Module G. A Mixed Bag of Historical Challenges on the Industrial Rhine: Profits, Politics, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Foreign Occupation, Swiss Banking, Pollution, and Flooding
This module concerns some industrial aspects of the Rhine, such as the great coal and steel conglomerates that grew up through the Ruhr area (the Ruhr is a smaller river that runs into the Rhine by Muehlheim and Duisburg), for example: Krupp in Essen.
And it takes a look at some of the great chemical and pharmaceutical industries which sprang up along the Rhine, including at Ludwigshafen and Leverkusen, places where the conglomerate called I.G. Farben, (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG [Syndicate – literally, “community of interests” – of dye-making corporations, Inc.] had large plants.
And we will also talk about manufacturing companies such as Ford, which has a huge plant in a suburb of Cologne on the right bank of the Rhine as well as GM’s Opel in Rüsselsheim on the Main, not far from its confluence with the Rhine, not to mention Porsche, Volkswagen, Mercedes, and the Bavarian Motor Works.
An important issue involves the fact that not only did some of these corporations contribute willingly, yea even eagerly, to the war effort after 1939, utilizing slave labor in their factories, making parts for weapons of mass destruction like the V2 rockets, and poison gas for the gas chambers of the extermination camps; many of them actively supported Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 in the first place. It’s an interesting if disturbing case study of business ethics in the era of the Holocaust.
Let’s look at some general Wikipedia-level facts in several cases and try to introduce them in some order: chemicals, automobiles, steel and coal, the occupation of the Rhineland, pollution, and flooding (with a little Swiss banking thrown in for good measure):
I.G.Farben:
I.G. Farben ,the producer of the Zyklon-B cyanide gas used in the extermination of millions of innocent people in the Holocaust, was formed in 1925 and was broken up after 1945 by the Allies. Though headquartered in Frankfurt, many of its affiliates were and still are on the Rhine, for example:
BASF (Badische Analin und Soda Fabrik ), now still the largest chemical producer in the world, headquartered in Ludwigshafen, just north of Speyer, across the river from Mannheim.
Bayer is in Leverkusen, just north of Cologne.
Agfa (Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation), now Agfa-Gevaert, is not on the Rhine. It was founded in 1867 Berlin by Paul Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, the son of famous composer Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, and Carl Alexander von Martius. After the break-up of I.G. Farben, Agfa merged with the Belgian company Gevaert, after having been acquired by Bayer for a number of years.
The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al., also known as the IG Farben Trial, was the sixth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany after the end of World War II.
The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials” or, more formally, as the “Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals” (NMT). The IG Farben Trial was the second of three trials of leading industrialists of Nazi Germany for their conduct during the Nazi regime. (The two other industrialist trials were the Flick Trial and the Krupp Trial.)
The defendants in this case had all been directors of IG Farben, a large German conglomerate of chemical firms. The company had been a major factor already in World War I, when their development of the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation compensated for Germany’s being cut off from the Chilean nitrate trade and allowed IG Farben to produce synthetic nitrate and extract and process nitrogen for use in agricultural fertilizer. (Nitrate is also an important component for the fabrication of explosives such as gunpowder, dynamite or TNT.)
In World War II, Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH = German Corporation for Pest Control Ltd., 42.5 per cent owned by IG Farben) was the trademark holder of Zyklon B, the poison gas used at the extermination camps.
During the IG Farben trial the director of Degesch, Dr. Gerhard Friedrich Peters, implicated himself. He had received information by Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who tried to halt the use of the gas, about the murder of people using Zyklon B. He was also informed that the German army needed the gas without the usual additives that were added to warn people by smell of its poisonous nature.
Later, in a court in Frankfurt, in 1949 Peters was charged with murder and convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The conviction was legally confirmed in an appeal in 1952 and reset to six years. Peters went to prison but was acquitted in a new appeal in 1953. The law had changed; he was no longer considered guilty in assisting in murder.
IG Farben also developed processes for synthesizing gasoline and rubber from coal, and thereby contributed much to Germany’s ability to wage a war despite having been cut off from all major oil fields. The charges at the Nuremberg (German: Nürnberg) tribunals consequently centered on preparing to wage an aggressive war, but also on slave labor and plundering.
The trial lasted from August 27, 1947 until July 30, 1948. Of the 24 defendants arraigned, 13 were found guilty on one or the other counts of the indictment and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one and one half to eight years, including time already served; ten defendants were acquitted of all charges.
Ford Motor Company:
In March 1929 General Motors purchased a controlling 80% holding in German automobile manufacturer Adam Opel (more about Opel below). Their competitor Henry Ford’s reaction was a prompt decision to build a complete Ford auto-factory in Germany, and before the end of 1929 a site at Cologne (Niehl) made available by the mayor of the city, Konrad Adenauer, was acquired by Ford. Most notably, Ford-Werke manufactured the turbines used in the V2 rockets.
In spite of the heavy bombing of Cologne, the factory got off relatively lightly and after the war production was able to restart in May 1945 with truck manufacture, the US government having paid $1.1 million in consideration of bombing damage from US air raids (!)
During the Second World War, Ford Werke employed slave laborers, though it was not forced to by the Nazi regime. The deployment of slave labor began before the Ford-Werke was separated from the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, while America had not yet entered the War.
Robert Schmidt presided over Ford-Werke during the Second World War, when it was engaged in the use of slave labor as well as the (illegal) manufacture of munitions. Once the war was over, notwithstanding all his carefully publicized efforts to erase the stain of the company’s past, no evidence emerged that either Henry Ford II or any other top-level Ford Motor Company executive ever raised any moral objects to rehiring Robert Schmidt, who had presided over one of the company’s darkest chapters.
The Ford slave labor story begins in 1942, when German soldiers swept into the city of Rostov in the Soviet Union, confronting Rostov families in their homes, forcing them to register at a labor registration center.
Elsa Iwanowa, who was 16-years-old at the time, was transported, along with many other Russians, in cattle cars to Wuppertal in the western part of Germany, where they were exhibited to visiting businessmen. From there Elsa Iwanowa and others were forced to become slave laborers for Ford-Werke.
On March 4, 1998, fifty-three years after she was liberated from the German Ford plant, Elsa Iwanowa demanded justice, filing a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Ford Motor Company. In court, Ford acknowledged that Elsa Iwanowa and many others like her were “forced to endure a sad and terrible experience” at Ford-Werke. Ford, however, maintained that cases like that of Elsa Iwanowa are best redressed on “a nation-to-nation, government-to-government” basis.
In 1999, the court dismissed Elsa Iwanowa’s suit; however, a number of German companies, including GM subsidiary Opel, agreed to contribute $5.1 billion to a fund that would compensate the surviving slave laborers. After being the subject of much adverse publicity, Ford, in March 2000, reversed direction, and agreed to contribute $13 million to the compensation fund.
Ford’s entanglement with Nazi crimes did not start with slave labor and V2 rockets, however. It goes back even further to a four volume set of booklets or pamphlets entitled The International Jew, published and distributed in the early 1920s by Henry Ford.
These volumes consisted of essays published consecutively for 91 issues in Ford’s personal newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, chronicling what Ford called the “Jewish menace”. Every week the paper exposed some sort of Jewish-inspired evil in a major story with a headline. The most popular and aggressive stories were chosen to be reprinted in The International Jew.
