German Industry and the Third Reich
by S. Jonathan Wiesen
-
Introduction: The Complicity
of German Industry
-
German Business and the Nazis:
The East German View
-
German Business and the Nazis:
The Western Approach
-
German Businesses Defend
Themselves
-
American Writers Look at the
Issue
-
Conclusion: Addressing a
Shameful Record
1
Introduction: The Complicity of German
Industry
Six years ago, Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who
protected Jews working in his factory during World War II, became renowned
through the medium of the motion picture. For many Americans and Europeans,
the film Schindler's List (1993) was their first contact with the
subject of the Holocaust. While people of all ages were moved by Schindler's
genuine heroism, some found it revealing -- and somewhat frustrating -- that
it took, in effect, a "good German" to introduce the Holocaust to
the general public. And for those familiar in 1993 with the history of German
business during the Third Reich, the singularity of Oskar Schindler's courage
was particularly striking. The reality was that the great majority of German
businessmen behaved in a decidedly unheroic manner during the Nazi era. Most
of them, especially leaders of larger companies, not only refrained from
risking their lives to save Jews, but actually profited from the use of forced
and slave labor,1 the "Aryanization" of Jewish property,
and the plundering of companies in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Much has changed in six years. The point was driven home to me
recently when, on the first day of my German history class, two students
separately approached me, eager to present their ideas for a required research
paper. Both of them proposed the same topic in the same way: "something
to do with German companies and Nazism." The two students cited as their
motivation the stories about German business that have made their way on to
television and into newspapers in recent years: the flurry of class action
lawsuits brought by former forced and slave laborers against German companies
that exploited them during World War II; the current negotiations between
American officials and lawyers and German politicians and industrial
representatives over the establishment of a compensation fund for these
workers; "Nazi gold" and Swiss complicity; reports of European
insurance companies and banks that were involved in denying Jews their legal
and civil rights in the 1930s and even after the war. After 50 years of
relative ignorance about German industry's relationship to the Third Reich,
the subject has now reached a mass public around the world.
This is not to say that such interest is entirely new.
What I hope to demonstrate in the following pages is that since 1945 the issue
of German industrial complicity with Hitler has, in fact, engaged the
attention of academia and segments of the general public (in the U.S., Europe,
and especially East and West Germany) more than is currently assumed. However,
it is indeed true that the topic is only now receiving the attention it truly
deserves. Let us try to understand how we have reached this point.
2
German Business and the Nazis:
The East German View
After 1945, the Allied occupying forces in Germany not only
charged former Nazis with a host of war crimes and crimes against humanity,
but also tried to educate Germans and their own publics back home about what
they perceived to be the origins and particular characteristics of National
Socialism.
In the Soviet zone (later East Germany), overt anticapitalism
underpinned the "official" view that Hitler rose to and maintained
power primarily through the support of German industry. Communist writers
argued (incorrectly) that by bankrolling the Nazi party, powerful companies
like Krupp (steel and weaponry), I.G. Farben (chemicals and pharmaceuticals),
and Siemens (electronics) had undermined the fragile Weimar Republic.
Throughout the entire history of East Germany, the connection between fascism
and big business was a fundamental aspect of the country's ideology. Communist
writers, however, focused more on the years leading up to Hitler's assumption
of power in 1933, in order to reinforce East Germany's dogma about the dangers
of "finance" or "monopoly" capitalism. The relationship
between German big business and the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945 and the
ugly practices that all too many companies were guilty of during that period
-- labor exploitation, the Aryanization of Jewish property -- were of
considerably less interest to these writers. As the Cold War escalated, the
suffering inflicted on Jews and others by German industry became almost a
taboo subject in East Germany (though the ordeals endured by communist
"freedom fighters" were much celebrated). Indeed, the Holocaust
itself disappeared from most of the literature on National Socialism in East
Germany.
3
German Business and the Nazis:
The Western Approach
After World War II, many people in Germany's Western zones of
occupation, and in the United States, also argued that businessmen, even free
enterprise as a system, were responsible for Hitler's rise, his wars of
aggression, and his crimes against humanity. In 1947 and 1948, the communist
countries watched with bemusement as the United States, the preeminent
capitalist country, prosecuted dozens of executives of three of wartime
Germany's largest companies for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the
dock were directors of the Krupp and Flick (steel and coal) companies, both of
which had built weapons of war and had employed forced labor, and board
members of I.G. Farben, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant that had run a
synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz. During the trials at Nuremberg, the
American prosecutors were careful not to portray the proceedings as attacks on
the market economy, but rather as attempts to punish individuals who
had committed crimes. Nonetheless, it was clear that they had established a
strong link between German industry and all aspects of the Nazi economy and,
more specifically, between German business and the crimes of National
Socialism. The trials resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of a number
of important company owners and directors. Most prominently, Alfried Krupp von
Bohlen und Halbach, the sole owner of Krupp, was found guilty of employing
slave labor and plundering businesses in France and the Netherlands. Krupp was
stripped of all his property and business holdings and sentenced to 12 years
in prison.
