[11][12] Raised in a strict Protestant family,[1] Mohn earned his German baccalaureate (Abitur) at the Evangelisch Stiftische Gymnasium Gütersloh in 1939 and went on to complete his Reichsarbeitsdienst, the official labor service of the Third Reich.

[18] According to Mohn's accounts, he was profoundly influenced by this experience;[19] as one example, he began reading American management literature for the first time.

[21] His father, Heinrich Mohn, had come under the scrutiny of British occupation authorities because he was a supporting member of the SS, because he had donated to other Nazi organizations, and for other reasons.

[31] In 1947, Mohn took over the management of the C. Bertelsmann publishing company, which had been largely destroyed by bombing raids during World War II.

[32] In 1950, he established the Bertelsmann Lesering [de] book club, which formed the basis for the fast growth of the company in the decades that followed.

[10] Mohn became chairman of the executive board, and in this position continued a corporate culture based on partnership,[42] the essential component of which involves dialogue between management and employees.

[44] The acquisition of Bantam Books (1977/1980) and Doubleday (1986) created the largest trade-book publishing group in the United States, at the time.

[63] Capital shares and voting rights were strictly separated in the gift agreement, so that neither the foundation nor the group can exert any significant controlling influence over the other.

In 1995, he founded the Fundación Bertelsmann [es], now based in Barcelona and Madrid, as an independent subsidiary foundation[66] that works to promote dual training to reduce youth unemployment.

[74] From the late 1980s on, Reinhard Mohn was also involved in journalistic activities as an essayist and nonfiction book author.

[100][101] In "Humanity Wins", published in 2000, he strongly advocated an executive style in a spirit of partnership as a paradigm of a modern organizational structure.

[104][105] In 2008, his last work was published as "A Global Lesson", in which Mohn provided an autobiographical account of the formative elements of his own life.

[106][107][108] It was written with author Andrea Stoll [de], who also wrote the script to the film "Es müssen mehr Köpfe ans Denken kommen" (More minds need to start thinking) from Roland Suso Richter.

[122][123] After questions arose in the 1990s as to the company's role in the Third Reich,[124] Bertelsmann, with the support of Mohn, established an independent historical commission, seeking to come to terms with its involvement in the Nazi era.

[125] The commission presented its final report in 2002 and found that the decades-long account of its alleged involvement in a publishing company for the resistance could not be substantiated.