Truth to Power

How could anyone do this?

Perhaps the most revolting thing I’ve ever encountered:

German car firm ‘used hair from Auschwitz’

Rolls of textiles made by Schaeffler ‘contain hair from 40,000 death camp inmates’

One of the pillars of German industry, the giant but debt-crippled Schaeffler car parts supplier, was accused yesterday of using hair shorn from at least 40,000 Auschwitz death camp prisoners to make textiles at its factories in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War.

The highly disturbing allegations were contained in new evidence unearthed by Polish historians at the Auschwitz museum, who said they had found rolls of fabric made from camp inmates’ hair at a former Schaeffler factory in Poland’s southern region of Silesia.

The company’s own historian dismissed the allegations yesterday and said there was no evidence to support the theory that Schaeffler processed death camp inmates’ hair industrially during the Second World War.

But Dr Jacek Lachendro, a historian at the Auschwitz museum, told Germany’s Der Spiegel television channel that 1.95 tonnes of cloth made from inmates’ hair had been discovered at a former Schaeffler textile and army tank parts factory in the town of Kiertz (formerly Katscher) after the Germans withdrew at the end of the war.

The amount of cloth, which was pictured on Spiegel television as rolls of closely-woven brownish fabric, was said to have derived from the hair shorn from some 40,000 Auschwitz prisoners. Dr Lachendro said that subsequent analysis of the hair showed that some of it contained traces of the Zyklon B gas used by the Nazis to murder millions in the death camps.</em>


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