- Guenther Quandt was a member of the Nazi party and benefited from its 'Aryanisation' programme by taking over Jewish firms
- His wife, Magda Behrend Rietschel, later divorced him and married Joseph Goebbels, with whom she died in Hitler's bunker in 1945
- Quandt factories employed 50,000 slave labourers to churn out weapons and ammunition for the Nazis during World War Two, making the family very rich
- Family still retains majority of shares in luxury car maker
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| Family secret: Guenther Quandt, whose family now owns BMW, used slave labourers during World War Two in his weapons factories in Germany |
The dynasty
behind the BMW luxury car marker has admitted, after decades of silence, using
slave labour, taking over Jewish firms and doing business with the highest
echelons of the Nazi party during World War Two.
Gabriele
Quandt, whose grandfather Guenther employed an estimated 50,000 forced
labourers in his arms factories, producing ammunition, rifles, artillery and
U-boat batteries, said it was 'wrong' for the family to ignore this chapter of
its history.
He spoke
out after an in-depth study by Bonn-based historian Joachim Scholtyseck,
commissioned by the family, that concluded Guenther Quandt and his son Herbert
were responsible for numerous Nazi injustices.
It found
Guenther acquired companies through the Nazi programme of 'Aryanisation' of
Jewish-owned firms.
Herbert
Quandt was 'part of the system', son Stefan Quandt said after the conclusion of
the three-year study - forced on the family by public outrage over a German TV
documentary - compiled using company files from the 12-year period of the Third
Reich.
The Quandt
family bought into BMW 15 years after the War.
The study
shows Guenther became a Nazi Party member on May 1, 1933, a month after Adolf
Hitler achieved supreme power in Germany.
But he had
long used a network of party officials and Wehrmacht officers to build up
contacts for lucrative state contracts.
Married to
Magda Behrend Rietschel, Guenther was divorced by her in 1929 although they
remained on friendly terms.
She went on
to marry the 'poison dwarf' of the Nazi party, the propaganda maestro Joseph
Goebbels, and would die with him - after murdering their six children - in
Hitler's bunker in 1945.
The company
grew rich in the Nazi era. In 1937, Hitler bestowed on Guenther the title
Wehrwirtschaftsführer - leader of the armament economy - and his business
supplied weapons using slave labourers from concentration camps in at least
three factories.
 |
| Family ties: Herbert Quandt, Guenther's son, was also aware that slave labour was being used in the family's factories. Right, Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Guenther Quandt divorced Magda Behrend Rietschel, who went on to become Goebbels' wife (pictured right) |
Hundreds of
these labourers died.
An
execution area to murder those who displeased their masters was found in one of
his plants in Hannover and the study mentions the fate of a Polish man who was
hanged at another plant in front of 50 other inmates.
The study
showed that the Quandt firms also used Russian POWs as slave labourers and that
Guenther and Herbert knew about them, detailing their dispersion among their
empire from the company HQ in Berlin.
Herbert
even employed Ukrainian slaves on his weekend retreat outside the Reich
capital.
Guenther
was described as an 'opportunist' who enthusiastically helped the regime to rid
Berlin industries of Jewish workers before the start of the war.
This was
despite his numerous contacts with Jewish bankers in the years before the Nazis
began their climb to power.
 |
| Admission: Stefan Quandt, pictured with his mother Johanna, has said his family - including father Herbert - was 'part of the Nazi system' |
He was also
'unscrupulous' in his take-overs of Jewish firms which were forcibly sold for a
pittance to loyal German industrialists such as himself.
'The family
patriarch was part of the Nazi regime', judged the historian in the 1,200 page
study.
'The Quandts
connected themselves inseparably with the crimes of the National Socialists.'
The Quandts
were pressured into commissioning the study after a 2007 TV documentary in
Germany entitled The Silence Of The Quandt Family.
Five days
later, as the press headlines about a fortune built on blood piled up, the
reclusive family announced its full backing for the research project.
At the time
it said: 'The accusations that have been raised against our family have moved
us.
'We
recognize that in our history as a German business family, the years 1933 to
1945 have not been sufficiently cleared up.'
BMW, of
which the Quandts became major shareholders 15 years after the war, was not
implicated in the documentary.
'We were
treated terribly and had to drink water from the toilets. We were also
whipped,' said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced labourer who worked in Quandt's
Hannover plant.
In 1946
Guenther Quandt was arrested and interned. To the surprise of many, he was
judged to be a 'Mitlaufer', or fellow traveller - namely someone who accepted the Nazi ideology
but did not take an active part in crimes.
He was
released in January 1948.
 |
| Business interests: The BMW factory in Cowley, Oxfordshire. The Quandt family still owns the majority of shares in luxury car manufacturer BMW |
One of the
prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials, Benjamin Ferencz, now says that if today's
evidence against him had been presented to the court at the time,'Quandt would
have been charged with the same offences as the directors of IG Farben' - the
makers of the gas used to murder the Jews at Auschwitz.
Quandt was
able to re-install himself in the supervisory boards of various German firms
such as Deutsche Bank. He also became an honorary citizen of the University in
Frankfurt in 1951.
He died on
holiday in Cairo on December 30, 1954.
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