Ikea to compensate East German political prisoners with €6m fund

Ikea has announced a landmark €6 million compensation fund for the political prisoners in communist East Germany who were forced to manufacture components for its furniture during the Cold War.

The decision will raise the pressure on the other western companies that allegedly profited from the practice, including Aldi Nord, the German budget retailer.

From the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, tens of thousands of East Germans who had been incarcerated for political reasons were made to produce consumer goods for sale to the West, often in inhumane or unsanitary conditions.

Earlier this year a report by historians at Humboldt University of Berlin, commissioned by a victims’ association, found that the programme had involved between 15,000 and 30,000 political prisoners a year.

Often they were dispatched to factories considered too dangerous for regular workers or exposed to harmful chemicals such as chlorine, mercury and chromium oxide.

Birgit Krügner, who was sent to the Hoheneck women’s prison in East Berlin for “subversive agitation” and “defaming the state” in 1979, was compelled to work on the housing for washing machine motors in an underground facility run by a state-owned firm.

The components were then shipped to the Joseph Scheppach factory in Ichenhausen, Bavaria.

“I had no protective glasses, nothing,” she told a recent inquiry in the Bundestag. “Nothing to drink. Two pots of tea for 20 people over a whole day, in great heat. Drilling and punching metal and cutting the threading for screws.

“My throat was completely burnt by the hot metal shavings … They always told me: If you don’t make your quota, your children won’t get any money or any support. The conditions in this basement were catastrophic.”

While the prisoners were technically deployed to East German companies, the goods they made were often sent to West Germany in exchange for much-needed hard currency.

The report suggested their total value had been as much as 600 million deutschmarks a year in the 1980s — equivalent to about €750 million today.

Ikea acknowledged in 2012 that it had received furniture parts from a metal factory in the East German city of Naumburg, manned by hundreds of prisoners who had been convicted of trying to flee the country.

Yet it was far from alone. The Humboldt University academics found that Aldi Nord had bought women’s tights made by East German political prisoners and that other prominent West German department stores such as Karstadt and Hertie might have exploited the same system. They also accused Otto, a mail order company, of distributing some of the products.

Ikea Germany is the first of the businesses to set up a compensation scheme. “We profoundly regret that products for Ikea were made by political prisoners in East Germany,” said Walter Kadnar, its chief executive.

The project was welcomed by representatives of the victims, who said they hoped other firms would feel obliged to follow Ikea’s example.

That may prove difficult. Aldi Nord has issued a general expression of regret but said the supply chains of the 1970s and 1980s could no longer be reconstructed in detail. Otto has denied profiting from the political prisoners and said it had been the target of a campaign.