Lufthansa Airlines, Germany’s flag carrier, foregrounds almost a century of aviation heritage in its marketing, often invoking images from the 1920s and 1930s and the brand’s “pioneering spirit.” Less visible is the airline’s entanglement with the Nazi regime and its wartime use of forced labor — a story that mirrors how many major German firms cooperated with National Socialism and later escaped full accountability.
Journalist David de Jong, author of the 2022 book Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties, documents how numerous business leaders who profited under the Third Reich were not punished in the way Nazi political and military figures were at Nuremberg. De Jong highlights families such as the Quandts (whose descendants control BMW) and industrialists like Friedrich Flick, convicted at Nuremberg for using forced and slave labor but later restored to influence and wealth — Flick became the largest shareholder in Daimler‑Benz after his early release.
Historian Peter Hayes, whose 2025 book Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust examines corporate complicity in atrocities, details extremes: IG Farben’s supply of Zyklon B, firms processing gold dental fillings and jewelry looted from victims, and companies that profited directly from persecution. Hayes argues that many firms not only knew what they were involved in but sought to profit from it.
How Lufthansa became part of Nazi rearmament
Deutsche Luft Hansa (styled Lufthansa from 1933) began in 1926 as a civil airline for an elite clientele and struggled financially in the early 1930s. Historians say the Nazi regime “saved” Lufthansa: Hermann Göring appointed Lufthansa director Erhard Milch to the Reich Aviation Ministry, and the airline increasingly functioned as a cover for rearmament. Under the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forbidden an air force, but civil aviation had fewer restrictions; Lufthansa’s operations and workshops were repurposed to support military needs. After 1941 the company ran aircraft repair workshops behind the front lines and, unlike many firms, directly procured forced laborers — including children taken from occupied territories.
When WWII ended, the Allies treated the airline as part of the German air force and liquidated it in 1951. A new company was founded in 1953 (Aktiengesellschaft für Luftverkehrsbedarf, later Deutsche Lufthansa) and acquired the name and crane logo in 1954. Many managers from the prewar and wartime company returned to leadership roles in the new firm. Kurt Weigelt, who had led the economic department of the NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy and was once listed as a wanted war criminal, served as chairman of Lufthansa’s supervisory board after his postwar sentence.
Research, delay, and public disclosure
In the late 1990s Lufthansa commissioned historian Lutz Budrass to study the airline’s use of forced labor. The study was completed in 2001 but not made public until 2016, when it appeared only as a supplement to a glossy company history; Budrass later published his own comprehensive account, Adler und Kranich: Die Lufthansa und ihre Geschichte 1926–1955 (2016). Lufthansa maintains it is not the legal successor of the 1926 company and says the legal foundations of today’s Lufthansa date to 1953, while acknowledging the National Socialist era as part of its history and promising further research around its centenary.
Justice delayed, compensation limited
The airline’s wartime role returned to public attention in the 1990s as US class-action lawsuits by former forced laborers prompted a wider reckoning. Under international pressure, the German government and major corporations — including Lufthansa, Kühne + Nagel and Volkswagen — helped establish the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (Stiftung EVZ) in 2000 to compensate victims. Yet because millions of former forced laborers had already died, only about 1.7 million ultimately received payments from the EVZ out of an estimated 20+ million who had been exploited.
Corporate histories and moral responsibility
Since the 1990s it has become common for major German firms to commission historians to investigate their Nazi-era activities; Allianz, BMW, Dr. Oetker, Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen are among those that have done so. De Jong and others contend, however, that many corporate studies remain buried in archives or receive limited public attention. De Jong criticizes a pattern of evasion: companies acknowledge research internally while failing to confront the public moral implications.
Klaus‑Michael Kühne, Germany’s richest man and the largest individual shareholder in Lufthansa, exemplifies this refusal to reckon, according to critics. Kühne + Nagel, the logistics firm co‑founded by his grandfather in 1890, once had a Jewish partner, Adolf Maass, who was removed from power in 1933 when August Kühne’s sons — both Nazis — assumed control; Maass was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Researchers say Kühne + Nagel had near‑monopoly control of transporting looted Jewish property, profiting from the seizure of furniture and artworks. Klaus‑Michael Kühne has resisted reopening the past, saying publicly the chapter is closed — a stance that triggered controversy when his funding of a new Hamburg opera house prompted accusations of “whitewashing.”
Broader patterns of postwar amnesia
Historians point to political choices that enabled corporate continuity after the war. West German leaders, including Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, pushed to end denazification, arguing the country needed experienced civil servants and professionals. Amnesty laws in the early 1950s reintegrated hundreds of thousands of former Nazis into the civil service and judiciary. Hayes and others describe a “willful amnesia,” a compartmentalization that cast atrocities as the work of a fanatic minority while allowing many perpetrators and profiteers to return to business and public life.
De Jong argues that beyond financial restitution — which may no longer be feasible on a large scale — firms owe moral responsibility: transparent acknowledgment, public disclosure of research findings, and visible engagement with the history of how wealth and assets were acquired during the Nazi era.
This article has been updated on 26.03.2026
Edited by: Sarah Hofmann