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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/31040/full/31040/gm-must-atone-for-past-ties-to-nazis/ <br /><br /> <b>GM must atone for past ties to Nazis</b> <br /> Friday, December 1, 2006 | by <br /><br /><p>In the Hollywood version of World War II, Germans are the bad guys, Americans the good guys. How disturbing it is, then, to learn that some Americans aided the Nazi war machine as it ginned up for its rampage of destruction.<br /><br /> As our cover story by Edwin Black this week shows, some American corporations helped Hitler outfit his army. Through its German subsidiary, Opel, General Motors built Nazi military vehicles later used to invade sovereign nations and murder Jews.<br /><br /> Despite the passage of many decades, despite the long-ago deaths of key players, the news comes as a shock. <br /><br /> Some might argue that outrage over GM’s involvement is a case of 20/20 hindsight. How could the company’s officers have known in the 1930s that Hitler was preparing a Holocaust? <br /><br /> Black’s story contends that senior GM executives were well aware of Nazi anti-Jewish laws and their impact on German Jews. It shows also that those same men acted with callous disregard.<br /><br /> Even if the 20/20 hindsight argument held up, there would be no excuse for GM to cover-up its prewar activities. Yet that is exactly what the company has done, despite a slow leak of revelations.<br /><br /> Other U.S. companies conducted unseemly dealings with Nazi Germany, yet Black cites the Ford Motor Company, for example, as having owned up to its wartime activities and maintained full transparency in the decades since the war.<br /><br /> Not so GM.<br /><br /> The famously secretive automaker has clung to obfuscation, denial and silence when it comes to its Nazi links. After Black’s piece, that won’t be good enough anymore.<br /><br /> All we would ask of GM is for a measure of accountability. We’d like to see the company admit its misdeeds and apologize. Beyond that, any further steps GM takes should be dictated by conscience.<br /><br /> According to an 1886 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, corporations are considered “persons,” with all due protections. This is now settled law.<br /><br /> We contend that, based on the evidence in Black’s article, the “person” known as General Motors must be held accountable. In matters as grave as World War II and the Holocaust, there is no statute of limitations, no pass for subsequent good behavior. The bell must toll for GM, just as it would for any other Nazi collaborator.<br /><br /> GM is a great company, an essential player in the industrialized world. We expect from it the highest levels of good corporate governance, and even more so when it comes to atoning for sins of the past.<br /><br /> Then, what would be good for General Motors’s soul, would be good for the world.</p> <p> </p>

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