Omas gegen Rechts, Part II: The Funding Pot Behind the Funding Pot

Where Part I Ended

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The first article of this two-parter traced where the Omas gegen Rechts Deutschland e.V. actually receive money:¹

• €18,000 from the federal programme “Demokratie leben!” (BMFSFJ, Federal Ministry for Family Affairs)
• €5,000 from the Federal Chancellery (Integration Commissioner) to the Buxtehude local group
• together €23,000 of public money, documented through the federal government’s reply to an AfD inquiry by MP Bernd Schattner in August 2024

Plus the context: the association is not recognized as charitable. Members act on a voluntary basis. The Omas themselves are not the problem. They are the friendly face. The structural question is: in which network do they operate? Part I showed Campact as co-signer of joint appeals, HateAid as a structurally related actor within the same ecosystem.

Part II goes one layer deeper and asks: Who funds this ecosystem?

The Alfred Landecker Foundation, €250 Million and One Family

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In June 2019 the siblings Renate Reimann-Haas, Wolfgang Reimann, Stefan Reimann-Andersen and Matthias Reimann-Andersen established the Alfred Landecker Foundation.² The Reimann family is majority owner of JAB Holding Company, one of the world’s largest private-capital conglomerates (Coty, Krispy Kreme, Pret a Manger, Calgon, Persil, Peet’s Coffee, Panera Bread, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Jacobs Kaffee). Estimated family wealth in the double-digit billions.

The foundation is endowed with €250 million over ten years³ — plus an additional humanitarian fund of €10 million for Holocaust survivors. Annually the foundation communicates a €25 million grant-making budget.⁴

The founding timeline is relevant. On March 24, 2019, Bild am Sonntag published the revelation that Albert Reimann senior and junior had been NSDAP members and SS donors since the 1920s, and that in the plants in Ludwigshafen forced labourers had been physically and sexually abused.⁵ Handelsblatt confirmed this and documented in December 2019 the establishment of a €10 million fund for former forced labourers.⁶ Three months lie between public revelation and the founding of the foundation.

The foundation is named after Alfred Landecker, a Jewish authorized signatory and business friend of the Reimanns who was deported in 1942 and murdered in the Holocaust. Declared purposes: Holocaust remembrance, fighting group-based hatred with a focus on antisemitism, strengthening democracy, scientific research, supporting Holocaust survivors.

That is the publicly communicated framing. The structural framing we formulated in our structural analysis of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation (Part 5 Media Criticism): heirs of Nazi profiteers today co-define, via their funding, what counts as “right-wing” — and buy themselves moral clarity with the same money against their own family past. This displacement happens without public debate, without mandate, simply because the money is there.

Who Concretely Receives Landecker Money

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The foundation publishes on its website, in press releases and through LinkedIn communication a number of documented recipients. Concrete amounts are only partially broken down in public — the foundation does not publish a full annual report with individual figures.

Documented with amounts:

• HateAid gGmbH: €1.4 million (2024).⁷ The Alfred Landecker Foundation was one of HateAid’s largest single funders in 2024, alongside the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs (BMFSFJ) and the Federal Ministry of Justice.
• Landecker Digital Justice Movement (HateAid umbrella initiative): €3.3 million total.⁸ Multi-year partnership to “combat digital violence” and advance “legal regulation of digital platforms”.
• Claims Conference: €5 million (USD 5.5 million) pledged 2019.⁹ For material support for Holocaust survivors — core mission purpose.
• Hebrew University of Jerusalem: USD 13 million.¹⁰ Research programme on antisemitism and Holocaust studies.

Documented without public amount:

• Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS): founding grant (March 2021) plus “substantial” follow-up grant through end of 2025.¹¹ CeMAS is a Berlin think tank on “disinformation, conspiracy ideologies and right-wing extremism” — its monitor reports are used by mainstream media and political actors as evidentiary base for anti-right narratives.
• Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (IDZ) Jena: project grant.¹² IDZ is organizationally anchored to the Amadeu Antonio Foundation (AAS) — see Part 5 Media Criticism. This is the line through which Landecker money indirectly flows into AAS structures.
• Landecker Democracy Fellowship (with Humanity in Action): 30 activists EU/UK/US per cohort, since 2020.¹³
• Bundesverband RIAS (antisemitism-reporting agencies), University of Oxford (Landecker Professorship), Jewish Museum Berlin (Lanzmann audio archive), University of Sussex (Digital Memory Lab), Munich Security Conference (Zeitenwende initiative), MARCHIVUM Mannheim, AMCHA Germany, KONTAKTE-KONTAKTY e.V., Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF) — all without publicly itemized amounts.

The Structure Around the Omas

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Assembling the picture:

This is not a conspiracy. Each actor has its own charter, its own funding line, its own press communication. What becomes visible is an ecosystem:

• The shopfront (Omas) runs on tax-money backing and volunteer work.
• The legal backend (HateAid) runs on €1.4M Landecker plus federal ministry money.
• The analytical base (CeMAS) runs on Landecker founding and follow-up grants.
• The academic seal (IDZ) runs through Landecker project funding into AAS structures.
• The umbrella communication (AAS) sits above IDZ and thus inside the Landecker catchment area.

Five layers. One thematic output: “against the right”. Two dominant funding sources: tax money and Reimann/Landecker wealth. The Omas say truthfully that they receive no Landecker money. That is correct. But they are not the whole story.

