On May 8, 2019, Verena Bahlsen, the twenty-six-year-old heiress to Germany’s famous maker of cookies, the Bahlsen company, walked onto the stage at a digital marketing conference in Hamburg to give a livestreamed keynote speech about sustainable food production. She was wearing blue denim overalls and a black turtleneck, topped with a black suit jacket; the muted colors were a striking contrast to her wavy red hair and bright freckles. She confidently took the microphone. Minutes into her speech, however, she veered off topic, responding to a socialist politician who had spoken earlier about the idea of common ownership of Germany’s largest companies, such as BMW. “I am a capitalist,” Verena declared. “I own a quarter of Bahlsen and I am happy about it too. It should continue to belong to me. I want to make money and buy sailing yachts from my dividend and stuff.”
Her offhand remarks immediately drew furious reactions on social media. How dare she brag about her wealth, especially when her family firm was known to have used forced labor during World War II? A few days later, Verena brushed the criticism aside in comments to Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid: “That was before my time and we paid the forced laborers exactly the same as the Germans and treated them well.” She added: “Bahlsen has nothing to feel guilty about.”
A scandal erupted. Verena had committed what is considered perhaps the greatest moral offense in Germany today: displaying ignorance about the Nazi era. It was no secret that her family firm, like most other German companies, had benefited from Nazi Germany’s system of forced labor during World War II, wherein millions of foreigners were taken from their homelands and compelled to work in German factories, often for paltry wages under abominable conditions. In Bahlsen’s case, some seven hundred coerced workers, most of them Polish and Ukrainian women, were deported to the cookie factory in Hannover, where they were underpaid and abused. Verena’s comments generated headlines worldwide, and the fallout was swift. Historians and politicians condemned her remarks. Calls for a boycott of Bahlsen cookies followed.
Within days, a line of black Mercedes limousines pulled up to Verena’s apartment building in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, to whisk her and her possessions home to Hannover. Verena then, through her family firm, issued a public apology. But reporters at Der Spiegel magazine dug in. They revealed that Verena’s grandfather and great-uncles, the men who ran Bahlsen during the Third Reich, had been members of Hitler’s Nazi Party (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP) and had donated money to the SS, Nazi Germany’s all-powerful paramilitary organization. Many of the Ukrainian women were deported to the plant in Hannover from an expropriated cookie factory in Kyiv that Bahlsen had taken over, the reporters discovered. After the war, like millions of Germans, the Bahlsen men denied all charges of complicity with the Nazis and got off scot-free.
As public outrage grew, the Bahlsen family used a tried-and-true method to deal with the fury: they announced, through their company, that they had hired a prominent German historian to independently investigate the history of the entire firm and family, including their actions during the Nazi era. The findings were to be published in a study for anyone to read, once the research was concluded. The announcement worked, and the controversy faded. But I knew where this story was headed.
I had joined Bloomberg News years earlier, in late November 2011, as a reporter on a new team investigating hidden wealth, billionaires, and family-owned companies many times bigger than Bahlsen. I began in the New York office the week after the NYPD had violently removed members of the Occupy Wall Street movement from Zucotti Park, in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. In the wake of the previous years’ financial crisis, the tension between the 1 percent and the 99 percent was palpable around the globe. Though I was hired to cover American business dynasties such as the Kochs and the Waltons (who control Walmart), I was soon asked to add the German-speaking nations to my beat, since I am Dutch.
I accepted the additional beat grudgingly. Germany’s brutal occupation of my native Netherlands from May 1940 through May 1945 had left a deep scar among the generations before me and in our national consciousness. Back then, “they” had occupied and pillaged our country. As a kid growing up in Amsterdam in the 1990s, I saw the Germans “invade” our nearby beaches during the spring and summer holidays, and worse, they often beat us at soccer (and still do).
My playful antagonism toward Germans was compounded by my family’s experiences during the war. In 1941, my maternal grandfather, a Protestant and not yet married, attempted to flee the Netherlands by sailing to England with his best friend. Their plan was to join the Royal Air Force, but their boat was blown back to shore. German soldiers arrested them, and they were sentenced as political prisoners. My grandfather spent almost two years in captivity, forced to work in a steel factory in Bochum. He contracted tuberculosis there and was emaciated, near death, at the time of his release.
