VW historian let go for chronicling Nazi past
VOLKSWAGEN has been struggling for a year to repair the damage caused by a scandal over its cover-up of diesel emissions, promising honesty and transparency. Now historians are accusing the company of reverting to secretive ways on a different subject: the Nazi past of German automakers.
Over the past 18 years, Volkswagen became something of a pioneer in revealing the company’s employment of thousands of forced labourers during World War II. But it has abruptly parted ways with the company historian who helped make that possible.
When the historian’s contract abruptly ended this week, an angry open letter signed by 75 prominent German academics accused Volkswagen of a vindictive punishment.
The historian, Manfred Grieger, and the company have declined to comment on the circumstances behind his departure, citing a mutual agreement to end his contract.
But the mystery over precisely why Grieger left – and whether he was dismissed – has complicated Volkswagen’s effort to regain public trust, and risks stirring up a dark chapter in company history.
The apparent catalyst for Grieger’s departure was his critical review almost a year ago of a 518-page study of the World War II labour practices of Audi, a VW subsidiary. The review – and the study, published in 2014 – gained scant attention until a leading German business weekly, Wirtschaftswoche, mentioned both in late August.
“Just this brief discussion in an academic journal then led to talk that Grieger be put on a short leash and limited in his academic freedom, which in turn led the prominent historian to leave,” according to the open letter from the historians. It expressed doubt that the company would continue to pursue other inquiries into its past, in particular over allegations of collaboration with the military leaders of Brazil in the 1970s.
In a statement issued last Tuesday, Volkswagen strongly denied Grieger had been dismissed, or that his separation signalled a changing approach.
“The fact is that Volkswagen continues to recognise the achievements of Dr Grieger and to thank him for the work performed,” the statement read. “Furthermore, the fact is that Volkswagen has examined its history as an enterprise consistently, honestly and strongly, and will continue to do so.”
Grieger was a co-author of an exhaustive study published in 1996 that exposed how Volkswagen had made extensive use of forced labour during World War II, when its factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, produced an array of weapons and military equipment.
The book, more than 1,000 pages by Grieger and another historian, Hans Mommsen, was financed by Volkswagen at a time when many German companies were coming to terms with their roles during the Nazi era.
But Volkswagen may have gotten more truth than it had anticipated. The book also uncovered embarrassing information about the Porsche and Piech families, who since 2012 have owned a majority of the carmaker’s voting stock.
Volkswagen was especially dependent on workers press-ganged from occupied countries or borrowed from concentration camps, including Auschwitz, because it was a new company with a limited workforce of its own.
While conditions at the factory were slightly better than in the concentration camps, inmates were overseen by SS guards and were poorly fed and frequently beaten or shot for minor infractions. Children born to forced labourers were taken away and housed in a squalid nursery overseen by an SS doctor, where 365 of the infants died.
Hartmut Berghoff, a professor at the Institute of Economic and Social History at the Georg-August University in Goettingen, was the driving force behind the open letter challenging Volkswagen over Grieger’s departure. He said it showed a tone-deafness similar to the company’s initial approach to the emissions scandal.
“Transparency in reacting to the public is not really the strength of VW,” Berghoff said in a telephone interview.
In its statement, Volkswagen said the company regretted that Berghoff had not responded to its offer of talks on the matter, which a spokesman, Eric Felber, said had been made two weeks ago.
Berghoff said an email from Volkswagen had gone into his spam folder, so he learned of the offer too late before the academics’ letter appeared.
He questioned whether Volkswagen officials respected Grieger’s work. “Why then did they part with him?” he asked.
The 75 historians are not the only people upset by Grieger’s departure. A former Volkswagen board member and workers’ representative, Walter Hiller, described it as “a scandal”.
And last week, two more historians specialising in the behavior of German companies during the Nazi era issued a sharp rebuke on the website of Wirtschaftswoche, the business weekly. By parting with Grieger, they said, Volkswagen was “disposing of an enlightener”.
It all shows “clearly how communication has gone awry at the top of VW”, said the historians, Lutz Budrass of Ruhr-University Bochum and Mark Spoerer from the University of Regensburg.
In his review of the study of Audi’s past, Grieger criticised the authors as having played down the company’s cooperation with the Nazis and its employment of forced labourers.