JACOB JR, MY JEWISH WORLD. BMW NAZI - Nazi Goebbels’ descendants are hidden billionaires
01/29/2013 08:56
In the spring of 1945, Harald Quandt, a
23-year-old officer in the German Luftwaffe, was being held as a
prisoner of war by Allied forces in the Libyan port city of Benghazi
when he received a farewell letter from his mother, Magda Goebbels –
the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
The hand-written note confirmed the devastating
news he had heard weeks earlier: his mother had committed suicide
with her husband on May 1, after slipping their six children cyanide
capsules in Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin.
“My dear son! By now we’ve been in the
Fuehrerbunker for six days already, Daddy, your six little siblings
and I, to give our national socialistic lives the only possible,
honorable ending,” she wrote. “Harald, dear son, I want to give
you what I learned in life: Be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the
people and loyal to your country!”
Quandt was released from captivity in 1947. Seven
years later, he and his half-brother Herbert – Harald was the only
remaining child from Magda Goebbels‚ first marriage – would
inherit the industrial empire built by their father, Guenther Quandt.
The brothers took the business, which had produced
Mauser firearms and anti-aircraft missiles for the Third Reich’s
war machine. Their most valuable assets became stakes in car
manufacturers Bayerische Motoren Werke AG ( BMW) and Daimler AG.
Lower profile
While the half-brothers passed away decades ago,
their legacy has endured. Herbert’s widow, Johanna Quandt, 86, and
their children Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt, have remained in
the public eye as BMW’s dominant shareholders. The billionaire
daughters of Harald Quandt – Katarina Geller-Herr, 61, Gabriele
Quandt, 60, Anette-Angelika May-Thies, 58, and 51-year-old
Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo – have kept a lower profile.
The four sisters inherited about 1.5 billion
deutsche marks ($760 million) after the death of their mother, Inge,
in 1978, according to the family’s sanctioned biography, Die
Quandts. They manage their wealth through the Harald Quandt
Holding GmbH, a Bad Homburg, Germany-based family investment company
and trust named after their father. Dr. Fritz Becker, the CEO of the
family entities, said the siblings realized average annual returns
above 7 percent from its founding in 1981 through 1996. Since then,
the returns have averaged 7.6%.
“The family wants to stay private and that is an
acceptable situation for me,” said Becker in an interview at his
Bad Homburg office. “We invest our money globally and if it’s
$1b., $500m. or $3b., who cares?”
Wartime profits
Together, the four sisters – and the two
children of a deceased sibling – share a fortune worth at least
$6b., giving each of them a net worth of $1.2b., according to the
Bloomberg Billionaires Index. They have never appeared individually
as billionaires on an international wealth ranking.
Becker declined to provide the exact figure the
holding manages for the four sisters. The siblings declined to
comment for this account, said Ralf-Dieter Brunowsky, a spokesman for
the family investment company, in an e-mail. He said the net worth
calculation was “too high,” declining to be more specific.
The rise of the Quandt family fortune shares the
same trajectory as Germany’s quest for global domination in the
20th century. It began in 1883, when Emil Quandt acquired a textile
company owned by his late father-in-law. At the turn of the century,
Emil passed the business to his eldest son, Guenther.
The younger Quandt saw an opportunity with the
onset of war in 1914. His factories, already one of the biggest
clothing manufacturers for the German state, quadrupled their weekly
uniform production for the army, according to Die Quandts.
Weapons production
After Germany’s surrender four years later,
Quandt put the company’s wartime profits to use. In 1922, he bought
a majority stake in Accumulatoren-Fabrik AG, a Hagen-based battery
manufacturer. Six years later, he took over Berlin-Karlsruher
Industriewerken AG, a Berlin-based manufacturer that made sewing
machines and silverware. The factory, once one of Germany’s largest
weapon producers, had been forced to retool as part of the country’s
disarmament agreement.
“The Quandt’s business grew in the
Kaiserreich, it grew during the Weimar Republic, it grew during the
Second World War and it grew strongly after the war,” Rudiger
Jungbluth, author of Die Quandts, said in an interview at a Bavarian
restaurant in Hamburg last November.
Nazi connections
In 1918, Guenther Quandt’s first wife died of
the Spanish flu, leaving him a widower with two young sons, Hellmut
and Herbert. He remarried Magda Ritschel in 1921, and the couple’s
only son, Harald, was born later that year. Hellmut died in 1927,
from complications related to appendicitis.
