It’s been reported that Coca Cola, the owner of Fanta, made a bit of a blunder when it put up an ad in 2015 (now withdrawn) celebrating the 75 years of Fanta’s history with images from the Sixties – but 75 years takes us back to 1940, so the good old days were really the Third Reich. The new ‘original’ offering is in a brown bottle again. It seems that the ingredients for Coke were hard to come by in the war years, so Fanta was developed, using whey and apple pulp – citrus fruits came in after the war. The brown glass protected the ingredients from light.
This was just reported in English in The Local, but it is apparently a 2015 story.
The Local (English)
Die Zeit (German)
(Coke and Pepsi ads have recently been withdrawn in 2017 too, in the USA and UK).
According to Die Zeit, Coca Cola did well in Germany in the Nazi period, sponsoring the Olympic Games in 1936:
Coca-Cola galt in anderen Ländern als Wahrzeichen für den American Way of Life. Aber das Unternehmen arrangierte sich mit der Diktatur in Deutschland – und machte sogar außerordentlich gute Geschäfte: Zwischen 1933 und 1939 stieg der Absatz von 100.000 auf 4,5 Millionen Kisten. Die Firma war offizieller Sponsor der Olympischen Spiele 1936 in Berlin, und bei Kriegsbeginn gab es 50 Produktionsstätten in Deutschland.
German prisoners of war arriving in the USA were surprised to find Fanta had beaten them to it.