Did you know that every time you walk through a big retail store, the ghosts of dead Nazis stare at you from the shelves? It’s true. They’re in the soda aisle, peeking out from between the cans and bottles. They’re in the automotive section, too, and the clothing department, and the pharmacy, and the electronics aisle. Especially the electronics aisle. Once you learn to see them, you’ll never stop. 

I’m being dramatic here, but only a little. The ghosts in question are metaphorical—representations of the ugly history of some of the world’s most famous corporations. Many of those corporations, it turns out, are reluctant to discuss what they were doing between the years 1933 and 1945, and with good reason. In fact, they were busy collaborating with Nazi Germany and its leaders and making a tidy profit in the process. They were sewing uniforms for Hitler’s troops, designing cars for the Nazi Party, brewing soft drinks to serve at Nazi events, and in one particularly grim case, providing punch card machines to count the prisoners in the death camps. Today, the same corporations are still around, filling the shelves of your local Target or Walmart. In most cases, they faced little or no punishment for their complicity in one of the most heinous regimes of mass murder ever recorded, and they were allowed to carry on doing business as usual after the war. That tells us everything we need to know about capitalism—and the depths of evil that businesses within this amoral economic system will sink to when there’s a buck to be made. 

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, it was already perfectly clear that Nazism was indefensible. This is a critical thing to recognize. There was never a point in time when anyone, if they had a basic knowledge of world events, could plausibly say that Nazi Germany was a normal European nation or that it was acceptable to do business with it. Before he became Führer, Hitler had already laid out his views and goals in 1925’s Mein Kampf—his loathing for democracy, his violent antisemitism (including fantasies about using “poison gas”), and all the rest. These were the guiding principles of the Nazi state from Day One, and they resulted in state-sponsored violence and oppression almost immediately. The first concentration camp opened at Dachau in March 1933 and was quickly filled with political opponents of the Nazi party, especially communists. By April, an estimated 60,000 German Jews had been imprisoned, at Dachau and elsewhere, and another 10,000 had fled the country. The initial stages of the Holocaust had already begun, and plenty of people around the world were raising the alarm. In Manhattan, more than 100,000 protesters rallied against the Nazi government and its antisemitic policies in May 1933, and there were loud and widespread calls for boycotts of German firms and products. Even at this early stage, the right and wrong sides of the situation were clear. But that didn’t stop the world’s big international corporations. They didn’t boycott; just the opposite. They knew about the oppression and horror, heard the calls for justice, and chose to embrace Nazi Germany as a business partner anyway. 

Take the Coca-Cola company. Today it’s one of the most famous corporations on Earth, with sales in more than 200 of the world’s countries and territories—including Antarctica. But in the 20th century, it was also intimately linked to the Nazis. In his book For God, Country and Coca-Cola, historian Mark Pendergrast lays out the full details of the alliance between the two, and they're profoundly disturbing. The key figures were two executives named Ray Rivington Powers and Max Keith, who Pendergrast calls “at once the quintessential Coca-Cola man and [a] Nazi collaborator.” They were in charge of Coca-Cola GmbH (the GmbH is for “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung,” the German equivalent of “LLC”), the company’s German subsidiary. By all accounts, both Powers and Keith were brilliant marketers, and Coke’s German sales grew dramatically in the 1930s. But they were also utterly amoral, and as Germany became a fascist dictatorship, they embraced the change:

Keith zeroed in on “special events,” such as patriotic mass meetings, realizing that sampling was the best way to build the business. Coca-Cola appeared at bicycle races, emphasizing its wholesome refreshment for athletes. As young men goose-stepped in formation at Hitler Youth rallies, Coca-Cola trucks accompanied the marchers, hoping to capture the next generation.

The biggest “special event” of all was the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, commonly known as the “Nazi Olympics” today. Hosting the games was a huge propaganda coup for Hitler’s government, which pioneered “sportswashing”—the use of athletics to promote a nation’s image on the world stage while distracting from atrocities being committed at home. The games were also a forum for Nazi theories of racial superiority, complete with an “Aryans Only” policy for the German teams. (Famously, this resulted in a “thumb in the eye” for Hitler when the African American runner Jesse Owens beat the alleged master race, taking home four gold medals.) Coca-Cola sponsored the games, advertising them with images of statuesque Aryan athletes with German eagles on their chests.

