Happy Birthday Mercedes Benz!
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Complicated History
A view of the driver's cockpit of the 3,000 horsepower T80, which was engineered by Ferdinand Porsche and developed to break the land speed record in the late 1930s, a project that was officially sanctioned by Adolf Hitler, an avid Mercedes fan. An active partner of the Nazis, Daimler-Benz was the biggest producer of arms in World War II Germany, creating airplane engines, trucks, tanks, armored vehicles and even part of the V-2 rockets for the Reich war machine. The company even sank so low as to use forced labor, including Jews from concentration camps, to meet wartime production goals.
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