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Detroit, 6:43 AM
Thu Nov 12
31 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/06/09
Putting a display on the wall for that time period and deliberately leaving it empty is actually a statement in itself, as in "that period existed and there's nothing there to show off or be proud of". Not the worst approach.
Yet, for a company with a labor-intensive industrial production (i.e. they used slave workers) a less abstract and more head-on open approach including actual information would be more appropriate.
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10/05/09
I'll spare you most of the details of her imprisonment except for what she said was the best day of the worst time of her young life....January 11th, 1944 at a BMW engine factory.
She detested the place. It was noisy, dangerous, and dismal work. She was one of several hundred that worked at the plant. They were housed down the road at an old leaky warehouse (falling flack would punch holes in the roof) which was a 20 minute walk down the road. For over a year she worked cleaning the machines and moving parts around before being assigned to a machine station. The most feared station in the factory.
The machine she was assigned to took a heavy metal shaft onto which several sets of caged ball bearings were pressed. It was with great force and considerable speed that this was done. Because of the lack of spare parts, the part of the machine that would normally hold the bearing in place had completely worn out and broken. They used their hands, female hands because they were smaller and could fit easier, to hold the bearing in place as it was drifted on to the shaft. It was dangerous work. Quite a few the women before her had lost their fingers, and then their lives, before her. She had been on the machine for two months.....
As she described it: The air raid sirens blared like they did almost everyday. The Germans ran for their bomb shelters as the guards locked them in the basement for cover from the falling flack. Normally the bombs would fall some distance away, never coming too close to the factory. The shaking of the walls and falling dust from the rafters was the norm. But not that day. Today their factory was a target.
For less than a minute, bombs were going off everywhere. The floor joists above their heads started to split. A concrete wall at one end of the basement gave way crushing several of her fellow prisoners. And then it was over...
The allies had destroyed the parts warehouse, the generator, and knocked several of the machines in the factory off of their stands. But one machine in the factory took a direct hit. Her machine. She couldn't help herself as she smiled. The dreaded machine was in a thousand pieces all over the factory floor and the ground outside. The fact that the most feared machine in the factory had been destroyed was a truly glorious one for her.
She loved telling that story.
She survived WWII. Emigrated to the US, became a psychologist, and spat on many a German car (walking through a parking lot with her could be embarrisng sometimes). She died in Phoenix, AZ in 1999.
10/05/09
A heart click seems like but a pittance.
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Last I looked in the History Books, Hitler didn't do any advertising before a new Battle started.
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10/05/09
For shame.
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10/05/09
BMW embrace your past, nobody save for the Jews is still pissed off at you for that.
10/05/09
I've been in that exhibit and it is quite sober and apologetic.
I must say that this makes it appear that this is the entire treatment of the World War II era in the BMW Museum. I think it is both misleading and needlessly provocative.
10/05/09