Herbert Werner Quandt was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party 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.

Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, commonly abbreviated to BMW, is a German multinational manufacturer of luxury vehicles and motorcycles headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The company was founded in 1916 as a manufacturer of aircraft engines, which it produced from 1917 to 1918 and again from 1933 to 1945 creating engines for aircraft that were used in the Second World War.