Not GR but interestingly related

[Mark Kohut]

Since slave labor is the topic, there's this. some of the history herein
from a book or two has already been talked about on the plist:

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/peter-james-hudson-slavery-capitalism

On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 3:43 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> 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> 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>
>> 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> 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/20161119/9a997c76/attachment.html>