From a media prize with a dubious pedigree to the horrors of Gaza, the establishment forgets and remembers what suits it best
Growing up in Germany, we were taught to believe we had done better. Better than our grandparents’ generation, who swept their complicity under a thick rug of silence. Better even than our parents, whose revolts in the late 1960s rarely led to any serious reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust.
Born in the late 1980s, my generation learned about Auschwitz early on. We visited former concentration camps and studied the Nazi regime not as an alien aberration, but as a warning: this is how democracies die. Today, with the far-right AfD and ethno-chauvinism on the rise, that warning has never felt more urgent. In the run-up to the German general election in February, tens of thousands marched against the AfD. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has classified the party as rightwing extremist, and the new government has pledged to keep cooperation with it to a bare minimum.
And yet much of the resistance feels hollow. Germany’s vigilance against revisionism is selective at best. This week, the winners of Germany’s most highly endowed journalism award – the Herbert Quandt Media prize – were announced. The award explicitly celebrates the legacy of Herbert Quandt, an early SS supporter who played a central role in the Nazi war economy. Quandt oversaw battery plants where thousands were abused, exploited – and killed.
With his father, Günther Quandt, Herbert Quandt subjected up to 57,500 people to slave labour in battery factories. The Quandt family fortune was built on these crimes. Günther Quandt acquired Jewish-owned companies after Nazi expropriations (so-called Aryanisations). Herbert Quandt personally helped secure some of those deals and oversaw the planning of a satellite concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. After the war, he continued to work with hardline former Nazis from Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry.
The Quandts were “denazified” through a superficial process that in effect shielded them from any serious accountability. In 1960, Herbert Quandt became BMW’s largest shareholder. Today, his heirs, Germany’s richest family, control BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce, and hold major stakes in the country’s chemical and tech sectors.
In 2007, a TV documentary exposed the extent of the family’s Nazi-era crimes. The Quandts responded by commissioning an independent study that revealed even deeper entanglements with the Nazi regime. Gabriele Quandt, Günther Quandt’s granddaughter, later said her family had been “wrong” to avoid confronting the truth about its Nazi past for so long….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/24/germany-nazi-past-gaza-media-prize-state
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