Transcript

Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

From Behind the Bastards · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 57 min · 10,634 words · 140 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil | BEHIND THE BASTARDS", an episode of Behind the Bastards published October 15, 2025 (57 min, about 10,634 words). It mentions 3 people, works and ideas, including Ferdinand Porsche, Wolfsburg, Maggie May Fitz.

What this episode is about

The discussion delves into Volkswagen's controversial history in Brazil, specifically highlighting the company's operation of a slave plantation during its production activities. It also features a reflective conversation between the hosts on personal challenges and the broader implications of historical injustices associated with powerful corporations.

Key takeaways

  • Volkswagen: A symbol of motoring freedom, but its roots are tangled in Nazi ideology and slave labor.
  • Every car company seems to have a skeleton; Ford favored fascism while Toyota built war machines for Japan.
  • Surprise! Volkswagen owned a slave plantation in Brazil, proving that some histories are darker than they seem.
  • Elon Musk isn't the only controversial figure in automotive history; Henry Ford's anti-Semitism was a chilling prelude.
  • In the quest for cars, we often overlook their grim backstories—it's a bumpy ride down the lanes of history.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Maggie May Fitz
  2. – 10:00: Ferdinand Porsche
  3. – 20:00: Wolfsburg
  4. – 25:00: Ferdinand Porsche
  5. – 30:00: Wolfsburg

Notable quotes from "Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"

  • 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 know you could.
    about Ferdinand Porsche · at
  • 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 start…
    about Wolfsburg · at
  • 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, over at Nebula, yeah, there's a show called Amy's Dead and Dreamhouse. it.
    about Maggie May Fitz · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Ferdinand Porsche — Person · Referenced industrialist/designer (VW origin figure) · 2 mentions · first at
    Presented as the key automobile designer approached by German auto industry/Nazi state to design the affordable "people’s car"; described as willing to work with Nazis to realize his design goals.
  • Maggie May Fitz — Person · Main guest / co-discussant · 2 mentions · first at
    Guest reacting to and discussing the episode’s investigation into Volkswagen’s history; also plugs her own work and references shared past with the host at Cracked.

Places & events

  • Wolfsburg — Place · Headquarters · 3 mentions · first at
    Location of Volkswagen's main factory during the Nazi era.

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. Uh a a topic I am well uh 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 hung over. Uh 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 Fitz. You see how I'm doing today, Maggie? You see how I'm doing? You see where my head is?

Fire. I'm [ __ ] up. Oh my god. It's almost like I'm not hung over. More [ __ ] electrolytes.

Sure. Thursday night's a normal party night. Absolutely. When you have a normal human schedule like us say for our kind. Yes, it is.

Mhm. Yeah. For our kind. Normal normal healthy people in the entertainment industry. Maggie,

you and I go way back. Uh we were colleagues at the old placec cracked.com. Um and you have grown uh and spread your wings from there. Uh like like like all of our wonderful colleagues uh and you have a YouTube channel now and uh you you've 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. Um

Oh, yes. Good. Something terrible. Good. Oh, I'm so prepared. Uh much like uh yeah, the show is called Amy's Dead and Dreamhouse. It's on Nebula. Um it's also about terrible things. Uh terrible things that happened to uh 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 uh and and something uh that I did not know about. Actually, this is this is one that kind of took me by surprise uh the the 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. Yeah. And uh some tenuous connection to Nazism. Is that

It's not tenuous. I'll tell you that much right now, Maggie. Okay. We will be talking a little bit about that. I I knew that like Volkswagen was connected to the Nazis like a lot of car companies, right? Like if you go back like I I don't know. There's no 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 [ __ ] obviously everyone's aware of the 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? People are aware of that.

Uhhuh. In Michigan. Yes. Ford wound up being a valuable part of the United States's like, you know, 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 US has sided with Nazi Germany, right? Like

absolutely. He's raring to go in my memory of history. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Raring to go with his Nazi newspaper about anti-semitism. Um, 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,

DTO, that's Yeah. No. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Toyota and Mitsubishi made a lot of 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? it not just in terms of making cars for the Vermacht, but like utilizing slave labor, all that good stuff. Um,

so that's not super surprising, right? Just the fact that car companies have 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. Um, I didn't know much about that. Oh, whoa. Oh, your words are catching up to my hung over brain. Um,

yes, we're talking about Volkswagen's Brazilian slave plantation today. Um, so that's that's got to be fun. Uh, this is this will this will this will be, you know, get everybody off on a good mood. You know, there's not obviously we very rarely encounter fascism in our day-to-day lives or on the news. So I certainly am. It's always it's refreshing to hear some history, you know.

