PROOF Corporations Will Sacrifice YOU for Profit Forgotten History Compilation

PROOF Corporations Will Sacrifice YOU for Profit Forgotten History Compilation

The 19th century saw the rise of the modern industrialist, an explosion of immigration, inventions that would change the world, and the birth of the billionaire cla.ss. This was called the Gilded Age from 1870 to about 1900. It was named by 1920s historians after Mark Twain’s 1873 novel The Gilded Age, A Tale of Today.

Many of the business practices of these so called robber barons were perhaps deemed necessary to conduct a business back then, but in many cases their actions were deplorable, even by the standards of their day. One man rose above his contemporaries to use politics, force, coercion, subterfuge, and manipulation, becoming the world’s first billionaire.

He was one of the most corrupt men in history in increasing his wealth at the risk of the health and lives of American citizens. And he had a lot of help. That phenomenon still exist to this day. Who was John D. Rockefeller? How did he make his wealth and maintain it? What did he do that would be considered criminal acts today? How was his influence survived even through today? Hello, I’m Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army and Marine Corps veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History.

John Davison Rockefeller Sr. was born on July 8th, 1839 in Richford, New York. He became an a.ssistant bookkeeper at age 16 and entered into the business world and made good investments in joining in partnerships beginning in age 20. Many of his business partners were connected to the Freemasons, but there is no evidence that Rockefeller was ever a member.

With his own money and family support, he engaged in the oil business, drilling in some cases, but primarily oil refining. And then he founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870 and managing the company until 1897. By 1900, Rockefeller controlled about 90% of all the petroleum production in the United States and his research teams created the first plastics, gasoline for internal combustion engines, which brought himself and Henry Ford quite close together, as well as Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, all as business partners.

The invention of the internal combustion engine created the need for gasoline, and Rockefeller controlled the entire industry in a monopoly, and the US government was his largest client. As a result, Rockefeller used his influence and money to lay the groundwork for a complete takeover of the healthcare industry as well.

Using his political contacts, who were essentially on his payroll for their elections, he had natural healing methods banned, doctors thrown into pr1sons, and hospitals and clinics thre4tened with being shut down if they did not follow his game plan. And here’s how he did it. In 1901, he est4blished the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now known as Rockefeller University, dedicated to advancing biomedical research and was instrumental in pioneering various medical treatments, including vaccines,

antibiotics, and synthetic dru9s, which would become the cornerstones of the burgeoning pha.rmaceutical industry. Rockefeller spent $100 million of his own money, equal to $2.6 billion today, to hire train and then deploy his doctors, clinical researchers and chemists who would perform and follow his guidelines, banning traditional treatments in favor of the new platform.

In 1902, he spent another $1 million to fund the creation of the General Education Board, which was pa.ssed by Congress based upon selective and misleading data. Effectively, he lied. Which then proceeded to prevent medical colleges and universities from receiving federal grants if they did not abandon the teaching of natural healing.
Rockefeller was a devotee of social Darwinism. He was an open racist. He agreed with the views of Margaret Sanger, see our video on her. In 1909, Rockefeller selected Andrew Carnegie, the Irish born steel magnate and founder of US Steel, to perform a national tour of hospitals and clinics to evaluate the current methods of treating illness and disease.

So, Carnegie chose a former school teacher, Abraham Flexner, who was neither a physician nor scientist, definitely not a doctor, but actually a wealthy owner and operator of a for profit college in Kentucky. The result was the Flexner Report of 1910, which called for a centralized system of controlling healthcare in a true socialist fashion, but also created the age of big pha.rmaceutical companies.

You see, up until that time, most doctors practiced holistic medicine using natural herbs and compounds to treat illness, which had been the case for many centuries around the world, and many were highly effective. But they were not as profitable for a pha.rmaceutical company hoping to break into the very new and potentially profitable dru9 industry.

But why did Rockefeller go to these great lengths? Well, hold on because the story gets ins@ne and still rings true today. Rockefeller wanted a corner of the global pha.rmaceutical market, but to do so, he needed allies in the business all over the world, and here’s how he did that. He started the war on plant based medications, which extended all the way into the big pha.rma companies condemning cannabis and cocaine, for example.

Since natural growing plants cannot be patented, the big pha.rma lobby, even today, spends billions in Congress to keep natural remed1es off the market so they can make profits on chemically created treatments, many of which don’t even work. Part of the misleading data was the claim that Rockefeller’s doctors had eradicated h00kworm in the US, which was touted as a major achievement using their own medical compounds.

It was a lie, but it worked to get Congress on board. Rockefeller then spent 180 million more dollars staffing these schools with like minded sycophants who were reliant upon him for their livelihoods, replacing the previous faculties who were then blacklisted. Rockefeller created a nonprofit that donated big money to medical schools that followed Flexner’s advice.
This in turn benefited his own growing chemical business once the competition was removed. We saw this major conflagration during the COVID 19 pandemic when Big Pha.rma coerced Congress and President Joseph Biden to condemn much cheaper, safe, readily available, and proven remed1es such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in favor of an experimental and now proven failed vaccine that was cheap to produce but patented for profit.
The Biden administration then fired and had social media outlets censor medical experts who challenged the Dr. Fauci platform and see our video on him. It was all about the dollars, healthcare and lives be d@mned. Rockefeller then began producing his own medicines with a petroleum base, meaning oil, which is a known carcinogen.
And most of these were highly addictive. Traditional herbal treatments were then labeled as alternative and he lobbied and bribed politicians to have them banned as unscientific quackery. Then he got the insurance companies on board to ban payments for such treatments. He did this also by taking control of the American media with the collusion of the great newsmen of the day, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, who helped spread his propaganda as all would see a profit.
He also took over the American Medical Association where he could control what was being taught in medical schools and push his doctrine that supported his own poison pill business, eliminating natural healing from the curriculum. Doctors and professors who challenged this new orthodoxy were fired, banned from teaching and practicing medicine, and their licenses were revoked.
To give context to this evil by Rockefeller, once it was proven that his own manufactured medicines were causing cancer, he founded the American Cancer Society and prevented any of that information from being disclosed and then still prevented natural remed1es from being used by the medical profession. We saw this recently with the big pha.rmaceutical companies giving the COVID 19 injections and hiding the downside of the ma.ssive rejections and side effects of those sh0ts, the jab.
The hypocrisy was astounding because now Rockefeller, along with J.P. Morgan and Kuhn, Loeb & Company, which later became Lehman, wanted to protect their newly obtained wealth. They all worked with Nelson Aldrich to create the Federal Reserve System in 1913 under Woodrow Wilson, and see our video on him, to whom they contributed heavily to both of his campaigns.
In addition, they were instrumental in est4blishing a federal income tax despite their previous collective positions on that subject and the Fed declaring such a thing was communistic. Ironically, Aldrich’s daughter was also married to one of Rockefeller’s sons. So, why the great change in their opinion? Simple, exemptions.

