Was the fact that companies like Kodak, Hugo Boss, Volkswagen ect were part of the Nazi war effort used against them by their competitors in the post war years?

VW was famously established as a Nazi initiative. However, this was more than balanced at the end of the war by its recovery through the efforts of Major Ivan Hirst, a British engineer from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. This started with the use of workshop facilities for the repair of British army vehicles in 1946 but Hirst saw the potential for reviving the no longer functional factory and reestablished production of the beetle. In 1949 years later it went to the German government and was run by new and presumably denazified management. However the link with Hirst and REME was kept so VW's origins were known but it was now considered unlinked to the former regime.

I guess it also helped that early VW was known for producing a basic, affordable car back in those days. This was seen to be vital for the German recovery. Also there was seen to be little high level management continuity into the postwar period (unlike some other German companies). VW did pay compensation later for the use of slave labour though much later.

Later, VW famously made fun of their origins in their co-operation with Top Gear which produced the joke slogan for a high economy car (a VW Polo "Blue): "From Berlin to Warsaw with one tank". VW did, of course, produce military vehicles during WW2, but not tanks.

This may be contrasted with companies like Deutsche Bank and Siemens where there were stories in the press about their dealings with the Nazis and in the latter case, the use of slave labour. Whether or not they were planted by rivals is another matter.

Sources:

Richter, Ralf "HISTORICAL NOTES 4: British Officer and Manager of Volkswagen’s Postwar Recovery" [PDF Warning] Publ: Online by VW AG retrieved 19/6/15

James, Harold, "The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank" Publ: Camb University Press 2004

Siemens Offers $12 Million to WWII Slave Labor Victims Associated Press 24/9/1998 (Retrieved 19/6/15)

Andrews, Edmund "Volkswagen to Create $12 Million Fund for Nazi-Era Laborers" published 11/9/98 (retrieved 19/6/15)

Although the wartime activities of West German industrial firms like Krupp-Thyssen or Volkswagen loom large in collective memory, this memory has not been much fodder for rivals' advertising campaigns. Partly this was because bringing up the war and its associated horrors ran against the grain of postwar European advertising mores. But more importantly, German industry and business leaders conducted an aggressive public relations campaign to disassociate themselves from the Third Reich and portray them as socially responsible members of Western society that were indispensable to rebuild the Western Europe.

An important aspect of this public relations campaign was to print and distribute tracts that allegedly showed that German industry was not a willing partner in the Third Reich's aggressive war, but also that German industrialists were in some ways victims of the regime. In the immediate postwar years, these efforts were largely focused upon exonerating those business leaders that had been arraigned at Nuremberg, like Alfried Krupp, and to try and forestall and prevent Allied attempts to break up German cartels and industrial interests deemed guilty of collusion with the prior regime. The short pamphlet Schwerindustrie und Politik by August Heinrichsbauer was emblematic of these early efforts. this short text, published by a number of Ruhr industrialists and circulated among German public intellectuals, argued that although heavy industry had, like many Germans, made mistakes during the Weimar era, it was not responsible for the rise of Hitler. Heinrichsbauer further contended that the four-year plans and forced labor were foisted upon industry and were antithetical to the deeply-held free market convictions held by many German industrialists. The pamphlet concluded with an appeal for political unity and an assertion that returning German industry to a position of strength would prevent a return to the political chaos of the 1920s. Although it is difficult to gauge the efficacy of public relations efforts like Schwerindustrie und Politik, German industrialists arguably did read the Western Allied reluctance to prosecute and break up German industry correctly. Although The Western Allies had already scaled back and limited the number of trials of German businessmen (Flick, Krupp, IG Farben) and only IG Farben would suffer the indignity of being dissolved. this was a far cry from Joint Chiefs of Staff policy directive (JCS 1067) of May 1945 which called for a massive restructuring of German industry.

This defensive public relations campaign conducted by German industry shifted by 1950 into a more proactive and formalized structure of public relations that cast German as responsible corporate citizens. Organizations like Deutsches Industrieinstitut exemplified this refinement of public relations as they had extensive funding from the resurgent German industrial firms. As before, this form of public relations gingerly dealt with the prior regime. This included a wider focus upon influencing American public opinion with translations of the pamphlet Warum wurde Krupp verurteilt? which portrayed the Krupp trial as a miscarriage of justice and publishing Tycoons and Tyrant, an exculpatory history of German industry. But these efforts of German industry extended beyond a self-defensive apologia, but instead sponsored cultural festivals and trade shows that illustrated West German industry as a vital cornerstone of Western reconstruction. This gelled with German industrialists' self-portrayal as apolitical patriots that had the best interests of their workers at heart. According to them, this lack of an ideological bent made them easy prey for the likes of Hitler, but not for honest partners like Eisenhower.

Within this context, German firms zealously guarded their disassociation from the Third Reich, making the possibility of a defamation lawsuit quite serious if a rival brought it up in its advertisements. German firms were actually quite willing to use legal action as early as August 1945 when the communist newspaper Deutsche Volkszeitung published a report impugning Siemens with constructing gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz. Siemens prepared for legal action against the newspaper and complained to the British military authority. The resulting rough treatment of one of Siemens' directors Wolf-Dietrich von Witzleben by British troops, became an early martyr for the industrial public relations effort. Although the rough contours of the wartime record of German industry was relatively easy to uncover, West German industry was able to stonewall serious efforts to investigate company archives. William Manchester's muckraking bestseller The Arms of Krupp further heightened West German industry's caution around historians and access to their archives was often quite restricted. The result is that in the early- and mid- Cold War period it was very difficult to accurately define what was German industry's precise role within the Third Reich. The ideological cloud of the Cold War in which the orthodox Marxist-Leninist narrative that industry bore primary responsibility for installing Hitler added a further murkiness to this history. Although there remained a popular connection between postwar West German industrial products and their NSDAP-era predecessors (EG jokes like how many Jews can fit in a VW Beetle; hint: it involves ashtrays), making a precise connection in an advertising campaign was a risky proposition.

Sources

De Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.

Swett, Pamela E., S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin. Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Wiesen, S. Jonathan. West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

_."Morality and Memory: Reflections on Business Ethics and National Socialism." The Journal of Holocaust Education 10, no. 3 (2001): 60-82.