Mhm. So it just reminds me of the Yeah. Yeah. Things used to be bad before we as a species really figured everything out, you know. Um Yeah.

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? Uh cuz it's a dark one. um in February. I've you know that like there's a tenuous connection, right? And so we're going to get into kind of what that connection entailed uh in February of 1933, right at the dawn of the Nazi regime. This is right after Hitler took office. Okay. Uh Adolf Hitler appeared at a car show in Germany to announce the start of a people's motorization, right? Um, and this was his plan and the plan that the Nazi party was really pushing to motoriize the Reich to like 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. Um, 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? And this

that does make sense actually. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That Yes. Yeah. Mhm. Yes. And that's kind of like fascism is at this point. It it 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 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,

not familiar at all. Uh yeah, that's uh bringing no bells. Today they're embracing AI and [ __ ] right? But like it's the same basic idea, right? This kind of like reckless embrace of like speed and technology. Um, and yeah, so one of Hitler's immediate priorities is kind of announcing and trying to really like propagandize the fact that like not like the Third Reich is going to uh is going to be a motorized society, you know. Uh, and in 1934, the next year, the Reich Association of the German auto industry entered into talks with a pioneering automobile designer, Ferdinand Porsche.

Uh, you may remember that or that last name is probably familiar to most people, right? This is the guy who made who started Porsche, right? Like obviously Porsche. The Porsche. Yes. Yes. Um and they sit down with Porsche and they ask him to create a cheap and efficient personal automobile. Uh something that would be affordable for like the average German family and something that like you know you could you could basically replace you know the the horses and other methods of transit with 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?

Like the Vulk is the beginning. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Great. That's where the name comes from. Thousand children uh into the tiny car.

Your motorized. You win. Yeah. Get all get your huge Nazi family into this tiny car and yeah, it'll be great.

Um so unlike many of the Reich's policies, Hitler personally directed the search for a people's car. There was a bunch of [ __ ] 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 motoriize Germany in an extent that's kind of rare for him, right? Cuz he is a big delegation guy, you know?

Like he's not 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 kind of in 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 motoriize Germany.

Um 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. Uh he liked going on rides. Cars were more exciting back then. You know, we we hadn't gotten completely burnt out on them. Um and Porsche, Ferdan 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 and to an extent.

Yeah, exactly. It's kismmet, you know. Um and his biographer Wolf from PA 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 uh 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 it's really convenient for both men.

Yeah. Yeah. And and Porsche, I mean, he's not 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. He just kind He doesn't really give a [ __ ] who he has to work with to make it happen, right? His dream is just to get this car made. The Nazis are willing to do that. He's a great man.

Entrepreneur working for himself. Yeah. Yeah. He just doesn't give a [ __ ] 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 the [ __ ] Volkswagen.

Um, 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 this vehicle needs to be fairly easily.

Yeah. Okay. Beats walking. Okay. That's our truth. So unintimidating. You ever tried to walk to Russia, Maggie?

Right. Um, 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 that it it wasn't like the idea was you know the Nazis when they came to power they had to signpost and 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 get 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 over in 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 workingass 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,

we will do this and this and this, but you will get a fancy hilton. Yes. Exactly. We're going to steal all this [ __ ] 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 like are like achieve. But this is the this is the idea behind the strength through joy program, right? Is we're kind of buying the loyalty of the working class uh of the of the classes that had been unionized and it 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. the idea. You get, you know, a couple ping pong tables, they'll say after work. Yeah.

Yes. It's exactly how Silicon Valley used to work, right? Strength through joy. Uh productivity through joy. Um and so the the motoriization 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, an economic collapse as Germany, that had gone through something as devastating as a famine so recently. That's really appealing, right? And it 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 create this, that they were trying to do this, right? That this was something that they were, you know, talking about, right? Um and cars were expressly a luxury

commodity when Hitler took over. When when he comes to power only about 150th of the country owned automobiles and the idea is that you know cars are not cheap right and the Volkswagen is supposed to cost just 999 Reichkes marks uh and there will be like an installment plan so regular citizens are able to afford it. It's a big deal. Uh 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 Crystalalln knocked in 1938, Jews were legally forbidden from driving or owning cars in the Reich. Um Hitler approves the first Volkswagen prototype near the end of 1935 and 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 start creating and building this factory in

Wolfsburg. Um, 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.

