A lesson in reinventing

**Danmark** · 08-31-2014, 09:11 PM

by Neil Hever

Who packed chocolate in tins for the Red Cross and Wehrmacht and still makes chocolate today? This part of their history is missing from the company history. According to Hildebrand they started making confections in the 1950s. NH

Rewriting history?? ........ never!!

**Danmark** · 09-01-2014, 04:03 AM

Standard Oil

Without the help of US petroleum giant Standard Oil, the Luftwaffe would never have gotten off the ground! Their plane engines needed tetraethyl lead gasoline in order to fly. At the time, only Standard Oil, Du Pont, and General Motors had the ability to produce this. In 1938, Walter C. Teagle, then president of Standard Oil, helped Hermann Schmitz of I.G. Farben ( their major shareholder ) to acquire 500 tons of tetraethyl lead from Ethyl, a British Standard subsidiary. In early 1939 ( before war began ) Schmitz returned to London and obtained an additional 15 million dollars’ worth of tetraethyl lead which was to be turned into aviation gasoline back in Germany. ( this fuelled the bombers that brought terror to London, Coventry & surrounds!!!! )

After the war began in Europe, and the English furious about U.S. shipments of strategic materials to Nazi Germany, Standard Oil immediately changed the registration of their entire fleet to Panamanian to avoid British search or seizure. These ships continued to carry oil to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where they refueled and siphoned oil to German tankers for shipment to Hamburg and to oil depots in the Spanish Azores & Cape Verde islands, where German submarines also refueled.

The various divisions of Standard Oil later became household names to all of us …….. Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Esso ( S.O. = Standard Oil ) and Chevron.

Believe it or not!

**zwerge** · 09-01-2014, 04:41 AM

I think this outfit is still in business.

**DougB** · 09-01-2014, 07:35 AM

What has not been written is IG Farben ran the large sub camp at Auschwitz Birkenau that was building the synthetic rubber plant (Buna), at which many died during the construction. Not 1, not a single 1, IG Farben executive, was brought to trial never mind convicted of war crimes.

IG Farben and its related businesses have blood on their hands but like so many international conglomerates today, are immune from any sort of human rights trials. Personally IG Farben was as guilty as anyone in the Nazi party of crimes against humanity but when convenience and commerce take precedent and political expediency is the order of the day a blind eye is oft turned and justice is never served.

Reinvention when slave labor was used as well as death camp labor, is not really a term that is correct. The corporations that were complicent in Hitler's regime then are like the corporations of today, without answer and without conscience. The men who sat on the board of directors of many of the companies outlined in this thread should have justifiably been hung, shot or thrown out of an aircraft at 20,000 feet over the Arctic. There are many books that factually tell the tale of corporate Germany's role in the holocaust. Very few are well read. All should be.

**Danmark** · 09-01-2014, 08:17 AM

And it took until 2011 for I G Farben to finally be destroyed.
Declaring bankruptcy in 2003 the "shell company" finally ran out of funds to pay surviving victims of their evil deeds and was scrubbed from the market.

The evil men do .........

**StefanM** · 09-01-2014, 08:34 AM

Hugo Boss?

**StefanM** · 09-01-2014, 08:39 AM

For those that don't know, all of the "P" patches for Polish forced labourers and "OST" patches for Eastern forced workers were produced by one company—the Berliner Fahnenfabrik Geitel & Co Berlin which is still going today and is owned by the same family as the wartime company —the Geitel family. Gustav Geitel founded the company in 1921 as Geitel & Co. Spittelmarkt. The Geitel's Berlin flag/banner factory did very well during the Nazi era having the contract to produce enormous numbers of official Nazi and military flags used by the German Third Reich. The company won the prestigious contract to produce the Nazi flags and banners used at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The Berliner Fahnenfabrik Geitel & Co changed its name in 1948 and now operates as the BEST company and unsurprisingly no mention of "P" patches, "OST" patches or Jewish star contracts on the company history web page:

Nationalflaggen Werbefahnen Fahnendruck Flaggen Fotodruck Präsentationssystem Berliner Stoffdruckerei GmbH

As well as the "P"and "OST" patches the Berliner Fahnenfabrik Geitel & Co later produced the "Jewish star" for which Jews had to pay 10 pfennig each to buy them. Jews, six years and older, had to wear them on their clothing. The contract for the manufacture of the "Jewish star" was awarded the Berlin Fahnenfabrik Geitel & Co on the basis that it was to be fulfilled within a few days. Nearly a million stars - printed on long rolls of fabric and packed in bales - were delivered on time and the order brought the company 30,000 Reichsmark, which following the normal business practice of the time "if paid within five days of delivery of order" a two percent discount was granted.