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Date:         Thu, 07 Nov 96 07:30:00 E
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         "Lebron,Nathan" <nlebron@troy.cobe.com>
Subject:      RE: New Book Examines Volkswagen's Nazi Years

Well that's why I am not a Democrat. I mean they did support slavery in the 1860's and that's not cool. (sarcasm)

I believe we had this conversation about a year ago. Not sure if it was on this list or on the water cooled newsgroup. The consensus was that VW history shouldn't be an issue nowadays. One guy even stated that he was not sure if Hitler actually forced VW to use slave labor for they cars. I wonder if the New York times realize that the paper they use also has bad labor blood.

Oh well I guess we are going to go into this mierda again.

Nate El Great 85 GL Hispanic owner who thinks it's cool that Mexico is making the VWs.

---------- >From: vanagon[SMTP:vanagon@lenti.med.umn.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 07, 1996 1:28 AM To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: New Book Examines Volkswagen's Nazi Years

<fontfamily><param>New_York</param><bigger><bigger>From the New York Times. We may all love VWs but we should never forget it's less than innocent beginings. Sometimes I'm not sure how to reconcile the fact that every car I own is a VW with Nazi roots, but if I was in Germany 50 years ago I could've been condemned to slave labor and made to work to death.

VWs are great, but there is blood it's hands.

November 7, 1996

New Book Examines Volkswagen's Nazi Years

By ALAN COWELL

BONN, Germany -- Fondly, they baptized it the Beetle. Over the years, more than 21 million were sold around the world -- funky, lumpy, never too fast, as much an emblem of a nation on new wheels as an early Ford or a Citroen 2CV.

But now the late Volkswagen Beetle, founding success of Europe's biggest automaker and onetime symbol of German economic grit, will be laden with far more historical freight than its modest trunk was ever designed to carry.

A 1,000-page book by one of Germany's most eminent historians published Wednesday subjects the Volkswagen company to detailed inspection, including its founding as an economically dubious pet project of Hitler, its munitions production during World War II and its wartime use of slave labor, including Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.

The book, by Hans Mommsen, was underwritten at a cost of $2 million by the Volkswagen company itself. That places the Beetle firmly in the self-scrutinizing historical annals of a nation that, no matter how much it would prefer to look to the future, can never wish away its past.

Once, the magazine Der Spiegel said, the Volkswagen Beetle, last produced in Germany in 1980, was "the symbol of the federal German economic miracle."

In the new book, "Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich," Volkswagen's history emerges as "the chaotic product of technocratic obsession and dictatorial madness," the magazine said.

According to the book's publishers, Econ Verlag, Duesseldorf, the book may have broken new ground in giving a closely woven picture of a major industrial group and its relationship with a brutal dictatorship that gave as much latitude to its favorites as it tormented its victims.

Its publication coincides with a wave of introspection among Germans about their history set off in part by another book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," by the American academic Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. That book has been criticized by Mommsen and others for suggesting that the Nazi mass killing of the Jews was a "national project" among Germans.

The story of the Beetle begins with Ferdinand Porsche, then a disgruntled former employee of Daimler-Benz. Postwar chroniclers have built a more flattering picture of him than the book, which condemns him as "morally indifferent" to the use of slave labor.

Rejecting the common wisdom of the prewar German auto industry, but with an eye to Hitler's foibles, the book says, Porsche insisted that the dictator's vision of an affordable car for all Germans was feasible.

"Porsche belonged to those professionals who were determined at any price to use the undreamed-of productive space that the regime suddenly made available for them, without questioning the prevailing political conditions," Mommsen's book said.

Porsche -- who designed the postwar sports car that bears his name -- joined the Nazi Party in 1937, but seemed indifferent to its ideological significance. "He walked through the crimes like a sleepwalker," Mommsen said.

In German the word Volkswagen means people's car. Displaying his support for the project, Hitler briefly eschewed his favored Mercedes to ride in a prototype Volkswagen Beetle when the first plant was opened in Lower Saxony in 1938.

After World War II began in 1939, the plant was turned over to military purposes.

When American troops occupied the plant on April 14 and 15, 1945, Hungarian Jewish slave laborers were still there -- survivors of thousands who had been pressed to work there in threadbare clothes, living on inadequate rations in crude barracks.

Mommsen sought to play down as "a huge misunderstanding" claims by the present head of Volkswagen, Ferdinand Piech, a grandson of Porsche, that the book had been changed to besmirch his family. Piech's father, Anton Piech, was Porsche's son-in-law and Volkswagen's wartime chief executive.

Klaus Kocks, a Volkswagen spokesman, said he hoped the book's depiction of the company's inglorious past would not be used by Volkswagen's competitors. "You don't sell cars with things like this," he said.

Copyright 1996 The New York Times

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