It's it's right. Yeah. Great name. They they found a better name. I think we could all agree Volkswagen rolls off the tongue better than the KDF wagon. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I know I uh my friends got this great K classic KDF wagon. It's still got the swastikas on the back end and everything.

Yeah, right. Um kill death wagon, right? Um a kill death [ __ ] wagon. Yeah, there we go. Um 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 kind of the given the just the nature of the German economy and their access to resources.

Look at that. They have a they already have the factory going. That's so convenient.

Right. So they just turned it over. It kind of Right. Right. It just moves immediately over to like military production. Right. Um, 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 uh 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. The fir a first concentration camp on the site, Arbitorf, was established on factory property in April of 1942. Force laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce at the city of the KDF car. So this is throughout the war these Volk the early Volkswagens, you know, and the the military vehicles they pivot to making are being made primarily by slaves, right? Like that's from the jump. VW is uh cars made by slave labor, which is 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 we

Yeah. Yeah. There we go. We we use kids for cars now. So, you know, it's Well, their tiny hands can reach the the the precious minerals in the Congo,

right? 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. Just as a heads up. Anyway, we're back. So, uh we're talking 1942. The city of the KDF car is primarily using slave labor to make uh you know, now they're not making cars for civilians. They're making cars for the military concentration camp inmates cuz they need 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 they're kind of combing concentration camps. They're going to places like Awitz, right? And in fact, a Volkswagen engineer travels to Awitz in 1944 to pick out 300 skilled metal workers from the recently

transported Hungarian Jewish population. War needs being what they were, large facions of the factory, uh, 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. Um uh another 650 skilled Jewish female laborers are brought in to make shells and explosives at the Volkswagen factory. Um their facility became a sub camp of the Noengama 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. Yes. And this is a problem, right, for the Nazis. Uh cuz 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, is they just send them back to whatever camp they'd come from. But this is not a good long-term solution. Right. Right. No,

I'm not ready to raise a baby, says the Third Reich. Um, 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 right the like, right? So they they want these people because they don't have enough people who know how to do this kind of [ __ ] and they can't just send all of them back. Um cuz they're by definition doing work that the right doesn't have enough bodies to accomplish. Fritz Sle uh who is the German secretary for labor allocation reverses this policy late in the war. Their morale actually does kind 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 have sort of 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 Lego farm for the weekend. A nice farm. Legoland. That's right. Yeah. Um and so late in the war, old Fritz establishes the first nursery facilities at these the the Volkswagen concentration camps uh for children of foreign laborers.

Huh. Okay. So dark. It is. It's really bad cuz as you might imagine, a Nazi nursery for the children of slave laborers, not a great place for kids. Um, now on paper, these are these are being described and being described to the the the pregnant workers as birthing centers and places where infants will be watched and cared for while their parents work, right? Um, obviously the Nazis have no real interest in taking care of interment children, right? They they think these they they don't want these people to exist at all. And so

they don't have universal child care for their slave labor. Yeah. Wow. I have some strongly worded letters to write. Uh

yeah, exactly. I can't believe the Nazis would do something this bad. Um so the first nursery facility gets opened at the Volkswagen camp in early 1943. And 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 Corbal. In time, children were sent to a similar home in the nearby town of Ruin, 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 are functional, but that is what they're doing is they're just killing these kids. Um, now at the end of the war, the Volkswagen factory manager is a guy named Anton Pike, uh, P I E C, 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, Anton flees to Austria and hides out on the personal estate of Ferdinand Ferdinand Porsche, who's his father-in-law. Um he takes about 10 million Reichkes marks with him when the Nazis lose and he tries to hide out there. It's not going to be super successful cuz like it's Austria. You haven't fled that far. Like it's still going to be occupied.

