At 10:30 p.m. on September 22, 1967, Harald Quandt’s Beechcraft King airplane took off from Frankfurt Airport. Its destination was Nice, specifically Harald’s villa on the Côte d’Azur, which he planned on selling. Also aboard were his mistress and two other guests. The weather over Frankfurt was stormy that evening, and the pilots soon lost radio contact with air traffic control. The next day, a shepherd in the last foothills of the Alps found the remains of the private jet. It had flown into the mountains of the Piemonte region, not far from Turin. Harald, all his passengers, and the pilots were killed.
Harald was only forty-five years old when he died. He left behind his wife, Inge, their five young daughters who ranged from two months to sixteen years of age, plus twenty-two executive and supervisory board positions. These numbers were, however, surpassed by his half brother, Herbert, who had six children from three marriages and held more board positions than any other West German industrialist. When Harald died, the only German richer than the Quandts was Friedrich Flick.
Flick, as well as high-ranking officers of the West German and American military, attended Harald’s memorial service in Frankfurt. They paid tribute to an enterprising, charming industrialist who had loved people and parties. Harald’s closest associates were “filled with horror” at his early death but weren’t particularly surprised by it. They had long feared this day would come. Harald always prized living dangerously. After all he had witnessed and endured, he still had a childlike zest for life. This attitude stood in stark contrast to that of his conservative older half brother, Herbert, the visually impaired savior of BMW who didn’t like strangers. But in truth, Harald was the burdened one. One of Harald’s daughters once asked him whether she had so many siblings because he once had six of them himself. He didn’t respond kindly to that question. While these tragic matters weren’t totally taboo, they were largely left undiscussed. But Harald carried this macabre past with him wherever he went.
A German journalist once described running into Harald at a party in Frankfurt that was hosted by a famous Jewish architect: “Among the excited, cheerful faces, one, pale as the moon, gazed, still and silent with bright watery eyes . . . looking nowhere. The pale face, smiling politely but laboriously, remained motionless. It seemed to me as if a distant storm was raging behind those waxy eyes, a memory of an incurable misfortune. Harald Quandt, rich heir, son of Magda Goebbels . . . Everyone who looked at him remembered the terrible sacrifice of Baal that his mother had made in the Führerbunker when everything came to an end.” Harald never forgave his mother and stepfather for murdering their own children, his beloved siblings, nor did he ever get over their murder-suicide. When a lawyer representing Goebbels’s estate contacted Harald about his stepfather’s inheritance, he had wanted nothing to do with it. Harald told the lawyer that he preferred to cherish the memories of the house on Berlin’s Schwanenwerder Island — with his six siblings and mother alive in it.
Harald’s death tore the Quandt clan apart. At the same time, the Flick family was coming undone as well. One business dynasty would survive the inner turmoil. The other would fall apart.