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Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

It's disingenuous to hold WWII crimes against current German companies.

No one in charge at the time is alive now and pretty much any large German company that was around at the time supported/had to support the Nazi regime and used slave labor from concentration camps.

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If you look at that Wikipedia page, there's a long list of pure evil done after the WWII. Like e.g. knowingly selling the untreated HIV contaminated products in 3rd world markets. And many other controversies...

No people in charge is alive, but the company still is. It means at least some of its current assets are of dubious origin.

You're talking in a forum based in the US, a nation founded on invasion, genocide and slavery.

If you look back far enough, I imagine almost every country has such a legacy.

The capacity for that behavior lies in all peoples.

You don't have to look back too far though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

IBM seems to be mentioned more than all the US companies that did business with Stalin's Russia.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Yeah but our US government made a bunch of treaties with the people living here before us that we immediately started breaking and have continued to break ever since.

This isn't something that's just an "in the past" thing, it's a current wrong our people are committing against the people we displaced.

That’s the point of GP

Company culture is passed down.

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