After these trials, the American government's interest in the
prewar and wartime behavior of German industry abated -- until now. The long
lull can be explained primarily by Cold War considerations. As the fear of
Soviet communism grew, American and Western European leaders (political and
otherwise) became uneasy with the continued imprisonment of German
businessmen, influential figures who were perceived as integral to the
creation of a vigorous capitalist economy in West Germany. In January of 1951,
during the Korean War, those businessmen still in prison were released through
a declaration of clemency by the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J.
McCloy, and almost all of their assets were returned to them.
International tensions and political ideology also inevitably
affected how others in the West -- scholars, et al. -- approached the theme of
business complicity in the Third Reich. From the late 1940s until the
mid-1980s, it was, again, the years before 1933 that were the focal
point of debate, for Marxists wanted to prove and anti-Marxists wanted to
refute the claims that capitalism and fascism were linked. During the
prosperous years of economic growth, many West Germans and Americans,
particularly government and industrial leaders, were uncomfortable with this
debate, because they felt it dredged up a past that might tarnish the postwar
achievements of German companies and might reinforce the communist world's
anti-capitalism crusade.
4
German Businesses Defend Themselves
It is important to note that German companies themselves did
not simply ignore the debates over industrial guilt. Quite the contrary;
German businessmen took the lead in defending their own and their companies'
reputations. For the duration of the Cold War there existed, in West Germany,
an ongoing struggle between German industry's critics and the country's
largest companies, which strove by a variety of means to defend their
reputations. Business leaders used aggressive public relations methods to gain
the confidence of the national and international publics and, indeed, workers
within their own companies. While some writers produced pamphlets and
publications condemning the "return to power" of capitalist
criminals, companies hired journalists and historians in Germany and the U.S.
to write sympathetic corporate histories and to exonerate the companies from
accusations that they were involved in the Nazis' criminal activities. Much of
the work produced by these writers was, frankly, a whitewash. These histories
usually blamed Nazi leaders and the SS for drawing industry
"unwillingly" into reprehensible conduct. Clearly, big business was
not owning up to its compromised past.
Two examples will serve to illustrate how sensitive German
companies have been to reminders of their complicity with the Nazis. The first
concerns an autobiography written by Richard Willstätter, a Jewish Nobel
Prize-winning chemist (1915) who had been forced to flee Germany in 1939.2 Willstätter, who wrote his book while in exile in Switzerland, died in 1942.
In 1949 his memoirs were posthumously published, and executives of the Bayer
corporation, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, read with dismay a short
passage in which the scientist criticized Carl Duisberg, the company's late
director (and the founder of the chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben, of which
Bayer had been the cornerstone), for making anti-Semitic comments when Willstätter
resigned from the University of Munich in 1924. No one appears to have paid
any attention to Willstätter's criticism of Duisberg until Bayer began to
lobby the book's publisher to withdraw the work. One particular Bayer
director, retired executive and company scientist Heinrich Hörlein, launched
an all-out campaign to besmirch the reputation of Willstätter and promote the
reputations of Carl Duisberg and Bayer. Hörlein himself had been tried and
acquitted at the I.G. Farben trial in 1947, and bitterness probably prompted
him to take vigilant action on behalf of his firm. For a short while in 1949,
a debate broke out within the West German chemical industry about
anti-Semitism and the Nazi past. In much of the discussion, people ignored the
sad events of Willstätter's life, particularly the anti-Semitism he had
endured in the 1920s and 1930s, and instead focused on whether he had done
some great wrong by criticizing Carl Duisberg. In the end, Bayer and Hörlein
prevailed. In future editions and in an English translation of the memoirs,
publishers removed the disputed passages. Since 1949, the short-lived but
vitriolic campaign against Willstätter has been almost entirely forgotten.
Twenty-three years later, another controversy erupted over the
publication of a book critical of German industry. In 1972, a German satirist,
F. C. Delius, published (in Germany) a mock history of Siemens to coincide
with the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the company's founding.3 The book, Unsere Siemenswelt (Our Siemens World), was a fake
official company publication that proudly listed some of the famous electrical
company's numerous "accomplishments": the mistreatment of slave
laborers in its factories during World War II, the installation of the
crematoria at Auschwitz, etc. It was not immediately obvious that this book
was an unauthorized satire, and less than a month after its publication,
Siemens took legal action against Delius in an attempt to suppress his mocking
commentary on corporate guilt. Ironically, a series of depositions, trials,
and appeals drew attention to the conduct of Siemens during the Nazi years
(and initiated a debate within the literary community about the role of satire
in a democratic society). After three years of legal wrangling, a district
court and a provincial appeals court in Stuttgart determined that several of
the book's claims, including the Auschwitz assertion, were false, and ruled
that Delius's ideas, despite being presented as satire, were damaging to
Siemens. (The district court also thought it was suspicious that Delius's
evidence had been derived from "communist" publications.) Eventually
both parties reached a settlement, part of which stipulated that future
editions of the book could only be published with the controversial lines --
including the crematoria claim -- literally blacked out. The most recent
edition (1995) of this book still bears the legacy of this settlement: many
pages contain black bars concealing lines of text.
