of the company cheap to
Ferry Porsche, although this
sacrifice did not spare him,
as a Jew, from persecution.
The Flicks and von Fincks
likewise gained rich pickings
from pursuing “Aryanisation”
opportunities, buying up
Jewish assets at firesale prices.
In 1945 scarcely any of
those tycoons, their proximity
to Hitler confirmed by
innumerable photographs,
paid much of a price.
Rudolf-August Oetker was
“denazified” by an internal
subcommittee of his own
company, and two years later
was back at its helm. Flick, in
the dock at Nuremberg,
portrayed himself as a victim
of the Nazis and friend of the
anti-Hitler resistance.
This farcical defence did
not spare him from a seven-
year jail sentence. He was
released in 1950, still master of
a fortune. After a few years of
financial conjuring he became
West Germany’s richest man.
Flick dismissed his jail time as
silly American moralising.HISTORY
Max Hastings
Nazi Billionaires
The Dark History of Germany’s
Wealthiest Dynasties
by David de Jong
Wm Collins £25 pp400
Susanne Klatten, Germany’s
richest woman, in 2008 looked
back to her Nazi-sponsoring
forebears and said with filial
devotion: “I will never lose
respect for my father. No one
can judge what it was like to
live back then.” Her dad was
Herbert Quandt, a scion of the
dynasty that managed, owned
— and still owns — huge
industrial interests, including
a lion’s share of BMW.
In the Nazi era Herbert
worked with his own father
on the hugely profitable
pillaging of occupied Europe.
Paterfamilias Günther Quandt
was among the earliest bosses
to remove Jews from the
boards of his companies. He
bought out Jewish company
owners at knockdown prices,
and employed slave labour.
It was not that the Quandts
were ideologues. They were
merely committed to
increasing the family fortune,
and knew that the best way to
achieve this was to work in
partnership with Germany’s
rulers. So consuming was this
ambition that, in the words of
the historian Joachim
Scholtyseck, it “left no room
for fundamental questions of
law and morality”.
Rudolf-August Oetker,
whose family owned a food
and catering conglomerate,
felt the same way. Oetker lived
on until 2007, and at his death
aged 90 left a global empire
with annual revenues of
$15 billion, which was divided
between his eight children
from three marriages. Not a
bad final divvy from a former
Waffen-SS officer, partly
trained at Dachau
concentration camp.
The message of this angry
book is that war crimes paid;that service to one of the
worst causes in human
history today keeps the
descendants of a score of
tycoons in castles, boats,
ski chalets, impressionist
paintings and cocaine.
David de Jong thinks this
stinks, and of course he is
right. A Dutch former
Bloomberg financial
journalist, he catalogues the
misdeeds and riches of the
Quandts, Flicks, von Fincks,
Porsche-Piëchs and Oetkers,
names that still disfigure the
social pages of smart Europe.
Their granddaddies were in
at the start. In 1933 Günther
Quandt, together with the steel
magnate Friedrich Flick, the
Bavarian finance mogul Baron
August von Finck, the steel
king Gustav Krupp von Bohlen
and a dozen others, gave
millions of marks to fund the
election campaign that gave
Hitler his first and last claim
on a popular mandate.
In July 1935 Adolf
Rosenberger, a co-founder of
Porsche, sold his 10 per centBetter than
le Carré?
The book that’s
giving Tinker Tailor
a run for its money,
and other thrillers
28
Life with
bin Laden
The documents that
take us inside his
home and his failed
plans for survival22
Twitter @TheTimesBooks l Instagram @thetimesbooks l Facebook TimesFirstEdition
The grandfather Friedrich Flick on trial at Nuremberg, 1947Still living it up
thanks to Hitler
Some of Germany’s richest families owe their wealth to forced
labour and Third Reich fire sales of Jewish businesses
I want to
make money
and buy
sailing yachts
from my
dividend
Verena Bahlsen,
heiress to theBahlsen biscuit
empire20 10 April 2022