Volkswagen Works Holds Holocaust Memorial Event

Wreath-laying, reading and musical performance marking the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

The management, Works Council and staff marked the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with an event commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. Wolfsburg Plant Manager Jens Herrmann, Works Council Committee Member Gabriele Trittel and Plant Works Council Chief Administrator Marco Wittek laid a wreath on the memorial stone at Gate 2.

This was the second occasion on which the works had held its own Holocaust Memorial event. Following the wreath-laying, a passage was read from the novel “Fateless” by Jewish author Imre Kertész (* 1929). Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate Imre Kertész survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps as a youth, and “Fateless” reflects his experiences. Musicians from the Philharmonic Volkswagen Orchestra then performed the Third String Quartet by Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), who was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The piece was written in the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1943, and was first performed at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg.

Plant Manager Jens Herrmann commented on the occasion of the memorial event: “For Volkswagen, commemorating the victims of National Socialism is an ongoing process, promoting mutual respect and consideration, and rejecting racism and intolerance.” In their statement, Gabriele Trittel and Marco Wittek from the Works Council added: “In view of the current debate concerning refugees, especially, exclusion and marginalisation must under no circumstances be tolerated.”

Among the 20,000 forced labourers at the works of the then Volkswagenwerk GmbH between 1940 and 1945 were Jewish prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The post Volkswagen Works Holds Holocaust Memorial Event appeared first on VWVortex.

from VWVortex http://ift.tt/20uS34e
via IFTTT

Comments

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier. The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow. While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something . To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it. Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait. So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers. The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience. So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf. In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...

Vorderman Volkswagen

Search This Blog