Herbert Werner Quandt (22 June 1910 – 2 June 1982) was a German industrialist credited with having saved BMW when it was at the point of bankruptcy and made a huge profit in doing so. Quandt also oversaw the use at his family's factories during World War II of tens of thousands of slave labourers, many of whom perished. Early life Herbert Quandt was born in Pritzwalk, the second son of Günther Quandt (1881–1954) and Antonie "Toni" Quandt (born Ewald). Antonie died of the Spanish flu in 1918. Quandt was afflicted with a retinal disease that left scars, and he was nearly blind from the age of nine. Consequently, he had to be educated at home. Nazi period The Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award-winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War. The family's Nazi past was not well known, but the documentary film revealed this to a wide audience and confronted the Quandts about the use of slave labourers in the family's factories during World War II. As a result, five days after the showing, four family members announced, on behalf of the entire Quandt family, their intention to fund a research project in which a historian would examine the family's activities during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship. The independent 1,200-page study that was released in 2011 concluded: "The Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis." , the family has not paid any compensation to surviving victims and no proof of apology can be found nor cited. Slave labor After extensive training at the family's companies at home and abroad, Quandt became a member of the executive board of AFA, later VARTA AG, in 1940. Quandt was the director of Pertrix GmbH, a Berlin-based subsidiary of AFA. During the war Herbert Quandt was the director of personnel at his family factory. During his time as director he personally oversaw the deaths of 40 to 80 people each month through the use of slave labor with each slave staying alive approximately 6 months. This turnover was due in large part to the concentration of acid gas in the air of the factory in which the slave labor was forced to work. Slave labor was used extensively throughout the Quandt factories and as early as 1938. Known factories where slave