The Coca-Cola Company have created Fanta to circumvent embargo and IBM provided counting machines to concentration camps. How do American companies manage their German and occupied countries subsidiaries during the WW2?

Expanded from an earlier answer of mine

The relationship of industrial capital and the Third Reich is one that is highly complex and the nature of international business adds a further layer of complexity. In 1920s, American companies saw Germany as a plum market by virtue of its large population and high degree of industrialization. This led to large-scale investment in German industries and subsidiaries opened up. Opel, for example, was established with the help of GM as a parent company in 1928. These international relationships continued after the advent of Hitler in 1933, but were often freighted with new political meaning.

Hitler's drive for rearmament caused some alarm among German industrial circles. Although support for the Weimar Republic was very shallow among these types, they were seldom fans of the new order. Many German industrialists resented state interference in the running of the factory floor and while more than a few welcomed the Third Reich's anti-labor laws, they also became packaged together with NSDAP organs like the Deutsche Arbeitsfront which was a sinecure for NSDAP cronies. On the extreme end of opposition, Hugo Junkers, head of one of the most prominent aviation companies of the interwar period and a firm believer in the peaceful use of airpower, was put under house arrest and the state forced him to surrender his patents and shares in the Junkers firm. Most German industrial leaders sought a cooperative relationship with the Nazi state, but the example of Junkers was a chilling one for those that thought of resistance. It made a degree of business sense for managers to patronize the new order rather than resist it. Wilhelm von Opel, the chairman of Opel, spent lavish amounts on gifts to NSDAP elites and became the chief sponsor of the National Socialist Motor League. American-owned companies or their subsidiaries often had to deal with this new reality, but it was still an incredibly complex picture. The Third Reich encouraged the cartelization of the German economy, which already was one of the most centralized in Europe prior to 1933, and American multinationals had to operate in this environment. Opel, for example, had to comply with the 1936 Schell Program, which streamlined German automobile production making it more suitable for military use, but Ford's Cologne plant was exempt from these restrictions. Ford-Werke's managers managed to capitalize on their connections within the state to guarantee its position and provide soft commitments towards increasing production and standardization. There was considerable correspondence between Ford's leadership in the US and the Ford-Werke in Dearborn; the German managers of the subsidiary appraised their nominal US superiors of the desirability of securing state contracts and Dearborn eventually backed the sacking of Ford-Werke's general manager Erich Diestel because his Jewish background could threaten the Ford-Werke's claim to be an Aryanized German company. In contrast to Ford, IBM lost day-to-day control of its German Dehomag, but the New York company also wanted to keep control of its near monopoly on tabulating machines, so it kept Dehomag in operation to preserve the company's monopoly in Germany.

IBM's case was paralleled in other major foreign-owned firms in Germany by the dawn of the war. While there were on paper owned by foreign concerns, they had been pretty much de facto German companies by 1939. The management had been Germanized and Jews thrown out of positions of authority. The laws of the Reich prevented profits from cycling out of the country, creating a headache for accountants. Reports on day to day operations grew more distant and only more so after the war broke out. But this did not mean that the German managers of these subsidiaries saw themselves as fully-independent from their parent companies. Many foreign firms were complicit in the larger process of Germanization, with more than a few gambling that playing with the state would lead to a more normalized business relationship when the political atmosphere was more relaxed. Other responses were predicated on the fear that if they resisted, then the Third Reich would engage in outright expropriation and control. This was what lay behind the convoluted case of tetraethyl lead gasoline. This was an old technology from the 1920s whose American-owned patents and manufacturing data were relatively open. Italy had already in 1935 overrode these patents on its own accord and allowed a state-owned company to produce it. There was alarm in American circles (the US patent was owned by the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation which in turn was under joint control of GM and Standard Oil) that Germany would follow the Italian precedent and seize control of the process and its production. Thus the Americans were more receptive to IG Farben's offer to form Ethyl GmbH with IG Farben, the German Standard Oil subsidiary, and Opel sharing ownership. The protection of a large German patron like IG Farben would allow the US firms to keep their trade secrets under some form of control, but the subsidiaries soon became passive partners as IG Farben assumed more control over Ethyl GmbH. Fears of losing control were also quite acute in the financial sector, both German and non-German owned, as they often operated under implicit threat that National Socialism saw such unproductive wealth as suspect and tainted by Judaism, which in turn made financial institutions more conducive towards freezing Jewish assets or other fiscal measures pushed by the state.

There was very little in terms of principled or ethics-based opposition among large businesses within the Third Reich. The example of Hugo Junkers may have been a warning shot to other industrial chiefs, but it was also an outlier in terms of behavior by industrial chiefs. Frictions with the dictatorship often had more to do with allocations of raw materials and quotas rather than Aryanization or the later use of slave labor. Nor was the Nazi dictatorship simply a case of firms cowering for fear of their very existence. In the case of Opel, the German managers often parlayed the regime's rhetoric of autarky and confiscation of non-German property to GM in the hopes that the parent company would sanction its seeking funding for more raw materials. A number of companies bucked state directives ordering them to focus on armaments-related projects; IG Farben for example did not invest too heavily in synthetic fiber production because it felt it was not viable for the long-term health of the country even though synthetic fibers would be valuable for a war effort should Germany find itself blockaded. Other firms were able to hoard liquid assets for postwar expansion even though this was contrary to the needs of the war economy. The regime could of course use strong-arm tactics to get its way, but there always was room for maneuver within the Third Reich. The polycratic nature of the state meant that business leaders could find a powerful patron to block initiatives by other corners of the chaotically-organized state. Patronage sometimes failed, but it was one of the mechanisms companies used to survive and even profit from the Third Reich.

The idea that the Nazis were "thugs for the rich" is a charge that actually dates back to the 1930s and was a staple of both socialist and communist propaganda of this time and in the later case remained an orthodoxy through the Cold War. It has also been taken as a given by various anti-capitalist movements seeking to tar existing multinational concerns like Ford with the taint of the Third Reich. Such contentions generate more heat than light. Hitler may have held Henry Ford and Fordism in high esteem, but so to did many other world leaders at this time, including the USSR of Stalin which practically enshrined Fordist/Taylorist industrial management as state doctrine. The reality was of course far more complicated and part of the problem of examining American multinationals and the Third Reich was that of the latter's twelve-year existence, Germany was at peace with the US for eight of these years. American firms, like their German counterparts, found themselves having to adjust to a state predicated both on military expansion and a subordination of industry to the needs of the state. Most industrial leaders accommodated these demands, and more than a few profited from them, but many were uneasy with them. Even in giant German conglomerates like Krupp or Rheinmetall-Borsig which grew tremendously under state military contracts, their management found that they were no longer quite masters of their own house.

But very much like American multinationals, German industrialists tended to find they could operate under the Third Reich. The state may have leveled varying controls over exports, raw materials, and profits, but many businesses in Germany, both German- and foreign-owned, felt confident enough to work within this system. Many larger industrial firms tacked to a long-range vision in which compliance with the state's immediate demands were an acceptable risk if it meant preserving their investments for when things had settled down in Germany. Internal documentation from companies like Degussa AG or Ford's various European subsidiaries were less concerned with the morality or ethics of using slave labor then they were with preserving trade secrets or future economic viability. Other business leaders were also in a degree of ideological resonance with some aspects of the dictatorship. While research by Henry Ashby Turner has shown that most German industrialists were not early backers of the NSDAP and preferred to more mainline nationalism of the DNVP, the idea that the Republic was anathema to a healthy German spirit was not uncommon among these circles.