It should be noted that Rockefeller and his cronies, who first opposed the Fed, and see our video on that subject, is very much like Bill Gates today, as most of these gigantic pha.rmaceutical companies and banks have since created tax exempt foundations, wherein they donate ma.ssive amounts of their corporate shares to not only avoid income taxes and capital gains taxes, but also estate taxes, and the money goes to bribe members of Congress.
They supported the creation of the Fed and IRS, control of big pha.rma and health care, while still supporting the legislature that created laws that they were exempt from. Rockefeller was the godfather of this lethal corruption. Of interest at the time, Kuhn, Loeb was run by Jacob Schiff, whose grandson married Al Gore’s daughter in 1997, just to make that connection.
The families so famous in politics today are connected through this criminal connection. In 1930, Salmon P. Chase became involved, and Chase Bank bought Equitable Trust Company of New York, whose largest shareholder was, you got it, John Rockefeller Jr., making Chase the largest bank in the world and Rockefeller the most powerful man in the oil and dru9 business.
So, it was a family affair. So, in 1939 Rockefeller created a business partnership with the German company IG Farben, the parent company of Bayer. It should be noted that Auschwitz was the largest ma.ss extermination factory in human history. However, few people are aware that Auschwitz was 100% subsidiary of IG Farben.
Well, when it came to the Holocaust, Rockefeller’s company was a willing partner. On April 14th, 1941 in Ludwigshafen, Otto Ambros, the IG Farben board member responsible for the Auschwitz project, stated to board colleagues, “Our new friendship with the SS is a blessing. We have determined all measures integrating the concentration camps to benefit our company.
” And who was their major benefactor? You got it. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. What he was referring to was the production of a pesticide called Zyklon B, which was being used on crops and as a household insecticide, but was being phased out due to health concerns. SS doctors, such as Karl Brandt and others, found a very good use for it in the gas chambers, making ma.ss murd3r more efficient than carbon monoxide buses and firing squads.
As a result of the horrors that resulted after World W4r II, IG Farben was dissolved and rebranded under the companies   such as General Mills, Kellogg, Nestlé, Bristol Myers Squibb, Procter & Gamble, Roche and Hoechst, now Sanofi Aventis, among others. Today, IG Farben still exists as a company, but in liquidation.
And connections go even deeper where corruption is concerned, as David Rockefeller, the grandson to David Sr., was the CEO and chairman of Chase Manhattan, which later became J.P. Morgan Chase. Today, J.P. Morgan’s a.ssets are worth over 2.727 trillion dollars. Chase had a strong presence in Hong Kong, but now the Chinese Communist Party is in charge, so that may explain a few things for a future video.
This sector of the medical industrial complex employs something on the order of 1,100 highly trained federal lobbyists, more than two for each member of Congress. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the dru9 companies spent 280 million dollars on Capitol Hill in 2017 alone, a 12% increase over 2016 spending.
They also poured 58 million dollars into the 2016 election, mainly supporting Democrats, but a few did support Donald Trump, hedging their bets. Today, the Rockefeller empire, in tandem with JP Morgan Chase, owns 50% of the Big Pha.rma industry in the US, and the US alone accounts for over 50% of all global pha.rma sales in the industry.
And that is the second largest manufacturer of products after the w3apons industry. However, as if the corruption was not bad enough, in order to make even greater profits, Big Pha.rma started moving their manufacturing overseas in the 1990s, using cheap and even slave labor, but still raising the cost of medications, and today most of our more important dru9s come from India and China.
We need change. And change is coming.  Lad1es, no more scraping, no more grinding, no more pounding, no more scouring, no more problems, no more mess with new Slip Away. You just spray, bake, and slip away. Yes, here in this handy spray can is new Slip Away, the revolutionary new nonstick coating for pots, pans, ovens, and grills.
And Slip Away contains the magic of DuPont Teflon.  It’s in your your children’s bl00d. It’s in the rain, the rivers, in the soil beneath your home, and it’s not going away, ever. For decades, one of the most powerful companies in America knew the truth about the chemicals they were dumping into the world.
They poisoned towns, covered it up, lied to regulators, and made billions of doing it. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s one of the most well documented environmental crimes in US history. And the most terrifying part? You probably still have it in your kitchen. This is the story of DuPont, C8, and the forever chemical they tried to erase from history.
So, how much would a company risk for profit if they knew you’d never find out? If a chemical is in your bl00d, but you never consented to it, who’s responsible? And if 99% of Americans are contaminated, is that an accident or a cover up? Let’s try and find out. Hello, I’m Mike Joburg, Marine Corps veteran and filmmaker, and we will try to answer these questions on today’s episode of Forgotten History.
I’m    Before the lawsuits, before the de@d cows and contaminated water, there was the DuPont family, America’s original corporate royalty. Founded in 1802 as a g.unpowder manufacturer, helped arm the US through every major war from the 19th century to World W4r II. By the mid 1900s, DuPont had become a chemical empire behind everything from nylon and Kevlar to Freon and dynamite.
And with that empire, gained power. For much of the 20th century, DuPont wasn’t just a company, it was a dynasty. The family was among the richest in America. Their influence embedded in industry, politics, and science. They had their own town, their own hospitals, even their own cemetery. So, when they introduced a miraculous new chemical, one that would make pans nonstick, fabrics waterproof, and profits explode, no one questioned it.
In 1938, a DuPont chemist named Roy Plunkett stumbled upon a strange white substance   that was slippery, heat resistant, and nearly indestructible. They called it Teflon, and DuPont patented it before the public ever heard the name. At first, it wasn’t for frying pans. Teflon’s earliest role was cla.ssified.
It was used during the Manhattan Project to coat valves and pipes carrying uranium hexafluoride gas for the atomic b0mb. DuPont’s chemical was so st4ble, so immune to corrosion, that it helped win the war. That gave it prestige and protected it from scrutiny. But scaling it for civilian use was a different challenge.
Teflon wouldn’t stick to anything, not even machinery trying to mold it. To solve that problem, DuPont turned to a chemical surfactant, perfluoride octanoic acid, better known as PFOA or just C8. After production, most of the PFOA is supposed to be removed, but trace amounts remain in finished products. Once the Teflon was made, there was a lot of leftover C8 in the water, the sludge, even the smoke coming out of the chimneys.
And the problem is, C8 doesn’t break down. Not in the ground, not in the water, not in your body. Once it’s in you, it’s there for good. DuPont knew that, but instead of finding a way to dispose of it safely, they did what was cheap. They dumped it into the local river, buried it in landfills, and released it into the air.
In 1961, their own scientists saw it cause liver damage in rats. By 1978, they found it was linked to birth defects in workers’ babies. And in 1984, they discovered it was already in the drinking water of the nearby towns. They had the proof, and they buried it. Internal memos warned, “We are already liable for the past 32 years of operations.
” The marching orders, keep quiet, keep dumping, keep making money. Then in the late 1990s, a cattle farmer in West Virginia named Wilbur Tennant started noticing something wrong with his cows. They were dying vi0lently, losing hair, drilling thick foam. Their organs shriveled. Some were born deformed. Others dropped de@d for no reason.
Over 150 of them d1ed. He thought he was going cr4zy until he looked upstream. The creek that ran through his property came from a DuPont landfill, the same one where the company had been dumping its chemical waste for years. Tennant tried getting help. Local agencies ignored him. State officials brushed him off.
So, he started filming everything. The dying animals, the black sludge in the water, the discolored organs during autopsies. Then he found a lawyer, Rob Bilott. Bilott was no environmental crusader. He was actually a corporate defense attorney, but he had one connection. He’d grown up near Parkersburg, the location of the DuPont Washington Works Water Works plant.
And once he saw the evidence, he switched sides. The lot filed a lawsuit, and once DuPont had to open its internal records, the floodgates burst open.  Suing them for producing toxic forever chemicals used in everything from clothing to cookware to cosmetics.  Those chemicals never break down naturally, ending up in our water, soil, and even our bod1es.
He uncovered tens of thousands of pages of internal memos showing DuPont had known for decades that C8 was d4ngerous and that it was in the water, the air, and the bl00d of people living near the plant. Rob Bilott wasn’t cr4zy. He was right. And DuPont had been caught red handed. Once Rob Bilott got his hands on DuPont’s internal files, the truth was undeniable.
They had known for over 40 years that C8 was toxic, and they had dumped it anyway. They had lied to regulators, their workers, and the public.  Based on our a.ssessment of the science, we do not believe this poses any cancer risk.  The lawsuit with the Tennant family was just the beginning.
Bilott launched a cla.ss action case on behalf of 70,000 people who live near the Washington Works plant. To prove the health risks, a medical panel was formed. It wasn’t just some quick study. It took 7 years and included over 69,000 bl00d samples. What did they find? C8 was in everyone. And it was linked to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and pregnancy induced hypertension.
One of the panel’s doctors said flat out, “There’s no known safe level of exposure.” In other words, any amount is too much. But even with all that, DuPont still didn’t face any real criminal consequences. In 2017, they agreed to pay 671 million to settle thousands of personal 1njury claims. Then they did what every cornered corporation does.
They cut and ran. DuPont spun off its chemical division into a new company called Chemours and dumped the liability with it. On paper, DuPont was clean. In reality, they just changed the name on the door. DuPont walked away. The settlement was a drop in the bucket compared to what they made off Teflon. No one went to jail.
No ex3cutives were held personally accountable. And yet, the damage was already done. C8 is now in the bl00d of an estimated 99% of all Americans. It’s been found in umbilical cords, polar bears, rainwater, and breast milk. It doesn’t break down in nature and it doesn’t leave your body. Ever. DuPont may have stopped using C8, but the industry didn’t stop making forever chemicals.
They just swapped it for new names. GenX, PFHXS, PFOs, different labels, same nightmare. Enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While he wasn’t part of the original DuPont lawsuit, he’s become one of the loudest voices exploding the broader PFAS crisis. Through lawsuits, testimony, and advocacy, RFK Jr. has gone after chemical giants like 3M, Chemours, and others.
He’s called it the biggest environmental crime in American history. And unlike most politicians, he’s actually read the signs and named the names. Meanwhile, the government still hasn’t banned PFAS entirely. The EPA has only recently proposed stricter limits in drinking water decades after knowing the risks.
