You Might Be a Zombie . . . (32 page)

Kennedy is still the only president to be granted jus primae noctis by popular vote.

IN
the interest of fairness and not getting sued, we’d like to make it clear that we’re not accusing any of the companies below of still being pro-Nazi. all of them have long disavowed Hitler’s regime as being both monstrous and no longer profitable.

5. HUGO BOSS

No yuppie’s wardrobe is complete without his standard Hugo Boss suit, shirt, tie, sunglasses, cologne, and man thong. Even if you’re too poor to afford Boss’s goods, you’ve seen Boss ads in magazines and on bil boards. You know, the ones that feature serious-looking men with hol ow eyes ful of infinite longing that scream, “I’m attractive and I’m really very unhappy about it.”

Job with the Nazis

Speaking of stern, closeted white men, Hugo Boss manufactured the sleek all -black uniforms for the Schutzstaffel (SS). While today Boss uses black for slimming effects, in the SS uniforms it was used to command respect and fear. As a bonus, the black uniforms soaked up sunlight during the summer months, causing the wearer to sweat uncomfortably and stink. Take
that
, Nazis.

How evil were they?

It’s amazing how quickly Hugo Boss went from being a family owned company teetering on the brink of bankruptcy to becoming a hugely profitable juggernaut outfitting the entire Nazi army. Turns out, all you have to do is stop paying employees and introduce the motivational wonders of loaded machine guns. According to a
Los Angeles Times
report, Hugo Boss’s Nazi uniforms were likely made in factories “manned by forced labor, including concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war.”

But unlike the products of some other companies on this list, the uniforms weren’t directly responsible for kil ing people. In fact, since they actually made the wearers uncomfortable and smel y, relative to the rest of these companies Hugo Boss probably deserves a medal.

4. VOLKSWAGEN

German automaker Volkswagen came on the scene just before World War I. The company was founded by Ferdinand Porsche, the granddaddy of those fast, expensive cars that douchebags drove in the 1980s. But before all that, Porsche was lead designer of the most mass-produced car of all time: the Volkswagen Beetle.

Job with the Nazis

Porsche’s partner in masterminding the Beetle: Hitler. See, in 1934 ol’ Adolf asked the German automobile industry to develop a “suitable small car” that

could be used by everyone in Germany. The Beetle was Porsche’s entry in the great Nazi design-off and was apparently just what the führer had in his clown-shit insane mind. A year later, Hitler announced that thanks to Porsche, the Third Reich had been able to “complete the preliminary designs for the German
Volkswagen
” a word that is German for “people’s car.”

How evil were they?

The Beetle is perhaps the most misunderstood car in history. People look at its rounded shape and anthropomorphic face and instantly think of love and peace. In reality, it was designed to Hitler’s specifications and, according to the German magazine
Der Spiegel,
manufactured with the famous Nazi work ethic, known outside of the Third Reich as “Jews from concentration camps and prisoners of war.”

You have to give credit to Porsche for designing a car so impossibly cute that we forget it was brought into this world by the worst thing that ever happened.

3. IBM

IBM is one of the few IT companies whose history dates back to the nineteenth century. On one hand, this means it has been a Fortune 500 company since 1924. On the other, over a century of history gives you a lot of opportunities to make some monstrous PR blunders.

Job with the Nazis

You’re probably thinking, “IBM is American! The closest America ever got to the Nazis was when Indiana Jones wore that uniform as a disguise in
Raiders
!”

Actually, prior to the war American business took what can be generously described as a moral y ambivalent stance on Nazi enthusiasm for an Aryan master race. However, once the war started most American businesses disavowed Hitler’s regime. IBM, on the other hand, decided to stick around and see where he was going with this whole “final solution” thing.

Back in those days, the only way to keep track of huge databases was with an extremely complicated system involving punch cards, and IBM was the best at constructing and maintaining those databases. Its databases could keep track of anything: financial ledgers, medical records, Jews . . .

As soon as the Nazis invaded a country, they would overhaul the census system using IBM punch cards and use them to track down every Jew, Gypsy, and any other non-Aryan on record.

How evil were they?

