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How history is catching up with the German economy

2020-08-28T06:10:19.372Z


Continental is not an isolated case. Many well-known German companies only gradually find a way to face their Nazi past - often through external impetus.


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Towers of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg: built with confiscated union assets and forced labor

Photo: Stringer / REUTERS

Continental faced a historical study of its Nazi past - 75 years after the end of the Nazi dictatorship. The Dax group is not alone with the late work-up.

Three cases for the unpleasant confrontation with the past in the past year alone: ​​A study also carried out by Paul Erker revealed in spring that the Reimanns were enthusiastic Nazis and anti-Semites and abused slave laborers at home. "We're relieved that it's out now," commented the richest family in the country. Her holding boss, Peter Harf , said: "Reimann senior and Reimann junior were guilty. The two entrepreneurs committed offenses, they actually belonged in prison."

In October, legendary consultant Roland Berger (82) had to face the accusation that he had nurtured his career with the legend that his father Georg was a victim of the Nazi regime - although he was actually an early NSDAP member and benefited from Aryanization. Berger also commissioned a historian: Michael Wolffsohn, who certified Berger senior that he was at least "not a perpetrator".

Mittelstandsgrande Werner Bahlsen (71) engaged the historian Manfred Grieger for a similar study - but only after daughter and company heiress Verena Bahlsen (27) publicly got lost in May by falsely claiming that Bahlsen treated forced laborers well and paid the same as Germans Workers.

Audi study "inadequate and belittling"

Manfred Grieger had made a name for himself as the chief historian of the Volkswagen Group. This - built on Hitler's orders with confiscated trade union assets and forced labor - had its particularly delicate history dealt with back in the 90s, when Grieger was on the team of the historian Hans Mommsen. But in 2016, the group went too far and it came to a break when Grieger criticized a study on the history of the subsidiary Audi as "poorly crafted and played down".

Daimler and Deutsche Bank also documented their Nazi history as early as the mid-1990s. However, Daimler had to live with a counter-study by the Hamburg Foundation for Contemporary History, which considered the commissioned work to be too positive.

The BMW family of major shareholders only became active in 2007 after the NDR showed the television documentary "Das Schweigen der Quandts".

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Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2020-08-28

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