Revealed: How the Nazis helped German companies Bosch, Mercedes, Deutsche Bank and VW get VERY rich using 300,000 concentration camp slaves

The colossal extent of slave labour used by modern-day German blue-chip companies to get rich during the Third Reich has been laid bare by the nation’s top business magazine.

WirtschaftsWoche has published a league table illustrating the Nazi past of top German firms like Bosch, Mercedes, Deutsche Bank, VW and many others, which involved the use of almost 300,000 slaves.

The league table follows revelations earlier thatAudi, which was known as Auto Union during the Nazi period, was a big exploiter of concentration camp supplied slave labor, using 20,000 concentration camp inmates in its factories.

 

Many of the companies listed by WirtschaftsWoche have already had internal reckonings with their Nazi past.

In 2011, the dynasty behind the BMW luxury car marker admitted, after decades of silence, to using slave labour, taking over Jewish firms and doing business with the highest echelons of the Nazi party during World War Two.

 

Gabriele Quandt, whose grandfather Guenther employed an estimated 50,000 forced labourers in his arms factories, producing ammunition, rifles, artillery and U-boat batteries, said it was ‘wrong’ for the family to ignore this chapter of its history.

But BMW were not the only German firm to profit from the sudden influx of slave labour.

Daimler, which owns Mercedes, admitted as far back as 1986 that it had employed 40,000 forced labourers under appalling conditions during the war enabling it to reap massive profits.

Electrical giant Bosch used 20,000 slaves while steelmaker ThyssenKrupp used a staggering 75,000.

VW, builder of the ‘People’s Car’ that morphed postwar in the VW Beetle, e mployed 12,000 slaves in the most terrible of conditions at its plant in Wolfsburg. The chemical and pharmaceutical behemoths BASF, Bayer and Hoechst employed 80,000 slaves.

Bayer celebrated its 150th anniversary last year with no mention in the official blurb about the Nazi years from 1933 to 1945.

And chemical manufacturer IG Farben even had a factory inside Auschwitz death camp that used prison labour in the production of synthetic rubber and oil.

However, their most ghastly act was in the sale of Zyklon B – the poison used in the Nazi gas chambers. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers.

There were also companies which enriched themselves through Nazi rule with Publishing giant Bertelsmann grew rich publishing gung-ho pro war books for Hitler Youth members and, according to Handelsblatt, ‘profited massively’ from contracts with the German armed forced at the Nazi Party central headquarters in Munich.

Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche, did not employ slaves but became hugely wealthy under Nazism. The bank sacked all Jewish directors when the Nazis came to power and from 1938 onwards became the richest in Germany by taking part in the ‘Aryanising’ – or taking over – of Jewish-owned businesses.

Train builder and electrical engineering giant Siemens still plays its cards close to its chest about wartime activities. 

The research director of the German Museum in Berlin said that what it has admitted so far about its past is merely a ‘house history’. Companies such as the sporting goods supplier Adidas and the high street retailer C&A are still working on company histories about their time under Nazism.

 

Top German companies a decade ago contributed £3billion into a fund to compensate forced labourers enslaved in Third Reich factories.

Under a programme organised by Fritz Sauckel – who was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes – over two million people were brought to Germany from conquered lands to work for the new master race.

Many of these went to private companies, like VW and BASF, while tens of thousands more were conscripted to work under the most appalling conditions producing weaponry.

These included the slaves who built the V1 and V2 Rockets and other massive construction projects, such as the Valentin submarine base in Bremen.

The Nazis differed from other regimes throughout histroy which used slave labour. Romans and Greeks, for example, valued and revered their forced labourers wile the Nazis treated them with immense crulety.

VW, for example, had something called the ‘dying room’  where female forced labourers who gave birth had to leave their newborns to die.

Most of the agricultural slaves came from the occupied eastern territories of Poland, the Baltic states and Russia. Because the Slavik people were regarded as subhuman in the Nazi racial lexicon, casualty rates among them were the highest of all.

 

 

Slave labourers were used after the 1943 Dambuster raid to repair the breached dams in the Ruhr Valley and many French workers were press-ganged into backbreaking work building Hitler’s Atlantic wall meant to stave off a seaborne invasion launched from England.

BASF built a plant at Auschwitz to produce synthetic rubber and inmates there had a life expectancy measured in weeks. Soviet PoWs concripted to work in Nazi industrial plants suffered death rates of between 90 and 97 per cent.

BMW: Dynasty used 50,000 slave labourers under Nazis

In 2011, after decades of silence, the dynasty behind the BMW luxury car marker admitted using slave labour, taking over Jewish firms and doing business with the highest echelons of the Nazi party during World War Two.

Gabriele Quandt, whose grandfather Guenther employed an estimated 50,000 forced labourers in his arms factories, producing ammunition, rifles, artillery and U-boat batteries, said it was ‘wrong’ for the family to ignore this chapter of its history.

He spoke out after an in-depth study by Bonn-based historian Joachim Scholtyseck, commissioned by the family, that concluded Guenther Quandt and his son Herbert were responsible for numerous Nazi injustices.

