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Germany’s wealthiest industrial dynasties amassed huge fortunes by collaborating with the Third Reich, and although the companies that benefited most from the expropriations and forced laborers paid financial compensation, “they never assumed moral responsibility (…) nor did they have to acknowledge wrongdoing”, says journalist and writer David de Jong.
This is what De Jong tells in his book “Money and Power in the Third Reich,” published in Spanish by Principal, where he talks about “the hidden history” of the wealthiest dynasties in Germany, how they appropriated Jewish businesses, took over slave labor and manufactured weapons for Hitler’s army and how “the political interests of other countries helped these millionaires to go unpunished for their crimes.”
In a meeting with journalists in Madrid on Tuesday, De Jong explained how, when Hitler made his German rearmament project official in 1934, prominent industrialists benefited from expropriations as soon as the racial laws prohibiting Jews from owning property were enforced.
Initially under a legal guise but later as “pure plunder,” the expropriation policy was extended to Nazi-occupied territories in Europe and forced, and slave labor was established.
“It is estimated that between twelve and twenty million Europeans were part of this forced labor structure,” he says.
According to Jong, German companies’ collaboration with the Nazis had no consequences for them: “It didn’t cost them any money at least until May 1943, when the tables began to turn.”
During the ten years of Nazism, they had free workers, said the writer and journalist, pointing out how companies such as BMW received workforces from the Dachau concentration camp, Daimler-Benz from Buchenwald, or Dr. Oetker, Quandt, and Volkswagen from Neuengamme.
“This system was organized around sub-concentration camps, satellite camps which were built around the factories and the company itself bore the costs of their construction, and to which prisoners were taken. The companies paid the SS 6 marks for skilled workers and four marks for unskilled workers,” he said.
In an agreement signed in 1999, the German government and industry pledged a total of $5 billion in equal shares to compensate forced laborers, mostly from Eastern Europe, who until then had received no compensation. The author recalls that eighty companies paid 60 percent of the $2.5 billion they were entitled to.
But these companies “did not have to assume any guilt, any moral responsibility for what they had done, nor did they have to acknowledge wrongdoing. That’s what my book is about, that these companies have not yet owned up to their past, they don’t admit guilt, and they continue to maintain a certain whitewash,” De Jong said.
He does not accuse them of Nazi ideology during the 1930s: “for the most part they were pure opportunists, they were already among the richest families in Germany, they prospered during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Republic, in West Germany, in the reunified Germany and they prosper today,” emphasizes the writer, who assures that they would do so “under any system.”
For De Jong, the industrialist Friedrich Flick was “the biggest and worst opportunist” of those included in his book, “the only one of the industrialists featured in the book who was tried and convicted of crimes against humanity. Sentenced in 1947 to 7 years, he served only three years in prison. And in 1959, he was once again the wealthiest man in Germany.
