B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28 , 2019
obituaries
BY MATT SCHUDEL
Ferdinand Piëch, a hard-charg-
ing Volkswagen executive who
transformed the company into
Europe’s largest automaker, over-
coming scandals and dispatching
business executives with a ruth-
less management style, died Aug.
25 in the German region of Bavar-
ia. He was 82.
The German newspaper Bild
reported that he collapsed while
eating dinner at a restaurant in
Rosenheim, Germany, and died at
a nearby hospital.
As the grandson of Ferdinand
Porsche, the Austrian-born Mr.
Piëch was a member of one of
Europe’s most prominent auto-
motive families. In the 1930s, his
grandfather founded the Porsche
auto company and designed, at
the request of Adolf Hitler, the
beetle-shaped “people’s car” — or
Volkswagen — for ordinary citi-
zens.
A brilliant engineer in his own
right, Mr. Piëch had a leading role
in the 1960s in developing the
Porsche 911 sports car and the
Porsche 917, a racecar that could
reach a top speed of 240 mph.
Ferdinand Porsche’s first Bee-
tles came off the assembly line in
1938 and, during World War II,
Volkswagen was a major producer
of military vehicles, aircraft en-
gines and other equipment for the
German war effort. Mr. Piëch’s fa-
ther was chief executive of Volks-
wagen during the war and was a
member of the Nazi party.
After designing sports cars, the
younger Mr. Piëch had hoped to
become the top executive of the
family-run Porsche business in
Germany. He had to shelve that
ambition, however, when his
mother and uncle — Ferdinand
Porsche’s children — grew weary
of intrafamily disputes and ruled
that none of Porsche’s descen-
dants could hold a management
position with the company.
Mr. Piëch then moved to Audi, a
German automaker that was a
Volkswagen subsidiary.
“All the quarreling made me
realize that I had the qualifica-
tions to prove myself outside of the
family,” he wrote in a 2002 autobi-
ography. “I wasn’t so certain that
some members of my loving fam-
ily could do the same.”
At Audi, Mr. Piëch helped devel-
op a five-cylinder engine and a
four-wheel-drive system that
helped burnish the image of the
once-dowdy brand. He moved up
in the company hierarchy, and by
the time he became board chair-
man in 1988, Audi was a credible
rival of Germany’s two top luxury
carmakers, BMW and Mercedes-
Benz.
Meanwhile, Audi’s parent com-
pany, Volkswagen, was falling fur-
ther behind its competitors. It
faced an estimated loss of $1 bil-
lion in 1992, and there was talk of
closing its dealerships in North
America. Mr. Piëch joined the su-
pervisory board and soon was
named chief executive of the
struggling company. He already
had a reputation as an imperious
leader who fired executives who
didn’t meet his expectations.
“Only when a company is in
severe difficulty does it let in
someone like me,” Mr. Piëch wrote
in his autobiography, acknowl-
edging his rough edges. “In nor-
mal, calm times, I never would
have gotten a chance.”
Mr. Piëch ousted several mem-
bers of the board to consolidatecontrol, eliminated layers of exec-
utives and demanded design
changes from the engineering de-
partment. In one meeting, he said
he wanted the gap between the car
door and the body frame reduced
within six weeks.
“If I don’t have it,” he said, “ev-
eryone in this room will be fired.”
The German magazine Der
Spiegel once described Volks-
wagen’s factories under Mr. Piëch
as “North Korea without the labor
camps.”
In 1998, he reintroduced his
grandfather’s Beetle, which had
long gone out of production. Once
the low-powered utilitarian vehi-
cle of the hippie generation, the
new Beetle had the familiar bub-
ble-top design but a livelier en-
gine. An innovative advertising
campaign played off its earlier im-
age with the slogan “Less Flower.
More Power.”
Mr. Piëch bought several other
carmakers, including Italy’s Lam-
borghini and Bugatti, Britain’sBentley and the Czech brand Sko-
da. He engineered concessions
from Germany’s powerful labor
unions, reducing the workweek to
four days while saving most work-
ers’ jobs.
He also introduced the idea of
building different car models —
from Audi to Volkswagen and oth-
er subsidiaries — on the same
“platform,” or the same design
blueprint. In other words, differ-
ent auto models would share the
same chassis, wheel-well design
and hardware. This efficiency
move reduced Volkswagen’s basic
design “platforms” from 19 to four,
while the company produced mil-
lions of cars a year.
One of the executives Mr. Piëch
recruited to Volkswagen was José
Ignacio López de Arriortua, who
worked for the Opel division of
General Motors and brought sev-
eral colleagues with him. Mr.
Piëch’s poaching of Lopez led to a
years-long legal dispute, with GM
accusing Volkswagen of industrialespionage.
“In my 40 years in the business,”
Mr. Piëch said in a typically sharp-
tongued statement, “my admira-
tion for Opel has never reached
the level of arousing my interest in
any secrets behind it.”
To avoid a prolonged court-
room battle, Volkswagen agreed to
pay $100 million to GM in 1997
and was required to buy $1 billion
worth of GM parts. Several years
later, some VW executives were
convicted in a scheme of paying
for prostitutes for labor leaders,
but Mr. Piëch was not implicated.
