German cake and biscuit producer Bahlsen relied closely on pressured labor in the course of the Nazi period and it benefited from shut ties to the Nazi regime, the outcomes of a historic investigation into the Hanover-based firm discovered.
Business for Bahlsen, greatest often called the makers of basic Leibniz biscuits, Choco Leibniz and Pick Up chocolate sandwich biscuits, elevated enormously in the course of the Nazi years in Germany, in accordance with historians Manfred Grieger and Hartmut Berghoff.
They discovered that the 135-year-old firm used greater than 800 pressured laborers between 1940 and 1945, lots of them girls from Ukraine and Poland. Those laborers had been required to put on patches on their clothes that recognized them as foreigners and subjected them to intense discrimination.
The historic analysis into the corporate’s previous got here after the heiress to the corporate fortune, Verena Bahlsen, claimed in 2019 that pressured laborers on the firm had been “treated well” in the course of the Nazi period.
Her remarks prompted a storm of concern and condemnation in Germany, and she or he issued an apology that described her feedback as a mistake.
The family-owned firm commissioned and funded the historic investigation.
“We were not aware of many details of the company’s history, and the truth is that we did not ask,” the Bahlsen household mentioned in a press release earlier than the guide’s publication.
The analysis has now resulted in a 600-page guide detailing the corporate’s historical past from 1911 to 1974, which went on sale on Wednesday.
The authors wrote that the corporate didn’t place any circumstances on the content material of their work and mentioned they remained in shut contact with each Verena Bahlsen and her father, Werner M. Bahlsen.
The historians discovered that Polish pressured laborers at Bahlsen acquired decrease wages, smaller meals rations and poorer medical care than different staff and had been housed in barracks and excluded from public life.
The fact concerning the occasions of that point was uncomfortable and painful, the household added within the assertion.
“We deeply regret the injustice that happened to these people at Bahlsen. We also regret that we did not face up to this difficult truth sooner.”
For many years, the corporate had sought to downplay reminiscences of pressured labor and describe the battle years as a interval of amicable cooperation underneath difficult occasions. Now, the corporate has acknowledged its true historical past.
“It is up to us to keep this memory alive and ensure that this history of National Socialism is never repeated,” reads a commemorative plaque within the lobby of the corporate headquarters.
Source: www.dailysabah.com