Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
By David de Jong
William Collins, £25
I have owned a series of German cars over the years, starting with an ancient two-tone Volkswagen Beetle and including a couple of rather smart BMWs rather later. I hadn’t realised how they were linked, however tenuously, to both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels respectively until I read David de Jong’s painstaking and well-researched investigation into the rise, fall and rise again of five German family businesses – de Jong rightly prefers the term ‘dynasties’ – who threw in their lot with Hitler in the early 1930s, prospered mightily in Nazi Germany, especially during the war, and then got away with it in the post-war era.
Dutch by birth and now living in Tel Aviv, De Jong first became interested in the subject as a reporter for Bloomberg News in 2012 and has spent the last four years working on this book. Of the five dynasties he concentrates on, some are household names, others less well known, but all followed remarkably similar trajectories. They are the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks, the Porsche-Piechs, and the Oetkers. Günther Quandt, Goebbels’s wife Magda’s first husband, transformed the family textile business into one of the Third Reich’s leading arms suppliers; Friedrich Flick built up Germany’s biggest conglomerate, based on steel; Baron August von Finck was a leading banker and insurance mogul who thought Hitler had been “sent by God” to save Germany.
Although the family name has become synonymous with expensive sports cars, Ferdinand Porsche was the man behind the Volkswagen, the ‘people’s car’, the first model of which was presented to Hitler, wastefully, as he couldn’t drive; and Rudolf-August Oetker, the “Pudding Prince” heir to the Dr Oetker empire, a huge wartime food supplier to the Nazi forces, was also a keen member of the Waffen-SS.
As Germany rearmed under Hitler in the 1930s, all their businesses benefited – and they were given a huge boost by Hitler’s Aryanisation programme under which Jewish businesses were bought up for derisory sums or just confiscated and handed over to them.
The dynasties also took advantage of the hundreds of thousands of forced labourers, male and female, made available to them by the Nazis. Indeed, their businesses couldn’t have run without them. Their living and working conditions were appalling, the mortality rate shocking.
Yet after the war, when the occupying Allied forces rounded them up, all the business leaders denied any involvement in plundering Jewish property or employing slave labour. They even denied they had supported Hitler, claiming they were acting under duress throughout, despite a wealth of evidence showing they were all committed Nazis and antisemites.
Incredibly, helped by naïve American prosecutors and then by the US’s changing priorities confronted with Soviet communism, most of them got off very lightly. Flick did worst, being sentenced to seven years, commuted to five. Then it was back to business. By 1970, Günther Quandt’s son Herbert, who bought the ailing BMW firm and turned it into a global success, Flick, von Finck and Oetker were West Germany’s four richest men, all billionaires, all still proclaiming their innocence and refusing to pay reparation. Porsche’s successors didn’t do too badly either.
Only in the last decade has there come any sort of reckoning for their past crimes, thanks to dogged investigators such as de Jong, with the family foundations grudgingly paying paltry compensation to the surviving slave labourers who helped to make them rich.
One question puzzles me: while we are currently beating ourselves up about British involvement in the slave trade, abolished in 1833, how come we still give a free pass to German institutions that were employing slaves just across the Channel within living memory?
Robert Low is a freelance journalist
