Photo: Volkswagen
A lot of things have happened throughout the world between 1939 and 1945, things that a lot of people don’t want to remember or don’t want to talk about. But since history has this habit of repeating itself, uncovering the past and facing straight on everything that happened is exactly what we must do.
It took some serious guts from Carl Hahn, Volkswagen’s CEO between 1982 and 1993, to commission a study documenting the company’s activity during the Nazi regime and World War Two. He probably wanted to tell things as they were, hoping the company could then move on from there and put everything behind.
Since he was busy heading one of the most important carmakers in the world, the job fell to Hans Mommsen, a German historian. Mommsen wrote a comprehensive paper spanning over 1,000 pages and entitled “Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich.” The study was published in 1996, after Mommsen worked for eight years to compile all the information.
According to Mommsen’s findings, Volkswagen factories used slave laborers from various concentration camps like Dachau, Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, as well as Russian prisoners of war. In the study, it was reported that Ferdinand Porsche, the company’s founder, “walked through these crimes like a sleepwalker.”
A lot can be forgiven, especially during troubled times such as an international war and a despotic ruling regime, but there is one requisite: some penitence must be shown. Instead, Ferdinand Piech, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, was angered by the reports, denying its findings and discarding it as a deliberate attack on his family. Prior to the publication of the study, he had removed Carl Hahn from his position as Volkswagen CEO.
Don’t imagine Volkswagen is the only German company that collaborated with the Nazi regime back in WWII. Does the name Maybach sound familiar? It should, because it was this company that produced engines for the Nazi tanks. How about BMW? Their engines were powering the Luftwaffe’s fighters that posed such a threat until the later stages of the war. And the list can go on and on. That’s not the problem. Refusing to accept the past and trying to pose as a primadonna, that’s a problem.
But the sad news of the moment that brought all this into the light once again is that Hans Mommsen died on November 5, aged 85. May he rest in peace.
Since he was busy heading one of the most important carmakers in the world, the job fell to Hans Mommsen, a German historian. Mommsen wrote a comprehensive paper spanning over 1,000 pages and entitled “Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich.” The study was published in 1996, after Mommsen worked for eight years to compile all the information.
According to Mommsen’s findings, Volkswagen factories used slave laborers from various concentration camps like Dachau, Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, as well as Russian prisoners of war. In the study, it was reported that Ferdinand Porsche, the company’s founder, “walked through these crimes like a sleepwalker.”
A lot can be forgiven, especially during troubled times such as an international war and a despotic ruling regime, but there is one requisite: some penitence must be shown. Instead, Ferdinand Piech, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, was angered by the reports, denying its findings and discarding it as a deliberate attack on his family. Prior to the publication of the study, he had removed Carl Hahn from his position as Volkswagen CEO.
Don’t imagine Volkswagen is the only German company that collaborated with the Nazi regime back in WWII. Does the name Maybach sound familiar? It should, because it was this company that produced engines for the Nazi tanks. How about BMW? Their engines were powering the Luftwaffe’s fighters that posed such a threat until the later stages of the war. And the list can go on and on. That’s not the problem. Refusing to accept the past and trying to pose as a primadonna, that’s a problem.
But the sad news of the moment that brought all this into the light once again is that Hans Mommsen died on November 5, aged 85. May he rest in peace.
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