At the Nuremberg Trials, key Nazi leader Baldur von Schirach mentioned that The International Jew made a deep impression on him and his friends in their youth and influenced them in becoming antisemitic. He said: “... we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy. In the poverty-stricken and wretched Germany of the time, youth looked toward America, and apart from the great benefactor, Herbert Hoover, it was Henry Ford who to us represented America.”
In 1922, The New York Times reported that Adolf Hitler’s office contained a large picture of Ford. A well-thumbed copy of The International Jew was found in his library.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
There is more about Ford and the Nazis: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an antisemitic hoax purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination.
It was first published in Russia in 1903. Despite conclusive proof that the Protocols were a gross forgery, they had sensational popularity and large sales in the 1920s and 1930s. They were translated into every language of Europe and sold widely in Arab lands, the US, and England. Henry Ford funded the printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed in his dealerships throughout the US in the 1920s, making his printing of the Protocols the largest anywhere.
In 1921, Ford defended the Protocols: “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on. They are 16 years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time.”
In 1927, however, the courts ordered Ford to retract his publication and apologize; he complied, claiming his assistants had duped him. He remained an admirer of Nazi Germany, however.
But it was in Germany after World War I that the Protocols had their greatest success. There they were used to explain all of the disasters that had befallen the country: the defeat in the war, the hunger, and the destructive inflation. According to historian Norman Cohn, whose must-read book on the protocols is entitled Warrant for Genocide, the assassins of German Jewish politician Walter Rathenau (1867–1922) were convinced that Rathenau was a literal “Elder of Zion”.
The Protocols also became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews. It was made required reading for German students. In The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945, Nora Levin states that “Hitler used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews.”
Here’s what Hitler said about the Protocols in his book Mein Kampf:
“The extent to which the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. ...the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.”
Hitler endorsed the forgery in his speeches from August 1921 on. At the height of World War II, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed: “The Zionist Protocols are as up-to-date today as they were the day they were first published.”
Ferdinand Porsche and the Peoples’ Car (VW):
In June 1934 the native Austro-Czech Ferdinand Porsche received a contract from Hitler to design a “people’s car” called the Kraft durch Freude – KdF : Strength through Joy – car (or People’s car: Volkswagen or Volksauto), following on from his previous designs such as the 1931 Type 12 car designed for Zündapp.
(Strength through Joy was a Nazi propaganda program designed to help workers purchase cars, go on cruises, etc. Special KdF cruise liners like the Wilhelm Gustloff were commissioned, which, then, crowded with refugees, was sunk at the end of WWII by a Russian submarine with the loss of 9,400 lives, over six times as many as on the Titanic which claimed 1,500 dead.)
Porsche’s first two VW prototypes were completed in 1935. These were followed by several further pre-production batches from 1936 to 1939.
The car was similar to the contemporary designs of Hans Ledwinka of the Czech firm Tatra, in particular the Tatra V570 and Tatra 97:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/TatraT97-front.jpg/250px-TatraT97-front.jpg
This resulted in a lawsuit against Porsche claiming infringement of Tatra’s patents regarding air-cooling of the rear engine. The suit was interrupted by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia: several years after World War II Volkswagen paid Tatra a settlement.
After being engaged by the Nazi authorities in building the Volksauto, Porsche was praised as the Great German Engineer. However, Hitler considered the Slavic Czechs subhuman and in 1934 Porsche was urged to apply for German citizenship. A few days later, Porsche indeed filed a declaration giving up his Czechoslovak citizenship at a Czechoslovak consulate in Stuttgart.
In 1937, Porsche joined the National Socialist German Workers’s Party (becoming member number 5,643,287) and he joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) as well. By 1938, Porsche was using SS-men as security members and drivers at his factory, and later set up a special unit called SS Sturmwerk Volkswagen.
In 1942, Porsche reached the rank of SS-Oberführer. (Translated as “senior leader”, an Oberführer was typically a Nazi Party member in charge of a group of paramilitary units in a particular geographical region.) During the war, Porsche was further decorated with the SS-Ehrenring (ring of honor) and awarded the War Merit Cross.
A new city, “Stadt des KdF-Wagens” (the city of the Strength Through Joy Car) was founded near Fallersleben at the site of an old castle called the Wolfburg, Wolf’s Fortress, for the Volkswagen factory. Wartime production concentrated almost exclusively on the military Kübelwagen and Schwimmwagen variants:
https://thinkingouttabox.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/kubelwagen-schwimmwagen.jpg?w=490
Mass production of the actual VW type 1 car, which later became known as the Käfer, or Beetle, began after the end of the war. The city is named Wolfsburg today and is still the headquarters of the Volkswagen Group.
Ferdinand Porsche was an important contributor to the German war effort during World War II. He was involved in the production of advanced tanks such as the Tiger I, Tiger II, Elefant, and the Panzer VIII Maus or Mouse, the giant super-tank that weighed 188 metric tons (207 US tons) as well as other weapons systems, including the V1 flying bombs.
Porsche visited Henry Ford’s operation in Detroit many times where he learned the importance of productivity and monitoring workers.
Volkswagen, under Ferdinand Porsche, profited from forced and slave labor. This would include a large number of Soviets. In the spring of 1945, 90% of Volkswagen’s workforce was non-German.
Porsche’s son-in-law, Anton Piëch, began managing the plant in 1941. In his study “The Volkswagen Plant and Its Workers in the Third Reich,” the German historian Hans Mommsen writes: “In the summer of 1943, Anton Piëch bluntly declared that he had to use cheap Eastern workers in order to fulfill the Führer’s wish that the Volkswagen be produced for 990 Reichsmark.”
In the early 1990s, this part of the history of the VW Group caught up with Ferdinand Piëch, the son of the former plant director Anton Piëch. Ferdinand Piëch, the head of Audi, was trying to rise to the top of the Volkswagen Group.
Piëch, who had pushed aside a number of executives along his career path, had his share of enemies. Some of them spread the rumor that Piëch was incapable of being the head of VW, hinting at the headlines it would produce in the important US market if the son of the former Wolfsburg plant director, who had used forced laborers, became the head of the modern-day VW Group.
As we have seen, Ferdinand Porsche himself served Hitler during the war as the head of his tank commission. He supported Hitler’s power and profited from the regime. Nevertheless, Mommsen believes that “the question as to the extent to which Porsche understood the criminal character of the regime he served must remain open.”
For Mommsen, Ferdinand Porsche is “the prototype of the expert interested solely in technological matters.” An Allied investigative commission later declined to file charges against Porsche, although he, his son Ferry and his son-in-law Anton were imprisoned in France for several months.
In November 1945, Porsche had been asked to continue the design of the Volkswagen in France and to move the factory equipment there as part of war reparations. Differences within the French government and objections from the French automotive industry put a halt to this project before it had even begun.
On 15 December 1945, French authorities arrested Porsche, his son-in-law Anton Piëch, and his son Ferry Porsche as war criminals. While Ferry was freed after 6 months, Ferdinand and Anton were imprisoned longer, first in Baden-Baden and then in Paris and Dijon.