Quandt and Magda divorced in 1929. Two years
later, she married Joseph Goebbels, a member of the German parliament
who also held a doctorate degree in drama and served as head of
propaganda for Germany’s growing Nazi party. After the Nazis took
power in 1933, their leader, Adolf Hitler, appointed Goebbels as the
Third Reich’s propaganda minister.
Guenther Quandt joined the party that same year.
His factories became key suppliers to the German war effort, even
though his relationship with Goebbels had become increasingly
strained.
“There was constant rivalry,” said Bonn-based
history professor Joachim Scholtyseck, author of a
family-commissioned study about their involvement with the Third
Reich, in a telephone interview. “It didn’t matter that Goebbels
didn’t like him. It didn’t have any influence on Quandt’s
ability to make money.”
Forced labor
In 1937, he earned the title of
Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer, the name given to members of an elite group
of businessmen who were deemed beneficial to the production of war
materials for the Third Reich. During the war, Quandt’s AFA
manufactured batteries for U-Boat submarines and V-2 rocket
launchers. His BKIW – which had been renamed Deutsche Waffen-und
Munitionsfabriken AG in 1936 – produced Mauser firearms, ammunition
and anti-aircraft missiles.
“He was one of the leading industrialists in the
Third Reich and the Second World War,” Scholtyseck said. “He
always kept a very low profile.” From 1940 to 1945, the Quandt
family factories were staffed with more than 50,000 forced civilian
laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp workers, according
to Scholtyseck’s 1,183-page study. The report was commissioned by
the family in 2007 after German television aired the documentary The
Silence of the Quandts, a critical look at their wartime activities.
Released in September 2011, the study also found
that Quandt appropriated assets from Jewish company owners and that
his son Herbert had planned building an AFA factory in which slave
laborers would be deployed.
Army volunteer
“Guenther Quandt didn’t have a Nazi kind of
thinking,” said Jungbluth, the family biographer. “He was looking
for any opportunity to expand his personal empire.” Quandt’s
youngest son, Harald, lived with his mother, Goebbels and six
half-siblings. In 1939, he joined the German army after the country’s
invasion of Poland, volunteering for the army’s paratrooper unit
one year later.
During the war, Harald was deployed in Greece,
France and Russia, before being shot and captured in Italy in 1944,
and taken to the British Army-run POW camp in Benghazi where he
received his mother’s farewell letter.
His stepfather also sent him a goodbye note.
“It’s likely that you’ll be the only one to
remain who can continue the tradition of our family,” wrote
Goebbels, who served as Chancellor of Germany for one day following
Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945.
After the war, Guenther Quandt served in an
internment camp in Moosburg an der Isar for more than a year, before
being judged a “Mitlaeufer” – a Nazi follower who wasn’t
formally involved in the regime’s crimes – in denazification
hearings in 1948. No repercussions followed.
“He was lucky that he wasn’t as prominent as
someone like Flick or Krupp,” said Scholtyseck, referring to the
German industrialists Friedrich Flick and Alfried Krupp, who were
sentenced to prison terms at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
Guenther died in 1954 while vacationing in Cairo,
leaving his business empire equally in the hands of his two surviving
sons, Harald and Herbert. Most notably, the assets included ownership
of AFA and Deutsche Waffen-und Munitionsfabriken – renamed
Industrie-Werke Karlsruhe AG after the war – and stakes in
Daimler-Benz and potash miner Wintershall AG.
Sovereign wealth
Herbert managed the stakes in the battery, car and
potash firm, while Harald oversaw the interests in the industrial
companies, according to Jungbluth’s biography.
Over the next decade, the brothers increased their
stake in Daimler; Herbert saved BMW from collapse in the 1960s after
becoming its largest shareholder and backing the development of new
models.
Harald died in 1967, at age 45, in an airplane
crash outside Turin, Italy. The relationship between his widow, Inge,
and Herbert deteriorated after his death. Negotiations to settle the
estate by separating assets commenced in 1970.
The most valuable asset that the Harald Quandt
heirs received was four-fifths of a 14% stake in Daimler, according
to the biography. In 1974, the entire stake was sold to the Kuwait
Investment Authority, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, for
about 1b. deutsche marks, according to a DaimlerBenz publication from
1986 celebrating its centennial.
