Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil

Summary

Behind the Bastards: “That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil” (Part One)

Host: Robert Evans
Guest: Maggie Mae Fish
Date: October 14, 2025
Podcast: Behind the Bastards, Cool Zone Media/iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the dark postwar history of Volkswagen in Brazil, focusing especially on the company’s operation of a massive cattle plantation (Fazenda Volkswagen) that used slave labor deep into the late 20th century. Host Robert Evans and guest Maggie Mae Fish dig into Volkswagen’s Nazi origins, the continuity of criminal practices after World War II, and the broader context of slavery in Brazil. Their irreverent tone adds gallows humor to a harrowing historical account.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

Volkswagen’s Nazi Roots

[07:52-19:21]

• Robert and Maggie kick off by situating Volkswagen’s infamous origins in Nazi Germany.
• Origin Story:
  • In 1933, Hitler pushes for the “People’s Motorization”—a car for every German family, both as luxury and as explicit Nazi propaganda.

    “One of Hitler's immediate priorities is... announc[ing]... that the Third Reich is going to be a motorized society.” (Robert, 09:48)

  • Porsche, already seeking to develop a mass-market vehicle, pairs with Hitler for mutually convenient ambitions.

    “Porsche and Hitler as made for each other.” (Robert, 12:37)

• Civilian & Military Intertwined:
  • The car was always planned for both civilian and military use.
  • Wolfsburg Volkswagen factory is opened with Hitler’s personal involvement.
• Nazi Labor Practices:
  • VW quickly shifts to war production and becomes a major user of forced labor under the Nazi regime—primarily camp inmates and foreign POWs.

    “Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of Soviet prisoners of war... Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce at the city of the KDF car.” (Robert quoting Holocaust Encyclopedia, 19:27)

• Atrocities:
  • Slave laborers included many skilled Jewish women; pregnant workers’ children were sent to “nurseries” with near 100% infant mortality rates.

    “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.” (Robert, 28:40)

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Volkswagen After the War: Continuity, Evasion, and (Eventual) Reckoning

[31:59-34:43]

• Continuity of Personnel and Practice:
  • Postwar, many former Nazi execs kept running VW.

    “Many, if not most, of Volkswagen's executive suite were guys who'd worked at Volkswagen during the Third Reich and just hadn't been punished.” (Robert, 34:22)

• Reluctant Reckoning:
  • Only after decades of activism and bad press (e.g., Hans Mommsen's company history in 1986, partial reparations in 1991) did VW take steps to address this legacy.

    “Even the proactive steps Volkswagen took... only happened because their hands were forced by constant attempts by activists to make the auto giant reckon with its history.” (Robert, 33:20)

  • Notable protest art: “It Was All Adolf” displayed a VW Beetle hood emblazoned with a swastika.

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Brazil’s Long History of Slavery

[49:54-57:00]

• Contextualizes Volkswagen’s 20th-century plantation abuses within Brazil’s centuries-old reliance on slavery.

  “Brazil took in more enslaved Africans than any other place on the face of the planet.... more than 12 times the number taken to mainland North America.” (Robert quoting AP, 53:03)

• Even after supposed abolition, forced labor and debt peonage persisted, especially in the coffee industry and Amazon region.

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The Volkswagen Fazenda: Operating a Slave Plantation in Late 20th Century Brazil

[35:51-48:54, picks back up 48:54-63:07]

• Dictatorship & Development:
  • Brazil’s military dictatorship encouraged multinationals to “develop” the Amazon—mainly by clear-cutting and ranching—which served both economic and political (anti-insurgency) aims.
  • Volkswagen, seeking to diversify beyond cars, established a gigantic cattle ranch, Fazenda Volkswagen, larger than Brazil’s capital city.

    “Volkswagen, Brazil, then the largest carmaker in Latin America, accepted the challenge… ‘This world not only needs cars,’ Volkswagen president Rudolf Leding declared in 1974, ‘but also meat.’” (Robert quoting Washington Post, 39:16)

• Contractors (Gatos) and the Debt Trap:
  • VW used contractors (“gatos”) to round up rural poor with promises of good wages and conditions.
  • In reality, workers were isolated, charged exorbitant fees for food/housing/tools, and kept in debt peonage enforced by armed guards.

    “They were expected to pay for their housing, for their food, and for their medical care…. In short order, they found themselves in debt. Any who tried to return home were stopped by men with guns.” (Robert, 43:02)

  • Former laborers recounted months of brutal forced work, illness, and no pay.

    “We left penniless and gravely ill.” (Manuel Lima, quoted by Robert, 44:28)

• Modern Slavery:
  • VW attempted to distance itself, claiming lack of awareness, as abuses were carried out “by contractors,” but the operation was core to VW’s land.

