Coming Clean: BMW Heirs Forced to Face Nazi Past

Exposed in a documentary on German television, the major shareholders of BMW, the Quandt family, finally own up to its share of atrocities during the Holocaust. Their slave labor camps included the most nightmarish conditions: whippings, humiliations, and public executions for having "displeased their masters." After the documentary aired, the family released a statement saying, ""We recognize that in our history as a German business family, the years 1933 to 1945 have not been sufficiently cleared up." 

Billionaire Stefan Quandt, major
shareholder of BMW

BMW's Quandt Family Faces Its Nazi Past

A shocking documentary aired on German TV exposes the family's shameful history of Nazi profiteering and use of slave labor

by Gail Edmondson

Automaker BMW is Germany's most admired employer and a pioneer in profit sharing. So it came as a shock Sept. 30 when an investigative television documentary exposed the Nazi-era misdeeds of BMW's controlling shareholder family, the Quandts. The Silence of the Quandt Family highlighted how patriarch Günther Quandt, grandfather to the generation now controlling BMW (BMWG.DE), built a blood-stained wartime fortune on the back of slave labor and how he sidestepped postwar recrimination.

The reclusive Quandt family responded to the documentary five days later, on Oct. 5, pledging to back a research project into the family's Nazi past and its role under the Third Reich, opening family archives and documents to an independent historian.

TESTIMONY FROM FORMER SLAVE LABORERS

"The accusations that have been raised against our family have moved us," said the family in a statement. "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. In keeping with its normal policy, the automaker made no comment about the Quandts, but noted that it has publically confronted its own wartime history via independent research projects.

The TV program stunned Germany and triggered a raft of newspaper stories with headlines such as "The Quandts' Bloody Billions" and "A Fortune Stained in Blood." The hour-long documentary included interviews with former slave laborers who testified to the devastating conditions and atrocities which took place at Günther Quandt's battery company, Accumulatorenfabrik AG (Afa). Afa produced highly specialized batteries for the Nazi war machine, used in U-boats and V-2 rockets. It also produced munitions. "We were treated terribly and had to drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped," said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced laborer who worked in Quandt's Hannover plant.

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