bistro777
Donuts-Is There Anything They Can't Do?
Premium
join:2002-02-07
Englewood, CO
| Re: German History- Well, I never really got into the American side of things, other than the Ford and IBM’s controlling interests in their respective German subsidiaries, because this thread started with a discussion of Bertelsmann. But you’re right in that Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as well as the banking/investment communities “love for the almighty dollar” are well documented as well in their dealings with Nazi Germany.
But I must differ with you regarding Siemens. - - - Siemens used salve labor and concentration camp labor in its factories at Ravensbruck and in the Auschwitz subcap of Bobrek, among others, and the company supplied electrical parts to other concentration and death camps.
1. According to company information, at least 50,000 workers were forced to work for Siemens during the war. The Berlin-based organization Action Reconciliation which works to assist those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, estimates that one-third of the employees in 1943 were slave laborers, prisoners of war or concentration camp inmates.
2. Reuters - September 25, 1998 - FRANKFURT -- Another German firm has reversed course and agreed to establish a fund for slave laborers it employed during World War II.
The announcement by the electronics giant Siemens of an $11.9 million fund to provide the humanitarian aid came just a year after the company rejected responsibility for compensation payments for the laborers. Siemens follows lead of VW in initiating slave laborers' fund. In a news release Wednesday, Siemens said it "continues to express its deepest regret for what occurred in those years."
3. LA Times, Sept. 24, 1998: "Siemens Offers $12 Million to WWII Slave Labor Victims" - In response to threatened lawsuits, Siemens announced that it would pay this amount into a fund for survivors of German exploitation, in addition to the $4.3 million it paid to the Jewish claims conference in 1961. It used both Jewish concentration camp inmates as well as up to 20,000 slave laborers captured in Poland and eastern Europe in its wartime factories. Just a year ago, when the electronics giant celebrated its 150th anniversary, its CEO said he "deeply regretted" that his company could do no more for its former slave laborers.
4. An excellent source is a couple of books by S. Jonathan Wiesen - - - German Industry and the Third Reich: Fifty Years of Forgetting and Remembering and West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955.
5. And from the “Huh? They did what?” department - - - BBC News - Thursday, 5 September, 2002 - - - German engineering giant Siemens has hastily abandoned plans to register the trademark "Zyklon", the same name as the Zyklon B poison gas used in Nazi extermination camps, BBC News Online has learnt. A year ago, Bosch Siemens Hausgeraete BSH), the firm's consumer products joint venture, filed two applications with the US Patent & Trademark Office for the Zyklon name across a range of home products, including gas ovens. Siemens should know better because it was directly complicit in the use of slave labor," said Dr Shimon Samuels, head of the European arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization.
”Sometimes it is not enough to do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.” - - Winston Churchill |
