Adidas: A History of Being Nazi As Fuck

Don't be surprised why it took so long to punt Kanye

I am “everyone carried their schoolbooks in an adidas bag” years old. It’s the largest sportswear company in Europe, second largest in the world after Nike. Adidas has an annual revenue of about $30 billion, and it was only when ONCE AGAIN supporting Nazis started to tank their stock price that they decided to cease partnering with a popular antisemite.

Adolf Dassler couldn’t be blamed for his first name, but it’s one motherfucker of a harbinger. His nickname was Adi. Last name Dassler. Adi-Das. And he was a fan of another Adolf, the really shitty one.

Born in 1900, Dassler turned 18 just before the end of World War I. Due to shortages from much of the continent having spent four years blowing the shit out of itself, Adolf looted corpses in the war-torn countryside to get materials for repairing shoes in his work as a cobbler. Adolf was big into designing sports shoes; his brother Rudolph joined his company in 1923, calling it the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory.

Perhaps you are familiar with Godwin’s Law; developed in 1995, it states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” But there is no discussion to be had, and no comparison either. These assbutt brothers were absolute literal fucking Nazis.

Perhaps they did it for money. A thing you should know about the fitness industry: it’s full of fucking Nazis, and the Dassler brothers capitalized on this. Nazis didn’t invent the idea of believing in superiority over one’s enemies, but they sure embraced the shit out of it. Physical fitness was and remains a key component of Nazi ideology as a way of projecting their master race bullshit.

German Olympians were winning gold wearing Adidas shoes, and when Hitler took power in 1933 Adi and Rudy were all sign us the fuck up, joining the Nazi Party just a few months later. And brother Adolf saw the potential in jumping on the exploiting kids bandwagon by becoming both a supplier of fitness equipment and a coach for the Hitler Fucking Youth to train them up to be physically fit cannon fodder for the Eastern Front. With the fucking Nazis in power and the Dasslers sniffing Hitler’s ass crack, profits of the shoe company soared.

It’s also worth mentioning that when Adi was 32, he started dating a 15-year-old, marrying her when she turned 16. Gross.

And guess what the shoe factory did during the war. Switched to making anti-tank weapons is what it did. When the Americans rolled in they were gonna blow that factory to shit, but Adolf’s wife—the one he started dating when she was only 15—ran out and said oh please don’t blow us up we only make running shoes and the Americans were all hey can you sell us some shoes? Really. American soldiers became such dedicated customers it saved the company.

Of the pair, Rudolf was supposedly the more gung-ho Nazi, accused of feeding information to the Gestapo. After the war both brothers were accused of supporting Hitler but were able to weasel their way out of any real consequences. But the brothers, who had been fighting for a while, soon went their separate ways, with Adolf forming adidas and Rudolf forming Puma.

Since then, adidas has been awfully tight-lipped about the company founders and their Nazi backgrounds.

Hey. Look at the button.

Let’s fast-forward to Kanye. Ye. Whatever. Usually I’m fine with calling people whatever name they wish but fuck this guy. He’s been a piece of shit for a long time. I mean, Trump support alone is sufficient ticket to entry into being a bigoted asswipe, but this goes beyond literally embracing the Danger Yam and into misogyny and racism, even referring to slavery as “a choice.” The fuck? Oh, and that was over four years ago, but adidas was chill with it. So were plenty of other companies who took their sweet ass time kicking Kanye to the curb.

And then there was his recent antisemitic as fuck commentary. It was a sequence of social media and going on Tucker Carlson fuckery that culminated in this bullshit:

FYI “death con 3” is a reference to an enhanced U.S. military alert status. To make such a reference toward a people repeatedly subjected to genocide across the millennia is bad. Very bad. But he kept going.

Finally, adidas said they “will not tolerate antisemitism.” Anymore. As of right now, I guess. What took adidas so long to cut ties after years of this shit? Welp, there is the previously mentioned reality of the company being founded by goddamn Nazis that just might have influenced their tolerance of Kanye’s bigoted bullshit. But it’s also the money issue. Adidas was heavily invested in Kanye, with his products making up a whopping 10% of company revenue. It wasn’t until the company stock began to plummet from their continued association that the bean counters at adidas said hey he reached the tipping point where it’s finally less financially destructive to punt him that the company finally did.

Assholes.

Buy my sweary fucking history books.