Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 15:55:55 -0400
Reply-To: James Cohen <jscohen@SPRYNET.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <Vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: James Cohen <jscohen@SPRYNET.COM>
Subject: Volkswagen Launches Fund for Nazi-Era Slaves
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This story was sent from the H20 list.
I am VERY pleased with VW for this. Good for them. They have taken
responsiblity for past sins, and want to atone for it.
That is very impressive, even though it's very late. I applaud VWs effort.
MB, and BMW do not seem to have the class of VW.
James
>
>Volkswagen Launches Fund for Nazi-Era Slaves
>By Fiona Fleck
>
>BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Volkswagen AG, the German automaker founded under
>Hitler's Nazi regime, announced Friday it was launching a 20 million-mark
>($11.87 million) fund to compensate its World War II slave laborers.
>Volkswagen -- Europe's biggest automaker, which relies on exports for more
>than
>half of its business -- announced plans to create the fund in July for
>elderly
>survivors, many of whom live in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
>The move came in the face of increasing pressure on German industry from
>Holocaust survivors and former slave laborers to redress injustice from the
>1933-45 Nazi era.
>``The company has decided, effective immediately, to create a Private
>Relief
>Fund,'' VW spokesman Klaus Kocks said in a statement released after a
>supervisory board meeting at the company headquarters in Wolfsburg.
>``The fund will be adequately financed and have a budget of 20 million
>marks,''
>Kocks said.
>Kocks said Volkswagen had not been legally obliged to provide restitution
>because Germany had already paid extensive postwar reparations -- more than
>100
>billion marks ($60 billion) to date.
>But the fund was a gesture in recognition of the company's shared moral
>responsibility, he said.
>Historians say VW, founded in 1938 to build the ''Volkswagen'' or
>``People's
>Car,'' bought the labor of about 7,000 slaves from Hitler's SS elite force
>between 1941 and 1945. Their work included building mines, V-1 rockets and
>antitank launchers.
>Overworked, underfed and with little time off, many of the workers died
>under
>the appalling conditions.
>German historian Hans Mommsen, who was commissioned by VW to write a study
>about
>its Nazi-era use of slave labor published in 1996, said it was impossible
>to
>say
>how many were still alive today. He put a rough estimate at below 1,000.
>Klaus von Muenchhausen, a German academic who represents about 150 Jews who
>were
>forced to work for VW, welcomed the fund as a good piece of ``start-up
>capital,'' but said that the key issue was how much each individual would
>receive.
>``We will not accept any tips here. People have become rather angry,'' he
>said.
>``Basically, this has come 50 years too late,'' he said, referring to the
>vast
>majority of survivors of Nazi slave labor who have died since the war.
>Muenchhausen said Volkswagen employed about 1,500 Jewish concentration camp
>inmates. Of those, about 200 are still alive today.
>In June, Muenchhausen, who won recent court battles for compensation for
>former
>slave laborers in Bonn and Bremen, threatened to sue VW if it failed to
>reach a
>settlement.
>U.S. lawyers also named VW as one of several German companies they might
>target
>in class-action lawsuits seeking restitution for unpaid wages.
>A month earlier, Swiss banks, threatened with an economic boycott by
>several
>U.S. states, agreed to a landmark $1.25 billion settlement with Holocaust
>survivors over unreturned assets in dormant Nazi-era accounts.
>Fearing they could also become embroiled in costly lawsuits, VW and several
>other German companies, including car makers BMW, Daimler-Benz AG (DAI -
>news)
>and engineering giant Siemens AG, signaled readiness to compensate unpaid
>wages.
>Virtually every major German company used slave labor during the Third
>Reich.
>Nazi Germany is estimated to have forced more than 12 million foreigners
>into
>slavery from across its occupied lands, working in every sector from
>industry to
>domestic service.
>Of those still alive today, 1.5 million live in Eastern Europe and less
>than
>1
>million elsewhere.
>German companies for decades rejected individual claims from former Nazi
>slaves,
>arguing that the German government -- as legal heir to the Third Reich --
>was
>liable for damages.
>Although Bonn has paid 100 billion marks ($60 billion) in reparations since
>the
>end of the war, many Nazi slave laborers were left empty-handed by a legal
>loophole in international treaties governing postwar reparations.
>
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