What Kuehne has not explained is why he won’t release the study that sources say he commissioned.
In early 2014 Kuehne commissioned Handelsblatt Research Institute, the independent research arm of German newspaper Handelsblatt, to conduct a study of his family firm’s entire history for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniversary in July 2015. Researchers were even given access to the company archive in Hamburg and a guarantee of academic freedom and independence, according to people familiar with the matter. But when the final result was sent to Kuehne in early 2015, including a chapter on the activities of his father, uncle, and firm during the Third Reich, he refused to have the study published. Kuehne rejected the study by saying “my father wasn’t a Nazi” during a phone conference, according to people familiar with the conversation. When the researchers refused to change the chapter, according to these sources, Kuehne said the study wouldn’t be published and ended the call. The 180-page study, contractually owned by Kuehne + Nagel, remains unpublished and inaccessible. Jan Kleibrink, the managing director of Handelsblatt Research Institute, would neither confirm nor deny Kuehne’s commissioning and shelving of the study.
Kuehne declined to be interviewed for this article. Dominique Nadelhofer, the spokesperson for the billionaire, his holding company, his foundation, and Kuehne + Nagel, declined to answer detailed questions sent by VF. “Mr. Kuehne was seven years old at the end of World War II and therefore had nothing to do with the war,” Nadelhofer wrote in an emailed statement. “He is now 87 years old and, again, these historical events are beyond his control.”
II. THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
For decades Germany’s political leaders have accepted moral responsibility and acknowledged the sins of the Nazi past, centering remembrance as a component of German society. But recently the country has seemed to regress. As the last witnesses to the Nazi era die and the cultural memory of the Third Reich fades, the right wing, increasingly mainstream, has attacked Germany’s progressive ideals. For much of 2023, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) polled as the largest party, hitting an all-time high of 23 percent in the polls in December. In June 2024 the AfD won a record number of votes in the European parliament elections. The party captured 16 percent of the German vote and came in second in the elections as concerns about immigration and the economy fanned voter discontent.
“Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over a thousand years of successful German history,” the AfD’s then coleader Alexander Gauland said in a 2018 speech. The AfD’s extremist wing is associated with antisemitism, Islamophobia, and historical revisionism, including the downplaying of Nazi crimes and denigration of the Holocaust. In May and July 2024, Björn Höcke, a leading AfD politician and founder of its extremist wing, was fined twice by a German court for using the banned Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany!” in his campaign speeches. Höcke has lamented the construction of a Holocaust memorial in central Berlin. Calling Germans “the only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital,” he has demanded a “180-degree turn” in the country’s “politics of memory.”
Kuehne’s politics could be described as free-market conservative. “I believe that support for the AfD will dwindle again,” he told German newspaper Welt in 2017. “Right-wing movements have no foothold in Germany.” Since 2021 he has donated about 200,000 euros ($220,000) to the Christian conservative CDU, the establishment party for German business and of former chancellor Angela Merkel. Kuehne even once said he could envision himself voting for the left-wing Green Party.
But Kuehne’s refusal to more publicly reckon with his family and firm’s Nazi past plays into the hands of the revisionist movement, says Henning Bleyl, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, a think tank affiliated with the German Green Party. He has been investigating Kuehne + Nagel’s wartime activities since 2015. These revisionist narratives of Germany’s past are prominently embodied by the AfD, but the far right in Germany, Austria, France, and many other European countries use historical revisionism to manipulate the narrative around the Nazi era and World War II to advance their political agenda.
“Even in past decades, it was unacceptable that Kuehne refused to deal honestly with his family’s actions during the Nazi era,” said Bleyl in an interview on the roof terrace above his office in Bremen. “Now it is even more of an issue because, as I view it, Kuehne’s stance places him in the ranks of those who want to ‘exonerate’ German history from its Nazi past.”
III. “A SO-CALLED ARYANIZATION”
Interviews and newly unearthed archival material by VF in Amsterdam, Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Montreal, and Washington, DC, detail the extent of Nazi profiteering by the Kuehne brothers and firm. Alfred and Werner Kuehne began profiting from the persecution of Jews much earlier than is known: years before World War II and mere months after Hitler seized power in Germany on January 30, 1933.
In late April of that year, the Kuehne brothers ousted their Jewish partner and co-owner Adolf Maass after he’d spent more than 30 years at the firm. Maass, 57 at the time, owned 45 percent of the Hamburg branch of Kuehne + Nagel, which he had founded in 1902 and which was the largest and most profitable part of the firm. When Friedrich Nagel died heirless in 1907, his shares went to his cofounder, August Kuehne, the father of Alfred and Werner. He died in 1932.
According to a signed and dated contract in the Maass family archive in the Montreal Holocaust museum, Maass signed over his shares and claims to the Kuehne brothers on April 22, 1933, for no compensation. The reason? An alleged inability “to fulfill his capital obligations” to the Kuehnes and the company. Such accusations became a common method in Nazi Germany to oust Jewish shareholders from their own firms. “This wasn’t a free and regular business contract,” says Frank Bajohr. “The Kuehnes used the political situation for their own benefit. It’s no accident that this contract was formulated in spring 1933. Maass wouldn’t have signed this contract in the years before Hitler took power. This was a so-called Aryanization.”
“The constitutional element of an Aryanization contract was that Jewish ownership was completely eliminated and that the company was handed over in its entirety to non-Jewish owners,” says Bajohr. “In this case, the Kuehnes.”
Nine days after ousting Maass, the Kuehne brothers became Nazi Party members, according to their denazification files in the Bremen state archive. In the following years the Kuehnes developed their firm into a “national-socialist model company,” an honorary title that the Nazi regime awarded to Kuehne + Nagel in 1937, the year that Klaus-Michael was born. The Kuehne brothers would declare in their denazification proceedings that Maass’s “Jewish origin caused serious trouble” for the firm and themselves. The siblings claimed that Maass left voluntarily and that they “derived no personal economic advantage from dissolving the partnership.”
