In July 1937, a 22-year-old American named Vernon Rudolph opened the first Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with $25 in his pocket and a yeast-raised recipe. The same month, on the other side of the Atlantic, a German chemical executive named Albert Reimann Jr. wrote a personal letter to Heinrich Himmler describing his factory as a purely Aryan family business and declaring himself an unconditional follower of the race theory.
The two stories had nothing to do with each other for 79 years. Then, in May 2016, JAB Holding Company, the secretive Luxembourg investment vehicle of the Reimann family, German billionaires whose fortune was built in part on slave labor at a chemical factory whose owner had personally funded the SS as early as 1931, paid $1.
35 billion to acquire Krispy Kreme. Thus, on today’s episode of Old Money Luxury, we trace the 80-year secret behind one of America’s most beloved consumer brands and the impossible human story at its center. A Jewish grandfather murdered by the regime his grandchildren’s other grandfather helped finance. When $30 from coffee and donuts was built on a foundation nobody talked about for eight decades, the Reimann dynasty.
JAB Holding Company is the investment vehicle of the Reimann family of Germany, owners of one of the most aggressively assembled consumer brand portfolios of the 21st century. Krispy Kreme, acquired for $1.35 billion in 2016, Panera Bread for 7.5 billion in 2017, plus Peet’s Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Keurig Green Mountain, Pret A Manger, Au Bon Pain, Stumptown, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, and a controlling stake in Coty Cosmetics dating back to 1992.
By the mid-2010s, JAB had assembled what financial observers described as an $80 million rival to Nestle and Coca-Cola in the beverages and food sector. A portfolio extending across coffee, fast-casual dining, donuts, sandwich shops, and cosmetics whose combined revenues place the family among the largest private consumer goods operators in Europe.
The family’s estimated fortune reached 33 billion euros at its peak, making them Germany’s second wealthiest family. A number that has since contracted to approximately $12 billion as of early 2025 amid declines at both Krispy Kreme and Coty. The Reimann family has long been defined by a culture of public invisibility so absolute that family heirs are reportedly asked to sign a pledge upon turning 18 committing them to avoid public attention.
A discipline that kept the family virtually unknown to consumers buying their products and that for decades kept their wartime history out of the public eye. The deeper governance and acquisition history too operationally complex for this video, including the mechanics of how a chemical company founded in 1823 named after Johann Adam Benckiser became the global consumer empire whose acronym JAB still preserves the founder’s initials and the role of family spokesman Peter Harf, who served as the family’s public voice for over 40 years,
fills our free Substack newsletter. We examine the family that bought Krispy Kreme, the documents their own younger members discovered in the family archive that triggered an internal reckoning, and the German newspaper that exposed everything before the family was ready to come forward on its own terms. The Krispy Kreme story most Americans know begins in 1937 with a young entrepreneur in North Carolina.
But the deeper story of who owns it now begins in 1823 with a chemical factory in Ludwigshafen and ends with a confession in a German tabloid in March 2019. A span of nearly two centuries during which a family fortune accumulated quietly through industrial chemistry, two world wars, and one of the most aggressive consumer acquisition sprees in modern European business history.
The man who built the donut chain was an American who served in the Second World War and died in 1973 having never met a Reimann. The family that bought it 43 years later carried a history he could not have [music] imagined and that the Reimanns themselves had spent eight decades not telling. Vernon Rudolph was born on June 30th, 1915 in Kentucky and on July 13th, 1937, at 22 years old, he opened the first Krispy Kreme store in a rented building in what is now historic Old Salem in Winston-Salem, North Carolina arriving
with reportedly only $25 and a yeast-raised donut recipe his uncle had purchased from a New Orleans baker >> [music] >> named Joseph LeBeau. His original plan was wholesale, selling donuts to local grocery stores, but when neighborhood residents were lured by the sweet aroma and began lining up outside, he famously cut a hole in the wall of his building and began selling directly to customers through a makeshift [music] window, creating what became known as the donut theater concept that defined the brand for generations.
