The reclusive heirs in line for billions when Europe’s top tankmaker lists
Unlikely cast of characters who own half of KNDS set for a windfall as Berlin prepares to buy in at an up to €20bn valuation
Every year in a nondescript business hotel, an unlikely group of Germans including a vet, a stairlift salesman and a Mozart scholar are invited to discuss one of Europe’s most important defence companies.
They are the “Wegmann shareholders” — the secretive heirs who own half of KNDS, the Franco-German manufacturer of the Leopard and Leclerc tanks.
Few of the several dozen individuals are known beyond a narrow circle of advisers. Many of their colleagues and neighbours have no idea they co-own a company central to the continent’s rearmament.
But all are in line for windfalls as they prepare to sell up to the German state alongside a listing that could value the group at up to €20bn, raising awkward questions about who stands to gain from surging European military spending in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Sebastian Schäfer, a Green member of parliament who specialises in defence spending, supports the idea of Berlin taking a stake in KNDS.
However, he said he felt uncomfortable about “German families getting rich in a way that’s more 19th century than 21st century” — especially as the government takes on hundreds of billions of euros in debt to fund its ballooning military budget.
As KNDS prepares to file for its initial public offering as early as this week with a target valuation of €15bn-€20bn, the German government is seeking to acquire a 40 per cent stake in the company by buying a large chunk of the Wegmann shares.
Under the tentative plan, Paris, which owns the other half of the group, would also sell down its holding to leave it and Berlin with equal stakes, while the remaining shares would be freely floated.
The discussions have gone down to the wire. The French and German governments on Monday agreed a deal on governance and veto rights — including on executive appointments and technology sharing. But the families are demanding that Berlin pay above the market price determined by the IPO, which the German government says it cannot justify before parliament, according to three people familiar with the talks.
The individuals that make up the Wegmann group have already received substantial payouts. In November they shared a €1bn special dividend with the French government, according to the company’s recently published annual report, while a second tranche of undisclosed size is due to be paid out before the IPO.
Their annual dividend surged to €65mn in 2024, almost double the level in 2021 before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
KNDS said the €1bn payout was an integral part of its preparation for the listing in order to “adjust our balance sheet”.
Sascha Haghani, an adviser to the families, told the FT “it doesn’t make sense to leave a lot of cash — past profits — in the company” when preparing for a free float.
The company was still left with cash and cash equivalents of €2.3bn at the end of 2025 and net profits of almost €1bn. Its revenues have boomed in recent years, reaching €4.4bn last year — up from €2.7bn in 2021.
To critics, the dividends jar with the demands being placed on Europe’s arms industry, which is under pressure from governments to expand production.
Schäfer said weapons makers were constantly asking officials and lawmakers for advance payments to fund new facilities. To take so much cash out of KNDS against that backdrop, he said, did not “feel right”.
KNDS told the FT it planned to invest €1.5bn in industrial capital expenditure over the next two years.
While several people involved in the listing told the FT the families wanted to cash out to benefit from high valuations in the defence sector, Haghani insisted they were not driven by financial motives but by KNDS’s needs.
“From the outside, money might look like a major driver but that is not the motivation,” he said. “The motivation is: are we as the private shareholders able to manage all the challenges going forward for this company for the next decade? And to be honest, the clear answer is no. The company needs a new capital structure.”
The Wegmann shareholders own their stake through Wegmann Holding, whose origins stretch back to 1882 when it was a railway carriage maker in the central German city of Kassel.
Then known as Wegmann & Co, the company was partly taken over in 1912 by industrialist August Bode, whose descendants remain one of the biggest family groupings among KNDS shareholders.
Wegmann moved into tanks during the first world war and became part of the Nazi war machine in the second, using forced labour to manufacture tanks and gun turrets.
Bode, who joined the Nazi party in 1937, was later named by Adolf Hitler as one of 400 “war economy leaders”. Wegmann Holding, whose website does not mention this history, declined to comment.
Following the war, the company returned to railway carriages as well as trams. But after West Germany began to re-arm in 1955, Wegmann became central to the development of the Leopard 1 tank, the forerunner to the Leopard 2 now used by 18 European nations.