The unabashedly anticorporate documentary
The Corporation
shows actual footage of IBM punch cards used in prison camps. They tracked people based on their religion, their location, and even how they’d be executed. For instance, Prisoner Code 8 was Jew, Code 11 was Gypsy. Camp Code 001was Auschwitz; Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was execution by order, and Code 6 was gas chamber.

IBM claims it was a victim of circumstance. It had a subsidiary in Germany before Hitler took over, and the company just fel under Nazi control, like every other company over there.

But the records suggest that’s not the whole truth. IBM sent internal memos in its New York offices acknowledging that its machines were making the Nazis more efficient, and it made no efforts to end the relationship with the German branch.

2. BAYER

Bayer, the massive pharmaceutical company that’s most famous for making aspirin, is also behind such wonder drugs as Levitra and heroin (see page 207).

Job with the Nazis

As unpopular as heroin turned out to be with everyone besides jazz musicians, it’s got nothing on the Bayer-produced Zyklon B gas, the stuff that killed mil ions of people in the camps. Bayer was once part of a large conglomerate, IG Farben, that churned out thousands of killer Zyklon B canisters. The gas was originally invented by Fritz Haber, a man whose life is so incredibly pathetic that you’d almost feel sorry for him, if he hadn’t indirectly caused mil ions of deaths.

After he oversaw one of the deadliest uses of chemicals in warfare up to that point in history, his wife kil ed herself in their garden in protest. Then Hitler took over, and Haber decided to renounce Judaism to fit in, only to be told that he was still Jewish according to the Nazi rule book. He died of a heart attack while fleeing the country he spent his life serving, and the chemical he original y invented to kil insects was used to kil a number of his relatives.

Also, he was named Fritz, so there was probably a lot of teasing on the playground.

How evil were they?

On one hand, the company that actually manufactured the gas was just partial y owned by IG Farben, and Bayer was just one part of IG Farben. On the other, Bayer at one time sponsored a scientist by the name of Josef Mengele, thus facilitating his important work in the field of being the living embodiment of the evil scientist.

1. SIEMENS

Siemens AG is the massive global conglomerate that makes everything from circuits to wind turbines to maglev trains. It has almost half a mil ion employees worldwide and is listed on every stock exchange imaginable. The company had its roots back in the nineteenth century, when famed scientist Werner von Siemens got tired of discovering stuff and decided to make some money instead. While Siemens died wel before the 1940s, the company he gave his name to is so evil it may as wel have its corporate headquarters inside a dormant volcano.

Job with the Nazis

Siemens struggled in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression. When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, the Siemens executives decided things were on the upswing and started building factories near the homey neighborhoods of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Like Hugo Boss and Volkswagen, its wartime resurgence was fueled by Nazi Germany’s version of a government bail-out: cheap slave labor. But being near two of the biggest concentration camps put Siemens in position to milk the atrocity for more war-crime-fueled profit than anyone else.

Hundreds of thousands of slave workers were employed to build all sorts of goodies for the German military to use on both the western and the eastern fronts. Though it wasn’t the only company at the time supplying the German war effort, it was certainly the most prolific. Siemens was in charge of Germany’s rail infrastructure, communications, power generation—the list goes on.

How evil were they?

At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, it was not atypical for a worker to build electrical switches for Siemens in the morning and be snuffed out in a Siemens-made gas chamber in the afternoon.

A few years ago, in an act of insensitive assholery so colossal it could blot out the sun, Siemens tried to trademark the name Zyklon with the intent of marketing a series of products under it. Including gas ovens.

This raises a few questions about Siemens’s business practices, most significantly, “What the hel is wrong with you people?”

OUR
culture is ful of tales of the undead walking the earth, from the New Testament to our comic books. But a zombie apocalypse isn’t actually possible, right?

Right?

Guys?

Actually, it’s quite possible. Here are five ways it could happen, according to science.

5. BRAIN PARASITES

What are they?

Parasites that turn victims into mindless, zombielike servants are fairly common in nature. There’s one called
Toxoplasma gondii
that seems to devote its entire existence to being terrifying.

This bug infects rats but can only breed inside the intestines of a cat. Knowing that it needs to get the rat inside the cat, the parasite takes over the rat’s brain and makes it scurry toward the cats. The rat is being programmed to get itself eaten, and it doesn’t even know it.