In 2019, Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten, Herbert Quandt’s youngest children and the two heirs to BMW, no longer could claim to be Germany’s wealthiest family. Another dynasty, even more reclusive, overtook them that year: the Reimanns. No picture of a Reimannn heir had ever become public. No one even knew where the family lived. This clan of shareholders controlled JAB, a consumer goods investment firm that was based, for tax reasons, in Luxembourg. Since 2012, JAB has spent more than $50 billion to acquire all-American food and beverage brands such as Snapple, Dr Pepper, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Peet’s Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Keurig Green Mountain, Panera Bread, and Pret A Manger. In Europe, the firm bought Douwe Egberts. The Reimann family also controls the beauty label Coty and the fashion brand Bally. They once owned Jimmy Choo.
But the roots of the Reimann family fortune run far deeper than doughnuts, bagels, coffee, lipstick, and stiletto heels. They lie in the bleak industrial city of Ludwigshafen, a one-hour drive south of Frankfurt. For four generations, the Reimann dynasty owned and ran Joh. A. Benckiser (JAB), a specialty chemicals firm that operated out of Ludwigshafen. Under Albert Reimann’s leadership in the 1960s, the family firm branched out into household consumer goods, forming the basis for an empire that is omnipresent in our lives as consumers. Albert was the father of the current Reimann heirs. He died in 1984. Like so many German tycoons of his generation, Albert had led a double life, hiding many dark secrets. His Nazi past was just one facet of a bizarre history that began to unfold, in real time, as four of his heirs emerged as Germany’s wealthiest family.
News of the Reimanns’ Nazi history first broke when the British tabloid Mail on Sunday revealed, in September 2018, that Albert had been a member of the NSDAP. The reporters had found his membership card in a German archive, which they had been digging through after JAB’s $2 billion acquisition of Pret A Manger, the global sandwich chain founded by a Jewish Londoner. That founder, who had died in 2017, could not respond to the tabloid story, but his sister did: “I am horrified . . . My brother would have been mortified. We are a Jewish family.” Spokespeople for JAB and the Reimann family told the tabloid that they were aware that Albert had been a member of the Nazi Party and confirmed that his company had made use of forced labor and prisoners of war. But that was it, for now. The article contained no other details.
After reading the story in fall 2018, I called up the Reimann family’s longtime spokeswoman in Düsseldorf. I had reported for years on JAB’s global spree of acquisitions while I was still at Bloomberg News. In fact, the first story I ever broke at Bloomberg, back in 2012, identified the four reclusive Reimann shareholders behind JAB. In addition to their names and ages, my colleague and I found out that most of them were trained chemists who ran a children’s charity and had never actually worked in their father’s consumer goods business. Their family office was based in Vienna. The Reimanns had traded in their German passports for Austrian ones, a tax-avoidance move that many wealthy German families took advantage of. (Among its various fiscal benefits, Austria has no inheritance tax.) We discovered little more than that at the time.
In fall 2018, the spokeswoman assured me over the phone that there was nothing more to the Reimann Nazi story that had just been published. Yes, Albert Reimann had belonged to the NSDAP, but that was it, she said. Suppressing my reporter’s instinct, I accepted her explanation. For a year already, I had been working on this book about German business dynasties and their Third Reich histories. The last thing I wanted was to add yet another family to the story.
That soon changed. In late March 2019, the front page of Bild am Sonntag, Germany’s largest Sunday tabloid, carried a major scoop: the Nazi history of the Reimann dynasty. A Bild reporter had discovered in archives that Albert Reimann, his sister Else, and their father were early believers in the Nazi cause and virulent anti-Semites. The father-and-son duo began donating to the SS in 1931 and became members of the NSDAP in 1932. The two men even successively joined Ludwighafen’s city council, representing the Nazi Party. In May 1933, Albert’s father told his employees: “The Jew Karl Marx gathered only the worst people around him to carry out his idea, while Hitler has gathered the best.” In July 1937, Albert wrote a letter to Heinrich Himmler, saying, “We are a purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old. The owners are unconditional followers of the race theory.” Albert Reimann was thirty-eight years old at the time, and the firm’s chief executive. His sister Else married an SS man.
The Bild reporter also found that by 1943, 30 percent of the Reimanns’ workforce at their chemicals plant, or some 175 people, consisted of forced labor or French prisoners of war. The firm’s factory foreman brutally abused these workers and even tortured a Russian woman in the coal cellar of Albert’s private villa. Albert encouraged this mistreatment. His foreman ordered female coerced laborers to stand naked outside their barracks in the middle of the night so he could grope them. During an Allied air raid in 1945, the foreman kicked dozens of workers out from the company’s bomb shelters. One Russian was killed; others were injured.
