Many companies still exist today that supported the Nazis leading up to and throughout WWII. While there are dozens of companies that fit the bill, each of these remains an important company in and out of Germany. Many contributed to the war effort by designing and building weapons and equipment, while others benefited from slave labor.
While each of these companies supported the Nazis in one way or another, not all of them did so willingly. Pressure was put in place to force numerous companies into submission, which should be considered when considering their actions leading up to and during WWII. That said, the companies that unforgivably employed slave labor crossed a rather significant line.
The following ten companies, presented in alphabetical order, all helped the Nazis in one way or another and continue operating to this day.
Related: Top 10 Discoveries That Wouldn’t Exist Without Nazi Germany
10 Associated Press
Table of Contents
The Associated Press is the standard-bearer for modern journalistic integrity, but during the lead-up to WWII, the AP was there, supporting Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. In the 1930s, the AP entered into an arrangement with the Nazis to continue reporting in Germany despite every other respectable agency having been kicked out of the country. This made the AP the sole legitimate reporting agency in Hitler’s Third Reich.
The AP maintained access by establishing a mutually beneficial arrangement with the Nazis. To accomplish this, the AP promised not to publish anything negative about the Nazis. One of the ways the AP managed this was by hiring pro-Nazi reporters and publishing Nazi propaganda. Some of this propaganda was negative toward Jews and filled with all manner of horrendous lies.
When news of the AP’s WWII activities came to light, a spokesperson told The Guardian, “AP rejects any notion that it deliberately ‘collaborated’ with the Nazi regime. An accurate characterization is that the AP and other foreign news organizations were subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime from the year of Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941.”[1]
9 Audi
Audi is known worldwide as one of Germany’s greatest luxury car brands, but it has a sordid past. During WWII, Audi, which operated under the name Auto Union during the conflict, hashed out a deal with the Schutzstaffel (SS) to use concentration camp inmates for production. A report published in 2014 found that Audi used more than 3,700 enslaved workers taken from seven labor camps operated by the SS.
On top of the company’s use of camp-based slave labor, Audi benefited from an additional 16,500 forced workers not taken from concentration camps in Zwickau and Chemnitz. Another 18,000 worked in Bavaria, where some 4,500 people died toiling for the company. Nearly one-fifth of Audi’s “employees” during WWII consisted of concentration camp inmates, the majority of whom were of Jewish descent.
Additionally, anyone who was disabled or otherwise incapable of performing their duties was sent to concentration camps for execution. Audi responded to the revelation, admitting the modern leadership of the company was unaware of the full extent of its shameful past. The company established a fund in the early aughts to compensate Nazi slave laborers and their descendants.[2]
8 Bayer
Bayer is a leading multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company operating today, but its actions throughout the 1930s and ’40s significantly differ from their modern operations. During WWII, Bayer belonged to the IG Farben conglomerate, which heavily supported the Third Reich. With ethical and legal limitations frozen by the Nazis, Bayer took advantage, testing drugs on unwilling human subjects in the Dachau, Gusen, and Auschwitz concentration camps.
Bayer worked through much of the conflict in Auschwitz, overseeing a chemical factory where human experimentation took place in Birkenau, at the women’s camp hospital. There, Bayer scientists purposefully infected patients with diphtheria, tuberculosis, and many other diseases. In addition to crossing this moral and ethical red line, Bayer also employed over 25,000 slave laborers.
Bayer’s involvement in the Holocaust came to light in 1999 following a lawsuit targeting the company. The suit accused Bayer officials of bribing Nazis to gain access to concentration camp inmates for human testing experiments. The suit included names like Dr. Koenig and Dr. Mengele as beneficiaries of these actions, effectively tying Bayer with the so-called “Angel of Death” and the horrors brought by other unscrupulous Nazi collaborators.[3]
7 Chase National Bank
These days, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., is one of the world’s largest consumer and commercial multinational banks. Leading up to World War II, Chase National Bank conducted business with the Nazis through a special program involving the sale of a unique version of the Reichsmark called the Rückwanderer (Reborrowing). Chase sold Rückwanderers to American citizens of German descent, but it wasn’t exactly on the up and up.
The Nazis used Chase to sell Rückwanderers to Americans at a discounted rate, and it was able to do this because the purchase of a Rückwanderer was backed by currency taken from Jews and refugees fleeing the Nazis. Chase was fully complicit in this, helping the Nazi government amass more than $20 million ($427 million in 2024), and it wasn’t the only controversy involving the bank.
Chase also aided the Nazis in blocking the French from accessing their accounts from the States, helping the Third Reich sidestep the United States sanctions on Nazi assets. On top of that, the head of Chase in Paris worked hard to block Jewish funds and property, ultimately benefiting the Nazis through this action. Chase’s involvement was finally exposed when The FBI declassified records of Chase’s actions during WWII.[4]
6 Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank (DB) is one of the largest commercial banks in the world, and it’s a primary money manager for Germans today. Leading up to and during WWII, DB was there to help the Nazis navigate the waters of international sanctions and defense spending. DB was fully integrated into the Nazi government, firing any Jews who worked for the bank. Part of DB’s actions during the lead-up to WWII involved the seizing of Jewish assets and turning them over to the Nazis.
As the Nazis spread across Europe, DB took advantage, taking control of banking institutions in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and elsewhere. Additionally, DB facilitated the sale of gold stolen from European Jews, which helped fund the Nazi war effort. DB’s WWII crimes came to international attention when the bank attempted a merger with a U.S. company.
