The owners of the brand in 2019 admitted that their family had ties to the Nazis and that they even used enslaved workers during World War II. In Chile, the opening of the first branch of “glazed donut” specialists has left images of people waiting since the day before.
For lovers of sweets, a donut can be an ideal meal to start the day off right. So much so that some are ready to spend the night outside a store to get the first bagels from the morning production.
It happened yesterday Thursday at 9:00 a.m. when the first Krispy Kreme location in South America was inaugurated, an American-born company that offers donuts in multiple flavors and with different fillings. The most known? Unquestionably the “frozen donuts”, recommended even by the ambassador of this country of Chile, Bernadette Meehan. “A feast for Chileans,” warned the diplomat.
Of course, the most enthusiastic guests at the idea of the opening they arrived around 11:30 a.m. the day before while later more people joined in with items such as tents and blankets to weather the cold night temperatures.
A televised dispatch made by T13 at 7 a.m. yesterday, he showed the scene just two hours after the public began to be served. According to the journalist, at that time there were about 70 guests.
The vast majority of attendees who visited the Vitacura store – located on Kennedy Lateral at 8200 – were motivated by advertised first-mover prices, such as weekly donuts for a year or even a party” .
The furor surrounding the opening of the branch in the east sector of Santiago was evident, but before the company became one of the most recognized for donut lovers, it went through a long process that dates back to the 1930s. . , in which the owners of the brand changed and in which disturbing facts about its history were revealed.
Krispy Kreme: the American brand that opened its first store in Chile
It was 1933 when a man named Vernon Rudolph met a French chef in New Orleans, from whom he bought “a secret recipe for sourdough beignets”.
At that time, the new owner of the formula was working for his uncle, Ishmael Armstrong, at a store in Paducah, Kentucky, where they sold different products plus these mouth-watering sweet bagels fried in pork fat.
At that time, the effects of the Great Depression were still strongly affecting the economy of the United States, so many entrepreneurs were considering the possibility of moving to other major cities in order to grow their businesses.
That’s how the two came to Nashville, Tennessee, to open a new specialty donut shop in 1934.
Its success was so great that Rudolph was able to move to Winston-Salem, North Carolina to open his own business focused on that market.
The name of his company will go down in history: Krispy Kreme.
An article available on the website of the North Carolina History Museum details that the warm smell of the preparations was so striking that Rodolphe had the idea of ”literally making a hole in the wall” of the premises, in order to attract passers-by and find out what he was offering.
Already between the 1940s and 1950s, he was able to open new stores in different towns in the two Carolinas, but he realized that the flavors of the donuts varied according to the inhabitants, since the production was not yet standardized and the managers depended heavily on the tools. and ingredients from each location.
Faced with this situation, in 1955 he created his own brand with a white, green and red logo. And a few years later, he developed a consistency model.
It would be the start of what, decades later, would become a fast-food giant, which remains in effect with branches around the world through intermediaries, such as the iconic glass-fronted restaurant at heart of Times Square in New York.
Also on this list is Chile, the first location in South America and recently incorporated by Grupo Premier, a franchisee that also operates Little Caesars Pizza in the country.
A turbulent turn in history
After Rudolph died in 1973, his family opted to sell Krispy Kreme, according to a report by the North Carolina History Project . This change resulted in multiple shifts in brand ownership. And in the same way, it also opened up the possibilities for new decisions to be made.
By the late 1990s, the company already had branches all over the United States, while in 2001 it expanded internationally to Canada.
After nearly two decades of Krispy Kreme continuing to make a name for itself in the industry, was acquired in 2016 by JAB Holding Company consumer conglomerate controlled since the beginning of the 19th century by the German family Reimmann and who, among other names, currently controls companies such as Panera, Espresso House and cosmetics brand Coty.
The company was run by Albert Reimann and Albert Reimann Jr. – father and son – in the 1930s and 1940s, at the time of World War II.
During this time, both were supporters of Adolf Hitler’s regime and allowed forced labor both at home and in the industrial chemical plant with which they began to amass their fortune, which would later become the multinational Reckitt Benckiser. .
As published The New York Times in 2019, the Reimanns were anti-Semitic, beat people under their command, and women were at constant risk of abuse if they disobeyed any of their orders.
They even joined the National Socialist Party and donated to the SS before Hitler assumed his role as Führer of Germany. This was confirmed by the same descendants of the Reimann family 74 years after the end of World War II, in 2019.
It all started in the early 2000s, when they began to examine documents suggesting a notorious link between his father, grandfather and the regime.
Over the years and with a host of doubts, in 2014 they asked University of Munich historian Paul Erker to investigate their family background.
It was there that they realized the abuses perpetrated by Albert Reimann and Albert Reimann Jr., who spoke no more of National Socialism after the end of the war in 1945.
This information was confirmed by the German newspaper Picture on March 24, 2019, when family spokesman and one of JAB Holding’s directors, Peter Harf, said Erker’s reports “perfectly match” the family’s suspicions.
“Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were guilty. The two businessmen are already deceased (in 1954 and 1984 respectively), but in reality they should have been in prison (…) we remained ashamed and very pale. There is nothing that covers. These crimes are disgusting.”
Among the documents the historian analyzed was a letter from June 1937, in which Reimann Jr. addressed then-SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who played a key role in the development of the Holocaust.
“We have been an all-Aryan family business for over a hundred years…the owners are strong proponents of race theory,” he wrote according to information collected by the Time which detailed that in 1943, 175 of the employees – a third of the total – were working under forced labor conditions.
The outlet explains that slave labor was recurrent in German companies during the Second World War, to the point that at the height of the conflict, around 20% of the people who worked worked in this modality.
The vast majority of them were prisoners of war or civilians captured in Nazi-dominated territories.
Although this was recurrent, the case of Albert Reimann and Albert Reimann Jr. differed because “it was not common for a business leader to be in direct physical contact with these people”, explains the director of the ‘Leibniz Institute in the aforementioned media. of contemporary history, Andreas Wirsching.
The professor of the School of History of the University Diego Portales (UDP), Pablo Álvarez, tells The third that these practices influenced by colonialism gave rise to a “war capitalism”.
“The Russians realized that closing the Tsarist concentration camps was unsustainable, as they needed to put prisoners there, but later they saw that these people served the purposes of forced industrialization that the Soviet Union was leading,” explains Álvarez, “and then the Nazis did the same with the Jews.”
“For them, it was very important to have this slave labor, because they were in a project of super accelerated modernization of the economy.”
Regarding how businesses gained access to slaves during Nazism, the UDP academic explains that while “the regime was revolutionary in some ways, in others it was closely tied to the business sector , that’s why they supported strategic companies”.
“There was a kind of special agreement between the Nazi state and big businessmen, in which they guaranteed production quotas through slave labor.”
Repair
After the Reimanns confirmed and admitted past abuse by loved ones, they sought compensation donation of over $11 million to a charity.
Other companies that also benefited from the Nazi regime in this area include Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Daimler and Volkswagen, among others, which decades later contributed millions of dollars to a fund set up by the German government in reparations for the victims.
viewed by The third the Premier group declined to participate in this article.
Source: Latercera
I am David Jack and I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years. As an experienced journalist, I specialize in covering sports news with a focus on golf. My articles have been published by some of the most respected publications in the world including The New York Times and Sports Illustrated.