Following protests from the local WWII survivors that Porsche’s Czech birthplace Vratislavice nad Nisou was promoting Nazism by displaying signs commemorating its native son, in 2013 the town authorities decided to remove the signs and change the content of a local exhibition so that it would cover not only his automotive achievements, but also his Nazi party and SS membership and the importance of his work for the Nazi war cause. The move was criticized by the local association of Porsche car owners as silly and intent on smearing the good name of Porsche.
A little-known fact is that in 1932, a delegation from Moscow had visited Porsche in his Stuttgart office. Shortly thereafter, Stalin invited him to the Soviet Union for an informational visit. “At first we thought the invitation was so improbable that we had trouble taking it seriously,” Ferry Porsche later wrote in his autobiography. “But soon it was made very clear to us that everything was perfectly serious.”
Stalin wanted to advance industrial development in the Soviet Union with the help of experts from capitalist countries. He had Porsche taken on tours of aircraft and automobile factories and, in the end, made him an offer to become general director of the development of the Soviet auto industry.
Stalin promised Porsche many privileges and powers. But the German engineer turned down Stalin’s offer “after much consideration,” Ferry Porsche wrote.
It was not the communist dictatorship that had deterred the senior Porsche as much as the language barrier. How could he manage such a gargantuan task, he reasoned, if he couldn’t even communicate in his native tongue? Stalin’s offer “could have had a very decisive influence on my subsequent life,” Ferry Porsche wrote.
The Quandt Family, Expropriation of Jewish Businesses, Slave Labor, and later BMW Acquisition:
This from Bloomberg Business News of October 10, 2007:
Automaker BMW is Germany’s most admired employer and a pioneer in profit sharing. So it came as a shock Sept. 30 when an investigative television documentary exposed the Nazi-era misdeeds of BMW’s controlling shareholder family, the Quandts. The Silence of the Quandt Family highlighted how patriarch Günther Quandt, grandfather to the generation now controlling BMW, built a blood-stained wartime fortune on the back of slave labor and how he sidestepped postwar recrimination.
The reclusive Quandt family responded to the documentary five days later, on Oct. 5, pledging to back a research project into the family’s Nazi past and its role under the Third Reich, opening family archives and documents to an independent historian. (The book by this historian is now available, albeit only in German so far: Rüdiger Jungbluth. Die Quandts: Ihr leiser Aufstieg zur mächtigsten Wirtschaftsdynastie Deutschlands. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2002. 391pp ISBN 978-3-593-36940-2. = The Quandts: Their Quiet Rise to the Most Powerful Economic Dynasty of Germany.)
“The accusations that have been raised against our family have moved us,” said the family in a statement. “We recognize that in our history as a German business family, the years 1933 to 1945 have not been sufficiently cleared up.”
BMW, of which the Quandts became major shareholders 15 years after the war, was not implicated in the documentary. In keeping with its normal policy, the automaker made no comment about the Quandts, but noted that it has publically confronted its own wartime history via independent research projects.
The TV program stunned Germany and triggered a raft of newspaper stories with headlines such as “The Quandts’ Bloody Billions” and “A Fortune Stained in Blood.” The hour-long documentary included interviews with former slave laborers who testified to the devastating conditions and atrocities which took place at Günther Quandt’s U-Boat battery company, Accumulatorenfabrik AG (Afa).
Afa produced highly specialized batteries for the Nazi war machine, used in U-boats and V-2 rockets. It also produced munitions. “We were treated terribly and had to drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped,” said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced laborer who worked in Quandt’s Hannover plant.
Based on documents unearthed by the film makers, Quandt estimated a “fluctuation of 80 prisoners per month,” in his submarine battery factory—a likely reference to expected deaths per month, the film claims. It also says that Quandt, who joined the Nazi party in 1933, wielded close family ties to the Nazi elite to grow his battery business. Sven Quandt, a grandson of Günther and the only family member to appear in the documentary, says that he and his siblings cannot be held responsible for their grandfather’s activities.
Afa had factories in Hannover, Berlin, and Vienna and was supplied with slave laborers from concentration camps who died by the hundreds, according to the documentary. One former Danish slave laborer testified in the film that he and other survivors, who were deported to a German concentration camp and sent to work at Afa, returned to Germany in 1972 to plead for financial support from the Quandts, since the harsh working conditions at Afa had resulted in lifelong ailments.
The Quandts turned them away, the film says. “It’s for me a step in the right direction that the Quandt family, after so many decades, finally is willing to face its history,” says Carl-Adolf Sörensen, a former Danish resistance fighter who was sent to the Hannover-Stöcken concentration camp in 1943. Sörensen wants the Quandts to admit that Afa relied on slave labor from the camp.
The Silence of the Quandt Family was broadcast by Norddeutsche Runkfunk (NDR), an affiliate of the national ARD network, and was based on five years of research by authors Eric Friedler and Barbara Siebert. It premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival on Sept. 30 and was aired without notice on television later that night, at 11:30 p.m., reaching an estimated audience of 1.3 million. Some German commentators surmise the broadcast was not announced in advance for fear of legal interference from the Quandts to block the program. ARD officials denied the speculation and said they decided to air the program only after the Film Festival premiere.
Despite his Nazi membership—and, as it now appears, his use of slave labor—Günther Quandt was deemed after the war to have been more of a “passive follower” than a convinced Nazi. But Benjamin Ferencz, a prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials interviewed in the documentary, said that the facts revealed today likely would have led to Quandt’s conviction for war crimes—similar to those meted out to members of the Krupp and Flick families.
“Quandt escaped justice,” Ferencz told the film makers. Industrialist Friederich Flick, by contrast, received a prison sentence of seven years at the Nuremberg Trials for deploying slave labor and for serving the Nazi war machine, but was freed in 1950.
After the war, Quandt received his company, later renamed Varta, back from the government and continued to build his industrial wealth—the fortune eventually wielded by his son Herbert in 1959 to buy BMW. Herbert’s heirs, including wife Johanna, daughter Susanna Klatten, and son Stefan, today own a controlling 47% stake in BMW, which has a market capitalization of $42 billion. The Quandts also own a controlling stake in pharmaceutical giant Altana. The family’s holdings are worth an estimated $34 billion.
Despite its acknowledgment that the family’s ties to the Nazis have been played down, the Quandt family members insist the details of Günther Quandt’s past are not entirely new. A 2002 biography covered much of the same ground. It’s also been known that Quandt’s wife Magda Ritschel, whom he divorced in 1929, remarried Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1931 and that Goebbels adopted Quandt’s son Harald. Adolf Hitler acted as witness at the wedding. (In April of 1945, Magda killed her six children in Hitler’s bunker before she and Joseph Goebbels died in a suicide pact.)
Many German companies including BMW, Volkswagen, and Deutsche Bank already have explored their own wartime collaboration and misdeeds during the Nazi era, publishing books, turning over documentation to experts, and paying millions of dollars into funds distributed to forced-labor survivors. Volkswagen’s book documents its deployment of 20,000 slave laborers during the Third Reich. In 1999, BMW and other German companies founded the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” foundation, which provides compensation to former forced laborers.
The Quandts, by contrast, have remained silent about their past, perhaps fearing a global public backlash against the BMW brand. Until now, the family has refused historians access to its Nazi-era historical archives and papers—and it still has not acknowledged that Afa factories made use of slave labor from concentration camps.
The Oct. 5 statement by the family noted that Quandt-owned companies BMW, Varta, and Altana, as well as individual family members, contributed to national funds established to compensate former slave laborers but did not mention the sums contributed.