After the war, Ludwigshafen fell within the French occupation zone. The Allies arrested Albert and held him in an internment camp. The family firm’s assets were seized, and their shares were frozen. In February 1947, the French authorities dismissed father and son Reimann from their own firm and banned them from other positions in business. But the two men engaged in occupation zone arbitrage. They appealed their sentence in Heidelberg, which was in the American occupation zone; they owned a second home there. And like so many other Germans, the father and son then procured Persilschein statements, falsely attesting to their stance against the Nazis and their active involvement in the Resistance. The two were classified as Nazi followers in their denazification trials. They had to pay a small fine; then their company was returned to them. Over the next decades, Albert turned his family firm in Ludwigshafen into a major consumer goods business, producing Kukident denture adhesive cream and Calgonit dishwasher detergent.
None of the Reimanns commented on the revelations in Bild am Sonntag. But Peter Harf, JAB’s chairman and the Reimanns’ longtime family confidant, confirmed all of the reporting and added that father and son Reimann “should have gone to prison.” Harf announced that the family would donate ten million euros ($11.3 million) to a suitable organization. He also revealed that the Reimanns had long before commissioned a prominent German history professor to research their family’s Nazi history, creating an independent study that would be available to the public. Weeks before the Bild story broke, the historian had presented an interim report to five Reimanns and to Harf: “We were ashamed and went white as a sheet. There is nothing to gloss over. These crimes are disgusting,” Harf said.
The fallout from the Reimann revelations was swift. Most of the brands the family controls are based in the United States and deeply embedded in American culture. Headlines like “Krispy Kreme Owners Admit to Family History of Nazi Ties” circled the globe. Calls for boycotts soon followed. The Boston Globe’s Jewish American food critic wrote a searing column called “I Found Out Nazi Money Is Behind My Favorite Coffee. Should I Keep Drinking It?” My personal favorite was a parody piece in McSweeney’s, titled “This Is Embarrassing, but It Turns Out Our Fake Jewish Bagel Chain Was Funded by Nazis.” The Reimanns desperately needed damage control, and fast, lest their reputation and their brands be marred beyond repair. The family had to issue a response. When they finally did, they made global headlines once again.
The Reimanns leaned on Peter Harf — arguably too much. The Cologne-born, Harvard Business School–trained economist is primarily responsible for creating the Reimanns’ fortune, estimated at around thirty-two billion euros ($39 billion) in 2020. Harf’s steering of their assets also made him a billionaire. Albert Reimann’s heirs appointed Harf as CEO of the family business in 1988, seven years after he left Boston Consulting Group and joined the company in Ludwigshafen. Over the next decades, Harf and a Dutch protégé turned the family firm into Reckitt Benckiser, one of the world’s largest consumer-goods companies. In 2012, Harf and two lieutenants used the money from Reckitt dividends and sales of shares to establish JAB as the Reimanns’ own investment firm, with a strategy focused on coffee, carbs, beauty, and luxury goods. In 2019, JAB expanded into pet care.
Harf is bald, with an intense gaze and a ready smile. He has a penchant for jeans, colorful designer shirts worn untucked, and glasses with heavy black frames mostly seen on architects and artists, not staid German executives. But he’s more cosmopolitan than your average global executive — living variously in London, Milan, and New York — and better connected too. Harf modeled JAB after his idol’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway. Although Harf’s returns haven’t been as good as Warren Buffett’s, everybody who’s anybody seems keen to stake some of their money with JAB. From Buffett and his favorite banker, the former Goldman Sachs partner Byron Trott, to the Brazilian investment firm 3G, to France’s Peugeot family, to Belgian and Colombian beer dynasties: all have invested in JAB and worked with Harf. During my prior reporting on the company, Harf’s brief answers via email were always carefully crafted and rather generic, revealing little. Everything about JAB and the Reimanns was shrouded in mystery, a communications strategy orchestrated by Harf and executed by an expensive PR firm in New York for the business side and a spokeswoman in Düsseldorf for the family. Bild’s revelations were a blow to that meticulously controlled image. But they also presented an opportunity for change. “By assuming responsibility for the past, damage to the company in the present and in the future had to be averted,” Harf later wrote to me. “If I had had to choose between the interests of the company and responsibility for the past, I think I would have chosen the latter.”