Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil

Calls are media.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history.

A topic I am well suited to address because I am one of the worst people in all of history, or at least I feel that way because I am calamitously hungover.

I am the villain in my own life and very angry at myself.

Here to express rage at me, my guest and friend, Maggie May Fiss.

You see how I'm doing today, Maggie?

You see how I'm doing?

You see where my head is?

I got fucked up.

Oh my God.

It's almost like I'm not hungover either.

I need more fucking electrolytes.

Sure.

Thursday night's a normal party night.

Absolutely.

When you have a normal human schedule like us.

I was gonna say, for our kind.

Yes, it is.

Yeah, for our kind.

Normal, normal, healthy people in the entertainment industry.

Maggie, you and I go way back.

We were colleagues at the old place, cracked.com.

And you have grown and spread your wings from there, like all of our wonderful colleagues.

And you have a YouTube channel now.

And

you just came out with a new project that I'm very excited to check out.

Do you want to talk a little bit about what you're doing and plug your pluggables before we get into this episode?

Absolutely.

Well, you know, I think it's apt.

We're going to be talking about supposedly someone terrible.

Something terrible.

Good.

Oh, I'm so prepared.

Much like, yeah, the show is called Amy's Dead in Dreamhouse.

It's on Nebula.

It's also about terrible things, terrible things that happen to you in adulthood, you and all of us.

So I'm very excited.

I'm so excited to learn today, Robert.

Well, we are going to be talking about something terrible that I did not know about.

Really?

This is one that kind of took me by surprise, the topic of this episode, because we are going to be chatting a little bit about a car company you might know of called Volkswagen.

Do you know much about Volkswagen?

Uh, Volkswagen New Beetle driving you wild.

Um, sure, yeah, absolutely.

That's one thing they're known for.

Barbie had one, uh, at one point.

Barbie had a Volkswagen.

Um, and uh,

some tenuous connection to Nazism.

Is that

it's not tenuous.

I'll tell you that much right now, Maggie.

We'll be talking a little bit about that.

I knew that like Volkswagen was connected to the Nazis, like a lot of car companies, right?

Like there's no good car company.

There's no like car company that's just got like a spotless, clean record, no war crimes, no one evil was ever involved.

You know,

like fucking, obviously everyone's aware of the fun journey that Elon Musk and Tesla have been on lately, but like Ford Motor Company was founded by a notorious anti-Semite, right?

Yes.

People are aware of that.

In Michigan.

Yes.

Ford wound up being a valuable part of the United States' like war effort, right?

They made a lot of cars that were used by the military.

But Ford himself, Henry, would have been much happier if the U.S.

had sided with Nazi Germany, right?

Absolutely.

He's raring to go in my memory of his time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Raring to go with his Nazi newspaper about anti-Semitism.

And it gets deeper than that.

Obviously, Toyota and Mitsubishi got their start building war machines for the Empire of Japan.

And that's not clean work, you know, as much as I love my Toyota.

Ditto.

That's what I didn't know.

Okay.

Okay.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Toyota and Mitsubishi made a lot of

cars, a lot of vehicles for Imperial Japan, which did not get up to anything good with them.

And obviously, every major German automaker that existed in the 30s contributed to the Third Reich, right?

Not just in terms of making cars for the Wehrmacht, but like utilizing slave labor, all that good stuff.

So that's not super surprising, right?

Just the fact that a lot of car companies have evil backstories or were involved with shady regimes.

We're going to be talking about something that did surprise me, which is that Volkswagen operated a slave plantation in Brazil in the latter half of the 20th century.

What?

I didn't know much about that.

Whoa, oh,

your words are catching up to my hungover brain.

Yes, we're talking about Volkswagen's Brazilian slave plantation today.

Okay.

You know, get everybody off on a good mood.

Obviously, we very rarely encounter fascism in our day-to-day lives or on the news.

So

it's always refreshing to hear some history, you know.

So just remind me of the

things used to be bad before we as a species really figured everything out, you know?

Right, right.

Yeah.

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So this won't be entirely surprising if you're familiar with Volkswagen's origin story, the fact that they had a slave plantation.

Let's talk a little bit about VW's origin story, right?

Because it's a dark one.

You know that, like, there's a tenuous connection, right?

And so we're going to get into kind of what that connection entailed.

Okay.

In February of 1933, right at the dawn of the Nazi regime, this is right after Hitler took office.

Okay.

Adolf Hitler appeared at a car show in Germany to announce the start of a people's motorization, right?

And this was his plan and the plan that the Nazi Party was really pushing to motorize the Reich.

The goal was eventually to have every family have their own car, which was an ambitious goal at this point, right?

We're still talking about like the military is handling most things with horses, right?

I mean, even through World War II, that'll be the case with the Germans.

Automobiles, though, were a really direct symbol of the future.

And futurism was a cornerstone of fascism.

The early fascists, and this starts in Italy, you know, this isn't something that has its origins even with German fascists.

Italian fascists are obsessed with cars because they're obsessed with speed.

Airplanes are the same thing, right?

Oh, that that does make sense, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yes.

Yes.

And that's kind of like fascism is at this point.

It's not just looking back to these kind of like quote-unquote traditional values and this, you know, desire to return to these kind of more medieval attitudes of social organization.

There's also a lot of obsession with like the future and with speed and all of this stuff.

A big part of Hitler's appeal and like a major cornerstone of his campaign is that he flies everywhere, right?

This is the first time in a democracy that a major political candidate had had traveled primarily by air to a bunch of their appearances.

And it was, it allowed him to reach a lot more places.

And it also, it fed into this image that, like, fascism is this ideology of the future, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Not familiar at all.

Yeah, that's ringing no bells.

Today they're embracing AI and shit, right?

But like, it's the same basic idea, right?

