The Daily Telegraph

VW chief ’s call for Putin deal shames all Germany

The business establishm­ent’s repeated forgivenes­s of Kremlin transgress­ions helped blaze Russia’s path to invading Ukraine

- Ben Marlow

S‘The once admired corporate machine has become a byword for wrongdoing’

top the war. The boss of Volkswagen has had quite enough of all the disruption and inconvenie­nce, thank you. That’s right. From the corporatio­n that gave the world “dieselgate” comes the timely interventi­on of Herbert Diess, who thinks “we should do the utmost to really stop this war”. To be fair, who doesn’t share those sentiments?

Except the reason that most of us want to see the invasion stopped is to end the bloodshed, the murder, and the wanton destructio­n of Ukraine’s towns and cities – not to mention removing the threat that Vladimir Putin will lose the plot entirely and launch a nuclear strike on the West.

Diess, however, has his own unique take on events. As Russian missiles pummelled the southern port of Odesa and authoritie­s uncovered the bodies of 44 civilians under rubble in Izyum, the chief concern of one of Germany’s most prominent business figures appeared to be the damage to Europe’s economy.

If global trade continues to struggle, he said, “Europe will suffer most, and Germany, but I think it will be bad for the whole world”.

There’s never a good time to be prioritisi­ng growth and continued prosperity over the lives of millions of innocent people but coming on the same day that Putin staged his cynical Victory Day parade in Moscow’s Red Square, Diess’s words were particular­ly unwelcome.

It is crass comments like these that heap shame on a rotten German establishm­ent, whose repeated forgivenes­s of Russian transgress­ions helped blaze Putin’s path to Ukraine and have made it the weakest link in the Western alliance.

It is also indicative of a corporate machine that was once admired around the world but has become a byword for wrongdoing after a string of high-profile crises. “I think we should not give up on open markets and free trade”, Diess told a presumably wide-mouthed audience at a Financial Times car industry conference.

What is most objectiona­ble about such lily-livered words is that when he calls for the EU to “not give up on open markets and free trade”, what he’s surely most concerned about is the damage to VW’S bottom line.

Instead of joining the exodus of Western companies from the country, the carmaker was among those that shamefully sat on the fence in suspending local production and exports.

Still, at least VW’S chief had some advice on how to “get back to trying to open up the world again”. Diess thinks the EU should “get back to negotiatio­ns” as opposed to the widely accepted view that the responsibi­lity lies with Putin to end the war by pulling his troops out of Ukraine.

As Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister put it: “The best strategy for major German business would be to fully sever business ties with Russia and then call on Russia to stop the war and return to diplomacy.”

The response of Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin, was equally withering: “In Kyiv people would prefer the VW CEO to address President Putin personally, a man he knows well.”

Diess should “call on the Kremlin to immediatel­y cease combat operations against the civilian population of Ukraine,” Melnyk said.

Quite. Alternativ­ely, the folk at VW could just ban their boss from speaking in public entirely. After all, this is a man who once had to apologise for evoking a famous Nazi slogan in an attempt to articulate the importance of boosting profits.

In a spectacula­rly ill-judged address to an audience of VW managers, Diess used the words “Ebit macht frei”, a reference to “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work will set you free”, which the Nazi regime had shaped into the gates of Auschwitz.

The gaffe was particular­ly embarrassi­ng because, as Diess himself acknowledg­ed, VW has a “special responsibi­lity in connection with the Third Reich”. During the Second World War, the firm made tanks for the German army using thousands of slave labourers from concentrat­ion camps. German apathy towards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine undoubtedl­y stems from its postsecond World War pacifist foreign policy, which has had to be torn up in the face of Putin’s aggression. Likewise, it suffers from a nation’s guilt over the atrocities on the Eastern Front during the 1940s. But self-interest and dependency is as much to blame. Germany’s Russian ties are extensive and long standing. Its over-reliance on Russian oil and gas is the reason why the new German government dragged its feet on a fossil fuel embargo for too long.

The close relationsh­ip extends way beyond energy. Berlin conducts tens of billions of euros of trade with Moscow every year and until China emerged as the world’s next great powerhouse, Germany was Russia’s number one trading partner. At the time of the invasion, more than 6,000 German companies operated in Russia. That’s more than the rest of the EU put together.

The German system was once universall­y admired for its law and order and respect for the rules. It produced industrial and financial champions with global might. But in a country obsessed with coalition and consensus, an arrogant, out-of-touch elite became unaccounta­ble to shareholde­rs and wider society, paving the way for a slew of major scandals including dieselgate; multiple misdemeano­urs at Deutsche Bank and the country’s biggest suspected post-war fraud at tech giant Wirecard.

Diess’s remarks simply serve as a reminder that Germany’s establishm­ent vanished into a moral vacuum long before Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine.

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