In 2016, BMW’s charitable arm was consolidated under the name BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt. It is now a major global charity, with approximately $150 million in assets, supporting sustainability goals and impact investing. Stefan Quandt and Mrs. Klatten are among the founding donors. If we are to believe the foundation’s website, Herbert Quandt’s entire biography consists of one act: he “guaranteed the independence” of BMW. The charity’s motto is to promote “responsible leadership” and “inspire leaders around the world to work for a more peaceful, just and sustainable future.”
BMW and its controlling shareholders, Mr. Quandt and Ms. Klatten, are not unique in their revisionism. In 2019, the Ferry Porsche Foundation announced that it would confer Germany’s first professorship in business history at the University of Stuttgart. The Porsche company laid the foundation in 2018, 70 years after Ferry Porsche designed its first sports car. “Dealing with one’s own history is a full-time commitment,” the charity’s president wrote in a statement. “It is precisely this critical reflection that the Ferry Porsche Foundation wants to stimulate, because: to know where you are going, you need to know where you come from.”
He could have started closer to home. The foundation is named after a man who volunteered to join the SS in 1938, was admitted as an officer in 1941, and lied about this for the rest of his life. During most of the war, Mr. Porsche was busy running the Porsche company in Stuttgart, which exploited hundreds of forced labourers. As CEO of Porsche in the post-war decades, he surrounded himself with former high-ranking SS officers.
In his 1976 autobiography, Mr. Porsche gave a distorted historical account, full of anti-Semitic statements, about the Jewish co-founder of Porsche, Adolf Rosenberger. He even accused Mr. Rosenberger of extortion after he was forced to flee Nazi Germany. The truth was that Ferry Porsche received Mr. Rosenberger’s shares in 1935 after his father, Ferdinand Porsche, and brother-in-law, Anton Piëch, bought the co-founder of the company and paid well below market value for his shares.
Today, Porsche doesn’t just sponsor chairs or make sports cars. Together with their cousins the Piëchs, the Porsches control the Volkswagen Group, which includes Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Seat, Skoda and Volkswagen. The combined wealth of the Porsche-Piëch clan is estimated to be approximately $20 billion. They are now preparing to split Porsche from the Volkswagen Group and include the sports car company in what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs of 2022.
The Porsches never publicly addressed the activities of their patriarchs during the Third Reich. And it wasn’t just Ferry Porsche who was involved: Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the Volkswagen, ran the Volkswagen factory together with Mr. Piëch during the war. There, tens of thousands of people were used as forced and forced laborers for the mass production of weapons.
The Ferry Porsche Foundation bestowed the professorship at the University of Stuttgart because members of the history department published a company-funded study in 2017 about the origins of the Porsche company in the Nazi era. But the study seemed to leave a lot out: Somehow, none of Mr. Rosenberger’s personal papers were included in the study. The study also misrepresented the nature of Mr. Rosenberger’s stock sale. The more I looked at the study, the more it started to look more like a partial whitewash than a full accounting.