American) stockholders were paid off in full. Then he blew the
whistle for the major offensive against the heirs of Ignaz Pet-
schek, who controlled Germany’s lignite-brickette production
through three syndicates. For months Wohlthat directed his
attack on this commercial battlefield, aided by intelligence from
the Gestapo and Forschungsamt. The multimillionaire Petscheks
clung to their property with a recklessness bordering on bra-
vado; just before Munich they vanished and surfaced in Lon-
don, now claiming British citizenship and, incidentally, over
£, of the £ million British government fund set up to aid
Czech refugees. Nothing, not even Göring’s personal “promise
of safe-conduct,” persuaded them to return to Germany for
questioning.
In the Petscheks’ now-abandoned German offices, Göring
and Wohlthat found a grinning band of front men German,
English, and Swiss bankers. Foreign holding companies surfaced
from the financial swamp and claimed title to the Petschek for-
tune. It seemed that the Petscheks had thought of everything,
but now Göring took the radical decision that brought victory
after all. He deemed the apex corporation of the Petschek con-
glomerate, a certain holding company named “German Coal
Trading, Inc.,” to be a Jewish business within the meaning of the
Reich Citizenship Act of June , , which decreed: “A busi-
ness shall be deemed Jewish if under predominantly Jewish
influence.” This caved in the Petschek defenses, because Göring
had established that this innocently named corporation was in
fact the Petscheks’ Konzernbank, or corporate bank. One after
the other, the remaining firms in the Petschek empire were pro-
claimed Jewish and turned over to the Reich trustees for dis-
posal.
Simultaneously Göring unraveled the financial problem of
buying out the Petscheks. The non-German stockholders were