The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Tycoons who got fat on the Nazi killing machine
After reading this book, you will never again buy a Volkswagen, a Dr Oetker pizza or Allianz insurance without a twinge of unease
After his men discovered the charred and bulletridden bodies of a thousand slave labourers murdered near the northern German town of Gardelegen in April 1945, US Army colonel George Lynch called the residents to a meeting. “Some will say the Nazis were responsible for this crime. Others will point to the Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither – it is the responsibility of the German people,” he told them. “Your so-called master race has demonstrated that it is master only of crime, cruelty and sadism. You have lost the respect of the civilised world.”
Lynch was right. The German nation at every level was complicit in the evils of the Hitler era but, as David de Jong’s fascinating new book shows, particular guilt attaches to the industrialists, businessmen and bankers at the top of the social tree. After reading it, you will never again slide behind the wheel of a Volkswagen, insure your home with Allianz or reach for a Dr Oetker pizza in the supermarket without a twinge of unease.
For the patriarchs behind these brands were up to their necks in the Nazi project. When Hitler beckoned, they came. In 1933, when he was chancellor but did not yet have a majority in the Reichstag, three of the subjects of this book were among a cabal of German industrialists who struck a pact with the devil. They agreed to fund the nearbankrupt party in the forthcoming election, knowing full well that if Hitler won there would be no more democracy. In return, the Third Reich would be an adventure playground for their enterprises.
They embraced the new order with eyes wide open. Having first warmed to Hitler as a bulwark against their nightmare of a communist takeover, they were soon possessed by a more primal urge. He was offering an amazing deal and their shrivelled souls could not bear to turn it down. As de Jong demonstrates in his study of some – but by no means all – of the culprits, whatever duty they might once have felt, to God, the nation or to decency was easily eclipsed by devotion to the deity that really mattered: Mammon.
What a grisly bunch they were. August von Finck, who inherited the Allianz global insurance giant from his father, was an emotional corpse, “both the richest and the stingiest man in Bavaria”. Günther Quandt, a textile, batteries and armaments magnate, was another pfennig-pincher – a stout, bald philistine whose wife, the Nazi
The SS supplied slave labour to Siemens, Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz
groupie Magda, would go on to become Frau Goebbels. The wily steel magnate Friedrich Flick bankrolled the SS and never renounced Hitler. Richard Kaselowsky, boss of the cosy-sounding pudding manufacturer Dr Oetker, was a devoted Nazi and kept the faith until the happy day when an American bomb landed on his villa; his stepson and heir was a serving officer in the SS.
De Jong describes how these men seized greedily on the opportunities opened up by Nazi policies.
Under the euphemism “Aryanisation”, they moved in to plunder Jewish businesses, snapping up enterprises at knockdown prices or simply stealing them. With war, the possibilities became endless. The state’s appetite for everything – weapons, steel, transport, clothing, food – was insatiable. And the tycoons were able to satisfy it, thanks to the army of forced labourers manning their factories.
At least 12million foreign men, women, boys and girls were sent
to work in Germany, of whom two and a half million died. SS-run camps supplied slave workers to world-famous names such as IG Farben, Siemens, Daimler-Benz and Volkswagen, as well as other concerns run by de Jong’s subjects.
All this was well known to the Allies. Yet, in the interests of stability, the US and British architects of postwar reconstruction were ready to turn a blind eye and retribution was token. A few men did a few years in jail before returning to their
desks to reap the benefits of the economic miracle that followed, and amass global fortunes to pass on to their heirs, who still dominate the German economic landscape.
De Jong is personally connected to the story, his Jewish grandparents having suffered under the Nazis, but he tells it with the brisk clarity of the good financial journalist he is and lets the facts speak for themselves. It leaves you awestruck at the power of greed. With it seems to come an inability to feel shame.
Porsche, for instance, gave a warm postwar welcome to out-of-work SS officers, finding jobs for one convicted of murdering 84 American prisoners of war, and another (their head of global public relations, ironically) who had been reprimanded by an SS court for attempted rape.
Only when goaded by impertinent writers and film-makers did the descendants of the Nazi billionaires reluctantly address the crimes of the past. Even then, there was little
in the way of genuine-sounding remorse or meaningful compensation. Between 2001 and 2006 the German state and firms with a Nazi legacy began paying out to survivors. The highest award was to the 300,000 slave labourers still alive. It worked out at £6,300 each.
To read an exclusive extract from David de Jong’s book, visit telegraph.co.uk/nazi-billionaires. Patrick Bishop is co-host with Saul David of the Battleground podcast