Pt 6
The story noted the Boston Globe published an article with the headline: “I found out Nazi money is behind my favorite coffee. Should I keep drinking it?”
Following the revelations, the company said it would donate $11 million to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany to help provide services and care to surviving Holocaust victims. The money will be administered through the Alfred Landecker Foundation, which the family planned to support with 250 million euros over 10 years.
“This (donation) marks a significant step for the Alfred Landecker Foundation and our ambition of researching and remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust, as well as providing humanitarian assistance for survivors of the Holocaust and former forced labor in World War II,” David Kamenetzky, chair of the Foundation, said in a statement.
The family renamed their original foundation after learning their mother’s story. In 1941, Emilie Landecker, a 19-year-old who was half-Jewish went to work for Benckiser after her father Alfred was deported.
Despite being terrified of also being deported, she fell in love with her boss, Albert Reimann Jr., and carried on a secret affair that produced three children while he had no children with his wife. Emilie worked for Benckiser until 1965, the same year, Reimann Jr. formally adopted their children who became heirs to the family fortune.
The children knew that their maternal grandfather had been murdered by the Nazis, but they did not learn their father had been a Nazi until the disclosures about the company came out in 2019.
They subsequently renamed the family foundation in their grandfather’s honor “to preserve Alfred Landecker’s memory and, through our work, ensure that his fate is not forgotten – and that something like this never happens again.”
It is also committed to raising “awareness of the conditions that paved the way for and enabled the Holocaust to occur, and to combat anti-Semitism in the here and now.”
The foundation website says it “supports Holocaust survivors and former forced laborers” and has already donated five million euros to the Claims Conference.
Additional funds have been donated to establish a Covid-19 emergency relief fund of 1.2 million euros for Holocaust survivors.
As of the end of 2020, 838 names of former Benckiser forced laborers had been identified and the foundation said it is going to provide them or their heirs with financial support.
“What we can learn from history and how we can learn from history is at the core of this foundation,” Norbert Frei, the chairman of its academic advisory council told the New York Times.
“This is not just about researching and remembering the past,” he said. “It’s about stabilizing and maintaining democracy today.”
Today, 90% of JAB, which is based in Luxembourg, belongs to four of the nine adopted children of Albert Reimann Jr. The family expects to publish a book next year that will detail the ties with the Nazis.
Sources: JAB Holding Company;
“JAB Holding Company,” Wikipedia;
Brigit Katz, “German Family That Owns Krispy Kreme Admits It Profited From Nazi Ties,” Smithsonianmag.com, (March 27, 2019);
Chris Isidore, “Krispy Kreme, Panera Owners Family History of Nazi Ties,” CNN Business, (March 25, 2019);
Katrin Bennhold, “Germany’s Second-Richest Family Discovers a Dark Nazi Past,” New York Times, (March 25, 2019);
“Admitting its Nazi past, family that owns Krispy Kreme, Panera Bread donates $7.3 million to Holocaust survivors,” National Post, (December 12, 2019);
Eli Rosenberg, “German billionaire family that owns Einstein Bros. Bagels admits Nazi past,” Washington Post, (March 25, 2019);
Katrin Bennhold, “Nazis Killed Her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One,” Washington Post, (June 14, 2019);
Alfred Landecker Foundation.
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