Etched on the gates to Dachau, Auschwitz, and other Nazi concentration camps built under the Third Reich are the German words Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Makes One Free. The concentration camps were initially advertised as helping derelict classes of society by reforming them through labor. The truth was that prior to the adoption of the gas chambers, most of the Nazis’ victims were killed by working them to death in a constellation of camps.
Many German companies helped perpetrate and were beneficiaries of the slave labor that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of prisoners at Dachau and elsewhere. One company in particular, Volkswagen, benefitted enormously from the Nazi’s enslaved workforce. Yet, over the past several years, Volkswagen has once again knowingly brought on a forced-labor workforce, this time in Xinjiang, China, where enslaved Uighur minorities build and inspect auto parts for the company.
In 1941, the president of Volkswagen, Ferdinand Porsche, asked Hitler to use slave labor from Eastern Europe for his factories, which—in addition to producing cars—were converted to war machines churning out munitions and equipment for the Nazi war effort. Hitler ordered the SS to “provide the workforce from the concentration camps.” During the later years of World War II, as much as 70 percent of Volkswagen’s workforce was slave labor.
Volkswagen executives were fearful of losing female workers when pregnant women gave birth, so the company set up “nurseries” that would take workers’ children within two weeks of being born. Instead of caring for them, Volkswagen killed 350 to 400 infants by leaving them to die of starvation, vermin, and disease.
Dr. Hans Korbel, who led the children’s homes, was sentenced to death by a British Military War Crimes Court in June 1946. The other leaders of Volkswagen, however, all went free within a few years of the war’s end. After decades of turning a blind eye to their past, Volkswagen executives commissioned a well-regarded historian in 1986 to produce an official accounting of their company’s crimes during World War II. In the 1990s, Volkswagen provided several million dollars’ worth of reparations to forced laborers and elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel.
It is in light of this shameful knowledge and legacy that Volkswagen should have applied the highest standards of scrutiny to their business operations in the People’s Republic of China, which has a long history of forced labor. Instead, the company chose to put slaves to work once again.
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In 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong instituted a program of laojiao or “reeducation through labor,” in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were imprisoned each year without due legal process and forced to work in austere conditions for up to 12 hours a day. The inmates, a combination of drug users, petty criminals, prostitutes, or those who had simply crossed local authorities, could be detained for up to four years. In November 2013, the 18th Party Congress outlawed the laojiao system and emptied camps across the country.
That system, however, paled in comparison to the broader laogai, or “reform through labor” penal system, instituted in 1949 after the Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War. Once convicted, the laogai inmates could be imprisoned for life and were more likely to be political prisoners and practitioners of prohibited religions. Inmates typically worked from dusk to late into the evening contributing to China’s agricultural and industrial output.
Laogai were renamed “prisons” in 1994 and operate across the country to this day. The Laogai Foundation estimates that 40 to 50 million Chinese have been imprisoned under the system since 1949.
Despite these conditions, Volkswagen began operations in China in 1985 under a partnership with the Chinese car company SAIC. In 2013, they opened a joint-venture plant in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwest province of Xinjiang. Only a few years later, concentration camps started filling up again around Volkswagen’s factory, this time with Uighur citizens whose only crime was their ethnicity.
By examining open-source intelligence from the Xinjiang Data Project, the public and Volkswagen executives can easily see that the factory is not only centrally located among at least 19 detention facilities and concentration camps but nestled particularly close to four of the largest concentration camps in the Urumqi metropolitan area.
Just four miles north of the Volkswagen factory is a high-security prison for Uighurs. Six miles south of the factory is another detention center surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and tall walls. Eight miles to the west lies a lower-security facility comprising several large housing structures enclosed by a tall wall. And six miles to the southeast is Fifth Prison District, another high-level security prison. Each of these facilities is used to house detainees sold into forced labor and brainwashed through “reeducation.”
In April 2019, around two years after the Uighur genocide had begun, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess was asked directly about his views on China’s activities by a BBC reporter at the Shanghai Auto Show.
BBC: Are you proud to be associated with what China is doing in that part of the world?
Diess: No, but we are proud to create, absolutely proud, to also create workplaces in that region, which we think is very useful.
BBC: But Xinjiang is something you are not proud to be associated with in terms of what the Chinese government is doing with Uighur people in that part of the country?
Diess: I can’t judge this, sorry.
BBC: You can’t judge it? But you know about it?
Diess: I don’t know what you are referring [to].
BBC: You don’t know about China’s re-education camps for a million Uighur people that it has referred to as reeducation camps as part of its counter-terror threat in the west of [China]? You don’t know about that?
Diess: I’m not aware of that.
Since then, Volkswagen executives say they have repeatedly visited the plant, where around 30 percent of the 240 workers are Uighurs, and continue to profess that there is no forced labor in the factory. Given their reluctance to admit any Chinese misconduct in Xinjiang, it’s hardly surprising that Volkswagen’s leaders haven’t found anything unsettling on their fact-finding missions.