As Pendergrast recounts, Max Keith and his fellow executives “provided enormous quantities of Coca-Cola for athletes and visitors,” and they spent the whole Olympics hobnobbing with Nazi elites. At one point, company president Robert Woodruff flew to Berlin and “brought over an entire Coca-Cola entourage” to a party hosted by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Field Marshal Hermann Göring. They made no objection to the Nuremberg race laws—then in full effect—that stripped civil rights from Jews and other non-Aryans. But they did raise a fuss about one point of Nazi policy, one thing they just couldn’t forgive: the mandate of a “contains caffeine” label on their packaging. 

From a purely capitalistic, profit-seeking point of view, Keith and Powers were being rational. They had a good reason to like Nazism: Nazism was good for business. In particular, it helped keep labor costs down and workers in line:

[W]orkers were little more than serfs, forbidden not only to strike but to change jobs. The employer became a kind of mini-dictator, a Geschäftsführer, or “leader of the enterprise.” Wages were deliberately set quite low, but most workers were happy just to have jobs and to believe Hitler’s propaganda that the Teutonic “Volk” would overcome all obstacles. [...] No wonder Max Keith’s faithful workers labored so diligently. By 1939, forty-three German plants bottled Coca-Cola, with nine more under construction. Over six hundred concessionaires, independent franchisees making considerably more money than most German workers, distributed the drinks. Each was his own mini-Führer, though bowing ultimately to Max Keith, who had made it all possible for them. 

Again, this makes perfect sense from a capitalist perspective. Even today, in what’s ostensibly the age of democracy, there’s nothing more authoritarian and less democratic than the workplace. Your boss doesn’t have to be elected, and in most cases you have no say in their decisions; you just have to obey, or be fired. We know, too, that bosses as a class do everything they can to suppress workers’ ability to organize and challenge their power. When the Nazis took over Germany, one of their first actions was to ban trade unions. Is it any wonder, then, that Coca-Cola’s executives jumped at the chance to operate under fascism? 

Even when World War II broke out, the collaboration didn’t end. When Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, Max Keith and his fellow executives once again made no objection. Instead, they wasted no time opening a Vienna branch in the newly conquered territory. Keith also ordered a group Sieg heil! at Coca-Cola GmbH’s headquarters “to commemorate our deepest admiration and gratitude for our Führer” on Hitler’s 50th birthday. And when the war broke out in earnest in 1939, making it impossible to import chemical ingredients from the United States, Coca-Cola GmbH came up with a solution: manufacture a whole new drink from whatever scraps were available on the domestic market, including such appetizing things as whey byproducts and apple fiber left over from cider-making. They even got a special exemption from the Nazi sugar-rationing laws to do it. The drink was called Fanta, from the German Fantasie, and it’s still sold today; you’ve probably had it yourself a time or two. But trade embargoes on Nazi Germany are the only reason it exists. 

Today, Coca-Cola avoids discussing its Nazi era whenever possible. In their publicity materials, they briefly acknowledge that they sponsored the 1936 Olympics and that Fanta was “introduced in 1940,” but that’s about it. In the “World of Coca-Cola” museum at the company’s Atlanta headquarters, the 1930s are carefully glossed over. In fact, the British comedian Mark Thomas once trolled the museum by offering it a donation: a facsimile of an old Hitler Youth “Mein Dienst” training booklet, complete with a Coke ad on the back. (Unsurprisingly, the museum staff didn’t hang it up.) More recently, the company faced a wave of backlash in Germany when it ran a TV ad  in 2015 for the 75th anniversary of Fanta’s creation, calling the soda “good like before… just today” and promoting a “Klassik” bottle modeled after the original. The company eventually pulled the ad and said that “We had no intention to call Nazi Germany 'the good old times',” but by the time you’re making a statement like that, things have already gone seriously wrong. 

This is only touching the surface. If we take a walk down to the clothing section, more hidden Nazis reveal themselves. By this point, it’s fairly well-known that Hugo Boss was a member of the Nazi Party, starting in 1931 (he was an early adopter), and did a booming trade in Nazi uniforms. In fact, his clothing company was saved from bankruptcy in 1931 by a wave of orders from the Party, including for the infamous brown shirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA). We can even find old advertisements for Boss products in Nazi publications: 

