How German companies deal with their Nazi past

Textile entrepreneur Günther Quandt and steel baron Friedrich Flick, who, like raiders of the modern capitalist era, secured more and more companies, are presented, an innovator like Ferdinand Porsche, who was happy to comply with Adolf Hitler’s wish for a “Volkswagen” out of engineering ambition and interest in making a profit, the stingy Munich baron August von Finck, who helped up Hitler’s pet project “Haus der Kunst” in Munich, or the Bielefeld Oetker family headed by Richard Kaselowsky, who had married into Nazi Germany. The member of the “Freundeskreis Reichsfuhrer SS” prepared the stepson Rudolf-August Oetker for his chief role in the Führer’s spirit. The “pudding prince” was integrated into the SA riders early on, was an SS officer and helped old SS comrades after the war.

All of these economic legends had in common that they profited opportunistically from the Nazi system of coercion in a cool cost-benefit calculation, in some cases they were ready to finance election campaigns of the NSDAP or SS and SA quite early on and themselves became part of the war and conquest machinery. They were all in the NSDAP, the SS, or both organizations.

Hitler’s economic advisor Otto Wagener is quoted as saying: “They want to earn money, money, dirty money – and they don’t even know that they are chasing after a diabolical phantom.” Typical, as economist Hjalmar Schacht said in February 1933 after a meeting with the newly elected entrepreneur Chancellor Hitler asked with a smile: “And now, gentlemen, to the cash register!”

Sometimes not money, but love, maybe sex played a key role. For example, in the case of the attractive Magda Friedländer, who first married Günther Quandt and then moved to Joseph Goebbels with her son Harald – a “First Lady of the Third Reich” who ended in suicide with her new family. Goebbels had previously written to his stepson Harald: “I expect from you that if you survive this war, you will only do honor to your mother and to me.”

Continuity is difficult here, but de Jong’s protagonists were denazified at some point after 1945 by organized “cleansing bills” from well-meaning witnesses, often also from “alibi Jews”. One had only been a “follower”. The West needed entrepreneurial bulwarks against Soviet communism and new markets for the economic miracle.

Only Friedrich Flick ended up in prison for a few years after being convicted by the Allies. His son Friedrich Karl then happily bribed the republic, liked to be a jet-setting bon vivant and sold everything to Deutsche Bank.

The others portrayed carried on with the capital accumulated under the Nazis. A Günther Quandt was considered apolitical. Forget the eulogy of business friend Hermann Josef Abs from Deutsche Bank on his 60th birthday: “You completely succeeded in adapting to the new era in 1933 thanks to your skilful tactics and your special skills. But your most outstanding ability is your belief in Germany and the Führer.”

At Quandt’s funeral service in January 1955, Abs then said: “He never servilely submitted to the overpowering state.” Quandt’s inheritance was divided between the sons Harald and Herbert, who once joked that if his father’s death hadn’t been in the newspaper, “it would have been financially no one noticed.”

After the red-green federal government in 2000 had forced laborers compensated by a foundation in which the private sector participated, more and more historians dealt with the Nazi era on behalf of the company. Some soft-focus like Gregor Schöllgen in the case of the Fürth merchant Gustav Schickedanz, many consistently precise like Joachim Scholtyseck in the case of the Quandt family, who directs BMW.

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Author de Jong finds it impossible that the Porsche clan minimizes the contribution of the Jewish co-founder Adolf Rosenberger, falsely even boasting that they helped him to escape. After the war, the pioneer was not reinstated as a partner, but resigned himself to a VW Beetle.

He once had to give his share to the Porsches at a bargain price: “They used my membership as a Jew to get rid of me cheaply.” As a producer of weapons, tanks and army vehicles, the clan from Stuttgart and Salzburg, which faced bankruptcy in 1933 stood, dazzling business in the war. Family member Anton Piëch tyrannized forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners in the Volkswagen factory.

A total of 71 of the 100 largest companies of the Nazi era “have not yet scientifically analyzed their past, so that in many cases it is unclear to what extent companies and family dynasties benefited from their role in the Nazi era,” Zachary and Katharina Gallant sum up in her book “Brauner Boden”. Röchling, Siemens, Bayer and Henkel are mentioned. In view of the many “clean bills” issued after the war, one could almost get the impression “that there were very few willing Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and 40s”.