    “These Volkswagen laborers... they’re directly employed by a contractor. So VW can say, ‘Well, these were never our employees,’ but like, they’re working Volkswagen’s land.” (Robert, 48:54)

• Wider Pattern:
  • Similar cases of slavery on farms across Amazonia, not limited to Volkswagen.
  • Mass graves and clandestine cemeteries, discovered as recently as the 1990s and 2000s.

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Impact of Slavery on Brazilian Society

[60:45-63:07]

• Enduring political and social damage from historic and ongoing slavery, including inequality, political disenfranchisement, and violence directed at Black and biracial Brazilians.
• Laws now allow seizure of land used for slavery, but damage remains.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On VW-Nazi Ties:

  “It's not tenuous. I'll tell you that much right now, Maggie.” — Robert (02:26)

• On the Birth of the Beetle:

  “Hitler needed a creative mind... and Porsche needed political backing to enable him to build it without financial pressure.” — Robert (quoting Peida, 12:37)

• On Labor Under Nazism:

  “From the jump, VW is cars made by slave labor. Which is great.” — Robert (20:33)

• On Corporate Evasion:

  “They're working Volkswagen's land. Why?... We had no idea.” — Maggie (49:09–49:11, sarcasm)

• On Today’s Car Industry:

  “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 or nightmare present to it.... Steal a car. That’s the only ethical way to buy a car.” — Robert (64:30–65:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------| | 07:52 | VW’s Nazi origins and use of forced labor | | 19:27 | Details on concentration camp labor at VW | | 28:40 | Infanticide in Nazi “nurseries” at VW factories | | 31:59 | Postwar continuity of Nazi leadership at VW | | 33:20 | VW’s halfhearted reckoning with its history | | 34:43 | Postwar VW execs and transition to Brazil context | | 35:51 | Start of VW’s Brazilian plantation saga | | 39:16 | “This world not only needs cars… but also meat.” | | 43:02 | The contractor (“gato”) system of coerced labor | | 44:28 | Manuel Lima’s testimony of abuse | | 48:54 | “We had no idea” – VW’s denial of responsibility | | 53:03 | Brazil’s status as the world’s largest slaver nation| | 56:34 | US involvement in Brazilian slave trade | | 60:45 | Legacy of slavery and effects on modern Brazil | | 63:07 | Teaser for Part Two |

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Tone & Style

• Gallows Humor: The hosts oscillate between frank horror at the material and irreverent jokes.

  “Right. Beat walking. They're so unintimidating.” — Maggie (14:06) “It’s woke slavery. You know, they're being paid.” — Robert (49:54)

• Critical and Incisive: Frequently connect past injustices to present-day practices in corporate capitalism and global supply chains.

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a disturbing but vital look at how corporations like Volkswagen perpetuated atrocity beyond the Nazi era, capitalizing on longstanding systems of oppression like slavery—enabled by political regimes and the shifting veneer of legality. The discussion previews further coverage in Part Two, including modern reckoning and consequences for VW.

Recommended for:
Listeners interested in corporate crime, dark modern history, Brazilian social issues, and the continuity between fascist pasts and present injustices.

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Pluggables:

• Maggie Mae Fish: YouTube channel & show “Amy’s Dead in Dreamhouse” on Nebula
• Robert Evans: See “Behind the Bastards” for deep dives into the worst people/systems

“Check out the history of slavery in Brazil. It's probably something we should all read more about. It's pretty bleak.” — Robert Evans (64:08)

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. A topic I am well 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 hungover. I am the villain in my own life and very angry at myself. Here to express rage at me, my guest and friend, Maggie Mae. Fis. Fi. Fis. You see how I'm doing today, Maggie? See how I'm doing? You see where my head is? I'm fucked up.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Oh, my God. It's almost like I'm not hungover either.

[Robert Evans]

I need more fucking electrolytes. Sure. Thursday night's a normal party night.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Absolutely.

[Robert Evans]

When you have a normal human schedule like us.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

I was gonna say for our kind. Yes, it is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, for our kind. Normal, normal, healthy people in the entertainment industry. Maggie, you and I go way back. We were [e-mail] and you have grown and spread your wings from there, like all of our wonderful colleagues. And you have a YouTube channel now, and you 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Absolutely. Well, you know, I think it's apt. We're going to be talking about supposedly someone terrible.

[Robert Evans]

Something terrible. Good.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Oh, I'm so prepared. Much like. Yeah. The show is called Amy's Dead in Dreamhouse. It's on Nebula. It's also about terrible things. Terrible things that happen to you in adulthood. You and all of us. So I'm very excited. I'm so excited to learn today, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

Well, we are going to be talking about something terrible that I did not know about, actually. Really? This is. This is one that kind of took me by surprise, 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Volkswagen New Beetle driving you wild?

