A shocking documentary aired on German TV exposes the family’s outrageous history of Nazi profiteering and employment of dependant labor

by Gail Edmondson

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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’sitting controlling shareholder family, the Quandts. The Silence of the Quandt Family highlighted by what mode patriarch Günther Quandt, grandpapa to the generation at this time controlling BMW (BMWG.DE), built a blood-stained wartime lot adhering the back of slave labor and to what degree 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 writer of history.

Testimony from Former Slave Laborers

"The accusations that have been raised in requital for 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 concede not been sufficiently cleared up."

BMW, of which the Quandts became major shareholders 15 years after the enmity, was not implicated in the documentary. In agreement with its normal policy, the automaker made no comment about the Quandts, but famous 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 so as "The Quandts’ Bloody Billions" and "A Fortune Stained in Blood." The hour-long documentary included interviews by former slave laborers who testified to the devastating conditions and atrocities which took place at Günther Quandt’sitting 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 take a drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped," said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced laborer who worked in Quandt’s Hannover plant.

Based on documents unearthed by the filmmakers, Quandt estimated a "fluctuation of 80 prisoners per month," in his battery factory—a likely intimation to expected deaths per month, the pellicle claims. It also says that Quandt, who joined the Nazi faction in 1933, wielded close family ties to the Nazi elite to expand his battery business. Sven Quandt, a grandson of Günther and the only family member to appear in the documentary, says that he and his siblings cannot be held responsible for their grandfather’s activities.

Quandts Rejected Pleas for Reparations

Afa had factories in Hannover, Berlin, and Vienna and was supplied with slave laborers from concentration camps who died by the hundreds, according to the documentary. One former Danish slave laborer testified in the film that he and other survivors, who were deported to a German concentration encamp and sent to work at Afa, returned to Germany in 1972 to make an allegation for financial protect from the Quandts, since the rough working conditions at Afa had resulted in lifelong ailments.

The Quandts turned them away, the film says. "It’s for me a progression in the right direction that the Quandt household, after so many decades, once for all is willing to face its history," says Carl-Adolf Sörensen, a former Danish resistance fighter who was sent to the Hannover-Stöcken concentration camp in 1943. Sörensen wants the Quandts to admit that Afa relied on slave suffer from the camp.

Escaping Justice

The Silence of the Quandt Family was broadcast by Norddeutsche Runkfunk (NDR), an affiliate of the national ARD reticulated, and was based upon five years of research by authors Eric Friedler and Barbara Siebert. It premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival on Sept. 30 and was aired without notice put on television later that obscurity, at 11:30 p.m., reaching every estimated audience of 1.3 million.