Business collaboration with Nazi Germany

American companies that had dealings with Nazi Germany included Ford Motor Company, Coca-Cola, and IBM. Ford Werke and Ford SAF (Ford's subsidiaries in Germany and France, respectively) produced military vehicles and other equipment for Nazi Germany's war effort. Some of Ford's operations in Germany at the time were run using forced labor. When the United States Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found "destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire." The German government seized control of these Ford plants by force and locked executives out. Henry Ford had no control over his factories at this time. Like Swiss banks, American car companies deny helping the Nazi war machine or profiting from forced labor at their German subsidiaries during World War II. Nazi concentration camps operated a Hollerith department called Hollerith Abteilung, which had IBM machines that also included calculating and sorting machines. The history community has long debated whether IBM was complicit in the use of these machines, whether the machines used were IBM branded, and even whether tabulating machines were used for this purpose at all. General Motors General Motors' Opel division, based in Germany, supplied the Nazi Party with vehicles. The head of GM at the time was an ardent opponent of the New Deal, which bolstered labor unions and public transport, and admired and supported Adolf Hitler. GM was compensated $32 million by the U.S. government because its German factories were bombed by U.S. forces during the war. International Telephone & Telegraph Eastman-Kodak Kodak's European subsidiaries continued to operate during the war. Kodak AG, the German subsidiary, was transferred to two trustees in 1941 to allow the company to continue operating in the event of war between Germany and the United States. The company produced film, fuses, triggers, detonators, and other materiel. Slave labor was employed at Kodak AG's Stuttgart and Berlin-Kopenick plants. During the German occupation of France, Kodak-Pathé facilities in Severan and Vincennes were also used to support the German war effort. Kodak continued to import goods to the United States purchased from Nazi Germany through neutral nations such as Switzerland. This practice was criticized by many American diplomats, but defended by others as more beneficial to the American war effort than detrimental. Kodak received no penalties during or after the war for collaboration. ==British, Swiss, U.S., Argentinian and Canadian banks==

German financial operations worldwide were facilitated by banks such as the Bank for International Settlements, Chase and Morgan, and Union Banking Corporation. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. acted for German tycoon Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler's rise to power. In March 1939 the Bank of England surrendered to Germany 23 tons worth 5.6 million pounds of gold that belonged to the National Bank of Czechoslovakia, six months before England entered World War II by transferring it between accounts of the BIS ; transfer of 27 tons of gold of the National Bank held in its own name with the Bank of England was blocked. According to an article in The Sydney Morning Herald, "The documents released by the Bank of England are revealing, both for what they show and what they omit. They are a window into a world of fearful deference to authority, the primacy of procedure over morality, a world where, for the bankers, the most important thing is to keep the channels of international finance open, no matter what the human cost." It names organizations such as IG Farben, which produced Zyklon B, and the Nazi-controlled Bank der . In 1943, Nazi sympathizer Juan Perón's United Officers' Group destroyed all known copies of the list, but a copy was discovered in 1984. Overall, Swiss banks were used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of Nazi loot, including plundered gold from German-occupied central banks of Europe. Switzerland resisted the Allies' call to return the wealth, while the Washington Agreement of 1946 required the restitution of $60 million to the Tripartite Gold Commission, assigned to return gold to the European banks. Both the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank helped to launder Nazi gold by transferring it from a Swiss account to one held by neutral Portugal. A single transaction in June 1942 by the Canadian bank moved 4.02 metric tons of gold. ==Hollywood==

Major Hollywood studios have also been accused of collaboration, in making or adjusting films to Nazi tastes prior to the U.S. entry into the war. Universal Pictures edited All Quiet on the Western Front to remove scenes that had sparked outcry in Germany. Georg Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles in 1933, threatened the American film studios with a German film regulation known as "Article 15": A company that distributed an anti-German picture anywhere in the world could see all its movies banned in Germany, a large market for American cinema. ==Other==

Robert A. Rosenbaum writes: "American companies had every reason to know that the Nazi regime was using IG Farben and other cartels as weapons of economic warfare"; and he noted thatas the US entered the war, it found that some technologies or resources could not be procured, because they were forfeited by American companies as part of business deals with their German counterparts. The Associated Press (AP) supplied images for a propaganda book titled The Jews in the USA, and another titled The Subhuman. The news agency reached a formal agreement with the Nazi regime, hiring Nazi propagandists as reporters. For example when the Germans discovered mass killings by the Soviets after entering Lviv, SS propagandist Frank Roth sent AP photos of those bodies, but refrained when the Nazis carried out a pogrom against Jews. Swiss companies including Oerlikon-Bührle, Tavaro, Hispano-Suiza and Dixi sold the Nazis antiaircraft guns, cannon, military precision instruments and ammunition. After the war, some of those companies reabsorbed their temporarily detached German subsidiaries, and even received compensation for war damages from the Allied governments. ==See also==