Nonetheless, Mr. Piëch won
praise for steering Volkswagen out
of a financial ditch. Under his
leadership, VW sales rose dramat-
ically around the world. In 1993,
the year he became chief execu-
tive, only 62,000 Volkswagens
were sold in the United States.
Nine years later, more than
355,000 were sold. A company
that was $1 billion in the red in the
early 1990s had annual profits ofmore than $3 billion a decade
after Mr. Piëch took over. VW be-
came Europe’s largest automaker
and challenged Toyota for the top
position in the world.
“He built the largest and most
successful automobile company
in the world,” automotive histo-
rian John Wolkonowicz told Auto-
motive News. “And he built it from
nothing.”
Ferdinand Karl Piëch was born
April 17, 1937, in Vienna, and grew
up on a family estate in southwest-
ern Austria.
As a child, Mr. Piëch visited
Volkswagen factories, seemingly
unaware that much of the work
was being performed by slave la-
borers. When a book appeared in
1996 describing Volkswagen’s part
in the Nazi war effort, Mr. Piëch
was upset and noted that the com-
pany had paid millions of dollars
in reparations.
Mr. Piëch attended boarding
school in Switzerland and gradu-
ated in 1962 from the Swiss Feder-
al Institute of Technology in Zur-
ich.
He led a complicated and some-
what veiled private life. He was
married three times and was the
father of at least 12 children with
four women. A complete list of
survivors could not be confirmed.
Mr. Piëch stepped down as chief
executive of Volkswagen in 2002
but stayed on as a powerful board
chairman for more than a decade.
In the mid-2000s, when the
Porsche company — owned by his
family — made a bid to take over
Volkswagen, Mr. Piëch fought the
effort. By 2009, he turned the ta-
bles and bought Porsche, placing
his family’s greatest jewel under
Volkswagen’s corporate umbrella.
He was finally forced out of
Volkswagen’s leadership in April
2015, months before a scandal
broke involving the fraudulent
manipulation of emissions fig-
ures. Observers charged that his
autocratic style led to a manage-
ment style of concealment, al-
though he escaped direct respon-
sibility. The fallout left the car-
maker facing about $30 billion in
fines.
In 2017, Mr. Piëch sold his bil-
lion-dollar stake in Volkswagen to
members of his family, giving ef-
fective control of both VW and
Porsche to his grandfather’s de-
scendants. When asked to name
the most important things in his
life, he listed, in order, “VW, family,
money.”
[email protected]FERDINAND PIËCH, 82
Turned Volkswagen into Europe’s biggest automaker
PETER STEFFEN/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Ferdinand Piëch, second from right, looks at a VW Golf during a celebration at the company’s plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, in 2007. He
transformed the company, overcoming scandals and dispatching business executives with a ruthless management style.BY EMILY LANGER
“My experience as a woman in
war,” Jan Ruff-O’Herne once said,
“is one of utter degradation, humil-
iation and unbearable suffering.”
It lasted long after her intern-
ment by the Japanese during
World War II, long after Japan’s
defeat and through years of si-
lence about her agony as one of
the “comfort women” conscript-
ed into sexual servitude during
the war.
Ms. Ruff-O’Herne, who had
grown up on her father’s colonial
sugar planation in what was then
the Dutch East Indies, was one of
the few Europeans used by the
Japanese as sex slaves during the
war. Most of the women — they
numbered as many as 200,000,
historians have estimated — are
believed to have been Korean. But
they also came from China, the
Philippines and other Japanese-
occupied territory, victims of an
act of systematic brutality that
left wounds still unhealed more
than seven decades later.
Ms. Ruff-O’Herne, who made a
new life after the war in Australia
and who died Aug. 19 at 96, was,
according to London’s Daily Tele-
graph, the first European to pub-
licly disclose the abuses that she
and other “comfort women” had
endured. She rejected the euphe-
mistic term. “We weren’t ‘comfort
women,’ ” she once said. “It means
something warm and soft and
cuddly. We were Japanese war
rape victims.”
Jeanne Alida O’Herne was
born Jan. 18, 1923, to a Dutch
family in Bandung, the capital
city of what is now West Java
province in Indonesia. Ms.
Ruff-O’Herne recalled a happy
childhood, filled with music and
the celebration of her family’s
Catholic faith. She hoped to be a
nun.
That idyll ended in 1942, when
Japan invaded Java. With her
mothers and sisters, she was in-
terned as an enemy noncomba-
tant in a Japanese prison where
they subsisted on what she de-
scribed as a starvation diet. There
were malaria, dysentery and roll
calls under the punishing sun,
until one day in 1944 when an
unusual roll was ordered.
“All single girls from 17 years up
had to line up in the compound,”
Ms. Ruff-O’Herne recounted in
testimony before a U.S. congres-
sional committee in 2007. “The
officers... paced up and down
the line, eying us up and down,looking at our figures and our
legs, lifting our chins. They select-
ed ten pretty girls. I was one of the
ten. We were told to come for-
ward and pack a small bag. The
first things I put in my bag was my
prayer book, my rosary beads and
my Bible. I thought somehow
these would keep me strong. And
then we were taken away.”
