Midterm Paper

My midterm paper is going to focus on corporations who worked within Nazi Germany. The film The Corporation talked about companies such as IBM and Coca-Cola, who instead of following Allied trade restrictions, they either created new products or subsidiaries to continue to sell their product in Nazi Germany. Along with exposing the companies who did such things, I also want to tie it together with corporate greed and lack of accountability. These companies were defying trade embargoes, potentially breaking law, and supporting Nazi suppression, all to make a profit.

In this paper I would really like to show how corporations have such blind greed that they will work around international laws and genocide to make a profit. Certain companies, such as IBM, actually helped the Nazi's in their oppression and murdering of Jews and other people groups by creating a punch-card system. They would use codes to keep track of each prisoner, making the task of killing millions of innocent people easier. Not all companies took such an appalling role in Nazi Germany and showed that kind of greed, but none they are still not innocent. I will not only focus on American companies however, I will research and talk about German corporations, such as BMW, who also participated in war-time activities in Nazi Germany. In my paper I plan on exposing these companies.

Sources I will use include scholarly articles, newspaper articles, and books that will help me write my paper. One of the main sources I will use is IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. I plan on using such resources as LexisNexis, Jstor, Google Scholar, and other scholarly databases to find scholarly articles and newspaper reports. It is important that my sources come from a respectable source, such as university professors, working professionals, experts, and researchers in the field for accurite and reliable information.