VF: The richest man in Germany is worth $44 billion. The source of his family fortune? The Nazis know.

VANITY FAIR writes:

Klaus-Michael Kuehne, born in 1937, has more money than Ken Griffin, MacKenzie Scott, or François Pinault. Just don’t ask him how he got so rich.

On a Thursday afternoon in mid-November 2023, an elderly man was walking through Hamburg’s Ohlsdorf Cemetery, the world’s fourth-largest graveyard, to visit the burial place of his favorite soccer player when he noticed something very wrong. Someone had sprayed “Nazi Kapital” (“Nazi fortune”) on the Kuehne family’s tombstone, in red and black, while the cryptic term “M-Aktion” was tagged on Alfred Kuehne’s tombstone.

These weren’t just any family tombs: The Kuehne dynasty is industrial royalty in Germany. Klaus-Michael Kuehne, the only child of Alfred and Mercedes Kuehne, is the country’s wealthiest person, with a fortune estimated at $44 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 87-year-old billionaire owes his fortune to Kuehne + Nagel, the world’s largest freight forwarder, founded by Kuehne’s grandfather and Friedrich Nagel in 1890. Kuehne has used his wealth to build up a global transportation empire. He is also the largest shareholder of the German airline Lufthansa, shipping behemoth Hapag-Lloyd, chemicals distributor Brenntag, Hamburg soccer club HSV, and the company that owns North America’s Greyhound bus lines. In 2023 alone, according to Bloomberg, he stood to pocket $4.5 billion in dividends from his empire…

The full post can be read here.