Inge Quandt, who suffered from depression, died of
a heart attack on Christmas Eve 1978. Her new husband, Dr.
Hans-Hilman von Halem, shot himself in the head on Boxing Day. The
five orphaned daughters, two of them teenagers, were left to split
the family fortune.
Family meetings
The estate’s trustees had started overseeing the
daughters’ money in 1974. An active investment approach commenced
with the founding of the family investment company in 1981.
“It’s different if you work for a family than
a corporation,” said Becker. “You can really invest instead of
fulfilling regulation requirements.” According to Die Quandts, the
siblings try to get together a few times a year to discuss their
investments. Gabriele Quandt lives in Munich. After earning a
master’s degree in business administration at INSEAD in
Fontainebleau, France, she married German publishing heir Florian
Langenscheidt, with whom she had two sons. The couple divorced in
2008.
Katarina Geller-Herr owns Gestuet Waeldershausen,
an equestrian center in Homberg (Ohm), Germany. She sponsored Lars
Nieberg, a twotime Olympic gold medalist in show jumping.
Jewish conversion
Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo is a jewelry designer
who runs a studio and showroom in Hamburg. She converted to Judaism
in New York at age 24. Her first marriage was to Michael Rosenblat, a
German-Jewish businessman, whose father survived a concentration
camp. The couple divorced in 1997. She remarried Frode Mo, a
Norwegian journalist.
Anette-Angelika May-Thies lives in Hamburg,
according to the Harald Quandt Holding shareholders list filed with
the German federal trade registry. Her first marriage was to Axel
May, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. international adviser for private
banking, who managed the family’s investments for about 25 years.
The siblings are also majority owners and
investors in five financial services companies, all of which pay
dividends, according to Becker. The firms were founded to manage the
sisters’ wealth and subsequently opened up to third parties.
Private equity
The six companies combined manage $18b. in assets,
according to the family investment company’s website. Becker said
the majority of the money controlled by these firms is invested for
third parties. One-fifth of the family fortune is managed by trustees
for the two children of the youngest Quandt sibling, Patricia
Halterman, who died in July 2005, four days before turning 38. Her
Upper East Side townhouse sold for $37.5m. in 2008.
Auda International LP serves as the sisters’ New
York-based privateequity unit. It manages almost $5b. and was founded
as their US office in 1989, said Becker. Real Estate Capital Partners
LP started the same year and has invested about $9b. in real estate,
according to its website. Both companies are owned through HQFS LP,
an offshore entity based in the Cayman Islands.
In Bad Homburg, HQ Trust GmbH serves as a
investment management company for about 30 families with fortunes
ranging from 50m. euros to 500m. euros. Equita Management GmbH
invests in small and mid-cap companies in Austria, Switzerland and
Germany. HQ Advisor GmbH provides accounting and controlling
services.
Only one sister, Gabriele, carries the family
name, and none are active in the day-to-day business of the family
office, said Becker.
“Sad truth”
Their uncle, Herbert Quandt, died in 1982. His
fortune was divided between six children from three different
marriages. BMW, his most valuable asset, was inherited by his third
wife Johanna Quandt and their children, Stefan Quandt, 46, and
Susanne Klatten, 50. The three billionaires hold 46.7% of the
Munichbased car producer, according to the company’s 2011 annual
report.
After Scholtyseck’s study was published in 2011,
cousins Gabriele and Stefan Quandt acknowledged their family’s ties
and involvement with the Third Reich in an interview with Germany’s
Die Zeit newspaper.
“Magda killed her six children in the
Fuehrerbunker. Our father loved his half-siblings very much. And
when, like me, you have something like this in your family history,
you think: It can’t be any worse,” Gabriele Quandt said in the
interview. “It’s a sad truth that forced laborers died in Quandt
companies,” said Stefan.
The acknowledgment didn’t prompt a public
distancing from the men that made their family Germany’s richest.
The families’ offices in Bad Homburg are named after Guenther and
Harald Quandt, and the Herbert Quandt media prize of 50,000 euros is
awarded annually to German journalists.
“They have to live with the name. It’s part of
the history,” said Scholtyseck. “It will be a constant reminder
of dictatorship and the challenges that families have to face.”
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