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You'd be smiling too if you were worth �12
billion
She started out as a secretary. Now Johanna
Quandt is Europe's second richest person. Hans
Kundnani goes on the trail of the shadowy
figure behind BMW
Monday April 19, 1999
Not many BMW drivers will have heard of
Johanna Quandt. But the reclusive widow of the
late Herbert Quandt, the man who was
instrumental in rebuilding the firm after the
second world war, has for almost 40 years been
one of the most important - yet mysterious -
figures behind the scenes of the BMW empire.
According to last week's Sunday Times Rich
List, 71-year-old Quandt is the second richest
person in Europe, worth almost �12 billion.
The family's shares in BMW alone, which she
inherited after her husband's death in 1982,
are worth �5 billion.
Given the fantastic extent of her wealth and
power - not least over the workforce of the
Rover plant in Longbridge - remarkably little
is known about her or her family. She spends
most of her time in a guarded villa in Bad
Homburg, an exclusive suburb of Frankfurt,
occasionally venturing out to make incognito
shopping trips. She is almost never seen in
public, and has never given an interview to a
journalist. She is even said to travel economy
class, under an assumed name.
In fact, the Quandt family is so secretive
that it was only in 1995, when a new German
insider-trading law obliged them to disclose
their stake in BMW, that the full extent of
their control emerged.
But behind Quandt's spectacular wealth is a
remarkable story of how a secretary became one
of the most powerful women in European
industry, a story which spans the entire
post-war history of Germany; and, in fact,
parallels the reconstruction of Germany after
it lay in ruins in 1945.
In 1960, when Herbert Quandt married his
secretary Johanna Bruhn, BMW was a struggling
manufacturer of motorcycles, which was heavily
in debt and had narrowly avoided bankruptcy
and takeover. Many of its shareholders had
lost faith in its ability to recover, and few
could have anticipated its future.
The Bayerische Motoren Werke was set up in
1917 as a manufacturer of aircraft engines
(the company's famous blue and white logo
represents a propellor). With its increasing
success in the 1920s, it expanded into
motorcycles, then automobiles.
At this point, Gunther Quandt, Herbert's
father, bought into the company. But the
second world war left it discredited and
virtually destroyed. The Quandts, by then
significant shareholders in BMW, had been part
of Hitler's inner circle: not only was Gunther
Quandt an economic adviser to Hitler, but his
wife, Magda (Herbert Quandt's mother) later
also married Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels.
During the war BMW had, like nearly all the
great names of the German car industry, been
integrated into the German war machine, making
engines for the Luftwaffe. When the Red Army
[Image] reached the BMW motorcycle factory in
south-east Germany in 1945, it confiscated the
little that had survived bombing. The
Americans, meanwhile, dismantled BMW's two
factories near Munich, and barred the company
from producing anything more threatening than
saucepans and bicycle frames.
In the early fifties, after the ban had been
gradually lifted, BMW struggled to rebuild its
reputation with a range of luxury limousines.
In post-war Germany, few could afford a
motorbike, let alone a car, and the firm
struggled. In 1959, with the company on the
verge of bankruptcy, the shareholders,
including Herbert Quandt, narrowly averted a
takeover bid by Daimler-Benz.
The real turnaround in the company's fortunes
came with the so-called 'economic miracle' in
the early 1960s. With the boom came greater
spending power, so BMW spotted a gap in the
market for a sporty, mid-range car, and
launched the 1500 model. Within a few years
BMW was back in profit.
Meanwhile, Herbert Quandt, recognising the
company's potential, set about increasing his
stake. By 1982, when he died, the family held
49 per cent of the company's shares, and
exercised even greater control.
The role played by Johanna Quandt during these
years remains shrouded in mystery. But with
her husband's death, she became, at a stroke,
the most powerful figure in the company,
taking control of the family's shares and her
late husband's seat on the advisory board.
Together with her closest adviser - the
executor of her husband's will, Count Hans von
der Goltz - she has effectively run the
company for the last 15 years. According to a
family acquaintance, she was 'a very
purposeful, confident woman' from the
beginning.
Johanna Quandt has now passed the mantle to
the fourth generation of the family. Two years
ago, she stood down from the advisory board,
and handed control over her shares to her two
children, Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten.
The extent of her behind-the-scenes influence
is now even more unclear. `How important her
voice will now be at BMW is impossible to
say,' a journalist close to the Quandts
commented.[QQ]
Susanne Klatten, 36, appears to take after her
mother. She spent several years working
incognito in the company's canteen in the
Munich factory, where she met her future
husband, only revealing her identity when she
was sure of his motives. Journalists who have
met her and her younger brother describe them
as very down-to-earth, pleasant people, who
share their mother's emotional attachment to
BMW.
Observers expect them to take an active part
in running BMW - 'perhaps more than their
mother', according to a BMW spokesman. In
fact, there were rumours that they were
instrumental in the recent bloodletting at BMW
in February, which saw the forced resignation
not only of chief executive Bernd
Pietschetsrieder - who had been responsible
for the takeover of Rover - but also his
expected successor and long-time rival
Wolfgang Reitzle.
The Quandt family might be shy but they're
certainly not shy about showing who's in
charge.
