Date:         Thu, 07 Nov 96 07:30:00 E
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         "Lebron,Nathan" <nlebron@troy.cobe.com>
Subject:      RE: New Book Examines Volkswagen's Nazi Years


Well that's why I am not a Democrat.  I mean they did support slavery in   
the 1860's and that's not cool. (sarcasm)

I believe we had this conversation about a year ago.  Not sure if it was   
on this list or on the water cooled newsgroup.  The consensus was that VW   
history shouldn't be an issue nowadays.  One guy even stated that he was   
not sure if Hitler actually forced VW to use slave labor for they cars.   
 I wonder if the New York times realize that the paper they use also has   
bad labor blood.

Oh well I guess we are going to go into this mierda again.

Nate El Great
85 GL
Hispanic owner who thinks it's cool that Mexico is making the VWs.

 ----------
>From:  vanagon[SMTP:vanagon@lenti.med.umn.edu]
Sent:  Thursday, November 07, 1996 1:28 AM
To:  Multiple recipients of list
Subject:  New Book Examines Volkswagen's Nazi Years

<fontfamily><param>New_York</param><bigger><bigger>From the New York
Times.  We may all love VWs but we should never forget it's less than
innocent beginings.  Sometimes I'm not sure how to reconcile the fact
that every car I own is a VW with Nazi roots, but if I was in Germany
50 years ago I could've been condemned to slave labor and made to work
to death.


VWs are great, but there is blood it's hands.

   


November 7, 1996


New Book Examines Volkswagen's Nazi Years


By ALAN COWELL



   BONN, Germany -- Fondly, they baptized it the Beetle. Over the
years, more than 21 million were sold around the world -- funky, lumpy,
never too fast, as much an emblem of a nation on new wheels as an early
Ford or a Citroen 2CV.


   But now the late Volkswagen Beetle, founding success of Europe's
biggest automaker and onetime symbol of German economic grit, will be
laden with far more historical freight than its modest trunk was ever
designed to carry.


   A 1,000-page book by one of Germany's most eminent historians
published Wednesday subjects the Volkswagen company to detailed
inspection, including its founding as an economically dubious pet
project of Hitler, its munitions production during World War II and its
wartime use of slave labor, including Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz,
Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.


   The book, by Hans Mommsen, was underwritten at a cost of $2 million
by the Volkswagen company itself. That places the Beetle firmly in the
self-scrutinizing historical annals of a nation that, no matter how
much it would prefer to look to the future, can never wish away its
past.


   Once, the magazine Der Spiegel said, the Volkswagen Beetle, last
produced in Germany in 1980, was "the symbol of the federal German
economic miracle."


   In the new book, "Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third
Reich," Volkswagen's history emerges as "the chaotic product of
technocratic obsession and dictatorial madness," the magazine said.


   According to the book's publishers, Econ Verlag, Duesseldorf, the
book may have broken new ground in giving a closely woven picture of a
major industrial group and its relationship with a brutal dictatorship
that gave as much latitude to its favorites as it tormented its
victims.


   Its publication coincides with a wave of introspection among Germans
about their history set off in part by another book, "Hitler's Willing
Executioners," by the American academic Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. That
book has been criticized by Mommsen and others for suggesting that the
Nazi mass killing of the Jews was a "national project" among Germans.


   The story of the Beetle begins with Ferdinand Porsche, then a
disgruntled former employee of Daimler-Benz. Postwar chroniclers have
built a more flattering picture of him than the book, which condemns
him as "morally indifferent" to the use of slave labor.


   Rejecting the common wisdom of the prewar German auto industry, but
with an eye to Hitler's foibles, the book says, Porsche insisted that
the dictator's vision of an affordable car for all Germans was
feasible.


   "Porsche belonged to those professionals who were determined at any
price to use the undreamed-of productive space that the regime suddenly
made available for them, without questioning the prevailing political
conditions," Mommsen's book said.


   Porsche -- who designed the postwar sports car that bears his name
 -- joined the Nazi Party in 1937, but seemed indifferent to its
ideological significance. "He walked through the crimes like a
sleepwalker," Mommsen said.


   In German the word Volkswagen means people's car. Displaying his
support for the project, Hitler briefly eschewed his favored Mercedes
to ride in a prototype Volkswagen Beetle when the first plant was
opened in Lower Saxony in 1938.


   After World War II began in 1939, the plant was turned over to
military purposes.


   When American troops occupied the plant on April 14 and 15, 1945,
Hungarian Jewish slave laborers were still there -- survivors of
thousands who had been pressed to work there in threadbare clothes,
living on inadequate rations in crude barracks.


   Mommsen sought to play down as "a huge misunderstanding" claims by
the present head of Volkswagen, Ferdinand Piech, a grandson of Porsche,
that the book had been changed to besmirch his family. Piech's father,
Anton Piech, was Porsche's son-in-law and Volkswagen's wartime chief
executive.


   Klaus Kocks, a Volkswagen spokesman, said he hoped the book's
depiction of the company's inglorious past would not be used by
Volkswagen's competitors. "You don't sell cars with things like this,"
he said.





Copyright 1996 The New York Times

</bigger></bigger></fontfamily>