Once revealed, the bank’s chairman, Rolf-Ernst Breuer, said, “We deeply regret the misery and injustice suffered and… we acknowledge the bank’s ethical and moral responsibility.” Perhaps Deutsche Bank’s most pivotal violation of human rights came during the war when it loaned the Nazis the money to construct the IG Farben facilities and the Auschwitz concentration camp using stolen Jewish gold.[5]
5 Ford & General Motors
General Motors (GM) and the Ford Motor Co. are American companies, so most people might not consider their involvement during WWII to be nefarious. After all, Ford and GM, like most companies, manufactured military machines for the American war effort. Still, both automakers were involved overseas through their many subsidiaries, which controlled 70% of the German auto market in 1939.
These subsidiaries did what Ford and GM did for America, only they retooled their plants to support the local war effort, i.e., they built stuff for the Nazis. Not only did these subsidiaries engage in war production, but they also did what many companies in Europe did at the time: They used a large slave labor force to work in their factories, and many of these enslaved personnel were Jews.
GM’s fully-owned subsidiary, Opal, built trucks and aircraft used in the Nazi war effort. When the U.S. Army liberated these factories toward the end of the war, one report found that Ford’s German branch served as “an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles.” The Army determined that the parent company (Ford) consented and was complicit. Despite this, both companies insisted they lost control of their German plants in 1941 and denied any culpability.[6]
4 IBM
IBM is an American company that developed computers leading up to and during WWII. These computers were considerably archaic compared to whatever you’re reading this article on, and they used punch cards for programming. In 1933, IBM sold 2,000 punch card machines to the Nazis, and the Nazi government used them to produce 1.5 billion index cards.
This was a monumental use of early computing effort, and the Nazis didn’t use it to keep track of bullets or ball bearings. Instead, the Nazis utilized IBM computers to create cards used to track and manage all of the people enslaved and executed during the Holocaust. These cards tracked Jews and other minority groups throughout Germany and Nazi-controlled parts of Europe, making the Nazi murder machine incredibly efficient.
IBM became involuntarily and quasi-voluntarily complicit in the wholesale slaughter of Europe’s Jewish population. Nazis used their IBM “Death Calculators” to determine the number of Jews they could efficiently remove from ghettos daily for shipment to concentration camps. At the time, IBM’s Polish subsidiary, Watson Business Machines, helped liquidate that nation’s Jewish population, so the company’s hands are far from clean.[7]
3 Mercedes-Benz
Germany had numerous manufacturers supporting the war effort leading up to and throughout WWII, and Mercedes-Benz was one of many. The company was known as Daimler-Benz AG at the time, and it worked closely with the Nazi government. The company’s board included numerous Nazis, and once the war broke out, Daimler-Benz became the Nazi’s leading manufacturer of armaments. While this wasn’t entirely unexpected, the means of manufacture were problematic.
To fuel the Nazi war machine, Daimler-Benz did what most companies did during WWII: It used a massive force of slave labor for manufacturing. These enslaved people were primarily Jews but also prisoners of war and other marginalized groups targeted by the Nazis. During the war, Daimler-Benz “loaned” its enslaved laborers to other companies in exchange for money, so it was fully active in the Nazi slave trade.
After the war, Daimler-Benz didn’t try to hide its involvement in Nazi activities and embraced the “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” initiative. In 1988, the company agreed to pay $12 million into a fund managed by the West German Red Cross designed to pay reparations to thousands of former slaves and their families.[8]
2 Porsche
Porsche didn’t come into existence until 1950, but the company existed before this, and it was one of Hitler’s most prolific suppliers of his war machine. This was done through Porsche’s founder, Ferdinand Porsche, who designed cars for Hitler leading up to WWII. When the conflict broke out, Porsche continued designing for Germany, only switching to building tanks and off-road vehicles.
Porsche’s success at this time could be attributed to two things: Hitler adored the man, and he fully embraced using slave labor in his factories to meet the Führer’s demands. Porsche not only utilized slaves to build everything from cars and trucks to tanks and more, but he did so actively and with the full knowledge that his “employees” were forced to live in rat-infested quarters with minimal food and terrible treatment.
Porsche enjoyed massive profits, and the company that grew from these efforts became a multinational car company that is respected worldwide. Those who labored and died producing Porsche’s Nazi war machine saw little compensation after WWII. Porsche hasn’t fully admitted its involvement, though it supplied €2.5 million to a German reparation fund. Ultimately, Porsche avoided prosecution for his actions during WWII. Still, his reputation bears the stain of his involvement in the Holocaust.[9]
1 Volkswagen
Most people know that Volkswagen created the VW Beetle for Hitler, but the company’s involvement in the Nazi war effort went way beyond that. When the war broke out, Volkswagen switched to military production, which most companies did at the time. This was true in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere, so war production isn’t why Volkswagen crossed numerous lines through its actions during World War II.
When Volkswagen’s Fallersleben plant opened, the war broke out, leading to the production of several military vehicles. Additionally, VW manufactured the V-1 flying bomb, which made its factory an ideal target for the Allies. This was problematic because VW employed a massive force of slave labor in the production of its vehicles and weapon systems. Volkswagen’s workforce consisted of approximately 70% forced laborers, who numbered in the thousands.
The laborers were “supplied” by the Schutzstaffel (SS) from nearby concentration camps. As you can imagine, living conditions were inhumane at best. Investigations into the company’s activities during the war determined the company “let babies die” in horrid conditions throughout WWII. In 1998, the company established a reparations fund consisting of $12 million to compensate its WWII victims ($23 million in 2024).[10]