Um and yeah, he's going to get charged criminally for his involvement here. As is Dr. Corbell, who ran that child death camp nursery thing. Uh, Corbella 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? Um, and Dr. Corbell is going to be one of the very few VW employees to pay for his war era crimes. Porsche and uh Pike, uh, who's, you know, obviously we know who Freden Porsche is. Pike is the guy who was managing the factory. They're both arrested and held in custody after the war, but the Allied authorities never got around to 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. That's again, this is this very German thing of it's like, well, the buildings are perfectly good. Like, it's not the buildings, but what are we going to do? Why would we change where we're based out of

John's no one? We have the factory right here. What? Oh, the vibes. Yeah. I remember visiting Saxonhousen, which is a concentration camp near Berlin. Was primarily for political prisoners like 10 or 15 years ago.

And you know, as we're going through, they point out this building. It's like, and that's where, you know, the the camp guards would be trained. And I was like, oh, you know, what is it today? And like, well, it's a police training facility today. And I was like, you guys couldn't just make another building? Like, is it you're training cops here now? Like, what the [ __ ]

Did no one sit down and talk about this? Okay. Cool stuff. Germany, it's a sick joke.

I mean, we're hardly ones to talk these days, but come on. Oh. Oh, excuse me. We build our own uh [ __ ] towns from scratch. We do, but we still people still get married at plantations right?

You know. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Um, 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. Um, 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. Um, 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 Mumson 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. Uh, 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 that happens some near the end of the 20th century. Now, I wouldn't I wouldn't describe this as even the minimum. You know, it's worth though really driving home the fact that the 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. One of my favorite examples of this is a there's a really good art piece by an Austrian artist, Wolf Gang Flats, called It Was All Adolf, which is made using the hood of a VW Beetle. I'm going to have uh I guess Ian share the image here um so folks can see. But yeah, you can see that it's like a the it's the 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.

Um that's good. I wonder if this was before or after a 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?

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

Yeah. Of course, with a backstory like that, Volkswagen took great pains over the next 80s 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. You know,

that isn't so common though, right? Like Right. Yes. This is the norm. This is the norm in German industry, the norm in 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.

Um and so uh 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. Uh the Brazilian military Hunto would govern uh 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 ha where they're kind of claiming their legitimacy is that well 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. A big

to get their own car uh to have their giant Yeah. And to have their own like and a big a big 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] so we can have cattle farms and the like. So the fact that the military honta does engage in this kind of re like building and industrialization process it's cited a lot by defenders of the regime including Jaer Bolsinaro who just got convicted of doing a coup but Bolsinaro 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 in power was trying to go back to those days in a lot of ways right and this is why he huge advocate for the illegal logging and clear cutting of the Amazon. You know that this is a thing that was important to him. And this really I'm not going to say it starts entirely under the military huna, but the military huna makes it a major part of the regime,

right? Is that we're going to get rid of this [ __ ] jungle and develop it. Um 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 o 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 cuz cows don't do great in super dense forest, right? You want to replace all those trees with pasture,

right? Mhm. Um and if you have huge herds of cattle, the jungle's not going to grow back cuz the cows are going to stomp everything down and and and eat. 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 um 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 underpinninging of what's happening here per an article in the Washington Post by Terrence McCoy and Marina Das quote Volkswagen Brazil

then the largest car maker in Latin America accepted the challenge in the untamed municipality of Santana de Araguaya the valet durio Cristalino company a subsidiary whose uh leadership included Volkswagen Brazil's president Wolf Gang Sauer and human uh and human resources director Admin Ganam obtained a large par 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 Rudolph Leading declared in 1974, but also meat.

And so that's that's really Volkswagen is not this slave thing isn't like to make cars. They're getting into the cattle business. a natural uh move for Volkswagen.

I mean, uh yeah, I mean, when they explain it, it makes so much sense. Yeah. The world needs not just cars, but meat too.

I'm I'm getting the vision. Okay. Yeah. So, Volkswagen settles on a chunk of forested land in the southeastern state of Par, 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 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 cuz that's kind of outside of their wheelhouse. 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. 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 c 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 gate or cats.

And I haven't seen like a good explanation for why they're calling these guys cats, but that's like what they what these these guys who are finding you kind of itinerant laborers, right? Um that's what they're called. And these the gate are played a flat paid a flat fee to find workers and meet certain production quotas. Now this is an old strategy in extreme right. Yes. Anyone who studied the history of capitalism, you know how this is going to end, right?