This kind of like reckless embrace of like speed and technology.

And yeah, so one of Hitler's immediate priorities is kind of announcing and trying to really like propagandize the fact that like the Third Reich is going to be a motorized society, you know?

And in 1934, the next year, the Reich Association of the German Auto Industry entered into talks with a pioneering automobile designer, Ferdinand Porsche.

That last name is probably familiar to most people, right?

This is the guy.

who started Porsche, right?

Like obviously.

V.

Porsche.

V.

Porsche, yes.

Mr.

Porsche.

Yes.

And they sit down with Porsche and they ask him to create a cheap and efficient personal automobile, something that would be affordable for like the average German family and something that like you could basically replace the horses and other methods of transit with

this cheap personal car, right?

And the name that they give to this, this people's car is the Volkswagen, which just pretty much literally means the people's car, right?

The Volk is the people.

From the very beginning, yeah, okay, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's where the name comes from.

great get all your six you know six thousand children into the tiny car you're motorized you win yeah get your huge nazi family into this tiny car and yeah it'll be great so unlike many of the reich's policies hitler personally directed the search for a people's car there was a bunch of shit that like hitler was i mean even like to an extent like the holocaust was a thing that like he delegated a lot he is directly involved in like the quest to motorize germany in an extent that's kind of rare for him right?

Because he is a big delegation guy, you know?

Yeah, this is like well beyond where he's just delegating everything and like

having sex all the time.

Okay.

Yeah.

Like this is something he's personally obsessed with, just kind of in the same manner that like he's obsessed with the rebuilding of Berlin and all of these kind of like architectural programs where they're creating these like massive buildings that will be symbols of the new Reich.

He's personally involved in that and he's personally involved in this quest to motorize Germany.

And Hitler never knew how to drive himself uh he was not a driver but he took great pleasure in being chauffeured around the country one of his hobbies was just having people drive him around right uh he liked going on rides cars were more exciting back then you know

we we hadn't gotten completely burnt out on them

and Porsche, Ferdinand Porsche, had been an advocate for something like the Volkswagen for years prior to the Nazis coming to power.

So this was one of those things that was really convenient for Porsche.

Kismet, yes.

Yeah, exactly.

It's Kismet, you know?

And his biographer, Wolfram Paite, describes both Porsche and Hitler as made for each other, writing, quote, Hitler needed a creative mind to produce his compact car suitable for mass production.

And Porsche needed political backing to enable him to build it without financial pressure, right?

So this is a match made in, I mean, not heaven, but it's really convenient to both men.

Hell, the other place.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Porsche, I mean, he's not a Nazi, but his primary, he's, he's obsessed with this quest to make, you know, a cheap automobile that's available for everybody.

And he just kind of, he doesn't really give a shit

who he has to work with to make it happen, right?

His dream is just to get this car made.

So he's a good guy.

He's a great man, right?

He's a great entrepreneur working for himself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He just doesn't give a shit like about, you know, the fact that it's going to be produced by slaves, about

what matters to him is getting this car out.

He has, he's, he's got tunnel blindness over this Volkswagen.

Now, from the jump, the Volkswagen was not a purely civilian endeavor.

In 1934, Porsche's company published a brochure laying out that their future car also had to be practical for particular military purposes, right?

And this is both like Germany has limited resources.

There's this kind of understanding that if a war breaks out, these civilian cars will probably get pressed into service.

And also a bunch of Volkswagens?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

At the front of the line, okay.

Beats walking.

Okay.

That's

our choice.

They're so unintimidating.

Yeah, you ever tried to walk to Russia, baby?

So, the Volkswagen becomes a cornerstone of what's called the Strength Through Joy program, which is a major set of policies that's organized by the Reich Association for Leisure Activities.

Now, I've seen strength through joy translated by German publications as strength through pleasure.

And I think this is probably a case where a lot of English translators maybe do a better job of capturing the initial meeting because strength through pleasure makes it sound weird in a way, but it wasn't.

Like the idea was,

you know, the Nazis, when they came to power, they had to signpost and kind of adapt a lot of left-wing talking points.

You know, initially early on, there was a left-wing of the party that got purged during the night along knives.

And part of that is, well, these socialists are always talking about stuff like vacation days.

And, you know, a big thing that the USSR did and that communist Yugoslavia did was they would built all these gigantic like recreation hotels and whatnot that were like resorts that were meant for like working class people, right?

This was a major thing that they were doing.

And the Nazis tried to have their version of that in part because, you know, this is just a way in which they were kind of trying to compete with the left, but also in part because this was part of the promise of fascism, right?

Obviously.

You will do this and this and this, but you will get.

a fancy Hilton.

Yes.

Yeah.

To swim in on, yes.

Exactly.

We're going to steal all this shit from these groups of people that are going to be forced out of society and annihilated.

And as a result, you'll get a vacation every year.

You'll get to go to the beach with your family.

You'll get a car.

That was the idea, right?

This is never something that they

fully achieve, but this is the idea behind the Strength Through Joy program, right?

Is we're kind of buying the loyalty of the working class, of the classes that had been unionized and had previously in German electoral history gone more towards left.

The idea is we're going to kind of get them on our side by promising access to all of these luxuries.

Right.

It's the Google method.

You get, you know, a couple ping pong tables.

Right.

They'll stay after work.

Yeah.

Yes, it's exactly how Silicon Valley used to work, right?

Strength through joy, productivity through joy.

And so the motorization of Germany is a big part of this, right?

The idea that a normal party member would be able to afford their own family car in a country that had been as strapped with poverty and economic collapse as Germany, that had gone through something as devastating as a famine so recently, that's really appealing, right?

And it makes fascism look really powerful.

The fact that, well, you know, a few years ago, everyone was starving, and now we're talking about giving everyone their own car, right?

