A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
in their monstrous war of conquest.
Herbert Quandt, the BMW boss, said: “Why did Hitler gain power? Because, I can say frankly, he declared war on Communism in Germany, over and over and in an impressive and robust manner.” (C. H. Beck, Der Aufstieg der Quandts: Eine deutsche Unternehmerdynastie, Munich: Joachim Scholtyseck, 2011.)
The banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder made it even clearer in 1947 at the War Crimes Court in Nuremberg: “The business world … wanted to see a strong Führer gain power in Germany, one who could form a government that would stay in power a long time…. A common interest of the economy lay in its fear of Bolshevism and the hope that the National Socialists, once in power, would establish an enduring political and economic foundation for Germany.” (Eberhard Czichon, Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht?, Cologne: Pahl Rugenstein, 1967, 78.)
Maybe I should explain that the name National Socialism given his movement by Hitler did not have the slightest connection with the socialism anyone else meant. The word was simply stolen to lure people who blamed war profiteers and other capitalists for the mass murder of the First World War and wanted big changes. That word national aimed, all too successfully, at twisting people’s anger and wounded national pride after military defeat and humiliation by the victorious powers at Versailles, toward chauvinism and revenge. The name was unofficially shortened to the abbreviated “Nazi.”
Emblematic for the Nazi-Big Business alliance is the Krupp corporation. Founded in 1811, it got rich making wheel rims for the U.S. railroad boom in the 1870s, and it also made weapons for every German war since 1864. The Hitler regime rewarded Krupp’s support: over 280,000 slave laborers toiled in its eighty-one factories; 70,000 died miserably. One Krupp plant was next to Auschwitz, saving “transport” costs for those no longer able to toil. The minimum working age toward war’s end was twelve years.
A major early Nazi supporter was the Thyssen family, steel producers, which, despite personal differences with Hitler, was heavily laden with guilt from start to finish. On March 24, 1945, at its family palace in Austria, daughter Margareta Thyssen held a party for Nazi bigwigs. She ordered up 180 Hungarian Jews, too sick and exhausted to continue digging defenses against the approaching Red Army, and handed weapons to fifteen guests. “The Jews were forced to undress completely and then try to flee from the drunken guests who, after murdering them, returned to the palace for drinking and dancing till morning.” The hostess fled to Switzerland, became a highly successful racehorse breeder, and was never tried. Two key witnesses were mysteriously murdered. (David R. L. Litchfield, “The Killer Countess,” Independent, London, October 7, 2007.)
The giant I.G. Farben chemical trust (Industrial Company Dyes) produced poison gas for the First World War, became Europe’s richest trust, divvied up world markets with DuPont and Standard Oil, was a major financier of Hitler, and built the Monowitz annex to Auschwitz to produce Zyklon Two for the gas chambers where all were sent who could no longer work.
At a U.S. Military trial in 1947–48, ten I. G. Farben bosses were acquitted; thirteen got brief sentences of one to eight years but were all free by 1952 and soon back on top of the pile. Heinrich Bütefish, a Nazi Party man and SS lieutenant-colonel, was awarded a War Merit Cross with Knight’s Cross by Hitler for managing fuel production at Auschwitz-Monowitz. After a brief jail term, he climbed so high that President Heinrich Lübke awarded him a Distinguished Service Cross of Merit in 1964. But a West Berlin researcher and a top GDR expert uncovered his Auschwitz past, which the authorities “had not known about,” forcing President Heinrich Lübke, who himself helped build barracks for slave laborers at the V-1 and V-2 rocket base, to ask Bütefisch to please return the fancy cross.
His former colleague, Fritz ter Meer, head of the Auschwitz chemicals department, stated in his trial that “no particular harm was done to the prisoners because they would have been killed anyway.” Amnestied in 1950, he was soon chairman of the board at the aspirin company Bayer, one of I. G. Farben’s giant daughters. Fritz ter Meer too was offered the Merit Cross but was smart enough to bow out before yet another scandal could occur. Bayer reached third place worldwide in chemical sales, with another I. G. Farben daughter, BASF, in first place. After merging with Monsanto, Bayer will probably overtake BASF.