So, here’s the question. If a company can poison nearly the entire planet and get away with it. What else are we being exposed to right now? And who’s going to stop it if no one goes to jail? Let us know your thoughts on the DuPont scandal in the comments below.  Every person in the USA has probably seen the commercials by law firms willing to represent v1tims of the water contamination at Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Many Marines, civilians, and their families were poisoned by the contaminated ground water. Many people saw the film Erin Brockovich where Julia Roberts gathered samples of water from an industrial site in defense of people living nearby who suffered and d1ed from various cancers and won a huge settlement against Pacific Gas and Electric in California on July 2nd, 1996 for $333 million, around $650 million today.
But the real crime reporting the huge payout was the cover up by PG&E. But the Camp Lejeune case is much larger involving the federal government. The Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration denied claims for decades, very similar to their resistance to including Agent Orange health related issues to Vietnam veterans until forced to accept those cases. But why? Let’s find out.
What caused the contamination? Why was there a cover up? Who was involved? Why has this problem never been fully resolved? How many people were affected and how? Hello, I’m Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army Marine Corps veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. It is believed that almost 200,000 Marines, sailors, and probably an equal number of their dependents and civilian workers were poisoned over five decades.
Investigations kept stating several causes from farmer runoff from fertilizers and much later from some illegal dumping of d4ngerous chemicals, but the federal government claimed that it was a North Carolina state issue, not the government, which was problematic because then under North Carolina statute of repose, no civil tort lawsuit can be filed after more than 10 years.
This law effectively blocked Camp Lejeune v1tims from bringing lawsuits seeking financial compensation. In  2012, the Janey Ensminger Act was pa.ssed authorizing the US government to pay medical care costs to family members ha.rmed by the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, but the Ensminger Act had limitations.
It was basically a disability benefits case. Worse, Marines’ families were excluded. In 2016, multi district litigation involving 850 former Camp Lejeune resident Straw v. The United States was dismissed based on the North Carolina repose statute. Many members of Congress, especially those who were veterans, believed that Marines and their families should not be limited to just VA benefits, which are hard enough to obtain, which led to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022, but it is still an uphill b4ttle even
when the evidence was presented. One source for much of this information comes from one of our loyal viewer with first person experience, and I quote, paraphrasing, “The base public relations then went on to say, ‘After water testing in 1982, they found four or possibly five d4ngerous chemicals in the drinking water.
Everything the base PR said is not true. It would appear that the contamination was not an accident, but a terrible crime that made thousands of Marines and their wives and children sick, many with serious diseases that lasted a lifetime, and many d1ed never knowing it was the water. The in depth testing determined that nine d4ngerous chemicals, not four or five, were in the water.
All are known carcinogens, and this was known by the base authorities in March 1965. The secret was kept until 1982 when they were forced to test the water. Camp Lejeune water supplies are very interconnected. Four months after arriving at Camp Lejeune and working near the water as well as consuming it, I started having unusual medical problems, losing weight, nosebleeds, coughing up bl00d, fevers, thrombosis in the testicles, pains in the kidneys, groin, and more.
I worked right at the water’s edge helping with various w3apons cla.sses. There were occasional complaints about the smell, but I thought it had to do with the water shifting, like the smell of a low tide. One evening in January of 1965, after cla.ss, I noticed a truck backing up to the water on a dirt trail nearby. The back of the truck opened and two men started emptying barrels of a colored fluid directly into the reservoir.
When they left, I had noticed a grease like film over the top of the water in that area and spreading outward. I became concerned and told two friends about it, but was told, “Don’t complain, just stay out of it.” I started keeping notes of the trucks’ arrival and dumping. During that time, I noticed a different truck smaller, but also dumping barrels of fluid into the water.
I went to pick up my laundry, which was delivered to the base a few times a week, and recognized the truck. I started questioning the truck driver under the pretense that I was doing some research on chemicals for a course I was taking. He gave me the name of the chemicals, which I recorded in my notes.
After a few weeks, I asked him about the dumping of the barrels into the reservoir, and his attitude changed. I directly asked him if he thought it was illegal. He responded that they had approval from the base authority. Much later, I found out who the authority was. As a matter of fact, he said the local chrome plating company, where he drove occasionally, did the same thing.
So, I borrowed a camera from my friend and started taking pictures of the dumping and keeping a record of how many barrels were being dumped from the large truck, which was the laundry truck, and the smaller truck, which turned out to be from the chrome plating company. Meanwhile, I was still sick often and not getting well, and so were a number of other Marines that I knew.
This went on for about 7 or 8 weeks. I took my file, notes, and pictures and went to see the Provost Marshal. He was very busy that day, but when I mentioned it was about the water, he closed the door and became very interested in what I had to say. I told him everything I had learned and my suspicions.
At first, he tried to brush it aside and that I was probably seeing something that was normal and my imagination was getting the best of me. He then said he would need to see proof to proceed with any investigations. That’s when I told him I had notes, a file, names of the chemicals, and even photos.    He looked sh0cked.
He congratulated me on trying to do the right thing and protect the base. He then asked me for all the notes, files, and photos that I had. He made sure this was the only record and told me he would take care of the matter quietly as he did not want to cause any bad publicity for the base. I should not discuss this matter with anyone ever, and he would take care of it in house.
I left feeling I had done the right thing. 48 hours later, an MP showed up at the barracks and I was given orders for WestPac. They got rid of me hoping I would d1e in the war and never return. Many years later, I found that the Provost Marshal and a few others were being paid to look the other way. The chrome  plating company and the laundry company both used toxic chemicals.
Onslow County had a dump for toxic chemicals, but it was costly and did not cover all the chemicals needed to be disposed of. So, both companies cut a deal to save money and get rid of the chemicals by paying the Provost Marshal and a few others to look the other way.    In 1982, after a lot of complaints, the water was tested.
It was found to have four or five d4ngerous cancer producing chemicals in it. After a big f1ght, the VA decided that they would give compensation to the Marines and their families that suffered and d1ed, although they a.ssumed no responsibility on behalf of the base for what happened as they considered it an accident and not the crime that it really was.
They put together a limited list of cancers and serious diseases that they felt could have been responsible due to the chemicals, although no one knows for sure what those chemicals could do in the body. No tests were done to see what would really happen if you were poisoned for a few years with those chemicals, and this is where the story gets very muddy. The test was done in 1982.
I reported the contamination of the water in late March of 1965. What follows are facts. Military personnel and their families were left to get sick and d1e for 17 more years. Then to make matters worse, the chemicals they are reporting on were not all the chemicals. The chrome plating company was gone by 1972, so those chemicals of the next 10 years, I was told, would evaporate or sink to the bottom and not show up on a test.
Quoting further, “That would mean that many Marines like myself that have had operations on the bladder, kidneys, testicle problems, etc. would not be on the radar because the chemicals the plating company was using would @ttack a different areas, such as the bladder, kidneys, and more. Even though my Camp Lejeune medical records show problems that appeared then and are still with me.
” In conclusion, over 160,000 Marines that served at Camp Lejeune and have applied for relief from the VA under the PACT Act, and yet after over 2 years, only 117 have been approved. 117 out of 160,000 applications. I myself have been denied five times, even though I sent the medical records the size of a New York phone book.
The worst part is I have never been able to have children. I bl4me the water. The VA is f1ghting every Marine or their widow’s request for help, putting them through all kinds of examinations and paperwork. There is a bill, 8545, that was put in by Congressman Greg Murphy of North Carolina that may help. But, I feel for many of the Marines that d1ed not knowing the real cause, their wives that had miscarriages, etc.
This he4rtbre4king report from Tony Andryuli is not an isolated incident. I, your humble narrator, personally know several Marines who had dealt with multiple cancers and other related issues. Various types of cancers, such as leukemia and non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, were the diagnoses of those affected, as well as infertility, tumors, children being stillborn, and born with birth defects, autism, and deformities.
Some children born seemingly healthy, but were ill, d1ed young. With newborn children, congenital heart defects are common in mothers who drank and bathed in the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune. Stud1es strongly suggest a link between a mother’s exposure to TCE during pregnancy and congenital heart defects.
But, the following additional illnesses have been proven to be directly caused by the chemicals in question, such as the bladder cancer, testicular cancer, brain cancer, breast cancer, esophageal cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, multiple myeloma, aplastic anemia, myelodysplastic syndrome, ovarian cancer, and cervical cancer.
The recent science and medical evidence regarding the chemicals continue to build links to other injuries besides cancer, to include infertility and miscarriage, the birth defects, birth injuries, brain injuries, cardiac defects, fatty liver disease, neurobehavioral effects, plastic anemia, and other bone marrow conditions, renal toxicity, scleroderma, hepatic steatosis, soft tissue cancers, ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.
PCE is absorbed following oral, inhalation, and dermal exposures. It travels through the bl00dstream to the lungs. PCE targets the central nervous system, liver, and kidneys, and accumulates in fat cells. Tetrachloroethylene also crosses the placenta and distributes it to the fetus, which is why there were so many birth defects at Camp Lejeune.
As of now, there are 546,500 active administrative claims filed. And as of August 7, 2024, the de@dline to file Camp Lejeune claims is now expired, and $23,400,000 has already been paid out on some cases, those numbering 117. As of February 6, 2025, 2,458 lawsuits have been filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina alone since February 2023.
