Germany’s Bahlsen biscuit empire has apologized for the “painful” findings of a report showing that the company used several times more forced laborers than previously thought during the Nazi period, The Guardian reported on Thursday.
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 laborers during the second world war, saying the company had “treated them well”. She later apologized for her remarks.
The study by two historians published this week, however, puts the number of forced laborers, most of whom were from Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine, at closer to 800. It also said the forced labor was used for a longer time than previously thought, from 1940 until 1945.
In its 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, according to The Guardian.
“Our ancestors … took advantage of the system in the Nazi period,” the family said, calling the company’s behavior “unforgivable”.
The biscuit company, which also makes Leibniz butter cookies, voluntarily paid about €750,000 in 2000-2001 to a foundation set up by German firms to compensate 20 million forced laborers used by the Nazis.