Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Fanta has its roots in Germany during WWII, so the Nazi association is something that's tough to deny. Dive in and hear all about how this beloved soda got its start as a non-orange, bad-tasting fizzy drink.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, it's Amartinez. The news can feel like a lot on any given day, but you can't just ignore las noticias when important world-changing events are happening. That is where the Up First podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories so you can keep up without feeling stressed out. Listen Up First from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Chuck, I have a question for you. Yes?

Don't you want to Fanta? Was that a slogan? Mm-hmm. Oh, don't you wanna? Yeah, yeah. I remember that now. It was very catchy. Don't you Fanta? Don't you wanna? Yeah, yeah, I remember that now. It was very catchy. Don't you Fanta, don't you wanna?

Was that it? Don't you want to Fanta? That's how I remember it. Oh, okay. I love Fanta, I mean. Wait, wait, wait, you never answered my question. Well, yeah, of course I do, if I love it. Good.

I think I've mentioned plenty of times that I did not grow up drinking much soda because as a family we didn't have the kind of money to just load up the house with sodas. So sodas were only reserved for my mom to drink Tab. Oh yeah, she was a Tab drinker, huh? Yeah, we had money for that. But I didn't drink much soda growing up, so I don't drink soda now, thankfully, because that stuff is so bad for you, generally speaking.

But I will hammer down six cokes a year and maybe four or five Fanta oranges. All at once, once a year. I love that Fanta orange. I just, you know, you can't drink that stuff a lot. Have you had any of the other Fantas, the grape, et cetera? I think I dabbled in the grape and knee-high grape and stuff when I was a kid.

But it's really that. And I like sun kissed, preferred sun kissed as a kid here and there. Sun kissed soda, right? Yeah, yeah. But Fanta orange is one of my rare, rare guilty pleasures. I got you. I was more of a fego man as a kid.

Do I never drink those? And I also never have drank any of the clear or yellows. Like, I've never tasted Mountain Dew, didn't drink Mellow Yellow or Sprite or 7-Up or anything like that. You missed out. You've never tasted Mountain Dew or Mellow Yellow. I just wanted to make sure I have that correct. I don't think so. Wow. I can't remember ever doing it. I mean, I don't even know what it tastes like. It looks lemon limey, but...

No, no, it's not. It's its own thing for sure. I don't know that you should ever break the streak now that you've reached this long without trying it, but it's not lemon lime. It's its own thing. But what we're talking about is whether or not Fanta is a Nazi drink. And we're going to go into the history of that, and we're going to start out talking a little bit about Coca-Cola, the parent company, as every, most people know by now.

It was invented by Dr. John Stith Pemberton in 1886. He was a morphine-addicted Civil War veteran looking for a better way to feel better than morphine and put together some cocoa leaves and cola nuts which had, you know, stimulants because of cocaine and caffeine and said, hey, this is like a new kind of medicine. And after he died, it went on to be a very, very popular drink. It sure did. One of the things that Coca-Cola did over time was they expanded around the world. They became an ambassador of American democracy. One of the places they expanded to is Germany, pre-war Germany, or maybe inter-war Germany.

I'm not sure when they showed up. But regardless, by the time World War II was starting to ramp up, say the 30s, the late 30s, Coca-Cola was heavily entrenched in Germany, and its subsidiary was Coca-Cola GmbH, which stands for Gelshaft Mit Beschkronter Haftung, which translates to Company with Limited Liability. And there was a guy named Max Keit who ran the show there. And boy oh boy was he dedicated to Coca-Cola and furthering the cause of Coca-Cola in Germany.

Yes, for sure. He, there's a guy named Mark Pendergrast who wrote a book called For God, Country, and Coca-Cola. No colon, way to go Mark. That's incredible. And he said that, you know, this guy loved Coke so much, he really just wanted to weave it into every aspect of German life, including the Nazi party, even though supposedly he never was officially joined the Nazi party.

