On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, marking the end of German democracy. In the months that followed, he used emergency decrees and political pressure to dismantle democratic institutions, eliminate opposition parties, and strip away individual freedoms, including freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. But ideology alone does not build tanks or fire artillery. The Nazi war machine depended on steel, coal, capital, and on the industrialists who supplied weapons, financed expansion, and profited from human suffering.
As the war escalated, forced labor became the engine of the German economy, with millions of prisoners, civilians, and concentration camp inmates forced to work under brutal conditions in factories and mines. Among those who profited most was Günther Quandt, who built one of Germany’s largest industrial empires, supplied ammunition, rifles, artillery, and submarine batteries to the Nazi war effort, and profited from tens of thousands of slave laborers in his factories. At least three of his plants used concentration camp inmates, and execution areas were set up on factory grounds. Thousands of those forced to work for him did not survive.
Quandt was born on July 28, 1881, in Pritzwalk, then part of the German Empire, the son of cloth manufacturer Emil Quandt. After completing training in the textile industry, he became co-owner of the Draeger Brothers Cloth Factory in 1909 and co-owner of the Friedrich Paul Cloth Factory in Wittstock by 1911. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Quandt supplied uniforms to the German army, amassing a large fortune. In 1915, he became head of Reichswall AG, and his corporate group became the army’s principal supplier.
His first wife died from the Spanish flu in 1918, the same year the war ended. After the war, Quandt worked as an advisor in the Reich Ministry of Economics and was active in the Reich Office for Textile Economics. In January 1921, he married the 19-year-old Magda Ritschel, and their son Harald was born later that year. From 1922 onwards, Quandt became increasingly involved in the potash industry, particularly with Wintershall AG, and worked closely with banker Jakob Goldschmidt, who helped him acquire control of Accumulatorenfabrik AG (AFA), Europe’s largest manufacturer of batteries and accumulators, including battery systems for submarines.
In 1928, he gained control of Berlin-Karlsruher Industrie-Werke AG, an armaments company that had been banned from producing weapons after the First World War. By the late 1920s, Quandt’s marriage to Magda was collapsing, but she would become the family’s key link to the Nazi movement. After their divorce in 1929, Magda joined the Nazi Party in September 1930 and began working at party headquarters in Berlin, where she met her future husband, Joseph Goebbels, who would become Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. Quandt remained on friendly terms with his ex-wife and was introduced to Goebbels.
He soon became convinced, like many industrialists of the time, that the Treaty of Versailles was a national disgrace and that communists posed a mortal threat to Germany. Quandt first met Hitler in 1931, when the Nazi leader was cultivating relationships with major industrialists. By mid-1931, Quandt had joined a secret group of industrialists who met with Hitler at Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof and pledged 25 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party in the event of a left-wing uprising. In December 1931, Goebbels recorded in his diary that he had received 2,000 Reichsmarks from Quandt, describing the industrialist as clever, energetic, and a brutal capitalist.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. The following month, Quandt participated in another secret meeting between Hitler and industrialists, where campaign aid of 3 million Reichsmarks was approved for the Nazi Party and its coalition partner. On May 1, 1933, Quandt became a member of the Nazi Party. Several days later, he was arrested on false charges.
Nazi officials publicly declared he had been caught transferring funds abroad and planned to relocate AFA factories outside Germany. Goebbels put in a good word for Quandt, telling Hitler, “It is a bad idea not to allow the economy to settle down. ” Quandt was quickly released and went on to become one of Germany’s most important arms producers. In 1937, Hitler appointed Quandt as a leader of the armament economy, a title given to industrialists who played a leading role in the Nazi war economy.
Quandt’s factories supplied Hitler’s military with ammunition, rifles, artillery, and crucially, batteries. AFA produced batteries of sufficient quality to make both the submarine war in the Atlantic and the launch of Hitler’s V2 rocket possible. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. As German industrialists appropriated factories throughout Europe in the wake of Hitler’s conquests, Quandt was one of the first in line.
He failed on two occasions, however. In Belgium, he tried to take over a chemical company after wrongly assuming its owner was Jewish. In Luxembourg, he attempted something similarly ruthless. In 1943, a local businessman was arrested by the Gestapo, and Quandt appealed directly to Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, hoping to secure a controlling stake in the man’s company.
Speer saw no reason to intervene on Quandt’s behalf. Inside his own factories, exploitation was already underway. According to historians, Jewish forced laborers were used in at least one of Quandt’s companies as early as 1938. During the Second World War, as German labor was recruited for military service, Quandt’s factories turned to other sources.
By 1944, forced laborers and prisoners of war made up around 40% of the total workforce of up to 5,800 workers at the AFA plant in Hagen. From the summer of 1943 onwards, inmates from the Neuengamme concentration camp satellite camp in Hanover were deployed in the AFA branch plant there. Around 1,500 concentration camp prisoners, housed directly on the factory grounds, carried out battery production in lead-poisoned surroundings. Another satellite camp on the factory grounds even had an execution site.
In Vienna, prisoners from Mauthausen concentration camp were used in 1944. In Berlin, around 500 female concentration camp prisoners were forced to work with caustic acids at Pertrix, a subsidiary of AFA. These working conditions caused an average of 80 deaths per month, a rate the company consciously calculated in advance as expected fluctuation. One former forced laborer was Carl Adolf Sørensen, a Danish resistance fighter deported in 1943.
He was sent to a satellite camp near Hanover and forced to work in the adjacent AFA battery plant. Sørensen arrived with 40 comrades, and they assembled batteries for German submarines while handling toxic heavy metals without protective gear. Six died in the first three months alone. SS men told Sørensen that inmates could not expect to survive more than six months.
Most prisoners ultimately succumbed to lead poisoning. The Quandt family was aware of these conditions. Günther Quandt’s son, Herbert, was director of Pertrix, the Berlin-based subsidiary of AFA that used female slave laborers, including Polish women transferred from Auschwitz. It is estimated that up to 50,000 slave laborers worked in Quandt’s arms factories during the Nazi era.
The Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. In July 1946, Quandt was arrested because of his connections to Goebbels and interned. To the surprise of many, he was classified as a follower, someone who accepted Nazi ideology but did not take an active part in crimes. In January 1948, Quandt was released without charge.
Benjamin Ferencz, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, later said that if the evidence against Quandt had been presented to the court at the time, he would have been charged with the same offenses as the directors of I. G. Farben, who served up to eight years in prison. Günther Quandt died on December 30, 1954, in Cairo, Egypt, at the age of 73.
After his death, his son Herbert turned the family fortune toward a new venture. In 1960, he acquired a large package of shares in BMW, protecting the struggling automaker from a takeover by Daimler-Benz. The story of the Quandts saving BMW became one of the great legends of the German post-war economic miracle, while the question of how they had amassed the fortune for that purchase remained largely forgotten.
To this day, the Quandt family remains the controlling shareholder of BMW and is among Germany’s richest and most influential families, with an estimated fortune of nearly 50 billion dollars.