The Richest Siblings In Germany Had One Rule: Never Ask Where The Money Came From.
How one unauthorized documentary exposed the dark history of the longest still-running "old money" auto family in Germany
On the evening of September 30, 2007, Germany’s public broadcaster ARD aired a 60-minute documentary at 11:30 at night, with no advance publicity, in the slot where television goes to be forgotten.
It was called Das Schweigen der Quandts. “The Silence of the Quandts”.
Roughly 1.3 million Germans happened to be awake for it, and what they saw was the family behind BMW, the second richest family in the country, confronted on film with the origins of its fortune: war contracts, seized Jewish businesses, and some 50,000 forced laborers, including survivors who testified on camera that they had been whipped by SS guards and made to drink from toilet basins.
By morning, the silence the family had kept for 60 years was over. Headlines called it a fortune stained in blood.
Five days later, the family announced it would commission an independent historian and open the archives.
Today, the siblings Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten control roughly 46 percent of BMW and the second largest fortune in Germany.
Both were born decades after the war. Both are innocent of any crime. What they inherited, along with the shares, was the most disciplined silence in European industry.
In the world we cover here, that silence deserves to be understood as something specific. It is an asset, and the Quandts managed theirs like one. This is the story of how it was built, how it was maintained for three generations, and what it took to break it.
