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After seven decades, the Audi car company, based in Ingolstadt, is gradually facing its past in the Third Reich. There are still eyewitnesses.
By Uwe Ritzer, Zwickau / Ingolstadt
A round mark in gray sheet, slightly larger than before a piece of five marks. On this alone the number 280 is stamped. "I had to wear them on the front of the backhand," says 88-year-old Helga Kinsky. At that time, she was still called Pollak and was 14 years old. Half-child still half hungry, dressed in shredded clothes. 280 was his work number. "On the back, they painted us with oil paint" KL "so that we could identify from afar." KL for Concentration Camps
More than seventy years later, the Jewish woman living in Vienna received a letter from Ingolstadt. "They are part of the ladies who were exploited by the subsidiary of Auto Union Agricola GmbH in unworthy circumstances from 1944 to 1945 and suffered a lot of suffering," she said. "For that, we would like to apologize from the bottom of your heart." It's a formally worded letter in which Audi promises to work on this "darkest chapter in our history" and asks Helga Kinsky for help.
It was high time to do it. While other companies were already working to repair the forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners in their factories during the National Socialist era and corrected themselves, until the headquarters of Audi based in Ingolstadt act as if the subject did not concern them. Richard Bruhn continued to be celebrated as the new founder of Audi AG after the war – although under his aegis at the head of the predecessor of Auto Union, tens of thousands of forced laborers and concentration camp had to work in the most miserable conditions. The worst thing happened in Leitmeritz in the Czech Republic, where prisoners had to cross tunnels and build tank engines. According to historians, up to one-third of the 14,000 to 18,000 forced laborers and concentration camp inmates were killed.
Thousands of forced laborers and concentration camps were working in the arms factories. Not only in the museum Horch Zwickau, their fate is now worked
(Photo: Stefan Warter)
At the beginning and voluntarily, the 1932 merged companies DKW, Horch, Audi and Wanderer Auto Union had become a factory Nazi weaponry, which produced Kübelwagen and tank engines, anti-aircraft ammunition and torpedoes for Hitler's war. After 1945, however, there was a lot of silence. Audi has staged its own story, including that of its predecessors, primarily as a glorious achievement of vehicle pioneers, talented inventors, accomplished technicians and brave race racers
; the subject of forced labor. Thus, a study published in 2014 by business historian Audi Martin Kukowski and the history professor of Chemnitz Rudolf Boch, which caused a sensation because it has proven relentless. The Auto Union, according to the researchers, was "implicated in a scandalous measure in the concentration camp complex" National Socialists "from a war interest. Much stronger and more voluntarily than before. The company was then contrite – but after a long time did not have much.
Monday this week after August Horch called the Audi Museum in Zwickau: Accompanied by his son and his wife Helga Kinsky from Vienna came in. She tells how she ended up in the childhood of a Viennese middle-clbad family in Theresienstadt and finally in the extermination camp of Auschwitz.And as an SS officer has them sorted immediately after arriving at the ramp with a finger indicating forced labor, instead of sending them, like most others, to the gas chambers. "Later, it was said that the man was supposedly Josef Mengele, "says Kinsky
![Audi Audi [19659007] Helga Kinsky is one of the last eyewitnesses </p>
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for them and for others, mainly young prisoners from Auschwitz to Oederan in Saxony, in a satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. They were there, most of them half-children, forced labor for Agricola, respectively the Auto Union on the machines. "I usually had to do something," recalls Kinsky. "I think they were pods for machine guns." A quarter took twelve hours and there was almost nothing to eat. Sometimes she also washed metal parts with hydrochloric acid, without safety at work. "At least you can sit there."
Audi now finances a job at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial
Jörg Skriebeleit, Head of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, Headquarters of the Zwickau Museum Horch. His belief is that "the central part of the culture of remembrance in Germany must also be the companies involved, and they can not be moved to memorial sites." In 2016, he and Kinsky were still in a critical television criticism of Audi voiced. The tenor: The company does too little and tries to cheat its responsibility for the exploitation and death of many forced laborers and prisoners of concentration camps.
In fact, according to the 2014 study, he did not spend much. Besides the fact that the company's pension fund and a street in Ingolstadt, which was called Bruhn, were renamed and a glorifying sign was removed from the Audi museum. Well, in July 2018, Skriebeleit says: "In the last two years has moved a lot at Audi." And yes, he sees that many "are honest and sincere about this."
One of them is Peter Kober. From time to time, the public relations officer of Audi Tradition, the historical division of Audi, turns into a history teacher. In Ingolstadt, the apprentices are sitting in front of him. Kober talks about the history of the company; he tackles the subject of the Third Reich head on. A set of ideas is particularly concise: apprentices can introduce themselves, the head of the Audi company committee Peter Mosch and the Ingolstadt plenipotentiary IG-Metall Johann Horn will be arrested today and beaten to death by the henchmen of a new government. Nothing happened to the workers' leader in Zwickau after the Nazis seized power.
A few days later, the trainees go to the Flossenbürg concentration camp memorial. There, Audi is now funding a permanent additional body for political education, and not tied to its own entanglement with the concentration camp, which has given the Auto Union a particularly high number of prisoners.
Even then, some things started to move. There are projects, conferences and seminars not only for apprentices, in collaboration with the Flossenbürg Memorial still alive former Auto Union forced laborers are hunted down and their eyewitness reports are documented. Above all, within the company committee, youth representatives and middle managers, many seem determined to deny nothing more and to "draw the right lessons from our corporate culture," as stated an Audi company committee in Zwickau. Helga Kinsky brought her plate number 280 here as a future exhibition. Audi also recorded the story of Kinsky in the film and sound. "Because we are the last survivors," she says, "after that, at worst, all that's left is the story."
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