Perhaps no one better encapsulates de Jong’s argument than Günther Quandt and his son Herbert Quandt, members of the Nazi party and patriarchs of the family that now dominates the BMW Group.

Herbert Quandt had responsibility over battery factories in Berlin where thousands of forced and enslaved labourers toiled, including hundreds of women from concentration camps. He acquired companies stolen from Jews in France and used prisoners of war and forced labourers on his own private estate. He even built a concentration subcamp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

When Günther Quandt was 37 and widowed, he met and married a 17-year-old called Magda Friedländer and had one child with her. After their divorce, Magda married the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, with whom she murdered their six children before both killed themselves in 1945.

After the war, Günther Quandt was arrested for suspected collaboration with the Nazis, only to be acquitted after falsely claiming that he had been forced to join the party by Goebbels.

“Günther Quandt becomes one of Nazi Germany’s most most successful industrialists,” de Jong, who has been reporting on the families for a decade, said in a phone interview from Palm Springs, California. “He was already immensely wealthy before Hitler seized power. He uses it at the end of the war as a way of saying, ‘I was a victim of persecution. I was persecuted by Joseph Goebbels and by my ex-wife.’”