How evil were they?

Cracked.com has a nice little article on five brands familiar to the Nazis and still going strong today…

Hugo Boss! (I wouldn’t have guessed this one.) Slave labor and semiotics, when Hugo says “branding,” you want to watch out.

Hugo Boss manufactured the sleek all-black uniforms for the Schultzstaffel, better known as the SS. While today Boss uses black for slimming effects, in the SS uniforms it was used to command respect and fear in the populace.

Volkswagen! (Everybody knew this one.) The people’s car, if you were one of the special, more “Aryan” people.

People look at its rounded shape and anthropomorphic face and instantly think of love, peace and smoking massive quantities of pot. But, it was really designed as a tool for everyday life in the always-cheerful Third Reich. Give credit to Porsche for designing a car so impossibly cute that we forget it was built by diseased slaves in some dark, dank factory in Stuttgart, Germany.

International Business Machines! (well, duh…)

Bayer! (okay, they say Josef Mengele was a Bayer employee, and Bayer was part of the IG Farben conglomerate that manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used for mass murders in the concentration camps but isn’t that like blaming, oh, I don’t know, GE Consumer Electronics for the GE radiation experiments on prisoners in Walla Walla, Washington? I mean, what does my clock radio have to do with radiation discharged into the atmosphere from a GE nuke plant? I think we should take a pass on Bayer. Hell, they invented Heroin, and where would the world be without it?)

Siemens!

At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, it was not atypical for a slave worker to build electrical switches for Siemens in the morning and be snuffed out in a Siemens-made gas chamber in the afternoon.

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