en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Quandt

The sentence is anchored to 1954 by the immediately preceding clause: “Quandt's father died in 1954 … By then, the Quandt group consisted of more than 200 companies…”.

That makes the reference to “Altana AG” incorrect. According to ALTANA’s official company history, the present ALTANA AG was created only in 1977, when a spin-off of Varta AG formed three separate companies, one of which became ALTANA AG. So ALTANA AG could not have been one of the companies in the Quandt group “by then” in 1954.

In other words, the article appears to project a later corporate successor back into an earlier date. A more accurate formulation would refer to the predecessor businesses that later became part of ALTANA, not to ALTANA AG itself existing in 1954.

The Deutsche Bundesbank states that the official exchange rate is €1 = DEM 1.95583.

Using that official rate, DEM 1.5 billion ÷ 1.95583 ≈ €766.9 million. So the article’s parenthetical euro figure of €585 million is not a correct conversion of DM 1.5 billion.

The dollar amount may reflect a separate historical or approximate conversion, but the euro amount as written is mathematically inconsistent with the official DEM→EUR conversion rate.

The sentence tells readers that the VARTA/AFA business “still belongs to the family.” That is no longer correct.

According to VARTA’s official corporate history, Montana Tech Components AG bought the R&D and microbattery business from Deutsche Bank and the Quandt family in 2007, and Montana Tech Components AG bought the holding company VARTA AG in 2011. VARTA’s 2024 annual report also states that, as of 31 December 2024, Montana Tech’s subsidiary VGG Beteiligungen SE held 50.12% of VARTA AG.

So the article’s present-tense claim that the VARTA/AFA business “still belongs to the family” is contradicted by VARTA’s own ownership history and current shareholder disclosures.

This sentence misreads the family office’s own website.

The Harald Quandt Family Office says the family holds interests in HQ Trust, HQ Capital, and CP Capital, and that these financial service providers together oversee assets of more than €17 billion. It does not say the Harald Quandt family itself has a personal fortune of that size.

The same page also explains that these firms serve private individuals, families, foundations, institutional investors, pension funds, and other clients. So the quoted figure is an assets-managed figure for the affiliated financial-services businesses, not a statement of the family’s own net worth.