Again, they never do this, but it's important to Hitler and it's important to the image of Nazism that they were trying to do this, right?

That this was something that they were, you know, talking about, right?

And cars were expressly a luxury commodity when Hitler took over.

When he comes to power, only about 1 50th of the country owned automobiles.

And the idea is that cars are not cheap, right?

And the Volkswagen is supposed to cost just 999 Reichsmarks.

And there will be like an installment plan so regular citizens are able to afford it.

It's a big deal.

Automobile ownership is intensely politicized from the very earliest years of the Reich.

The German General Automotive Club expelled all of its Jewish members in 1933.

And after Kristallnacht in 1938, Jews were legally forbidden from driving or owning cars in the Reich.

Hitler approves the first Volkswagen prototype near the end of 1935.

In the late spring of 1938, construction begins on the first factory in Wolfsburg.

Hitler himself made an appearance at the ceremony, basically cuts the ribbon as they're creating and building this factory in Wolfsburg.

And at this point, the Volkswagen, which is known initially, they don't start calling it the Volkswagen, It's called the KDF wagon, which I think is just like the strength through joy wagon, basically.

Yeah, sure.

Right.

Yeah.

They found a better name.

We can all agree.

Volkswagen rolls off the tongue better than the KDF wagon.

Oh, yeah.

No, my friends got this classic KDF wagon.

It's still got the swastikas on the back end and everything.

Yeah, right.

Kill fuck death wagon.

Right.

Or kill death fuck wagon.

Yeah, there we go.

So the idea in Nazi propaganda is that the KDF wagon is going to be the symbol of the National Socialist People's Community, and the plant in Wolfsburg would be known as the City of the KDF car.

In short order, Hitler promised more than 1.5 million of these cars would be produced every year.

Now, they never achieve this.

This is never more than a propagandistic boast because they start building the factory in 1938, and World War II kicks off like a year later.

And so, as soon as Germany gets into a war with everybody, the military need for different vehicles and tanks trumps the desire to get civilians automobiles.

You can only do one at a time, basically, given the nature of the German economy and their access to resources.

And look at that.

They already have the factory going.

That's so convenient.

Yeah.

Wow, really planning ahead.

Right, right.

It just moves immediately over to like military production, right?

And resource shortages were so severe during this period of time that Volkswagen has to almost immediately pivot to using slave labor to meet production quotas as soon as the war kicks off.

And I want to quote from an article in the Holocaust Encyclopedia summarizing how this process got going.

Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of Soviet prisoners of war.

The factory employed a variety of categories of workers, including German employees and migrant workers, but also prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates, including Jews, and increasingly large numbers of Soviet and Polish civilian foreign force laborers, known as Eastern workers.

A first concentration camp on the site, Arbeitsdorf, was established on factory property in April of 1942.

Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce at the city of the KDF car.

So throughout the war, the early Volkswagens, you know, and the military vehicles they pivot to making are being made primarily by slaves, right?

Like that's from the jump.

VW is cars made by slave labor, which is great.

It's great.

That's great.

I mean, you know, now we just have, yes, a very similar.

Yeah, now we just use slaves to get the rare earth minerals, right?

You know, we

go.

We use kids for cars now.

So, you know, it's, it all shakes out.

Well, their tiny hands can reach the precious minerals in the cogo that we need.

As they get their hair stuck in the weaving.

Well, sure.

Yeah, you're going to lose some kids.

Speaking of child slave labor, you know, who doesn't use that?

Whatever sponsor comes next.

Unless it's like Haribo.

If it's the gummy bear people, they definitely use child slave labor.

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So, we're talking 1942.

The city of the KDF car is primarily using slave labor.

Now they're not making cars for civilians.

They're making cars for the military, concentration camp inmates, because they have to be skilled laborers.

You can't just grab anyone to help make a car, right?

You need people who have certain abilities or certain like knowledge.

So they're kind of combing concentration camps.

They're going to places like Auschwitz, right?

And in fact, a Volkswagen engineer travels to Auschwitz in 1944 to pick out 300 skilled metal workers from the recently transported Hungarian Jewish population.

War needs being what they were, large portions of the factory had been turned over to making munitions.

So they're not just making vehicles, like they're increasingly, just because of how desperate the war is, using these auto factories to make like tank shells and artillery shells and bullets and stuff.

Another 650 skilled Jewish female laborers are brought in to make shells and explosives at the Volkswagen factory.

Their facility became a subcamp of the Neuengama concentration camp.

And by the war's end, the plant consisted of four concentration camps and eight forced labor camps.

The number of Eastern workers alone neared 5,000 people, half of them female.

The number of skilled female laborers brought another issue, which is that a lot of these female workers are arriving at the slave factory pregnant, right?

Or they become pregnant while they're working at the facility for reasons I shouldn't have to explain, you know?

Yes, yes.

And this is a problem, right, for the Nazis because you have kind of two choices.

One of them is ship these people back to where they had been taken from, which is what they do initially, right?

When they find that they've got pregnant Eastern workers, they just send them back to whatever camp they'd come from.

Oops, put them back.

Right, right, right.

Oh, no.

No, no, no.

I'm not ready to raise a baby, says the third Reich.

But this isn't like a great solution because they need these people, right?

These are not interchangeable.

These are skilled like metal workers and the like, right?

So they want these people because they don't have enough people who know how to do this kind of shit.

And they can't just send all of them back.

Because they're, by definition, doing work that the Reich doesn't have enough bodies to accomplish.

Fritz Sockle, who is the German Secretary for Labor Allocation, reverses this policy late in the war.

Like their morale actually does kind of of matter to an extent.

So, you can't just like take their kids.

I mean, that's what they're going to do, but you have to, you have to at least pretend that you're going to take care of these kids, right?

Because it does sort of matter how productive these laborers are.

