Göring’s little-publicized campaign to hound the Jews out of
German business life was as carefully planned as any battle that
his paratroopers would later fight over Corinth or Crete. His
targets were the big multinational corporations, some of which
had set up complicated interlocking banking and holding cor-
porations designed to conceal their ownership from the Reich
and other anti-Semitic countries in which they operated in
Central Europe. He made no distinction between Jews who were
Germans and those who had adopted different nationalities “just
so as to save their skins.” “In Austria and the Sudeten territo-
ries,” he would say, “all of a sudden there’s a host of them
who’re becoming Englishmen, or Americans, or what have you.
It won’t cut any ice with us.”
Under his chief economic adviser, Helmuth Wohlthat, he
raised a team of official bloodhounds specially trained to sniff
out these corporations and strip off their Aryan camouflage so
that he could expropriate them in the name of the Reich. This
extraordinary battle can be illustrated by one example, the
ruthless liquidation of the two mining conglomerates built up in
Central and Eastern Europe by the feuding brothers Julius and
Ignaz Petschek. In Ignaz had bequeathed a fortune of two
hundred million Reichsmarks to his four sons all of whom
were nominally Czechs. The sons had immediately begun to di-
vest their empires, salt away their fortunes, and appoint “front
men” of unchallengeable German blood for their operations in-
side the Reich. The assets were concealed so cunningly that
Wohlthat confessed to “insoluble difficulties” when Göring gave
him the job to “de-Semitize” (entjuden) both Petschek empires
in the spring of .
Göring suggested he mop up the smaller empire, Julius
Petschek’s, first. That job was done by July and the (partly