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Later, when the Nazis took over the German government, Boss would boast that he’d been a “supplier of Party equipment since 1924,” and his company won lucrative contracts with the German military as they ramped up uniform production in 1938. It’s a popular misconception that Boss designed the black uniform of the SS; that was Karl Diebitsch and Walter Heck, high-ranking SS members who also created the twin lightning bolt symbol. But the Boss company certainly manufactured SS uniforms, along with those for the Wehrmacht, the Hitler Youth, and other Nazi organizations, and it used forced labor to do it. Even a historical study commissioned by the company itself in 2011 admits that around 140 people, mainly Polish women, were “forced to live in [a] special camp set up for eastern Europeans” at one of the company’s factories in 1943, where they worked grueling 12-hour shifts sewing uniforms. Historian Roman Köster also writes that “hygiene levels and food supplies were extremely uncertain at times” in the camp, and that “there were some committed National Socialists in the company who treated the women extremely harshly and threatened them with concentration camps.” (Again, keep in mind that this is a study commissioned by Hugo Boss itself, so “treated harshly” is likely a polite euphemism.) In 2011, the company made an official apology expressing its “profound regret to those who suffered harm or hardship at the factory,” and since the 1990s it has paid an unspecified amount into a reparations fund for Holocaust victims. But it still uses the name “Hugo Boss,” loud and proud, in all its advertising—and when its menswear catalog happens to include a square-jawed blonde model with blue eyes, it’s frankly a little unnerving. 

Even the perfume counter isn’t completely Nazi-free. Two of the most popular scents in the world, Chanel No. 5 and No. 19, have their own dark history. As Hal Vaughan’s 2011 book Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War details, Hugo Boss wasn’t the only iconic fashion designer who sympathized with the Third Reich; the creator of the “little black dress” did too. Coco Chanel was blatantly antisemitic throughout her life, saying at one point that “I only fear Jews and Chinese; and the Jews more than the Chinese,” and during World War II she became an active collaborator with the Nazi regime. Vaughan’s book takes its title from a romantic affair Chanel had with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German intelligence officer who operated in France, but she was also a spy in her own right. In 1941, she traveled to Madrid, then England, carrying “economic and political information” on behalf of the Nazi Abwehr. In exchange, the Nazis freed her nephew André from prison. She was also involved with Operation Modellhut, a somewhat half-baked plan to smuggle a message from the commanders of the SS to Winston Churchill about a possible peace deal with England in 1943 and ’44. But the most shameful part of Chanel’s record was when she tried to use Nazi race laws to her advantage, reporting her business partners Pierre and Paul Wertheimer—who were Jewish—to the Gestapo in an attempt to have their shares of the perfume business confiscated and given to her. Thanks to some clever financial maneuvering on the Wertheimers’ part, the plot failed, and they maintained control of Chanel No. 5 from a new headquarters in New Jersey. So Chanel created her own rival perfume, No. 1, and marketed it from neutral Switzerland in direct competition to them. Like with Fanta, that particular scent wouldn’t exist if not for antisemitism and the Nazis—and it’s still sold today, rebranded as No. 19.

Turning to the auto department, there are several famous car brands with Nazi ties. Henry Ford, for instance, was a virulent antisemite—so much so that he devoted multiple issues of his Michigan newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to the subject of “The International Jew.” In a 1924 letter, Heinrich Himmler referred to Ford as “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.” In 1938, he accepted a medal called the “Grand Cross of the German Eagle” from Hitler’s government, although Ford implausibly denied “any sympathy on my part with Nazism” at the same time. (Sure, Henry.) Meanwhile, as investigative journalist David de Jong has extensively reported, the Quandt family of industrialists—who control the BMW Group today—were guilty of using slave labor on a mass scale during the Nazi years, along with buying up Jewish businesses that were confiscated or forcibly sold. Like many other companies, BMW is reluctant to broach the subject nowadays. 

And then there’s Volkswagen. Here, it’s not just that the company worked with the Nazis in one capacity or another. Rather, the company itself was created by the Nazi Party. It was a project of the Kraft durch Freude (KDF) organization—whose name literally means “Strength through Joy”—which coordinated things like tourism and consumer goods in order to promote the supposed success of Nazism to both domestic and international audiences. The original idea was to create a “people’s car,” literally a wagen for the German volk, that every citizen could afford. (Apart, of course, from German Jews, who were banned from owning or driving cars in 1938.) The first Volkswagen was designed by Ferdinand Porsche, who had succeeded where Coco Chanel failed, taking advantage of Nazi “Aryanization” laws to force his Jewish business partner Adolf Rosenberger out of the Porsche company and gain full control for himself. The car looked very, very similar to the iconic “Beetle,” and there are photos of Hitler grinning with approval at a model, then inspecting the prototype cars when they came off the assembly line. Even the original logo incorporated a fan or rotor-like swastika around the “VW” symbol.

