When Nazi Billionaires creator David de Jong first started his analysis into the histories of uber-rich German enterprise homeowners, he had no thought their crimes could be as blatant, and horrible, as they had been.
“The sheer magnitude of the crimes surprised me,” he tells New Irregular co-host Molly Jong-Quick on this bonus episode. “I went in anticipating, naively, maybe that it was gonna be one way or the other contained.”
De Jong, who bought began on this beat as a Bloomberg reporter, says these highly effective households used “tens of 1000’s of slave pressure laborers,” together with Jewish folks, to provide their firms’ merchandise, and lots of of them died. He was additionally surprised by “the sheer magnitude of the businesses and the belongings that they stole from Jewish folks.”
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One household that de Jong says has a horrible antisemitic historical past is the household of Herbert Werner Quandt, which owns nearly half of the posh automotive model BMW.
“He had the duty for a manufacturing unit in Berlin the place, amongst different folks, 500 feminine slave laborers from focus camps had been held. He acquired firms abroad from Jews in France. He used pressured laborers and prisoners of battle in his non-public property throughout the battle. However now you will have the BMW Basis Herbert Quandt, whose motto is ‘Encourage Accountable Management.’”
Molly wonders if these households have any guilt for the crimes that occurred on their ancestors’ watches.
Sure and no, says de Jong. The guilt is there once they’re confronted with it, however he says they brush it off as one thing that many prosperous German households have of their histories.
“These persons are heirs, proper? Proper. For my part, for probably the most half, this reckoning will not be honest,” he says. “They’re billion-dollar manufacturers and fortunes on the road.”
“It led me to ask this query,” he provides. “Does enterprise success trump morality?”
He and Molly dissect that and extra on this episode.
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