Photo: Bundesarchiv

The parent company behind RTL has a dark German past.

Luxembourgers can be proud of a lot. Kachkéis, Luxair and then there’s all that good money. But there’s something that even extends beyond our small country and has earned us worldwide recognition. We’re talking about the one and only RTL, aka Radio Télévision Luxembourg, of course. The Luxembourgish identity is already present in the name.

What few people know: Behind our beloved Luxembourgish news medium there’s also a non-Luxembourgish element. Not the kind of non-Luxembourgish you think of when you say „three times no“ to a foreigner. The company is the nice little family business Bertelsmann from Germany. Well, they’re not that small after all. With a turnover of over 20 billion a year, they’re even the largest media company in Europe. And yet, a terribly nice family.

In 1835, Carl Mohn founded the publishing house. He printed hymnals and church literature and passed the publishing house on to his sons, who then passed it on to their sons, who then passed it on to their sons… and so on, from Mohn to Mohn. Until the small family grew very large. 1933 was a key year. At this time, the then publishing director, Carl’s great-grandson Heinrich Mohn, had the good intuition to adapt to market conditions: He enlisted as a „förderndes member“ of the SS and adapted Bertelsmann’s fiction program to the conditions of the then government in Germany – they happened to be Nazis, but who could have known that at the time?

The fact that Bertelsmann then switched to printing anti-Semitic and National Socialist works on a grand scale and with a certain Goebbels was very close with a certain Goebbels, that Bertelsmann also printed and sent Nazi propaganda for the soldiers at the front – the „field editions“ had a circulation of 19 million copies in 1944 – had purely economic reasons:

A real liberal

The same can be said about the Jewish forced laborers who had to work for the Bertelsmann printing plants in Lithuania: More and more economy than Ideology.

Mr. Mohn would of course have also bought other forced laborers if this had been more in line with the spirit of the times – Roma, Muslims, Hindus – ethnic or religious affiliations were certainly completely irrelevant to his noble soul. A true liberal!

Heinrich’s son Reinhard Mohn, for his part, volunteered for the Nazi air force, became a lieutenant for the Nazis in the 1940s and even served on a war mission in North Africa before he took over the publishing house. Nevertheless, one must say: It was certainly all just a big mistake. One that made the publishing house great. Until his death in 2009, the likeable son, who himself led Nazis in war, was the owner of the publishing house. Today it is his widow, Liz Mohn. And what does she have to do with her husband ideologically? You can see that the connections to the Nazi past are only extremely, extremely indirect, intertwined, with several generations and hundreds of fifth-degree cousins ​​in between, so that this complex construction can hardly be unraveled. And anyway – what do you want with such old camels?

Bertelsmann, after all, is so much more. A friendly corporation that buys up other companies and squeezes the last bit of profit out of them by firing employees and cutting programs, in order to then sell the badly saved company at a high price. Here too, the same applies: All this is not happening out of some hostility to humanity, but is a sign of good business sense. And who can take that away from a company?

Practically, RTL belongs to Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann, thanks to its Nazi lieutenant Reinhard Mohn, is also a public foundation, so to be precise, a tax avoidance facility and also a fierce lobbying organization that almost succeeded in abolishing public law in Germany. Unfortunately, this wish has not yet been fulfilled - but what is not, can still be. How else are you supposed to keep a European monopoly alive and eliminate it when there are broadcasters that simply represent the interests of the general public and therefore also receive public funds?

Of course, things look different when you can get public money yourself. Then you don’t have to ask twice. Namely in… Luxembourg! RTL Luxembourg receives a good 10 million euros a year from the state, i.e. from taxpayers. Practically, RTL belongs to Bertelsmann and can pass the money directly to the parent company as private profit. Wait a minute, and what does Luxembourg actually get out of it? That’s right! Very shaky jobs (business sense, you know) and a public-law casting channel.