News
Assistance for educational work and modernization
Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft is donating €1 million to the Auschwitz International Youth Meeting Center. With this donation, Volkswagen intends to make a long-term contribution to safeguarding the high quality of educational work and the modernizations required at the center. For more than 20 years, apprentices from Volkswagen have visited the International Youth Meeting Center to contribute to the maintenance of the Auschwitz memorial sites together with young people from Poland.
The donation was handed over today at Volkswagen’s plant meeting in Wolfsburg. The Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn, said: “Volkswagen has been involved in the International Youth Meeting Center at Auschwitz for more than 20 years. Work at this place that is so deeply embedded in the collective memory has become a key task for our employees. They bring their impressions back to their workplace. These experiences shape us all. They have become a key element in our corporate culture. Above all, our donation expresses our gratitude for these experiences.”
The Chairman of the Group Works Council, Bernd Osterloh, emphasized: “Especially because we want our employees, whether young or old, to be part of a watchful, active civil society both in the world of Volkswagen and in the societies where they live, we support the work of our colleagues at the Auschwitz International Youth Meeting Center. At the center, each of them develops a human and political motivation to resist indifference and to stand up for other people. We therefore see it as an important task to safeguard the work of the International Youth Meeting Center in the long term. We hope that other institutions will follow us. Responsibility does not have an expiry date.”