A TV documentary titled “The Silence of the Quandt Family” that aired in Germany in 2007 has forced the Quandt family, which is a major shareholder in the BMW Group, to commission an independent study on their ancestors’ actions during World War II.
But before we get into more details, let us note that the Quandt family acquired BMW 15 years after the end of the war in 1959, and the automaker is not involved in this particular issue nor was it implicated in the documentary.
The 1,200-page study carried out by historian Joachim Scholtyseck concluded that the patriarch of the family, Guenther Quandt, not only cooperated willingly with the Nazi regime, of which he became a member only a month after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, but also “employed” 50,000 slave workers in his factories that churned out machinery for the German army.
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