[Robert Evans]

Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. That's one thing they're known for.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Barbie had one at one point.

[Robert Evans]

Barbie had a Volkswagen. Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

And some tenuous connection to Nazism is that.

[Robert Evans]

It's not tenuous. I'll tell you that much right now, Maggie. We will be talking a little bit about that. I knew that, like, Volkswagen was connected to the Nazis, like, a lot of car companies. Right? 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 fucking. Obviously everyone's aware of 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?

[Ad Read / Sponsor]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

People are aware of that in Michigan. Yes. Ford wound up being a valuable part of the United States, like 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Like, absolutely. He's raring to go in my memory of history.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Raring to go with his Nazi newspaper about anti Semitism. 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, because I love my Toyota.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Ditto. That's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Didn't know. Okay, okay.

[Robert Evans]

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? Not just in terms of making cars for the Wehrmacht, but like utilizing slave labor, all that good stuff. So that's not super surprising. Right? Just the fact that 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 plant in Brazil in the latter half of the 20th century.

[Nicole Angemi]

Ooh.

[Robert Evans]

What? I didn't know much about that.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Your words are catching up to my hungover brain.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, we're talking about Volkswagen's Brazilian slave plantation today. Okay. You know, get everybody off on a good mood. Obviously we very rarely encounter fascism in our day to day lives or on the news, so I certainly have. You know, it's always, it's refreshing to hear some history, you know, so just.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Remind me of the.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, things used to be bad before we as a species really figured everything out, you know?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

This is an I heart podcast.

[Cheryl McCollum]

I'm Sheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place, it's a way of life. Now this ain't just any old podcast, honey. We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives, prosecutors, and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years to help me work these difficult cases. I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of, and thousands you haven't we started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes. Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims, family members. Come be a part of my Zone 7 while building yours. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

On a cold January day in 1995, 18 year old Christa pike killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Christa has been sitting on death row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live?

[Cheryl McCollum]

We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name.

[Robert Evans]

Christa Pike.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

Listen to unrestorable Season 2 proof of life on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sacred Scandal Narrator]

Sacred Scandal is back, the hit true crime podcast that uncovers hidden truths and shattered faith. For 19 years, Alena Sada was a nun for the Legion of Christ. This season, she's telling her story.

[Elena Sada]

When I first joined the Legion of Christ, I felt chosen. I was 19 years old when Marcia Almaser, the leader of the Legionaries, looked me in the eye and told me I had a calling.

[Sacred Scandal Narrator]

Surviving meant hiding. Escaping took courage. Risking everything to tell her truth. Listen to Sacred Scandal, the many secrets of Martial masiel on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nicole Angemi]

Hi everyone, It's Nicole Angemi, PA, and curator of ISSsangemi on Instagram, where I have been teaching about pathology and death for over 10 years. And I'm her daughter, Maria Q. Kain, and we host the podcast Mother Knows Death. Each week we dive into the darker side of life, exploring topics such as what can go wrong with the human body, true crime, medical mysteries, freak accidents. New episodes of our show drop twice a week. Make sure to tune in to Mother Knows Death on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

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. Cause it's a dark one. Yeah. You know that like there's a tenuous connection. Right. And so we're going to get into kind of what that connection entailed.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

In February of 1933, right at the dawn of the Nazi regime. This is right after Hitler took office, Adolf Hitler appeared at a car show in Germany to announce the start of a People's motorization. Right. And this was his plan, and the plan that the Nazi party was really pushing to motorize the Reich. The goal was eventually to have every family have their own car, which is 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. 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Oh, that does make sense, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. And that's kind of like fascism is at this point, 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Of the future, you know, not familiar at all. Yeah, right. Ringing no bells.

[Robert Evans]

Today they're embracing AI and shit, right? But, like, it's the same basic idea, right? This kind of, like, reckless immigrant embrace of, like, speed and technology and. Yeah, so one of Hitler's immediate priorities is kind of announcing and trying to really like, propagandize the fact that, like, the Third Reich is going to be a motorized society, you know? And in 1934, the next year, the Reich association of the German Auto Industry entered into talks with a pioneering automobile designer, Ferdinand Porsche. That last name's probably familiar to most people, right? This is the guy who started Porsche, Right? Obviously, the Porsche. The Porsche, yes.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Mr. Porsche.

[Robert Evans]

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 could basically replace, you know, 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, and which just pretty much literally means the people's car. Right. The Volk is the people from the very beginning.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Yeah.