For decades its central figure was Bode’s grandson Manfred, who presided over deals including the 1999 merger of Wegmann’s tank unit with German conglomerate Krauss-Maffei’s defence division and the 2015 tie-up with French state-owned defence group Nexter that created what is now KNDS.
One industry veteran described the Nexter merger as a “desperate move” to save the business — and to fend off rival tank-maker Rheinmetall, which had long coveted it.
At least 12 descendants of August Bode hold more than a third of Wegmann Holding’s shares.
The most prominent is Felix Bode, the only Wegmann shareholder with a seat on the KNDS board and boss of Wegmann Holding’s automotive parts division. His brother Stephan leads another unit that makes tank turret components. A third division manages the KNDS stake.
“In families you always have a leader, regardless of whether they are 10, 15, 20 members,” said one person familiar with the internal dynamics of KNDS since the French merger. “It was Manfred Bode and now it’s his son Felix Bode.”
But he added that Felix, like many of the other family shareholders, was “not interested in keeping the company” any more.
The brothers hold 12 per cent of the limited capital of Wegmann, putting them in line to share €1.2bn if KNDS achieves a €20bn valuation.
Another large group of shareholders is the von Braunbehrens, an intellectual family whose members include the Mozart musicologist and a scholar of language and texts.
They are descended from brothers Theodor and Julius Springmann, who bought stakes in Wegmann & Co and a predecessor company in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Andreas Bornefeld, a researcher on Germany’s wealthiest families.
Over the past few years, however, the three elderly Braunbehrens siblings who continued to hold KNDS shares transferred them to a holding company linked to an obscure charitable foundation in the city of Heidelberg.
Projects listed on the Theodor Springmann Foundation’s website include a bibliography of historic German almanacs and a platform for publishing articles on the science of carpets and flatweave rugs.
As of 2023, when the company published its most recent list of shareholders, the foundation was the ultimate owner of the largest single shareholding in Wegmann Holding, with a 24 per cent stake that would hand it €2.4bn if KNDS achieves the top end of its target range. The foundation did not respond to requests for comment, and an employee hung up when called by the FT.
A fourth sibling, 85-year-old leftwing artist Burkhart von Braunbehrens, left the company after publicly criticising a planned tank sale to Saudi Arabia more than a decade ago. Although initially barred from exiting, he received about €4mn for his stake following arbitration and used the proceeds to set up a foundation supporting migrants. “I’m a normal citizen now,” he told the FT.
Other shareholders include descendants of German industrialist Eduard Sethe as well as the children of a former company executive.
Wegmann asked the FT not to identify shareholders whose names were not already public, citing security concerns at a time when Russia has been targeting figures in the European defence industry.
Even without their names, their biographies make for an unusual cast. They include a transport lawyer, a tax adviser, a psychoanalyst, the owner of a shop selling mobility aids, a vet, a US-based landscape gardener and at least six children.
Haghani said the Wegmann owners had been careful, responsible stewards for more than a century, developing and safeguarding military technology for Germany even when there were barely any government contracts.
“Providing stability and a long-term future are the hallmarks of German family-owned businesses,” he said. “This also sets the Wegmann shareholders apart.”
But the expected sale to the German state has left some observers uneasy.
Moritz Schularick, head of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, is concerned Berlin will overpay.
“It’s bizarre that they announce all these contracts with the tank makers first and then decide to buy a stake after inflating the share price,” he said. “It’s like the opposite of a pump and dump scheme: pump and buy.”
Schäfer said that while he did not blame the family shareholders as individuals for making money from the planned sale, “we need to look at the structural problem — and that is in how wealth is inherited”.
For years, that inheritance was managed with little fuss. At the annual shareholders’ council, according to people with knowledge of the meetings, participants sit in a U-shape, ask questions about the business and break for a buffet lunch, with contentious issues settled out of sight.
Several people familiar with the company said managing their interests had been difficult at times but Haghani said they were now “united” on the decision to sell.
For Eric Brune, a longtime employee and union representative at KNDS in France, the sale marks the culmination of a gradual loosening of ties between the Wegmann shareholders and the business they inherited.
“As is typical in families, there are those who see themselves as the heirs to the family history — and then the generation that no longer sees itself that way.”
