Germany’s Second-Richest Family Discovers a Dark Nazi Past

BERLIN — Germany’s second-richest family built its multibillion-dollar fortune with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Jimmy Choo shoes and Calvin Klein perfume — and forced laborers under the Nazis.

The Reimann family, which controls the consumer goods conglomerate JAB Holding Company, recently commissioned a historian to dig deep into company archives and shed light on its activities during the 12 years of Nazi rule.

The initial revelations, 74 years after World War II ended, are damning.

Albert Reimann Sr. and his son Albert Reimann Jr., who ran the company in the 1930s and 1940s, were enthusiastic Hitler supporters and anti-Semites, who condoned the abuse of forced laborers, not only in their industrial chemicals company in southern Germany, but also in their own home.

Female workers from Eastern Europe were forced to stand at attention naked in their factory barracks. Those who refused were sexually abused. Workers were kicked and beaten, among them one Russian woman, who cleaned in the Reimanns’ private villa.

News of the family’s dark history broke Sunday in the tabloid Bild. Peter Harf, the family spokesman and one of two managing partners of JAB Holding, said the historian’s findings “completely matched” those of the family.

“Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were guilty,” Mr. Harf said. “They belonged in jail.”

The exploitation of forced workers was widespread in Germany during the war, a time of acute labor shortages. An estimated 12 million people from more than a dozen European countries were abducted by the Nazis and forced to work in support of the German war effort. At their peak, forced laborers made up an estimated 20 percent of the German work force.

Farms and industrial companies that mattered to the war effort got priority from the government office that allocated the workers — men and women taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories or, sometimes, prisoners of war.

The Reimann case stands out for the particular brutality detailed in some of the reported documents, and the fact that father and son appear to have been involved in the abuse themselves, said Andreas Wirsching, director of the Munich-based Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History.

“It was very common for companies to use forced laborers — but it was not common for a company boss to be in direct and physical contact with these forced laborers,” Mr. Wirsching said.

Albert Reimann Sr., who died in 1954, and Albert Reimann Jr., who died in 1984, reportedly never spoke about the Nazi era after the war. It was only in the early 2000s that the younger generation began looking at old company documents and stumbled across material that suggested their father and grandfather had been committed Nazis.

In 2014, the family asked Paul Erker, an economic historian at the University of Munich, to document the history. Mr. Erker’s research is still underway. What has emerged so far came from an interim presentation he gave earlier this year, Mr. Harf said.

“We were speechless,” Mr. Harf said. “We were ashamed and were white as a wall."

Once the report is completed next year it will be made public, he said. The family plans to donate 10 million euros, or about $11.3 million, to a charity that has yet to be identified.

In 2000, the German government helped set up a 10 billion mark (about 5.1 billion euros) fund to provide compensation to forced laborers, with half the money coming from companies like Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Daimler and Volkswagen.

The list of well-known German companies that profited from forced labor — and Nazi crimes more generally — is long, and it often took decades for them to open their books.

Daimler was one of the first, in the 1980s. The Mercedes maker used nearly 40,000 forced laborers toward the end of the war. Volkswagen used some 12,000, including concentration camp prisoners who were locked up in a dedicated camp used by the company. Hugo Boss produced the black SS uniforms. Deutsche Bank was one of many companies that profited from businesses being taken from their Jewish owners.

The Reimanns initially made their fortune from a chemical company that became Reckitt Benckiser, the $58 billion consumer products giant whose brands include Lysol. They then channeled much of their wealth into JAB, a conglomerate that has become one of the biggest players in the consumer world through a rapid-fire series of corporate takeovers.

JAB has spent billions to become a rival to the likes of Starbucks and Nestlé by buying chains like Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger. Last year, it also helped the pod-coffee company Keurig Green Mountain buy Dr Pepper Snapple for nearly $19 billion.

It also controls the cosmetics giant Coty, owner of Calvin Klein fragrances, and previously owned luxury fashion labels like Jimmy Choo.

The fortune of the Reimanns, one of the most secretive industrial families in Germany, was estimated last year at 33 billion euros, according to Manager Magazin, a financial publication. In lists of the wealthiest families in the country the Reimanns most recently ranked second.

Based on what has been revealed so far, Mr. Wirsching, the historian, said the Reimanns had most likely not just been opportunists but also “committed Nazis.”

Father and son joined the Nazi party and donated to the SS even before Hitler came to power. In July 1937, Albert Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, who oversaw the Holocaust.

“We are a purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old,” he wrote. “The owners are unconditional followers of the race theory.”

By 1943, 175 workers, or a third of the total, were forced laborers, Bild reported. In addition to Russian and Eastern European civilians, the Reimanns used French prisoners of war. In 1940, Albert Reimann Jr. reportedly complained to the mayor of Ludwigshafen, the town where his factory was based, that the French were not working hard enough.

At the end of the war, the Reimanns were investigated by the allied occupying powers. The French barred them from continuing their business activities, but the Americans overturned the judgment, Bild reported.