And you think like, well, Coke probably wasn't super stoked about this. They didn't care. Robert Woodruff was running Coke at the time. And he was like, hey, this is all good. We're going to cosponsor the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We're going to hang up some banners there with our logo right next to the swastika. And it's all good, everybody. Yeah. Can you imagine?

I looked high and low for a photograph of that, and I could not find it. I'm sure Coca-Cola has dedicated a significant amount of its operational funding to destroying any evidence of that banner ever. I haven't been to the world of Coke Museum, but I bet right here in Atlanta, I bet it's not in there. I'll bet they don't have it up to.

There was also, for the 10th anniversary of Coca-Cola GmbH, they decided to commemorate their deepest admiration for the Fuhrer for Hitler's 50th birthday with a mass Nazi salute, I guess, of employees who worked there at the time. Yeah, exactly. So Coca-Cola was very much entrenched in Nazi Germany even before the war, especially before the war, I should say. Well, yeah, because once the war started, they were like, oh, well, I guess we can't do business with Germany anymore. And Germany was seizing enemy-owned businesses at will. I think General Motors actually got out of Germany, but they did seize IBM. And Coca-Cola said, sorry, Kite, we got to stop sending you our 7X flavoring. And he said, but that is the secret. And they went, I know, and I'm really sorry. But even

though we're friends, our countries aren't friends right now. And that was a huge hit on Coca-Cola LLC, GmbH, Germany. He couldn't make Coke. So he was like, I got to come up with a new plan. Yeah. And also at the same time, he's walking this fine line between not having access to the product that his company makes and trying to keep the German government from officially seizing and taking over his company. And to do that, he needs a hit.

He needs the most delicious, most nutritious thing you could possibly put together that's going to sweep Germany right off the bat. And I feel like we should talk about this product that Max Keite introduced after a break. You can't just ignore las noticias when important world changing events are happening. That is where the Up First podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories. You can keep up without feeling stressed out. Listen up first from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Cheekies, and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite

podcast, Cheeky's and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast Cheeky's and Chill. I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys. And I know a lot of people are going to attack me. Why are you going to go visit your dad? Your mom wouldn't be okay with it. I'm going to tell you guys right now, I know my mother and I know my mom had a very forgiving heart. That is my story on plastic surgery.

This is my truth. I think the last time I cried like that was when I lost my mom. Like that, like yelling. I was like, no. I was like, oh, and I thought, what did I do wrong? And as always, you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more. And don't forget, I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheeky's. So my fiance and I have been together for 10 years.

In the first two years of being together, I find out he is cheating on me, not only with women, but also with men. What should I do? Okay, where do I start? That's not love. He doesn't love you enough, because if he loved you, he'd be faithful.

It's going to be an exciting year and I hope that you can join me. Listen to Cheeky's and Chill, Season 4, as part of the My Kultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so Max Kite's like, what am I going to do? I need to come up with something fast to keep my company afloat. I think I'll just create an entirely new drink that no one's ever even thought of making before. And because there's so many wartime rations going on, I'm gonna have to get really creative here, but I'm gonna do it.

Yeah, I mean, not only was he not getting that sweet, sweet 7X Coke syrup, he didn't have sugar, or at least much. They were rationing sugar at the time. So he said, all right. He ended up saying the recipe was made from the leftovers of the leftovers. The first Fanta, which by the way is the German word for fantasy or imagination. And supposedly he said, hey, marketing team, use your fantasy to think of a good name.

And they said, how about Fanta? And he went, that's great. How about Love Day? I think it was a guy named Joe Nip, who officially thought of the name, but he got Apple Pulp from leftover apple cider making, beet sugar and whey. And by all accounts, it was not orange at all,

and it tasted like sweet garbage. Yeah, it took me a couple of reads to be like, well, wait a minute, how does that taste like Fanta? And then I realized with just sudden pour, it didn't taste anything like Fanta, and apparently it didn't taste very well at all. Historians, no one knows what it tasted like, or at least no one's been able to find somebody who actually drank this stuff.