[Sacred Scandal Narrator]

Okay.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. That's where the name comes from. Great.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Get all your six, you know, 6,000 children into the tiny car. You're motorized. You win.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Get out. Get your huge Nazi family into this tiny car, and. Yeah, it'll be great. So unlike many of the Reich's policies, Hitler personally directed the search for a people's car. There was a bunch of shit 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 motorize Germany in an extent that's kind of rare for him. Right. Because he is a big delegation guy, you know. Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

This is like, well beyond where he's just delegating everything and, like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Having sex all the time.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Yeah. Like, this is something he's personally obsessed with. Just kind of, kind of 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 motorize Germany. And Hitler never knew how to drive himself. 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. He liked going on rides. Cars were more exciting back then. You know, we hadn't gotten completely burnt out on them. And Porsche, Ferdinand 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Kismet. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. It's kismet. You know, and his biographer, Wolfram Peida, 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 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 to both men.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Hell, the other place.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. In 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. And he just kind of. He doesn't really give a shit to sell who he has to work with to make it happen. Right. His dream is just to get this.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Car made so he's a good guy.

[Robert Evans]

He's a great man. Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

He's a great entrepreneur working for himself.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. He just doesn't give a shit, like about, you know, the fact that it's gonna 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 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

And also a bunch of Volkswagens.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

The front of the line.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Beats walking. Okay.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

They're so unintimidating.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You ever tried to walk to Russia, Maggie? 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 kind of adapt a lot of left wing talking points. You know, initially, early on, there was a left wing of the party. They 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, 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 working class 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Obviously you will do this and this and this, but you will get a fancy Hilton.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

To swim in on.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, exactly. We're gonna steal all this shit 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 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, of the classes that had been unionized and had previously in German electoral history gone more towards lefty ideas. We're going to kind of get them on our side by promising access to all of these luxuries.

[Nicole Angemi]

Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

It's the Google method. You get, you know, a couple ping pong tables.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

They'll stay after work.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yes. It's exactly how Silicon Valley used to work. Right. Strength through joy. Productivity through joy. And so the motorization 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 and 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 do this. Right. That this was something that they were, you know, talking about. Right. Mm. And cars were expressly a luxury commodity when Hitler took over. When, when he comes to power, only about 1/50 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 999reichsmarks. And there will be like an installment plan so regular citizens are able to afford it is a big deal. 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 Kristallnacht in 1938, Jews were legally forbidden from driving or owning cars in the Reich. 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 creating and building this factory in Wolfsburg. 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Sure, right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They found a better name. We can all agree Volkswagen rolls off the tongue better than the KDF wagon. Oh, yeah, no, I. My friend's got this classic KDF wagon. It's still got the swastikas on the back end and everything.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Yeah, right. Kill Fuck Death wagon.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Kill Death Fuck wagon. Yeah, there we go. 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 the nature of the German economy and their access to resources.

[Ad Read / Sponsor]

And look at that.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

They have. They already have the factory going. That's so convenient.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Wow. Really planning ahead.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right. It just moves immediately over to, like, military production. Right. 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 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 forced laborers known as Eastern workers. Our first concentration camp on the site, Arbeitsdorf, was established on factory property in April of 1942. Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce at the city of the KDF car. So throughout the war, the early Volkswagens, you know, and the military vehicles they pivot to making are being made primarily by slaves. Right. Like that's from the jump. VW is cars made by slave labor. Which is great.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

That's great. I mean, you know, now we just have. Yes, a very similar.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, now we just use slaves to get the rare earth minerals. Right. You know. Yeah, there we go.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

We use kids for cars now, so, you know, it's. It all shakes out.

[Robert Evans]

Well, their tiny hands can reach the precious minerals in the cargo that we.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Need as they get their hair stuck in the weaving.

[Robert Evans]

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, this is an ad by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, a time to reflect on the importance of mental well being and those who support it. This year, let's flip the script and focus the attention on thanking the therapists who have made an impact on people's lives. BetterHelp therapists have helped more than 5 million people worldwide with their mental health journeys. BetterHelp's therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully qualified. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and their 10 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. But if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a separate therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. So this World Mental Health Day, let's celebrate the therapists who have helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com behind that's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com behind.

[Ad Read / Sponsor]

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[Sacred Scandal Promo Voice]

At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling. In the new season of Sacred Scandal, we pull back the curtain on a life built on Devotion and deception. A man of God, Martial Maciel looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ.

[Elena Sada]

My name is Elena Sada and this is my story. It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive, and eventually how I got out.