It found Guenther acquired companies through the Nazi programme of ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish-owned firms.

Herbert Quandt was ‘part of the system’, son Stefan Quandt said after the conclusion of the three-year study – forced on the family by public outrage over a German TV documentary – compiled using company files from the 12-year period of the Third Reich.

The Quandt family bought into BMW 15 years after the War.

Guenther became a Nazi Party member on May 1, 1933, a month after Adolf Hitler achieved supreme power in Germany.

But he had long used a network of party officials and Wehrmacht officers to build up contacts for lucrative state contracts.

Married to Magda Behrend Rietschel, Guenther was divorced by her in 1929 although they remained on friendly terms.

She went on to marry the ‘poison dwarf’ of the Nazi party, the propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels, and would die with him – after murdering their six children – in Hitler’s bunker in 1945.

The company grew rich in the Nazi era. In 1937, Hitler bestowed on Guenther the title Wehrwirtschaftsführer – leader of the armament economy – and his business supplied weapons using slave labourers from concentration camps in at least three factories.

Hundreds of these labourers died.

An execution area to murder those who displeased their masters was found in one of his plants in Hannover and the study mentions the fate of a Polish man who was hanged at another plant in front of 50 other inmates.

The study showed that the Quandt firms also used Russian POWs as slave labourers and that Guenther and Herbert knew about them, detailing their dispersion among their empire from the company HQ in Berlin.

Herbert even employed Ukrainian slaves on his weekend retreat outside the Reich capital.

Guenther was described as an ‘opportunist’ who enthusiastically helped the regime to rid Berlin industries of Jewish workers before the start of the war.

This was despite his numerous contacts with Jewish bankers in the years before the Nazis began their climb to power.

He was also ‘unscrupulous’ in his take-overs of Jewish firms which were forcibly sold for a pittance to loyal German industrialists such as himself.

‘The family patriarch was part of the Nazi regime’, judged the historian in the 1,200 page study.

‘The Quandts connected themselves inseparably with the crimes of the National Socialists.’

BMW, of which the Quandts became major shareholders 15 years after the war, was not implicated in the documentary.

‘We were treated terribly and had to drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped,’ said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced labourer who worked in Quandt’s Hannover plant.

In 1946 Guenther Quandt was arrested and interned. To the surprise of many, he was judged to be a ‘Mitlaufer’, or fellow traveller –  namely someone who accepted the Nazi ideology but did not take an active part in crimes.

He was released in January 1948.

One of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials, Benjamin Ferencz, now says that if today’s evidence against him had been presented to the court at the time,’Quandt would have been charged with the same offences as the directors of IG Farben’ – the makers of the gas used to murder the Jews at Auschwitz.

Quandt was able to re-install himself in the supervisory boards of various German firms such as Deutsche Bank. He also became an honorary citizen of the University in Frankfurt in 1951.

He died on holiday in Cairo on December 30, 1954.

 

AUDI: ‘Firmly ensnared’ in Nazi regime

Car giant Audi employed thousands of concentration camp inmates during the Second World War and was ‘firmly ensnared’ in the Nazi regime, an investigation found last month.

During the war years, Audi was known as Group Auto Union and, in a deal brokered by the SS, hired 3,700 concentration camp inmates to work in what was then Germany’s second biggest car firm.

The academic study also revealed another 16,500 forced laborers, who were not imprisoned in concentration camps, were working in Auto Union plants.

Authors of the study, economic historian Rudolf Boch of the University of Chemnitz, and Martin Kukowski, head of the Department of history at Audi, were granted access to the Audi archives for the first time for their ‘house cleaning’ history of the firm.

Their book, Wartime Economy And Labour Usage Of Auto Union Chemnitz AG During The Second World War, centres on the firm, which was the only serious competitor to Mercedes during the 12 year lifespan of the Third Reich, with a 20 percent market share for luxury cars.

During the war some of the plants were turned over to military production, churning out tanks and air-craft engines.

The 500 page report claims that Auto Union – now Volkswagen’s luxury marque Audi – built its success on the back of human misery and suffering, and that founder Dr Richard Bruhn was largely  responsible for the firm’s large-scale exploitation of forced labour.

‘More than 20,000 forced laborers were used in the production of Auto Union in their Saxon works, including almost one-fifth from concentration camps,’ said the study authors.

Conditions in the concentration camp in the city of Zwickau, where many workers were held, were particularly appalling with 1,000 prisoners – many of them forced labourers from France – living in unheated barracks.

‘The conditions were devastating,’ said the historians.

The researchers also discovered that disabled workers were shipped north to the Flossenburg concentration camp to be executed, and their numbers replaced with prisoners from that camp.

Towards the end of the war, 688 Zwickau inmates were sent on a death march to Karlovy Vary, now in the Czech Republic, with almost half of them dying on the way.

Audi recognised its wartime guilt in using forced labour more a decade ago, paying massive amounts into the £3billion fund which German industry set up to compensate Nazi slave workers and their descendants.

The company was founded in 1932 following a merger of four car makers, and dropped the Auto Union name after a further merger in 1985.