They're going to

a Legoland

weekend, a nice farm to get cigarettes.

And so, late in the war, old Fritz establishes the first nursery facilities at the Volkswagen concentration camps for children of foreign laborers.

It's so dark.

Yeah, yeah.

It's really bad.

Because as you might imagine, a Nazi nursery for the children of slave laborers, not a great place for kids.

Now, on paper,

these are being described and being described to

the pregnant workers as birthing centers and places where infants will be watched and cared for while their parents work, right?

Obviously, the Nazis have no real interest in taking care of Untermensch children.

They don't want these people to exist at all.

They don't have universal child care for their slave labor?

Wow.

Yeah.

I have some strongly worded letters to write.

Yeah, exactly.

I can't believe the Nazis would do something this bad.

So the first nursery facility gets opened at the Volkswagen camp in early 1943.

And I want to quote from the same write-up again.

Medical supervision of the maternity ward and children's home became the responsibility of the factory physician and overseer of Volkswagen's medical facilities, Dr.

Hans Korbel.

In time, children were sent to a similar home in the nearby town of Ruen, where the mortality was close to 100%.

It is thought that 365 infants and toddlers, the children of female Eastern workers who labored at Volkswagen, died at Ruin.

So

this is just a death camp for little kids, right?

They're kind of pretending it's not so that these people are functional, but that is what they're doing, is they're just killing these kids.

Now, at the end of the war, the Volkswagen factory manager is a guy named Anton Pike, P-I-E-C-H, and he winds up in charge of a military unit made up of Volkswagen employees acting as reserve soldiers who are supposed to be like defending this factory.

It doesn't work well.

And as soon as it becomes clear the war is lost, Ole Anton flees to Austria and hides out on the personal estate of Ferdinand Porsche, who's his father-in-law.

He takes about 10 million Reichsmarks with him when the Nazis lose, and he tries to hide out there.

It's not going to be super successful because, like, it's Austria.

You haven't fled that far.

Like,

it's still going to be occupied?

And yeah, he's going to get charged criminally criminally for his involvement here, as is Dr.

Corbel, who ran that child death camp nursery thing.

Corbel actually gets charged by the British occupying officials with criminal neglect in 1946, and he's executed in 1947.

And again, I just really want to emphasize these are all Volkswagen employees, right?

Yes.

And Dr.

Corbel is going to be one of the very few VW employees to pay for his war-era crimes.

Porsche and Pike, you know, obviously we know who Fredand Porsche is.

Pike is the guy who is managing the factory.

They're both both arrested and held in custody after the war, but the Allied authorities never got around really charging them with any crimes.

Volkswagen continues to operate after World War II, and the Wolfsburg plant remained the headquarters of the company up until the modern era.

They never changed their HQ from like the place where they had slave factories.

Because, again, this is this very German thing: it's like, well, the buildings are perfectly good.

Like, it's not the buildings.

Why would we change where we're based out of it?

Harms, no one.

We have the factory right here.

Wow.

The vibes.

Yeah.

I remember visiting Saxonhausen, which is a concentration camp near Berlin.

It was primarily for political prisoners like 10 or 15 years ago.

And, you know, as we're going through, they point out this building.

And it's like, and that's where, you know, the camp guards would be trained.

And I was like, oh, you know, what is it today?

And they're like, well, it's a police training facility today.

And I was like, you guys can just make another building?

Like,

you're training cops here now?

Like, what the fuck?

Did no one sit down and talk about this?

Okay,

cool stuff, Jeremy.

That's a sick joke.

I mean, we're hardly ones to talk these days, but come on.

Oh, okay, excuse me.

We build our own uh cop towns from scratch.

Um, we do, but we still, people still get married at plantations, right?

Yeah, you know, oh, yeah, oh, yeah,

so it took 40 years for there to be any kind of open reckoning with Volkswagen company history on like a serious scale.

You know, this is a kind of thing that builds increasingly, you know, once there's a couple of decades distance from the war years.

That's interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, it takes a little while.

Not that like there's none initially, but it does take a while for things to really build up.

This kind of culminates in 1986 as a part of kind of this pressure.

for them to reckon with their past, Volkswagen hires a historian named Hans Mummson to write a warts and all history of the company.

And this is, you know, starts a partial reckoning, which culminates in 1991 when the company created a fund to compensate former slave laborers to the tune of some 12 million marks.

Additional reparations attempts are executed over the years.

And so there are some, there's some effort taken to like pay back.

people that Volkswagen profited from enslaving, right?

That happens some near the end of the 20th century.

Now, I wouldn't describe this as even the minimum, you know.

It's worth, though, really driving home the fact that even the proactive steps Volkswagen took in this period only happened because their hands were forced by constant attempts by activists to make the auto giant reckon with its history.

Right.

One of my favorite examples of this is there's a really good art piece by an Austrian artist, Wolfgang Flatz, called It Was All Adolf, which is made using the hood of a VW Beetle.

You can see that it's like the hood of a Volkswagen beetle, an old one kind of rusted with a swastika in the center and then the colors of the German flag running underneath it.

That's good.

I wonder if this was before or after Volkswagen Barbie.

It feels like it could be.

I believe this is before.

Well, no, no, no.

I think this actually would have been right around the same time.

That was in the 90s, right?

I think so.

I think this would have been contemporaneous to that, you know, more or less.

Okay.

Yeah.

Good art.

Yeah, I like it.

Of course, with a backstory like that, Volkswagen took great pains over the next 80-something years of their long and storied corporate history to avoid anything morally questionable.

You'd never catch Volkswagen, for example, enslaving hundreds and hundreds of people in order to make a buck.

Only, of course, you would, because going into the 50s and 60s, all of the men, not all, but a lot of the guys running Volkswagen were former Nazis.

