ire
Nobody could accuse the richest people in
Germany of flaunting their wealth, quite
the opposite.
With the death of Karl Albrecht, there was no
announcement for nearly a week, and not until
the small, private funeral was over. He and his
brother, Theo, had turned their mother's small
grocery store in the Ruhr into Aldi, one of the
world's biggest supermarket chains, but the
habits and thoughts of this mega-business
mogul were unknown.
For the obituaries the German papers could
only trace bland statements he had made in
1953 and 1971.
This was not a chatty public figure. He grew
orchids, apparently, and played golf - but on
his own, private golf course. In the absence of
a public presence, a legend grew around him.
The brothers, ex-employees said, would keep
accounts using stubs of old pencils, almost too
short to hold. It is said that they once told
architects designing a new store that they were
using paper that was too thick.
It was this frugality which set the Albrecht
brothers on the road to super-rich status.

After the war, they took over the grocery store
and set up a company called Aldi after
Albrecht Diskont.
They pared the costs to the bone, dispensing
with advertising and relying on the reputation
for low prices. They sold what sold quickly,
only 300 items initially.
Even shelves were thought to be too
extravagant - after all shelves had to be
stacked and that meant stackers and that
meant wages. Instead, the goods were
deposited, in the stores on the pallets on
which they arrived.
Even today, Aldi stores usually offer no more
than 2,000 products compared with the
45,000 products for other chains.
Food tended to be in tins because fresh food
cost money to store. Managers had no
telephones - they were told to use the nearest
pay phone.
When Theo was kidnapped in 1971, Karl
negotiated - over some days, according to the
German media - and then paid the ransom
which, legend has it, he tried to offset against
tax.
If Karl Albrecht was reclusive, the head of the
rival Lidl chain is positively invisible.
There are only two photographs in existence of
Dieter Schwarz, and one of those is in black-
and-white. He may be the 25th richest man on
the planet but nobody outside his closest
circle knows anything about what he thinks or
does.
It is the same with the Quandt family which
owns BMW. The product may be a symbol of
conspicuous consumption but they are a
symbol of inconspicuous taciturnity.
Take the case of Susanne Klatten, the daughter
of the industrialist Herbert Quandt, the man
who made BMW the luxury-car colossus it is
today. She was left 12.5 % of BMW.
With her other business interests, she is the
44th richest person in the world, but a woman
with a low profile. When she started in
business, learning at the bottom, as an
apprentice, she worked at a BMW factory
under a false name.
The man she married never knew her real
identity until the romance was solid.

It would be tempting to draw big conclusions
about the reticence of Germany's super-rich.
In the US and Britain, business people are part
of public life. Warren Buffett gives press
conferences. Bill Gates tours the world,
banging the drum for measures to prevent
disease. Every American city has a museum or
a medical research centre or a university
department named after a local moneybags.
But the German way with money is to keep it
quiet.
It is partly because frugality is a virtue, a
matter of morality and not just of wise
behaviour. And maybe, after the experience of
Theo Albrecht, privacy means you're less likely
to get kidnapped.
It is not the kind of place then to approve of
young millionaires roaring around in expensive
cars - they may make the Porsches and the
BMWs but it's for others to rev them up and
show off.
The figures show that private wealth in
Germany is more unevenly distributed than in
any other country in the eurozone. While the
richest 1% have personal wealth of just short
of one million euros on average, a quarter of
adult Germans have no wealth or even owe
money.
But because those with the money keep their
heads down, it doesn't always show.

http://m.bbc.com/news/magazine-28472884

Susanne Klatten is Germany's richest woman