You may not have heard of JAB Holding Company, but there’s a good chance you’ve been in one of its stores. The Luxembourg-based conglomerate, controlled by members of the reclusive Reimann family in Germany, owns coffee chains and bakeries from sea to shining sea – and beyond. The list is extensive: Peet’s Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Bruegger’s Bagels, Manhattan Bagel, Noah’s New York Bagels, Krispy Kreme, Pret A Manger, Insomnia Cookies, and Panera Bread. In fact, the company now sells more coffee than Starbucks.
Even coffee drinkers who try to keep visits to small neighbourhood cafés are probably giving their money to JAB because many independent stores buy their beans from roasters owned by the company, including seemingly local ones such as Stumptown Coffee Roasters, La Colombe Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia Coffee, and Green Mountain Coffee.
JAB also sells directly to customers who prefer their beverages at home through its ownership of Keurig Dr Pepper, one of the largest makers of single-serve coffee pods in the United States, and Trade Coffee, an online retailer.
JAB became the world’s second-largest purveyor of coffee (excluding coffee sold in stores) within seven years of selling its first bean.
The Reimann family has studiously avoided the sort of media coverage and public appearances. In fact, rumour has it that when family members turn 18, they sign a pledge not to show their faces in public, which is why no photos accompany their names in the annual Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people. As The Economist put it, the Reimanns are “faceless”, letting the wild success of their coffee empire speak for itself.
Their family fortune dates to the 19th century when Ludwig Reimann, great-great-grandfather of the present-day Reimanns, married the daughter of an industrial chemicals magnate named Johann Adam Benckiser (JAB). Ludwig Reimann took over the company when Benckiser died, and it stayed under the family’s control for generations.
Ludwig’s descendants, Albert Reimann Sr and his son Albert Reimann Jr, controlled the company as Germany descended into fascism. Both were ardent anti-Semites and became members of the Nazi Party, as well as early and enthusiastic supporters of Adolf Hitler, as Katrin Bennhold reported extensively in The New York Times.
The younger Albert Jr hitched his wagon to Hitler as early as 1923, when he heard the future dictator speak in Munich. He even wrote a letter to Heinrich Himmler, the main architect of the Holocaust, describing the family as “unconditional followers of the race theory” and their company as “a purely Aryan family business”.
Once the Nazis came to power, the company became enmeshed in the regime’s racial project. One of its factories was held up as a “model [Nazi] plant”, and Albert Sr even took a leadership position in a committee that “helped orchestrate the Aryanisation, expropriation and expulsion of Jewish businesses”.
Both Albert Jr and Albert Sr used forced labour, not only in their factories but also in their homes. Female workers were “forced to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse”. At the time, forced labour was common among companies such as the Reimanns’, but this level of abuse stood out.
Despite his unbridled anti-Semitism, Albert Reimann Jr had an affair with a half-Jewish employee. Emilie Landecker was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, who died when Emilie was just six. As her father witnessed the Nazi rise to power and was stripped of his rights as a citizen, he decided to protect his children by baptising them in the Catholic faith and putting the family property in their names.
Because her father was not allowed to work, Emilie supported the family by getting a job, at the age of 19, in the accounting department of the Reimann family’s company. She was working there in 1942 when the Gestapo sent her father to a death camp. At some point, she became romantically involved with Albert Reimann Jr and ultimately had three children with him. Two of those children now own a large portion of JAB Holding Company.
Wolfgang Reimann remarked of his mother, “She lived through the horror show happening in our own company.” In interviews with The New York Times, Wolfgang recounted being shushed by Emilie when he asked about his Jewish grandfather. He said the children knew little about the company’s sordid past until media reports began to surface.
In 2018, a story broke about the Reimanns’ historical ties to the Nazi regime. Soon after, the family members who own JAB released an interim report they had commissioned to investigate those ties. To atone, the owners of JAB announced a one-time donation of €10m to organisations that help former forced labourers and their families. They also pledged to give €25m annually to their family foundation to fund projects that “honour the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and of Nazi terror”.
The family’s contrition appears to be genuine, and their willingness to publicly acknowledge such a dark history deserves to be commended. Yet they have not always backed up this sentiment with action. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, many Western companies, including Starbucks, ceased operations in Russia, citing moral and ethical concerns.
As of August 2023, JDE Peet’s, one of JAB’s core portfolio companies, still operated in Russia, based partially on the reasoning that coffee is essential to “sustain health or life”.
JAB is by no means the only company that built its wealth by supporting the Nazi regime. As a report by America’s secretary of war noted, Hitler’s Germany was characterised by “a great series of industrial monopolies in steel, rubber, coal, and other materials”. These companies include several firms still around in some form today, such as Bayer, Deutsche Bank and Siemens.
These giants and their wealthy owners were instrumental in the Nazis’ rise. In 1947, shortly after the end of the Second World War, the Library of Congress prepared a report that analysed the reasons the Nazis came to power in Germany. It found that cartels provided critical financial support to the party at key moments.
People like Albert Reimann Jr recognised that if they did their part to bring the regime to power and supercharge its war machine, they would reap the benefits. Sure enough, the Reimanns’ close ties to the party resulted in a financial windfall, with sales more than tripling during the decade after the Nazis took power.