In fact, many, if not most, of like Volkswagen's executive suite were guys who'd worked at Volkswagen during the Third Reich and just hadn't been punished at all.

And they just kept working at Volkswagen after the war.

That is like so common, though, right?

Like, right.

Right.

Okay.

This is the norm.

This is the Norman German industry, the Norman German politics.

A lot of, obviously, there are guys who had been on the left and who had gotten punished who wind up in politics after the war, but a lot of former Nazis wind up in business and politics running companies after the war because most of them don't get punished.

And so this all is relevant to Brazil because in 1964, less than 20 years after the end of World War II, Brazil gets taken over by a military dictatorship, right?

The democratically elected government gets overthrown and the military takes over.

The Brazilian military junta would govern the country with an iron fist until 1985, so a little over 20 years.

Like many dictatorships, they did engage in massive infrastructure projects, right?

This is a big part of like what the junta, where they're kind of claiming their legitimacy is that we're building highways, you know, we're modernizing the country.

We're pushing for large numbers of civilians to move from these kind of more developed, crowded urban areas and develop more of these massive chunks of empty jungle wilderness, right?

Yes.

To get their own car

to have their giant victory.

Right.

It rhymes.

It's true.

Yeah, it rhymes.

And a big part of this is like, well, we kind of got to get rid of a lot of the Amazon.

You know, that's just wasted space.

If Brazil is going to be a modern country, we got to pave over that motherfucker.

You know, we all agree on that.

Yeah.

Too much Amazon's a real problem for Brazil.

You know, we got to get rid of that shit so we can have cattle farms and the like.

So the fact that the military junta does engage in this kind of building and industrialization process, it's cited a lot by defenders of the regime, including Jair Bolsonaro, who just got convicted of doing a coup.

But Bolsonaro is very much influenced by the military dictatorship, right?

He is a guy who will always see this as like the military dictatorship was doing the right thing.

And that's what we, his whole time and power was trying to go back to those days days in a lot of ways, right?

And this is why he was a huge advocate for the illegal logging and clear-cutting of the Amazon.

You know, this is a thing that was important to him.

And this really, I'm not going to say it starts entirely under the military junta, but the military junta makes it a major part of the regime, right?

Is that we're going to get rid of this fucking jungle and develop it.

And so what you're seeing in this period from the 60s to the early 80s is the birth of the systematic state-encouraged annihilation of the rainforest.

This has continued to be a celebrated cause among the Brazilian right-wing ever since.

The overwhelming ideological need on behalf of the military dictatorship to develop the wild parts of Brazil led them to offer multinational corporations a mix of tax breaks and public funds if they would invest in projects that would help with the clear-cutting of the Amazon.

Cattle ranching was the preferred way of doing this, right?

Because if you're going to create a cattle ranch, you got to cut down a shitload of forest.

Because cows don't do great in super dense forest, right?

You want to replace all those trees with pasture right

and if you have huge herds of cattle the jungle's not going to grow back because the cows are going to stomp everything down and and right they're going to eat it right exactly everywhere yeah

everywhere this is so this is kind of seen as like this is the perfect way to get rid of our amazon problem and ensure that we have more meat right

now The process was in line with the military government's overarching resource strategy in this period.

Basically, the translation was integrate so as not to surrender, right?

And this is kind of an answer to colonialism and international capitalism where we're inviting this stuff in, but we don't just want these foreign companies to strip our land of value, right?

We want them to make, obviously, it's important, they need to make a profit or they won't be interested.

And we want to make a profit, but we also want to develop land for other use by Brazilians, right?

That's kind of the ideological underpinning of what's happening here.

Per an article in the Washington Post by Terence McCoy and Marina Diaz, quote: Volkswagen Brazil, then the largest car maker in Latin America, accepted the challenge.

In the untamed municipality of Santana do Uruguaya, the Valle do Rio Cristellino Company, a subsidiary whose leadership included Volkswagen Brazil's president, Wolfgang Sauer, and human resources director Admon Ganem, obtained a large parcel of land.

Executives back in Germany envisioned a herd of more than 100,000 cattle and an answer to world hunger.

This world not only needs cars, Volkswagen president Rudolf Lieding declared in 1974, but also meat.

This slave thing isn't like to make cars.

They're getting into the cattle business.

A natural move for Volkswagen.

I mean,

I mean, when they explain it, it makes so much sense, you know.

Yeah, the world needs not just cars, but meat, too.

I'm getting the vision.

Okay.

Yeah.

So Volkswagen settles on a chunk of forested land in the southeastern state of Para, which is about 140,000 hectares in size, this like chunk of land that they're going to turn into a ranch, which means that Volkswagen's, like this plot that they have purchased, is larger than like the capital of Brazil itself.

This is a massive piece of property.

And the farm becomes known as the Fazinda Volkswagen.

Now, Volkswagen, being an auto company, didn't have people on staff who knew how to clear-cut land or operate a cattle farm because that's kind of outside of their wheelhouse.

Yeah.

So they opted to hire outside contractors who could do the job for them, right?

We'll bring in some guys

and they'll know how to do this stuff.

Right.

And using contractors in this way, this is not just a Volkswagen thing, right?

As I said, the military dictatorship is inviting all sorts of foreign multinationals into the country to do stuff like this, to operate farms, to clear the rainforest.

And the standard is that you have a subsidiary company that is in charge of whatever efforts you're doing here in Brazil.

And that company hires local contractors to find you laborers.

And the colloquial name for these contractors is gatos or cats.

And I haven't seen like a good explanation for why they're calling these guys cats, but that's like what these guys who are finding you kind of itinerant laborers, right?

That's what they're called.

The gatos are paid a flat fee to find workers and meet certain production quotas.

Uh-oh.

Right.

Yes.

