In May 1933, Günther Quandt’s elder son, Herbert, returned to a Germany that was unrecognizable to him. His home city, Berlin, was now the capital of a new state. His former stepmother was now considered the First Lady of the Third Reich, and her new husband was the Nazi minister for propaganda. Meanwhile, his father was sitting in a cell in a Moabit jail, on unknown charges, while a corporate coup was being engineered against him at AFA.
The twenty-two-year-old Herbert had spent much of the past four years outside Germany, after barely finishing his “downright torturous” schoolwork for good. For better or for worse, he was, after Hellmut’s death, his father’s heir apparent. Herbert relished the opportunity despite his visual impairment. (His sight had remarkably improved over the years due to medical treatment.) The Great Depression also had no negative effect on him. Herbert had learned English and French in London and Paris, traveled around the world with his father, and received vocational training at an AFA battery factory in Germany and at firms in Belgium, England, and the United States.
He especially enjoyed his time in America and told his family repeatedly over Christmas in 1932 that he planned to move there if Communism drove the Quandts from Europe. “That danger wasn’t small,” Herbert later wrote, in fall 1979. “Why did Hitler come to power at the time? Because, I’m not afraid to say this here, he had declared war on communism in Germany again and again in a very impressive and pithy way.” While Herbert said he was “a blank page politically,” by January 1933 he saw Communism, not Nazism, as the great German peril. “The looming red communist danger, which had already been brought to my attention by the press in America, I now experienced firsthand as a threatening, ever-growing monster,” he later recalled.
Still, Herbert kept his head down until his father was released from jail and had returned to the office. Herbert then married his fiancée, Ursula; moved to the villa his father bought for him near the family mansion in Babelsberg; and began a four-year stint as a management trainee at AFA in Berlin. Not until two years after Hitler seized power did Herbert sign up as a supporting member of the SS.