[Sacred Scandal Promo Voice]

This season on Sacred Scandal, Hear the full story from the woman who lived it. Witness the journey from devout follower to determined survivor as Helena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him. Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light. Listen to Sacred Scandal, the many secrets of Marcial Maciel as part of the My Cultura podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

This is a tape recorded statement. Person being interviewed is Krista Gale Pike. This is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer. She just started going off on me, then I hit her.

[Cheryl McCollum]

I just hit her and hit her.

[Robert Evans]

And hit her and hit her.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

On a cold January day in 1995, 18 year old Christa pike killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Christa has been sitting on death row.

[Cheryl McCollum]

The state has asked for an execution date for Christa.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable. How does someone prove that they deserve to live?

[Cheryl McCollum]

We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name.

[Robert Evans]

Christa Pike.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

Listen to unrestorable Season 2 proof of life on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

We're back. So we're talking 1942, the city of the KDF car is primarily using slave labor now. They're not making cars for civilians. They're making cars for the military concentration camp inmates because 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 Auschwitz, right? And in fact a Volkswagen engineer travels to Auschwitz in 1944 to pick out 300 skilled metal workers from the recently transported Hungarian Jewish population. War needs being what they were, large portions of the factory 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.

[Cheryl McCollum]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Another 650 skilled Jewish female Laborers are brought in to make shells and explosives at the Volkswagen factory. Their facility became a subcamp of the Neuengamme 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Yes, yes.

[Robert Evans]

And this is a problem, right, for the Nazis. Cause 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. Oops.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Put them back.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Oh, no.

[Robert Evans]

Ah, no. Ew. I'm not ready to raise a baby, says the Third Reich. But this isn't like, a great solution. Cause they need these people, right? These are not interchangeable. These are skilled, like, metal workers and the like, right? They want these people because they don't have enough people who know how to do this kind of shit. And they can't just send all of them back because they're, by definition doing work that the Reich doesn't have enough bodies to accomplish. Fritz Sauckel, who is the German secretary for labor allocation, reverses this policy late in the war. Like, 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 at least pretend that you're gonna take care of these kids, right? Because it does sort of matter how productive these laborers are.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

They're going a Legoland, a nice farm weekend, A nice farm to get cigarettes.

[Robert Evans]

And so, late in the war, old Fritz establishes the first nursery facilities at the Volkswagen concentration camps for children of foreign laborers.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

This is so dark.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, it's really bad. Cause as you might imagine, a Nazi nursery for the children of slave laborers. Not a great place for kids. Now, on paper, 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. Obviously, the Nazis have no real interest in taking care of intermensch children. They don't want these people to exist at all.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

They don't have universal childcare for their slave labor. Wow. Yeah, I have some strongly worded letters to write.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. I can't believe the Nazis would do something this bad. So the first nursery facility gets opened at the Volkswagen camp in early 1943. 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 Korbel. 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 functional, but that is what they're doing is they're just killing these kids. Now at the end of the war, the Volkswagen factory manager is a guy named Anton Pike. P I E C H 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, ol Anton flees to Austria and hides out on the personal estate of Ferdinand Porsche, who's his father in law. He takes about 10 million Reichsmarks with him. When the Nazis lose and he tries to hide out there. It's not going to be super successful because like it's Austria, you haven't fled that far. Like it's still going to be occupied. 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. Corbell 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? Yes. And Dr. Corbell is going to be one of the very few VW employees to pay for his war era crimes. Porsche and pike, you know, obviously we know who Ferdinand 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 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. Again, this is this very German thing of, it's like, well, the Buildings are perfectly good. Like, it's not the buildings.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

What are we gonna do?

[Robert Evans]

Why would we change where we're based?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Out of harm's no.

[Robert Evans]

1. We have the factory right here.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Wow, the vibes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I remember visiting Sachsenhausen, 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 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 can just make another building. Like you're training cops here now. Like, what the fuck? Did no one sit down and talk about this? Okay, cool stuff, Germany, Sick joke. I mean, we're hardly ones to talk these days, but come on.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Oh, excuse me. We build our own cop towns from scratch.

[Robert Evans]

We do, but we still. People still get married at plantations, right? You know? Oh, yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

That's interesting. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

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. This kind of culminates in 1986. As a part of kind of this pressure to. For them to reckon with their past, Volkswagen hires a historian named Hans Mommsen 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. 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 describe this as even the minimum, you know, it's worth, though, really. Driving home the fact that 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. Right. One of my favorite examples of this, there's a really good art piece by an Austrian artist, Wolfgang Flats, called It Was All Adolf, which is made using the hood of a VW Beetle. You can see that it's like 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

That's good. I wonder if this was before or after Volkswagen Barbie. Feels like it could be.