My father’s parents, who were Jewish, were separated during the war. My paternal grandfather owned and ran lace and stocking factories near the Dutch-German border. He managed to hide in the center of Amsterdam after his firm was expropriated. My grandmother, a native of Switzerland, tried to flee with my three-year-old aunt and a companion to her country of birth in 1942. They were arrested by the Gestapo (Nazi Germany’s secret police) at the French-Swiss border. A Gestapo officer took pity on my grandmother and her young child, and he let them go. They made it over the border to Switzerland. Their companion in this attempted escape, a well-known painter, was not so fortunate. He was put on a train to Sobibor, the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where he was murdered.
My grandparents, despite their suffering in the war, were exceptionally lucky. My Jewish grandfather was reunited with his wife and young daughter after the liberation of Europe, and he got his stocking factories back, but tragically, his father had died in a concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. My Jewish grandparents were never bitter about the ones they loved and lost, murdered by the Nazis. Nor was my maternal grandfather bitter about the time he spent in German captivity. Before he was robbed of his freedom, he had fallen in love with the girl next door. He recovered from tuberculosis at a Swiss sanatorium; my grandmother remained at his bedside the entire time. They married shortly after he recovered.
My parents were born a few years after the war. All told, my grandparents made a good life for themselves, for their children, and for me.
Yet my maternal grandfather had a way of taking some gentle “revenge” on the Germans: he constantly made jokes about them. He was my hero growing up, a proud Dutch patriot. My grandparents lived on a farming estate in a tiny Dutch village with three hundred inhabitants, near the German-favored beaches. “Another incoming invasion,” he quipped every spring. He would ask me to promise never to take the Germans seriously because they took themselves so seriously. I earnestly swore to him that I would not. “Humor is the best revenge,” he said.
But on my new beat, I came to take the Germans very seriously — particularly those in big business and finance. In summer 2012, as part of a reporting assignment, I stumbled on an inconspicuous website. “Harald Quandt Holding,” read the homepage of this company, which listed the assets of its various investment firms at $18 billion. How did an obscure German family office with a bare-bones, one-page website manage to invest such staggering amounts of money? That question became the loose thread that led me to this history.
It turned out that this branch of the Quandt business dynasty descended from one Magda Goebbels, the unofficial First Lady of the Third Reich and wife of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Magda’s son Harald was the only one of her seven children to survive the war. Harald, sole offspring of Magda’s first marriage to the industrialist Günther Quandt, grew up in the Goebbels household but never joined the Nazi Party. Harald did have an older half brother, Herbert Quandt, who would save BMW from bankruptcy years after the war. By 2012, Herbert’s youngest heirs remained Germany’s wealthiest family, with a near-majority control of BMW, whereas Harald’s heirs oversaw a “smaller” holding in a leafy spa town outside Frankfurt.
In 2007, the Quandt dynasty, in a move not unlike the Bahlsens’, commissioned a German history professor to investigate the family’s Nazi past. This move came on the heels of a critical TV documentary that threw light on some of the dynasty’s involvement in the Third Reich, focusing on its mass production of weapons, its use of forced and slave labor, and its seizure of firms owned by Jews. Günther and Herbert Quandt led the family firms involved in these activities.
What struck me during my reporting was the continuing lack of historical transparency among members of the Quandt dynasty’s richer branch, the one that owns BMW, even after the family-commissioned study — with the professed goal of “openness” — was published in 2011. The study revealed that the family patriarchs committed many more brutal crimes during the Nazi era. As I soon discovered, the Quandts were not alone. Other German business dynasties flourished during the Third Reich and went on to control enormous global fortunes, all the while struggling, or outright failing, to reckon with a dark lineage.
