In September 2011, Stefan Quandt and his cousin Gabriele, a daughter of Harald, sat down with two journalists from Die Zeit, Germany’s highbrow weekly newspaper, for the family’s first and only interview, to date, on the study’s findings. One of the interviewers was Rüdiger Jungbluth, writer of the 2002 bestselling Quandt family biography and the first to bring the dynasty’s Nazi past to a larger audience.
Gabriele expressed her horror and shame at the way forced and slave laborers were treated in Quandt-owned firms during the Third Reich. She concluded: “It hurts. Günther Quandt is our grandfather. But we would have liked to have had another one. Or rather: we would have liked to have had him differently.” The documentary, though flawed, had put things in motion, Gabriele said. She “found the insinuation that our publicity shyness suggested that we had skeletons in the closet, and that our money came from dubious sources, painful and outrageous. But it woke us up.”
Apparently not everyone woke up. Stefan again went on the defensive. The interview began with Germany’s richest heir recounting the things that the study confirmed his grandfather Günther was not: “. . . not an anti-Semite. Not a convinced National Socialist. And not a warmonger.” Günther’s many Aryanizations were news to the forty-five-year-old Quandt heir. He described the revelations as “painful.” But even so, Stefan didn’t share Scholtyseck’s conclusion that his grandfather was a part of the Nazi regime: “I would prefer ‘part of the Nazi system.’ I interpret ‘regime’ as political leadership, to which he didn’t belong. He took advantage of the opportunities the system offered industrialists, but he didn’t pursue its ideological goals.”
And although Stefan acknowledged that coerced workers endured terrible circumstances in the family factories and found it “a sad truth that people didn’t survive forced labor in Quandt companies,” the BMW heir argued that Günther “didn’t pursue the goal of killing people. This is something that is close to my heart as a grandson. That line wasn’t crossed. The employment of forced labor was necessary in the system at that time to maintain production. The German men were at the front.” Stefan ignored the fact that Günther had directly benefited from the frontline killing, simply by being one of Nazi Germany’s largest producers of arms and ammo.
Whereas Stefan conceded that his father, Herbert, was also a part of that same Nazi system and participated in the use of forced and slave labor, he considered the Third Reich era too short a period to serve as a basis for understanding Herbert or inferring his “entire personality from his actions. He stood in his father’s shadow.” Stefan announced in the interview that, together with his mother, Johanna, and his sister, Susanne, the three BMW heirs would make a donation to Berlin’s forced labor documentation center. The center is located in an intact camp that had imprisoned two hundred enslaved women at the Pertrix factory, for which Herbert was responsible during the war. His heirs would give more than five million euros (about $6 million) toward its renovation, as well as its educational programs and exhibitions, including one on Pertrix’s use of forced and slave labor. Stefan had visited the center, and he was impressed by the remembrance work being done there.
When the interviewers asked Stefan about his half brother’s statement that Germany should just forget about its Nazi past, he eventually admitted that Sven’s answers were unfortunate: “I don’t see any point in time in Germany when we can say: We shouldn’t think about the Nazi era anymore, or no longer reflect on it. But it also can’t be that this country defines itself only through the twelve years of National Socialism.” But Stefan had at first stood up for Sven, stating that he “was not prepared for these questions.” Stefan seemed to find it unfair that a reporter might ask him, or one of his relatives, a question without forewarning or a chance to vet it beforehand. This from the steward of an annual journalism prize.
Stefan described the family’s distancing from his father and grandfather as necessary but a “massive and painful” inner conflict. And yet, despite these admissions, little seemed to change among the younger, more penitent Quandts. The BMW Quandts wouldn’t remove Günther’s name for their headquarters in Bad Homburg. “We cannot and do not want to erase Günther Quandt from our history, but we will remember him with his light and dark sides. Everything else is too easy,” Stefan said in the interview. Germany’s wealthiest family also decided to retain Herbert’s name for the media prize and one of their foundations. Stefan believed his father’s “life’s work” justified it. The Quandt heir didn’t find it strange that they awarded a media prize in the name of a man who rarely spoke to the press, let alone one who bore “direct responsibility” in the crimes of the Third Reich. Like Herbert before him, Stefan was apparently unable or unwilling to escape his father’s shadow.
Stefan said in the interview that the family’s most important goals in commissioning the study of their history were “openness and transparency.” But, for an entire decade following the interview, when you visited the website of the Herbert Quandt Media Prize and read the biography of its namesake, you would find no mention of his activities during the Nazi era except one: he joined the executive board of AFA in 1940. Nothing was written about his crimes, those of his father, or those of their firms. The website’s description of Scholtyseck’s study was bafflingly vague. The reason for the study and the weight of its findings were absent, nor was the Third Reich mentioned anywhere. From this one could have parsed the study’s real impetus — public pressure, but not an honest desire to confront a challenging history. This euphemistic statement was as close as the website got to expressing the reason for the study: “As with other important firms and entrepreneurial families of the 20th century, there was a loud call for an overall presentation of the family business history.”
Only in the last week of October 2021, more than a decade after the study was published but just days after the latest in a series of inquiries from me, was Herbert’s whitewashed biography on the website suddenly replaced with an expanded one. This version included some of his activities during the Third Reich, part of Scholtyseck’s findings and conclusions, and the reason the study came about: public pressure.