In its presentation to the commission's special hearing on the role of business during apartheid, the regional conglomerate, which accounts for six percent of South Africa's gross domestic product, said it strove hard to put a human face to business.
"We realised long back that racial discrimination and free enterprise are basically incompatible and the failure to destroy one ultimately resulted in the destruction of the other," the group said in its submission.
This mentality, the group said, brought it into conflict with the former National Party government on a number of occasions.
Among its achievements which stood above the rest was the quota system for black recruitment. In 1986 its target recruitment of blacks was 25 percent.
This rose to 50 percent in 1992, Anglo chairman Julian Ogilvie-Thompson said.
"Many whites - and most particularly National Party-supporting and Broederbond-affiliated Afrikaner whites - achieved high office, high influence and high reward which would have gone to others had merit been the yardstick for the full South African population," he said in the statement read to the commission.
This bias also manifested in business.
"During the crunch decade of the 1980s, during which the trade union movement and those organisations which were part of the Mass Democratic Movement were the object of extensive government repression, Anglo developed a policy whereby employees detained under the emergency, or any security statute, where kept on the payroll until found guilty."
The group also invested in education and together with other stakeholders like the National Union of Mineworkers, established a R14 million trust fund for mine accident victims.
He said as early as the 1950s Anglo America fought to house 10 percent of its black workers with their families, but the government of then prime minsiter Hendrik Voerwoed rejected the idea.
"The desegregation of the workplace should have commenced much earlier and proceeded more and been achieved more easily and consistently... It not only gave the lie to the values expressed by Anglo's leaders, it was also a direct affront to human dignity," Ogilvie-Thompson conceded.
"We could have done more for our workers had it not been for the narrow minded policies of the National Party then.
"NP hostility towards the Anglo group was evident throughout in may statements by party leaders and the appointment of the Hoek Commission in 1964. These attitudes on occasion even prejudiced our ability to do business... most notably when our bid for the state-owned Samancor failed on political grounds."
Responding to a question on the high incidence of violence at some of its mines and the mining industry in general, Ogilvie-Thompson said it was too simplistic to attribute the violence to ethnic tensions as the apartheid government often alleged.
He agreed that the system could have also played a clandestine role.
Asked whether Anglo supported former president PW Botha's "total onslaught strategy" Ogilvie-Thompson said: "We did not. We told him it was total nonsense."