CNS-Just as contemporary American fortunes were made upon the backs of enslaved people of the past, so too, major European corporations profited from the enslavement of human beings of the past, yet within living memory. For much of the last fifty years many people in Europe have chosen to forget their pasts as active Nazi collaborators and supporters, since the Nazi defeat and surrender made Nazi-ism politically incorrect. Yet ironically, many successful outfits had their origins in the Nazi plundering of Europe.

Last August, holocaust survivors filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S., against some of Germany's biggest and best known corporations, accusing the firms of profiting from Nazi-era slave labor. One lawsuit named Volkswagen, and a second action named VW along with its Audi subsidiary, and electronics giant Siemens, auto makers BMW and Daimler-Benz (maker of the Mercedes Benz), steelmaker Krupp-Hoesch, engineering group MAN, photo equipment group Leica, and weapons maker Diehl.

These companies used more than 2 million slave laborers during the Nazi era, and yet they are active, doing business today, with no stigma whatsoever. The lawsuit asks for $150 million in damages, which does not include millions more that will be due, for attorneys fees. Approximately 12 days later, Volkswagen made a total about face, and announced that it was setting up a $12 million private relief fund to compensate the slaves it used to establish the corporation in the world markets. Volkswagen is Europe's biggest car maker, and it was established in 1938 with a mission from Adolf Hitler to create a "people's car," hence "Volkswagen"; its factories also churned out grenade launchers, land mines and V1 rockets during World War II.

For years, Volkswagen (which deployed as many as 20,000 slave laborers) argued that it had no legal duty to pay back wages to slave laborers, because those laborers were forced upon them by the Nazis. Most of the firms insisted that they owed no monies to anyone because the German government had paid reparations. However, one individual has pressed and won claims in district courts in Bremen and Bonn on behalf of other slave laborers over the past two years, which has set a legal precedent that companies that used enslaved workers under the Nazi regime are individually obliged to make restitution even though the German federal government paid out 100 billion marks, or about $59 billion in war reparations.

Volkswagen's decision to reverse its previous position, to compensate its former slaves, was also a device the corporation used to steal away the thunder of its victims. It admitted to being "morally called upon" to redress the wrongs of its founders, but at the same time that it was creating a $12 million relief fund, VW posed as a humanitarian making a gracious gesture. This is after waiting until the majority of its slaves are long dead, all the while denying that any of them had a bona fide claim. The damage is done. Just as the beneficiaries of centuries of slavery in the United States have no desire to revisit the issue of just compensation to American slaves, so too, Volkswagen put off its victims until the issue of compensation was almost academic. (And it's far below the $150 million the attorneys are still shooting for).

On the heels of the VW decision to accept some responsibility for their own actions during the war, the industrial giant Siemens also announced that it would make an effort to compensate the slave laborers it used during the war. Almost a year ago, at its 150^th anniversary celebrations, the company insisted that it could do no more for its former slaves than express "deep regrets." The Munich-based Siemens said its $12 million fund is in addition to the $4.3 million it paid to the Jewish Claims Conference in 1961. Siemens estimates that between 10,000 to 20,000 slaves were employed in its wartime factories.

The current generation views World War II, and the death and prison camps as ancient history, and they look on to the survivors as if they were witnessing a car accident. The post-war generation was quick to dispense with the de-Nazification campaign, to return to business as usual. And West Germany was the industrial workhorse of Europe, becoming the real engine for European unity. Yet many interests that grew fat and rich from the plunderings of the Nazis remained after the war, without being forced to return the riches that they accumulated from the Nazi atrocities. When the death camps were built, they constituted an economic opportunity to all sorts of industrial giants, who built the facilities where the genocide took place. For example, the chemical firm Degussa, based in Frankfurt, produced and supplied the Nazis with the deadly Zyklon B cyanide tablets the Nazis used to gas hundreds of thousands of concentration camp inmates. And it is still in business today.

More chilling was the outright theft conducted by the Swiss banks, who declined to return the deposits of their Jewish customers. Additionally, the Swiss banks operated as money launderers, enabling the Nazis to make off with uncounted loot. Before World War II, the Swiss were a poor Alpine country most famous for their cuckoo clocks and their chocolate. After the war, Switzerland was famous for their no-questions-asked international banks. Of course, that power to function as international bankers derived directly from the ill-gotten gains of a holocaust. And the scars of that holocaust still run fresh today.

Christoph Meili was a security guard at the Union Bank of Switzerland in January, 1997, when he made a discovery that altered his life. While making his regular rounds one night at the bank's Zurich headquarters, he noticed two large containers filled with old books about to be shredded. Upon inspection, Meili was shocked to discover that the books contained financial records dating to World War II. Some were the records of Jewish financial assets and properties confiscated by the Nazis during the holocaust. The discovery occurred after a visit by the leader of the World Jewish Congress as part of a two-year campaign to retrieve Jewish assets, when an investigation into the whole issue heated up, and just three months previously, Switzerland had enacted a law forbidding the destruction of war-era documents pertaining to holocaust assets.

What he did made him a hero to many in the world, but a villain to some of his own countrymen. Even though World War II is fifty years behind us, the scars of that war remain fresh, especially when money is involved. For decades the Swiss banks refused to even discuss the issue of repaying their Jewish customers, using such legal delaying tactics as demanding death certificates for people known to have perished in Nazi concentration camps, for whom there were no death certificates. But Meili's discovery put an end to all that, and eventually played a key role in bringing about a $1.25 billion settlement between the Swiss banks and holocaust survivors.

At first, coverage in the Swiss mainstream press was positive, and Meili was honored for his good deed. Then the attacks began, labeling him everything from a publicity seeker to a Jewish spy. Meili was fired from his job and shunned by his friends and family, as he became the target of death threats and kidnapping threats. Finally unable to endure the onslaught of terror, Meili fled with his wife and two young children to the safety of the United States, where he was granted permanent resident status.

Anyone who wants to imagine that World War II is over and irrelevant, is not dealing with a full deck of cards. Just like someone who believes that slavery in the United States is ancient history, the legacy of slavery still lives among us, no matter what measures we take to extirpate it; it lives on until that legacy is addressed, and everyone's concerns are resolved. In countries that do not honor Honor, everything is relative, and nothing is absolute. But slavery is an absolute evil, which cannot be condoned in any quarter. And the wealth that was built upon the backs of slaves, owes a debt that in many ways can never be repaid. But it never hurts to try.

SOURCE: Information in this article came from an article entitled, "Survivors of Holocaust Sue German Firms," in the 1 September, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, BUSINESS section. And from the 12 September, 1998, and the 24 September, 1998 issues of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, entitled, "VW Setting Up Fund to Pay Nazi-Era Slave Laborers," and "Siemens Offers $12 Million to WWII Slave Labor Victims." And 4 December, 1998, issue of the LA Times, OC Edition, entitled, "German Firm Is Cited as Top Producer of Death Camp Gas." And the 19 November, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times, OC Ed., entitled, "Schooled in Heroism, Swiss Who Helped Free Jewish Assets Gets Chapman Scholarship."