Modern Companies that Collaborated with Nazis During World War 2
Staff of the Bayer group at IG Farben conducted medical experiments on concentration-camp inmates at Auschwitz and at the Mauthausen concentration camp. At Auschwitz they were led by Bayer employee Helmuth Vetter, an Auschwitz camp physician and SS captain, and Auschwitz physicians Friedrich Entress and Eduard Wirths.
Kjetil-Vidar Haraldstad, better known as Frost, Turns 50yrs old today!
His impressive career in some of the most iconic Black Metal bands has cemented his place in the scene. From Satyricon and Gorgoroth to 1349, Zyklon-B, Gehenna, Ov Hell, and Keep Of Kalessin.
The U.S. is a diverse nation of immigrants—but it was not intended to be, and its historical biases continue to haunt the present.
When David Dorado Romo was a boy growing up in El Paso, Texas, his great-aunt Adela told him about the day the U.S. Border Patrol melted her favorite shoes. Romo’s aunt was Mexican and had a visa that allowed her to commute into South Texas for her job as a maid. Every week she had to report to a Border Patrol station, in accordance with a program that ran from 1917 into the 1930s requiring most Mexican immigrants to bathe in government offices before entering the United States. She would dress up in her nicest clothing, because those who looked dirty or were thought to have lice were bathed in a mixture of kerosene and vinegar. Years later, when Romo visited the National Archives outside Washington, D.C., he found photos and records of gas chambers where the belongings of the Mexican workers had been disinfected with the chemical Zyklon B, as well as a large steam dryer of the sort that had melted his aunt’s shoes. He discovered that a German scientist had taken note of the procedures being carried out at the American border and advocated for them to be implemented in Nazi concentration camps. Eventually, the Nazis increased the potency of Zyklon B in their gas chambers, and began using it on human beings.
Romo also learned that just as the bathing and gas-dousing program was winding down, the American government began using a different dangerous chemical to delouse Mexican immigrants: From the 1930s through the 1960s, border agents sprayed DDT onto the faces of more than 3 million guest workers as they crossed the southern border.
Yikes. But this reminds me that Americans never wanted Mexicans within its borders, even when it’s the U.S. border expanding into Mexican territory. After winning the Mexican-American War in 1848, the All of Mexico Movement advocated for incorporating the entire country into the U.S. instead of just the sparsely-populated northern portion (what is now the span from California to the border of Texas). John C. Calhoun spoke in opposition:
Nor have we ever incorporated into the Union any but the Caucasian race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the first departure of the kind; for more than half of its population are pure Indians, and by far the larger portion of the residue mixed blood. I protest against the incorporation of such a people.
In other words, “we don’t want Mexico because there are too many Mexicans there.”
Oh, as for the feel-good “nation of immigrants” label Americans like to apply to themselves?
Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in.