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Kuehne + Nagel Central Role In The Nazi Party

David’s First Appearance On The Pod - Going Deep On Nazi Billionaires

• David De Jong First Appearance On The Pod - Nazi Billionaires, #127 - Apple

• David De Jong First Appearance On The Pod - Nazi Billionaires, #127 - Spotify

David’s Appearance Today - An Addendum To Nazi Billionaires

• David De Jong Episode Today - Nazi Billionaires Addendum, #187 - Apple

• David De Jong Episode Today - Nazi Billionaires Addendum, #187 - Spotify

David De Jong is a Dutch historian and investigative journalist.

Early in his career, he found himself in New York reporting for Bloomberg on hidden fortunes and the power of family offices all across the world - it was during this job he discovered a nondescript €18,000,000,000 German family office…

David eventually pulled that thread all the way back to the upper echelons of the Nazi party

This led him to move to Berlin and embark down a 4 year investigation into the dark and dusty vaults of Germanys corporate pst.

What he uncovered was Nazi wealth that has endured to this day which has its tentacles wrapped around many companies that you and I consume or interact with on a daily basis.

Today, we recorded a brief addendum to the story, David published in Vanity Fair recently a story of Kuehne + Nagel, one of the worlds largest freight forwarding companies, that is listed on the Swiss exchange, but a very German company indeed.

The podcast is about the central role Kuehne + Nagel played in the Third Reich. The politics of memory in Germany and the son of Kuehne + Nagel founder, Klaus-Michael Kuehne who is germanys richest man, the largest shareholder of Kuehne + Nagel and until today, still denying the companies dark origins. 

David De Jong Episode Today - Nazi Billionaires Addendum, #187 - Apple

David De Jong Episode Today - Nazi Billionaires Addendum, #187 - Spotify

Link To Nazi Billionaires Book

Link To Vanity Fair Article

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Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
So the story begins with someone tagging Nazi capital across the Kuhn family tombstone. Klaus Michael Kuhn was born in 1937. He's worth over $44 billion, making him Journey's richest man and one of the richest people on the planet.

David
Yeah, Klaus-Mikkel Kühne within a few decades, particularly the last few years since the COVID-19 pandemic, has become Germany's richest man as the majority shareholder of Kühnen-Nagel, which is the world's largest freight forwarding company. This is a family business. It was started by his grandfather, August Kühne and it was really his father and his uncle, Werner and Alfred, who built it up to a global company in the Third Reich. And they did it at the expense of, you know.

Millions of Europeans, mainly Jewish Europeans, by expropriating, well first of all, expropriating your Jewish shareholder Adolf Maas in 1933, but mainly through the so-called emak shown, which was also tagged across the family grave, this kind of...

cryptic note on the grave and the M-Action which is in German means is an abbreviation for Möbel-Action which means furniture action denotes the operation that the Nazi authorities did during from from 42 through 44 which was in liaison with the the perpetrating of the Holocaust in Western Europe was the mass removal or seizure or robbing of or emptying of houses of Jewish families after they had been deported to concentration and extermination camps. So families were deported, houses stood empty. these houses would be taken, you know, these houses would be taken, their contents, entire households would be taken to warehouses and from there on, Kühne and Nagel would transport these looted goods to Germany. And this was mainly done in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Luxembourg. That's where there was a contract made between the Nazi authorities and Kühne and Nagel to...

Yeah, forward these shipments of looted goods mainly per ships, also to lesser extent by trucks or trains. But...

It was really, and it wasn't just only household goods, it got kind of this clinical term furniture action, but it was also art, for example, very valuable art, which Kuhnenagel transported on behalf of the Nazi authorities, entire libraries, valuable books, but mainly it was hundreds of thousands of houses of Jewish families and their entire contents.

So it was really a direct profiteering of the Holocaust that Kühne and Nagel did during the Third Reich. Of course, Klaus-Michel Kühne was born in 1937 and was seven when the war ended. He didn't have, you know, of course he didn't have any...

role in the profiteering that his father and his uncle did. But what he has been doing very insidiously in particularly the last decades is covering this history up or refusing to acknowledge this history in any meaningful way. And one of the things I discovered in the art during the reporting of my article was that he had commissioned a study

at Handelsblatt Research Institute, which is a independent research institute affiliated with Handelsblatt newspaper, which is kind of the Wall Street Journal, if you will, or the Financial Times of Germany. And the researcher spent a year on the study. He had commissioned it for the 125th year anniversary of Kühnen-Nagel in 2015. And when they came back with the final product and he saw that they had included

the expropriation of Adolf Maas, the role of Kühne Nagel in the EMAX shown his father and uncle being Nazi party members. He shelved the study. He didn't want to it published because he said allegedly during a phone conference, my father wasn't a Nazi. My father was not a Nazi. And there was end of discussion.

And the study has been shelved ever since. I didn't get to see it in the course of my reporting, but the existence was confirmed to me and hasn't been disputed since. that was really, you know, as with the book I wrote, Nazi Billionaires, it was really about the contemporary cover-up using the history as a back story to what is Germany's richest man trying to cover up, essentially.…….

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