‘Ashamed’: industrialist family owns its Nazi past

Keurig owners donate $7.3M to Holocaust fund

Germany’s secretive Reimann family, owners of food firms Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Panera Bread, Pret A Manger and Keurig Green Mountain, has announced a $7.3 million donation to survivors of the Holocaust, after its ties to Hitler and the Nazis were revealed.

The donation will be made to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which offers payments to help provide services and care to surviving victims.

Recently it has emerged that the dynasty, worth some $48.5 billion, made much of its early wealth on the back of slave labour during Nazi rule.

Many German industrial giants benefited greatly from slave labour, including Siemens and Volkswagen.

In March, Germany’s Bild am Sonntag paper, citing a trove of documents, dropped a series of revelations about the Reimann family past. The family was linked to the Nazis long before then, but Bild went much further, reporting that family leaders Albert Reimann senior and junior were party members since 1931; that the firm flew swastikas at its factories; and that female slaves from eastern Europe were abused at family workplaces. Bild reported that at one point onethird of the firm’s workforce was forced labour. Bild added that Reimann junior, in 1937, penned a letter to Heinrich Himmler, saying his was a “purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old,” which firmly backed “race theory.”

Though initially arrested by the Allies after the war ended, the Reimanns were allowed to hold onto their businesses. Reimann senior died in 1954; junior in 1984.

Now, after decades in which it says it didn’t discuss the past, the family has entered a new stage of reckoning. In an interview with Bild in March, after the paper released its report, Peter Harf, managing partner of the Reimann’s investment firm JAB Holding Company, said the family had commissioned its own research which matched the paper’s.

“It is all correct. (Albert) Reimann senior and Reimann junior were guilty … they belonged in jail,” he said in the interview. “In the 2000s, the Reimann children started reading and browsing their father’s documents. At the beginning of 2014 we decided: we want to know more. That’s why we signed a contract with economics historian Professor Paul Erker of the University of Munich.”

Harf said that Erker presented a horrifying preliminary report.

“When Professor Erker reported, we were speechless. We were ashamed and white as the wall. There is nothing to gloss over. These crimes are disgusting,” Harf said.