Porsche, BMW and other famous German brands

must come to terms with their past

A new book urges companies to square with their past in order to move forward with their
future

Grace Ho
Opinion Editor

Cars being transported by rail at the production site of German carmaker Volkswagen in
Emden in northern Germany last week. PHOTO: AFP
MAY 24, 2022, 5:00 AM SGT

On Feb 20, 1933 at 6pm, about two dozen of Nazi Germany's wealthiest and most influential
businessmen arrived, on foot or by chauffeured car, to attend a meeting at the official
residence of Reichstag president Hermann Goring in the heart of Berlin's government and
business district.

The attendees included Gunther Quandt, a textile producer-turned-arms and battery tycoon;
Friedrich Flick, a steel magnate; Baron August von Finck, a Bavarian finance mogul; Kurt
Schmitt, chief executive of insurance behemoth Allianz; executives from chemicals
conglomerate IG Farben and potash giant Wintershall; and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und
Halbach, chairman through marriage of the Krupp steel empire.

Thus begins journalist and historian David de Jong's gripping, if at times horrific, portrait of
how Germany's wealthiest families funded and participated in Adolf Hitler's World War II
machinery, in his new book Nazi Billionaires.

As the businessmen one by one agreed at the meeting to stump up millions to fund Hitler's
campaign for the election on March 5 - which he would win eventually - the seeds of his
ascendance and Germany's path to war were further sown.

Forced labour and expropriation

Who were these industrialists? Flick was a steel producer and early sponsor of the Nazi
movement. The Quandts are best known as the controlling shareholders of luxury car brand
BMW, though their wealth came from their supply of arms and batteries to the Nazi war
effort, not cars.

The current generation of Quandts are also descendants of Magda Goebbels, the wife of Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and a close companion of Hitler, who killed all but one
of her children in a bunker in 1945.

IG Farben, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Krupp and various companies controlled by the
Quandt and Flick patriarchs were some of the largest users of forced labour in private industry
during World War II.
The book describes labour collaboration between SS-run concentration camps and German
companies, including Auschwitz with IG Farben, Dachau with BMW, Sachsenhausen with
Daimler-Benz, Ravensbruck with Siemens, and Neuengamme with Porsche's Volkswagen.

The von Fincks, who founded insurance giants Allianz and Munich Re, profited from the
Aryanisation - or forced transfer of Jewish property - of the banking family Rothschild's assets.

Rudolf-August Oetker, whose name you may recognise in the frozen pizza section of the
supermarket, supplied Nazi troops with munitions, baking powder and pudding mixes. He
volunteered in the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the Nazi paramilitary organisation.

Car designer Ferdinand Porsche, together with his son-in-law Anton Piech, built Hitler's
Volkswagen, or "people's car", which he had hoped would rival America's Ford.

Porsche's co-founder Adolf Rosenberger, who was Jewish, was bought out of the company in
1935 for the exact amount he had paid for his 10 per cent stake in 1930, even though
Porsche's profits had hugely increased by then. The Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, also
revoked his German citizenship.

"Plain and simple, Rosenberger had been stiffed and did not receive the full value of his
shares," writes de Jong.

The author does an impressive job of weaving political violence with dynastic drama. But even
without his embellishment, the horrors of war speak for themselves.

In October 1941, the Volkswagen factory became one of the first in the Third Reich to take in
Soviet prisoners of war as slave labour. Of the first batch of 650 men, most arrived severely
underfed and could barely walk. Many collapsed at the machines and died within weeks.

At Quandt's arms factories, children as young as 12 were shuffled like cattle, working night
shifts and performing gruelling manual labour.

In Flick's factories, as many as 100,000 people may have been put to making cannon and
shells. Eyewitnesses recounted how pregnant women had to keep working up to the point
that they gave birth.
History repeats itself

It would be facetious to link Nazi Germany and its military-industrial complex to current
events, particularly the Ukraine war. But there are similarities which may hold lessons for
today and the future.

First, nostalgia for the past - real or imagined - is a powerful tool to stir up public sentiments
to justify present action.

In his meeting with industrialists in 1933 to get them to fund his campaign, Hitler gave a long
speech on how the year 1918, which saw the German empire defeated in World War I, had
been a catastrophic turning point in German history.

He appealed to their sense of patriotism and waxed lyrical about how they were on the right
side of history: "I hope the German people recognise the greatness of the hour. It shall decide
the next 10 or probably even 100 years."

Second, the use of fear-mongering and euphemisms to conceal harsh realities.