[Robert Evans]

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? Hmm.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

I think so.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Cheryl McCollum]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Good art.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I like it. Of course, with a backstory like that, Volkswagen took great pains over the next 80 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

That is, like, so common, though, right? Like, Right, Okay.

[Robert Evans]

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. And so 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. The Brazilian military junta would govern 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 junta, where they're kind of claiming their legitimacy, is that 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Yes. To get their own car, to have their giant van.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

It rhymes. History.

[Robert Evans]

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's gonna be a modern country, we gotta pave over that motherfucker.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

You know, we all agree on that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, too much. Amazon's a real problem for Brazil, you know, we gotta get rid of that shit so we can have cattle farms and the like. So the fact that the military junta does engage in this kind of building and industrial cited a lot by defenders of the regime, including Jair Bolsonaro, who just got convicted of doing a coup. But Bolsonaro 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 was a huge advocate for the illegal logging and clear cutting of the Amazon. You know, this is a thing that was important to him. And this really. I'm not gonna say it starts entirely the military junta, but the military junta makes it a major part of the regime, right? Is that we're going to get rid of this fucking jungle and develop it. 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 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 gotta cut down a shitload of forest. Because cows don't do great in super dense forest, right? You wanna replace all those trees with pasture, right? And if you have huge herds of cattle, the jungle's not gonna grow back because the cows are gonna stomp everything down and.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Right. They're gonna eat it.

[Robert Evans]

Right? Exactly.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Shit everywhere.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, shit 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 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 underpinning of what's happening here. Per an article in the Washington Post by Terence McCoy and Marina Diaz, quote, volkswagen, Brazil, then the largest carmaker in Latin America, accepted the challenge. In the untamed municipality of Santana do Araguaia, the Vale do Rio Cristalino Company, a subsidiary whose leadership included Volkswagen, Brazil's president Wolfgang Sauer and human resources director Admon Ganham, obtained a large 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 Rudolf Leding declared in 1974, but also meat. This slave thing isn't like to make cars. They're getting into the cattle business. A natural move for Volkswagen.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

I mean, I mean, when they explain it, it makes so much sense, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The world needs not just cars, but meat too.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

I'm getting the vision. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Volkswagen settles on a chunk of forested land in the southeastern state of Para, 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 because that's kind of outside of their wheelhouse.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So they opted to hire outside contractors who could do the job for them. Right. We'll bring in some and they'll know how to do this stuff.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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 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 and is gatos or cats. And I haven't seen like a good explanation for why they're calling these guys cats, but that's like what these guys who are finding you kind of itinerant laborers. Right. That's what they're called. The Gatos are paid a flat fee to find workers and meet certain production quotas.

[Ad Read / Sponsor]

Uh.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, right, yes. Anyone who studied the history of capitalism, you know how this is going to end, right?

[Nicole Angemi]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

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. These are, like, generally, like, English employees, but they're like, local contractors and whatnot. 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 really care if there's enough food for the people who live there, because anything that's not being shipped out 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

A classic potato famine situation. Like, take all of it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, right. This is an old story, right? And Volkswagen's going to put a kind of a different spin on it. But you can sort of see, like, this is not, like, coming out of nowhere. Right, right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

They're gonna tell it again.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Gatos hired by Volkswagen trawl distant towns in the Styx, places like Mato Grosso and Tocatin 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 fuck 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 nest egg that we can use to fund the next stage of our lives.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Right, Like a cat.

[Robert Evans]

Like a cat. Exactly. Like a cat.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Like again, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Per the Washington Post, that's not how things worked out, not for any of them. The Gatos 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 the armed guards watching them would allow them to visit. They had no choice but to pay whatever price the Gatos 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

That's so recent, right?

[Robert Evans]

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 Gatos force them to return to clearing the forest at gunpoint. Lima and six of his friends are only allowed to leave five months later because they had been worked so near to death that the Gatos 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

That's cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Looks like it all worked out.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

Your dreams came true.

[Robert Evans]

It looks like it all worked out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 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 penniless and gravely ill, but not that bad. You know, not that bad.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, speaking of the Internet, let's hear some ads from the Internet.

[Ad Read / Sponsor]

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[Sacred Scandal Promo Voice]

At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling in the new season of Sacred Scandal, we pull back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception. A man of God, Martial Maciel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ.

[Elena Sada]

My name is Elena Sada and this is my story. It's the story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive, and eventually how I got out.

[Sacred Scandal Promo Voice]

This season on Sacred Scandals, hear the full story from the woman who lived it. Witness the journey from devout follower to determined survivor as Helena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him. Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light. Listen to Sacred the Many Secrets of Marciel Maciel as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

This is a tape recorded statement. Person being interviewed is Krista Gale Pike. This is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer. She just started going off on me when I hit her.