Their destination was the port
city of Semarang, where they ar-
rived at a Dutch colonial house
that they quickly understood to
be a brothel. The women were
assigned Japanese names and
photographed for soldiers who
would then choose among them.
“We were a very innocent gen-eration,” she told the congres-
sional committee. “The horrific
memories of opening night of the
brothel have tortured my mind all
my life.” She said her first assail-
ant threatened to kill her with his
samurai sword if she did not
submit to him.
“I curled myself into a corner
like a hunted animal that could
not escape. I made him under-
stand that I was not afraid to die.
He could kill me. I would not give
myself to him,” she said. “But I
pleaded with him to allow me to
say some prayers, and at that
moment, I felt very close to God.
While I was then praying, he
started to undress himself, and I
realized he had no intention of
killing me. I would have been no
good to him dead.
“He then threw me on the bed
and ripped off all my clothes,” she
continued. “He ran his sword all
over my naked body and played
with me as a cat would with a
mouse. I still tried to fight him,
but he thrust himself on top of
me, pinning me down under his
heavy body. The tears were
streaming down my face as he
raped me in the most brutal way. I
thought he would never stop.”
The women held in the brothel
were raped unremittingly during
their time there. At one point, Ms.
Ruff-O’Herne shaved her hair,
thinking she might appear less
desirable. Her shorn head only
made her the object of greater
curiosity.
After three months, they were
returned to the prison camp.
After the Japanese threatened to
kill their families if they revealed
what had transpired at the
brothel, Ms. Ruff-O’Herne even-
tually confided in a priest. “My
dear child,” she said he told her,
“under the circumstances I think
it is better that you do not
become a nun.” It was yet an-
other devastation.
In 1946, the year after the warended, she married Tom Ruff, a
British soldier. She told him just
once before their marriage about
what she had been through but
told the New York Times that she
felt she could never open up fully.
“I loved Tom and I wanted to
marry and I wanted a house,” she
said. “He had to be very patient
with me. He was a good husband.
But because we couldn’t talk
about it, it made it all so hard....
For that generation the story was
too big. My mum couldn’t cope
with it. My dad couldn’t cope
with it. Tom couldn’t cope with it.
They just shut it up. But nowa-
days you’ll get counseling im-
mediately.”
In 1960 they settled in Aus-
tralia, where Ms. Ruff-O’Herne
taught in Catholic schools. She
first spoke publicly about her
story in 1992, appearing at a
public hearing in Japan, after
watching a television program in
which three Korean women re-
vealed the indignities to which
they had been subjected as “com-
fort women.”“When I spoke out in Tokyo,
the whole world was there, want-
ing to know the truth,” she told
the Sydney Morning Herald.
“They weren’t taking that much
notice before because they were
‘only Asian comfort women.’ It’s
terrible to say, but that’s the
truth.”
Two years later, she published a
memoir, “Fifty Years of Silence,”
which was also the title of a 1994
documentary film about her life.
Amid the ongoing war in the
Balkans, she became an advocate
for the rights and protection of
women in wartime.
For years she sought greater
recognition for the “comfort
women,” a matter that, along with
demands for an official apology
and reparations, continues to
complicate relations between Ja-
pan and South Korea in particu-
lar. “The apology will never come
for me,” Ms. Ruff-O’Herne told the
Australian Advertiser last year.
“I’m too old.”
Her husband died in 1995, ac-
cording to the Telegraph. She hadtwo daughters, as well as grand-
children and great-grandchil-
dren, but a complete list of survi-
vors was not immediately avail-
able. Her death was announced in
a statement by South Australian
attorney general Vickie Chap-
man. The statement did not note
a cause of death. Australian me-
dia said she died in Adelaide.
“At night when I draw my
curtains, when it’s getting dark, I
still get a feeling of fear going
through my body because I re-
member, when it’s getting dark it
means being raped over and over
again,” Ms. Ruff-O’Herne re-
marked to the Eastern Courier
Messenger of Australia in 2008.
But there was a measure of
relief in telling her story.
“It’s something that’s been bot-
tled up for 50 years,” she said.
“There have been times where I’ve
been wanting to scream it out to
the world and yet you can’t do it
because it is too terrible. Then all
of a sudden, phewt, that’s it: it’s out
and it’s a release and that’s good.”
[email protected]JAN RUFF-O’HERNE, 96
Sought dignity, recognition of abuse
of fellow ‘comfort women’ of WWII
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
Jan Ruff-O’Herne poses in 2007 with a symbol of her struggle as one of many “comfort women” who
were sexually enslaved by the Japanese during World War II. She later became an advocate for the
rights and protection of women in wartime.“We weren’t ‘comfort
women.’ It means
something warm and
soft and cuddly. We
were Japanese war
rape victims.”
Jan Ruff-O’Herne, the first European
to publicly disclose her sexual abuse
by the Japanese during WWII