German logistics billionaire faces questions over Nazi-era legacy
Klaus-Michael Kuehne has repeatedly declined to address growing evidence of his company’s wartime conduct
Ron Zur grew up knowing that his grandfather, Leo Lewitus, had left behind a business when he fled the Nazis — but no one in the family spoke of what it was, or what had happened to it.
“You have to understand, the people who ran from Europe, they didn’t want to talk about the past,” he told the Financial Times. “Some of them didn’t talk at all.”
That silence lasted more than eight decades, until a German playwright contacted Zur this year.
Buried in wartime archives, she had uncovered documents showing that the shipping company his grandfather founded in today’s Czech Republic had been forcibly taken over by Kuehne + Nagel — the logistics giant whose majority owner Klaus-Michael Kuehne regularly tops German rich lists.
“It came out of the blue,” Zur said. “From that moment, everything changed.”
As Germany grapples with declining industrial power and growing domestic tension over its military support for Israel amid widespread criticism of the war in Gaza, long-buried questions about the foundations of its postwar prosperity are resurfacing.
That support, justified as a duty born of the Holocaust, sits uneasily alongside a failure to account for the Nazi-era origins of many of its industrial dynasties’ wealth.
Zur’s family, based in Israel, is exploring whether it can seek compensation — the takeover of his grandfather’s company was part of the Nazi era’s so-called Aryanisation process that transferred Jewish-owned businesses into non-Jewish hands at a fraction of their value. But he does not expect the company or its owner to be eager.
“We understand that Mr Kuehne is doing all his best to . . . vanish all the Nazi connections to his family,” he said.
Kuehne has repeatedly declined to address the growing body of evidence detailing K+N’s Nazi-era conduct, including lucrative contracts to transport the possessions of Jewish families who had been sent to concentration camps, which helped build the family fortune.
He is now a significant shareholder in German corporate giants such as airline Lufthansa, shipping company Hapag-Lloyd, chemicals group Brenntag and coach operator Flixbus.
“If the discussion had arisen shortly after the war, I would have fully understood,” Kuehne, now 88 and the company’s sole heir, told Der Spiegel in March. “But how would one find out today?”
The apparent reluctance of Kuehne to investigate the roots of his family fortune stands in contrast to a reckoning with the Nazi past beginning to unfold across German industry, whose legacy has long been insulated from scrutiny even as the nation has been praised for a broader culture of remembrance.
Porsche, for example, last month published the findings of an independent inquiry that showed its Jewish co-founder, Adolf Rosenberger, had been forced out by the ancestors of the billionaire Porsche-Piëch family during the Nazi era and denied fair compensation.
But Kuehne, whose foundation this year announced a €300mn donation to build a new opera in his native Hamburg, has taken a different approach.
“I was seven years old at the end of the second world war and had no influence whatsoever on what happened beforehand,” Kuehne told the Financial Times, adding that it was not right to “persecute” him.
He said K+N’s alleged expropriation of the business belonging to Ron Zur’s grandfather was a “topic . . . completely unknown to me”, and that “there is no connection between the war period and the company assets acquired many decades later”.
Much of the debate over Kuehne’s moral responsibility to confront his family’s past centres on the contested fate of K+N’s wartime archives.
K+N has repeatedly stated that its wartime corporate archives were destroyed by Allied bombs during the war. But researchers point out that the company itself reported to German authorities in the 1990s that it held wartime files that would take up 10 metres of shelf space and named a person responsible for managing it.
Henning Bleyl, a journalist and director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, a think-tank affiliated with the German Green party, believes there is evidence that the archives survived.
He said Kuehne could also have funded efforts to search public records as copies of many wartime company documents exist in archives across Europe. “But work, time and money is needed to find them,” added Bleyl, who has extensively researched the company’s past.
The recently unearthed documents related to Zur’s grandfather showed that he spent years pursuing a restitution claim against K+N, which appears to have been dropped for reasons unknown.
Zur said he believes many Jewish businessmen were pushed into dropping claims during this period, as German companies sought to pre-empt future liability while the country prepared more stringent corporate restitution laws.
The answer to what happened between Leo Lewitus and Alfred Kuehne may still lie buried in wartime archives scattered across Europe.
Questions also remain about the circumstances under which Adolf Maass — the Jewish businessman who built up K+N’s profitable Hamburg business — was forced to surrender his 45 per cent stake in the branch in 1933, just months after Hitler came to power.
A chronicle of K+N’s history published for the company’s 125th anniversary in 2015, seen by the FT but not available to the public, states that when the Nazis came to power, they threatened to withdraw key grain shipping contracts because the company had a Jewish partner.
“Mr Maass of his own accord bore the consequences [and] with our amicable agreement, resigned from the company,” according to a postwar account by Alfred Kuehne.
“My grandfather was put in a totally untenable situation,” said Barbara Maass, Adolf’s Canada-based granddaughter. “And in my view, it was the start of the spiral that eventually led to Auschwitz,” she said, referring to how readily many German businesses complied with Nazi demands.
Adolf Maass and his wife Käthe were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in 1944.
Maass said the recent rise in “hatred, theft and genocide” had compelled her to speak out about her own family’s history of state-sanctioned persecution.
Unlike the Zur family, she is not seeking financial compensation — despite questions over whether Maass was ever fairly compensated when he handed over his stake in K+N’s Hamburg branch — but wants her grandfather’s fate to be acknowledged.
“It’s not primarily about blame, it’s more about understanding,” she said. “The story of Kuehne + Nagel is an example that we can learn from.”
Her family has donated “thousands” of documents — including handwritten letters between her grandparents and their children — to the Montreal Holocaust Museum, where they are being analysed for insights into the social processes that enabled the atrocities of the Nazi era.
Presented with the allegations from Maass and Zur, Kuehne said: “These are largely incorrect insinuations, from which I distance myself.”
Bleyl from the Heinrich Böll Foundation said Kuehne’s reluctance to confront how he profited from Nazi-era crimes mattered because it reflected something deeper — an unwillingness by Germans to fully reckon with the shadows of the past.
“In a material sense, we were all profiteers; the Third Reich is part of all of our small biographies,” he said. “Just like Kuehne doesn’t want to face his heritage, so many of us don’t.”
