In a country celebrated for its culture of reckoning, the richest families are often an exception.
 | By Max Strasser Assistant Editor, Opinion |
Should you feel guilty if you drive a Volkswagen? |
You might after you read David de Jong's recent guest essay. He writes that the car line was put into production by Hitler, at the urging of Ferdinand Porsche. His son, Ferry, who built on his father's legacy to create the Porsche sports car empire, was a voluntary SS officer. |
It's not just Volkswagen. Many other well known German car brands — BMW, Mercedes and Audi, among others — can trace their histories back to slave labor, wartime profiteering and cooperation with the Nazis. And it's not just the companies that deserve scrutiny: It's their heirs. Today, as de Jong writes in his riveting essay, a handful of Germany's richest families are living comfortable lives built on wealth tainted by Nazism. |
All of this raises some uncomfortable questions: How much responsibility do modern corporations have for their pasts? What kinds of reparations should they make? What does a real apology look like? After all, much of the American economy was built from the labor of enslaved people. In Britain, where I live, it's hard to find an institution of any kind that hasn't profited from colonialism and empire. Where do we start and where do we end? |
De Jong doesn't try to answer all these questions. He comes to a more basic conclusion. |
He's spent years reporting on the families in Germany who have inherited billions of euros in Nazi fortunes. This essay was adapted from de Jong's recently published book. As he dug deeper into these families, he found that they were obfuscating their Nazi histories, if not covering them up outright. And prizes and buildings were still being named after these men, who ranged from wartime collaborators to convicted war criminals. When de Jong asked the chairman of the Ferry Porsche Foundation why the foundation's website made no mention of its namesake's career in the SS, he was told that "we view the life's work of Ferry Porsche in a differentiated light." |
It may be hard to know exactly how to deal with generations' worth of dirty money. But the least the beneficiaries can do, de Jong writes, is be transparent about their histories. That might be embarrassing, maybe even shameful. But it shouldn't be that difficult. |
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