Tue 6 July 2004 - Burying the past?
With recent accusations that IBM punch-card machines were used by the Nazis to more efficiently bring about the Holocaust, I was just pondering how companies who have had less than illustrious histories document events they’d rather forget about.
WW2 footage often shows German forces driving Mercedes trucks. In their truck history, they talk about the “dictatorial regime” forcing the company to make particular types of vehicles.
Krups, who apparently made gas chambers used in the camps, manages to gloss over much of their history, by only talking about their post-1846 “founding years”, before resuming the story at 1950.
Volkswagen are fairly candid about their role in supplying the German Armed forces with vehicles, and the fact that their labour was made up of “approximately 20,000 forced labourers, prisoners of war, and later also concentration camp inmates”. They also point out that in 1998 they started a programme to compensate those workers. Better late than never I suppose.
I’m not sure I can draw any meaningful conclusion from all this. And I’m not sure why I thought it worth looking into. I just found it interesting.