Here is an important book that dwells on the continuities of Hitler’s Germany, the industries that maintained Hitlerist Germany by churning out tanks and ammunition for the front and today. This is not conspiracy talk, it it just about the fortunes of family businesses who were the actual war profiteers, but after WWII during the so-called German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) period became heroic figures of the new Germany’s industrial might, particularly those involved in heavy industries of the Ruhrgebiet – Thyssen, Krupp, Klöckner, Vögler, etc. and the car industry.
Maybe you are familiar with the seminal modernist novels of Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbow that deal with the mind-boggling implications of Germany’s harnessing the power of chemistry and rockets under the lead of IG Farben and aerospace engineer Werner von Braun. After WWII von Braun was taken off the Nazi V rocket program to be put in charge of US intermediate-range missile program. Due to the secretive nature of the ultra-rich in Germany, we know very little about today’s German corporate industrial giants and their tarnished past. There is a long debate btw historians of Nazi Germany as to what industry branch was more progressive. What if the Junker-Heavy Industry alliance (btw the militaristic Junkers – rye and the Ruhr barons – iron) did not become so prominent or if electricity took the lead? Did the great bankers and captains of industry bankroll the rise of the NS or only join later when the wind of change was in the air?
Anyway, IG Farben – a former giant of the Chemical industry and Big Pharma (as well as concentration camp poisons and numerous other chemical products ) was a different corporate object than older Imperial power company structures such ad Dutch East India Company let’s say. Here is a close look and long overdue historical reckoning of how Germany’s economic might and beloved motor car industries (Volkswagen or BWM) is deeply enmeshed with its wartime nazi support and war effort even involving slave labor. The heirs and heiresses (some of Germany’s richest women and nr 50 on the world’s top richest) are still silent about these things. An ARD documentary eas entitled specifically The Silence of the Quandts – investigating the role of the Quandt family business during the Second World War – KZ (concentration camp) prisoners worked for the batteries in a specially built concentration sub-camp – without any protection workers had to labor and manipulate highly toxic compounds used by the industry.
“I hope people will become more aware on a consumer level that the money they spend on these products might end up as dividends for these families and might go towards the maintaining of foundations, corporate headquarters, and media properties in the name of Nazi war criminals.
“I think people should be more aware of these histories and of history in general, particularly when it comes to consumption and the continuing whitewashing of history by these consumer brands and families that control them.” David de Jong
TimeSpace Warps 