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Friday, October 7, 2011

The BMW family and the Nazis

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

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After decades of silence the Quandt family are giving up the goods. 

An in-depth study has expectedly revealed that Guenther Quandt used forced labour from Nazi concentration camps in his factories in the production of ammunition, rifles and artillery for Germany in the war.  The family also acquired companies through Aryanisation, a Nazi program that seized Jewish owned firms for the enrichment of Nazi allies. 

The family bought into BMW 15 years after the war therefore BMW is not implicated in the focus of the research project, 1933-1945.

Quandt joined the party on 1st May 1933 a month after Hitler rose to power in Germany.

Guenther and his wife Magda Behrend Rietschel divorced in 1929. She later married Nazi propagandist Jospeh Goebbels - they famously poisoned their 6 children and then committed suicide in Hitler's bunker days before the Fuhrer and Eva Braun in 1945. 

An unscrupulous opportunist, he visciously turned his back on the Jewish business associates he had before the war.  An investigation commissioned by the family confirmed that Guenther Quandt and family members were inseparably connected to the crimes of the National Socialists.  The family was forced to own its history after a 2007 German documentary, The Silence of the Quandt Family, insisted on the public admittance that their fortune was built on blood.

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