Soft Drinks, Cameras, and Cars: 5 American Companies that Profited from Nazi Business Ties

Soft Drinks, Cameras, and Cars: 5 American Companies that Profited from Nazi Business Ties

Jeanette Lamb - April 4, 2017

Soft Drinks, Cameras, and Cars: 5 American Companies that Profited from Nazi Business Ties
Thomas Neumann

Kodak

Every picture tells a story. One of Hitler’s top economic advisors was heavily invested Kodak. He offered Kodak (and other U.S. companies) advice, telling them to fire any Jews who worked for them.

Kodak’s business expansion before and after the onset of the Second World War is partly linked to economic opportunity. Joseph Goebbels’ admiration for Hollywood perpetuated the German desire to use top of the line visual tools to project the Nazi message.

Kodak’s willingness to do business with the Third Reich does not lead one to draw the same conclusions as with Standard Oil and GM. Kodak is more like Coca-Cola, in that neither service provided by the company undermined American war efforts. In fact, the fact that Kodak continued selling its film (although it did so in Germany under a company called Afra, which had been around since 1887) allowed for moments between 1939 and 1945 to be captured democratically by anyone of any nation with access to a camera and film.

The benefits are abundant, considering archives now exist depicting wartime locations like Paris from both the French and the German perspectives.

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