Pret owners to donate millions over Nazi past

THE owners of Pret a Manger are to donate millions of pounds to support Holocaust survivors after admitting their family’s Nazi past.

In 2014 the Reimann clan, which counts Schweppes and Calvin Klein among its assets, asked historian Paul Erker, of the University of Munich, to examine its wartime activities. For years, it has faced claims that its wealth was built on support for the Third Reich.

Documents found in Germany, France and the US showed Albert Reimann Senior, who died in 1954, and his son Albert Junior, who died in 1984, used Russian civilians and French prisoners of war as forced labourers at their chemicals company Benckiser in Germany.

The two men also offered support to Adolf Hitler, the research showed, and in 1937 Albert Junior wrote to Heinrich Himmler declaring: ‘We are a purely Aryan family business.’ The men played a part in the expulsion of Jewish businesses from Germany, the research said.

Peter Harf, chairman of JAB Holdings, the family firm, said the Reimann children and grandchildren were shocked. Yesterday JAB announced a donation of £4.2 million to the Jewish Claims Conference in New York to distribute to Holocaust survivors globally.

Another £4.2 million will go towards finding and supporting the forced labourers. An additional £21 million will be provided annually to Holocaust education.

Pret, which has more than 530 coffee branches in the UK, was sold to JAB last year for £1.5 billion.