LONDON — Ikea, the Swedish furniture chain, knowingly benefited from forced labor in the former East Germany to manufacture some of its products in the 1980s, an investigation revealed yesterday.
A report by the auditors Ernst & Young concluded that political and criminal prisoners in the former East Germany were involved in making components of Ikea furniture and that some Ikea employees knew about it. Ikea had commissioned the report in May after allegations that the company knowingly used forced labor between 25 and 30 years ago.
Ikea said yesterday that it was sorry about the incidents and pledged to donate money to research projects on forced labor in the former German Democratic Republic.
“We deeply regret that this could happen,” Jeanette Skjelmose, sustainability manager at Ikea, said in a statement. “The use of political prisoners in production has never been acceptable to the Ikea Group.”
Allegations against Ikea started to appear about a year ago in media reports in Germany and Sweden. They said that the company worked with suppliers in communist former East Germany that benefited from forced labor by political prisoners. The workers were thought to have lived in East Germany in the 1980s and been arrested for criticizing the government.
Ernst & Young concluded that state-owned companies during the communist regime often used prisoners as workers because of a labor shortage and that Ikea purchased products from these companies.
The report is based on more than 90 interviews of former and current Ikea employees and witnesses from the former East Germany as well as on historic documents from Ikea’s and the German federal and state archives.