Harald Quandt
Harald Quandt (1 November 1921 – 22 September 1967) was a German industrialist, the son of Günther Quandt and Magda Behrend Rietschel. His parents divorced and his mother was later married to Joseph Goebbels. After World War II, Quandt and his older half-brother Herbert Quandt ran the industrial empire left to them by their father owning a stake mainly in Germany's luxury car manufacturer BMW and the electric battery producer VARTA which emerged from Accumulatoren-Fabrik AFA.[1] which still belongs to the family.[2]
Harald Quandt
1 November 1921
Industrialist
5
Herbert Quandt (half-brother)
Goebbels children (half-siblings)
Nazi Germany (1939–1945)
Post-war[edit]
Quandt married Inge Bandekow (1928–1978), who was the daughter of the company's lawyer and worked as a secretary with her father, at the beginning of the 1950s. In the following 17 years, the couple had five daughters: Katarina Geller (1951), Gabriele Quandt-Langenscheidt (1952), Anette May-Thies (1954), Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo (1962), and Patricia Halterman (1967–2005). Quandt had the reputation of being a “committed playboy".[7]
Business dealings[edit]
After returning to Germany, Quandt first assisted his half-brother in re-building the family firms, and then from 1949 to 1953 studied mechanical engineering in Hanover and Stuttgart, where his family owned large firms (AFA/VARTA in Hanover, a private equity firm in Stuttgart).
Quandt's father died in 1954, leaving his business empire jointly to Herbert and Harald, and making Harald one of the wealthiest men in West Germany. By then, the Quandt group consisted of more than 200 companies, ranging from the original textile businesses to pharmaceutical company Altana AG. The family holdings also included large stakes in the German auto industry with nearly 10% of Daimler-Benz and 30% of BMW. Although Herbert and Harald jointly managed the companies, Herbert focused on AFA/VARTA and the automotive investments, while Harald was in charge of IWKA and the engineering and tooling companies. Harald was an enthusiast of the amphibious vehicle known as the Amphicar that was manufactured by IWKA. His death in 1967 caused the ceasing of production of the Amphicar after the serial production had already ended in 1963 due to lack of demand.[8]
Death[edit]
Quandt survived an aviation accident at Zurich Airport on 12 December 1965, but he was killed two years later in another air crash in Cuneo, Italy, on 22 September 1967.[9][10]
In popular culture[edit]
The Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts[16][17] by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War. The family's Nazi past was previously not well known, and the documentary film revealed it to a wide audience and confronted the Quandts about the use of forced labour in the family's factories during World War II. As a result, five days after the showing,[18] four family members announced, on behalf of the entire Quandt family, their intention to fund a research project in which a historian will examine the family's activities during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship.[19] The independent 1,200-page study released in 2011 concluded that, "The Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis", according to Joachim Scholtyseck, the historian who compiled and researched the study.[18]