BMW proper (pre-Quandt ownership):
A major traveling exhibit on forced labor in Nazi Germany was organized in 2010 and first displayed at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. It can be accessed in English at its website (which tells us it requires six semi-trailers to transport):
http://www.ausstellung-zwangsarbeit.org/en/341/
This exhibit lists a number of German firms which benefitted from the estimated 20 million slave laborers, including BMW, a major manufacturer of aircraft engines (hence the BMW logo, showing a spinning propellor on a blue and white background). Some of their observations on BMW follow:
Beginning in March 1943, BMW brought prisoners from the Dachau Concentration Camp to work on the construction sites in Munich. Later inmates were also put to work in manufacturing. They were housed in the Allach subcamp. Eastern European forced laborers were not permitted in air raid shelters. During the bombing of the BMW facility in Trostberg, the Soviet prisoners of war were brought into the forest, where three of them died.
The Anker factory in Bielefeld posted instructions on the treatment of foreign workers on their facility’s bulletin board. The German worker nicknamed “Smart” is harsh in his treatment of the female Soviet forced laborers.
Toward the end of the war ninety percent of the workforce at the largest aircraft engine factory in the German Reich – BMW’s plant in Munich-Allach – consisted of foreign civilian workers, POWs and concentration camp inmates. The number of workers had risen from 1,000 in 1939 to more than 17,000 in 1944.
Forced laborers worked not only in the assembly halls, but also on the factory’s expansion. Due to BMW’s importance to the armament industry, the authorities gave it priority over other companies in the assignment of workers. Nevertheless, its personnel demand was never completely met.
Some of the Western European workers lived in private quarters. For all others, barrack camps were set up all around the factory grounds until 1944, ultimately accommodating 14,000 people. That figure included several thousand concentration camp inmates which the company management had applied for already in 1942.
(The BMW story hits me personally, albeit indirectly, as an acquaintance of mine, a good LDS brother, at one time the Patriarch of the Heidelberg Stake, Bruno Stroganoff, was a forced laborer in an underground BMW aircraft engine factory near Heidelberg, after he had been arrested for desertion from the SS. He lost a lung to tuberculosis after standing for years at a lathe with water dripping on his body from the rock wall above him. You can read my brief account of his life in an article in BYU Studies, (“An LDS in Hitler’s SS”) which will allow you to download it for 99 cents unless you happen to be a subscriber, in which case it’s free):
https://byustudies.byu.edu/showTitle.aspx?title=6847
Daimler Benz, Mercedes:
Here’s Herbert Mitgang’s New York Times August 23, 1990 review of the book Mercedes in Peace and War, German Automobile Workers, 1903-1945, by Bernard P. Bellon, 356 pages. Illustrated. Columbia University Press. $37.50.
The history of Germany and the history of Daimler-Benz in two world wars run on parallel tracks in “Mercedes in Peace and War.” It’s a chilling account of how the great automobile and arms maker prospered on the backs of its workers, including the use of thousands of concentration camp slave laborers right up to the final days of the Third Reich.
The story will not be found in the company history that was put out in 1986 for the 100th anniversary of the first Daimler and Benz cars. The official line was that “Daimler-Benz supported the National Socialist regime only to an unavoidable extent for a company of its importance.” No research was permitted in the company’s archives about the labor force during the Nazi period.
Finally, after its own official history came out, the company relented and opened its archives. Several German historians interceded on behalf of the author of this book, Bernard P. Bellon, who at the end of 1986 was permitted to examine the company’s closed records. Mr. Bellon is assistant professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University in Berlin. Although his book is occasionally repetitious and often polemical – given the findings, how could it be otherwise? – he has uncovered devastating information about Mercedes’s military-industrial connections.
“Leading managers of Daimler-Benz lent valuable assistance to the National Socialists before Hitler became Chancellor in 1933,'” Mr. Bellon writes. “The corporation even claimed that it was responsible for ‘helping to motorize the movement.’” One way the company aided Hitler’s party was to take out large advertisements as early as 1931 in the Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, known for its virulent propaganda and anti-Semitic tirades. The author believes that the ads may have been part of a quid pro quo arrangement under which Daimler-Benz cars were given or lent to Hitler and his party’s officials.
The three-pointed Mercedes emblem and the Nazi swastika were paired in the eyes of the German volk, according to the evidence in the book. '”The company itself was a personal favorite of the Führer, who generally rode in Mercedes cars, as did the rest of his entourage,'” Mr. Bellon says. Jakob Werlin, an associate director of the company, was a personal friend of Hitler whose ties with the Fuhrer dated back to the 1923 putsch. When Hitler left the Landsberg penitentiary in 1924, the author notes, Werlin picked him up at the prison gates. According to American intelligence documents obtained by Mr. Bellon under the Freedom of Information Act, Hitler held a portfolio of Daimler-Benz stocks, which Werlin personally administered for him.
By examining the fate of the trade unions in the Daimler-Benz factories, the book traces the way the fortunes of the company and affairs of state were linked. When the Nazis came to power, they destroyed the unions and related institutions – including factory councils and arbitration committees – that had shaped the industrial order since World War I. A new order was introduced, by legislation, that established a system of work based upon fear, reward and discipline.
Top management at Daimler-Benz welcomed the military buildup under National Socialism; the company became the leading armaments maker in Nazi Germany. Airplane motors and spare parts, tanks and armored vehicles, heavy trucks and even a major section of the V2 rocket were produced for the Third Reich’s war machine. As the war progressed, booty from companies like Peugeot, the French auto maker, was taken to Germany.
“On a massive scale, Daimler-Benz threw tens of thousands of men and women, including foreign workers and concentration camp inmates, into the battle to produce engines for the German air force,” Mr. Bellon writes. Daimler-Benz used Jewish women from the concentration camps at Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen as worker-slaves. One group of female inmates working at Daimler-Benz was moved back to Sachsenhausen in the final weeks of the war, apparently to be gassed. They survived to tell the tale when the camp’s gas chamber failed to function.
“Mercedes in War and Peace” concludes with the statement that the company that began with the artistry of machinists and metal workers, and “the tough optimism of the labor movement before World War I,” ended in 1945 “with huddled foreign inmates assembling motors for no pay” as the Third Reich perished in flames.
But this, of course, is not the end of the Daimler-Benz story. It’s now the largest company in West Germany. While well researched as far as it goes, the book leaves the reader hungry for more information about how the question of war criminality was resolved, about how the ownership of the company retained its assets, about the remarkable revival of Daimler-Benz in the postwar years and as a diversified conglomerate, and about where the German automobile workers and their trade unions rank within the changed company today.
Auto-Union (Audi):
Here’s a short article from the UK’s The Telegraph by Tony Paterson from 27 May 2014:
The German car giant Audi’s predecessors ruthlessly exploited thousands of Nazi concentration camp prisoners and other slave labourers and forced them to work in inhumane conditions under which many died, a new study commissioned by the car makers has revealed.
The study by historians Martin Kukowski and Rudolf Boch established that Audi’s forerunners, Auto Union, bore “moral responsibility” for the deaths of 4,500 inmates at Flossenberg Nazi concentration camp in Bavaria who died while working in a company labour camp.