Um 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 the I mean these are like generally like English employees but they're like contractors and whatnot who

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 care if there's enough food for the people who live there because that anything that's not being shipped out and 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 take all of it yeah this is this is an old this is an old story right and

Volkswagen is 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? Um

they're going to tell it again. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The the gate hired by Volkswagen troll distant towns and the sticks, places like Mroso uh and Tokatin um 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 [ __ ] 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 next nest egg that I can we can use to fund the next stage of our lives. Right.

Like a cat. Like a cat. Exactly. Like a cat. Yeah. Mhm. Per the Washington Post, quote, "That's not how things worked out. Not for any of them. The gate drove them to isolated chunks of forest up to 80 km from the entrance 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 with the armed guards watching them would allow them to visit, they had no choice but to pay whatever price the gate 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 you know, 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 gate force them to return to clearing the forest at gunpoint. Uh Lima and six of his friends are only allowed to leave 5 months later because they had been worked so near to death that the Gatau 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 That's cool. Yeah. Looks like it all worked out. It looks like it all worked out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I 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 Pennyless and gravely ill, but not that bad." You know,

not that bad. Um, anyway. Oh, wow. 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 uh who aren't technically they're working for a subsidiary of Volkswagen and they're being they're directly employed by a contractor. So, VW can say, "Well, these were never our employees, but like they're working Volkswagen land, right?" Exactly.

We didn't know. How could we have known? Um, another laborer, I Darmmo, 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, uh, we walked 16 km for meat and other food uh, for ourselves and our companions. At the end of the felling, we didn't get a single scent." The Gateau Hermino said he still we still owed 13,160 um, you know, the local currency, right? So, and what you're seeing here, what's happening to these people, the term for this is debt page, right? So, this is not cattle slavery, right? These people are technically employees unlike, you know, slaves brought over from the, you know, Atlantic slave trade.

Modern uh it's woke slavery, you know. They're being paid. Yeah. Employees. Mhm.

They're being paid now. They have to pay for their health care and food and 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? Legally legally. Legally, it's different from cattle slavery, right? 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 these gateos 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 they can't just go like buy or like rent houses. They're not like living here in 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 gatas. They don't have a choice here. Um, so they're just [ __ ] as soon as they get hired.

Um, one unnamed worker later informed a factf 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 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 hunter 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. And it was 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 cattle 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? This is Brazil is the number one place where the Atlantic slave trade sends people. Nowhere else even. No single place comes close really. Right.

Wow. Wow. Yeah. 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. We were doing the most of this. And like we were, 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 either.

We played a supporting role in their number one slot. But, but this is a huge deal in Brazil. Per an AP article by Elanor 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. Um, so that's pretty stark and that's why these problems continue because it's always been so key to how Brazil has operated.

Uh, for additional context, the estimated total number of people taken from slave ships from Africa you by slave ships 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. Um. 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 US after that point, but we're not legally importing slaves, right, from the Atlantic. It still happens to an extent and people are still like selling enslaved people obviously until you know the end of the civil war. Um 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.

Okay. Yeah. It's it's key to the growth of coffee as a world industry. Um Uhhuh. 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 uh Leonardo Marks described as a as one of the greatest crimes of the 19th century, even by 19th century standards, which is saying something

cuz we did a lot of crimes against humanity in the old 19th century. Yeah. Really puts things into perspective, huh? Huh.

Yeah. They're doing bad by the standards of like slavery in the 19th century. Brazil is is on another level.

Wow. Uh 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 incre increasingly employed US resources in their operations. US-built ships became a predominant feature of the transatlantic slave trade for their speed and quality, as was the case good old American manufacturing. as was the case in most sectors of maritime commerce. More complicated was the fact that the US 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 in its to its own dominions, but it had much less success in curtailing its participation in the traffic to other places such as Brazil. US companies based in Rio di Janeiro simultaneously became the main sellers of US 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 tear drinking British. So we are intimately involved in why slave tra 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.

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

And the the British, their hands are not clean because they're into tea instead of coffee, they start a war in China over this, right?

