Kodak's
Nazi Connections
by John S. Friedman
The Nation magazine, March 26, 2001
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Kodaks_NaziConnections.html
New information recently uncovered at the National Archives
reveals that subsidiaries of the Eastman Kodak company traded
with Nazi Germany long after America had entered the war.
A number of US firms have been identified previously as having
been involved with the Nazi regime; most recently IBM was
cited in a lawsuit filed in early February. The archive documents
also provide a glimpse of the attitudes of some US and British
government officials during that period who were unwilling
to impose any sanctions against the firm recommending instead
that Kodak continue trading to preserve its market position.
Though there is no current evidence that Kodak headquarters
in Rochester, New York, exercised direct control over its
operations in Germany during the war, it did control branches
in neutral Switzerland, Spain and Portugal-all of which did
business with the Nazis, providing markets and foreign currency.
Kodak's Swiss branch bought photographic supplies from Germany
in 1942 and 1943 for 72,000 wartime Swiss francs, from occupied
France for more than 24,000 Swiss francs and from Hungary
(a German ally) for 272,000 Swiss francs. For 1943 alone,
these transactions were described by the American Embassy
in London as "fairly substantial purchases from enemy
territory." "The idea that he has been helping the
enemy seems never to have occurred" to Kodak's Swiss
manager, noted Howard Elting Jr., a US vice consul in Switzerland,
in November 1943. "I pointed out to him that our sole
interest is to shut off every possible source of benefit to
our enemies, regardless of what American commercial interests
might suffer."
But other officials disagreed. In early 1942 Kodak's branch
in Spain imported items from Germany worth at least 17,000
Reichsmarks. In March 1942, more than three months after America
had declared war on Germany, Willard Beaulac, charge d'affaires
at the American Embassy in Madrid, recommended to the Secretary
of State that Kodak headquarters be given "an appropriate
license" for its Madrid subsidiary to import "films,
chemicals, spools, and other supplies from Germany."
He reasoned, "Shutting off of German sources of supply
would seriously embarrass the company without serving any
useful purpose since the demand for services in the Spanish
market which could not be met by Kodak would simply be taken
over by its German and Italian competitors. The position of
these competitors in this market would thereby be considerably
strengthened and the recapture of the business by Kodak after
the war greatly handicapped." An official at Britain's
Trading With the Enemy Department in 1943 agreed that Kodak
should "continue to get supplies from Germany so that
the market may not be lost to German competition." (But
licenses were not granted. Kodak executives had known that
licenses were required. Their branch in Turkey had been given
a British license in 1940 to import from Hungary. It was revoked
in February 1942.)
A.D. Page, legal adviser to Kodak in London, told the British
government in 1943 that Kodak branches "have been able
to obtain some goods from Kodak factories in Germany, France
and Hungary," which he said "resulted in their being
able to maintain the Kodak name alive in the* territories
and to supply the customers with more goods than they would
have been able to do had they been limited to purchasing from
England and America only."
Kodak's Portuguese subsidiary helped the enemy in still another
way: It sent its profits to the company's branch in the Nazi-occupied
Hague in mid-1942, a dispatch from Kodak Lisbon to the general
comptroller in Rochester revealed. No penalties for Kodak's
trade with the enemy were ever imposed by the United States
or Great Britain, according to available records.
German historian Karola Fings discovered that in 1941 Kodak
had transferred its German operations to two Kodak trustees
and an attorney to represent Kodak's interests in case of
war with America: Carl Thalmann, supervisory board chairman
of Kodak's German operations; Hans Wiegner, a board member;
and Gerhard A. Westrick, a German attorney who acted as an
intermediary between US corporations and the Third Reich.
(Wilhelm Keppler, Hitler's personal economic adviser, was
dubbed "a Kodak Man" by US military intelligence
for his close business and personal connections to the firm,
Edwin Black writes in IBM and the Holocaust. Once Hitler had
come to power, Keppler advised a number of US firms on letting
their Jewish employees go.)
Kodak's revenues and employees in Germany increased during
the early years of the war as the company expanded to manufacture
triggers, detonators and other military hardware. "Business
doing well," Thalmann cabled Rochester at the end of
1942. The branch in occupied France also thrived. In May 1943,
C. de Julian, a former staff-member of Kodak in Italy and
son of the Kodak manager in Madrid, wrote to Kodak executives:
"Anticipating that the Management would surely be interested
to know the state of affairs of the French Kodak Company,
I succeeded in getting a permit to stop in Paris." He
reported that the branch had made so much money during the
war that it had purchased real estate, a coal mine and a rest
house for the staff.
In Germany Kodak used slave laborers, according to Fings and
Roland Wig of the Milberg Weiss law firm, which has been active
in Holocaust-related lawsuits. At Kodak's Stuttgart plant,
there were at least eighty slave laborers, and at the Berlin-Kopenick
factory there were more than 250 slave laborers. Asked to
comment, a Kodak spokesman said that in recognition of its
use of slave labor, Kodak had contributed $500,000 to the
German fund for the victims of forced labor, adding: "I
have every confidence that Kodak did not do business with
any enemy country during the war and that it cooperated fully
with US government regulations and sanctions. At no time was
Kodak in violation of any proscriptions from the US or UK
war offices. The Swiss subsidiary was never notified to stop
trading. Once it received notification it stopped."
The US State Department declined to comment. A spokesman for
the British Embassy in Washington said he was unable to respond
without a search of the documents.
Kodak was not the only US firm that maintained relations with
the enemy; others involved included Standard Oil, ITT and
Ford [see Ken Silverstein, "Ford and the Fuhrer,"
January 24, 2000]. To set the historical record straight,
Kodak and the others should divulge the full extent of their
wartime transactions with Germany and the Axis nations. And
the US government should release all files that pertain to
any trade with the enemy by American companies.
On a related subject, Professor Saul Friedlander, the historian
who chairs the commission investigating Bertelsmann's Nazi
past, said that a final report, which could be as long as
500 pages, is expected to be released by the end of the year.
John S. Friedman is completing Stealing the Fire, a documentary
about German corporate aid to Third World nuclear weapons
programs. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund
of the Nation Institute.
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