German cookie titan Bahlsen has issued an official apology for the family-owned firm’s Nazi previous, and on Wednesday launched a guide on its historical past that features particulars of its hyperlinks to Adolf Hitler’s regime.
“Our ancestors and the folks concerned on the time took benefit of the system through the Nazi period,” the Bahlsen household wrote in an announcement. “Folks suffered, particularly the greater than 800 compelled laborers between 1940 and 1945.”
The self-investigation follows broadly criticized feedback in 2019 by heiress Verena Bahlsen, who claimed her household’s firm “paid the compelled laborers precisely as a lot as German employees and we handled them nicely.”
She subsequently issued a sugar-coated apology for the feedback, which the guide launched on Wednesday has additional uncovered as wholly unfaithful.
The Bahlsen household added that the reality is “uncomfortable and painful” and that they “deeply remorse the injustice finished to those folks at Bahlsen.” The household house owners and administration additionally pledged to advertise a tradition of remembrance and a “clear stance towards hatred, xenophobia and anti-democratic tendencies.”
The makers of the Leibniz Butterkeks, a gentle butter-flavored biscuit, started manufacturing within the late nineteenth century. The Hanover-based firm is the market-leading biscuit maker in Germany.
