by Cracked. com
Job with the Nazis
Porsche’s partner in masterminding the Beetle: Hitler. See, in 1934 ol’ Adolf asked the German automobile industry to develop a “suitable small car” that could be used by everyone in Germany. The Beetle was Porsche’s entry in the great Nazi design-off and was apparently just what the fuhrer had in his clown-shit insane mind. A year later, Hitler announced that thanks to Porsche, the Third Reich had been able to “complete the preliminary designs for the German Volkswagen” a word that is German for “people’s car.”
How evil were they?
The Beetle is perhaps the most misunderstood car in history. People look at its rounded shape and anthropomorphic face and instantly think of love and peace. In reality, it was designed to Hitler’s specifications and, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, manufactured with the famous Nazi work ethic, known outside of the Third Reich as “Jews from concentration camps and prisoners of war.”
You have to give credit to Porsche for designing a car so impossibly cute that we forget it was brought into this world by the worst thing that ever happened.
3. IBM
IBM is one of the few IT companies whose history dates back to the nineteenth century. On one hand, this means it has been a Fortune 500 company since 1924. On the other, over a century of history gives you a lot of opportunities to make some monstrous PR blunders.
Job with the Nazis
You’re probably thinking, “IBM is American! The closest America ever got to the Nazis was when Indiana Jones wore that uniform as a disguise in Raiders!”
Actually, prior to the war American business took what can be generously described as a morally ambivalent stance on Nazi enthusiasm for an Aryan master race. However, once the war started most American businesses disavowed Hitler’s regime. IBM, on the other hand, decided to stick around and see where he was going with this whole “final solution” thing.
Back in those days, the only way to keep track of huge databases was with an extremely complicated system involving punch cards, and IBM was the best at constructing and maintaining those databases. Its databases could keep track of anything: financial ledgers, medical records, Jews …
As soon as the Nazis invaded a country, they would overhaul the census system using IBM punch cards and use them to track down every Jew, Gypsy, and any other non-Aryan on record.
How evil were they?
The unabashedly anticorporate documentary The Corporation shows actual footage of IBM punch cards used in prison camps. They tracked people based on their religion, their location, and even how they’d be executed. For instance, Prisoner Code 8 was Jew, Code 11 was Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz; Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was execution by order, and Code 6 was gas chamber.
IBM claims it was a victim of circumstance. It had a subsidiary in Germany before Hitler took over, and the company just fell under Nazi control, like every other company over there.
But the records suggest that’s not the whole truth. IBM sent internal memos in its New York offices acknowledging that its machines were making the Nazis more efficient, and it made no efforts to end the relationship with the German branch.
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 servants are fairly common in nature. There’s one called Toxoplasma gondii that seems to devote its entire existence to being terrifying.
This bug infects rats but can only breed inside the intestines of a cat. Knowing that it needs to get the rat inside the cat, the parasite takes over the rat’s brain and makes it scurry toward the cats. The rat is being programmed to get itself eaten, and it doesn’t even know it.
Of course, those are just rats, right?
How it can result in zombies
Hey, did we mention that half the humans on earth are infected with toxoplasmosis and don’t know it? Maybe you’re one of them. Flip a coin.
If your coin just landed braaaains-side up, you should know that studies have shown that the infected will often see a change in their personality
and are more likely to go insane.
Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse
Humans and rats aren’t all that different. It’s why we use them to test our medications. All it would take to cause a zombie apocalypse is a more evolved version of toxoplasma that could do to us what it does to the rats. So imagine if half the world suddenly had no instinct for self-preservation or rational thought. Even less than they do now, we mean.
If you’re comforting yourself with the thought that it may take forever for such a parasite to evolve, you’re forgetting about all the biological weapons programs around the world busy weaponizing such bugs. You’ve got to wonder if those lab workers don’t carry out their work under the unwitting command of the Toxoplasma gondii already in their brains. If you don’t want to sleep at night, that is.
Granted, these people have never been dead and thus don’t fit the exact definition of zombies, but we can assure you that the distinction won’t matter a whole lot once the groaning hordes are clawing at your windows.
4. NEUROTOXINS
What are they?
There are certain kinds of poisons that slow your bodily functions to the point that you’ll be considered dead, even to a doctor. The poison from Japanese blowfish can do this.
The victims can then be brought back under the effects of a drug like stramonium (or other chemicals called alkaloids) that leave them in a trancelike state with no memory but still able to perform simple tasks like eating, sleeping, moaning, and shambling around with their arms outstretched.
How it can result in zombies
Can? How about does.
This has already happened in Haiti, where the word zombie comes from. Just ask Clairvius Narcisse. He was declared dead by two doctors and buried in 1962. They found him wandering around the village eighteen years later. It turned out the local voodoo priests had been using alkaloid-like chemicals found in jimsonweed (or as it’s known in Haiti, zombie’s cucumber) to zombify people and put them to work on the sugar plantations.
So the next time you’re pouring a little packet of sugar into your coffee, remember that it may have been handled by a zombie at some point.
Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse
On the one hand, it’s already happened, so that earns it some street cred. But even if some evil genius intentionally distributed alkaloid toxins to a population to turn them into a shambling, mindless horde, there is no way to make these zombies aggressive or cannibalistic.
Yet.
3. THE REAL RAGE VIRUS
What is it?
In the movie 28 Days Later, it was a virus that turned human beings into mindless killing machines. In real life, we have a series of brain disorders that do the same thing. They were never contagious, of course. Then mad cow disease came along. It attacks the cow’s brain, turning it into a stumbling, mindless attack cow.