“There can be no discussion about the extent of Auto Union’s Nazi connections,” the historians concluded, adding that the concern was “firmly ensnared by the National Socialist regime”.
Their research found that 18,000 Flossenberg inmates were forced to carry out slave labour for the company and that Auto Union used a further 16,500 slave labourers from seven purpose-built SS camps to work in plants where military vehicles were produced for the Nazi war effort. A quarter of the prisoners were said to be Jews.
The study, which was conducted at Audi’s behest, also revealed that the so-called “Father of Auto Union”, Dr Richard Bruhn, was an active Nazi who was given the status of a “Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer” or defence industry leader which denoted the company’s importance as a producer of war materials.
Audi admitted to being shocked by the historians’ findings and said it was considering altering the company’s official profile. “I am very shocked by the scale of the involvement of the former Auto Union leadership in the system of forced labour,” Audi works council leader Peter Mosch told the magazine, Wirtschaftswoche.
Auto Union was created in 1932 as a result of a merger of the German car manufacturers Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer. Bruhn was head of Auto Union from 1932 until 1945. At the end of the Second World War he was interned by the British. But he was reinstated as head of Auto Union when the company was later reopened in West Germany.
In 1953 West Germany awarded Bruhn one its highest accolades, The Grand Cross of Merit, for his role in reviving Auto Union’s fortunes with the help of American Marshall Plan funding. He died in 1964. Auto Union was renamed Audi in 1985.
Christian Lösel, the mayor of the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt where Audi has its company headquarters, told Wirtschaftswoche that in the light of the study, the council would consider renaming streets which had been named after Bruhn.
Audi is the last major German car manufacturer to come clean about its Nazi past. Others have included Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW , all of which commissioned similar historical research into the company history from 1933 onwards. Volkswagen has provided financial compensation to its former slave labourers.
(I’m sure this constitutes flogging a dead horse, but I worried that if I left out a major automobile company, I might be accused of bias. So here’s a final entry on GM, namely an article from the Washington Post in 1998, which also summarizes the problem we’ve been discussing here – repeating a few things – and introduces one other problem, that of Swiss banks. Since this module is getting too long anyway, I’ve included here for those who would like to read it, a transcript of a PBS Frontline documentary called The Sinister Face of Neutrality, which explains very well the problem of Swiss banking and the Nazis):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings/sinister.html
Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration, by Michael Dobbs,Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01
Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate.
Like the Swiss banks, the American car companies have vigorously denied that they assisted the Nazi war machine or that they significantly profited from the use of forced labor at their German subsidiaries during World War II. But historians and lawyers researching class-action suits on behalf of former prisoners of war are busy amassing evidence of collaboration by the automakers with the Nazi regime.
The issues at stake for the American automobile corporations go far beyond the relatively modest sums involved in settling any lawsuit. During the war, the car companies established a reputation for themselves as “the arsenal of democracy"” by transforming their production lines to make airplanes, tanks and trucks for the armies that defeated Adolf Hitler. They deny that their huge business interests in Nazi Germany led them, wittingly or unwittingly, to also become “the arsenal of fascism.”
The Ford Motor Co. has mobilized dozens of historians, lawyers and researchers to fight a civil case brought by lawyers in Washington and New York who specialize in extracting large cash settlements from banks and insurance companies accused of defrauding Holocaust victims. Also, a book scheduled for publication next year will accuse General Motors Corp. of playing a key role in Hitler’s invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union. [Note: I can’t find such a book. AK]
“General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland,” said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades researching a history of the world’s largest automaker. “Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM.”
Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army.
But documents discovered in German and American archives show a much more complicated picture. In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.
After three years of national soul-searching, Switzerland’s largest banks agreed last August to make a $1.25 billion settlement to Holocaust survivors, a step they had initially resisted. Far from dying down, however, the controversy over business dealings with the Nazis has given new impetus to long-standing investigations into issues such as looted art, unpaid insurance benefits and the use of forced labor at German factories.
Although some of the allegations against GM and Ford surfaced during 1974 congressional hearings into monopolistic practices in the automobile industry, American corporations have largely succeeded in playing down their connections to Nazi Germany. As with Switzerland, however, their very success in projecting a wholesome, patriotic image of themselves is now being turned against them by their critics.
“When you think of Ford, you think of baseball and apple pie,” said Miriam Kleinman, a researcher with the Washington law firm of Cohen, Millstein and Hausfeld, who spent weeks examining records at the National Archives in an attempt to build a slave labor case against the Dearborn-based company. “You don't think of Hitler having a portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich.”
Both Ford and General Motors declined requests for access to their wartime archives. Ford spokesman John Spellich defended the company’s decision to maintain business ties with Nazi Germany on the grounds that the U.S. government continued to have diplomatic relations with Berlin up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. GM spokesman John F. Mueller said that General Motors lost day-to-day control over its German plants in September 1939 and “did not assist the Nazis in any way during World War II.”
For GIs, an Unpleasant Surprise
When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel – a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary – and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler’s role in the German rearmament effort was much less significant.)
When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and company documents extolling the “genius of the Fuehrer,” according to reports filed by soldiers at the scene. A U.S. Army report by investigator Henry Schneider dated Sept. 5, 1945, accused the German branch of Ford of serving as “an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles” with the “consent” of the parent company in Dearborn.
Ford spokesman Spellich described the Schneider report as “a mischaracterization” of the activities of the American parent company and noted that Dearborn managers had frequently been kept in the dark by their German subordinates over events in Cologne.
The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.
Although Ford later renounced his antisemitic writings, he remained an admirer of Nazi Germany and sought to keep America out of the coming war. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria, he accepted the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. The following month, a senior executive for General Motors, James Mooney, received a similar medal for his “distinguished service to the Reich.”
The granting of such awards reflected the vital place that the U.S. automakers had in Germany’s increasingly militarized economy. In 1935, GM agreed to build a new plant near Berlin to produce the aptly named “Blitz” (Lightning) truck, which would later be used by the German army for its blitzkreig attacks on Poland, France and the Soviet Union. German Ford was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army after GM/Opel, according to U.S. Army reports.
The importance of the American automakers went beyond making trucks for the German army. The Schneider report, now available to researchers at the National Archives, states that American Ford agreed to a complicated barter deal that gave the Reich increased access to large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber. Author Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told him in 1977 that Hitler “would never have considered invading Poland” without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.
As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for U.S. corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Under intense pressure from Berlin, both companies took pains to make their subsidiaries appear as “German” as possible. In April 1939, for example, German Ford made a personal present to Hitler of 35,000 Reichsmarks in honor of his 50th birthday, according to a captured Nazi document.
Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company’s German operations were “highly profitable.”
The internal politics of Nazi Germany “should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors,” Sloan explained in a letter to a concerned shareholder dated April 6, 1939. “We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization. . . . We have no right to shut down the plant.”
U.S. Firms Became Crucial
After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. James Mooney, the GM director in charge of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler in Berlin two weeks after the German invasion of Poland.
Typewritten notes by Mooney show that he was involved in the partial conversion of the principal GM automobile plant at Rüsselsheim to production of engines and other parts for the Junker “Wunderbomber,” a key weapon in the German air force, under a government-brokered contract between Opel and the Junker airplane company. Mooney’s notes show that he returned to Germany the following February for further discussions with Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering and a personal inspection of the Rüsselsheim plant.
