Time Doesn’t Erase a Nazi-Era Debt: When Collaboration Still Echoes in Modern Institutions

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.