Most blatant was the coal and steel empire of Friedrich Flick, a major donor to the Nazis, who made 3 billion marks by using 40,000 to 60,000 forced laborers and camp inmates, often toiling half-naked in icy snow, working with chemical poisons without gloves, goggles, or proper gear for little food, no beds, and many beatings. Over 10,000 died. Sentenced to seven years in a high-comfort prison but pardoned in 1950, Flick soon controlled a hundred companies worth 8 billion marks, among them Daimler-Benz, Dynamit Nobel, and Krauss-Maffei (which made Leopard tanks). As Germany’s richest man, he received, and kept, the Federal Grand Order of Merit with Cross and Sash.
In what became the “Flick Affair,” his son in 1983 sold his holdings in Daimler-Benz and other giants to Deutsche Bank but somehow neglected to pay almost a billion marks in taxes before absconding to the family’s huge estate in low-tax Austria. To cover up this incredible rip-off, the firm bribed top German parties and politicians with sums ranging from 30,000 to 565,000 marks for Bavarian boss Franz Josef Strauss, ex-president Walter Scheel, a few cabinet ministers, and Helmut Kohl, later to become chancellor. In the end, two cabinet ministers were sentenced to negligible fines.
Krupp and Thyssen merged in 1999. Every day I see their logo in my elevator and on escalators in Berlin’s train stations, but I am aware that not all their products are so harmlessly uplifting. Their shipyards, for example, are international leaders in producing submarines.
Behind all of them, influencing every aspect of financial and political life, are institutions like Allianz insurance, the Commerzbank and, on the highest rung, as criminally guilty as any and a true world power, Deutsche Bank.
On July 10, 1945, a U.S. Senate Subcommittee headed by Harley Kilgore (D-WV.) reported:
Hitler and the Nazis were latecomers in these preparations. It was the cartels and monopoly powers—the leaders of the coal, iron and steel, chemicals and armament combines—who at first secretly and then openly supported Hitler in order to accelerate their ruthless plans for world conquest … Your Subcommittee finds that the German economy was developed as a war economy, and that its vast industrial potential remains largely undamaged by the war: that Germany has a worldwide network—including even the United States—of commercial relationships and economic, political espionage out-posts which she could mobilize for another war; that the leading German industrialists are not only as responsible for war crimes as the German General Staff and the Nazi Party, but that they were among the earliest and most active supporters of the Nazis, whom they used to accelerate their plans for world conquest, and that these industrialists remain the principal custodians of Germany’s plans for renewed aggression. (U.S. Senate, Report by Kilgore Subcommittee on War Mobilization, November 22, 1946.)
These ugly, blood-besmirched characters, still very much alive when I worked in East Berlin, helped shape my picture of West Germany, the traditions it built upon, and the powers behind its politicians, from Bonn to Munich and West Berlin. A share of them had not been active Nazis—or Nazis at all, especially on the Social Democratic side of the aisle. But only a very few in the Bundestag or state legislatures had been active anti-fascists; the small Communist Party delegation, almost all of whose members were survivors of Nazi camps and prisons, was outlawed in 1956.
Of course, my heart went out to all the good people in West Germany who were trying courageously to change the direction. In McCarthy-era America I had learned how difficult resistance could be, and in West Germany, with the East-West dividing line so close, it was undoubtedly worse. Had I somehow landed in the Federal Republic, I would have joined their resistance. But I had not.
18—Defying Stacked Deck
I happened to land in a new republic where the factories, mines, and landed estates of those mighty guilt-ridden men had become public property and a barrier against their powerful rule as job-givers and decision makers. Their refusal to accept these losses in this divided country and city and their active hatred of the GDR demanded a choice. While socialism and capitalism were fairly abstract issues in the United States in the 1960s, chewed over