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Rudolph grew the company steadily through the American Southeast, served in the Second World War, and upon returning split the business into two entities, Krispy Kreme Doughnut Company for store operations and [music] Krispy Kreme Corporation for product consistency and development across an expanding regional footprint.
He led the company until his death in 1973 having no connection of any kind to Germany, the Third Reich, or the Reimann family. A clean American business story that would remain clean for another 43 years and that no consumer of the brand ever had reason to question. After Rudolph’s death, the company passed through several hands.
It was sold to Beatrice Foods in 1976, bought back in a 1982 leveraged buyout by 21 franchisees led by Joseph McAleer Sr. >> [music] >> for approximately $22 million, and went public for and went public for the first time in 2000, accumulating the kind of operational history any successful American consumer brand collects on its way through several decades of changing ownership.
Then, in May 2016, JAB Holding Company acquired the chain for $1.35 billion in a transaction that took Krispy Kreme private and folded it into the rapidly expanding Reimann consumer portfolio. The transaction was clean by every legal and commercial standard, a German conglomerate buying an American business at a market price, no different from hundreds of similar transactions in any given year between European capital and American consumer brands.
What no consumer in any Krispy Kreme location knew and what the Reimann family itself had not yet fully grappled with was that the wealth used to make that purchase was rooted in a chemical factory eight decades earlier whose owners had funded the SS, employed slave labor, declared themselves unconditional followers of the race theory that produced the Holocaust, and beaten and humiliated workers in their own private villas as well as on the factory floor.
The company that built that wealth was called Joh. A. Benckiser, founded in 1823, and to understand the Reimann fortune, you have to understand what happened in Ludwigshafen between 1933 and 1945. Joh. Benckiser was founded in 1823 by Johann Adam Benckiser as a chemical manufacturing firm in Ludwigshafen producing industrial chemicals like citric acid, phosphates, and citrates, and operating for decades as a low-key regional enterprise.
In 1828, a chemist named Ludwig Reimann joined the company and eventually inherited control of the business, the founding act of the Reimann dynasty that would over the next two centuries expand from industrial chemistry into consumer detergents, including the Calgon water softener brand, and ultimately into a global consumer empire valued in the tens of billions.
By the early 20th century, under the leadership of Dr. Albert Reimann Sr., born in 1868, and his son Albert Reimann Jr., the company had become a significant player in German chemistry. And by the early 1930s, both [music] father and son had become committed Nazi ideologues whose support for the regime extended well beyond the kind of opportunistic alignment that characterized many German business owners of the era.
The depth of the family’s Nazi conviction is startling, >> [music] >> not because it existed, but because of how early it manifested. According to the investigation the family itself later commissioned, Albert Reimann Sr. was donating money to Hitler’s paramilitary SS as early as 1931, two full years before Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933.
This was not opportunistic collaboration. It was ideological conviction that predated the regime itself, financial support given when supporting the Nazis was still a fringe political choice rather than a survival strategy. Both Reimann father and son attended events with Adolf Hitler as early as the 1920s, >> [music] >> and the historians who reviewed the archival documents, primarily Professor Paul Erker of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, whose work was independently corroborated by Professor Christopher
Kopper, described them as a particularly enthusiastic pair of Nazi adherents rather than reluctant participants in an authoritarian system. In July 1937, the very same month Vernon Rudolph opened his first Krispy Kreme store in North Carolina, Albert Reimann Jr. wrote his personal letter to Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS who would later oversee the implementation of the Holocaust, describing his company as a purely Aryan family business >> [music] >> that is over 100 years old and declaring himself and the other owners to be
unconditional followers of the race theory. The letter was not a routine business correspondence required by the regime. It was a voluntary expression of ideological loyalty addressed personally to the man who would within 4 years be running the final solution. The factory in Ludwigshafen was formally declared a a model National Socialist Enterprise, the highest ideological certification a German company could receive from the regime, awarded to businesses whose leadership demonstrated exemplary commitment to
Nazi values in their operations and labor management. The two men who would build the Reimann fortune through the war years and into the post-war economy had committed themselves to the Nazi cause not under duress but by enthusiastic personal choice. What followed in their factory between 1941 and 1945 was the inevitable consequence of that commitment.
