Germany’s Bahlsen biscuit empire has apologised for the “painful” findings of a report showing that it used several times more forced labourers than previously thought during the Nazi period.
The report was commissioned after family heiress Verena Bahlsen caused outrage in 2019 by appearing to play down the hardship suffered by hundreds of people, many of them women from Nazi-occupied Ukraine, forced to work at the family business.
Bahlsen, whose father owns the maker of some of Germany’s most famous biscuits including Choco Leibniz, intimated the firm had done nothing wrong when it used 200 forced labourers during the second world war, saying the company had “treated them well”. She later apologised for her remarks.
The study by two historians published this week, however, puts the number of forced labourers, most of whom were from Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine, at closer to 800. It also said the forced labour was used for a longer time than previously thought, from 1940 until 1945.
In a statement the Bahlsen family called the findings “uncomfortable and painful” and expressed regret that the company “didn’t confront this difficult truth before now”.
“We as a family did not pose the obvious question of how our company was able to get through world war II,” said the statement, issued on Tuesday and reported by Agence France-Presse.
The Hanover-based company, founded at the end of the 19th century, used the forced labour to produce rations for German soldiers during the war. “Our ancestors … took advantage of the system in the Nazi period,” the family said, calling the company’s behaviour “unforgivable”.
Verena Bahlsen’s comments in 2019 caused a storm of controversy, with German politicians criticising them, and some social media users calling for a boycott of Bahlsen biscuits. She swiftly said sorry for what she called her “thoughtless” remarks, saying: “It was a mistake to amplify this debate with thoughtless responses. I apologise for that. Nothing could be further from my mind than to downplay national socialism or its consequences.”
She left the firm three years later.
Founded by her great grandfather, the biscuit company, which also makes Leibniz butter cookies, voluntarily paid 1.5m deutschmarks (about €750,000) in 2000-2001 to a foundation set up by German firms to compensate 20 million forced labourers used by the Nazis.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report.
