"I am a capitalist.
I own a quarter of Bahlsen, so I'm happy about it." In 2019, Verena Bahlsen didn't realize that she had just talked her head and neck on stage.
The social networks reacted immediately.
The focus of the shit storm was not the biscuit manufacturer's economic success, but the insensitive handling of the then 26-year-old company heiress with the dark past of the Hanover-based company.
Several family members had once supported the NSDAP, and Bahlsen did good business with the Wehrmacht.
In addition, the company employed forced laborers from 1942 to 1945, including many women from the Ukraine.
A few days after her speech, Verena Bahlsen delivered a half-baked apology, which the FAZ also reported: "That was before my time,
Marcus Young
Editor in Business.
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It is a clever move by David de Jong to place this seemingly nondescript scene from a digital marketing conference at the beginning of his book, Brown Legacy.
Bahlsen's spontaneous statement and the following statement revealed (as de Jong writes) the "biggest moral faux pas that one can commit in Germany": the consistent hiding of the family biography in the Third Reich.
Many Germans never faced the heavy burden of guilt after enriching themselves personally through the Aryanization of companies and the use of foreign forced labourers.