German automotive company confronts its Nazi-era horrors

German car-parts maker Continental reveals that it played a key role in the Nazi war effort and used thousands of slave laborers during World War II.

Continental was the world’s biggest producer of rubber materials at the time, supplying the Nazi war machine as the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded.

Historian Paul Erker, tasked by the company with researching its relationship with the Nazis, says it ended up as a “pillar of the National Socialist armaments and war economy.”

The company used about 10,000 forced laborers in its factories during the war, Erker’s 800-page report says, including concentration camp prisoners, in what he called “inhumane” conditions.

The study shows that “Continental was an important part of Hitler’s war machine,” the company’s chief executive Elmar Degenhart says.

— AFP