Nazi Billionaires
On Monday, February 20, 1933, about two dozen of Nazi Germany’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen attend a meeting at the official residence of Hermann Goring. Gunther Quandt, a textile producer. Friderich Flick, a steel magnate. Baron August von Finck, a Bavarian finance mogul. Kurt Schmitt, CEO of Allianz. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach, chairman-through-marriage of the Krupp steel empire.
Hitler attend the meeting and quickly left. Nazi party needed money. The money – three million reichsmarks was allocated on the spot.
Nazi money
On May 8, 2019, Verena Bahlsen, the twenty-six-year-old heiress to Germany’s famous maker of cookies, the Bahlsen company, walked onto the stage at a digital marketing conference in Hamburg. It was no secret that family firm had benefited from Nazi’s Germany’s system of forced labor during WWII. In Bahlsen case, there were seven hundred workers, most of them Polish and Ukrainian women, deported to the cookie factory in Hannover.
Harald Quandt Holding investment firm assets were at 18 billion USD. This branch of Quandt business dynasty descended from Magda Goebbels. Herbert Quandt was the one who saved BMW from bankruptcy years after the war. The Quandt dynasty’s richer branch owns the BMW. Quandt’s hire a German history professor to investigate family’s Nazi past in 2007.
Some of these tycoons were ardent Nazis, who unquestioningly embraced Hitler’s ideology. But most were simply calculating, unscrupulous opportunists looking to expand their business empires at any cost. Such is the dark history of the Quandts of BMW, the Flicks, former owners of Daimler-Benz; the von Flicks, a financier family who cofounded Allianz and Munich Re; the Porsche-Piech clan, who control Volkswagen and Porsche; and the Oetkers, who own global empires of baking ingredients, prepared foods, beer, and luxury hotels.
Perfectly average
Gunther Quandt permanently moved to Berling amid the flu pandemic in October 1918. He was born on July 28, 1881, in rural Pritzwalk. His family textile business profited from the WWI, due to uniform production.
Gunther was married to Toni and has two sons Hellmut and Herbert. But Toni died. After six months he fell in love again. To Magda Friedlander. She later became Magda Goebbels.
Magda had Jewish stepfather and she also dated a Jew named Victor Chaim Arlosoroff before Gunther. She married Gunther in early January 1921. On November 1, she gave birth to Harald.
In summer of 1922 the inflation accelerated in Germany, the inflation rate rose by 1.300 percent. It was time for speculators and Gunther was on of them. He earned some money and bought the Berlin-based Accumulatoren-Fabrik AG (AFA). Three years later he bought Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken (DWM).
Two years younger than Gunther Quandt, Friedrich Flick was born on July 10, 1883, in Ernsdorf. He was becoming one of Germany’s most influential and successful steel tycoon.
In July 1927 Hellmut the oldest son of Gunther Quandt died in Paris. His second son Herbert was not the best choice due to his mental capacities for the succession of his brother. In 1927 Gunther and Magda went to USA. There they get in touch with Kurt Ludecke and Nazi party. Magda was much more interested than Gunther. Hellmut’s death drove them more and more apart. They divorced in 1929.
Magda soon found new meaning in her life. She was getting involved with Nazi party. She met Joseph Goebbels. She took the post of secretary of Goebbels’s deputy.
Whereas Magda entered the Nordic Circle, Gunther joined the Society for the Study of Fascism to Berlin. The head of the group was Waldemar’s Pabst. He has ordered the executions of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
On February 1, 1931 Hitler went to see Otto Wagener, his chief economic adviser. He introduced Walther Funk. The newspaper editor was eager to set up meetings with industrialist and financiers for the Nazi leader. The first one was Baron August von Finck. He was controlling Merck Finck bank and Allianz and Munich RE.
Next was Gunther Quandt.
Gunther left the right to use his Severin estate to Magda in the divorce. Hitler was regular guest there. Rural Severin and its surroundings were an NSDAP stronghold.
Magda married Goebbels on December 19, 1931. Gunther was not found of Goebbels, but he did visit them both. He later lied about that. Later Gunther started legal battle for custody for Harald.
Funk also arranged introduction of Friedrich Flick to Hitler. He extended invitation to Flick’s right hand Otto Steinbrinck. Steinbrinck was decorated navy veteran.