[Cheryl McCollum]

I just hit her and hit her.

[Robert Evans]

And hit her and hit her.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

On a cold January day in 1995, 18 year old Christa pike killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Christa has been sitting on death row.

[Cheryl McCollum]

The state has asked for an execution date for Christa.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

We let people languish in prison for decades raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable. How does someone prove that they deserve to live?

[Cheryl McCollum]

We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name.

[Robert Evans]

Krista Pike.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

Listen to Unrestorable Season 2 Proof of Life on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Cheryl McCollum]

I'm Sheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place, it's a way of life. I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you have. We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes. Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims, family members. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. Podcast.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. So we're telling the stories of some of these Volkswagen laborers who aren't technically, they're working for a subsidiary of Volkswagen. They're directly employed by a contractor. So VW can say, well, these were never our employees, but like, they're working Volkswagen's land. Why?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

We had no idea.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

We didn't know.

[Robert Evans]

How could we have known? Another laborer, Elias DiCarmo, 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, we walked 16km for meat and other food for ourselves and our companions. At the end of the felling, we didn't get a single cent. The Gato Hermino said we still owed 13,160 of the local currency. Right. And what you're seeing here, what's happening to these people, the term for this is debt peonage. Right? So this is not chattel slavery. Right. These people are technically employees, unlike, you know, slaves brought over from the, you know, Atlantic slave trade.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

It's the modern.

[Robert Evans]

Right. It's woke slavery. You know, they're being paid.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Employees, kind.

[Robert Evans]

Of, they're being paid now. They have to pay for their health care and food and their housing, obviously first. And that winds up being more money than they can possibly up 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?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Legally.

[Robert Evans]

Legally, yeah. Legally. It's different from chattel slavery. Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

And how dare you.

[Robert Evans]

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 ghatos 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 can't just go like buy or like rent houses 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 Volkswagen, basically, or these different ghatas. They don't have a choice here. So they're just fucked as soon as they get hired. One unnamed worker later informed a fact 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 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 junta 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. It's rampant because slavery has always been key to the Brazilian economy since its birth as a colony. The Trans 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 chattel 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. Brazil is the number one place where the Atlantic slave trade sends people nowhere else even. No single place comes close, really. Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

We just assume we're the best at.

[Robert Evans]

Everything, including that we were doing the most of this. And like to be clear here, as we'll talk, we were intimately involved in the Brazilian slave trade. So we're not clean on this either.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

We played a supporting role in their number one slot. Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But. But this is a huge deal in Brazil. Per an AP article by Eleanor 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. So that's pretty stark. And that's why these problems continue, because it's always been so key to how Brazil has operated. For additional context, the estimate total Number of people taken from slave ships from Africa 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. It's impossible to exaggerate.

[Nicole Angemi]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

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 selling enslaved people obviously until, you know, the end of the Civil War, 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 slavery. Slaves. Right?

[Cheryl McCollum]

Huh?

[Nicole Angemi]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's key to the growth of coffee as a world industry.

[Cheryl McCollum]

Huh.

[Robert Evans]

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 Leonardo Marx described as one of the greatest crimes of the 19th century, even by 19th century standards. Was she saying something? Because we did a lot of crimes against humanity in the old 19th century.

[Nicole Angemi]

Yeah.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Really puts things into perspective.

[Robert Evans]

Huh? Huh? Yeah. They're doing bad by the standards of like slavery in the 19th century. Brazil is on another level. Wow. 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 increasingly employed U.S. resources in their operations. U.S. built ships became a predominant feature of the transatlantic Atlantic slave trade for their speed and quality. 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 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 de 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 Tea drinking British. We are intimately involved in why 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. Right? Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

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

[Robert Evans]

And to be fair, the British, their hands are not clean because they're into tea instead of coffee. They start a war in China over this, right? Yeah. Look, if you like a hot caffeinated beverage in the 19th century, you're getting involved in something fucked up. Also the 20th and 21st centuries, whatever.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

You know, you know, you don't gotta hand it to Mormons, but they were against hot beverages.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they've got their Mormon tea with ephedra in it. Yeah, that's good. 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, 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, modern day slavery. 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 Para, was a particular hub of these communities due to its isolation. This is relevant to the reason the military junta 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 and enslaved on this plantation are themselves the descendants of slaves. Right. Or at least partially the descendants of slaves. 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 caste 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'd once sheltered in the jungles they were now tearing down. Right.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Symbolism. Duh duh.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, 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 that's an additional reason to want to do this.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Absolutely.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And slavery is so baked into the very fabric of Brazil's economy that its return during the period of the junta's time in power was a 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 Terboy from Rodonia was accused of keeping more than 100 mining farm workers under a captive regime on their farm, one of which was on the border with Bolivia. The workers were recruited by the Cat Itamar Magal Verdipino and transported on behalf of Salvador Fernandez, owner of a restaurant. They were forced to work in deforestation from 4 o' clock 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, this is something that's much bigger than just Volkswagen. And these are always very similar cases, right? You're seeing here, like. 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.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Well, you know, he watched the podcasts, he listened to all their advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. Fellow entrepreneur, right?

