Maria Schaeffler Refused State Aid, Has To Deal With Being Linked To Nazis

Maria Schaeffler, the German industrialist who looks like 1970s hair-dye advertising made flesh, is in another spot of bother. We’ve been following how her car parts company bought out Continental tyres in a highly leveraged deal that has gone sour post-recession; she asked for state aid to save her company. Now she’s having to deal with accusations that her company used the hair of Auschwitz victims to make textiles with. What’s the German for “Don’t kick me when I’m down”?

Polish historians uncovered rolls of textiles made from hair at a factory in Kiertz that became the basis for setting up the Schaeffler manufacturing empire, but they’ve only just revealed their findings to German TV channel Spiegel. The channel interviewed former workers at the factory who said that hair was indeed delivered there during the war.

Poor Maria! It’s hardly her fault that the company she married into did some repulsive things back in World War II; she’s already had to publicly acknowledge that the company used slave labour during the war too. It’s not even certain that her brother-in-law, who owned the factory at the time, was even involved in the processing of the hair – it seems to have been undertaken by a separate company that absorbed the textiles operation. So she especially doesn’t need captions to her photos reading: “Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler, the current owner, at a rally near Nuremberg last month”, as it does in the Independent. 

Meanwhile, it looks like Schaeffler’s bid for state aid has failed, with Bloomberg reporting that the family stands to retain just 20% of the company as it has its equity taken over by lenders in exchange for shouldering the debt. Don’t worry Maria! You still look fabulous!

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | March 6, 2009 1:07PM |