Quote:
Originally Posted by amploud
I'd never consider working for any company that ran concentration camps during World War II. I don't care if it was a long time ago. Some things are not forgivable.
[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_AG"]Siemens AG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/URL]
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This is a great example of why you should never trust Wikipedia...
In 1972, a German satirist, F. C. Delius, published (in Germany) a mock history of Siemens to coincide with the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the company's founding.3 The book,
Unsere Siemenswelt (
Our Siemens World), was a fake official company publication that proudly listed some of the famous electrical company's numerous "accomplishments": the mistreatment of slave laborers in its factories during World War II, the installation of the crematoria at Auschwitz, etc. It was not immediately obvious that this book was an unauthorized satire, and less than a month after its publication, Siemens took legal action against Delius in an attempt to suppress his mocking commentary on corporate guilt. Ironically, a series of depositions, trials, and appeals drew attention to the conduct of Siemens during the Nazi years (and initiated a debate within the literary community about the role of satire in a democratic society). After three years of legal wrangling, a district court and a provincial appeals court in Stuttgart determined that several of the book's claims, including the Auschwitz assertion, were false, and ruled that Delius's ideas, despite being presented as satire, were damaging to Siemens. (The district court also thought it was suspicious that Delius's evidence had been derived from "communist" publications.) Eventually both parties reached a settlement, part of which stipulated that future editions of the book could only be published with the controversial lines -- including the crematoria claim -- literally blacked out.
Source - [url=http://www.adl.org/braun/dim_13_2_forgetting_print.asp]German Industry and the Third Reich: Fifty Years of Forgetting and Remembering[/url]
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