The “silence” referred to in Shattering Silence, screened recently at the Montreal World Film Festival, lasted only until this documentary, on one of Germany’s wealthy industrialist families, was seen for the first time last year on German television.
By all accounts, the billionaire Quandt family, the majority owner of the BMW auto-making firm since 1960, expressed a willingness to have the family’s inglorious and notorious collaboration with the Nazi Third Reich researched and investigated only after the documentary was aired on TV and all the grim revelations spilled out.
That family decision was a long time – more than five decades – in coming.
As the hour-long film amply chronicles in first-class investigative style, the family, known to be extremely private, had been, up until the release of the film, even more secretive about its activities during World War II.
But writer-director Eric Friedler and his colleague Barbara Siebert uncovered reams of archival evidence in historical archives showing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the extent of the Quandt family’s contribution to the human toll of torture and suffering during those years.
In fact, Shattering Silence, maybe more then anything else, betrays the sheer blind amorality of a family for which accumulating a fortune was such an overriding priority that the suffering and deaths of others – Jew or non-Jew – meant virtually nothing. Shattering Silence details how the family amassed a substantial part of its fortune on the backs of slave labourers producing munitions and batteries used in an array of war armaments.
The film includes the testimony of former slave labourers themselves, many of whom succumbed on a regular basis – about 80 each month – to the toxic and cancer-causing fumes that the work produced. They are joined by historians and others – including Benjamin Ferencz, a former Nuremberg war crimes trial prosecutor – in describing the appalling conditions under which they worked.
The labourers would be taken from nearby concentration camps and brought to the family’s factories in Berlin, Hanover and Vienna. At the Hanover facility in particular, which was called Afa (short for Accumulatorenfabrik AG) and is now known as Varta, there was even a company concentration camp right on the grounds, with its own space for the overseeing SS to execute workers.
Overseeing all this was the family patriarch, one Günther Quandt, who joined the Nazi party in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became German chancellor. Quandt’s first wife, Magda Ritschel, whom he eventually divorced, ended up marrying Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propaganda minister. Hitler was even at the wedding, and one of Quandt and Magda’s children, Harald, was adopted by the Goebbels.
All this, as Shattering Silence clearly demonstrates, is an indication of the close relationship the Quandt family had with the Nazi regime – that is until the end of the war, when the family began to portray itself as another victim of the Nazi machine by being “forced” to co-operate.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the whole story – beyond the family’s own unwillingness to publicly come clean about its past – is the fact that the family also escaped any real justice after the war. Quandt hid out in Bavaria, and the entire family kept a low profile.
Nuremberg trial prosecutor Ferencz speculates that if all the facts had come out at that time, the family would have been prosecuted, as was IG Farben, the German company the produced Zyklon B for the Nazi death camp gas chambers, and the Krupp family, whose company built armaments for the Nazi machine. But the Quandt family was simply not paid enough attention, he suggested, given the onerous amount of work investigators were saddled with during that period.
Whatever the case, Shattering Silence does succeed in shattering any illusions the public might have had about the Quandts’ family history. Although the family issued a statement last fall, after the airing of the documentary, that said it would contribute to a fund for slave labourers and support research into the family’s past, there have been no other public statements made by the family since.
The only family member to appear in the film, Quandt’s grandson, Sven – perhaps not without merit – said that the current generation of the family should not be held responsible for crimes committed by a previous generation.
But as Shattering Silence makes abundantly clear, the family has the moral obligation to confront its past and to compensate anyone still alive who suffered at its hands.