Mooney’s involvement in the conversion of the Rüsselsheim plant undermines claims by General Motors that the American branch of the company had nothing to do with the Nazi rearmament effort. In congressional testimony in 1974, GM maintained that American personnel resigned from all management positions in Opel following the outbreak of war in 1939 “rather than participate in the production of war materials.”
However, according to documents of the Reich Commissar for the Treatment of Enemy Property, the American parent company continued to have some say in the operations of Opel after September 1939. The documents show that the company issued a general power of attorney to an American manager, Pete Hoglund, in March 1940. Hoglund did not leave Germany until a year later. At that time, the power of attorney was transferred to a prominent Berlin lawyer named Heinrich Richter.
GM spokesman Mueller declined to answer questions from The Washington Post on the power of attorney granted to Hoglund and Richter or to provide access to the personnel files of Hoglund and other wartime managers. He also declined to comment on an assertion by Snell that Opel used French and Belgian prisoners at its Rüsselsheim plant in the summer of 1940, at a time when the American Hoglund was still looking after GM interests in Germany.
The Nazis had a clear interest in keeping Opel and German Ford under American ownership, despite growing hostility between Washington and Berlin. By the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the American stake in German Ford had declined to 52 percent, but Nazi officials argued against a complete takeover. A memorandum to plant managers dated November 25, 1941, acknowledged that such a step would deprive German Ford of “the excellent sales organization” of the parent company and make it more difficult to bring “the remaining European Ford companies under German influence.”
Documents suggest that the principal motivation of both companies during this period was to protect their investments. An FBI report dated July 23, 1941 quoted Mooney as saying that he would refuse to take any action that might “make Hitler mad.” In fall 1940, Mooney told the journalist Henry Paynter that he would not return his Nazi medal because such an action might jeopardize GM’s $100 million investment in Germany. “Hitler has all the cards,” Paynter quoted Mooney as saying.
“Mooney probably thought that the war would be over very quickly, so why should we give our wonderful company away,” said German researcher Anita Kugler, who used Nazi archives to trace the company's dealings with Nazi Germany.
Even though GM officials were aware of the conversion of its Ruesselsheim plant to aircraft engine production, they resisted such conversion efforts in the United States, telling shareholders that their automobile assembly lines in Detroit were “not adaptable to the manufacture of other products” such as planes, according to a company document discovered by Snell.
In June 1940, after the fall of France, Henry Ford personally vetoed a U.S. government-approved plan to produce under license Rolls-Royce engines for British fighter planes, according to published accounts by his associates.
Declaration of War Alters Ties
America’s declaration of war on Germany in December 1941 made it illegal for U.S. motor companies to have any contact with their subsidiaries on German-controlled territory.
At GM and Ford plants in Germany, reliance on forced labor increased. The story of Elsa Iwanowa, who brought a class-action suit against Ford last March, is typical. At the age of 16, she was abducted from her home in the southern Russian city of Rostov by German soldiers in October 1942 with hundreds of other young women to work at the Ford plant at Cologne.
“The conditions were terrible. They put us in barracks, on three-tier bunks,” she recalled in a telephone interview from Belgium, where she now lives. “It was very cold; they did not pay us at all and scarcely fed us. The only reason that we survived was that we were young and fit.”
In a court submission, American Ford acknowledges that Iwanowa and others were “forced to endure a sad and terrible experience” at its Cologne plant but maintains that redressing such “tragedies” should be “a government-to-government concern.” Spellich, the Ford spokesman, insists the company did not have management control over its German subsidiary during the period in question.
Ford has backed away from its initial claim that it did not profit in any way from forced labor at its Cologne plant. Spellich said that company historians are still researching this issue but have found documents showing that, after the war, American Ford received dividends from its German subsidiary worth approximately $60,000 for the years 1940-43. He declined a request to interview the historians, saying they were “too busy.”
The extent of contacts between American Ford and its German-controlled subsidiary after 1941 is likely to be contested at any trial. Simon Reich, an economic historian at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on the German car industry, says he has yet to see convincing evidence that American Ford had any control over its Cologne plant after December 1941. He adds, however, that both “Opel and Ford did absolutely everything they could to ingratiate themselves to the Nazi state.”
While there was no direct contact between American Ford and its German subsidiary after December 1941, there appear to have been some indirect contacts. In June 1943, the Nazi custodian of the Cologne plant, Robert Schmidt, traveled to Portugal for talks with Ford managers there. In addition, the Treasury Department investigated Ford after Pearl Harbor for possible illegal contacts with its subsidiary in occupied France, which produced Germany army trucks. The investigation ended without charges being filed.
Even though American Ford now condemns what happened at its Cologne plant during the war, it continued to employ the managers in charge at the time. After the war, Schmidt was briefly arrested by Allied military authorities and barred from working for Ford. But he was reinstated as the company’s technical director in 1950 after he wrote to Henry Ford II claiming that he had always “detested” the Nazis and had never been a member of the party. A letter signed by a leading Cologne Nazi in February 1942 describes Schmidt as a trusted party member. Ford maintains that Schmidt’s name does not show up on Nazi membership lists.
Mel Weiss, an American attorney for Iwanowa, argues that American Ford received “indirect” profits from forced labor at its Cologne plant because of the overall increase in the value of German operations during the war. He notes that Ford was eager to demand compensation from the U.S. government after the war for “losses” due to bomb damage to its German plants and therefore should also be responsible for any benefits derived from forced labor.
Similar arguments apply to General Motors, which was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants. Washington attorney Michael Hausfeld, who is involved in the Ford lawsuit, confirms GM also is “on our list” as a possible target.
Friedrich Flick and Alfried Krupp:
Friedrich Flick (born 10 July 1883 in Ernsdorf, Siegerland; died 20 July 1972 in Constance) was a German industrialist, a member of the Flick industrial family, the richest person in West Germany during the Cold War and one of the richest people in the world at the time of his death in 1972.
He initially built a fortune during World War I and became extremely wealthy during the Weimar Republic, establishing a major industrial conglomerate in the coal and steel industries. Despite being found guilty in the Nuremberg Flick Trial, and being sentenced to seven years, including time already served, he quickly became one of West Germany’s richest people by the 1950s and the largest shareholder of Daimler-Benz.
While originally a member of the liberal German People’s Party, Flick also supported the Nazi Party financially from 1933, and over the next ten years donated over seven million marks to the party.
During the Second World War Flick’s industrial enterprises used 48,000 forced laborers from Germany’s concentration camps. It is estimated that 80 per cent of these workers died as a result of the way they were treated during the war. Flick was found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg in 1947 and was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was pardoned shortly after and resumed control over his industrial conglomerate, becoming the richest person in West Germany.
The 1983 Flick Affair revealed that German politicians had been bribed to allow the Flick family to reduce its tax liabilities, and after becoming an Austrian citizen to further reduce his tax obligations, in 1985 Friedrich Karl Flick sold most of his industrial holdings to Deutsche Bank for $2.5 billion, retiring until his 2006 death.
On Thursday November 20, 2008, it was reported that his body was stolen from a cemetery in Veldel, Austria, presumably in an attempt to hold it for ransom. It was later returned.
He was awarded numerous honors, including the Grand Cross with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1963 and the Bavarian Order of Merit, and was an honorary senator of the Technical University of Berlin.