When World War II broke out, the plan changed. Instead of making the “people’s car,” Volkswagen instead went into military production, building Jeep-like utility vehicles (Kübelwagen) and amphibious trucks that could float as well as drive on land (Schwimmwagen). And as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, the firm was complicit in the Holocaust itself:

The company actively sought out forced labor from the concentration camp system. One VW plant engineer traveled to Auschwitz and selected 300 skilled metalworkers from the massive transports of Hungarian Jews in 1944. In addition, 650 Jewish women were transferred to assemble military munitions. The official relationship between the Nazi concentration camps and Volkswagen was cemented when the Fallersleben facility officially became a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. Overall, the Volkswagen plant contained four concentration camps and eight forced-labor camps.

It wasn’t until after the war, when Volkswagen had been seized by the British military and turned over to new management, that the first Beetles actually went into mass production. But when they did, the Nazi connection had successfully been scrubbed away, and they became associated with the hippie movement of the 1960s instead. (Talk about a reversal!) Ferdinand Porsche was jailed for two years in France, but he never stood trial for his war-era crimes and died without facing justice in 1951. Today, his heirs own the majority of the Volkswagen Group—which also includes Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, and Škoda—and have an estimated net worth of roughly $20 billion. And in an echo of the past, Der Spiegel reports that Volkswagen is once again accused of using forced labor, this time exploiting members of the Uyghur minority at its factory in Ürümqi, China. 

Stroll a little further down the aisles to the pharmacy, and we can find even more Nazis lurking. These ones come from the archives of the Bayer corporation, which sells billions of aspirin tablets and other medications worldwide every year. During the 1930s and ’40s, Bayer was a subsidiary of I.G. Farben. You might remember that from history class as the company that manufactured Zyklon B, the chemical agent used to kill millions of people in the Nazi gas chambers. Bayer itself hadn’t invented Zyklon B—that was the pesticide company Degesch, also under the I.G. Farben umbrella—but its record was almost as vile. As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum records, its leaders “took advantage of the absence of legal and ethical constraints on medical experimentation to test its drugs on unwilling human subjects” who had been rounded up and imprisoned in the concentration camps: 

Bayer was particularly active in Auschwitz. A senior Bayer official oversaw the chemical factory in Auschwitz III (Monowitz). Most of the experiments were conducted in Birkenau in Block 20, the women's camp hospital. There, [SS physician Helmuth] Vetter and Auschwitz physicians Eduard Wirths and Friedrich Entress tested Bayer pharmaceuticals on prisoners who suffered from and often had been deliberately infected with tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other diseases.

Today, we even have access to some of the chilling communications that were sent back and forth from Bayer employees to Nazi camp commandants, including this letter to Auschwitz overseer Rudolf Höss:

The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price. 

One of the most important figures responsible for these atrocities was Fritz ter Meer, a Bayer executive and Nazi Party member who had helped to design the Monowitz sub-camp at Auschwitz. When the Nazis were finally defeated, ter Meer went on trial at Nuremberg—but in a truly obscene miscarriage of justice, he was given only seven years’ prison time as punishment, and even that was shortened for good behavior. He was released in 1950, and in 1956 he was appointed as a supervising board chairman for Bayer, now an independent West German company after the liquidation of I.G. Farben. The company thrived under his leadership and continues to thrive today. There have been some minor gestures of contrition from its leadership, mostly grudging. CEO Helge Wehmeier made a public apology in 1995 after he was confronted by the Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel. There was also a class-action lawsuit in 1999 from another group of Holocaust survivors, which was settled out of court with Bayer agreeing to contribute to a $5.2 billion reparations fund. But compared to the sheer scale of the horrors the company is responsible for, even that seems too little. By all rights, the name “Bayer” should be as infamous as the names “Eichmann” or “Mengele,” and it should be impossible to operate a company under that name. All of the firm’s assets, not just a token donation, should have been seized and given to the victims. But thanks to the miracle of capitalism and public relations, it hasn’t ended up that way. 

