German car company 'used hair from Jews murdered at Auschwitz'
The Schaeffler group is lumbered with close to £14bn worth of debt after buying out the major European auto parts and tyre maker Continental last year in a hostile takeover.
When the global crunch hit shortly after the purchase, the group began teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, threatening the jobs of 220,000 people around the world.
It has asked for German state aid and Berlin was said to be receptive to its overtures "until details of its dark past under the Nazis came to light".
Last week the group issued the findings of an independent historical stocktaking of its activities in the Third Reich, one of numerous concerns to do so in recent years. It admitted the widespread use of forced labourers who worked and died under appalling conditions in its factories in occupied Poland which were switched from consumer goods to armaments in wartime.
The company released the findings on the back of internet rumours that the plants had also utilised the hair from many of the inmates who died at Auschwitz, a charge it vehemently denied.
But the allegations have returned to haunt the company this week with the findings of the deputy director of the Auschwitz memorial site, Dr Jacek Lachendro.
He claims that 1.95 tons of human hair – "it was shaved from the heads of the victims before they were gassed" – was found in a Schaeffler textile factory after the war ended. He says he also has records from the camp of former slave labourers at the camp who were responsible for despatching the hair in two railway car loads to the Schaeffler enterprise, which back then operated under the name Davistan AG.
He said the hair was examined after the war and found to contain traces of Zyklon- B; the pesticide which the Nazis used at Auschwitz to kill an estimated 1.1 million people, most of them Jews.
The company's historian dismissed the allegations.