Flick was saved by German government in 1932 when they bought his stake in Gelsenberg. Flick also met Heinrich Himmler and he started donating to SS.
On the day that Adolf Hitler seized the most powerful post in the country, Adolf Rosenberger quit his job in the Porsche automobile. On January 30, 1933.
Ferdinand Porsche was terminated by Austria’s Steyr Automobiles and Daimler-Benz before establishing his own company. He moved to Stuttgart from Austria in 1930. Porsche’s first contact with Hitler had been indirect, and a sheer coincidence in 1925. They met again in May 1933. Hitler wanted him to create a car for German people – Volkswagen.
Gunther Quandt joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, and the next day Hitler imposed a membership ban. August von Finck also joined. Ban was in place for four years. Friedrich Flick and Ferdinand Porsche had to wait until 1937 to join.
Gunther was arrested during that time, but he was released when he started donating money.
The National Socialist haunt will soon pass
Gunther celebrated his 60 birthday in 1941. He was one of the Third Reich’s leading industrialists. He was also buying stakes in new companies. Like 60 percent stake in Byk Gulden, a pharmaceutical and chemicals company formerly owned by Jews.
On June 8, 1933 Hjalmar Schacht, the Reichsbank president, approved the financial stimulus package to initiate the first phase of Nazi Germany’s rearmament. Hermann Goring, his deputy Erhard Milch and the defense minister Werner von Blomberg decided that almost 4,4 billion reichsmarks annually would be spent in the next eight years. Following his release from jail, Gunther was exceptionally well positioned for the rearmament boom. He reactivated DWM’s Berlin facilities right after Hitler seized power. Then the entire complex was expanded, all paid for by the regime.
Flick was also on the receiving end of German’s rearmament. One of Flick’s steel firms provided the HWA with a shell company called Montan, which served as a front through which a legitimate transaction could take place.
Montan controlled more than a hundred arms firms at the start of the war. The HWA (Army Weapons Agency) also asked Flick to buy Simson, the Jewish company. Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935 provided legal basis for generals to take Jewish companies.
Richard Kaselowsky was CEO of Dr. August Oetker, a food company. What he lacked in business stature, he made up in zeal for Hitler.
In late June 1934, Porsche signed a contract with the Reich Association of the German Automotive Industry to develop the Volkswagen. On September 5, 1935, ten days before Nuremberg Race Laws, Adolf Roseberger was arrested by the Gestapo.
An asset was considered Aryanized in the Third Reich when the Jewish element of ownership had been removed.
Porsche introduced two test cars to Hitler and Goring in early July 1936.
Oetkers were a Nazi family through and through, they all joined Nazi party. Rudolf-August’s stepfather was the first in May 1933.
Gunther helped Georg Sachs, a Jew, in order to benefit both men, in the summer of 1936.
Erhard Milch, Goring’s deputy was the son of a Jewish pharmacist. But Goring allegedly said, that he decides who is a Jew.
Goebbels decided to get to know Lida Baarova, a Czech movie star, better, after Magda confessed her affair with Ludecke.
The Aryanizations by Kaselowsky, Oetker, and Porsche-Piech paled in comparison to the size and scope of those carried out by Gunther Quandt, Friderich Flick, and August von Finck.
Gunther made Horst Pavel his right-hand man and Herbert was again fighting to prove himself.
Gunther took over Henry Perls business. It was a state-of-the-art toolmaker. Its owners were Jewish.
Flick took over estates from Jewish owners. He also took over Lubeck blast furnaces, a major pig-iron plant in the Hanseatic port town. His target was also conglomerate owned by Julius and Ignaz Petschek.
Otto Christian Fischer, a prominent Nazi banker, served on the museum board of trustees with von Finck, and was a key figure in finance Aryanizations as head of the Reich bank authority.
The Dreyfus Aryanization gave von Finck’s bank instant notoriety in Berlin, where it became known as the bank of the Fuhrer. After Aryanization on March 5, 1938, Wily Dreyfus immigrated to Basel. Von Finck also got a chance to Aryanize S. M. Rothschild, the largest private bank in the country and part of the great Rotschild dynasty. Louis von Rotschild was released after he signed the contract and paid largest ransom in modern history – 21 million USD or 385 million in current value.
Von Finck’s fundraising efforts for Hitler’s pet project had paid off. Within one year of the museum’s opening, he had Aryanized two major private banks.
