BMW, the German carmaker, has admitted its "profound regret" for using Nazi slave labour during the Second World War.
BMW has said that it operated exclusively as a supplier to the German arms industry during the 1930s and 1940s. As demand for BMW aero engines increased, forced labourers, convicts and prisoners from concentration camps were recruited to assist with manufacturing them.
"To this day, the enormous suffering this caused and the fate of many forced labourers remains a matter of the most profound regret," BMW said in an announcement on its website.
BMW made the admission during a celebration in Munich for its 100th birthday.
The Quandt family, which has been a majority shareholder in BMW since 1960, broke its silence about the company's role during the Nazi era with a 1,200-page independent study commissioned in 2007, after some of the company's practices were first exposed by a television documentary.
While BMW was not implicated in the report, it showed that Günther Quandt and his son Herbert, who both headed the dynasty during the Third Reich, willingly collaborated with the Nazi regime by employing an estimated 50,000 forced labourers in its arms factories. An average of 80 slave labourers per month died at Quandt factories and many were executed.
“We were treated very badly, we were whipped and had to drink water out of the lavatories,” recalled Takis Mylopoulos, a former slave labourer who worked at a Quandt factory in Hanover during the Second World War.
BMW said that it is "explicitly facing up" to this chapter in what it called its "dark past".
In 1999, it became a founding member of the foundation “Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft” (“Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”) for the compensation of former forced labourers.
