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.
Read the full piece in Commentary.
Gabriel Noronha is the executive director of Polaris National Security and a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. He previously served as the special adviser for Iran at the Department of State under Secretary Mike Pompeo and as the special assistant to the Senate Armed Services Committee under Chairmen John McCain and Jim Inhofe.