Aiding and Abetting
By: Ash
Tags: Capitalism, American History, World War II, History, Economics

I’d like to buy the Reich a Coke

During World War II, Coca-Cola bolstered the company’s image by dedicating itself to providing every soldier with Coca-Cola, in exchange for being largely exempt from the sugar rationing in place in the United States, and freely using the US military as a freight courier.

Super patriotic, right? But you already know where I’m going to go with this. Starting out in 1929, Coca-Cola increased their German sales to over 100,000 Reichsmarks (roughly $350k in today’s dollars) by the time Hitler came to power. The same year, Max Keith (pronounced ‘kite’) joined the ranks of the ‘Coca-Cola men’, and would later take over from Powers. Keith’s innovative workarounds would produce one of the most popular drinks the world over.

Without the cola syrup, unavailable due to blockades, Coca-Cola’s German subsidiary couldn’t produce actual Coca-Cola. In 1941, Keith asked chemists to come up with an alternative. They obliged, and combined leftovers from apple cider pressings with German-made Coke ingredients to create Fanta soda. When the American troops reached Germany, Coca-Cola’s ‘technical observers’ came and reclaimed Coca-Cola GmbH, as well as the new addition to the Coca-Cola family.

But what would American history be without the systemic degradation of everyone that wasn’t a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant?

The enemy of my enemy is my…country?

Agnes Bluhm

The Rockefeller Foundation of New York played a large part in providing the one essential component Germany lacked: money. They started in 1920 when they began funding the research of racial hygienist Agnes Bluhm, who was studying alcoholism and heredity. Seems pretty innocuous, right? Well turns out trying to blame societal ills on what would be known as genetics is a slippery slope.

After a tour of Europe, the Rockefeller Foundation began supporting other eugenicists and racial hygienists, such as Hermann Poll, Alfred Grotjahn, and Hans Nachtshiem. By 1926, German researchers had received $410,000 (in modern day terms, approximately $4 million) from the Rockefeller Foundation. They also helped establish several of Germany’s largest centres for conducting eugenics research and experiments, including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity. Later, when the latter was going under during the depression, the Rockefeller Foundation would pump money into the Institute to keep it afloat. In 1928 they built a new building for the Department of Genealogy and Demography, which carried a price tag of $325,000. Even after the Nazi rise to power and the start of the Third Reich, Rockefeller remained supportive of Germany’s institutions and practices.

(For the uninitiated, eugenics was the well-intentioned-but-racist pseudoscience born in Virginia and culminating in eliminating ‘unfit’ individuals in German gas chambers. Developed by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, it applied the concepts behind livestock husbandry to human populations, with the devastating, if not unforeseeable, consequence that people started being treated like livestock.)

More help researching what to do with those pesky nonwhites shortly followed. The Carnegie Institution of Washington kept close-knit ties with Germany’s fascist eugenicists, and the two worked closely, sharing work and results. One of the Carnegie-backed studies produced the formulas for calculating if someone was a full Jew, a half-Jew, or a quarter-Jew. California eugenicists worked to produce propaganda pamphlets for the Nazis, and helped to distribute them. In return, America would get the German documentary Erbkrank, or The Hereditary Defective, which would be shown in public schools across the country. That was the justification for the systemic annihilation of people. Now they just needed a method. Once again, America provided.

THINK of people as numbers

Like the rest of the companies mentioned, IBM had a respectable German subsidiary company which veiled connections with its New York-based parent company. Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, better known as Dehomag, was responsible for providing the punch card and database system the Nazis used to identify, organise and systematically exterminate enemies of the Reich. These cards gave the Nazis everything they needed to know: nationality, date of birth, family information, which category of ‘unfit’ people they belonged to, and their fate once they reached the camps. Dehomag also designed systems to track Luftwaffe inventory, railroad schedules and other aspects of life in the Third Reich.

On 12 April, 1933, Hitler decreed that a census would immediately take place. But the local governments were not up to the task of such a massive project. Enter Karl Koch, an attorney for Dehomag, who offered to do the job on a contract. Their successful handling of the project started IBM’s prosperous relationship with Nazi Germany, despite the gathering war clouds. In anticipation of this, Thomas Watson, the company’s president, took actions to ensure that Dehomag received the clients and factories of any IBM companies within other European countries, so that when Germany’s borders expanded, no profit would be lost. Austrian IBM systems even logged all Jewish possessions for records of assets acquired by the Reich.

Their relationship grew even more entangled in 1941, when an agreement was made to sell some shares of Dehomag to the Nazi government in exchange for a secure monopoly and the right to pay royalties to IBM in New York. As the war progressed, nearly every camp the Nazis established had its own IBM outpost for cataloguing its victims. Each camp had its own code, and these outposts were responsible for giving each inmate their assigned number. Under this system, each camp could potentially register 999,999 people.

Without Dehomag’s ability to handle great swaths of data, the Third Reich would never have successfully implemented the Holocaust to the extent that they did. And while Dehomag was inextricably tied to Hitler’s regime, throughout the war IBM NY maintained awareness of its subsidiary’s actions and directed it via companies in neutral countries, so that IBM appeared to cut ties in Germany once the United States entered the war. Then, like GM, IBM lodged post-war claims for compensation for war damage to their machines in each of the countries affected by the war, including Bulgaria, France, Poland and Romania.