Think Russia's claims of a "special military operation" and "denazification" of Ukraine are
ludicrous? In 1943, Goebbels was already conjuring for his German audience the
phantasmagoric scenario of hordes of Soviet soldiers and "Jewish liquidation commandos",
all of them reducing Germany to mass starvation and terror.

At the end of one of his speeches, the propaganda minister asked his audience: "Do you want
total war? If necessary, do you want it to be more total and more radical than we can even
imagine today?"

The crowd, whipped up into a ferment of hatred, went wild.

When mentioning Jews in his speech, Goebbels let slip the word "eradication" which he
quickly replaced with "suppression", so as not to draw attention to what was already taking
place: the systematic murder of Jews in camps that had been built across Nazi-occupied
Poland.

Third, the difficulty of enforcing reparations after the war - thanks partly to the US
government, and partly to the inexorable march of history and the global economy.
As the Cold War began in early 1947, the Truman administration's priorities began to shift
from punishing Germany to enabling its economic recovery.

The United States wanted a bulwark against communist expansion in Europe. The western
part of Germany, which had the potential to become Europe's largest economy, was seen as
being able to contain the Soviet Union and revive the rest of the continent.

Momentous changes ensued. Allied authorities accelerated the handover of suspected war
criminals to so-called German denazification courts, or regional judicial panels.

The overwhelming caseload, and unwillingness of Germans to pass judgment on their own,
meant that many convictions amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 was the spark that ignited West Germany's
economic resurgence. As American factories were turned over to weapons manufacturing,
the production of many essential goods stalled. West Germany picked up the slack, which
enabled the tycoons and their heirs to enter a period of unfathomable wealth.

The industrialists Krupp and Flick, who had been condemned in the Nuremberg war crime
trials, soon returned to their old positions at the beginning of the 1950s.

By 1970, barely three decades after World War II had cratered their country's economy, Flick,
von Finck, Quandt's son Herbert, and Oetker made up West Germany's top four richest
businessmen, in descending order.

All four had been members of the Nazi Party.

The past is a foreign country

Restructuring in post-war Germany should have meant reckoning with some hard truths. But
lawyers and scions of the Nazi billionaires argued repeatedly over the years that hardly a
single German company did not conduct Aryanisation during the war.

Gunther Quandt, for example, fought restitution proceedings tooth and nail. In 1947, Franz
Eisner, a German Jewish chemist who had fled to London, filed a restitution claim against
Quandt's company AFA.
Quandt had Aryanised Eisner's electrochemical companies outside Berlin in 1937. But Quandt
had AFA's lawyers fight the claim on jurisdictional grounds, and Eisner's claim was rejected.

AFA's successor Varta granted money in the 1980s to preserve the Neuengamme
concentration camp as a memorial site. But even then, the chairman of the charity making
the request had to work hard to convince those at Varta to do so.

And after Varta finally sent the cheque - only 5,000 marks, an amount so low the chairman
thought it was a mistake - to add insult to injury, the battery producing giant asked that an
expense receipt be sent along to the company to make the grant tax-deductible.

Like his father, Friedrich Karl Flick steadfastly refused to compensate those who had
performed slave labour for the Flick conglomerate, leaving it to Deutsche Bank to satisfy the
claims of the Jewish Claims Conference.

As for Porsche, in the 1950s, Rosenberger would approach Ferdinand Porsche's son Ferry,
now the company CEO, with an offer of patents and to represent Porsche in California. Ferry
did not commit.

Almost a decade after Rosenberger's death in 1967, Ferry accused Rosenberger in his
autobiography of extortion: "After the war, it seemed as though those people who had been
persecuted by the Nazis considered it their right to make an additional profit, even in cases
where they had already been compensated. Rosenberger was by no means an isolated
example."

Who controls the narrative controls history

De Jong does not tread new ground in the sense that Germany's richest families are well
known to have Nazi ties.

Yet he puts a new spin on this by describing the extent to which their descendants have fought
to keep this dark legacy out of the limelight, and even downplayed it by crafting their own
version of events. He writes of the enduring power of social and business networks that
preserve and expand wealth, long after the political regimes which fostered them have come
and gone.

In response, those whose assets were expropriated continue to fight on.

The book shows why history is important. The dominant historical narrative can serve as a
legitimising tool for brutality and continued inequity, or a powerful check and source of
accountability.

And if anyone is under any illusion that the world has learnt from its past, events of the
present always have a way of reminding one not to speak too soon.