Not GR but interestingly related

[Allan Balliett]

In history, the Nazi's were unique in the extent they were cruel to their
unpaid laborers.


Check out the article at this link, excerpt below. (VW in bold)


https://popularresistance.org/300000-slaves-made-german-corporations-rich/

Under a programme organised by Fritz Sauckel – who was hanged at Nuremberg
for war crimes – over two million people were brought to Germany from
conquered lands to work for the new master race.

Many of these went to private companies, like VW and BASF, while tens of
thousands more were conscripted to work under the most appalling conditions
producing weaponry.

These included the slaves who built the V1 and V2 Rockets and other massive
construction projects, such as the Valentin submarine base in Bremen.

The Nazis differed from other regimes throughout histroy which used slave
labour. Romans and Greeks, for example, valued and revered their forced
labourers wile the Nazis treated them with immense crulety.

*VW, for example, had something called the ‘dying room’  where female
forced labourers who gave birth had to leave their newborns to die.*

Most of the agricultural slaves came from the occupied eastern territories
of Poland, the Baltic states and Russia. Because the Slavik people were
regarded as subhuman in the Nazi racial lexicon, casualty rates among them
were the highest of all.

Dark past: Chemical manufacturer IG Farben even had a factory inside
Auschwitz (pictured) that used prison labour in the production of synthetic
rubber and oil. However, their most ghastly act was in the sale of Zyklon B
– the poison used in the Nazi gas chambers. At its peak in 1944, this
factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers


On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not only Slothrop disappeared......
>
> A little unmystical reading and Von Braun on the afterlife and The Other
> Side passim, have new resonances.
>
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 1:43 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> This is a point I've tried to make in connection with the list's
>> recurring discussions of von Braun (and the broader public's re-discovery
>> every decade or so that OMG There Was a Nazi in Our Spaceport):
>>
>> That in the insane moral/economic landscape of wartime Germany, slave
>> labor was very widely used (and very widely abused, including summary
>> executions for the most trivial causes or none at all) throughout civilian
>> industry all over the Reich as well as in war production...
>>
>> That therefore tens of thousands of executives, professionals and
>> managers -- both Party (even SS) members and not -- saw that every day and
>> did nothing...
>>
>> And that postwar "de-Nazification" penalized -- let alone tried -- only
>> the tiniest handful of those.
>>
>> All of which is to say that while there was brutal, bitter irony in von
>> Braun's reincarnations as genial Dr. Space on Disney programs in the 1950s,
>> and a leader in the race for ICBMs and then the Moon, there was nothing
>> very uncommon either in his offenses nor in his escape from consequences.
>> For all the recurring focus on the weapons-tech figures brought over by
>> Operation Paperclip, they were far outnumbered by Germans who emigrated
>> quietly on their own to Allied countries in the 1950s and 1960s, one by
>> one, to pursue careers in construction or auto-making or vegetable canning
>> which had earlier been entwined with horrors.
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Allan Balliett <
>> allan.balliett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> apropos for anyone sympathetic to VW's recent  recent payouts and layoffs
>>>
>>> Slave labour was an integral part of the Nazi war machine. Many
>>> concentration camps were attached to dedicated factories where company
>>> officials worked hand-in-hand with the SS officers overseeing the camps.
>>>
>>> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34358783
>>>
>>
>>
>
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