Transparency and honesty are the keys to grappling with corporate histories with genocide, racism and slavery.
Twice a year, Dieter Landenberger and a group of his young colleagues take a trip to Poland.
It’s not your typical corporate retreat. Landenberger, Volkswagen director of heritage communications, and a group of apprentices from the German automaker travel to Auschwitz, the site of Nazi Germany’s most notorious concentration camp where an estimated 1.1 million Jews, Poles, Romanis and others were murdered.
Their goal is to commemorate the lives of those lost during the Holocaust and remind themselves of Volkswagen’s responsibility for the horrors of the past. Between 1940 and 1945, 20,000 forced laborers and 5,000 concentration camp prisoners were forced into working for the company.
“It has become part of our company culture,” said Landenberger, who spoke to us from Auschwitz where he and the apprentices were staying for two weeks and doing site restoration work. “It’s very important work and for the young people, it’s really life changing.”
With the Juneteenth commemoration of the end of slavery in the U.S. approaching, it also points the way for other companies to meaningfully engage with their own communities and histories. From a brand perspective, it’s important to do the research, ideally with external experts, and take an active role in reckoning with that history, whatever it reveals. Transparency and authenticity are the keys.
National Geographic and its history of racism
Volkswagen isn’t alone in openly addressing its history in this way.
Washington, D.C.-based National Geographic is recognized globally for its iconic magazine and its role in the fight for environmental conservation. Despite that positive reputation, the magazine’s editors made the decision to confront the brand’s racist past.
The National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 by a group of 33 explorers and scientists, all of them white men, with the mission to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge. But that work came freighted with the prevailing notions of race at the time, said Tara Roberts, National Geographic explorer in residence, during a keynote speech at the Ragan Communications Leadership Council Spring Retreat in California
So in 2018, National Geographic published an entire issue devoted to race and reckoning with the magazine’s role in perpetuating the racial divide and amplifying stereotypes. Nobody called on the editors to do it, Roberts said, and after publication some critics dismissed their efforts and questioned the editors’ motives.
“It was a very mixed public relations bag,” Roberts said.
The power of an open reckoning with the past
But for Roberts, the effect was deeply personal. She had recently become involved with Diving With a Purpose, a group of scuba divers whose mission is to discover the wrecks of the ships that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas. After seeing the issue, she reached out to National Geographic and applied for a grant from the society to document their story.
Tara Roberts, National Geographic explorer in residence. (Courtesy image)
That $30,000 grant allowed her to travel from Mozambique to Costa Rica and create a podcast series called “Into the Depths.” Roberts was featured on the magazine’s cover and was tapped as 2022’s Explorer of the Year, the first Black person to receive the award.
Roberts’ experience is a testament to the power of one organization’s decision to confront its past and let others be a part of the reckoning process. Approximately 1.8 million Africans died in the crossing from Africa, most of them forgotten to history.
“These people were poets and farmers. They were mothers and fathers,” Roberts said. “They were more than faceless statistics in a cargo hold. They were real people and they’ve never been properly mourned or grieved.”
It is difficult but empowering work, Roberts told the audience of communicators in California. “We have raised our hands and said we’re not going to wait for anyone else to decide this history is important. We are going to search for it ourselves and bring it back into memory.”
Roberts is now working with National Geographic on a new project. The Return Expedition is a reverse boat journey that will trace the route of the transatlantic slave trade across 27 countries. “It changed the world we live in today but we don’t really talk about it,” Roberts said.
Transparency in communications about history
Some brands are increasingly willing to talk. In 2020, the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK, commissioned an academic review to look into the links between the paper’s founders and the slave trade. They published the results of that study in 2022, and issued an apology and announced a restorative justice program.
Volkswagen followed a similar route. The company was founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front, the national labor organization of the Nazi Party, said Landenberger, the company’s official historian.
“With such kind of history, you have to deal with it and you have to take responsibility,” Landenberger said.
That effort was led by the workers’ union and the board starting in the 1980s and culminated in a 10-year research project that delivered a 1,000-page report on the company’s founding by one of Germany’s leading historians.
Volkswagen also entered into a cooperative agreement with the Auschwitz Committee and funded a youth meeting center at the site. Company executives also take part regularly in Holocaust Remembrance Day and partner with groups like Yad Vashem in Israel and the Anti-Defamation League in the US.
Dieter Landenberger leads a group through the memorial to forced laborers at the Wolfsburg factory. (Courtesy image)
The company also established a small museum in a former air raid shelter at its Wolfsburg, Germany factory in 1999 that 4,000 people visit each year. During the war, forced laborers went into the shelter during Allied bombing raids.
“It’s not a nice place,” Landenberger said. “Not every visitor can take it, but I think it’s the best place for an exhibition like this.”
Connection, not marketing, drives the efforts
While it’s important to be open and invite others in, communicators have to find the right approach and tone. Volkswagen is open about its history but the company avoids doing active marketing with their efforts.
“If our partners communicate these projects, it’s OK, we’re happy,” Landenberger said. “But we do not do press releases saying we donated this amount of money, we did this program. We don’t want to do marketing with it, not at all.”
That’s not to say there is no communication. Volkswagen maintains a site that directly addresses its history and in January launched a social media campaign on Instagram sharing the stories of forced laborers in conjunction with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Transparency is the most important thing these days,” Landenberger said. “You cannot hide or deny anything. I always say history sticks. It sticks on the soles of your shoes and you cannot get rid of it.”