THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS THAT YOU ARE
Emilie Landecker was 19 when she went to work for Benckiser, a German company that made industrial cleaning products and also took pride in cleansing its staff of non-Aryan elements. It was 1941. Ms. Landecker was half Jewish and terrified of deportation.
Her new boss, Albert Reimann Jr., was an early disciple of Adolf Hitler and described himself as an “unconditional follower” of Nazi race theory.
They fell in love.
In July 1937, Albert Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, who would later oversee the Holocaust.
“We are a purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old,” wrote Mr. Reimann, then 39 and a senior executive in his father’s company. “The owners are unconditional followers of the race theory.”
The Reimanns had embraced National Socialism and anti-Semitism long before the Nazis came to power, according to an interim report by Mr. Erker, the historian. The younger Reimann heard Hitler speak in Munich in 1923 and became an early supporter. His father, Albert Reimann Sr., then the chief executive of Benckiser, heard him four years later in Mannheim, near the company’s southern German headquarters, and joined the Nazi party in 1931. His son followed a year later.
Around this time, the men gave the company a makeover in keeping with Nazi principles.
By the time Hitler took over, Benckiser already housed a Nationalist Socialist Company Organization — a worker council that sought to uphold Nazi ideology. It later became a “model National Socialist plant.”
Benckiser benefited from the Nazi system, more than tripling sales over the next decade. Mr. Reimann Sr. served as president of the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which helped orchestrate the Aryanization, expropriation and expulsion of Jewish businesses.
Starting in late 1940, the Reimanns routinely took advantage of forced labor: men and women taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories, as well as prisoners of war, who were allocated by the Nazis to farms and industrial companies across Germany.
It was around this time that Emilie Landecker started working in the accounting department as a clerk. Little is known about her time at the company during the war years, except that Mr. Reimann Jr. was now her boss.
By 1943, a third of the total work force were forced laborers.
Benckiser operated two labor camps, one of them overseen by a brutal foreman, Paul Werneburg. On his watch, female workers were forced to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse. Workers were kicked and beaten, among them a Ukrainian woman who also cleaned in the Reimanns’ private villa.
During a bomb raid on Jan. 7, 1945, Werneburg threw dozens of workers out of a camp bomb shelter. Thirty were injured, and one died. As word of Werneburg’s brutality spread, even the local Nazi office in charge of allocating forced laborers reprimanded the Reimanns for mistreating their workers.
Ms. Landecker was at work at Benckiser when the Gestapo came for her father.
It was April 24, 1942. Around noon, two police officers arrived at the family apartment. Her younger brother, Wilhelm, who would later recollect the incident in an unpublished family memoir, opened the door. “Is the Jew Alfred Israel Landecker here?” one of the officers asked.
Wilhelm led them to his father, who had been waiting. A letter had arrived that month, informing him of the date of his deportation. With Germanic precision, it had instructed him to pack one suit, some underwear and a coat with a yellow Star of David sewn to the front. No money or valuables were allowed.
“So, you dirty Jew,” the officer said. “Are you ready to take a trip?”
Alfred Landecker closed his suitcase and put on his coat. Then he hugged and kissed his son for the last time. “Willi, stay home so that no one associates my Star of David with you,” Mr. Landecker said, and then asked him to say goodbye to his sisters. “Give my love to Emmi and Gerdele. Behave, and obey God.”
A few weeks later, one last letter arrived from Mr. Landecker, but only the envelope has survived. It shows that he was interned in block III 416/2 in Izbica, a ghetto serving as a transfer point for the deportation of Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Ms. Landecker would have witnessed it all.
The Reimanns’ enthusiasm for Nazi ideology never waned.
The relationship between Mr. Reimann and Ms. Landecker was for many years a secret. He was married, but had no children with his wife. He and Ms. Landecker had three, and he adopted them in the 1960s; today, two of them own a combined stake in JAB of about 45 percent.
Mr. Reimann and Ms. Landecker, who died in 1984 and 2017, respectively, never spoke about those years. Incriminating documents were destroyed or locked away in a safe.
After World War II, Benckiser evolved into one of the largest consumer goods conglomerates on the planet.
Peter Harf, who joined the company in 1981 and became chairman this year, and whose own father was a Nazi, said he never really bought the idea that the organization had nothing to hide. “I knew the stories they told,” he said. “It didn’t smell right.”
In March, the first findings about the abuse of forced laborers at the company leaked.
JAB’s portfolio of sunny coffee-and-doughnut brands in the United States made the revelations a global news story.
Known today as JAB Holding Company and still controlled by the Reimann family, it is worth more than $20 billion and owns Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Peet’s Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Pret A Manger, Keurig and other breakfast brands.
There have been boycott threats; The
Boston Globe published a scathing article with the headline: “I found out Nazi money is behind my favorite coffee. Should I keep drinking it?”
Over the years, Benckiser went through mergers and spinoffs; it combined with another firm to become the consumer-product giant Reckitt Benckiser, known for such brands as Lysol and Durex condoms, and eventually, the Reimanns channeled much of their wealth into JAB.
In recent years the holding company has spent billions to become a rival to the likes of Starbucks and Nestlé by buying chains including Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger.
Last year, it also helped Keurig Green Mountain buy Dr Pepper Snapple for nearly $19 billion.
JAB also controls the cosmetics giant Coty, the owner of Calvin Klein fragrances.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/business/reimann-jab-nazi-keurig-krispy-kreme.html
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