Many retired Marines and their families live in this area. Of those 103 cases filed, they have been dismissed, most voluntarily. But there are still 408,000 administrative claims pending before the Department of the Navy, with about 6,000 cases being reviewed for potential early settlements. Depressingly, that is only 1.5% of all claims.
Leukemia and non Hodgkin’s lymphoma are the main targets, but litigants want that list of illnesses expanded given what is known about the chemicals. Another illness that has recently gained a lot of momentum with regard to this issue is Parkinson’s disease. The parties are currently debating what proof is needed to est4blish water contamination and causation.
Expert testimony is under review with the US government considering objections to plaintiffs’ reports. Medical exams for some plaintiffs are still being scheduled. Plaintiffs claim the DOJ’s proposed medical exams are excessively long. The exams last 35 minutes to 2.6 hours, while the DOJ demands longer exams, and the court is being asked to ensure reciprocity in exam durations.
The EPA did announce final rules banning all uses of trichloroethylene, TCE, and consumer uses, along with many commercial uses of perchloroethylene, PCE. These were the primary chemicals at Camp Lejeune. The government has still been f1ghting to disavow any compensation. The DOJ claims that they are proceeding slowly to protect confidential information, but that is a stall tactic.
If people d1e, they can’t file a claim. Congress created the CLJA in 2022 to provide v1tims with a new legal remedy, but the fourth circuit misapplied Supreme Court precedent by requiring a magic words standard for Congress to authorize jury trials against instead of focusing upon the obvious intent of the legislation. The government lawyers are more focused on defending itself vigorously against claims than on fulfilling the congressional mandate of the Camp Lejeune Justice Act.
You would expect this garbage when suing Fortune 500 company. Those lawyers commonly prioritize every possible legal defense over humane and timely resolution, but that is not what Congress intended here, and these kinds of tactics violate the spirit of the CLJA. In addition, under the CLJA, an individual must open an estate or be appointed in some official capacity to act as the legal representative of a deceased person.
One plaintiff who filed on behalf of her deceased husband had not met those criteria. The government stated that she lacked the legal standing to proceed. However, the court did not dismiss her case. Instead, the case was stayed allowing her time to open an estate and correct the issue. The government is, not surprisingly, trying to narrow the focus.
It wants to focus just on evidence limited to the concentration of chemicals in the drinking water due to the probable de4ths of civilians who worked at locations such as Hadnot Point and Midway Park, which is the on base housing complex. Ironically, despite the government cleanup in 2012, the Hadnot Point water facility was also found to be contaminated with mercury.
Mercury may have come from water pressure meters at the facility that were removed in the 1980s. For 346 months, the Tarawa Terrace water treatment and supply facility at Camp Lejeune was contaminated with a d4ngerously high levels of PCE. The source of the contamination was identified as a nearby dry cleaning company.
The EPA’s maximum safe level for PCE in drinking water is 5 ug/L. The peak level of TCE contamination in 1985 in the Camp Lejeune water supply was 215 ug/L. That is 43 times the safe level for TCE. It is a wonder there were not more Camp Lejeune water contamination de4ths and injuries than have been reported. TCE is an industrial chemical that is used in the manufacturing of refrigerants and other hydrofluorocarbons.
It is a ha.rmful chemical that is long known to be unfit for human consumption. TCE has also been used as a solvent and fumigant to k1ll insects. The body absorbs TCE mostly through inhalation and through oral and dermal exposure as well. The bl00dstream pushes this chemical to major organs that receive bl00d and deposit it in the fat cells.
The body metabolizes TCE mainly in the liver, kidneys, and lungs. Humans extensively metabolize inhaled doses of trichloroethylene. Metabolites may play a role in the adverse health effects described in stud1es. TCE was also commonly used as a solvent and degreaser on metal in military equipment. The Hadnot Point water treatment facility servicing Camp Lejeune was found to be highly contaminated with TCE.
The contamination is believed to have come from numerous sources. EPA’s maximum safe level for TCE in potable water is five parts per billion. The Camp Lejeune water supply was contaminated with TCE as high as 1,400 parts per billion. What is absolutely unfathomable is that our government would spend a trillion dollars of our tax money overseas supporting foreign countries, their populations, and militaries, but f1ght tooth and nail to avoid taking care of our own people ha.rmed by criminal negligence.
We brought this to light in two of our videos regarding the criminal negligence of FEMA and their handling of the Maui fires and Hurricane Helene. So, please see our videos on those two travesties. I, your humble narrator, was also at Camp Lejeune from 1987 to 1988 and fortunately have not as of yet experienced any of these symptoms.
We wish to thank Tony Andreoli for his personal testimony and for suggesting this video topic. We wish him and all the others affected the very best.  By the late 1800s, America had transformed into a different kind of country. The Industrial Revolution replaced farms with factories and towns with towering cities.
Steel rails stitched the nation together. Coal powered everything and millions of immigrants poured in chasing the American dream. Between 1850 and 1900, the US population more than tr.i.pled. Urban centers like New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh ballooned into overcrowded industrial powerhouses. But feeding that population became a logistical nightmare.
Fresh food spoiled quickly and rural supply couldn’t keep up with urban demand. So, the new solution was industrial food production. Preserved, packaged, and able to be shipped long distances. Canned meat, condensed milk, jarred vegetables, anything that could be stored, sold, and consumed at scale. It wasn’t just efficient, it was highly profitable, and it was completely unregulated.
America didn’t just industrialize its workforce, it industrialized what we ate. And the cost was hidden in every bite. In 1902, there were no safety labels, no ingred1ent lists, and no government watchdog. Just trust and a lot of bl1nd luck. A gla.ss of milk could be laced with formaldehyde. Canned peas were dyed bright green with copper sulfide.
Bread was whitened with alum. Candy for children was often colored with lead salts and arsenic. Even meat was freshened with borax. And yet there were no laws and no one to stop it until one man had enough and formed a secret team of human guinea pigs to expose the truth. So, how do we go from feeding people poisoned by accident to doing it on purpose with a government stamp of approval? And who are the forgotten men who risked everything to make sure we knew what we were eating? And if the FDA was created to protect us from corporations,
why does it now protect the corporations from us? Let’s try to find out.  Hello, I’m Mike Roweberg, a Marine Corps veteran and filmmaker, and we will try to answer these questions on today’s episode of Forgotten History.  At the turn of the 20th century, food in America was a gamble. No labels, no federal agency checking what you ate.
If it looked fresh, you bought it. And if it didn’t k1ll you right away, it pa.ssed the test. This wasn’t just a few shady vendors on the corner. Some of the biggest names in American industry were knowingly feeding the public poison. The American meatpacking industry, centered in Chicago, routinely sold spoiled beef and pork, dousing it with borax to mask the foul stench of rot.
American author and journalist Upton Sinclair would later call the factories a jungle of filth, disease, and de4th. Another was the Corn Products Refining Company, caught using formaldehyde in milk to cover spoilage, selling it to families, hospitals, and even schools. And Heinz, long before its family friendly branding, was caught using benzoate preservatives at levels that triggered migraines, digestive issues, and allergic reactions.
Candy manufacturers like Dunton’s and Sticky and Poor routinely added lead chromate and arsenic based dyes to keep sweets looking vibrant, fully aware that it could lead to nerve damage, seizures, and even de4th in children. And bakeries across New York and Boston used alum and chalk dust to bleach cheap flour, creating the illusion of purity while delivering toxins in every slice.
There were no lawsuits or consequences. The American food industry had become a profit machine, one willing to sacrifice public health to protect the bottom line. And Washington, silent, but in complicit. Until one man inside the government finally decided to f1ght back. Enter Dr. Harvey Wiley. He was a chemist and a bureaucrat, but a man with a conscience.
And Harvey Wiley was about to declare war on the American food industry. Born in Indiana, Harvey Washington Wiley   was the son of a Civil W4r veteran, and he carried the same sense of duty into science. He stud1ed chemistry and medicine, eventually earning a position as a chief chemist at the US Department of Agriculture in 1883.
At first, the job was simple. Analyze crops, review fertilizer use, and publish government bull3tins. But Wiley kept stumbling onto something bigger. The same food products that were k1lling livestock were being fed to humans, and no one was keeping track. People were getting sick, children were dying, and the only thing more toxic than the food was the silence surrounding it.
Wiley began publishing his findings, calling out companies, raising alarm bells. But industry lobbyists pushed back hard. They labeled him a crank and a fear monger. Politicians brushed them off. Even President Theodore Roosevelt refused to act without solid evidence. So, Wiley changed tactics. If the government wanted data, he’d give them the data.
Real, irrefutable, human tested proof. And that’s when he created the experiment that would make him a hero or get him fired. He called it the Poison Squad. Wiley didn’t just test chemicals in the lab. He tested them on people. Real, living volunteers from within the government. In 1902, inside a government run boarding house in Washington, D.C., Dr.
Wiley recruited 12 healthy young men. Most of them clerks at the Department of Agriculture. They were in their 20s, athletic, sharp, and patriotic enough to sign up for something no one had ever done before. Eat food laced with poison every day on purpose. There was no extra pay, no fame, just three meals a day, and the knowledge that what they were doing might save millions.
Each meal was carefully prepared and dosed. The men were monitored obsessively. Wiley and his team tracked their weight, bowel movements, appetite, energy levels, and even mood swings. They tested one chemical at a time, borax, used in meat preservation, salicylic acid, an antiseptic preservative, benzoates, used in condiments and sauces, formaldehyde, sometimes added to milk, and sulfur dioxide, used on fruits.
The results were brut4l. Some men experienced nausea, vomiting, headaches, and joint pain. Others reported memory loss and fat1gue. A few were forced to withdraw from the experiment altogether. No one d1ed, but the cumulative effects were impossible to ignore. It wasn’t a question of if these additives were d4ngerous. Wiley had his answer.
The only question now was whether anyone in power cared, and soon the rest of the country would find out what he was doing. Wiley never intended the Poison Squad to be a media spectacle, but once the press found out, it went viral, the 1903 version of it, that is. Newspapers across the country seized on the story.
Headlines blared, “Government clerks eat poison for science. Uncle Sam’s human experiment. The Poison Squad. Real men, real meals, real danger.” The public was horrified and fascinated. Letters flooded in from citizens demanding food safety laws. Church groups, women’s clubs, and civic organizations rallied behind Wiley. Mothers began refusing to buy certain brands. Political pressure mounted.
