As for German assets in the USA-my understanding was that the US Gov seized all German-owned assets, patents, intellectual property, when war was declared. Among these patents were the ones owned by IG Farben, concerning the Fischer-Tropsch process (for making gasoline out of coal).I remember that these patents were abandoned in the late 1970’s-who owns them now?
It’s been a whle since I read it, but I believe the book IBM and the Holocaust mentions this.
It was rather convoluted, since the ownership of IBM-Germany was complicated. To get around nazi rules about foreign ownership, IBM tried to claim that the German subsidiary was owned by Germans (but IBM actually kept tight control over it). But after the war, they claimed it was owned by IBM, and asked for compensation for war damages.
I believe such compensation was given by virtue of the Corporate Blownup Overseas Objects Neutralized During Obligatory Grenading Granting the Liberation of Europe Act. Otherwise known as the Corporate BOONDOGGLE Act.