The darkest legacy of all, though, belongs to IBM. Today, the computer company is one of the most recognizable in the world, and an industry leader in new technologies like AI and quantum computing. But in the 1930s and ’40s, things were different. Back then, IBM had a close business relationship with the Nazi state, and it helped that state carry out some of its worst crimes. There’s an entire 528-page book about this period, Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, and it makes for nightmarish reading. Black is the son of two Holocaust survivors, and his book is a meticulously—some might say obsessively—detailed account of how IBM supplied punch card data processing machines to the Nazis. Known as Hollerith machines, these were precursors to the modern computer. They were capable of processing simple facts and figures much faster than a human clerk could, and were initially used for taking census data. In the United States this was innocent enough, with IBM punch cards recording facts like people’s gender, their occupation, and what language they spoke at home. But when the company expanded into the German market, things became more sinister. In 1933, the Nazi government hired IBM to help it conduct a national census, and it cared about one question more than any other—whether or not its citizens were Jewish:

“Be Aware!” reminded huge block-lettered signs facing each cluster of data entry clerks. Instructions were made clear and simple. Column 22 RELIGION was to be punched at hole 1 for Protestant, hole 2 for Catholic, or hole 3 for Jew. Columns 23 and 24 NATIONALITY were to be coded in row 10 for Polish speakers. […] When Jews were discovered within the population, a special “Jewish counting card” recorded the place of birth. These Jewish counting cards were processed separately. 

It was this mechanized record-keeping, Black argues, that allowed the Nazis to accurately estimate where German Jews lived, and to compile lists of  “targets for confiscation, arrest, imprisonment, and ultimately expulsion.” 

Later, in the concentration camps, the Hollerith machines were again used to keep track of millions of prisoners. Consulting archival documents, Black lays out the numerical code that classified each camp: 001 for Auschwitz, 002 for Buchenwald, 003 for Dachau, and so on. There were also sixteen different categories of victim: 1 for political prisoners, 2 for Jehovah’s Witnesses (who were singled out for their pacifism and refusal to swear oaths to Hitler), 3 for LGBTQ prisoners, 8 for Jewish prisoners, 12 for ethnic Romani, etc. Together, all of these punched-out digits formed a serial number, which in some cases was identical to the one tattooed on prisoners’ forearms. The extent of the computing operation was massive: 

In some camps, such as Dachau and Storkow, as many as two dozen IBM sorters, tabulators, and printers were installed. Other facilities operated punches only and submitted their cards to central locations such as Mauthausen or Berlin. […] Without IBM’s machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, whether located on-site or off-site, Hitler’s camps could never have managed the numbers they did. 

The phrase “continuing upkeep and service” reveals a horrible truth. IBM did not actually sell its machines to the Nazis. Rather, they pursued a business model that was much more efficient and profitable from a capitalist standpoint. They leased the machines, and sent their own IBM technicians to make repairs and adjustments when they were needed, “even when [the] site was in or near a concentration camp.” IBM was also the only source for new punch cards, which had to be custom-made by the million. 

As Black writes, it’s unclear how much the company’s leaders understood about the exact ways their technology was being used. Many records have been lost or destroyed, and machines were often moved “with or without IBM’s knowledge” from one location to another. But by the early 1940s, it was clear that the Nazis were pursuing a program of racial extermination everywhere they went. That didn’t stop IBM from doing business with them, or even give it pause. In fact, CEO Thomas Watson personally ordered the opening of “new subsidiaries established in conquered territories in cadence with Nazi invasions,” and IBM’s New York leadership sought “special bureaucratic exemptions […] to continue or expand business dealings throughout occupied Europe.” Like Henry Ford, Watson received a German Eagle medal from Hitler in 1937. Like so many wealthy businessmen, he faced no real consequence for IBM’s dealings with the Nazis after the war. Today, the company makes roughly $62 billion a year, and its AI model Watson is named after the former CEO. At Brown University, students raised a petition to take Watson’s name off the Center for Information Technology in 2021—but their request was unanimously denied. 

So why does all this matter today, so long after the fact? In part, it matters because justice does not come with an expiration date, and there is still a historic debt owed to the victims of Nazi violence and their descendants. Most of the individual capitalists who collaborated with the Nazis are long dead, but the companies they built are alive and well—and as David de Jong points out, their tainted fortunes have been passed down to their heirs. To a large extent, they got away with it, and that’s unacceptable. 

