Rewrite of history needs an edit

Guest columnist

By STEVEN GAYDOS

Professors Trutz Rendtorff, Saul Friedlander of Israel and Norbert Frei sat on an independent commission that researched the links between Bertelsmann and the Nazi Party.

Most companies, and corporate officers, have a bent for rewriting history.

The back-stories of some of America's oldest companies have been sanitized over the years to banish violence surrounding strikes or indictments for monopolistic behavior.

None of this corporate revisionism, however, can match what was accomplished lately by Bertelsmann.

On Oct. 7, nearly 60 years after the end of WWII, the German-based conglom issued a nearly 800-page historical report. The volume spelled out the devastating truth behind Bertelsmann's incredible growth from a quiet, provincial printer of hymn books to the world's dominant English-language publishing company.

The report disclosed that the company:

• benefitted from the use of Jewish slave labor;

• was the biggest supplier of Nazi propaganda, publishing some 20 million Nazi texts, surpassing even the Nazi Party's own publishing operation;

• was once led by chief Heinrich Mohn, who lied about his firm's activities and covered up his own support of the Nazi SS.

Just as the reaction to these revelations hit, German publisher the Von Holtzbrinck Group (parent of Farrar Straus and Giroux and several others) disclosed it has hired a writer to research its history from 1933-45.

"It is our company's, and my family's responsibility to explain the past," president Stefan von Voltzbrinck, told the New York Times. "For me, the worst thing would be if everything did not come out."

If only Bertelsmann embraced such forthrightness.

In these times, when the goings-on at a corporate lunch can't be covered up, one has to marvel at Bertelsmann's ability to paper over -- for more than half a century -- the publication of 20 million books and the employment of Jewish slaves in Latvia and Lithuania.

Now that the record has been set straight, by Bertelsmann's own hand, one might assume that a major program of compensation and positive civic deeds would accompany such a dark admission. Especially since German firms Volkswagen, Siemens and Deutsche Bank have faced similar scrutiny in recent years.

That assumprion would be wrong.

All that has accompanied the report is a statement by current chairman Gunter Thielen that expresses "regret" for "inaccuracies" and "wartime activities."

Since the report itself mentions such pre-war, 1930s-era Bertelsmann titles as "The Christmas Book for Hitler Youth," one might conclude Thielen's statement was inadequate. More than that, it is preposterous.

Bertelsmann needs to offer a far more substantive response to this devastating report, perhaps something more along the lines of what Lord Janner of Braunstone, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Fund, has proposed.

Calling Thielen's statement "pathetically inadequate and disgraceful," Lord Janner suggested the firm "do everything in its power to influence public opinion against racism" and that "they have the ability and responsibility to make amends."

To take a word from the hymn books that Bertelsmann has so proudly printed for the last century and a half, "Amen."

Steven Gaydos, based in London, is executive director of Daily Variety.