Date:         Thu, 07 Nov 1996 16:47:05
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         EXPRES@gnn.com (Ron Salmon)
Subject:      Re: New Book Examines Volkswagen's Nazi Years



>On Thu, 7 Nov 1996 James Cohen said:
>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.

Joel Walker responded:
>then we should not drive Nissans or Toyotas or Hondas?? Toyoda made most
>of Japan's military trucks... and what about the anti-union "police" 
>employed by GM and Ford during the 20's and 30's??... one of my own 
>ancestors was hung for horse stealing in n.carolina...Henry Ford was 
>considered pretty "morally indifferent" to his laborers ... Thomas Edison 
>was also considered to be not exactly kindly toward his paid employees... 

and then wisely said:
>ALL inventions and developments of technology are two-edged swords: they
>can be used for good, or they can be used for evil....if *WE* had been 
>directing things back then, WE wouldn't have done the same things...but 
>the people that were did what they did. for good or bad, that's what the 
>history is. we can either live with that and go on with our lives, or we 
>can try to find some totally pure and unsullied products on which to base 
>our lives. and i'm afraid that there are NO such products. at least, not 
>that i've seen in my lifetime.

to which Nathan Lebron added:
>I believe we had this conversation about a year ago. The consensus was 
>that VW history shouldn't be an issue nowadays.


Perhaps the reason that this issue comes up with regard to Volkswagen more 
often than with some other companies that were involved in various war 
efforts (and that would be most of them) is because Nazi Germany was 
responsible for more than just a war effort. It was the calculated and 
systematic mass genocide of between 6 and 12 million innocent civilians. 
This clearly dwarfs the various examples that Joel cites above.  

That said, I still have to agree with Nathan and Joel. If the same people 
who took part in the atrocities of the Holocaust were presently running 
Volkswagen, I wouldn't buy their cars. But those people are, for the most 
part, dead and gone.  To resent present-day German companies (and by 
extension, present-day Germans) for things their ancestors did is itself a 
form of prejudice. As such, ironically, it exemplifies the same sort of 
misdirected hostility that was the foundation of Nazism in the first place. 
(Besides, there are too many people in the world doing bad things right now 
to waste time resenting people for things their grandparents did.)

Still, on a purely emotional level, having lost family in the concentration 
camps, I have to admit that when I see pictures of old kubelwegens and the 
like in Nazi getup, I get an uneasy feeling from the reminder that my own 
beloved Volkswagen comes from that ancestry.  

-Ron Salmon

p.s.  sorry to prolong a thread that is perhaps not appropriate for this 
forum, but I just had to get in my $0.02 anyway.  :)