Nazi Billionaires

"Nazi Billionaires

By David de Jong

(Mariner, 381 pages, $28.99)

David de Jong's "Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties" is a provocative group portrait of five industrialists who expanded their fortunes by colluding with Hitler and then, after World War II, walked away with minimal punishment and barely a dent in their bottom lines. Today these dynasties are worth billions.

"Over the past fifty years," Mr. de Jong writes, "German political leaders haven't shied away from taking moral responsibility and acknowledging the sins of the past," not least the atrocities perpetrated during the Nazi regime. Not so these five dynasties, which, over time and across generations, Mr. de Jong tells us, have deflected or excused themselves from accountability. They have obfuscated their connections to companies that armed and fed the soldiers of the Third Reich; that used slave laborers from Nazi concentration and prisoner-of-war camps; or that were acquired through Aryanization -- the Nazi euphemism for the forced takeover of Jewish-owned businesses for a pittance of their worth. In this meticulously researched book, Mr. de Jong, an investigative journalist and former reporter at Bloomberg News, compels us to confront the current-day legacy of these Nazi ties.

Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) remains best known as the designer of the Volkswagen Beetle and the founder of his eponymous sports-car company. Unmentioned in the company's official history until the late 2010s, however, was the integral role played by the Jewish race-car driver Adolf Rosenberger (1900-1967). The erasure was deliberate. In addition to being one of the car company's co-founders, Rosenberger was its financial backer and fundraiser. Porsche Aryanized Rosenberger's stake in 1935. Then, after World War II, the company contested his restitution claims in court. Rosenberger -- who had fled, penniless, for America -- ended up with only a meager settlement.

Friedrich Flick (1883-1972), a major arms supplier to the Nazis, refused to pay any restitution at all for the slave laborers who worked at his coal, steel and munitions plants. He denied the war-crimes charge for which he was convicted and, after completing a shortened prison sentence, returned to helm his many companies. He also started using the proceeds from his businesses to acquire shares in the car maker Daimler-Benz. By the end of the 1950s, he was Germany's wealthiest man.

Flick's youngest son, Friedrich Karl Flick (1927-2006), also refused to pay restitution to forced- and slave-labor survivors. In 1975, the younger Flick sold a 29% stake in Daimler to Deutsche Bank for 2 billion Deutsche marks, then in 1985 sold his remaining businesses to Deutsche Bank for $2.2 billion. At the time of his death, Friedrich Karl Flick's net worth was $6 billion.

August von Finck Sr. (1898-1980) inherited controlling stakes in the insurance giants Allianz and Munich Re, as well as in the private bank Merck Finck -- all founded by August's father, Wilhelm. August gave millions to the Nazi Party. During the Anschluss in 1938, he helped absorb S.M. von Rothschild, Austria's largest bank, which belonged to members of the Jewish Rothschild family. August also raised some 20 million reichsmarks for the Haus der Deutschen Kunst -- Hitler's art gallery, built to showcase Nazi-approved art and architecture, as opposed to works by abstract and Jewish artists that Hitler had labeled "degenerate." In 1990, we are told, August von Finck Jr. (1930-2021) sold Merck Finck to Barclay's for an estimated $370 million and soon after reportedly became a donor to Alternative for Germany, which in 2017 "became the largest opposition party in the country's national parliament, and the first far-right party to hold seats there in almost sixty-five years." At his death, August von Finck Jr. was worth an estimated $9 billion.

Rudolf-August Oetker (1916-2007), who had volunteered for the Waffen-SS, built a fortune in part by feeding Hitler's army with the instant pudding produced by his dry-goods company, called Dr. Oetker. It was a history that Oetker's eight children would not learn about until 2013. Nor had they been aware, until then, that Richard Kaselowsky, Oetker's stepfather and predecessor as Dr. Oetker's CEO, had been a member of Himmler's "Circle of Friends," helping fund the Lebensborn -- which Mr. de Jong describes as "a human-breeding association in whose maternity homes children were bred for the 'master race.'" Under Rudolf-August Oetker, Dr. Oetker Aryanized beer and packaging businesses and owned arms factories whose workforce included slave laborers. Nonetheless, Mr. de Jong reports, the Oetker heirs "continued to maintain two foundations under the name of their father and their grandparents, all of whom were committed Nazis."

Gunther Quandt (1881-1954) became the Nazis' chief supplier of arms, ammunition and vehicle batteries beginning in the 1930s. He Aryanized numerous companies in car-making, banking and insurance. Despite his factories' use of forced and slave laborers, after the war he served less than two years in a detention camp. Following Gunther's death, his sons Herbert and Harald -- the latter himself a former lieutenant in the Luftwaffe -- continued to expand the family's substantial fortune, which today includes an approximately 47% controlling stake in the car maker BMW. Mr. de Jong reports that, by 2012, Harald Quandt's family holdings amounted to $18 billion, while Herbert's two youngest children were estimated in 2019 to have a combined fortune of $30 billion. It took a 2007 film expose of the family's Nazi ties for the Quandts to commission a historian to uncover the origins of their wealth. The resulting book, published in 2011, led Gunther's descendants to donate about $6 million to Berlin's forced-labor documentation center.

Even so, Gunther's grandson Stefan remains defiant. His grandfather was "not an anti-Semite," he has asserted. "Not a convinced National Socialist. And not a warmonger." All his grandfather did was what any industrialist would have done: avail himself of the opportunities Hitler offered. "The employment of forced labor was necessary in the system at that time to maintain production."

And so the Nazi billionaire dynasties keep in place their moral blinders, screening from fuller view the vast darkness on which their fortunes were founded.

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Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir "After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges."" [1]

1. Reichsmark Uber Alles
Cole, Diane.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 14 Apr 2022: A.13.