And when humans eat the meat …
How it can result in zombies
When humans are infected with mad cow, they call it Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Check out the symptoms:
* Changes in gait
* Lack of coordination (stumbling and falling)
* Muscle twitching
* Myoclonic jerks or seizures
* Rapidly developing delirium or dementia
The sanest guy in the office.
Sure, the disease is rare and the afflicted aren’t known to chase after people in murderous mobs. But it proves widespread brain infections of the rage variety are just a matter of waiting for the right disease to come along.
Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse
If the whole sudden, mindless violence idea seems far-fetched, remember that you are just one brain chemical (serotonin) away from turning into a mindless killing machine. All it would take is a disease that destroys the brain’s ability to absorb that one chemical, and suddenly it’s a real-world 28 Days Later.
So imagine such an evolved disease, which we’ll call super mad cow, getting a foothold through the food supply. Say this disease spreads through blood-on-blood contact, or saliva-on-blood contact. Now you have a rage-type virus that can be transmitted with a bite.
With one bite, you’re suddenly the worst kind of zombie: a fast zombie.
2. NEUROGENESIS
What is it?
You know all the controversy out there about stem cell research? Well, the whole thing with stem cells is that they’re basically used to regenerate dead cells. Particularly of interest to zombologists is neurogenesis, the method by which stem cells are used to regrow dead brain tissue.
How it can result in zombies
Science can pretty much save you from anything but brain death; doctors can swap out organs, but when the brain turns to mush, you’re gone. Right?
Not for long. They’re already able to regrow the brains of comatose head-trauma patients to the point that they wake up and walk around again. Couple that with the ability to keep a dead body in a state of suspended animation so that it can be brought back to life later, and soon we’ll be able to bring back the dead, as long as we get to them quickly enough.
That sounds great, right? Well, a German lab dedicated to “reanimation research” has looked into the process of “reanimating” a person and found a small problem. It causes the brain to die off from the outside in. The outside being the cortex, the part that makes humans human. You don’t need the cortex to survive, so that just leaves the part that controls basic motor function and primitive instincts behind.
So you take a brain-dead patient, use these techniques to regrow the brain stem, and you now have a mindless body shambling around, no thoughts and no personality, nothing but a cloud of base instincts and impulses.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we like to call a real, live, undead zombie.
Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse
Under every legal system in the world, all rights and responsibilities are terminated at death. All it would take for the clock to strike “Ah, zombies!” is someone with resources and a need for a mindless workforce of totally obedient slave labor.
1. NANOBOTS
What are they?
A technology that science engineered to make you terrified of the future. We’re talking about microscopic, self-replicating robots that can invisibly build—or destroy—anything. Sure, at some level scientists know nanobots will destroy mankind. They just can’t resist seeing how it happens.
How it can result in zombies
Scientists have already created a one-cell nanocyborg, by fusing a tiny silicone chip to a virus. The first thing they found out is that these cyborgs can still operate for up to a month after the death of the host. Notice how nanoscientists went right for zombification, even at this early stage.
According to studies, within a decade they’ll have nanobots that can crawl inside your brain and set up neural connections to replace damaged ones. That’s right; the nanobots will be able to rewire your thoughts. What could go wrong?
Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse
Do the math, people.
Someday there will be nanobots in your brain. Those nanobots will be programmed to keep functioning after you die. They can form their own neural pathways and use your brain to keep operating your limbs after you’ve deceased and, presumably, right up until you rot to pieces in midstride.
Of course, when that happens the nanobots would just need to transfer to a new host. Therefore, the last act of the nanobot zombie would be to bite a hole in a healthy victim, letting the nanobots stream in and set up camp in the new host. Once in, they can shut down the part of the brain that resists (the cortex) and leave the brain stem intact. They will have added a new member to the unholy army of the undead.
Look, we don’t want to create a panic here. All we’re saying is that on an actual day on the actual calendar in the future, runaway microscopic nanobots will end civilization by flooding the planet with the cannibalistic undead.
Science sa
ys so.
CREDITS
Nathan Birch (The Ten Most Insane Medical Practices in History, The Five Creepiest Urban Legends That Happen to Be True). In addition to working for Cracked.com, Nathan spends his time writing for top video game sites, producing his own Web comic (www.zoologycomic.com), and hoping he’ll never actually have to grow up.
Robert Brockway (Three Colors You Don’t Realize Are Controlling Your Mind) is an editor and columnist for Cracked.com and the author of Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, a book that is infinitely superior to this one in every way. He is also fired, just now.
Adam Tod Brown (Five Horrifying Food Additives You’ve Probably Eaten Today, The Awful Truth Behind Five Items on Your Grocery List) is a freelance editor and comedy writer with skills often described as “ninja-like.” He holds a master’s degree in street knowledge and drinks from only the finest bejeweled goblets.
Tim Cameron (The Six Most Terrifying Foods in the World, Four Great Women Buried by Their Boobs) goes by his middle name Niall as a musician, since it’s over 70 percent more pretentious. You can experience Niall’s stirringly resonant soundcrafts at www.niall-cameron.com
Erica Cantin (“Michael Bay Directs the News” in Five Stories The Media Doesn’t Want You to Know About) lives in a formerly abandoned castle near the sea, where she and her family sing many a merry shanty.
Rory Colthurst (Five Wacky Misunderstandings That Almost Caused a Nuclear Holocaust) is a politics student based in London. He started writing when the school system would no longer let him draw pictures, and has never looked back.