IKEA apologised on Friday for using the forced labour of political prisoners in communist East Germany to make some of its furniture during the 1980s. Victims of the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) Stasi secret police watched as a senior executive of the Swedish giant acknowledged for the first time that it had failed to act when rumours of prison labour emerged.
"Despite IKEA's attempts in the 1980s to prevent the use of political prisoners in making its products in the GDR, political prisoners were used. As the representative of IKEA in Germany, I offer my deepest regrets to the victims," said Peter Betzel, the company's country manager.
Embarrassed by media reports IKEA, the world's largest furniture retailer, launched an internal investigation a year ago into whether it had used forced labour in the GDR until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It handed the investigation to auditors Ernst & Young in May to ensure greater objectivity. The presentation of the report took place a few metres from Checkpoint Charlie, one of the landmarks of the division of Berlin during the Cold War, where former Stasi prisoners said they hoped the study would lead to financial compensation.
"It's not about getting compensation just from IKEA but from all the companies who played a role in this," said 62-year-old Rainer Wagner. IKEA did not touch on the issue of compensation although it said it would consider funding further research into the whole issue of forced labour. Wagner was jailed after attempting to flee the GDR in 1966 and was forced to work in a factory producing gas meters. Some of the firms involved were privatised after reunification, he said.
Other former prisoners told of being thrown into isolation cells and fed on punishment rations for failing to reach productivity targets at factories working for Western companies, including IKEA and other household names. Thousands of firms from then-West Germany and other Western countries subcontracted production to state-controlled firms behind the Iron Curtain, attracted by the low labour costs.