Thank god Dennis Darkɔ’s valuable reaction wasn’t omitted from the screenshot
That’s hilarious 😂🤣
This is how you can tell who took the original screenshot
Always love scrolling through German and Japanese company pages in their history sections.
Lots and lots of stuff before 1935
History seems to stop at 1935 and magically restarts again in 1945
After 1945, the narrative resumes with lots of detailed glamorous history
“W-we took a little break…”
Italians: … we … ah … we … we kinda sorta maybe took a little break
Can you tell any German company that doesn’t explicitly mention their history in that period?
Note: These are highlighted quotes only.
VW:
The first group of such slave labourers were Polish women deployed at the company’s main plant.
BMW:
BMW bears a major share of the responsibility for these crimes as well as a burden of guilt from its involvement in them.
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/company/history/BMW-during-the-era-of-national-socialism.html
Bayer:
I.G. Farben starts building the company’s own Buna-Monowitz concentration camp in 1942
https://www.bayer.com/en/history/1925-1945
ThyssenKrupp:
In all, the Krupp Group employs at least 100,000 foreign and forced laborers. The conditions under which the forced laborers live and work are often inhumane and contradict law and morality
https://www.thyssenkrupp.com/en/company/history
(Note: You need to press “>” a couple of times)
Siemens:
During the entire period from 1940 to 1945, at least 80,000 forced laborers worked at Siemens.
https://www.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/company.html
Those are the first five companies I was thinking of by the way and not selecively chosen.
In comparison:
Toyota:
https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75years/
No entry between 1938 and 1947.
Nintendo:
1933 The company was established as an unlimited partnership, Yamauchi Nintendo & Co.
1947 Mr. Yamauchi began a distribution company, Marufuku Co. Ltd.
https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Hardware/Nintendo-History/Nintendo-History-625945.html
Toshiba:
As the war intensified, the company grew rapidly by filling state orders for radios, vacuum tubes and other military supplies, and also producing generators. However, production capacity was crippled by bombing raids targeting factories
That’s it. No mention of their role in WW2.
https://www.global.toshiba/ww/outline/corporate/history/chronology.html#y1940
Honda:
History starts at 1946, no mention of how the money came from to found the company.
Mitsubishi:
Despite the spirit of internationalism and social justice he engendered, at the outbreak of hostilities following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Koyata Iwasaki stated at a speech given to the assembled top executives of each Mitsubishi Group company: “Now our nation has come to a decision. And although my personal ideas regarding diplomacy depart from those of the nation, we are all now called upon to follow the order of our Emperor, to be united and to endeavor with all our strength for the nation.” A small voice of reason in a time of turmoil and growing call to arms, Koyata urged the nation to look beyond the current state of affairs, and envision a time when internationalism and peace would prevail. [ Several sentences of further praise omitted ]
Some German companies above also championed their founders/leaders as opponents of war. None of them solely focus on how they were a lighthouse of peace in times of uncertainty though. This reads like satire.
https://www.mitsubishi.com/en/profile/history/outline/
I haven’t chosen the Japanese companies selectively either. They were the first one’s to come into my mind as well. But none of them even offer remotely even a fraction of the “honesty” of seemingly any major German company. And that’s even with the German companies doing the bare minimum!
Hilarious. Like, if Apple bought some dictator a golden trinket or so nowadays.
I would love the opportunity to be embarrassed to admit this in like 15 years. Feels optimistic, though.
Or many American companies like IBM or Coca Cola…
Ford motor Corp … Henry Ford was an ugly antisemite and was even awarded by Hitler for it.
IBM built, maintained and staffed the machines used to route victims of the Holocaust through the rail network. The arm tattoos were used to match people up to the punch cards that the operatives used to identify “passengers”.
Henry Ford was an utter cunt but IBM directly profited from genocide.
I remember when growing up, BASF had the coolest looking VHS cassette sleeves! They also made Zyklon B…
An Argentinian why they have a German surname.
Still waiting for Porsche or another German company to come up with a new tiger III design to send against Russia.
Clip from Family Guy on this:
Daimler Benz actually has a website on the Nazi time and their role in it. https://group.mercedes-benz.com/unternehmen/tradition/geschichte/1933-1945.html
We don’t ask how the name Adidas came about either
German shoe maker Adi Dassler who gave his newly developed shoes to Jesse Owens prior to him starting racing at Berlin 1936, knowing he was the best competitor there despite not being Aryan?
Adi Dassler
Well, Adi was not his given name. However, Adolf was not an uncommon name back then. It just somehow became unpopular after 1945.
