Nazi Slogan 'Arbeit Macht Frei' Found at Packard Plant in Detroit

An iconic slogan used at Auschwitz and other concentration camps during the Holocaust has been put up in large red letters at the Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit.

The German words “Arbeit Macht Frei” – “Work Will Make You Free” – could be seen this week on an overpass at the vacant, crumbling plant's entrance, according to the Detroit Free Press.

It is unclear who put the slogan up, The Detroit News reports.

Jewish prisoners entering the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland during World War II saw the slogan as they passed through a metal gate in which the words were wrought.

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“I found it disturbing,” Huntington Woods resident David Schulman, who saw the sign while driving home last week from Belle Isle, told the Free Press.

“It’s a form of hate speech,” the newspaper quoted Schulman, whose grandmother had family members killed in the Holocaust, as saying.

The sign at the Packard plant is wrong on multiple levels, said Stephen Goldman, executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus in Farmington Hills.

It is a cruel reminder for Metro Detroit's population of Holocaust survivors, which is among the largest in the country, he said. That community includes Bloomfield Hills residents Henreitta and Alvin Weisberg, who actively work to continue Holocaust education in Metro Detroit.

"Holocaust survivors, when they saw this, had been tricked by Nazis to believe they were going to slave labor," he said. "Really, they were either going directly to their deaths or eventually being worked to death."

And, if the sign is intended to be an artistic statement on labor issues that equates working in an auto plant to working as a slave in a Nazi concentration camp, it fails to communicate an accurate message, Goldman said.

"On a historical level, it criticizes an industry that has come back so well. I would find it offensive as an automotive executive," he said. "... It's a cruel irony and I don't think it adds to the dialogue, which is what art is supposed to do.

"I think it's more ignorant than sinister," Goldman said.