Anyone who's studied the history of capitalism, you know how this is going to end, right?

okay

we could go back to the very birth of capitalism during the age of sale under the dutch and british east india companies right there's a starvation genocide in bengal at the end of the 1700s that kills somewhere between like 10 and 30 million people and it's a product of the british east india company has these local guys these are like generally like English employees, but they're like local contractors and whatnot.

They want to get the most profit out of their territory by maximizing how much food they're extracting from like these different regions, these villages.

And they don't really care if there's enough food for the people who live there because anything that's not being shipped out and monetized is money that they think is going out of their pocket.

And so tens of millions of people are going to starve to death.

So these guys, these local employees of the company can maximize their own VIG, right?

A classic potato famine situation.

Let's take all of it.

Yeah.

Right.

This is an old story right and volkswagen's going to put a kind of a a different spin on it but you can sort of see like this is not like coming out of nowhere right right they're going to tell it again uh yeah yeah exactly the gatos hired by volkswagen trawled distant towns in the styx places like mato grosso and tocatin in order to find workers and they promise these people good contracts on paper these are good jobs there's high pay they're promising them you'll get free medical care you'll have quality housing and so these laborers and these are generally people who come from bum fuck nowhere, right?

Are signing on thinking like, okay, well, I'll be away from home for like six months or a year, and I'll save up a bunch of money and I'll come back to my families with this healthy nest egg that we can use to fund the next stage of our lives, right?

Like a cat.

Like a cat.

Exactly like a cat.

Like a cat.

Yeah.

Per the Washington Post, quote, that's not how things worked out.

Not for any of them.

The Gatos drove them to isolated chunks of forest up to 80 kilometers from the entrance of of the Volkswagen farm itself.

They were expected to pay for their housing, for their food, and for their medical care.

Since there were no towns, certainly not ones the armed guards watching them would allow them to visit, they had no choice but to pay whatever price the Gatos decided to charge for these services.

In short order, they found themselves in debt.

When the actual circumstances of their labor proved to be much rougher than they'd been promised, any who tried to return home were stopped by men with guns.

One employee, Manuel Lima, told interviewers later of his experiences, which began in April of 1981.

And, this gets started in the 70s, but most of our stories of these guys, our accounts kind of start in the 80s.

That's so recent.

Right.

This is happening when Reagan's in office.

The only water was from a filthy well swarming with mosquitoes.

We all got sick, feverish with malaria.

As I was weak, I left midway through the logging.

17 of us sought the pay we were owed, but they didn't want to pay.

And Lima and his group are forbidden from leaving, right?

They're like, okay, give us our money.

We're too sick to continue.

They're like, you don't aren't owed any money.

And also, you're not allowed to leave.

And so the Gatos force them to return to clearing the forest at gunpoint.

Lima and six of his friends are only allowed to leave five months later because they had been worked so near to death that the Gatos decided keeping them was more trouble than it was worth.

They did not get paid for their work.

Quote, we left penniless and gravely ill, he recalled.

So that's cool.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Looks like it all worked out.

Your dreams came true.

It looks like it all worked out.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean,

I am reading this and being like, wow, you know, writing comedy for the internet, not such a bad gig, you know?

A lot of us did leave penniless and gravely ill, but not that bad, you know?

Not that bad.

Woo-woo-woo.

Wow.

Anyway, speaking of the internet, let's hear some ads from the internet.

And we're back.

So we're telling the stories of some of these Volkswagen laborers who aren't technically, they're working for a subsidiary of Volkswagen.

They're directly employed by a contractor.

So VW can say, well, these were never our employees, but like, they're working Volkswagen's land.

Really?

We had no idea.

Yes.

We didn't know.

How could we have known?

Another laborer, Elias DeCarmo, was interviewed in November of 1983 about his experiences.

He recalled, we worked four months clearing the land through rain and biting flies.

On Sundays, we walked 16 kilometers kilometers for meat and other food for ourselves and our companions.

At the end of the felling, we didn't get a single cent.

The Gato Herminio said we still owed $13,160

of the local currency, right?

So,

and what you're seeing here, what's happening to these people, the term for this is debt peonage, right?

So, this is not chattel slavery, right?

These people are technically employees, unlike you know, slaves brought over from the you know Atlantic slave trade, it's the modern, uh, you know, right, It's woke slavery, you know?

They're being paid.

Yeah.

Employees.

Kind of.

They're being paid.

Now they have to pay for their health care and food and their housing, obviously, first.

And that winds up being more money than they can possibly earn.

And they can't leave until they've made up for the debt that they owe the company as soon as they start working.

But they're not like,

you know, owned by the company.

Right.

Right.

Legally.

Legally.

Yeah.

Legally.

It's different from channel slavery, right?

And how dare you?

And like the logic is whenever these people are like, but you're not letting them leave, their argument is like, well, but they owe us money.

You wouldn't expect, this isn't a charity.

You wouldn't expect Volkswagen or you wouldn't expect these Gatos to lose money because their employees couldn't avoid going into debt, right?

You know, and the reality is they don't have any choice.

For one thing, they're out in the middle of the jungle.

They can't just go like buy or like rent houses because there's not like villages and towns that they're allowed to live in.

So they have to get their food and stuff from these, you know, Volkswagen basically, or these different like gattas.

They don't have a choice here.

So they're just fucked as soon as they get hired.

One unnamed worker later informed a fact-finding delegation of Sao Paulo legislators, quote, all I did was work to pay for jeans, flip-flops, and a little food, nine months of relentless labor, cutting trees for the multinational under the orders of the contractor, and I was trapped with no way out.

Now, I think we've set up here how gnarly this system was and hideous.

I think it's important here that we take a little bit of a substantial digression, because it would be wrong for me to talk about Volkswagen's operations in Brazil as if they were just descended from the company's birth as an organ of the Nazi state.

