When Ron Zur received an unexpected call from a German playwright earlier this year, he could hardly have imagined that it would unearth an eight-decade-old wound — and a troubling moral question about how Europe remembers its past.
The playwright had uncovered archival evidence that Zur’s grandfather, Leo Lewitus, had his Czech shipping company seized during the Nazi era under the so-called Aryanisation process — a legalised form of theft in which Jewish-owned businesses were forcibly transferred to non-Jewish hands for a fraction of their worth. The beneficiary in this case: Kuehne + Nagel, a logistics firm that would grow into a global powerhouse, whose current owner, Klaus-Michael Kuehne, today ranks among Germany’s wealthiest men.
The Hidden Foundations of Prosperity
The story of Kuehne + Nagel is not unique — it mirrors the uneasy intersection of profit, collaboration, and silence that underpinned much of postwar Europe’s industrial rise. During the Nazi era, the company profited from transporting the possessions of deported Jewish families to concentration camps. These lucrative contracts, historians argue, helped cement the family’s fortune.
And yet, when asked to reckon with this past, Kuehne demurs. Now 88 years old, he insists he was too young to bear any responsibility, claiming ignorance of his company’s wartime conduct. “How would one find out today?” he told Der Spiegel.
That question, whether rhetorical or deflective, goes to the heart of Europe’s struggle with moral accountability. Porsche, for example, recently commissioned an independent investigation into how its Jewish co-founder, Adolf Rosenberger, was forced out during the Nazi era — a rare gesture of corporate honesty. By contrast, Kuehne + Nagel maintains that its wartime archives were destroyed by Allied bombing, despite contradictory evidence that records survived.
Belgium’s Own Moral Freight: The NMBS/SNCB Case
Germany is not alone in this uncomfortable reckoning. Belgium’s NMBS/SNCB, the national railway company, has long faced questions about its role in the deportation of more than 25,000 Belgian Jews and Roma to concentration camps during the Holocaust. Trains owned and operated by NMBS transported victims to the Mechelen transit camp, from where they were sent to Auschwitz.
What makes this case particularly haunting is that, decades after the war, NMBS refused to return or compensate the money it had received from Nazi Germany for these transports. The company argued that, as a state entity, it could not be held legally accountable for actions taken under occupation — a bureaucratic justification that fails to address the deeper moral debt.
In 2022, descendants of deported families demanded that NMBS establish a compensation and remembrance fund, similar to those in France and the Netherlands, but the Belgian government quietly shelved the proposal. The argument was again legal: the payments had been “lawful” under wartime conditions.
The Lesson: Time Doesn’t Save From a Nazi-Era Debt
Europe’s postwar prosperity — from logistics giants to public railways — was, in part, built on the ashes of lives and businesses extinguished by state-sanctioned theft and deportation. What unites the stories of Kuehne + Nagel and NMBS is not just their historical complicity, but their ongoing reluctance to return moral capital to the descendants of their victims.
Kuehne’s €300 million donation to build a new opera house in Hamburg may elevate his philanthropic image, but it does little to confront the silence that financed his fortune. Similarly, NMBS invests heavily in modernization and sustainability campaigns, but avoids mentioning the cargo its trains once carried under Nazi rule.
As Henning Bleyl of the Heinrich Böll Foundation notes, “In a material sense, we were all profiteers; the Third Reich is part of all of our small biographies.” His words cut deep. If prosperity rests upon unacknowledged suffering, then no amount of time, donations, or infrastructure can wash away that stain.
A Moral Reckoning Still Waiting on Track
Both Germany and Belgium have been praised for their cultures of remembrance — yet remembrance without restitution is hollow. The descendants of men like Leo Lewitus and Adolf Maass, who lost everything and were murdered in Auschwitz, deserve more than vague sympathy. They deserve recognition that wealth accumulated under oppression remains tainted until it is transparently accounted for.
Whether in the boardrooms of Hamburg or the offices of Brussels, the message should be clear: Time doesn’t erase a Nazi-era debt. It compounds it. Until Europe’s corporations and state institutions acknowledge not only their pasts but also the profits that flowed from them, their legacy will remain — like the trains that once left Mechelen and the ships that once left Hamburg — on the wrong side of history.
I was calmly eating my Belgian fries—perhaps one of Europe’s last undisputed contributions to world civilization—while watching the Flemish channel VTM. The sun was shining, the sky was clear, and that of course meant it was time for a national ritual: discussing climate change on television.
Because nothing pairs better with a warm, dry day than a panel of concerned experts explaining why everything is actually getting worse.
The news anchor, with the appropriate dose of mild existential concern, asked the question of the day: Why is Europe warming faster than other continents? A fair question. You would expect a complex answer about ocean currents, atmospheric dynamics, or perhaps decades of industrial legacy.
Instead, the explanation took a turn that nearly cost me my appetite.
According to the expert, Europe’s enthusiastic green policies may have… unintended side effects. Fewer emissions mean fewer particles in the air—particles that used to reflect sunlight and thus formed a kind of atmospheric “shield.” In other words: by cleaning the air, we may also be removing a protective layer against the sun.
At that moment, my fries became secondary. I was witnessing a philosophical paradox unfolding live on television: Europe, in its moral quest to save the planet, may be making itself more vulnerable to exactly what it is trying to combat.
You would almost expect a Nobel Prize for irony.
And so we naturally arrive at the thought experiment of the day. If fewer emissions reduce that protective layer, then the often-criticized “Drill Baby Drill” philosophy might deserve reconsideration—not as environmental damage, but as… climate management.
Absurd? Certainly. But no more absurd than pretending that complex systems respond linearly to idealistic policies.
After all, Nobel Prizes have been awarded for raising awareness about global warming. By that logic, one might almost expect that someone like Donald Trump would at least receive a nomination for proposing counterbalances—however controversial. When one side of the debate is treated as untouchable doctrine, the other side quickly begins to look like heresy… until reality asserts itself.
Because here lies the uncomfortable truth: nature does not follow ideology.
In life, and apparently also in the environment, everything revolves around balance. Push too far—whether toward unchecked industrialization or toward uncompromising green orthodoxy—and the system reacts. Not with applause, but with correction.
When policy becomes religion, nuance is the first casualty. And nature, unlike voters, does not negotiate. It restores equilibrium.
Perhaps that is the real lesson, somewhere between a portion of fries and a television debate: environmental policy is not about purity. Not about absolutism. Not about moral superiority.
It is about balance.
And balance, by definition, requires more than one force.
Which may well be the most uncomfortable conclusion of all.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Receive Breaking News
Sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date! Be the first to receive the latest news in your mailbox: