You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [85]
2. BAYER
Bayer, the massive pharmaceutical company that’s most famous for making aspirin, is also behind such wonder drugs as Levitra and heroin (see page 207).
Job with the Nazis
As unpopular as heroin turned out to be with everyone besides jazz musicians, it’s got nothing on the Bayer-produced Zyklon B gas, the stuff that killed millions of people in the camps. Bayer was once part of a large conglomerate, IG Farben, that churned out thousands of killer Zyklon B canisters. The gas was originally invented by Fritz Haber, a man whose life is so incredibly pathetic that you’d almost feel sorry for him, if he hadn’t indirectly caused millions of deaths.
After he oversaw one of the deadliest uses of chemicals in warfare up to that point in history, his wife killed herself in their garden in protest. Then Hitler took over, and Haber decided to renounce Judaism to fit in, only to be told that he was still Jewish according to the Nazi rule book. He died of a heart attack while fleeing the country he spent his life serving, and the chemical he originally invented to kill insects was used to kill a number of his relatives. Also, he was named Fritz, so there was probably a lot of teasing on the playground.
How evil were they?
On one hand, the company that actually manufactured the gas was just partially owned by IG Farben, and Bayer was just one part of IG Farben. On the other, Bayer at one time sponsored a scientist by the name of Josef Mengele, thus facilitating his important work in the field of being the living embodiment of the evil scientist.
1. SIEMENS
Siemens AG is the massive global conglomerate that makes everything from circuits to wind turbines to maglev trains. It has almost half a million employees worldwide and is listed on every stock exchange imaginable. The company had its roots back in the nineteenth century, when famed scientist Werner von Siemens got tired of discovering stuff and decided to make some money instead. While Siemens died well before the 1940s, the company he gave his name to is so evil it may as well have its corporate headquarters inside a dormant volcano.
Job with the Nazis
Siemens struggled in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression. When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, the Siemens executives decided things were on the upswing and started building factories near the homey neighborhoods of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Like Hugo Boss and Volkswagen, its wartime resurgence was fueled by Nazi Germany’s version of a government bail-out: cheap slave labor. But being near two of the biggest concentration camps put Siemens in position to milk the atrocity for more war-crime-fueled profit than anyone else.
Hundreds of thousands of slave workers were employed to build all sorts of goodies for the German military to use on both the western and the eastern fronts. Though it wasn’t the only company at the time supplying the German war effort, it was certainly the most prolific. Siemens was in charge of Germany’s rail infrastructure, communications, power generation—the list goes on.
How evil were they?
At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, it was not atypical for a worker to build electrical switches for Siemens in the morning and be snuffed out in a Siemens-made gas chamber in the afternoon.
A few years ago, in an act of insensitive assholery so colossal it could blot out the sun, Siemens tried to trademark the name Zyklon with the intent of marketing a series of products under it. Including gas ovens.
This raises a few questions about Siemens’s business practices, most significantly, “What the hell is wrong with you people?”
FIVE SCIENTIFIC REASONS WHY A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN
OUR culture is full of tales of the undead walking the earth, from the New Testament to our comic books. But a zombie apocalypse isn’t actually possible, right?
Right?
Guys?
Actually, it’s quite possible. Here are five ways it could happen, according to science.
5. BRAIN PARASITES
What are they?
Parasites that turn victims into mindless, zombielike