Um, yeah. If you like a a hot caffeinated beverage in the 19th century, you're you're getting involved in something [ __ ] up. Also, the 20th and 21st centuries, whatever. You know,

look, you know, you don't got to hand it to Mormons, but they work as hot beverages that, you know,

right? Yeah. You know, yeah, they've got their Mormon tea with a fedra in it. You know, that's good. That's that's local. Yeah.

So, US 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, it's there's still a problem with slavery today. Like there's a sizable amount of effort that goes on in Brazil to deal with modern-day slavery. Um 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, uh Pyra, was a particular hub of these communities due to its isolation. This is relevant to the reason the military hunto 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 on and enslaved on this plantation are themselves the

descendants of slaves, right? Or at least partially the descendants of slaves. Um, 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 cast 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' once sheltered in the jungles they were now tearing down. Right?

The symbolism, guys. Right. It's it's it's pretty it's pretty bleak, right? But it also makes sense like these the fact that these areas are so hard to reach means that they're a threat to the power of the regime. And so there that that's an additional reason to want to do this.

Absolutely. And slavery is so baked into the very fabric of Brazil's economy that its return during the period of the Hunter's time in power was 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 Turbo 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 Maggal Verdipino and transported on behalf of Salvador Fernandez, owner owner of a restaurant. They were forced to work in deforestation from 4:00 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 I

this is something that's much bigger than just Volkswagen. And it always 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, he, you know, he watched the podcasts. He he listened to all their advice. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Fellow entrepreneur. Mhm. Right. He he cut a YouTube ad telling him like, you know, the passive income, 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 Novadelli and Par. Several 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.

Yeah. Uh right. I think just to hide it, right? You burn some tires on top of it and it kind of obscures what what's buried there. Um, I found another more recent article from 2024 in the Intercept, which discusses a farm that was appropriated 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 a 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 Deonta 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 Papadia, 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 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 the fact that this is always like this is not again you can look at similar things have happened in the United States, right? And are continuing

the perfect formula. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Brilliant. Incredible. Oh, wow.

Mhm. Yeah. And you know, up to this the present day in Brazil, black and biracial Brazilians are likely 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 you doing? How we feeling, Maggie?

Good. Good. This is so fascinating. Feeling great. I'm raring for some uh some revenge.

Yeah, we we we will talk we will talk a lot um yeah about what happened next and how this all continued. Uh but first, why don't you plug your pluggables?

Oh, yes. Uh, how how does one transition? I feel like my brain's been cooked. Well, you know what? If you if you're feeling down, if you're feeling a little sad after this episode, you know, over at Nebula, yeah, there's a show called Amy's Dead and Dreamhouse. Uh, it also tackles some pretty dark topics. Uh, but, you know, in the Fun Guys of a Kid Show, so go check that out. Uh, and then, yeah, you can find my video essays, uh, just at my name, Maggie May Fish. Uh, we do have a very fun one coming out about true crime and propaganda. So, you know,

fun just fun things at the top of my brain right now, you know. Well, check that out. Check out Maggie's whole URA of work and uh, you know, check out the history of slavery in Brazil. It's probably something we should all read more about. It's pretty bleak. Um, I don't know. Also, maybe I I was gonna say don't buy a Volkswagen, but really there's not a car you can buy without some sort of nightmare history to it.

It really is. What uh what Talman 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 a an enormous scale, like lying about the emissions of their diesel vehicles, like just an absolute Yeah. Like is a huge deal. Um, and then we could talk about like the fact that they they operate factories uh in in Zenzhang in China that they have a really questionable human rights record, too. But I don't know, you're not going to find a clean automaker here. Um, so steal a car. That's what I'm saying.

Everybody, steal all of your vehicles. That's the only ethical way to buy a car. Yeah. Auto theft. Mhm. Great. All right. Well, that's part one, everybody.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

Robert Evans (Host), Maggie May Fish (Guest).

What is "Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil | BEHIND THE BASTARDS" about?

The discussion delves into Volkswagen's controversial history in Brazil, specifically highlighting the company's operation of a slave plantation during its production activities. It also features a reflective conversation between the hosts on personal challenges and the broader implications of historical injustices associated with powerful corporations.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

3 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Ferdinand Porsche, Wolfsburg, Maggie May Fitz. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

The episode runs 57 min; the transcript is about 10,634 words in 140 timestamped sections.

More from Behind the Bastards

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated February 2, 2026.