Magda and Goebbels agreed to a truce, after Hitler talked to Goebbels.
On April 20, 1939, Ferdinand Porsche gifted the first finished Volkswagen, a black Beetle convertible, to a delighted Hitler, Goring received the second, and Goebbels the fourth. But only 630 of them were built during the Third Reich.
Gunther was against the war, but war was good for business. Harald was about to volunteer on the front.
The children have now already become men
Even though Harald was growing up in arguably the Third Reich’s most radical family, he was no Nazi.
In October 1940, Gunther, Horst Pavel and Herbert explored Nazi-occupied France for almost ten days. They had some problems with takeover of French battery firms. Their success rate was 2 out of 7. And those two were due to Herbert’s work.
On May 20, 1941, Harald finally went to war.
Flick had big plans for his succession. He has three sons: Otto-Ernst was the oldest one, but not really cut out for succession. Rudolf and Friderich Karl were better. But Rudolf died in war in Ukraine.
Because millions of German men were being drafted or had volunteered for the Wehrmacht, manpower quickly became incredibly scarce across Germany. Hitler enabled one of the largest coercive labor programs the world has ever seen in early 1942. At least twelve million foreigners were forced to work in Germany Durgin the war. Two and a half million of them died there.
IG Farben, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Krupp and various companies controlled by Gunther Quandt and Friedrich Flick were some of the largest private-industry users of forced and slave labor.
The construction of AFA’s subcamp started in mid-July 1943. About fifteen hundred captives from Neuengamme were soon brought into the subcamp to do work at Gunther’s factory.
Flick has started using concentration camp prisoners in September 1940, making his conglomerate one of the first private companies in Nazi Germany to do so.
Porsche’s son in-law, Anton Piech was enacting a regime of terror at the Volkswagen factory in Fallersleben. The first sub-concentration camp on the complex was cynically called Work Village.
Because of the war business at Dr. Oetker was booming. Mora than half a billion packages of the firm’s famous baking powder and pudding mixes were being sold in Nazi Germany by 1942. Richard Kaselowsky was the member of Himmler’s Circle of Friends. He also met SS general Oswald Pohl and let him into the business. Him and SS.
Reinhardt Nebuschka was German forced into labour in Gunther’s the Cegelski weapons complex in Poznan. He wrote letters of complaint. The first was to Goebbels and Goring and the second to America’s chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.
On May 9, 1944, Ferdinand Porsche, his daughter, Louise, and his son, Ferry, fled to safety in Austria with their families and most of Porsche’s employees. Anton Piech continued with his work in Germany.
Herbert Quandt was responsible for the female concentration-camp slaves at Pertrix.
Rudolf-August Oetker was just weeks away from becoming a Waffen-SS officer, but because of Kaselowsky’s death he would never start the position.
In late 1944 Harald Quandt was captured by British army in Italy. Harald would never see his mother, stepfather, or his six half siblings again.
You will live on
On April 25, 1945, one week before his ex-wife killed six of her children and then herself, Gunther Quandt fled Berlin and the approaching Soviet troops. He went to Bavaria hoping that it would get more affection from business oriented Americans. Friderich Flick and August von Finck also expecting similar scenario.
In the night that stretched from April 7 to 8, 1945, one day after the SS evacuated the AFA factory subcamp in Hannover, Herbert Quandt and Horst Pavel, fled Berlin and relocated to Bissendorf with twenty employees.
Friedrich Flick fled from Berlin to Bavaria in February 1945. Just before Allied forces liberated the Rombach steel complex in France, in late summer 1944, Otto-Ernst Flick fled back to Germany. In June 1945 the US Counter Intelligence Corps put Flick under house arrest. Soon both Flick were arrested.
Baron August von Finck has a much quieter war than Quandt and Flick did. But he was still put under house arrest. They have released him after five months.
Work stopped at the Volkswagen factory in early April 1945. US troops liberate workers on April 11, 1945. One day before Anton Piech, fled the complex, and stealing more than ten million reichmarks in cash and run back to Austria where the rest of the Porsche-Piech clan awaited him. Even before that the Porsche firm had already billed the Volkswagen plant about 20.5 million reichmarks for design and development services.
On May 8, 1945 Bielefeld lay in the British occupation zone. Rudolf-August was banned from rebuilding his family business. The pudding prince was biding his time.