Nor would it be right for me to make it seem as if the military junta that ruled Brazil for much of the latter third of the 20th century was something totally novel in the nation's history.

Slave labor was rampant during the military dictatorship and after because it's still a major problem in Brazil to this day.

It's rampant because slavery has always been key to the Brazilian economy since its birth as a colony.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database was first published in 1999 and is a collection of detailed files on some 35,000 slave trafficking voyages starting in 1520 and continuing until 1866.

It represents the most detailed accounting of the history of chattel slavery as an import industry.

And while these files represent just a fraction of the total number of humans forcibly transported from Africa to the New World and elsewhere, it still includes files on some 90,000-plus enslaved Africans.

And according to this database, Brazil took in more enslaved Africans than any other place on the face of the planet, right?

Brazil is the number one place where the Atlantic slave trade since began.

Nowhere else, even, no single place comes close, really, right?

Wow.

Yeah, and this is something I don't think a lot of like Americans are particularly, I think Brazilians are, but a lot of Americans aren't aware of this.

We just assume we're the best at everything.

Yeah, that we were doing the most of this.

And like,

to be clear here, as we'll talk about, we were intimately involved in the Brazilian slave trade, so we're not clean on this.

We played a supporting role in their

but this is a huge deal in Brazil.

Per an AP article by Eleanor Hughes, nearly 5 million kidnapped Africans disembarked in Brazil, more than 12 times the number taken to mainland North America.

Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888.

So that's pretty stark.

And that's why these problems continue, because it's always been so key to how Brazil has operated.

For additional context, the estimated total number of people taken from slave ships from Africa to the Americas is around 10 million.

This means Brazil, or Portuguese America, as it was known for most of this period, accounted for somewhere near half of the entire Atlantic slave trade, right?

Like

massive.

Wow.

It's impossible to exaggerate.

Wow.

Now, the importation of enslaved Africans to the United States was legally halted in the first quarter of the 19th century.

Obviously, slavery continues in the U.S.

after that point, but we're not legally importing slaves, right?

From the Atlantic, it still happens to an extent, and people are still selling enslaved people, obviously, until the end of the Civil War.

But it continues, the importation of these people continues in Brazil for much longer.

Slaves provided the main source of workers in coffee plantations in Brazil after 1831, when Brazil finally abolished the importation of slaves, right?

Uh-huh, okay.

Yeah, that's it's key to the growth of coffee as a world industry.

Uh-huh.

And even after 1831, when the formal ban is put in place, around a million enslaved Africans are forcibly imported to Brazil and what Yale University Press author Leonardo Marx described as one of the greatest crimes of the 19th century, even by 19th century standards.

Which is saying something.

Because we did a lot of crimes against humanity in the old 19th century.

Yeah.

Really puts things into perspective, huh?

Yeah, they're doing bad by the standards of like slavery in the 19th century.

Brazil is on another level.

Leonardo goes on to write, the new context of illegality, however, changed some of the characteristics of the slave trade to Brazil.

In order to circumvent authorities, especially the British Navy, slave traders increasingly employed U.S.

resources in their operations.

U.S.-built ships became a predominant feature of the transatlantic slave trade for their speed and quality.

Good old American manufacturing, as was the case in most sectors of maritime commerce.

More complicated was the fact that the U.S.

flag also started to be used by slave traders as a cover to protect them from the actions of the British Navy.

The United States was one of the few countries that refused to establish anti-slave trade treaties with the British that included the mutual right of search, which had been one of the causes of the War of 1812.

Consequently, the country managed to suppress the slave trade to its own dominions, but it had much less success in curtailing its participation in the traffic to other places such as Brazil.

U.S.

companies based in Rio de Janeiro simultaneously became the main sellers of U.S.

ships and the main exporters of slave-produced coffee.

Most of this coffee went to the United States, whose consumption of the hot beverage expanded as part of the construction of its own national identity, as opposed to the tea-drinking British.

Oh!

We are intimately involved in why slavery is such a big deal in Brazil, right?

We're providing the ships, We're providing legal cover to the people doing this illegally, and we're buying all the coffee that these slaves are producing, right?

Right.

Well, it's for us to form our own identity, and that's like really important.

And to be fair, the British, their hands are not clean because they're into tea instead of coffee.

They start a war in China over this, right?

Yeah.

Look, if you like a hot caffeinated beverage in the 19th century, you're getting involved in something fucked up.

Also, the 20th and 21st centuries, whatever, you know?

You know, you don't got to hand it to Mormons, but they were against hot beverages.

Yeah, they've got their Mormon tea with ephedra in it.

You know, that's good.

That's local.

Yeah.

So U.S.

entities remained intimately involved in the Brazilian slave trade until the 1850s, when it was unevenly but largely suppressed.

Slavery did not officially end inside Brazilian territory until the early 1890s.

And again, there's still a a problem with slavery today.

Like there's a sizable amount of effort that goes on in Brazil to deal with modern-day slavery.

During the long period in which slavery was practiced openly in Brazil, there were regular periodic escapes of enslaved workers who would form their own settlements, sometimes containing more than a thousand runaways during their height.

And the state where Volkswagen operates its ranch, Para, was a particular hub of these communities due to its isolation.

This is relevant to the reason the military junta focused on developing the area, right?

The fact that there's so many of these like freed slave colonies, that that's part of the history here, that a lot of the people who are going to be working and enslaved on this plantation are themselves the descendants of slaves, right?

Or at least partially the descendants of slaves.

Since the time of Portuguese colonization, this region of the country, which is so isolated and heavily forested, had represented a barrier to every kind of authoritarian system in the territory.

The jungle stood in opposition to the colonial government, to the racial caste system, and now to the dictatorship.

They chose to tame the jungle using the raw manpower of, in many cases, descendants of the same slaves who'd once sheltered in the jungles they were now tearing down, right?

