The Modern-Day Captains Of Industry Linked To The Nazis
Adolf Hitler lays the cornerstone of a car factory in 1938, with Ferdinand Porsche second to the right of him. (AP Photo)
The new book “Nazi Billionaires” traces the long, cozy relationship between capitalism and the Third Reich.
Over the past couple of decades, a malignant form of historical revisionism has emerged on the American right. Led by conservative political commentator and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza, the right has peddled a convenient fiction: that the Nazis, because their full name was “National Socialist,” belonged to the left, and that Hitler was a product of “statism” gone awry.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as investigative journalist David de Jong demonstrates in his new book, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties. According to de Jong’s thorough reporting, German capitalists supported the Nazis at every turn — and their legacy continues to this day, with the country’s economic elite still closely intertwined with Nazi war profiteers.
Many German billionaires, de Jong shows, are intertwined with the Third Reich, which extensively mobilized Germany’s industrial base and enslaved and murdered millions of Jews, Roma, and Slavs to deliver on the never-ending orders from the Reich’s military-industrial complex.
And to this day, Germany’s capitalist elite maintain close ties to Nazism. For example, the modern-day neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, co-founded by a former Goldman Sachs economist, received major campaign contributions from August von Finck Jr., a financier whose father had founded financial services giant Allianz and a major private bank, Merck Finck, and profited handsomely from the Third Reich.
This is far from the only example. Joseph Goebbels’ stepson and onetime protege, Harald Quandt, grew to become one of the leading industrialists of postwar Germany. The Porsche sports car company — the first producer of the Volkswagen — was founded in 1930 by Ferdinand Porsche, an Adolf Hitler confidante and war profiteer, in conjunction with Anton Piëch, who was Porsche’s son-in-law.
The Porsche/Piëch family’s full acquisition of Porsche and Volkswagen in 1935 was only possible through an Aryanization process that left Volkswagen’s Jewish co-founder, racecar driver, and investor Alfred Rosenberger, with peanuts. De Jong reports that Porsche had 20,000 slaves provided to him by Hitler.
Such details aren’t simply ancient history. Until 2015, the supervisory board for Volkswagen and Porsche included Ferdinand Piëch, the grandson and son of the Nazi war profiteers who had founded and then Aryanized the company.
The family ties aren’t secret — many Nazi heirs, in fact, are quite brazen about their histories. One descendent, cookie heiress Verena Bahlsen, conceded in 2014 that her family had 700 enslaved Polish and Ukrainian captives working in their factories in World War II. But according to de Jong, Bahlsen wasn’t contrite about it, since she said her family had treated these slave laborers fairly.
“I own a quarter of Bahlsen and I am happy about it, too,” said Bahlsen. “It should continue to belong to me. I want to make money and buy sailing yachts from my dividends and stuff.”
The Death Of A “Hard Peace”
As de Jong illustrates, German capitalists worked hand in hand with the Nazis as they moved to take over the country.