Like much of the world, America did not even know of the Holocaust's existence until well after the fact; their only clue were the stories of refugees that told of people being taken away or, later on, of miraculous escapes from prison camps.
Answer: There is persistent evidence that some American companies (but not the government) were aiding Germany since 1933.
- Specific investigations have been initiated against IBM (and its German subsidiary) which designed complex automated solutions for the Reich's need for tracking the victims of the holocaust. This included the punch card machines machines and the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.
- In March 1998, Ford Motor Company and its GerĀman subsidiary Ford Werke were accused of "knowingly acĀcepting substantial economic benefits" from the use of forced labor in Nazi Germany during World War II and to have "knowingly earned enormous profits from the aggressive use of forced labor under inhuman conditions."