VW historian criticized study Audis Nazi past – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The chief historian of Volkswagen has a study on the Nazi past of the subsidiary Audi accused of serious deficiencies. Manfred Grieger provided confirmation that the plant technical mistakes, a truncated approach a fragmented treatment of sources and linguistic blur.

Specifically criticized Grieger, the study had a “empathic core”, it therefore lacked it in an unbiased approach. There was “argumentative turns” that “a defensive attitude” suggesting. Posted who study an Audi historian and a professor of economic and social history of the TU Chemnitz.

A VW spokesman of parent company Volkswagen said on Monday the company will give views not on the subject. An Audi spokesman declined to comment on the intragroup disputes also.

Grieger deemed profiled researchers to forced labor under the Nazis. He received his PhD in 1996 on “The Volkswagen plant and its workers in the Third Reich”. Since 1998, he is in VW services. His general criticism of the investigation was published in the “Journal of Business History (ZUG)” by the end of 2015. The 518-page study called “war economy and labor input in the Auto Union AG of Chemnitz in World War II” is from 2014. About Grieger review first had the “Business week” reported.

the auto Union is a predecessor of today’s VW subsidiary Audi AG. In some companies the Auto Union should have consisted of concentration camp inmates, according to the study temporarily one-sixth of the workforce. Audi took the analysis 2014 an opportunity to adjust images to the Nazi involvement of its predecessor, Auto Union. For example, texts have been changed in the company museum and the Internet, a spokesman declared at the time.

In the review of the VW boss historian it is now, although the study suggest not “through relations with the Nazi elite the two directors Richard Bruhn, William Werner and Carl Hahn in importance “, but this aspect will” downplayed “. Audi calls today the Bruhn-Vita on the website the “responsibility for the use of forced laborers, concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war in the Auto Union AG”. However, a similar reference on the CV of Carl Hahn senior missing.

roots in Nazism

had Audi’s parent Volkswagen’s own Nazi history already in can examine the nineties. The Group was also involved for all its brands and on the founded in 2000, Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) that paid to nearly 1.7 million former forced laborers of the Nazi dictatorship until 2007 about 4.4 billion euros. The budget dined economy and collar together.

The roots of the VW Group are in Nazism. Adolf Hitler laid the foundation for the main plant Wolfsburg, which was created with money from the union expropriated assets. Audi belongs since 1965 to the VW Group. For its relationships with business partners, the VW group governs today in a specifications catalog: “Volkswagen rejects any knowing use of forced or compulsory labor, including bonded or involuntary prison labor from.”