[music] Beginning in 1941, the Benckiser factory was classified by the Nazi state as a crucial war enterprise producing items for the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry, a designation that gave the company priority access to the government office that allocated forced laborers seized from Nazi-occupied territories across Europe.
By the spring of 1942, Benckiser was employing approximately 200 civilians as forced laborers, and by 1943, the figure stood at 175 forced workers constituting roughly 1/3 of the factory’s total workforce. Most of them Russian and Eastern European civilians deported from their homes along with French prisoners of war captured during the German military campaigns of the early war years.
The company operated two labor camps on its premises, facilities housing the people whose labor produced the chemicals that built the post-war Reimann fortune. To put the Benckiser numbers in their broader context, >> [music] >> some 12 million people from more than a dozen European nations were seized by the Nazis and forced to work for the German war machine, at their peak constituting approximately 20% of the entire German workforce.
The Reimann factory was not an aberration but a participant in one of the largest systems of organized forced labor in human history. The crimes at Benckiser went far beyond mere exploitation. Historian Paul Erker’s investigation conducted between 2014 and 2019 at the family’s own request documented specific acts of brutality under a foreman named Paul Werneburg who had been with the company since 1910 and became notorious for his cruelty.
Female forced laborers were ordered to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse. Workers were routinely beaten, including a Ukrainian woman who also worked as a cleaner in the Reimann’s private villa. A French prisoner of war was kicked out of a bomb shelter during an air raid and subsequently died.
Some forced laborers died in workplace accidents under conditions Erker described as sometimes life-threatening. The abuse extended beyond the factory floor into the Reimann’s private lives. Forced laborers were used not just in industrial operations but in the family’s personal villas, where the cleaner who was beaten lived as part of the household staff under conditions of total subjection.
Albert Reimann Jr. demonstrated his contempt for the workers in writing. He sent a letter to the mayor of Ludwigshafen complaining that the French prisoners of war were not working hard enough and suggesting they should be imprisoned. A documentary detail that captures the casual administrative cruelty of a man who had committed himself ideologically to a regime that viewed his workers as subhuman.
Erker’s research identified 870 names of former forced laborers who had [music] worked at Benckiser, giving human identities to people who had been until that investigation nameless contributors to the chemical output of a factory whose profits would compound across 80 years into one of the largest consumer fortunes in Europe.
The most haunting element of the Reimann story is the human figure of Alfred Landecker, a man whose life and death connect the Nazi perpetrators to their Jewish victims in a way that almost defies comprehension. Landecker was born on June 4th, 1884 in East Prussia, into a well-integrated Jewish family.
A patriotic German who served in the First World War as a volunteer, was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, and spent years in Mannheim as a respected businessman. He married a Catholic woman named Marie Gessner. They had three children, Emily, Gerda, and Willy, before Marie died suddenly in 1928. When the Nazis rose to power, Landecker initially believed they would not last.
He was wrong, and he was systematically stripped of his rights, [music] barred from professional advancement, forced to wear the yellow star, and watched helplessly as his children, officially classified as half-Jews, were expelled from schools. His youngest daughter, Gerda, suffered from seizures resembling epilepsy, which placed her at risk of the Nazis’ euthanasia program, >> [music] >> and Landecker made the agonizing decision to send her away to a Catholic aunt with Nazi ties, hoping those connections might protect her,
the kind of impossible parental calculation the regime forced on Jewish families across occupied Europe. In April 1942, he received a deportation order, and his attempts to appeal, including a desperate trip to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, the very nerve center of the genocide operation, were futile.
[music] His last letter to his children read, “If I should survive the end of this war, perhaps there will still be a glimmer of a future, but at the moment, the likelihood of that is 99% against me.” He was deported on April 24th, 1942 to the Izbica Ghetto in occupied Poland, a transit point funneling Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps.
