The heirs of German business magnate Heinz Hermann Thiele have paid a record amount of almost €4 billion in inheritance taxes.
As German newspaper FAZ reported on June 24, the family transferred the sum to the German State of Bavaria in April 2025 following a prolonged court battle.
Both the Bavarian Government and the Thiele family declined to comment.
Heinz Hermann Thiele was the majority owner of railway component manufacturer Vossloh and braking-systems group Knorr-Bremse which, as general manager, he helped to build and expand.
He was also the second-biggest shareholder in German airline Lufthansa.
Thiele died aged 79 in February 2021 in Munich. The worth of his estate was estimated by Business Insider at around €17 billion – almost one third of the average total inheritances per year in Germany.
Thiele had repeatedly declined suggestions to leave Germany permanently to avoid inheritance taxes.
Instead, he had been planning to transfer the bulk of his assets into a family foundation. This move would have helped to avoid a large part of the inheritance tax burden. The foundation, though, could not be finalised in time while Thiele was still alive.
Furthermore, the three main heirs – Thiele’s second wife Nadia as well as his children from his first marriage, Henrik Thiele and Julia Thiele-Schürhoff, Business Insider reported in December 2022, had fallen out after the industrialist’s death.
Widow Nadia Thiele also tried to remove Thiele’s former lawyer Robin Brühmüller as the executor of her husband’s will.
The main reason, Business Insider reported, was that according to the official tables of the German association of notaries, as executor Brühmüller would have been entitled to a fee of 1.5 per cent of the total inheritance – €255 million, which Nadia Thiele regarded as “excessive”.
In late 2024, the row was reportedly settled in a confidential agreement.
The tax bill of €4 billion was the highest ever paid in Germany. Still, it paled compared to the €143 billion in new debt the German finance minister planned to take on in 2025 alone.
Germany has one of the highest inheritance taxes in Europe, amounting to 7 per cent to 50 per cent of the value of the bequeathed assets.
Many high-net-worth Germans, therefore, choose to relocate in time to neighbouring countries without inheritance taxes, such as Austria.