Symbolism.

Oh, my God.

It's pretty bleak, right?

But it also makes sense.

Like, the fact that these areas are so hard to reach means that they're a threat to the power of the regime.

And so that's an additional reason to want to do this.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And slavery is so baked into the very fabric of Brazil's economy that its return during the period of the junta's time in power was a reversion to the mean more than anything else.

The website Amazon Today has done a good job of documenting other less famous cases of confirmed slave work during the same period that Volkswagen's Ranch was in operation.

Quote, in June of 1985, the farmer Sebastio Terboy from Rodonia was accused of keeping more than 100 mining farm workers under a captive regime on their farms, one of which was on the border with Bolivia.

The workers were recruited by the cat, Itamar Migal Verdipino, and transported on behalf of Salvador Fernandez, owner of a restaurant.

They were forced to work in deforestation from four o'clock in the morning until the sun disappeared, did not receive the promised payment, slept in canvas camps, and were watched by 20 armed guards.

So this is not, again, this is something that's much bigger than just Volkswagen.

And these are always very similar cases, right?

You're seeing here, like, this isn't even a multinational corporation.

This is like a guy who owns a restaurant that is, this is like his side business is, you know, helping to keep these people enslaved in order to mine for him.

Well, you know, he watched the podcast.

He listened to all their advice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Fellow entrepreneur.

Right.

He caught a YouTube ad telling him like, you know, the ultimate kind of passive income is just owning people, right?

So.

Another complaint made by representatives of the Federation of Workers in Agriculture in 1995 found slave labor being practiced at a farm called Nova Deli in Para.

Seven workers were found to have been kept for years and only given food.

Investigation into this farm revealed another owned by the same person with a clandestine cemetery in it, filled with, quote, bones and signs of incineration of bodies covered by tires and black plastic.

Such graveyards are a common sight in uncovered Brazilian slave plantations.

Covered by tires.

Sorry.

Yeah, right.

I think just to hide it, right, you burn some tires on top of it and it kind of obscures what's buried there.

I found another more recent article from 2024 in The Intercept, which discusses a farm that was expropriated by the Brazilian state in 2008 under an amendment to the Constitution in 2001 that allowed land from people holding slaves to be confiscated and turned over to the descendants of its victims.

Such actions are important, but they don't reverse the damage generations of slavery did to the fabric of Brazilian society, some of which is what allowed de Junta to take power in the first place.

Per an article on the impact of slavery on local institutions in Brazil from the Latin American and Caribbean Center by Andrea Papadilla, quote: A widespread reliance on slave labor may have heightened racial cleavages, making resource sharing through taxation and public goods more difficult.

Second, a high incidence of slavery deprived a large share of the population of a political voice and limited competition between municipalities, since slaves could not vote with their feet.

This reduced the strength of citizens' demands and the accountability of local politicians.

Thus, slavery is likely to have affected the development of fiscal capacity and provision of public goods both directly and indirectly.

On one hand, slaves lacked even the limited political voice that free Brazilian citizens had.

On the other, slavery influenced the settlement of foreign migrants and therefore the extent to which this dynamic group of citizens was able to shape local institutions, right?

So the fact that this such a huge chunk of the country is enslaved, it means both the state develops in such a way where this chunk of the populace goes most of the length of the state's existence without having any kind of a voice in politics.

And that contributes to the development of these authoritarian systems, right?

Like again, you can look at similar things have happened in the United States, right?

And are continuing to happen, you know?

It's so perfect.

It's the perfect formula.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Brilliant.

Incredible.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And, you know, up to this, the present day in Brazil, black and biracial Brazilians are likelier to be poor, to face imprisonment and to die early than their peers.

Only about a quarter of Brazil's lower house of Congress come from this segment of the population.

So Volkswagen's operations in Brazil were nothing new for it or for Brazil, except for one crucial fact, which is that they would eventually be subject to a reckoning.

And we will talk about that and more in part two.

How are we feeling, Maggie?

Woo!

Good.

Good?

Yeah, I'm feeling great.

This is so fascinating.

I feel great.

Yeah.

I'm raring for some revenge.

Yeah, we will talk a lot about what happened next and how this all continued.

But first, why don't you plug your pluggables?

Oh, yes.

How does one transition?

I feel like my brain's been cooked.

Well, you know what?

If you're feeling down, if you're feeling a little sad after this episode, you know, over on Nebula, yeah, there's a show called Amy's Dead in Dreamhouse.

It also tackles, yeah, some pretty dark topics, but you know, in the fun guys of a kid show.

So go check that out.

And then, yeah, you can find my video essays just at my name, Maggie Mae Fish.

We do have a very fun one coming out about true crime and propaganda.

So, you know, I can't wait.

Fun, just fun things at the top of my brain right now, you know?

Well, check that out.

Check out Maggie's whole oeuvre of work.

And,

you know, check out the history of slavery in Brazil.

It's probably something we should all read more about.

It's pretty bleak.

I don't know.

Also, maybe I was going to say, don't buy a Volkswagen, but really, there's not a car you can buy without some sort of nightmare history to it or nightmare present to it.

Right.

It really is.

What talisman are you picking up?

You know, I will say Volkswagen's worse than most.

You know, they got caught a couple of years ago for just like massively.

committing fraud on an enormous scale, like lying about the emissions of their diesel vehicles.

Yeah, like it's a huge deal.

And then we could talk about like the fact that they operate factories in Xinjiang and China that they have a really questionable human rights record too.

But I I don't know.

You're not going to find a clean automaker here.

So steal a car.

That's what I'm saying, everybody.

Steal all of your vehicles.

Steal a car.

That's the only ethical way to buy a car.

Yeah, auto theft.

Great.

All right.

Well, that's part one, everybody.

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