The exact date and place of his death remains unknown, and it was not until 1949 that his children received official confirmation of his death. In 1941, the year before her father was deported, Emily Landecker, 19 years old, half-Jewish, terrified of deportation, went to work at Benckiser, the company run by Albert Reimann Jr.
, the committed Nazi who had written to Himmler about his purely Aryan enterprise. Despite the impossible ideological gulf between them and despite the fact that Reimann’s support for the regime was in part responsible for the persecution that killed her father, Emily and Albert Reimann Jr. fell in [music] love. The relationship was kept secret for years.
Reimann was married but had no children with his wife, and he and Emily had three children together whom he officially adopted in the 1960s. Today, two of Emily Landecker’s children with Albert Reimann Jr., Stefan Reimann Anderson and Matthias Reimann Anderson, own a combined stake of approximately 45% in JAB Holding Company. They are the grandchildren of Alfred Landecker, the Jewish man murdered by the Nazi regime that their own father enthusiastically supported, a bloodline that holds in a single family both the perpetrator and the victim of the same
historical crime. The trigger for reopening the family’s Nazi history was not an academic inquiry or a journalist’s tip. It was the Reimanns themselves stumbling upon documents in their own family archive in the 2000s when younger family members began reading papers that had belonged to Albert Reimann Sr.
and found material that troubled them. The family had previously believed a 1978 internal report had revealed the full extent of the company’s connections to the Nazi regime. That report turned out to have barely scratched the surface, >> [music] >> capturing some general wartime complicity without documenting the depth of the family’s ideological fanaticism, the personal cruelty inside the villas, or the full scale of forced labor exploitation.
By 2014, the family had commissioned a formal investigation, >> [music] >> hiring Professor Paul Erker of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University to conduct a thorough historical study, a process that took 5 years and produced findings far more damning than the 1978 [music] report had suggested. The family had not yet decided how to make the findings [music] public when the German tabloid Bild am Sonntag obtained an interim version of Erker’s report and published a four-page exposé on the weekend of March 24th, 2019.
Family spokesman Peter Half went before the press and issued one of the most extraordinary corporate admissions in modern history. It is all correct. Reimann senior and Reimann junior were guilty. The two businessmen have passed away, but they actually belonged in prison. He added, “We were all ashamed and turned as white as the wall.
There is nothing to gloss over. These crimes are disgusting.” In December 2019, the family established the Alfred Landecker Foundation in Berlin, named after Emilie Landecker’s murdered father, funding research and education about the Holocaust, providing humanitarian support to survivors and former forced laborers, and committing 250 million euros over 10 years from the parent company Joh. A.
Benckiser to fund the foundation’s ongoing work. Critics noted that an initial 10 million euro pledge represented approximately 0.03% of the family’s net worth. Pocket change. And that no individual forced laborers or their families have received direct personal compensation, with donations going to general Holocaust survivor funds rather than to the descendants of the 870 specific people Reemtsma identified.
The Krispy Kreme story has its own contemporary chapter. The brand was relisted on Nasdaq in 2021 at a valuation of approximately 2.7 billion dollars. But a disastrous McDonald’s distribution partnership terminated in 2025. A cyber attack and operational struggles have collapsed the market capitalization to roughly 497 million.
In April 2025, Peter Half, the man who confirmed the Nazi past to build and served as the family’s public voice, announced his retirement [music] after more than 40 years with the family, ending the era of personal stewardship that included both the empire’s greatest expansion and its most difficult [music] public reckoning.
The donut in your grocery store was made by an American company founded in 1937 by a man with $25 in his pocket, and bought eight decades later by a family whose fortune carries a history that no foundation, no donation, and no public statement can ever fully resolve. And now we’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Should the Reimann family have done more to compensate the descendants of the people who built their fortune, or is the Alfred Landecker Foundation a meaningful step toward atonement? We look forward to the discussion below, and thanks for joining us for another episode of Old Money Luxury. Cheers.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
