The Silence of the Quandts, film on nazi capitalists

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This video is called The Silence of the Quandts (English subtitles, German narration).

By Emma Bode and Brigitte Fehlau in Germany:

The Silence of the Quandts: The history of a wealthy German family

A documentary film by Eric Friedler and Barbara Siebert

29 November 2008

A remarkable film, The Silence of the Quandts, which won the Hans Joachim Friedrichs prize for television journalism, deals with the unscrupulous rise of one of Germany’s richest and most influential families. The Quandts own 46.6 percent of the auto manufacturer BMW, have an estimated fortune of €20 billion and are implicated in the crimes of Hitler’s Nazi regime. Today, against the background of a financial and economic crisis that evokes the events of the 1930s, the film is of particular relevance.

The Quandts owe their wealth directly to their support of the Nazi regime and the bloody exploitation in the concentration camps—something the family is unwillingly to discuss. No family member has ever been indicted for the crimes that occurred in their company-owned concentration camps, nor has the family paid any compensation to the victims who survived.

The Quandt family has historical links to the military production business Dynamit Nobel.

This video, in English, says about itself:

BMW – The Silence of the Quandts

3 October 2012

The first 15 minutes of a documentary about the BMW family’s involvement in the Holocaust.

This series of YouTube videos, in German, says about itself:

16 May 2010 — The Quandt family is the silent might behind one of the world’s largest and most profitable automakers, BMW. Yet the family has a dark past. Its businesses profited from forced labour during the Third Reich, and the patriarchs, who were intimately involved with the Nazi regime, managed to escape prosecution and keep those profits when the war ended. This documentary shows the victims, and asks the question, “Why are the Quandts silent?”

It is my hope that, by making this excellent German documentary available to English-speaking people, the resulting public pressure will help to move the Quandts to acknowledge the family’s role, apologise, and take active steps to make reparations to the victims.

The adulation of the super-rich by Germany’s media earlier this week was quite remarkable: the object was Johanna Quandt, the third wife of Herbert Quandt, multi-billionaire and BMW heiress, who died at the age of 89 last Monday, August 3 in Bad Homburg: here.

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