Volkswagen boss apologises for Nazi gaffe

IG Farben made Zyklon B for the Nazis and used slave labor, yet Bayer is still going strong! It really does blow your mind.

a Nazi GAFFE?

A fucking GAFFE?

What was the gaffe, OP? You posted anything but.

The gaffe was a pun the CEO made in a speech, where he punned on the phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei."

[quote]At a company event this week, Diess said the phrase “EBIT macht frei,” which is extremely similar to the Nazi-popularized phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei.” “Arbeit Macht Frei” means “work will set you free”; EBIT is a popular business acronym for “earnings before interest and taxes.” Diess said in a statement cited by BBC News that he regretted what was “definitely an unfortunate choice of words,” and argued that “at no time was it my intention for this statement to be placed in a false context. At the time, I simply did not think of this possibility.”

[quote] "At the time, I simply did not think of this possibility.”

Sheer ignorance.

The Allied postwar de-Nazification program deliberately chose not to grind the German people's faces in their defeat. It was decided that doing that after WWI had been a key element in the rise of Hitler. Instead they used due process to punish individuals who perpetrated crimes against humanity and otherwise encouraged Germany to rebuild according to the international community's standards of democracy. It was very successful and the VW Beetle became the favorite vehicle of American hippies.

[italic]"Just amazing that VW was allowed to carry on after the war."[/italic]

Just the opposite: Germany was in ruins, people needed jobs to eat and then rebuild, and the Allied occupiers (except for the Soviets) wanted to secure the loyalty of the German people as Stalin was taking over Eastern Europe. (Stalin preferred other methods instead of jobs.) Volkswagen's plant was in the British zone and a British army officer and engineer, Ivan Hirst, who first ran a tank repair base in Belgium, moved to occupied Germany in the summer of 1945 with the intention of scrapping the VW plant in Wolfsburg as war reparitions. He realized, instead, that the factory could produce vehicles for the British Army of Occupation and did so.

There's now a road in Wolfsburg named "Major-Hirst-Straße"

[quote] American hippies

Sheer ignorance. They probably did not know either that Hitler's admiration for the way the Native Americans were destroyed was such that his armored train was called "Amerika".

VW and other German car companies used the concentration camp labor to make their products during the war

Not at all, R9 -- everyone in the 1960s in America knew the history of Volkswagen, but it wasn't considered a scandal because the company had been completely revamped by the British Allies. It was seen as a symbol of post-war resurgence of German democracy and resilience and a sign they could rehabilitate themselves as a country, which is why it was signed back over to the Germans pretty early on, 1949 I think.

Not sure what the "Amerika" thing is about, it seems off topic.