Wiley had done the unthinkable. He’d made food safety a national conversation, but with visibility came enemies. The food and chemical industries launched a coordinated @ttack. They called Wiley a quack, claimed the additives were perfectly safe in moderation, accused them of wasting taxpayer dollars.
Lobbyists lined the halls of Congress. Some offered bribes, others thre4tened funding cuts. One food ex3cutive even called Wiley a menace to American enterprise. But Wiley wasn’t just a chemist anymore. He was a crusader. And he had the public behind him. Still, the political b4ttle dr4gged on for years until a series of high profile scandals finally forced the government’s hand.
Amongst them were the beef scandal during the Spanish American W4r. The US Army was supplied with spoiled, chemically treated meat by big packaging companies like Armour and Co. Sold1ers called it embalmed beef. Many got sick, some d1ed. General Nelson Miles testified before Congress confirming the meat was unfit for consumption. Public outrage exploded.
This scandal directly implicated both corporations and the government. Then, Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, published in early 1906, graphically exposed the filthy, disease ridden conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. Roosevelt received hundreds of letters from enraged citizens demanding reform.
Roosevelt himself sent federal inspectors who confirmed everything was even worse than Sinclair described. Another scandal was the Coca Cola and patent medicines. The growing patent medicine industries were selling unregulated elixirs filled with alcohol, cocaine, morphine, and toxic fillers. Coca Cola itself came under scrutiny for cocaine content.
Public health advocates pushed back arguing these unregulated dru9s were addictive and d4ngerous, especially to children and the poor. So, finally, in 1906, the law Wiley had been f1ghting for reached the president’s desk. It took 4 years, thousands of pages of data, and a national media frenzy, and the suffering of 12 brave men but the system finally cracked.
In June of 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act into law. It was the first federal legislation to ban misbranded or adulterated food and dru9s in interstate commerce. For the first time in American history, the government had legal authority to stop companies from poisoning the public.
The act gave power to Wiley’s Bureau of Chemistry to inspect food factories, seize d4ngerous products, and take legal action against manufacturers. And Wiley, he became a national hero, dubbed the father of the Pure Food and Drug Act. But the celebration didn’t last. Almost immediately, corporate lobbyists moved to gut the law.
They pushed for acceptable levels of ha.rmful preservatives. They stacked oversight committees with industry sympathizers, and they worked behind the scenes to sideline Wiley from enforcement. Sound familiar? The same men who had mocked him now smiled in his face while carving loopholes in the law he helped to create.
By 1912, Wiley had been pushed out of the Bureau entirely. His dream of a government that protected his people had been compromised almost as soon as it began. Still, the foundation had been laid. The Pure Food and Drug Act evolved into what we know now as the Food and Drug Administration. But the question remains, would the men who sacrificed their health to build it even recognize what it’s become? The men of the Poison Squad were never given medals.
Their names weren’t remembered, but their suffering gave birth to one of the most powerful agencies in America. The FDA now oversees over a quarter of the US economy from food to pha.rmaceuticals to cosmetics. It has the power to ban ingred1ents, recall products, and shut down companies.
Wiley imagined the FDA as a sword and shield for the people. Instead, it became a revolving door for ex3cutives and lobbyists. Along the way, it stopped using the power to protect you and started using it to protect them. The same government agency that once exposed corruption is now funded, influenced, and in some cases run by the very same corporations it was created to regulate.
Names like Scott Gottlieb, FDA Commissioner from 2017 to 2019, left office and immediately joined the board of Pfizer. Janet Woodcock, a long time FDA official, greenlit opioid approvals that fueled the crisis while ignoring red flags about oxycontin and Purdue Pha.rma. And former FDA Deputy Commissioner, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, later worked for organizations with direct ties to Johnson & Johnson, even as the company faced lawsuits over cancer linked talcum powder.
These aren’t just coincidences, they’re pipelines running directly from your government to the Big Pha.rma boardrooms. Meanwhile, additives linked to cancer are still in children’s cereals. Genetically modified ingred1ents are barely labeled. Prescr.i.ption dru9 ads saturate every screen with side effects longer than the benefits.
And whistleblowers inside the FDA are silenced, transferred, or fired. The FDA was built by men willing to eat poison to protect the public. Today, it rubber stamps it for profit. And that’s the tr4gedy of the Poison Squad. They won the b4ttle, but we lost the war.   So, here’s the question.
If the FDA was born from sacrifice, but now protects profit over people, who’s is to hold them accountable? Tell us what you think because silence is how it started last time, too.  After World W4r II, the world was exposed to the horrors of the concentration camps and de4th camps, which took lives of millions of people, which sh0cked the world and started the first ever international war crimes trials to punish those responsible.
Nazi policy saw the eradication of various groups, such as 6 million Jews, 4 and 1/2 million Soviet citizens, 3 and and 1/2 million Soviet pr1soners of war, 1.8 million Poles, over 300,000 Serbs, and about 1.5 million Romani. But there were a series of events before the war involving American companies and persons who est4blished business relationships with German firms, essentially doing business that a.ssisted the Axis war effort and the annihilation of entire populations.
What were the connections between American and other companies and the Germans during the war? Which companies and persons were involved? Were these considered treasonous activities by the US government? Were they directly involved in the Holocaust?  Hello, I’m Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army Marine Corps veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History.
Many American companies were deeply involved with Germany before and during the war, which were clear violations and even treason. Before the war, many American companies, such as Ford Motor Company, which had $17.5 million in 1941 monetary value, invested in Germany. General Motors had $120 million, and Coca Cola had about the same, and were all operating in Germany well into the war using both paid sk1lled and slave labor during World W4r II.
See our videos on all three of those companies and their connections to Nazi Germany. Standard Oil, the creation of billionaire John D. Rockefeller Sr., had $120 million invested in Germany, and he was selling American oil and refined gasoline to Germany, which was crucial to the Allied war effort, through their New Jersey office using neutral Switzerland as the middleman for great profits.
Besides Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller had cornered the pha.rmaceutical and chemical industries in the United States and much of the world, especially in Europe. In the 1939, he was in full partnership with IG Farben, Bayer, and other German companies later involved in the Holocaust. He was a personal investor in the company which manufactured and delivered Zyklon B.
Chase National Bank and Morgan Bank openly operated in Paris, France, conducting business with Germany even after the war began against the Axis powers, making billions in deals. They managed cash and gold transfers as the middleman to Swiss bank accounts. Much of the wealth stolen from European Jews, which helped fund Germany’s war effort.
Hitler even gave them both freedom from seizure for their being allowed by Washington to continue doing business even while at war with the United States. International Telephone and Telegraph had $30 million invested and a.ssisted Germany’s communication systems, and in fact, helped develop the radio and gyroscopic guidance systems for Hitler’s V2 rockets and the Fritz X radio controlled flying b0mbs.
They also worked with the Japanese on projects until the end of the war in 1945. The special privilege given to ITT was due to the fact that the Gestapo chief in Paris, Walter Sch3llenberg, was a major stockholder in ITT, and he maintained protection for that company and others. Sch3llenberg also protected the American interest and investments in the Chanel perfume and clothing brand, since Coco Chanel was his mistress.
And she was complicit in turning in her Jewish business partners and stealing their a.ssets. See our video on Coco Chanel. Another company doing business in Germany was International Business Machines or IBM, which before the war had operated subsidiaries utilizing their p.unch card technology. That data generated by means of counting and alphabetization of equipment supplied by IBM was instrumental in the census counts and cataloging of personal information.
In fact, IBM p.unch cards were used by the Coca Cola company in Germany during the war. See our video on that. This a.ssisted in targeting Jews and others across Europe. Watson Business Machines, the Polish IBM subsidiary, set up operations in Poland after the invasion in September 1939. They ran offices at both the Lodz and W4rsaw ghettos to keep accurate counts of those to be exterminat3d.
Every concentration camp maintained its own Hollerith Abteilung a.ssigned with tracking inmates through the use of IBM’s p.unch card record keeping. IBM not only leased Nazi Germany the machines, but they provided continuous maintenance service and sold the spare parts and the special paper needed for the customized p.unch cards.
Despite these facts, IBM responded by stating that there was no proof IBM had enabled the Holocaust. However, Sam Jaffe in Business Week wrote, “With exhaustive research, author Edwin Black makes the case that IBM and Watson conspired with Nazi Germany to help automate the genocide of Europe’s Jews.” It seems that the administration of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and see our videos on him, was not only aware of all of this activity, but he actually prevented any repercussions against the companies and their ex3cutives during the war. This amazing failure to acknowledge or hold these companies accountable is inexplicable, since all of these companies tried to recoup money they felt that they were entitled to during the war.
Many of these corporate tycoons had been very financially supportive of FDR’s various presidential campaigns, and he was just repaying the favors. In the United States, the concept of eugenics was widely accepted as a natural method for maintaining a healthy population. The mentally ill and criminals were subjected to sterilizations and experiments.
A prime example were the Tuskegee syphilis experiments against black Americans. In the United States, Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation against blacks and American Indians, so the Germans saw no problem with their American relationship by imposing such laws against Jews under the 1935 Nuremberg laws. Apparently, the US had no problem with this program, either.
Hence, the business contracts. Like in the US, Germany had a special handling of their less than desirable people. But unlike in America, the T4 euthanasia program focused upon k1lling the mentally challenged, Jews, even children who were considered incompatible with the Nazi eugenics policy of protecting German bl00d and German honor as stipulated in the Nuremberg Laws.
The relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazis did have its problems. It started out well after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. However, the breakdown of that relationship started in 1936 and pretty much ended with many Catholic priests being placed in the new concentration camps.
But only through the intervention of Pope Pius the 11th did that euthanasia program stop, at least publicly after the Concordat was signed. On eugenics and the influence upon German policy, see our video on Margaret Sanger. Pope Pius the 11th hoped that the Concordat would allow the Catholic Church in Germany to operate free from any interference.
But this was not to be the case. Concentration camps were already a part of the German program with Dachau near Munich being the first est4blished in 1933 as a re education camp for political and social pr1soners. It was also the first slave labor camp, primarily for Germans, Gentiles, Communists, Jews, and common criminals in general.
But while there were 100 more such camps would be constructed, many as supplemental slave labor camps, but five camps would be built for the sole purpose of ma.ss murd3r. But it was an evolutionary process that was recorded by IBM. On January 20th, 1942, a meeting was held in the Wannsee district of Berlin where a meeting of 15 high ranking members of the SS, SA, and government convened under the direction   of SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich and his a.ssistant Captain Adolf Eichmann.
This 2 hour meeting was well documented in the 2000 HBO film Conspiracy starring Stanley Tucci and Kenneth Branagh. And it is worth watching. Their primary focus were the 2.5 million Jews in the General Government of occupied Poland under SS General Hans Frank and Secretary of State Josef Bühler. The Jews had been placed into ghettos in the major cities, separated from the rest of Polish society, which were overcrowded, diseases broke out, and using German sold1ers as security force reduced manpower for the war against
Stalin. These men were there to discuss and be informed of the new program of exterminating the Jews of Europe authorized by Adolf Hitler and managed by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. Of top interest was the use of poison gas and how it would be more efficient in the k1lling. Previously, these murd3rs were conducted by the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and then moving into the Soviet Union.
They were mobile k1lling units that followed the army’s advance and entered towns, rounded up Jews primarily, and sh0t them. The v1tims were men, women, and children who were buried in deep ma.ss graves such as at Babi Yar in Ukraine, where 33,771 people were k1lled in September 1941 alone. It was the largest ma.ss grave in history.
Then there was another development to accelerate the ma.ss murd3rs. Buses and vans were converted into mobile gas chambers, the exhaust redirected into the vehicles, which were packed with people. Carbon monoxide did the rest. But these methods were considered slow, crude, and inefficient. The four Einsatzgruppen commanders reported that many of their men were becoming morally debilitated by doing this kind of work.
Killing unarmed people, especially women and children, was not something many of the sold1ers could manage. Alcoholism rates skyrocketed and morale plummeted, and there were even desertions. In all the occupied regions, local non Jews were instead recruited to a.ssist and help in the k1lling to offset the damage to Germans and enhance that k1lling process.
One German physician, Wilhelm Gustav Schüppe, testified after his capture that his SS unit had k1lled over 100,000 people between September 1941 and March 1943, keeping accurate records courtesy of IBM. Estimates were that around 1 million people had been k1lled this way from 1939 to the end of 1941. According to official records and the interviews with SS Lieutenant General Karl Wolff and SA General Gerhart Klopfer, Heinrich Himmler had issued his top secret order.
These operations were not to be discussed. Every man involved, regardless of rank or branch of service, SS, army, or police, was sworn to secrecy under penalty of court martial. The reason was twofold. First, any advance knowledge of the k1llings would reach other target populations which needed to be taken by surprise, cajoled into accepting relocation, especially in clearing ghettos, without them having any knowledge of their pending fates.
The other reason was that, despite many Germans and Austrians being anti Semitic to some degree, like many other Europeans, the leadership of the Third Reich were not willing to expose their populations to open ma.ss murd3r as a matter of policy. It was well known that every German knew his good Jew, and many were friends, and some had even married into their families.
The people were only informed that Jews were being relocated east for work. According to Karl Wolff, Hitler had said that removing the undesirables to include Slavs, Jews, and others was our noble cause. Himmler said the same thing. But allowing that to be an open policy known to all would not benefit the effort.
He knew that many Germans would find such an act appalling, which Himmler agreed with. That was why the order was issued to maintain secrecy, but things did have a way of getting out. Heydrich and Eichmann held the meeting to inform all of the regional commanders that there was a new method that had been tried and proven effective. Gas chambers.
Two camps had been constructed at Belzec and Auschwitz Birkenau in 1941 where testing was done. This is where Rockefeller and IBM come into play. Rockefeller was an investor in chemicals through IG Farben and Bayer, which included their pre war development of the insecticide Zyklon B, which would become the preferred manner of extermination in the gas chambers because it was very cheap and very efficient.
Watson IBM systems automated the categorization and counting process of shipments of all chemicals as the SS was a real stickler on accuracy, including using the system to keep the trains running into the camps on time loaded with v1tims and on schedule. Auschwitz would be the largest of all camps providing slave labor for dozens of German industry, such as IG Farben and other war manufacturing businesses, and also supplying human subjects designated for medical experiments.
While the Birkenau complex next door would simply k1ll those unfit for labor. See our video on Dr. Josef Mengele on this subject. And IBM machines kept those records. According to Gerhard Klopfer, once we heard about the est4blishment of these special camps, meaning de4th camps, I think all of us sitting there were somewhat sh0cked at the reports we were hearing.
Eichmann explained it. I for one was not quite believing what I was hearing, and others at the table were somewhat visibly unnerved. But this came from the Führer, and it was also signed by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Due to the success of the testing and pressure from Berlin in 1942, aside from Auschwitz Birkenau, which served a dual purpose, five dedicated k1lling centers were created at Belzec, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Majdanek.
These locations would have trainloads of v1tims arrive, but these were not holding areas for slave laborers. Most of these people would be k1lled within a matter of hours after arrival. According to Mark Roseman, in this respect, the Wannsee Protocol captured a decisive transition in German policy, a transition from murd3rous deportations to a clear program of murd3r.
The only people allowed to live, at least for a while, were the Sonderkommandos, pr1soners who would handle the corpses of those ga.ssed. One of these was Rudolf Reder, who arrived at Belzec in August 1942 when he was 61 years old. Reder was chosen to work instead of being k1lled right away. He was a.ssigned to a Sonderkommando moving bod1es from the gas chambers to ma.ss graves.
Powerless to intervene, he said, “I heard the doors shut. I heard their screams and cries. I was haunted by the terrible things I saw, hearing the cries of the murd3red and the children weeping.” Belzec was one of five dedicated de4th camps which the Nazis started building in 1941, and by 1942 was fully running as a de4th camp.
Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek then followed. Soon, all had their crematoria. Reider had been there for almost 4 months when in November 1942, while being taken outside the camp to collect sheet metal, he managed to escape. He survived the rest of the Holocaust by hiding. Out of 434,500 Jews sent to d1e in Belzec, only Rudolf Reider and one other person survived.
IBM recorded it all. When it came to the Holocaust and chemical production, Rockefeller’s company was a willing partner. As a full partner and investor. In a board meeting on April 14th, 1941 in Ludwigshafen, Otto Ambros, the IG Farben board member responsible for the Auschwitz project because they owned Auschwitz, stated to his board colleagues, “Our new friendship with the SS is a blessing.
We have determined all measures integrating the concentration camps to benefit our company.” It should be noted that Auschwitz was the largest ma.ss extermination factory in human history. However, few people are aware that Auschwitz was 100% a subsidiary of IG Farben. So, what role did IBM play in the Holocaust? Every train load of v1tims was offloaded and processed upon arrival at the concentration camps where people were not to be k1lled right away, each pr1soner was a.ssigned a number, which was tattooed on their forearm.
This was to maintain accountability. If a pr1soner d1ed, their number was unregistered and tabulated, keeping an accurate count, which was critical. Himmler liked progress reports, and he He impressed with those camp commandants who k1lled the most people the quickest. Another program was the forced kidnapping of young children all over Europe, especially in Eastern Europe.
If the child looked Aryan, then they were sent to Germany or Austria to be raised in a special orphanage, but sometimes they were adopted by German families. Usually, the parents were either already de@d or headed to a camp for special treatment. These children were also counted and tabulated using IBM p.unch cards.
As far as war industry was concerned, Hitler had an insatiable appetite for knowing the exact numbers of production from tanks, ships, U boats, aircraft, rifles, helmets, machine g.uns, and bull3ts. Keeping count of all of this were the tabulation machines of IBM, which maintained its operational subsidiary, as did Rockefeller, Coca Cola, Ford, GM, and other companies, which after the war wanted to recoup any profits those companies had made.
Ford and GM actually came to terms with the Holocaust in varying degrees.   And see our video on that. But there was not any real punishment. Holocaust surv1vors filed lawsuits against all the companies, German and American, with Ford and GM coming to agreements, which is in our video on that subject.
So, in the end, were American companies actively complicit in the Holocaust and aiding an enemy of the United States in a time of war? Or were they just companies whose subsidiaries were carrying on business without the proper permissions and patents being applied that aided the German war effort? Were their managers war criminals? We will let you decide.
History is filled with corporate disasters. Love Canal in 1977 poisoned an entire community. Three Mile Island in 1979 came close to a nuclear catastrophe. Chernobyl in 1986 left a radioactive scar across Europe. Even in recent years, the 2023 East Palestine train derailment shows how fragile safety can be when profit comes first.
Yet none of these compare to what happened in Bhopal, India in 1984. In a single night, a toxic gas cloud turned a city into a graveyard. And what followed in the years after, the cover ups, the corruption, and the abandonment of surv1vors, was an even greater crime than the disaster itself. What happened in Bhopal, India? How did it happen? How many people were affected and how? What was the end result? Was anyone held responsible? Hello, I’m Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army Marine Corps veteran,
