Jets And Giants Face Nazi Stadium Ties
By Brian Miller
This is just too insane to make up. The New York Jets and the New York Giants have a new stadium that they will be playing in, in the near future. They will dump their Meadowland diggs for a new field that almost touches the old one, opting to stay in New Jersey rather than New York. Now, it seems that the two teams, will have their new stadium, tied in name to Nazi Germany. The name on the stadium could be insurance and financial services company Alianz.
Alianz is a Germany founded company who according to the New York Daily News:
"“Allianz, the front-runner to secure the new stadium’s naming rights, is an insurance and financial services company founded in Berlin in 1890 that moved to Munich in 1949 and had ties to Nazi Germany. Its CEO at the time, Kurt Schmitt, was Adolf Hitler‘s economics minister. It was the insurer of the Auschwitz death camp’s facilities and personnel.”"
The Auschwitz connection alone should be enough to deter anyone remotely connected to the stadium involvement in naming rights to be immediately discounted. Let’s face the facts here. This is September 11th. The day in which America was attacked by foreign aggressors of terrorism. The country calls today “Patriot Day” yet on this very day, this information comes to light?
New York is the city that never sleeps. It is as iconic as Uncle Sam is to the U.S. military. The New York Giants where Red, White, and Blue uniforms. Has money become so ingrained in our times that we can arbitrarily cast off the notion that a company with Nazi ties can have their name across a US stadium?
I realize that there this is the 21st century and that many Nazi affiliated companies have paid their penance for their involvement in WWII and Jewish persecution. Still, this is a company who made their money by insuring Germany’s most infamous prison camp and we are talking about putting it on a building that will represent NY. What message does this send?
It’s bad enough that buildings in NY and Chicago are being bought up by Arabian tycoons who have made a mint off of oil and gas prices elevations but lord, can you imagine an Iraqi renaming Wrigley Field “Saddam”?
Sorry, this goes against everything that our nation fought for. The loss of innocent lives for the sake of extermination. The more I write about it the more enraged I seem to get. Sure, the world is a completely different place than it was 20 years ago and the Jewish community has moved on from those times, but make no mistake, in my opinion, it’s a slap in their face. It is nod to the Iranian presidents remarks that the Holocaust never happened.
The Holocaust was one of the worst events in world history, while I am sure that the company has moved far beyond it’s ties to that event, it is in my opinion, a joke to explore that possibility in the face of so many survivors who lived through that period.