Paris, May-June 2023

An article entitled ‘‘Les entreprises, ‘des êtres sans mémoire’’’ (Businesses, “entities without memory”) was published in the journal L’Arche n° 698 of May-June 2023.

Written by Richard Odier, the article reminds us of the German, but also Austrian, Japanese or French businesses that collaborated with the Nazi regime. Eighty years later, many have emerged from World War II and the Holocaust apparently unscathed, but still have the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with their dark past.

Many companies still need to carry out a real work of Memory, to learn the lessons from their complicity and apply Simon Wiesenthal’s admonition “Never Again!”. To remind businesses of their past responsibilities and sensitize them on contemporary forms of antisemitism has been among the Wiesenthal Centre’s tasks over the past decades. This was, for example, the case with companies providing chemical agents to Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, that were used to massacre and maim the Kurdish minority.

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