10.

The headline that accompanied the New York Times article in mid-June 2019 could have been the subtitle of a trashy novel: “Nazis Killed Her Father. Then She Fell in Love with One.” But the article itself had a far more serious tone. For the first time ever, two members of the Reimann dynasty, now Germany’s wealthiest family, had spoken on the record to a reporter. The story they told was both tragic and bizarre. During or soon after the war, Albert Reimann — dynasty patriarch, anti-Semite, and local Nazi Party politician — began a decades-long relationship with Emily Landecker, an employee of the mogul and the daughter of a Jewish man. In 1941, Emily was hired at Reimann’s firm in Ludwigshafen. In 1942, her father, Alfred, was arrested by Gestapo officers at his home in Mannheim, and murdered soon after. His last message came from a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, which served as a transfer point to the extermination camps Sobibor and Belzec.

From 1951 on, Albert Reimann fathered three children with Emily; two are current shareholders in the family conglomerate, JAB. Now, some of the Reimanns were ready to share their family’s legacy. They were descendants of an ardent Nazi and a Jewish man murdered by the Nazis. They were the product of perpetrator and victim, and their story involved both reckoning and grief. But it got more complex. Throughout his romance with his employee Emily, Albert was also married to another woman. Their union remained childless, though, and in 1965 Albert formally adopted his children with Emily and continued their liaison. Albert and Emily spoke little of the war with their children. The only things Albert told them was that French prisoners of war were “often given some red wine on Saturdays” and that “forced laborers had loved the company so much, they cried when the conflict ended and they had to leave.”

Wolfgang Reimann, the son of Emily and Albert, told the Times that when they asked their mother about the family’s Jewish roots, she spoke vaguely of being raised in a “Jewish milieu” and then chided her children to quit talking about “that old stuff.” They didn’t discover that their father had been a fervent Nazi until the family-commissioned historian presented his interim report to them in January 2019. Emily had loved Albert, despite everything. “I never understood why,” Wolfgang told the New York Times. “He was not very lovable from my perspective.”

In the article, JAB’s chairman and the Reimanns’ confidant, Peter Harf, born exactly one year and one day after the war ended, revealed that his own father had been a Nazi too. He was worried about the rise of nationalism in the West and said it was time to take a stand. The billionaire thought that too few corporate voices were speaking out against the resurgence of populism. “In history, businesses have enabled populists,” Harf told the Times reporter. “We mustn’t make the same mistake today.”

In a major breakthrough in corporate Germany’s reckoning with the Third Reich, the country’s wealthiest business dynasty announced that they would rename their family foundation. It would no longer honor the Reimanns’ Nazi father or grandfather, but rather their Jewish grandfather who had been murdered by the Nazis. Furthermore, the Alfred Landecker Foundation would focus on educating people about the Holocaust. The Reimanns signaled their commitment to this goal with a massive family-funded endowment: 250 million euros ($300 million), every ten years, in perpetuity. They stacked the foundation’s board with globally prominent names from academia, business, and politics, and announced the funding of a new program and chair at Oxford University to research the persecution of minorities in Europe. The family didn’t stop there. The foundation began tracking down survivors of forced labor at the family firm, and then compensated them. To put it bluntly, Germany’s new wealthiest business dynasty was putting their money where their mouth was, all in the name of a man who had been demonized by the family’s founding tycoons. What’s more, the website of the Alfred Landecker Foundation is transparent about the Reimann family’s Nazi patriarchs and their crimes.

This stood in stark contrast to the Quandts of BMW. On June 20, 2019, six days after the New York Times article about the Reimanns came out, Manager Magazin, a German publication similar to Forbes, published a cover story about two of the Quandts. It was the first time Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt, Herbert’s youngest children, had sat down together to give an interview. The magazine estimated their fortune that year at about 26.5 billion euros ($30 billion), making them Germany’s second-wealthiest family, behind the Reimanns. The two Quandt siblings control about 47 percent of BMW, among many other investments. BMW gave them a total dividend of almost 800 million euros ($1 billion) in 2019, even though its share price lagged. In the interview, the family’s Nazi history was left undiscussed. Apparently, the magazine thought that the topic had long since been exhausted.

Instead, Stefan used the opportunity to question the rationale of an inheritance tax. Susanne said that wealth redistribution doesn’t work and argued for a meritocracy, saying that a fair society should allow people to pursue opportunities according to their abilities. “Our potential stems from our roles as heirs and in developing that [inheritance],” she told the magazine. “We work hard on that every day. The role as guardians of wealth also has personal sides that aren’t so nice.” One of those unpleasant aspects, according to the multibillionaire siblings, is dealing with jealousy concerning their immense inheritance: “Some people believe that we are constantly sitting around on a yacht in the Mediterranean,” Susanne said. Her brother had made a similar comment almost eight years earlier when discussing the family’s Nazi history with Die Zeit. “We don’t spend all day at the beach,” Stefan had said back then. “I don’t have a big money bin like Scrooge McDuck.” He too seemed to view his inheritance as an immense cross to bear. The headline for this new interview directly quoted a question Susanne put forth, echoing, without a trace of irony, another of her brother’s earlier musings: “Who Would Want to Trade Places with Us?”

On June 22, 2019, two days after the interview was published, the annual Herbert Quandt Media Prize was awarded, as usual, on the occasion of the mogul’s birthdate. That day, Stefan published a version of his award speech as a column in the conservative-leaning Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest and most influential newspapers. The title of his column was “Protect Private Property!” In it, he railed against supposed threats to property rights, the menace of a higher inheritance tax, and the specter of expropriations in today’s Germany. The fact that his grandfather and father had flouted the private property rights of their Nazi-era victims and massively benefited from state-supported expropriations was seemingly lost on the BMW heir. Ten days later, Stefan joined the newspaper’s supervisory board.

Stefan Quandt at the Jewish Museum Berlin, 2018.

ullstein bild – Henry Herrmann

To this day, the two Quandt siblings oversee their corporate empire from the Günther Quandt House in Bad Homburg. Stefan annually awards the Herbert Quandt Media Prize to German journalists. In 2016, BMW’s charitable arm was consolidated under the Herbert Quandt Foundation. The foundation’s assets were increased to a hundred million euros ($120 million); another thirty million ($35 million) were provided by Stefan and Susanne themselves. Its mission is to promote and inspire “responsible leadership” in the name of a man who once helped Aryanize companies in France, who supervised a factory in Berlin filled with female slave laborers, and who oversaw the planning and building of a sub–concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. But none of that matters to BMW, apparently. If the foundation is to be believed, Herbert’s entire biography consists of only one act: he “secured the independence” of BMW. The triumphs and travesties of his life are reduced to that one terse sentence.

In May 2021, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that a street in Munich named after Herbert Quandt was on a shortlist of streets that might be renamed. When a district member of the AfD argued that Herbert’s business merits following the war should be considered during the deliberation, the historian in charge of recommending the renamings countered that anyone who had “profited from the Nazi system” and thus “sinned” against humanity’s core values “doesn’t deserve a relativizing overall view of his life’s work.”

Thus far, the scale remains tipped in favor of money and power. Many German business dynasties continue to sidestep a complete reckoning with the dark history that stains their fortunes, and so the ghosts of the Third Reich still haunt them.