At the time of his death, his industrial conglomerate encompassed 330 companies and around 300,000 employees. His heirs were his son Friedrich Karl Flick and his grandson Friedrich Christian Flick, who established the modern art gallery Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, one of the world’s leading modern art collections, encompassing around 2,500 works by 150 artists. (In February 2008, the younger Flick, known as Mick Flick, donated 166 works of art to the National Gallery, the largest gift of a private person the museums since its foundation in the 19th century.)
(In 2001 Flick hired the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to design a museum in Zürich for his collection. But Jewish groups and others criticized Flick for, unlike his siblings, not contributing to a $6 billion compensation fund for slave laborers and their families. He argued that the fund was not meant for individual contributions and instead created his own foundation to fight xenophobia, racism and intolerance. But the protests continued, and he decided to place his collection elsewhere. Through an agreement with the German government, Flick then lent his collection of some 2,500 works to the Hamburger Bahnhof a leading museum in Berlin, where it will be shown in exhibitions that are supposed to change every nine months or so.)
Alfried Krupp, the son of Gustav Krupp, was born in Essen, Germany, on 13th August, 1907. After studying engineering in Munich and Berlin he joined his father’s company, Friedrich Krupp AG, that by the First World War was Germany’s largest armaments company.
Krupp and his father were initially hostile to the Nazi Party. However, in 1930 they were persuaded by Hjalmar Schacht that Adolf Hitler would destroy the trade unions and the political left in Germany. Schacht also pointed out that a Hitler government would considerably increase expenditure on armaments. In 1933 Krupp joined the Schutzstaffel (SS).
(Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, was a German economist, banker, liberal politician, and co-founder in 1918 of the German Democratic Party, served as the Currency Commissioner and President of the Reichsbank under the Weimar Republic. He was a fierce critic of his country’s post-World War I reparation obligations. He became a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and served in Hitler’s government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. Later he fell out of favor with Hitler.)
As a result of the terms of the Versailles Treaty the Krupp family had been forced to become producers of agricultural machinery after the First World War. However, in 1933, Krupp factories began producing tanks in what was officially part of the Agricultural Tractor Scheme. They also built submarines in Holland and new weapons were developed and tested in Sweden.
During the Second World War Krupp ensured that a continuous supply of his firm’s tanks, munitions and armaments reached the German Army. He was also responsible for moving captured factories from occupied countries back to Germany where they were rebuilt by the Krupp company.
Krupp also built factories in German occupied countries and used the labor of over 100,000 inmates of concentration camps. This included a fuse factory inside Auschwitz. Inmates were also moved to Silesia to build a howitzer factory. It is estimated that around 70,000 of those working for Krupp died as a result of the methods employed by the guards of the camps.
In 1943 Adolf Hitler appointed Krupp as Minister of the War Economy. Later that year the SS gave him permission to employ 45,000 Russian civilians as forced labor in his steel factories as well as 120,000 prisoners of war in his coal mines.
Arrested by the Canadian Army in 1945 Alfried Krupp was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was accused of plundering occupied territories and being responsible for the barbaric treatment of prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. Documents showed that Krupp initiated the request for slave labor and signed detailed contracts with the SS, giving them responsibility for inflicting punishment on the workers.
Krupp was eventually found guilty of being a major war criminal and sentenced to twelve years in prison and had all his wealth and property confiscated. Convicted and imprisoned with him were nine members of the Friedrich Krupp AG board of directors. However, Gustav Krupp, the former head of the company, was considered too old and senile to stand trial and was released from custody.
By 1950 the United States was involved in fighting the Cold War. In June of that year, North Korean troops invaded South Korea. It was believed that German steel was needed for armaments for the Korean War and in October, John J. McCloy, the high commissioner in American-occupied Germany, lifted the 11 million ton limitation on German steel production.
McCloy also began pardoning German industrialists who had been convicted at Nuremberg. This included Fritz Ter Meer, the senior executive of I. G. Farben, the company that produced Zyklon B poison for the gas chambers. Ter Meer was also Hitler’s Commissioner of Armaments and War Production for the chemical industry during the war.
McCloy was also concerned about the increasing power of the left-wing, anti-rearmament, Social Democratic Party (SDP). The popularity of the conservative government led by Konrad Adenauer was in decline and a public opinion poll in 1950 showed it only had 24% of the vote, while support for the SDP had risen to 40%. On 5th December, 1950, Adenauer wrote McCloy a letter urging clemency for Krupp. Hermann Abs, one of Hitler’s personal bankers, who surprisingly was never tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg, also began campaigning for the release of German industrialists in prison.
In January, 1951, John J. McCloy announced that Alfried Krupp and eight members of his board of directors who had been convicted with him, were to be released. His property, valued at around $45 million, and his numerous companies were also restored to him.
Others that McCloy decided to free included Friedrich Flick, one of the main financial supporters of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). During the Second World War Flick became extremely wealthy by using 48,000 slave labourers from SS concentration camps in his various industrial enterprises. His property was restored to him and like Krupp became one of the richest men in Germany.
McCloy’s decision was very controversial. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to McCloy to ask: “Why are we freeing so many Nazis?” The Washington Post published a Herb Block cartoon depicting a smiling McCloy opening Krupp’s cell door, while in the background Joseph Stalin is shown taking a photograph of the event. Telford Taylor, who took part in the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals wrote: “Wittingly or not, Mr. McCloy has dealt a blow to the principles of international law and concepts of humanity for which we fought the war.”
Rumors began circulating that McCloy had been bribed by the Krupp’s American lawyer, Earl J. Carroll. According to one magazine: “The terms of Carroll’s employment were simple. He was to get Krupp out of prison and get his property restored. The fee was to be 5 per cent of everything he could recover. Carroll got Krupp out and his fortune returned, receiving for his five-year job a fee of, roughly, $25 million.”
McCloy rejected these claims and told the journalist, William Manchester: “There’s not a goddamn word of truth in the charge that Krupp’s release was inspired by the outbreak of the Korean War. No lawyer told me what to do, and it wasn’t political. It was a matter of my conscience.”
Within a few years of his release, Krupp’s company was the 12th largest corporation in the world. Alfried Krupp died in Essen, West Germany, on 30th July, 1967.
Occupation of the Rhineland:
One of the industrial and Rhine-related issues from the run-up to World War Two is that in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles had in effect taken away “the Rhineland” from Germany and allowed it to be occupied by France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. A quarter of a million US forces participated as well, under General Pershing, until they were withdrawn in 1923.
This was all the territory west of the Rhine, and, after Germany failed to make its reparations payments in 1923, a lot more territory, the entire Ruhr, for example, east of the Rhine (till 1925). It was as though the entire US “rust belt”: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been suddenly given to Canada.
(An odd side light involves the fact that the French used many Senegalese troops in their occupation of German territory. Rheinlandbastard became a derogatory term used in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany to describe Afro-German children of mixed German and African parentage, who were fathered by Africans serving as French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland after World War I. Under Nazism’s racial theories, these children were considered inferior to Aryans and consigned to compulsory sterilization. Needless to say, the matter played well into the hands of Hitler’s propaganda ministry and their racist world view.)
Not surprisingly then, one of Hitler’s strongest campaign promises had been to “remilitarize” the Rhineland. The occupation had been intended to prevent Germany from ever attacking France and Belgium again, as they had in 1914. It was also intended to prevent Germany’s industrial heartland from producing weaponry.
