OBERNDORF (dpa-AFX) - The Nazi past of Heckler & Koch's founders will be highlighted in a study that historians will present at the company's headquarters on Tuesday (2 p.m.). The company commissioned the study after an article in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper three years ago revealed Edmund Heckler's involvement. During the Second World War, Heckler worked, among other things, in a tank fuselage factory of a long-defunct armaments company in Saxony. After the end of the war, the NSDAP party member fled to the French occupation zone, where he was classified as a fellow traveler.

In 1949, together with Theodor Koch and Alex Seidel, he founded Heckler & Koch, which became Germany's largest manufacturer of handguns and still supplies the German armed forces with assault rifles and machine guns. The study by the Society for Corporate History will also shed light on the past of Koch and Seidel, who worked at Mauser-Werke in Oberndorf during the war.

German industry was deeply involved in Nazi crimes through the use of forced laborers - whether Daimler, Volkswagen, BASF or Bayer. Numerous companies have had their past reappraised by historians. Heckler & Koch is a special case here, as the company was not founded until the Federal Republic of Germany. For decades, the company did not concern itself with the question of what its founders had done before that. A picture-heavy company chronicle that appeared on the occasion of the 50th anniversary in 1999 did not deal with this critically./wdw/DP/stw