10. Hitler Was BFF With BMW’s Owners
BMW, have always been known for their high quality cars, and until 1945, for their aircraft engines. The company, which today produces luxury automobiles and motorcycles, is a multinational with plants in Germany, America, the UK, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. Less known is that its major shareholders, the Quandt family, were Hitler’s close friends. After a 2007 TV documentary aired unpleasant revelations about the company’s activities during the Third Reich, the Quandt family launched an investigation, which reached troubling conclusions. In a nutshell, the Quandt family patriarch, Gunther Quandt, and his son Herbert, were in deep with the Nazis.
To their credit, the current generation of Quandts, unlike many others with a history of Nazi ties, did not duck the issue or sugarcoat things, but came clean. They commissioned a respected German historian to research the company’s past, and set him loose on BMW’s and the Quandt family’s archives and files. The result was a 1200 page report, which concluded that “[t]he Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis … The family patriarch was part of the regime“.
