The patron behind Hamburg’s new opera house has resisted scrutiny of his family’s Nazi collaboration

Klaus-Michael Kühne, speaks to employees at the headquarters of Kühne + Nagel. (Axel Heimken/picture alliance via Getty Images)

(JTA) — The Hamburg State Opera has announced plans for a new opera house, backed by a donation from a German billionaire whose family grew its fortune by collaborating with the Nazi regime.

The flashy new home for the state opera is set to be built near the city’s waterfront and is expected to cost approximately 340 million euros, or around $394 million. It was funded in part by a major donation from German billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne, who pledged 300 million euros for the construction of the building in January.

But the source of Kühne’s fortune has cast a shadow over the project, as his family’s company,  Kühne + Nagel, which is one of the world’s largest logistics firms, collaborated with the Nazi regime during World War II to transport goods stolen from Jews.

While many major German companies such as Deutsche Bank, Volkswagen, and Bertelsmann have acknowledged their collaborations with the Nazi regime and allowed historians to examine their archives, Kühne has resisted calls for an investigation into his family’s company and called such examinations irrelevant.

“At some point, things have to be put behind us,” Kühne told Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger about his resistance to an audit by historians of his company in 2022. “That’s my fundamental attitude. It’s important to learn from what happened back then.”

Many German companies began issuing formal apologies for their role in the Holocaust in the 1990s. It was not until 2015, 70 years after the Holocaust, Kühne + Nagel issued a statement acknowledging its Nazi past ahead of the broadcasting of a short documentary on its history.

“Like other companies that already existed before 1945, Kühne + Nagel was involved in the war economy and had to maintain its existence in dark and difficult times,” wrote the company in the German-only statement, according to Vanity Fair.

“Kühne + Nagel is aware of the shameful events during the Third Reich and deeply regrets that it carried out some of its activities on behalf of the Nazi regime. The conditions under the dictatorship at the time and the fact that Kühne + Nagel survived the turmoil of war with all its strength and secured the company’s existence must be taken into account,” the statement continued.

Annette Jael Lehmann, a professor in cultural studies at the Free University in Berlin, told The New York Times that using Kühne’s funding to build the new opera house did not sit well with Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance.

“One could say that art is meant to whitewash Kühne’s company,” she told the New York Times.