23 May Did KLM Help the Nazis?
While we are on the topic of Nazis, a more contemporary story: recently discovered documents have reignited controversy in the Netherlands over whether KLM played an active role in helping Nazi war criminals flee Europe at the end of WW II.
KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, has always denied that it had a policy of assisting Nazis to escape justice at the hands of the Allies after the Second World War, when hundreds escaped to Argentina.
But papers revealing the activities of a mysterious Herr Frick in trying to help Germans to cross into Switzerland then to fly to Buenos Aires have raised fresh questions about the behaviour of one of Europe’s best-known airlines in the mid-1940s.
“The documents give the distinct impression that KLM was intensively involved in transporting Nazis,” said Marc Dierikx, an aviation historian at the Institute for Netherlands History in The Hague.
[snip]
Suspected war criminals could not obtain official papers to leave Germany. But some adopted false identities, and KLM acknowledges that some of its passengers were probably fleeing Nazis. It insists, however, that its role was not to police its passengers but to carry those who turned up with valid papers who had completed airport security checks by the Allied authorities.
In papers unearthed in Swiss archives by Dutch documentary-makers, Herr Frick, said to be a KLM representative, is documented in October 1948 asking the Swiss authorities to allow potential passengers from Germany to cross the border without the proper papers.
[snip]
Opposition MPs are demanding an independent inquiry and Bart Koster, a spokesman for KLM, said that he would advise the company’s board to commission one. He told Radio Netherlands: “If we really want to be sure what happened, we have to have a thorough investigation.”
Every month a new story like this appears. It’s clear that the complete history of corporate involvement with the Nazi regime has yet to be written.
Thanks again, Mr. Heller, for your attentiveness to this subject–I didn’t catch this one. You’re so right about the full story being told. There are a lot of smoking guns, as IBM and the Holocaust evinces (and as Prescott Bush, for one, knows).
It is not only that the history of corporate involvement with the Nazi regime has yet to be written, but also history of involvement of over forty European companies in the Transatlantic slave trade during fifteenth and nineteenth century will have to be rewritten.
Don’t think I’ll be buying that KLM motorcycle.
I’ve read articles and reports on present day companies involved in the slave trade either directly or having the bulk of their funding coming directly from the trade.
“We Help the Nazis” or “We Gained Off Slavery” isn’t something companies would want easily found out about them. Many of the original companies reorganized under different names and even in different countries to hide their pasts.
The African American reparations movement, started by an attorney, actually have a proposed legal argument and there is a lists of the many companies the profited off the slave trade.