While commemorating its 100th birthday, the German auto company BMW expressed regret for its actions during the Holocaust.
In a statement on its website, headed “Facing up to the past,” the car company said it “operated exclusively as a supplier to the German arms industry” under the Nazis, using “forced laborers, convicts and prisoners from concentration camps” in its manufacturing.
“To this day, the enormous suffering this caused and the fate of many forced laborers remains a matter of the most profound regret,” the statement said.
BMW notes that in 1983, it “became the first industrial corporation to initiate a public debate about this chapter of its history, publishing a book on the topic.”
“The BMW Group is explicitly facing up to this dark chapter of its past, and in 1999 it became a founding member of the foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft (Remembrance, Responsibility and Future) for the compensation of former forced laborers.”
According to the Independent, a 1,200-page study commissioned by BMW and published in 2007 found that the company’s wartime owners willingly collaborated with the Nazis, and an average of 80 slave laborers died each month at BMW factories. — jta