Gunther started to prepare his defense.
Persilschein, a Persil ticket, were declarations named after a famous German laundry detergent. It was a tongue-in-check term for any statement that meant to wash clean a stain of Nazi-collaboration and sympathies. The most valuable kind of Persilschein was written by someone with a Jewish background.
In October 1946, Gunther received support letter from Georg Sachs, former employee of DMW. Life in the Moosburg camp was tough on Gunther.
Josif Marcu was an American investigator assigned to the Flicks. In March 1946, the chief prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson appointed Telford Taylor as his deputy for the first and main Nuremberg trial. As the main trial at Nuremberg ended, it became clear that a second one, led by the Allies and focused on German businessmen, wasn’t going to happen. Taylor agree that they will prosecute only three German industrialists and executives.
A French commission headed by the Communist minister of industry, wanted to work with Ferdinand Porsche on developing a French version of the Volkswagen. Porsche, Piech and Ferry traveled to Baden-Baden but French arrested them because Peugeot filled a complaint against them.
In early 1947, the Porsche siblings decided to formally split the family business, Louise had retained Austrian citizenship and incorporated a new firm in Salzburg under Porsche name. Ferry revived the original Porsche company in Stuttgart.
As the Cold War commenced in early 1947, the Truman administration’s priorities began to shift from punishing Germany to enabling its economic recovery. Handover of suspected war criminals were taking place to so-called German denazification courts. Most Germans were none too keen on judging their own compatriots.
In its ruling on July 28, 1948, Gunther was classified as a mere follower of the Nazis. He only paid for trial costs.
The denazification trial against von Finck took place in Munich in late December 1948. On January 14, 1949, he was ruled as a follower.
The denazification of Rudolf-August Oetker never even went to trial. In 1947 he was reinstated as Dr. Oetker CEO.
On May 5, 1948, a military tribunal in Dijon acquitted Porsche and Piech. The families entered into negotiations with the new Volkswagen CEO, Heinrich Nordhoff. They received a 1 percent licensing fee on every Beetle sold. Nordhoff’s daughter soon married a son of Louise and Anton Piech.
The Flick case was the fifth out of twelve American-led trials at Nuremberg’s Military Tribunal, and the first of three trials involving industrialists. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. Flick was released on August 25, 1950. He sold some of his steel assets and he bought Daimler-Benz. By the end of the decade, the convicted Nazi war criminal was once again on top. He was Germany’s wealthiest man.
Nine zeros
Gunther died on December 20, 1954.
Nazi tycoons left their heirs with firms and fortunes worth billions – but also with a bloodstained history waiting to be uncovered.
Gunther left Herbert and Harald an empire worth 55.5 million deutsch marks (135 million USD today). Harald was supervising IWK, Mauser, Busch-Jaeger Durener, and Kuka. Herbert would supervise AFA, Wintershall and Daimler-Benz.
Due to Korean war, Germany was again building the weapon manufacturing industry.
In 1967 Harald died in plane accident. His death tore the Quandt clan apart.
By 1970, Friedrich Flick, August von Finck, Herbert Quandt and Rudolf-August Oetker made up West Germany’s top four wealthiest businessmen. All four were former members of the Nazi Party.
Friedrich Flick died in 1972. Von Finck died in 1980. Herbet Quandt died in 1982. He left behind six childrens.
The two Quandts branches were much different. The older Herbert’s is more conservative, the Harald’s more modern.
The reckoning
In 2019, Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten, Herbert Quandt’s youngest children and the two heirs to BMW, no longer could claim to be Germany’s wealthiest family. Reimanns, owning JAB, a consumer goods investment firm based in Luxembourg, overtook them. But their money was also tied to Nazi Germany.
In August 2000, a foundation named Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future (EVZ). Compensation payments would be made to survivors of forced and slave labor. Between 2001 and 2006 the EVZ paid out about 4.4 billion euros.
Rudolf-August Oetker died in 2007, the last of Nazi billionaires.
Some of the families commissioned historians to research the Nazi history of the families. Von Finck’s never did. Even more August von Finck Jr. was supporting AfD. He died in 2021 in London.
Epilogue: The Museum
To see the names Quandt an Flick honored in an Israel museum, their names spelled out in Hebrew, was, as the Germans might say, unheimlich, eerie.
