A TV documentary has revealed that the BMW fortune may well have been built on forced labour from concentration camps under the Nazis. The documentary says controllers of BMW, the Quandt family profited immensely from the forced slave labour shipped in from the Neugamme concentration camp.
Other German corporations have investigated their practices during the war and come up with startling results. BMW, however, has resisted any such investigation. Volkswagen investigated its working practice under the Nazis and found that their main plant had a ‘dying room’ where women slave labourers left their newborns to die.
BMW has never gone for such an investigation, and it can be said the investigation work was done by this TV documentary. It is a known fact that major industrial concerns had to integrate themselves with the regime.
Quandt was held briefly in the post-war period but was not charged because he claimed to be a party member and not an ardent Nazi. The documentary claims that the ’slaves’ at the plant were made to do dangerous work and many of them died. The work conditions were abysmal and beyond any human rights concern. A labourer who worked at BMWs Afa plant said:
It was worse than slave labour. We were treated terribly, had to drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped.
The documentary claims that there were close relations between the Quandts and the Nazi regime. Herbert Quandt was raised by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. A prosecutor for the Nuremberg trials commented that had these facts been brought before the courts, Quandt would have qualified for stringent punishment.
Quandt family spokesman has said that they were surprised by the film and that these allegations were not incisively new.
It is a bit discomforting to know that the history of a manufacturer of such beautiful cars lies probably in blood. Just remembered Balzac’s famous quote:
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
[Source: Dailymail]