If Herbert Diess had taken just an hour to tour the surrounding area, he could have come across the Xinshi camps, a massive miles-long complex of detention camps—only 10 miles from Volkswagen’s factory—that house tens of thousands of Uighurs alongside factories, all surrounded by tall walls lined with wire and watchtowers.
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During World War II, the Nazi government exploited and easily deceived inspectors from the International Red Cross by treating them to staged theater productions with Jewish cast members. Before the inspectors’ visits to Jewish ghettos, the SS forced prisoners to plant gardens and paint their housing facilities to create a sense of normalcy and tranquility. The inspectors in turn reported back that they saw no signs of the genocide that was in fact occurring on those grounds.
It would not have been difficult for local Chinese officials to stage such a show for Volkswagen, or merely to threaten workers or their family members with severe punishment if they gave any indication of the truth. Many are already thoroughly brainwashed by the time they reach a factory. Consider the words of one young Uighur woman who was shipped from a labor camp in Xinjiang, along with 544 other detainees, to work at one of Volkswagen’s suppliers in eastern China. “General Secretary Xi Jinping said that ‘happiness comes from hard work,’” she told a state media outlet. “My current goal is to work hard, become an excellent intern, and be able to stay and work.”
Volkswagen’s lackluster effort to find any trace of forced labor extends to an external audit imposed on the company by its outside investors. The audit report, released in late 2023, claimed to have found no signs of forced labor and audaciously said, “All interviewees were very relaxed and with smiling faces.” Unsurprisingly, a new report by the Financial Times revealed that the audit was deeply flawed and that most of the claims made by Volkswagen about the audit were misleading or false. Indeed, Volkswagen had commissioned Liangma, a Chinese law firm with strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party, to conduct the audit. This July, Liangma celebrated the CCP’s anniversary with a rendition of the same song Uighur detainees are forced to sing in reeducation camps: “Without the Communist Party, there would be no China.”
In any event, Volkswagen has admitted that its decision to stay in Xinjiang comes down to money. Nicolai Laude, a spokesperson for the company, responded to British human-rights researchers in a December 2022 email, writing: “It is a fact of life that plants cannot be built or closed down overnight. Investments have a decades-long horizon.”
But this justification is incomplete. The Urumqi plant does not seem to be much of a useful economic investment at all. The plant’s output declined massively in the years after 2019, from roughly 20,000 cars per year to 5,000 cars per year. Now the factory has stopped producing automobiles altogether and only conducts inspections. Given the amount of scrutiny Volkswagen has faced for their continued operation in Xinjiang, the factory is a far greater liability than asset. One worker at the plant wrote, “The Xinjiang plant will not likely be closed in the short run.…It has political significance, after all.” Volkswagen executives have evinced that same craven logic to European lawmakers as well, arguing that their continued presence in Xinjiang is merely the requirement of doing any business in China.
Last year the Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, applauded Volkswagen for resisting pressure to shut down its operation:
Given such political pressure, it shows great courage on the part of the new Volkswagen boss to insist on keeping its plant in Xinjiang, which essentially rejected the politically charged claims made by anti-China forces.… The German carmaker knows first-hand the answer to the question as to whether there are human rights abuses in Xinjiang as many Western politicians claimed. In this sense, the company’s insistence on keeping the Xinjiang factory in the face of political pressure not only shows the pragmatic spirit of win-win cooperation, but also reflects the courage to seek truth from facts.
Therein lies the great fault with Volkswagen’s continued operations: Even without the likely use of forced labor, its refusal to withdraw or close its factory provides an endorsement and a denial of the CCP’s genocide in Xinjiang. Acquiescence to Beijing’s pressure helps guarantee Volkswagen’s business future in China, and it comforts the CCP’s leaders to know they are not paying too high a price for their genocidal acts.
The CCP’s genocide has been ongoing for more than six years. The Uighur people have been scattered across China, their culture decimated, their mosques torn down, their babies forcibly aborted, and any individuality shorn like Uighur men’s hair. If Western businesses were to close their factories, the CCP would probably appropriate the facilities and give them to their Chinese partners with whom Western companies are required to engage. But the CCP would not earn the moral accreditation that comes from each Western company that routinely claims that its factory doesn’t use forced labor.
Volkswagen is not alone in its blame. There are dozens of other Western businesses with operations, supply chains, and activities in Xinjiang, such as Tesla, Disney, Coca-Cola, and Adidas—and they should likewise be held to account. But Volkswagen’s damning history and its clear institutional memory mean its executives—and the shareholders they report to—can and must know better. No leading businessman who opens a newspaper can claim he doesn’t know what’s occurring in the camps of Xinjiang.
Volkswagen executives—like all other Germans—have toured the camps at Dachau and elsewhere. They have seen the watchtowers, the walls, the cramped living quarters, and the gas chambers. And they have seen, sunken into Dachau’s gravel grounds, the memorial etched with the eternal pledge “Never Again.”
What actions are we in the West willing to take to uphold that pledge? We have a healthy enough fear of genuine war. But if we are not even willing to abstain from the moral, economic, and political endorsement of genocides—and require our companies to do the same—then clearly that phrase means nothing to us at all.
Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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