What Happened To All That Nazi Wealth Created In The 1940s? It Didn't Disappear Into Thin Air

Goebbels, a family of pillaging psychopaths... real rich ones

My Dutch friend David de Jong is a reporter for Bloomberg. He has an interesting beat: billionaires in general and secret billionaires in particular. And he has some awesome stories coming out over the next few months-- I'm sworn to secrecy but I'll give you a heads up when it's OK. Meanwhile, though, I suspect they're going to be something like the pieces he did exposing how scions of Nazi fortunes live the life of riley today. In January 2013 he broke the story about the Goebbels grandchildren's billions.

In the spring of 1945, Harald Quandt, a 23-year-old officer in the German Luftwaffe, was being held as a prisoner of war by Allied forces in the Libyan port city of Benghazi when he received a farewell letter from his mother, Magda Goebbel -- the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

The hand-written note confirmed the devastating news he had heard weeks earlier: His mother had committed suicide with her husband on May 1, after slipping their six children cyanide capsules in Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin.

"My dear son! By now we’ve been in the Fuehrerbunker for six days already, Daddy, your six little siblings and I, to give our national socialistic lives the only possible, honorable ending," she wrote. "Harald, dear son, I want to give you what I learned in life: Be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country!"

Quandt was released from captivity in 1947. Seven years later, he and his half-brother Herbert-- Harald was the only remaining child from Magda Goebbels’ first marriage-- would inherit the industrial empire built by their father, Guenther Quandt, which had produced Mauser firearms and anti-aircraft missiles for the Third Reich’s war machine. Among their most valuable assets at the time was a stake in car manufacturer Daimler AG. (DAI) They bought a part of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) a few years later.

They're dead long dead but their children are rolling in wealth and are the dominant shareholders of BMW. They inherited around $760 million, wartime profits-- some stolen from Jewish businessmen but mostly using slave labor from concentration camps to manufacture batteries for U-Boats, Mauser firearms, ammunition, anti-aircraft missiles and V-2 rocket launchers-- that have since turned into at least $6 billion. Lovely family. They try to stay undercover and de Jong's attention was not welcome, although a 2007 German TV documentary, The Silence of the Quandts had already taken a critical look at their wartime activities.

“Guenther Quandt didn’t have a Nazi-kind of thinking,” said Jungbluth, the family biographer. “He was looking for any opportunity to expand his personal empire.”

Quandt’s youngest son, Harald, lived with his mother, Goebbels and six half-siblings. In 1939, he joined the German army after the country’s invasion of Poland, volunteering for the army’s paratrooper unit one year later.

During the war, Harald was deployed in Greece, France and Russia, before being shot and captured in Italy in 1944, and taken to the British Army-run POW camp in Benghazi where he received his mother’s farewell letter.

His stepfather also sent him a goodbye note.

“It’s likely that you’ll be the only one to remain who can continue the tradition of our family,” wrote Goebbels, who served as Chancellor of Germany for one day following Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945.

Three of his survivors, Johanna Quandt, Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten are billionaires who own 46.7% of BMW. The Herbert Quandt media prize of 50,000 euros is awarded annually to German journalists. Embarrassing.

A year later, de Jong did another blockbuster for Bloomberg on hidden German billionaires whose money came from criminal Nazi activities.

Rudolf-August Oetker was weeks away from becoming an officer in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS when he received word that his mother, two stepsisters and stepfather had been killed by an Allied bomb dropped on their family home in Bielefeld, Germany.

The loss wasn’t just a personal tragedy for the 28-year-old cadet. It was a blow to one of Adolf Hitler’s front-line suppliers, Dr. August Oetker OHG, whose dry goods were being shipped to German soldiers fighting in World War II.

Oetker was granted permanent leave from his duties to take control of the family business in October 1944. Over the next six decades, the former SS officer, who trained at Dachau concentration camp, would add interests in shipping, food, beverages, banking and hotels, creating a conglomerate that has more than 26,000 employees and 10.9 billion euros ($14.8 billion) in annual revenue.

“People at the company still regard him as a hero, who made the company big after the war,” Sven Keller, co-author of an Oetker-commissioned study about the family’s involvement with the Third Reich, said in an interview in Munich. “One needs to see both sides of the person.”

Oetker died in 2007, at age 90, leaving eight children from three marriages-- Rosely Schweizer, August Oetker, Bergit Douglas, Christian Oetker, Richard Oetker, Alfred Oetker, Carl Ferdinand Oetker and Julia Oetker-- and an empire now valued at $12 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The siblings have never appeared individually on an international wealth ranking.

...In the late 1930s, Kaselowsky joined the Freundeskreis Reichsfuehrer SS, an elite group of businessmen and Nazi officials brought together by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and organizer of the Holocaust, according to the 624-page study, which was released last October.

“He was a Nazi by conviction, and interested in gaining a reputation and close contact with leading party officials,” said Jungbluth.

The company contributed to the Third Reich’s war machine by initiating joint food ventures with the SS and German army in the late 1930s, and delivering pudding and baking powder to the troops during the war.

The study also found that Kochs Adler, then majority-owned by the family, produced howitzer grenades and parts for MG 42 machine guns, and staffed its factories with foreign slave laborers during the war. Its chemical business, Chemische Fabrik Budenheim, also used prisoners of war.

“Kaselowsky and the Oetker businesses took the opportunities the regime offered them,” said Keller. “They planned for a victorious war, making sure that the soldiers at the front got their pudding.”

Kaselowsky’s stepson, Rudolf-August Oetker, was drafted into the German army in 1940 and volunteered for the SS the following year. He began his officer’s training in 1942.

As part of his training, Oetker enrolled in courses at Dachau concentration camp northwest of Munich, where one of the SS officer’s schools was based. Camp prisoners were forced to clean the aspiring officer’s rooms, according to the study.

“It was an ideological decision,” said Keller. “You didn’t sign up for the Waffen-SS if you weren’t convinced that Nazism was the right thing.”

Oetker was arrested by British forces in May 1945. He was cleared in denazification hearings and returned to the helm of the company two years later.

The timing couldn’t have been better, as Germany’s rapid return to affluence-- known as the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle-- propelled his ascent as one of Germany’s foremost industrialists.

We've tried making our readers aware of the roots of our own Nazi billion family, the Kochs but something tells me that de Jong is going to be able to fill in some blanks that haven't come to light before about the family of sociopaths that is, to this day, aimed like a dagger at the heart of American democracy.