Not GR but interestingly related

Sat Nov 19 02:43:14 CST 2016

Not only German corporations ...

> ... The German branch plants of American corporations also made eager use of slave labour supplied by the Nazis, not only Fremdarbeiter, but also POWs and even concentration camp inmates. For example, the Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company based in Velbert in the Rhineland reportedly relied on “the aid of labourers from Eastern Europe” to make “considerable profits,” and Coca-Cola is also noted to have benefitted from the use of foreign workers, as well as prisoners of war in its Fanta plants.  The most spectacular examples of the use of forced labour by American subsidiaries, however, appear to have been provided by Ford and GM, two cases that were recently the subject of a thorough investigation.

Of the Ford-Werke it is alleged that starting in 1942 this firm “zealously, aggressively, and successfully” pursued the use of foreign workers and POWs from the Soviet Union, France, Belgium, and other occupied countries — apparently with the knowledge of corporate headquarters in the US.  Karola Fings, a German researcher who has carefully studied the wartime activities of the Ford-Werke, writes:

[Ford] did wonderful business with the Nazis. Because the acceleration of production during the war opened up totally new opportunities to keep the level of wage costs low. A general freeze on wage increases was in effect in the Ford-Werke from 1941 on. However, the biggest profit margins could be achieved by means of the use of so-called Ostarbeiter [forced workers from Eastern Europe].  The thousands of foreign forced labourers put to work in the Ford-Werke were forced to slave away every day except Sunday for twelve hours, and for this they received no wage whatsoever.

Presumably even worse was the treatment reserved for the relatively small number of inmates of the concentration camp of Buchenwald, who were made available to the Ford-Werke in the summer of 1944 ... <

http://www.globalresearch.ca/profits-ber-alles-american-corporations-and-hitler/4607

Am 18.11.2016 um 21:14 schrieb Allan Balliett:

In history, the Nazi's were unique in the extent they were cruel to their unpaid laborers.

Check out the article at this link, excerpt below. (VW in bold)

https://popularresistance.org/300000-slaves-made-german-corporations-rich/

Under a programme organised by Fritz Sauckel – who was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes – over two million people were brought to Germany from conquered lands to work for the new master race.

Many of these went to private companies, like VW and BASF, while tens of thousands more were conscripted to work under the most appalling conditions producing weaponry.

These included the slaves who built the V1 and V2 Rockets and other massive construction projects, such as the Valentin submarine base in Bremen.

The Nazis differed from other regimes throughout histroy which used slave labour. Romans and Greeks, for example, valued and revered their forced labourers wile the Nazis treated them with immense crulety.

VW, for example, had something called the ‘dying room’  where female forced labourers who gave birth had to leave their newborns to die.

Most of the agricultural slaves came from the occupied eastern territories of Poland, the Baltic states and Russia. Because the Slavik people were regarded as subhuman in the Nazi racial lexicon, casualty rates among them were the highest of all.

Dark past: Chemical manufacturer IG Farben even had a factory inside Auschwitz (pictured) that used prison labour in the production of synthetic rubber and oil. However, their most ghastly act was in the sale of Zyklon B – the poison used in the Nazi gas chambers. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com<mailto:mark.kohut at gmail.com>> wrote:
Not only Slothrop disappeared......

A little unmystical reading and Von Braun on the afterlife and The Other Side passim, have new resonances.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 1:43 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com<mailto:montedavis49 at gmail.com>> wrote:
This is a point I've tried to make in connection with the list's recurring discussions of von Braun (and the broader public's re-discovery every decade or so that OMG There Was a Nazi in Our Spaceport):

That in the insane moral/economic landscape of wartime Germany, slave labor was very widely used (and very widely abused, including summary executions for the most trivial causes or none at all) throughout civilian industry all over the Reich as well as in war production...

That therefore tens of thousands of executives, professionals and managers -- both Party (even SS) members and not -- saw that every day and did nothing...

And that postwar "de-Nazification" penalized -- let alone tried -- only the tiniest handful of those.

All of which is to say that while there was brutal, bitter irony in von Braun's reincarnations as genial Dr. Space on Disney programs in the 1950s, and a leader in the race for ICBMs and then the Moon, there was nothing very uncommon either in his offenses nor in his escape from consequences. For all the recurring focus on the weapons-tech figures brought over by Operation Paperclip, they were far outnumbered by Germans who emigrated quietly on their own to Allied countries in the 1950s and 1960s, one by one, to pursue careers in construction or auto-making or vegetable canning which had earlier been entwined with horrors.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com<mailto:allan.balliett at gmail.com>> wrote:
apropos for anyone sympathetic to VW's recent  recent payouts and layoffs

Slave labour was an integral part of the Nazi war machine. Many concentration camps were attached to dedicated factories where company officials worked hand-in-hand with the SS officers overseeing the camps.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34358783

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20161119/183d8ef6/attachment.html>