I recently was in the BMW museum and they actually had a whole section dedicated to their Nazi past and how they want to never do that again. Do with that what you will but at least they’re not shoving it under the carpet.
It’s important not to forget the past. If America treated slavery the same way we’d be a lot further socially.
Is that a face or are you referring to the asterisk wildcard and implying you can put any social evil instead of the asterisk?
Reminder that the USA was a big inspiration for the nazis.
They pretty much wanted to make a USA II
American here. What is this “slavery” you speak of?
I didn’t know either, so I consulted some textbooks from Florida. Turns out, it was a long-term internship program that the New World set up to help out the uncivilized savages from Africa.
As I understand it, it was a physically demanding program, and most of those who participated didn’t make it to the end, but those who did gained life skills that would continue to impact not only them, but generations of their dependents.
Some, especially teachers in Florida who wish to keep their jobs, might say it was the very first Affirmative Action program. When you look at it that way, we should be proud of this part of our heritage.
I know there is regional variation on how the slave trade is taught, but when I was in school we had numerous, extended, and graphic discussions on the horrors of the slave trade starting from elementary school and extending into college.
Without doxxing yourself could you give an idea of where you went to school? I went to public school in the south and other than being mentioned I didn’t learn much about slavery in school. I mean we learned about the underground railroad and generally knew about the slave trade and that being a slave was about the worst thing humanly possible. But other than getting whipped they didn’t talk about much of the torture or punishments they’d went through. Civil rights I remember being discussed more in depth than slavery but when I was a kid I attributed it through the fact that most of my teachers remember the civil rights movement from when they were my age. Sorry I’m high so I’m rambling now.
Every single business in existence will sell out any value they say they hold for profit.
If they don’t another business will, welcome to capitalism.
TBF, Disney is not buckling under pressure from the Florida Nazi governor.
If they don’t another business will
That’s true, but just because the business that does sell out is more successful, doesn’t mean we can’t and shouldn’t buy from the businesses that didn’t sell out. Obviously they will be harder to find because they tend to be more local and/or niche (you gotta be, if you want to survive against businesses with no morals), but we all need to be doing what we can.
Of course with cars, there’s little we can do because all the privately owned companies tend to be making multi-million dollar cars. But for things like food, clothing, etc, there are often alternatives to the big name brands. You just have to look for them.
They did what they were told and didnt argue.
Same as Hugo Boss made SS uniforms, a lot of german people and companies at the time just went along. Even if they didnt wholeheartedly swallow the propaganda, even if they quietly hated the Nazi regime, they saw those that spoke out beaten, killed or straight up vanish. Some of the companies willingly stuck their heads in the sand and just went along because they knew that to resist was to mark yourself, and to cooperate was to profit.
Their current symbol looks like a painted over swastika, so I’m sure their future will continue be a painted over swastika.
Actually it resembles an aircraft propeller, because that’s what their engines were for.
Back when I worked at IBM, there were a bunch of flags hanging in the cafeteria that represented every country where IBM did business. We often wondered, why wasn’t there a Nazi Germany flag? After all, IBM did sell a ton of machines to the Nazis to keep track of Jews and other undesirables, in order to commit genocide. I wonder why IBM wouldn’t want people to know about that? /s
“In February 2001, an Alien Tort Claims Act claim was filed in U.S. federal court on behalf of concentration camp survivors against IBM. The suit accused IBM of allegedly providing the punched card technology that facilitated the Holocaust, and for covering up German IBM subsidiary Dehomag’s activities.”
Sadly, a majority of the lawsuits brought up against IBM in connection with it’s dark past get dropped.
Doing business with Nazis because it’s profitable. Nazis died, BMW regrets.
Doing business with fossil fuel because it’s profitable. Earth dies, BMW regrets.
I see a pattern here
Hmmm… Maybe we shouldn’t prioritize profits over all else?
Nah, nvm. That can’t be right.
Nah they literally used extermination camp forced labour, that much we know without doubt so they were pretty damn complicit. Tried to research whether BMW ever actually made gas vans, but couldn’t find a definitive confirmation or good evidence to the contrary from a reputable source, so gonna say they might have.
Fun fact: The grandmother of the current BMW owner Gabriele Quandt was literally Magda Goebbels. No, seriously.
On a similar note Deutsche Bank literally funded the Nazis and to this day is still doing shady shit like the numerous money laundering scandals and also being involved in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. For each of those, including funding the Nazis, they merely got a slap on the wrist as they’re literally still allowed to exist as one of the top 10 biggest banks of Europe.
Yes, but for justice they would have had to arrest half of Germany and find prison guards that do not sympathise with the prisoners, so 99% foreigners. It was just impossible without Germany collapsing. And they probably wanted to avoid another treaty of Versailles.
How do you measure that, there’s no crime in Germany that’s in anyway related to the horrors of WW2 (I’m assuming). Most remnants feel guilty or ousted by society if they mention being part of war crimes. Very few would have found support in different parts of the world encouraging supremacy or something shady.
The purpose of punishments and prison system if to avoid repeat behavior which mostly happened anyways. So does still punishing them have any real value except for feelings of revenge?
Honestly, after WW2 and the horrors of it and the Holocaust, I’m mildly surprised that Germany wasn’t intentionally “collapsed” in a permanent way. Not just its division into zones but permanently dissolved as a geopolitical entity, with the allies flooding their respective zones with people to settle, work, and live in the region, and encouraging the German people to travel to their countries to dilute/absorb/assimilate the people and culture to the point that the actual land effectively became something between a territory and a colony of each ally (or even an outright annexation), with no moves toward creation of East and West Germany, nor any consideration of reunification.
I guess time has a way of healing wounds, but given the impact of the war and the acts of the nazi regime, I would have expected the allies, post-war to do everything in their power to prevent a German state from ever existing again.
Admittedly, I’m not as familiar with that time period as I am with the war itself, and such ideas are always easier said than done…but that’s always seemed like a more realistic course of events, to me, than what actually happened.
some of them also became Austrian (or stayed in Austria) and went into politics after a very short while… (which is the origin story of the Austrian populist right-wing party “FPÖ” - their first leader was the former Nazi Minister of Agriculture and an SS officer) No need to hide your nazism if you’re in Austria (even today)
