Herbert Quandt

Herbert Werner Quandt (1910 to 1982) was a German industrialist from the Quandt family, born in Pritzwalk as the second son of Günther Quandt. Nearly blind from the age of nine because of a retinal disease, he was educated at home and then trained in the family companies. In 1940 he joined the executive board of the battery maker AFA, later VARTA, and directed its Berlin subsidiary Pertrix. After his father died in 1954 he and his half-brother Harald divided a conglomerate of about 200 businesses. In 1959 he declined to sell BMW to Daimler-Benz, raised his stake to half against his bankers' advice, financed the BMW 700 and backed the BMW 1500, and is credited with saving the carmaker from bankruptcy. The family firms used tens of thousands of forced laborers during the Second World War, Herbert was a Nazi Party member who served as personnel director at a family factory, and a 2011 independent study concluded that the Quandts were inseparably linked with Nazi crimes.