However, by 1930, all the countries had withdrawn their forces from the area. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933 and in the election of March 5, 1933, the NSDAP (Nazi) party won 44% of the vote. On the 23rd of March, Hitler passed the enabling act (Ermächtigungsgesetz = empowering law) which made him essentially an absolute dictator.
Whether we can see it as the first step in a series of planned conquests as some argue or as a simple ad hoc reaction to signs of severe weakness in Britain and in France (and to garner more support in Germany, where the propaganda effort needed propping up at the moment, as others have argued), at any event, not long after dawn on March 7, 1936, nineteen German infantry battalions and a handful of planes entered the Rhineland. By doing so, Germany violated Articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles and Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty of Locarno. They reached the river Rhine by 11:00 a.m. and then three battalions crossed to the west bank of the Rhine.
The Rhineland coup is often seen as the moment when Hitler could have been stopped with very little effort. The American journalist William L. Shirer wrote if the French had marched into the Rhineland: “...that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco...France’s failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain’s failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in, fact...bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip”.
Hitler himself said: “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”
However, the Hitler biographer, British historian Ian Kershaw, wrote that Hitler had conveniently forgotten his own orders for a fighting retreat if the French should march, and that Hitler was exaggerating for effect here the extent of the planned German retreat, in order to prove he was a leader blessed by “providence”.
A Final Brief Note on Water Pollution and Flooding of the Rhine:
One very different aspect to the industrialization of the Rhine is that of flooding. Yet another is the question of water pollution. Though all throughout the 19th century and during the world wars of the 20th, horrible pollution occurred along the Rhine, another terrible event occurred in 1986. (What are we to think of this interesting entry on the matter from Wikipedia with the hint of East German sabotage?):
The Sandoz chemical spill was a major environmental disaster caused by a fire and its subsequent extinguishing at Sandoz agrochemical storehouse in Schweizerhalle, Basel-Landschaft, Switzerland, on 1 November 1986, which released toxic agrochemicals into the air and resulted in tons of pollutants entering the Rhine river, turning it red. The chemicals caused a massive mortality of wildlife downstream, killing among other things a large proportion of the European eel population in the Rhine, although the situation subsequently recovered within a couple of years.
The stored chemicals included, beside urea and fluorescent dye, organophosphate insecticides, mercury compounds and organochlorines. Among the major resulting water pollutants were dinitro-ortho-cresol, the organophosphate chemicals propetamphos, parathion, disulfoton, thiometon, etrimphos and fenitrothion, as well as the organochlorinemetoxuron.
The cause of the blaze was never established. In 2000 Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior U.S. intelligence official, stated that the Soviet KGB had ordered the East German Stasi to sabotage the chemical factory. According to him, the operation’s objective was to distract attention from the Chernobyl disaster six months earlier in Ukraine. The Swiss authorities were considering opening investigations again. [I think we may never know what caused that spill! AK]
Efforts to clean up the Rhine and bring back the salmon have been somewhat successful, which efforts may be endangered, however, by global warming and the melting of the glaciers which feed the Rhine.
There have been increasing floods on the Rhine, for example, especially the giant floods of 1995. Some of the factors which made matters worse include the building of walls along the river, preventing high water from harmlessly flooding fields and forests and soaking into the ground. Here’s a summary of the causes from Geographyfieldwork.com:
Floods are part of the natural water cycle and flooding is, for the most part, steered by natural processes.
The immediate cause of the most recent floods, was abnormally high rainfall combined with unusually mild temperatures, which melted mountain snows, to produce a massive torrent of water. Over the past century, average temperatures in southern Germany have increased by between 1°C – 1.5°C. Rainfall in the Rhine catchment area has risen steadily this century and winter precipitation has increased by 40%.
The catastrophic flooding might be an early sign of a change in the climate caused by global warming. The growing concentration of ‘greenhouse gases’ could lead to even milder winters in N.W. Europe and hotter, drier summers.
For a large section of its course in Germany, the Rhine flows through a narrow gorge which restricts the amount of land either side available to soak up flood water. This increases the flood problem downstream.
Uncontrollable climatic factors are not the only reasons for the increasingly frequent occurrence of flooding and a number of human-made factors have made the problem worse.
Apart from the river bed, there are four important factors which improve the water storage effect of a river’s catchment area and help to control flooding levels:
Vegetation – trees and plants store large quantities of water and also intercept precipitation before it reaches the ground.
Soil – stores water very effectively and can store up to one hundred times the quantity of water as vegetation. It behaves like a sponge.
Ground – Steep land does not retain much water. There is little surface retention in mountainous areas but vegetation on steep land helps to retain water. By contrast, more water is stored in flat areas.
Drainage Networks – small streams, rivers and their water meadows fill up and flood when water levels rise, acting as water storage areas.
When water storage in vegetation, soil, ground and drainage networks is overloaded the drainage situation changes dramatically.
Deforestation in the Alps has reduced interception and soil storage of water and increased rates of surface runoff.
Urbanization of the flood plain, with water flowing off roofs and roads into drains leading directly to the river has greatly increased river levels after heavy rain.
The Rhine, for several decades, has been put into a kind of straitjacket. In the past, excess water would flow out over marshes and flood plains. These acted like sponges, soaking up the water, but since then some of the land has been drained, cemented and asphalted for buildings and roads.
The embankments have been strengthened and raised to protect residential and industrial areas, but raising them has closed off former flood meadows. Steep concrete flood walls along the upstream river banks channel flood water quickly from the upper reaches of the river but this has shifted the flooding problems down stream. (Politicians came under pressure to make riverside land available for local businesses or housing).
The river Rhine is a major shipping highway. To enable larger barges to use it and to speed up the journey time it has been strengthened, deepened and canalized. When a storm takes place the flow of water (or discharge) does not increase straight away. There is a gap, called a ‘Time Lag’ between the high rainfall and the peak discharge. A river with a short time lag and high discharge increases the danger of flooding.
Stretches of the Rhine have been straightened and banks heightened, cutting some 50 kilometers off the river’s 1,320 kilometer meander to the sea. This has doubled the speed of the water’s flow from Basel, at the Swiss border, to Rotterdam. Now, when there is heavy snow or rain upstream, water cascades down to flood at the mouth or half-way along, instead of soaking into marshes near its source.
Building hydro-electric power stations along much of the upper Rhine has increased the problem. Since the 1950s, the upper Rhine, along the French-German border, has been changed with the construction of 10 hydro-electric power stations. The ‘Power Project’ involved building a ‘new’ river parallel to the old Rhine and the construction of these H.E.P. stations created a deeper, faster Rhine.
Changes in farming practices have made fields less absorbent, as hedges and forests have been chopped down to create prairie farms. The drainage of swampy areas, and pumping out the ground water for irrigation purposes have dried out the land even further. The extensive network of cemented farm roads act as extra drainage channels.
(This module is a mixed bag, I admit it. And these are things that a Germanist like myself cannot pretend to know well. Still, when I contemplated the kinds of people we might meet on this voyage and the things they might be interested in and have expertise in, I felt we ought to talk about industry, banking, and finance, if possible. So I hope these topics will stimulate a discussion and I look forward to learning a great deal more about these and related topics.)