[Robert Evans]

He caught a YouTube ad telling him, like, you know, the ultimate kind of passive income is just owning people, right? So. So another complaint made by representatives of the Federation of Workers in Agriculture in 1995 found slave labor being practiced at a farm called Nova, Delhi and Para. 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 in black plastic. Such graveyards are a common sight in uncovered Brazilian slave plantations.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Covered by tires.

[Robert Evans]

Sorry, yeah, right. To hide it, right. You burn some tires on top of it and it kind of obscures what's buried there. I found another, more recent article from 2024 in the Intercept, which discusses a farm that was expropriated 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 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 the junta 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 Papadilla, 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 families 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 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 again, you can look at similar things have happened in the United States. Right. And are continuing to happen.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

You know, it's so perfect. It's the perfect formula.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Brilliant. Incredible. Oh, wow.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Ad Read / Sponsor]

Woo.

[Robert Evans]

Ugh.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Good, good.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm feeling great.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

This is so fascinating. I feel great. Yeah, I'm raring for some revenge.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We will talk a lot about what happened next and how this all continued. But first, why don't you plug your pluggables?

[Maggie Mae Fish]

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, you know, over on Nebula. Yeah. There's a show called Amy's Dead in Dreamhouse. It also tackles, yeah, some pretty dark topics, but you know, the fun guys of a kid show. So go check that out and then, yeah, you can find my video essays just at my name. Maggie Mae.

[Robert Evans]

Fish.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

We do have a very fun one coming out about true crime propaganda.

[Robert Evans]

So, you know, I can't wait.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Fun. Just fun things at the top of my brain right now, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Well, check that out. Check out Maggie's whole oeuvre of work. And, you know, check out the history of slavery in Brazil. It's probably something we should all read more about. It's pretty bleak. I don't know. Also, maybe 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 or nightmare present to it.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Right. It really is. What. What Talisman.

[Robert Evans]

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 an enormous scale, like, lying about the emissions of their diesel vehicles. Like, yeah, like, it's a huge deal. And then we could talk about, like, the fact that they. They operate factories in Xinjiang and 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, here. So steal a car. That's what I'm saying, everybody. Steal all of your vehicles.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Steal a car.

[Robert Evans]

That's the only ethical way to buy a car. Yeah. Auto theft.

[Maggie Mae Fish]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Great. All right, well, that's part one, everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio alert app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behind the Bastards.

[Cheryl McCollum]

I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place. It's a way of life. Now, this ain't just any old podcast, honey. We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives, prosecutors, and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years to help me work these difficult cases. I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't. We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes. Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims, family members. Come be a part of my Zone 7 while building yours. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

[Sacred Scandal Narrator]

Sacred Scandal is back. The hit true crime podcast that uncovers hidden truths and shattered faith. Faith for 19 years, Alena Sada was a nun for the Legion of Christ. This season she's telling her story.

[Elena Sada]

When I first joined the Legion of Christ, I felt chosen. I was 19 years old when Marcia Almaser, the leader of the Legionaries, looked me in the eye and told me I had a calling.

[Sacred Scandal Narrator]

Surviving meant hiding. Escaping. Took courage. Risking everything to tell her truth. Listen to Sacred Scandal, the many secrets of Martial Maciel Authority, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

On a cold January day in 1995, 18 year old Christa pike killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Christa has been sitting on Death row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live?

[Cheryl McCollum]

We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name.

[Robert Evans]

Krista Pike.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

Listen to Unrestorable Season 2 Proof of Life on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nicole Angemi]

Hi everyone, It's Nicole Angemi, P.A. and curator of ISSsanjemi on Instagram, where I have been teaching about pathology and death for over 10 years and I'm her daughter Maria Q. Kane, and we host the podcast Mother Knows Death Death. Each week we dive into the darker side of life, exploring topics such as what can go wrong with the human body, true crime, medical mysteries, freak accidents and more. New episodes of our show drop twice a week. Make sure to tune in to Mother Knows Death on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Narrator (Unrestorable)]

This is an I Heart podcast.