and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. In the early morning hours of December 3rd, 1984, the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, released a lethal cloud of methyl isocyanate gas into densely populated neighborhoods. As the cloud spread and descended upon the outlying villages, even beyond the city, there was no warning by the company, although they would have known immediately.
The people slept as de4th approached. The disaster was the result of corporate negligence. Safety concerns and systems were left offline. Equipment was outdated and deteriorating, and critical upgrades were never made. To save money, the plant was understaffed, and cost cutting policies included hiring unqualified workers at much lower wages along with a failure to conduct required safety inspections and replace equipment, all combined to create the disaster.
The trigger factors created a cascade effect. Water contaminated the MIC storage tank, which overheated in the absence of a working cooling system, creating a runaway exothermic reaction. This resulted in a ma.ssive release of toxic gas as safety valves failed. Post incident inspection proved they were rusted and had not been replaced, probably since the factory was built.
By midday, over 500,000 residents were affected by the toxic plume of chemicals, and the immediate de4th toll was originally estimated to be about 2,259 k1lled in the first official report, later upgraded to at least 8,000 de4ths within 2 weeks. Some figures suggest as many as 15 to 20,000 d1ed when long term effects are included, but over 558,000 people sustained serious eye and skin burns accompanied by respiratory injuries, with many suffering permanent disabilities.
How many have d1ed due to the long term effects are unknown. One estimate since that event stated 300,000 d1ed by the end of the 1980s, and even more since. surv1vors alive today, most being further away from the main city, continue to b4ttle respiratory ailments, high rates of birth defects, cancer, and multi generational suffering.
The Bhopal disaster wasn’t an act of fate. It was a foreseeable and preventable outcome of cost cutting, human negligence, and corporate evasion. Corporate giants escaped with relatively light consequences, while entire communities were d@mned for generations. The local provincial government immediately tried to start an investigation which was impeded by UCI corporate.
The cover up effort started the same day as the disaster, which meant they knew it happened. And from day one it played out on multiple levels, corporate, governmental, and even judicial. Within hours the parent company in the US, Union Carbide Corporation, tried to minimize the disaster and publicly claimed the incident was sabotaged by a disgruntled employee, although no employee was named, thereby shifting bl4me from corporate negligence and legal culpability.
Medical experts at the local hospital identified the primary chemical from v1tims and through autopsies on the de@d. Doctors in Bhopal begged UCC for details on methyl isocyanate or MIC exposure and antidotes. The company had the information, but they delayed or refused to share critical medical information costing even more lives.
UCC immediately ran public relations campaigns calling it an unfortunate accident, avoiding the word negligence, and they still failed to provide the requested information. After the preliminary medical and biological reports and the initial inspection of the facility were concluded, the local police filed charges against Union Carbide and the CEO, W4rren Anderson.
Anderson, as the CEO of Union Carbide Corporation, was arr.ested briefly when he flew into India after the leak, but he was then released on bail. He was hardly out the door of the courthouse when he fled the country, ignored the court summons, and remained a fugitive at large. His being allowed to even leave the country has been widely seen as collusion between UCC, the Indian state, and the US government.
Despite his leaving, the investigation continued and the mountain of evidence all pointed to corporate failures at every level in violation of UCIL’s own operating procedures and Indian law. The US government refused India’s extradition request to bring Anderson to trial. But the charges were challenged and these went all the way up to the Indian Supreme Court.
Indian national authorities then charged several UCIL ex3cutives with culpable homicide and first degree manslaughter. As the chemical leak was deemed negligent homicide and was not premeditated, hence not murd3r. This most serious offense of negligent homicide carried a maximum penalty of 10 years in pr1son.
However, the Supreme Court downgraded the charges to causing de4th by negligence, which carried a maximum penalty of 2 years in pr1son. The justices argued no mens rea or no criminal intent and that there was no evidence Union Carbide ex3cutives intended to k1ll or even knowingly risk ma.ss de4th. Still, the legal case dr4gged on.
The court called it an accident, just negligence, but Union Carbide had broken every safety rule in the book and thousands paid the price. Meanwhile, the lawsuits went forward. In 1989, UCIL’s parent corp company, Union Carbide Corporation or UCC, settled out of court for $470 million distributed via the Indian government, translating roughly into $400 to $500 per v1tim, which was about an annual salary per person in that impoverished area.
The settlement was hardly enough to compensate widows, orphans, and those left with lifelong disabilities. Many saw it as a political deal designed to shut the case down quickly. But the people of Bhopal still demanded justice. Senior Indian managers who kept their positions at the plant had also played a role in the negligence and cover up, and years later they too were finally brought to trial.
But the court ruled in 1996 that while safety systems were inadequate and corners were cut, this didn’t amount to the level of knowledge required for culpable homicide under Indian law. The courts repeatedly dismissed cases against Dow Chemical, which acquired UCC in 2001, allowing the company to walk away from environmental cleanup and liability.
surv1vors and activists called it a judicial betr4yal, arguing that the court treated the largest industrial disaster in history like a routine traffic accident. The 1996 ruling was the knife twist. It turned what should have been the corporate equivalent of manslaughter into little more than a paperwork level negligence case.
It effectively ensured that no one of significance would serve real pr1son time. It reinforced a pattern where corporate crime was shielded under the guise of accidents. Legally, it cr.i.ppled any chance of holding senior management or the parent company criminally accountable. These rulings caused many of the locals to believe that the court or even the government had been paid off by Union Carbide.
Despite not being able to get the corporate officers into an Indian court and because of the attempted cover up afterward, lawsuits were filed almost immediately, but that also took time. The cleanup, compensation, and justice efforts are patchy at best. surv1vors still quarterback their own f1ght for health care, environmental rehabilitation, and closure on their backs with scant support.
Here’s what followed. When the verdict finally came in in 2010, 26 years after the leak, the Indian ex3cutives were arr.ested and then obtained immediate bail until their trials. The criminal convictions were as follows. In 2010, seven Indian UCIL employees were found guilty of negligence, but they received minimal sentences and fines.
Accountability continued to slip away as UCC and later Dow Chemical avoided meaningful responsibility. As time went on, the courts deflected cases and surv1vors, many living in poverty, were left to f1ght ongoing b4ttles for recognition and rehabilitation, even having to pay what they could for ongoing medical treatments. But about the aftermath, environmental contamination continues decades later.
Toxic waste still lurks at the site, contaminating soil and groundwater, damaging public health and livestock. Farming, the main method of subsistence, almost totally stopped. Nearly 40% of allocated rehabilitation funds from the lawsuit remain unused, and a promised empowered commission remains unest4blished, leaving v1tims stuck in bureaucratic limbo while the money draws interest for someone.
But the people still fought back again. surv1vor led initiatives such as the Sambhavna Trust Clinic, founded 1996,   continue to provide free medical care using both modern and traditional therapies. In a cultural commemoration, the Remember Bhopal Museum opened in 2014 by surv1vors and activists preserves personal narratives and hard earned memories of injustice.
Leaders like Abdul Jabbar Khan devoted their lives to championing justice for the surv1vors, earning posthumous honors, but facing an uphill b4ttle to hold corporations accountable. The surv1vors continue to tell their stories. Rashida Bee is emblematic of the survivor run f1ght for justice. A 1984 survivor, she led international campaigns and court actions against Union Carbide and Dow Chemical demanding cleanup, medical care, and accountability.
She earned the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2004 and founded the Chingari Trust to aid children born with birth defects, another horrible result of the tr4gedy, serving hundreds of children with therapies and education support. Sunil Verma, orphaned by the disaster, later volunteered at the Sambhavna Trust Clinic and continued supporting surv1vors until his trag1c de4th from chemical induced cancer in 2006.
His personal loss and advocacy highlight how deeply this tr4gedy affected surv1vors across generations. This clinic is the only facility offering free integrated care to surv1vors combining modern and Ayurvedic medicine, mental health support, and environmental health programs. It serves those exposed to gas and contaminated ground water, including children born after 1986 who continue to bear the burden of exposure.
Abdul Jabbar Khan had become one of the most effective campaigners for the v1tims. With gra.ssroots organizing in parks, protest, and minimal funding, he built a powerful movement. The Indian government posthumously awarded him the Padma Shri in 2020. Unfortunately, the cover up and corruption continues. Earth Rights International represented surv1vors in the lawsuits like Bano versus Union Carbide and Sahu versus Union Carbide demanding cleanup of the site.
All were dismissed despite unmistakable evidence of responsibility. Campaigners continue pressing for broader justice. Activist Rachna Dhingra, for instance, spearheads legal action, media outreach, and mobilization. Her work includes hunger strikes, long marches, and international awareness campaigns, she also received multiple civic honors.
Concerns are also mounting over incineration risks, potential water contamination, toxic residue, and shifting the burden to other communities. The Indian government claims the incineration method meets national environmental standards and is safe, but critics are unconvinced. Meanwhile, groundwater remains poisoned by chemicals, heavy metals, and organochlorines plaguing thousands of families for decades.
The human toll continues with multi generational tr4uma, illness, de4ths, and systemic underfunding. Many claim that the government actively suppressed the science as independent stud1es that linked groundwater contamination and long term health issues were often ignored or dismissed by the government agencies.
Toxic waste was left unremediated for decades. Reports by NGOs showed poisoned groundwater and soil, but officials downplayed the scale of the problem. Only in 2025, 40 years later, did India start removing 337 tons of waste from the Bhopal plant site to an incineration facility in Pitampur, which activists blasted as symbolic while most of the contamination remains underground.
Activists say this pales when compared to the 1 million plus tons of toxic material still buried underground and call this cleanup a farce or a publicity stunt, arguing it’s the easy to remove waste while the worst remains below ground. But, how deep were the cover ups? Union Carbide corporate falsely bl4med sabotage, withheld chemical data, inhibiting proper and timely medical treatment, and tried minimizing their liability.