But they're like, just look at the ingredients, there's no way it tasted good. And they think that it was probably mostly sold to be used as like a flavor agent for soups and stews and stuff like that. That people weren't just knocking back bottles of this stuff because they would have vomited until they died I guess. Instead they were just using it in other ways but that's not to say it wasn't a huge hit it was a big seller and not only that it instilled like a kind of national pride among Germans like look at how resourceful we are in the face of

you know wartime scarcity but have you tried this stuff? Yeah it was their own. They're like, we have Fanta and beer, and we're going to claim those, and love those, and drink those until we fall over. So he did, even though, like I said, he officially, supposedly never joined the Nazi party, he did work very closely with the Nazi party

because he needed their help. He needed their help making sure that production continued. And you know, the cooperation with the Nazis was a key part of that. But that was able to keep the doors open at least. Officially Coca-Cola in April of 1955, post-war, said, why don't we rejigger Fanta and make it taste good? And we've got the name, we have it copyrighted and it's already sort of got a little bit of a cred, at least in Europe. So let's just keep the name and hopefully no one will remember the Nazi ties. Yeah. But also, so this name, just the name, right? They could have come up with anything else,

but just the name has Nazi ties, like you said. It was created in and for Nazi Germany. And it was also made from apple pulp and beet sugar and whey. Why would you use that? I would think you would want to do the exact opposite and bury that name like it was a banner with the Coke logo and a swastika.

But instead, they just went with it and they introduced it in Italy first as this, the version we know now, this orange soda version. And Italy was like, yeah, it's pretty good. Let's go with that. And they started to export it, finally made it into the United States in 1958, which was, I think, three years after they reintroduced it in Italy. Yeah, I think what the deal was is it wasn't widely known outside of Germany, so it's not

like the word Fanta had some negative connotation all over the world. And the Germans loved it, so it actually had a positive connotation in at least one market. So yeah, I get it. I mean, maybe it would have been a good PR move to change it because it's a Nazi thing, but I don't think it was like some otherwise tainted name. I see. I see what you mean. And they were like, I'm sure people just forget about it anyway within a year or two, anybody who even knows about it, it'll never come out. Yeah, until, you know, people started calling it a Nazi drink and, you know, on the internet.

And the idea kind of spread. And it was, you know, it was Fanta and not Fanta. But yeah, people largely didn't think much about it. And I still don't think much about it. I mean, it's not like if you buy a Fanta or something today, you're supporting Nazis. Right. It goes to support the upkeep of Hitler's tomb or something like that. A small donation.

But the author Pendergrast was like, this is pretty, it is still pretty significant that people like this drink enough that even knowing its roots or where it came from, you're just like, it's just, it's an orange soda. I like it for what it is. And it's not just orange, as we said. They have a whole line of flavors, including grape. And I think it's much more popular in South America right now, but it's still pretty big in America, in the United States. Man, we keep getting taken to task

for that, for calling the US America. Sorry everybody, that's what they tell us, that's what they teach us here. Yeah. And, hey, pretty soon a lot of parts of the world are going to be called America. So get used to it, everyone. As far as Kite goes, he stuck around and the Coca-Cola company said, you know what? Even though your drink was garbage, you did the yeoman's work way back then and kept that brand alive.

And so he was made eventually the head of Coca-Cola Europe and seems like had a pretty good career as a soda guy. So one other thing about that too is Kite, as the Nazis rolled in the country after country, Kite was right behind the tanks going, your division of Coca-Cola is now part of Coca-Cola Deutschland. Your division of Coca-Cola is now part of Coca-Cola Deutschland. Your division of Coca-Cola is now part of Coca-Cola Deutschland.

And so when he was made the head of Coca-Cola Europe, he had consolidated through conquering other businesses. He had consolidated all into one company because of the Nazis conquering these countries. Isn't that nuts? Yeah. I mean, who better to lead the Coca-Cola Europe, you know? I guess he was already in place.

Exactly. Yeah. He kept pounding his fist in his hand whenever he talked at like board meetings and investors meetings. That's right. Okay. Well, that's it for Fanta. Do you want to Fanta?

I don't know. That's only a question you can answer yourself. And while you think about that, we're done with this. So short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.