In my search for a new coffee maker, a concerned friend advocated a boycott of both Braun and Krups brands because they were made by German companies that manufactured concentration camp crematoria in the 1930s and 40s. Can this be true? I’m drinking tea pending your reply. Also, did Adolf Hitler really name the Volkswagen? –Yvonne Pelletier, Chicago
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None of the companies mentioned built crematoria, but Daimler-Benz, maker of Mercedes-Benz cars, committed other crimes. Testimony at the Nuremburg war-crimes trials suggests the ovens were mostly built by heating equipment manufacturers and such. The crematoria at Auschwitz were built by I.A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, those at Dachau and Lublin by C.H. Kori. A horrified spokesperson for Braun, a maker of small appliances bought by Gillette in 1967, assures me the firm’s main business during the 1940s was electric shavers. Krups mostly made small household products like scales.
Krupp doesn’t make consumer products, but other former slave employers do. Daimler-Benz, for example. The firm avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world’s leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. According to historian Bernard Bellon (Mercedes in Peace and War, 1990), at least eight Jews were murdered by Daimler-Benz managers or SS men at a plant in occupied Poland. There was a report that Daimler-Benz built mobile poison-gas vans, but this has never been corroborated and is doubtful.