There is a possible remedy that’s worth looking into, both for the case of Nazi collaborators and many others where corporations knowingly harm people. It’s called the “corporate death penalty,” or the less dramatic term “judicial dissolution.” It’s an extension of the British legal doctrine of corporate manslaughter, which allows companies to be held criminally liable for causing people’s deaths in much the same way people are. The corporate death penalty takes the logic a step further, holding that if corporations are legally “people”—the way Mitt Romney and the Supreme Court keep telling us they are—then it should also be possible for them to be “executed,” or forced out of existence. One version of the theory,  proposed by Joshua M. Pearce in the journal Social Sciences, would “execute” any corporation that kills more people than it employs, like tobacco and coal companies. Another paper in the Journal of Management Inquiry proposes the chopping block for corporations that “achieve goals via corruption, cause permanent environmental damage, cause physical pain and death, and violate basic human rights.” The author of that version, John F. Hulpke, even uses Volkswagen as an example because of the 2015 scandal where it systematically lied about its vehicles’ carbon emissions. Really, the company’s use of concentration camp labor seems like ample grounds, too. The same isn’t necessarily true for every company we’ve examined here. Chanel, for instance, had a less direct relationship to the Nazis and is actually owned by the Wertheimer family—Coco Chanel’s intended victims—today. It’s probably fine for it to keep existing, even if the name is a little distasteful. But we should think seriously about “executing” IBM and Bayer for what they’ve done, and even Coca-Cola is on thin ice. 

In a wider sense, though, it’s important to understand this history because of what it teaches us about capitalism—the economic system we all, unfortunately, still live under. The lesson is twofold. First, knowing about the links between the Nazis and major international corporations makes it clear that the narrative about fascism being somehow “left-wing” or “socialist” is laughable nonsense. This shouldn’t even need to be said, but thanks to right-wing propagandists like Dinesh D’Souza (who wrote a book purporting to show “the Nazi roots of the American left” in 2017), the myth is still around. It basically holds that because “Nazi” is short for “National Socialist,” and Hitler occasionally named “the bourgeoisie” as one of the many groups he hated, the Nazis were therefore actual socialists, and socialism is Nazism. But as we’ve seen, this is silly. When they were in power, Hitler and the Nazis made no real attempt to eliminate capitalist companies. Instead, they made lucrative deals with them for the most vital parts of their war machine, from Hugo Boss uniforms to Bayer and I.G. Farben chemicals. (They also relied heavily on oil refineries built for them by the Koch family of U.S. conservative fame, and on the Krupp steel company. The latter is still around under the name ThyssenKrupp and is one of ten companies that student protesters want Cornell University to divest itself from because it supplies weapons for the Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Not that there are any parallels to be drawn there, or anything.) The whole Nazi state was powered by private contractors from top to bottom. It was the workers and their organizations who got suppressed, on behalf of the capitalists. In every meaningful sense of the word, the Nazis practiced capitalism. It was capitalism in the context of a military dictatorship, sure, but capitalism nonetheless.

More fundamental, though, is the opposite lesson. Not only was there nothing anti-capitalist about the Nazis, but there is nothing anti-Nazi about capitalism. In other words, capitalism has no morality or humanity at its core. If selling poison gas to Hitler is what’s most profitable, that’s what capitalist firms will do. Importantly, this isn’t a case of a few “bad apples” within capitalism; it’s not just that some companies sometimes behave unethically. Rather, the structure of capitalism and its competitive markets ensures that they will. Suppose, for example, that the leaders of Coca-Cola had done the noble thing and refused to do business with Germany once the Nuremberg Laws were passed. Another firm would doubtless have stepped into the gap. Coca-Cola would have lost out financially, and the other, less moral company would have been rewarded. Capitalism always rewards vice and punishes virtue. This pattern repeats throughout history, whether it’s fossil fuels destroying the climate, AR-15 rifles slaughtering civilians in mass shootings, addictive nicotine products being marketed toward children, or any other horror that results in healthy profits for its perpetrators. In Nazi Germany, people with money had a demand for drinks—and for steel, and for Zyklon B. And so, the market dictated there would be a supply.

In fact, the most honest of the capitalists say outright that this is how things should work. Milton Friedman, one of the high priests of 20th-century libertarianism, espoused something called “shareholder primacy”—the idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” and nothing else. Friedman was a monster in many ways, and “shareholder primacy” is a terrible way to think about the responsibilities of companies to the public. But he was right in the sense that corporations really do behave like they have no other responsibility except to make money. (And in the rare cases when they are held responsible for their unethical acts, it’s often in the form of a fine, which they absorb as the cost of doing business rather than changing their ways.)

 In this light, even the “corporate death penalty” doesn’t go far enough. If it were implemented today, new unethical companies would pop up just as soon as the old ones were abolished. To really bring the harm to an end, we need to uproot the system itself. Capitalists worked hand in hand with the Nazis yesterday, and they can’t be trusted to run the world today.