Volkswagen Meets Its Historic Responsibility

Having announced that it will join forces with the Anti-Defamation League to fight the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe, Volkswagen, the German car manufacturer, has taken yet another step to make amends for its role in the Holocaust.

Last week, Volkswagen said it will fund the operations of an Anti-Defamation League office in Berlin whose task will be to research and combat antisemitism on the European continent. Funding for the pilot project will last three years, with an option to renew it, a Volkswagen spokesman said.

“The initiative will focus on assessing the root causes of antisemitism, extremism, and bigotry in society and develop programs to counter it through advocacy and education,” the Anti-Defamation League noted.

Herbert Diess, Volkswagen’s chief executive officer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview   that he was concerned about the recent upsurge of antisemitism in Europe. He said that Volkswagen has a special obligation to counter racism due to its close connection with Nazi Germany.

“Volkswagen, because of its history, has an obligation to care about antisemitism and racism,” he said in a telling comment. “We have more obligation than others. The whole company was built up by the Nazi regime.”

“Antisemitism is creeping up again, so clearly we have to do more,” he added. “It’s really disturbing that in the last five years it has been creeping up again.”

With the emergence of right-wing populism, antisemitism is on the ascendance again in European countries. Last month, for example, the German government disclosed that hate crimes against Jews and visible minorities in Germany increased by a whopping 20 percent in 2018.

In a reflection of this malaise, the German official in charge of monitoring antisemitism advised Jews to refrain from wearing yarmulkes in certain parts of Germany. Subsequently, German Chancellor Angela Merkel assured Jewish citizens that Germany will do whatever is necessary to protect them from antisemitic violence.

But at the end of the day, the fact remains that open antisemitism is rearing its ugly head again, not only in Germany but throughout Europe.

Which is presumably why Volkswagen recently took it upon itself to position itself against the ageless spectre of antisemitism.

As Diess correctly suggested, Volkswagen was a creature of Nazi Germany. It was Adolf Hitler, the chancellor and Nazi Party leader, who devised the novel idea of building a “people’s  car” that ordinary Germans could afford and would be able to drive on the network of new highways, autobahnen, that criss-crossed Germany.

Ferdinand Porsche, the eminent engineer, designed the first Volkswagen in the early 1930s. In May 1938, six months before the eruption of the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany, Nazi officials from Hitler on down converged on the town of Fallersleben to witness the inauguration of the first Volkswagen factory in Germany. In a comment that still haunts Volkswagen, Hitler declared that it  would be “a symbol of the National Socialist people’s community.”

The Volkswagen plant was expected to produce about 1.5 million cars annually. But with the outbreak of World War II, the company phased out the production of civilian cars and began manufacturing military vehicles.

As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum points out in a paper, Volkswagen never had a sufficient workforce and resorted to using forced laborers. “Indeed, Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of Soviet prisoners of war,” it says. “The factory employed a variety of categories of workers, including German employees and migrant workers, but also prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates (including Jews), and in increasingly large numbers Soviet and Polish civilian foreign forced laborers.”

Volkswagen obtained forced labor from German concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where 300 skilled metalworkers were found among a transport of Hungarian Jews in 1944. “The official relationship between Nazi concentration camps and Volkswagen was cemented when the Fallersleben facility officially became a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp,” says the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

By the end of the war, approximately 60 percent of Volkswagen workers were slave laborers. Poorly housed and underfed, they toiled under appalling and often dangerous conditions.

Volkswagen resumed civilian production after the war, and one of its cars, the Beetle, became a best-seller in Germany and elsewhere. Rolling in profits, Volkswagen conveniently left its unsavory past behind. But in 1986, it commissioned a renowned German historian, Hans Mommsen, to write an independent corporate history of the company. Completed in 1996, it is remarkably transparent concerning Volkswagen’s activities during the Nazi era.

In 1991, Volkswagen allotted a further payment of 12 million German marks to its former forced laborers. Just a year later, Volkswagen agreed to provide financial support to institutions in Israel which assist Holocaust survivors. In 1998, Volkswagen funnelled additional aid to former forced laborers.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Volkswagen has been in the forefront of corporate efforts in Germany to provide reparations for Nazi crimes against humanity.

Volkswagen’s latest project, aimed at monitoring and combating antisemitism in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League, falls within that profoundly positive mission.