Trademarks, Memory, Nazis, and Death Camps

JF Ptak  Science Books  Post 1891

In the world of identifying symbols--which I've been writing about a little over the past few days, but mainly on Renaissance and Baroque and Mannerist iconography--few are as distinctive and recognizable as modern trademarks.  There's a lot of high-voltage connecting wires between modern advertising and memory devices and Renaissance emblemata, and as I was sorting out some of the nice compatables I was stopped in my tracks by one of the modern images, mainly because I had a recollection for an older and unmentioned iteration of the symbol.

Sinoxid.  It was recorded in the registry of German trademarks for 16 November 1968 as being owned by Dynamit Nobel AG. 

This is what the trademark looked like in 1968:

The same trademark, a little earlier in its career, as it was being admired by a Nazi Brown Shirt S.A. member in 1933:

Dynamit Nobel A.G. is an old company. It is the German arm of the Swedish Nobel munitions firm (begun in 1864) by Emil and much-more famous (and longer-lived) brother Alfred.The German company was established in 1865 in Toursiburg so that the dangerous products produced by the firm wouldn't have to travel as many miles if it was produced closer to the consumer.  The Nobel firm manufactured munitions--famously so with a nitrogylcerin compound known as "blasting oil" that was notoriously unstable, and which in a fit of instability  actually killed Alfred's brother Emil in 1864. It also blew up parts of the German factory (on two occasions before 1870).  The stuff was beyond lethal.  But it didn't stop Nobel from shipping their explosive goods worldwide in unmarked crates so as to not attract attention to a dangerous product. Three such cases were once sent to the Union Pacific company in San Francisco in 1866--two became unstable and blew up in the company's headquarters, killing dozens. But no one was scared beforehand.

Alfred Nobel left no heirs and so donated some percentage of his firm's monies to the foundation we know today by his name. The company grew into the largest munitions producer in Europe. Beginning in the mid-1920's it began a relationship of fusions and mergers and so on with the giant cartel I.G. Farben, among many others.

I.G. Faben company produced Zyklon B. It operated its business with slave labor in concnetration camps. It sent tens of tens of thousands to their deaths working on Farben products. Zyklon B itself killed millions of human beings.

This is what used canisters of Zklon B looked like after they had been used to murder Jews and other prisoners in the death camps:

 

They have a design much like the tossed-away bodies of their victims.

Zyklon B's patent was held by the company called Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH and a subsidiary of Degussa) which distributed/sold the poison to the Germany Army via subsidiaries Tesch & Stebenow. The chairman of the board of Degesch from 1939 to 1945 was Herman Schlosser. He was finally arrested for war crimes in February 1948. He was aquitted 14 months later. Evidently few people any where at any time knew anything about anything, at Farben.

Schlosser was happily again selected to managing board in 1948, and then to lead the company as chairman of the board in 1949, a post he held until 1959.¹ After that, he served on the supervisory board (1959-1965), and then padded the long velveteen carpet to the netherworld serving as the company's honorary chairman.

The director of Degesch, Dr. Gerhard Friedrich Peters, was found guilty here and there in his trials from 1949-1952, and was ultimately sentenced to six years in prison in 1952 for his role in knowingly facilitating the distribution of the extermination gas.  He was later aquitted in 1953 after a change in the law made his involvement no longer a crime.²

 I.G. Farben famously slid past most of its attrocities. The company was broken up by the Allies in the post war denazification period, disbanded into three parts, left to function as a different entities. Farben is gone, but its constituents certainly are not. They are familiar trademarks, now, too.

Here's one:

 

Here's another:

Numerous people from Dynamit Nobel were brought to trial in Nuremberg for various crimes against peace and humanity.  None were convcted.

Dynamit was in the sphere of much of this, and later on got their very own acquitted war criminal to run the operation. In 1952 Dynamit Nobel appointed Fritz Gajewski as their chairman. After WWII he was brought to charges for having turned former board members of Nobel and Farben who were Jewish into the Gestapo. He also supervised factories of Farben in occupied countries that used vast amounts of slave labor and which also functioned within the confines of concentration camps like Auschwitz.

He was acquitted.

This is what Gajewski looked like in 1947:

 

Its not a pretty picture, in general.

Here's another uncomfortable image:

The "VW" logo was designed by Nikolai Borg under the direction of "Nazi designer" Fritz Todt (!)--Borg is still alive and is currently suing to be officially recognized as it designer.  The cog part of the wheel surrounding the VW letters--which is a design commonly seen encircling the Nazi swastika--was ordered to be removed by the occupying British forces just after the war, softening up the image a little.

And as long as we're in a car mode:

There's also Henry Ford, who was a monstrous moral figure without an ounce of historical understanding who blamed much of the world’s troubles on the “Jewish Dictatorship”, which somehow, in his mind, spawned WWI.  Long story short, Ford received the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle for his friendship and services to the Nazi state—this friendship extended in form of money and many thousands of military vehicles, and so on.  His was a treacherous business, his Nazi interests folding very nicely in with his astounding anti-Semitism. Ford, by the way, received his medal months after the invasion of Austria, when he really should’ve known better. I’m not sure if he gave the thing back or not after the war ended. Chalres Lindbergh, an America-First-er, got something similar, but he sent his back after 7 December 1941.)

This stuff goes on and on, my examples being just that.  Scratch the surface of every third major international company's activities during WWII, and it stands a good chance of revealing something ugly. I just stopped by for a quick, distracting graze.

 Notes

1.  (See Peter Hayes' From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich, Cambridge 2009.)

 2. [This is a complex story , of course, which has been extremely simplified here. An excellent source for the entire unravelling and explanation is Raul Hilberg The Destruction of the European Jews, published 1961-2003, (particularly volume 3). Available here.]