What the Union Asked — And What the Government Answered

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On February 24, 2025, days after the federal election, the CDU/CSU faction under Friedrich Merz and Alexander Dobrindt submitted the minor inquiry “Political neutrality of state-funded organizations” — printed paper 20/15035, 551 questions, run structurally through 17 organizations:¹⁴

CORRECTIV gGmbH · Omas gegen Rechts Deutschland e.V. · Campact · Attac · Amadeu Antonio Foundation · PETA · Animal Rights Watch · Foodwatch · Dezernat Zukunft · Deutsche Umwelthilfe · Agora Agrar · Agora Energiewende · Greenpeace · BUND · Netzwerk Recherche · Neue deutsche Medienmacher*innen · Delta1/Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit

The questions were structurally identical for each actor: charitable purposes, party campaigning, share of public funding, donations from industry/party-affiliated foundations, connections to parties, influence on political decision-making, cooperation with Rosa-Luxemburg / Heinrich-Böll / Friedrich-Ebert / Desiderius-Erasmus Foundation, public grants, foreign funding, neutrality assessment.

The reply by the then federal government came on March 12, 2025 (printed paper 20/15101, lead ministry: Federal Ministry of Finance).¹⁵ The central statement appears on page 3:

“The Federal Government sees no indication for the claim contained in the minor inquiry that the supported ‘NGOs formed a shadow structure’.”

On concrete individual questions the government responded with structural answers without individual figures:

• Question 1 (list of all funded charitable bodies): “not possible within the available time” given 500,000+ bodies. Reference to the Donation Recipients Register of the Federal Central Tax Office (zer-poc.bzst.de).
• Questions 11/120/153 etc. (fulfilment of charitable purposes): jurisdiction of state tax authorities.
• Questions 13/45/70/95/122 etc. (cases of party campaigning): “The Federal Government has no findings in this regard.”
• Question 10 (Federal Constitutional Court statement on Attac BFH ruling): simply “No.”

The legal foundations the government presents in its preliminary remark are not arbitrary but the actual legal situation: charitable organizations may be politically active (BFH 10.01.2019 V R 60/17). “Occasional statements on day-to-day political topics outside the statutory purpose” are not to be objected to (BFH 12.03.2020 V R 5/17). §55 (1) No. 1 sentence 3 of the German Tax Code expressly forbids only direct use of funds for political parties — not political positioning.

What the Two Papers Together Show

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The Union asks in 551 questions about neutrality. The federal government answers with legal dogmatics: NGOs may be political, individual cases are state-tax-authority jurisdiction, there is no shadow structure, concrete figures are available in the donation-recipients register. That neutralizes the Union dramatization — but it does not resolve the actual structural question.

Because the question is not whether the Omas campaigned party-politically for the SPD. It is: who funds the apparatus in which the Omas are deployed as shopfront? The answer to this question is not in the government’s paper — because the government does not answer it. It is in the Landecker Foundation donor communication, the CeMAS press release on follow-up funding, the HateAid annual report 2024, the IDZ project archive.

The government reply is, read legally cleanly, a deflection document. The structural question remains open. We answer it here in outline.

The Structural Finding

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Three things are true simultaneously:

1. The Omas are volunteers and receive no Landecker money.
2. The ecosystem around them (HateAid, CeMAS, IDZ/AAS) is decisively co-funded by a foundation whose capital derives from the wealth of a family whose Nazi past (NSDAP memberships from 1931 on, SS donations, forced-labour abuse) became public in 2019, and which founded the foundation three months later.
3. The federal government rejects the question about this structure by reference to state jurisdiction and §52 of the Tax Code.

All three statements are verifiable. None requires speculation. Together they produce the picture that the apparent contradiction “€23,000 or €1.4M?” actually conceals.

Conclusion: Who Wins, Who Loses

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Winners:

• Alfred Landecker Foundation / Reimann family — six years after the Bild am Sonntag revelation, the family is the German NGO co-financier in the anti-right milieu. €250M endowment against roughly €1.4M documented HateAid output per year corresponds to less than one percent of the foundation’s assets. The PR effect per euro invested is historic.
• HateAid, CeMAS, IDZ — institutionally consolidated, publicly effective, financially secure.
• Federal Ministry for Family Affairs / Federal Chancellery — co-fund the shopfront (€23,000) and outsource the legal and analytical backend to the Reimann-funded actors. Cheap, effective, politically distributable.

Losers:

• The Omas themselves — they are deployed as the face of an apparatus about whose funding structures they, by their own account, have no knowledge. If they did know, they would not stop demonstrating. But they would have the right to know.
• German political culture — a family foundation with €25M per year has decisive influence on the definitional power over what counts as “right-wing” and what counts as “extreme”. Without parliamentary mandate, without public debate, without democratic accountability.
• The honesty of the federal government — when a ministry-led reply to 551 questions essentially amounts to not being able or not having to provide the information, that is not a misunderstanding but a political decision about the degree of public enlightenment.

One funding pot. Many recipients. One funding pot behind the funding pot. One family whose wealth originated partly in Nazi Germany and today co-funds the anti-right apparatus. Three layers, two papers, one structure.

The Omas are not the problem. They are not the solution either. They are the face on the poster.

The poster is printed by someone else.

Sources

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