The The government settled rapidly and cheaply, protecting foreign investment interests, and downplayed de4th tolls from day one. The government still does not record the de4ths of those who suffered with many years of ailments after they were exposed and diagnosed. To do so would mean paying out from the lawsuit.
The courts reduced the charges, ensuring ex3cutives got wrist sl4p penalties, but that any serious public responsibility because then the individuals could have also been sued in separate cases. The most egregious player in all of this was the US government in helping with the cover up, which was systemic and multi level, as Union Carbide Corporation and later Dow Chemical never faced criminal penalties in India.
The Bhopal disaster is remembered as not just the world’s worst industrial accident, but as a case study in corporate and governmental greed and impunity. Due to public outrage, which has only grown in recent years, the Indian government has continued to file petitions for harsher charges and more compensation.
But US courts and Dow Chemical have stonewalled these efforts, as jurisdiction is usually the reason given. W4rren Anderson, then the CEO of Union Carbide US, and the corporation itself escaped entirely, as this downgrade in charges and dismissal of criminal responsibility made it easier for courts to sidestep harsher precedents.
As for W4rren Anderson himself, he d1ed a very wealthy man in 2014, never having to accept responsibility for the disaster, which was truly of his making. His corporate greed and a total disregard for safety to save money are a warning to all of us. During World W4r II, many companies worked for the Third Reich and used slave labor, as it was cheap and the Nazi Party determined who worked where.
American companies Ford and General Motors had extended their businesses all over the world into a dozen nations. And those businesses operated serving both the allies and the Axis  powers. What were American companies doing working with Hitler and his war machine? How deeply involved were Ford and General Motors in Germany’s production of war material using slave labor? How did these companies operate producing war material to both the United States, allies, and Nazi Germany?  If German companies were punished after
the war, what about Ford and General Motors? Hello, I’m Colin Heaton, former sold1er, Marine Corps scout sniper, history professor, historian, and book author. And we’ve answered these questions and other issues on this segment of Forgotten History.   This post war punishment and financial penalties have been applied to all the major German companies such as Volkswagen, IG Farben, BASF, Krupp, BMW, Daimler Benz, the aircraft manufacturers, Siemens, and Bosch, just to name a few.
All of them were on the financial h00k for using slave labor. European industrialists such as Professor Willy Messerschmitt, Professor Ferdinand Porsche as examples, were all charged with war crimes using slave labor. Not what they really had a choice in doing, but the American companies did. Both Ford and GM had est4blished their companies in Germany and other nations, with GM buying Opel in 1931.
After the war, both were subsequently charged with aiding and abetting the Holocaust, in essence playing both sides of the war for profit. In Germany, General Motors and Ford were critical in building and maintaining Germany’s war machine. Heinrich Himmler ensured that the Gestapo maintained security at all of the Ford and GM operations, as well as German companies, for maximum effectiveness and security.
In July 1938, following the German annexation of Austria, Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. This was the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow upon a foreigner, and Hitler admired Ford’s anti Semitic outlook and kept an autographed photo of Ford, which he prized.
However, Ford was not alone in receiving accolades, as a month later, the senior ex3cutive for General Motors in Germany, James Mooney, also received a medal for his distinguished service to the Reich. The major portions of their profit was the use of slave labor by the Third Reich, primarily under Reich Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who was in charge of war production.
Ironically, one of Henry Ford’s stipulations for hiring were “No Negroes or Jews.” It’s the height of irony that tens of thousands of Jews built Ford products for Hitler. GM’s plants in Germany, along with the other firms, built thousands of jet propulsion systems and vehicle engines, as well as trucks, under their brand name Opel,   started by Franz von Opel, which they owned under license.
Ironically, during the war, GM’s American plants simultaneously produced aircraft engines for the American aviation industry. Researcher Bradford Snell stated that, quote, “General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland, as their banks profited from the deposits of stolen wealth.
However, GM, like Ford, was critical a critical part in the German war effort. And of 350,000 trucks used by the German army as of 1942, 1/3 were made by Ford, the other third made by GM. In late January of 1942, the Dearborn headquarters was informed that Ford’s operations in France had the highest production level of all other manufacturers, and, as summed up by the US Treasury report, that they were still relying upon the French government to preserve the interests of American stockholders.
This was divulged during the war due to secret meetings held in Lisbon, Portugal between Robert Schmidt and Ford ex3cutives. Ford’s Cologne manufacturing center used slave laborers from 1941 and 1945, mostly from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but also many forest workers from France and Italy. One large part of this collective Ford and GM operation were the concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz.
The largest camp where arrivals were selected either for labor, the gas chamber, or in some cases medical experiments. But there was also another category, one necessary for the war effort. According to SS Lieutenant General Karl Wolff, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, had criteria for selection of pr1soners.
Those pr1soners with any sk1lls such as metalworking, construction, any form of engineering, electricians, mechanics, medical training, anything that would aid the war effort were to be sent for labor under Speer, end quote. The Auschwitz records fell into Soviet hands after they liberated the camp in January of 1945.
These files are detailed and supposedly contain the names of 100,000 forest workers located in the Moscow archives. Ford did admit under oath that its German subsidiary Ford Werke AG used slave labor in Cologne plant and was aware of it. Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime rather than divest themselves of their German a.ssets.
Less than 3 weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, General Motors Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended the strategy as sound business practice given the fact that the company’s German operations were, quote, highly profitable. The purpose for both companies not closing down was to protect their investments.
Ford and GM decided not to shut down their German factories after the war had been declared as they still expected their profits from manufacturing claiming they had no right to close down. GM also had its issues as part of its operations with the development of synthetic fuels which became even more critical as Germany’s access to petroleum slowly crumbled.
When the US Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they discovered the slave laborers and began taking statements. US Army reports dated September 5th, 1945 accused the German branch of Ford of serving as an arsenal of Nazism at least for military vehicles with the consent of the parent company in Dearborn, Michigan.
Incredibly, after the war, both GM and Ford demanded reparations from the US government for wartime damages sustained by their German facilities as a result of Allied b0mbing. In 1967, the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the US Congress made a compensatory award and Ford received a little less than $1 million primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck factory at Cologne.
Yet, at no point during these proceedings was the use of the slave labor force even brought up. On March 4th, 1998, a first of its kind lawsuit was filed against Ford Motor Company and subsequently General Motors also found themselves in trouble. After a Switzerland’s largest banks agreed in August of 1997 to make a $1.
25 billion settlement to Holocaust surv1vors, which they had resisted for decades, a precedent was est4blished. Holocaust surv1vors could be compensated for pain, suffering, and loss of material wealth and a.ssets. The success of Nazi v1tims obtaining financial reparations from Swiss banks, which had profited from Nazi wartime deposits, sh00k the financial world.
Regarding Ford, the lawsuit claimed that Ford’s German plant became an eager, aggress1ve, and successful bidder for forced laborers. And that senior Ford ex3cutives in Dearborn, Michigan were well aware of the fact. Ford’s lawyers argued that the parent company lost control of German operations when the war broke out, and those a.ssets were seized as enemy property.
But Ford still took the money. Later, Ford corrected its initial claim that it did not profit in any way from forced labor, but only after documents surfaced that after the war, Ford received dividends from its German subsidiary worth approximately $60,000 for the years 1940 to 1943. Similar arguments applied to General Motors, which was paid $32 million by the US government for damages sustained to its German plants, even though they made war material for Germany.
The Treasury Department had investigated Ford in 1942 for possible illegal contracts and contacts with its subsidiary in occupied France, which produced German trucks under their Opel brand using slave labor, along with GM. Investigation ended without charges being filed, possibly due to the heavy US government influence and the fact that Ford was making so much money for the American war effort along with General Motors.
Ford even called the former US Secretary of State W4rren Christopher as a witness to testify that former administrations had upheld the concept that governments, and not courts, should decide war reparations. Ford also argued that the statute of limitations on the v1tims’ claims had expired without providing any legal precedent.
But if that were so, how could Nazi war criminals still be h.unted without any such expiration or legal restrictions. Making this point was New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, who represented the slave laborers and their families when he stated, “Quote, time can never shield a war criminal, either criminally or civilly, end quote.
” Famed Nazi h.unter Simon Wiesenthal agreed and said, “The perpetrators of these crimes, whether extermination or slave labor, have no legal relief and therefore cannot expect any compa.ssion and forgiveness, end quote.” Ford’s credit, according to Simon Reich, who compiled Ford’s World W4r II documents, he totally disagreed with any comparison with General Motors.
Reich stated, “Quote, Ford decided to take a very public, open, and transparent route. Any serious researcher can go into the Henry Ford archive and see the documents in paper form and have them copied. Compare and contrast to this with the fact that General Motors conducted a very private study and had the original hard copy documentation upon which was made and has never been made available and today cannot be copied without General Motors legal department’s permission, end quote.
” Unlike General Motors, to their credit, Ford agreed to a $5 billion settlement and in 2001 added $2 million to compensate v1tims of slave labor. It also set aside $4 million for research on human rights and slave labor. So, the connections between American companies and the Third Reich is more transparent than most believed.
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