These histories have never been told to an audience outside Germany. Meanwhile, these families still control billions of euros and dollars. Some of the heirs no longer own a business; they simply manage their inherited wealth. But many own well-known brands, whose products blanket the globe — from the cars we drive, to the coffee and beer we drink, to the houses we rent, the land we live on, and the hotels we book for vacations and business trips. My articles focused mainly on these families’ finances. It was Bloomberg, after all. But that angle left the most compelling questions unanswered. How did the patriarchs of these families rise to greater heights of power under Hitler’s rule? Why were almost all of them allowed to walk free after Nazi Germany fell? And why, after so many decades, are many of the heirs still doing so little to acknowledge their forebears’ crimes, projecting a view of history that keeps these matters opaque? Why are their charitable foundations, media prizes, and corporate headquarters still named for their Nazi-collaborator patriarchs?
The answer to those questions, or at least a piece of it, lies in these pages — in the origin stories of some of Germany’s wealthiest reigning dynasties, who continue to control swaths of the global economy. More specifically, the answer lies in the stories of those dynasties’ patriarchs, who amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Born in or near imperial Germany, these men joined the ranks of the business elite during the volatile period after World War I. By the start of the Nazi era, in 1933, they were well-established industrialists, financiers, food producers, or car designers, though some were just starting a career as the designated heir to an imperious father. These men collaborated with Hitler’s regime in the years leading up to and including World War II, enriching themselves and their firms through weapons production, the use of forced and slave labor, and the seizure of companies owned by Jews and non-Jews alike in Germany and Nazi-occupied territories.
Some of these tycoons were ardent Nazis, who unquestioningly embraced Hitler’s ideology. But most were simply calculating, unscrupulous opportunists looking to expand their business empires at any cost. All of them became members of the Nazi Party or the SS, or both, during the Third Reich. Such is the dark history of the Quandts of BMW; the Flicks, former owners of Daimler-Benz; the von Fincks, a financier family who cofounded Allianz and Munich Re; the Porsche-Piëch clan, who control Volkswagen and Porsche; and the Oetkers, who own global empires of baking ingredients, prepared foods, beer, and luxury hotels. Their patriarchs are the Nazi billionaires. This book details the Third Reich histories and reckoning of those German business dynasties that continue to have worldwide influence and relevance today.
But this book isn’t just about the sins of Germany’s titans of industry and finance. Here too is the story of how, after the war, it fell to the victorious Allies to decide the fate of these Nazi profiteers. But for the sake of political expediency, and for fear of the looming threat of Communism, the United States and the United Kingdom quietly handed most of these tycoons back over to Germany, which in turn allowed most of the guilty moguls to walk free, with little more than a slap on the wrist. In the decades that followed, the western part of a divided Germany developed one of the world’s most prosperous economies, and those same Nazi businessmen amassed billions of dollars, joining the ranks of the world’s wealthiest tycoons. All the while they kept silent, or outright lied, about their ties to genocide.
As of today, a small few of these men’s heirs have truly reckoned with the family past. Others still refuse to do so, with little negative effect. Verena Bahlsen escaped any professional consequences for her comments. In fact, her father soon promoted her. In mid-March 2020, Bahlsen announced that Verena, instead of her three siblings, would become the company’s primary active shareholder and represent the next generation at the family firm.
The Germany that rose out of defeat in World War II matured into a tolerant society, one that educated its people, in remembrance and remorse, about its past mistakes. As many of today’s great global powers have fallen prey to dictators, far-right populists, and demagogues, Germany has remained the moral backbone of the West. Much of that delicate equilibrium stems from its continuous public reckoning with the Nazi past and the mass atrocities that occurred under Hitler’s regime. Over the past fifty years, German political leaders haven’t shied away from taking moral responsibility and acknowledging the sins of the past. But more recently, Germany has begun a transformation in a different direction. As the last witnesses to the Nazi era die and the memory of the Third Reich fades, an increasingly mainstream and brazen reactionary right is brutalizing the progressive ideals of postwar Germany.
At a time when disinformation is omnipresent and the far right is rising globally, historical transparency and the subsequent reckoning become even more important, as we can see in the United States and in the United Kingdom, where statues of Confederate generals, slave traders, and Christopher Columbus are being torn down and colleges named after racist presidents are being rechristened. Yet this movement toward facing the past is somehow bypassing many of Germany’s legendary businessmen. Their dark legacy remains hidden in plain sight. This book, in some small way, tries to right that wrong.