(NaturalNews) It seems that some public policies are more important than others when it comes to the Obama Administration and other leftist regimes around the world.

In recent days, the U.S. government and, perhaps eventually, others in Europe and Asia, lashed out at Volkswagen after the company was caught cheating on U.S. air pollution tests. The carmaker installed sophisticated software known in the industry as "defeat devices" in the electronic control module of vehicles with diesel engines between 2008 and 2015, according to CNBC.

The software was designed to sense when an emissions test was being conducted on the vehicle based on the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine's operation and barometric pressure. When the software sensed these inputs, it activated a sort of "test mode" when the front wheels of the vehicle were on a dynamometer. That allowed emissions controls to run full-on during the official test; while on the road, however, the vehicles emitted 10 to 40 times the legal amount.

The Environmental Protection Agency raised the issue with Volkswagen after independent researchers questioned the emissions.

VW chiefs reacted quickly to the news, apologizing for the irregularities and pledging cooperation. But none of that will matter: The EPA is expected to land heavily on VW, imposing a fine of $37,500 per diesel vehicle sold in the U.S. since 2008. That's 482,000 vehicles, which could mean a penalty of up to $18 billion, CNBC reported.

Why punish this Nazi-founded corporation?

So far the EPA has not forced VW to issue a total recall, but the agency is expected to; that, too, will be paid for by the carmaker. Lawsuits are also expected.

Now, here's the irony: VW was founded in 1937 as a state-owned enterprise, at the height of Nazi Party rule. The German Labor Front, a Nazi-affiliated organization, initially operated the company.

But other companies either founded by Nazis or who assisted Nazi Germany during World War II have never been held to account, despite the fact that the regime they did business with was responsible for millions of deaths and the near-extermination of the Jewish culture.

One of them was IG Farben, maker of Bayer aspirin. Founded in 1925, the company eventually became a mainstay supplier for the Nazi regime. As noted in the book Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine, the company – the fourth-largest in the world at the time – even used labor from the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp for a synthetic rubber plant it built in occupied Poland, Bloomberg News reported.

Oil, chemicals and Holocaust assistance

Bloomberg further reported:

IG Farben went on to build a plant at Auschwitz so massive that it consumed more electricity per day than Berlin. It was in effect a privately run death camp, where inmate workers' life expectancy was only a few months. That was hardly the only activity that put IG Farben at the center of the Nazi nightmare. An IG Farben subsidiary produced Zyklon B, the pesticide repurposed by the SS for the gas chambers. And the conglomerate was the main supplier of chemical products essential to the Nazi war machine.

Then there is Standard Oil, founded and owned by the famous Rockefeller clan (the modern iterations are ExxonMobile and Chevron). Before and during World War II, Standard Oil's various subsidiaries sold oil to the Nazi (and Japanese) regime(s). In 1941, a State Department report detailed "refueling stations in Mexico and Central and South America that were suspected of furnishing oil to Italian and German merchant vessels. The report listed Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of California among those fueling enemy ships," according to an MIT historical account. No action was taken against what was, at the time, the largest oil company on the planet.

Finally, there is IBM. In the 1930s and '40s, the company's punch card system – the precursor to the computer – was used to first identify, then enslave, and then kill millions of Jews, according to the book IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, as noted in this New York Times book review.

Again, no punishment was ever meted out by our government. But let a Nazi-founded carmaker put a few extra tons of carbon in the air, and the boom must be lowered.

Sources:

CNBC.com

History.com

MIT.edu