Delius has been vindicated in some ways. Contemporary scholars
are continuing to learn about the extent to which Siemens, and every major
German business in the Thirties and Forties, was implicated in the brutality
of Nazi economic policies, most egregiously through the abuse of forced and
slave laborers. Siemens ran factories at Ravensbrück and in the Auschwitz
subcamp of Bobrek, among others, and the company supplied electrical parts to
other concentration and death camps. In the camp factories, abysmal living and
working conditions were ubiquitous: malnutrition and death were not uncommon.
Recent scholarship has established how, despite German industry's repeated
denials, these camp factories were created, run, and supplied by the SS in
conjunction with company officials -- sometimes high-level employees.
5
American Writers Look at the Issue
Until recently, most of the controversies about German
industry and the Nazis surfaced in West Germany, not in the United States. To
be sure, for many decades some Americans refused to buy German products,
particularly automobiles made by Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler-Benz. But
American writers, from the mid-1950s to 1968, did not publish much about
German corporate complicity. This changed somewhat with the publication in
1968 of William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp,4 a 950-page
book about Germany's "royal family" of armaments manufacturers, a
family whose company produced weapons during many conflicts, including the
First and Second World Wars. Though Manchester had gotten some of his facts
wrong, he did reveal how the suffering of many individuals during the Second
World War was the result of the conduct of Germany's major industries. His
damning revelations, combined with his hyperbolic style, rankled the German
business world (particularly, of course, Krupp) to such an extent that after
1968 companies were more reluctant than ever to allow outside scholars into
their archives to research the Nazi period. (How reluctant were these
businesses to cooperate with independent historians before the
publication of The Arms of Krupp? Here is a telling anecdote. After the
book was published, Manchester recalled how the company and the residents of
Essen -- the site of Krupp's headquarters -- kept close watch on him as he
carried out his research in that city. He even claims to have caught a Krupp
employee rifling through his papers as he entered his hotel room one day.5)
Despite German industry's lack of cooperation, academics and
others continued in the 1970s and early 1980s to scrutinize and debate German
business guilt. The debates became volatile at times. In 1981 the Princeton
historian David Abraham published The Collapse of the Weimar Republic.6 The book, which was initially well received in academia, sought to demonstrate
a connection between "organized capitalism" and the rise of the Nazi
party during the Great Depression. While Abraham avoided the simplistic
equation of capitalism and fascism, his structuralist-Marxist approach could
not accommodate the findings of the Yale historian Henry Turner, whose prior
articles (and his later book7) successfully disproved the
suggestion that German industry, before 1933, supported Hitler to any great
extent, either financially or ideologically. When researchers checked the
accuracy of Abraham's evidence, they found a number of serious errors in his
footnotes. Abraham cited documents that did not exist and turned paraphrases
into quotes. The controversy eventually became less concerned with the role of
industry in the downfall of Germany's first democracy than with a scholar's
use and misuse of sources, and with how historians' politics and ideological
leanings affect their research and their response to others' works. However,
what also emerged from the angry exchanges, in my opinion, was a more nuanced
picture than had existed before of pre-1933 industrial behavior in Germany. It
became clear that despite some financial links between individual
industrialists and the Nazi party, big business did not, to use the German
phrase, "in den Sattle heben" ("lift Hitler into the
saddle"). On the other hand, German industralists did little to help
salvage the crumbling Weimar democracy during the Nazis' ascendancy in the
early 1930s.
The "Abraham Affair," for all intents and purposes,
marked the end of scholarly debates about German business and National
Socialism before 1933. Researchers, with the cooperation of some corporations,
now turned their attention to German industry's behavior after 1933. They
examined the relationship between businesses and mass murder and attempted to
understand the motivations of individuals like the executives of I.G. Farben,
whose company worked people to death in Auschwitz.8 The research
that emerged from these scholarly inquiries indicated that German
industrialists in the Thirties and Forties weren't, by and large, ideologues
as much as opportunists; it was their eagerness for profits that led them to
participate in a number of heinous endeavors: securing control of Jewish-owned
companies, producing war matériel for the Wehrmacht, exploiting forced and
slave laborers.
6
Conclusion: Addressing a Shameful Record
Some businessmen, it is true, resisted the demands of the Nazi
regime; some, like Oskar Schindler, protected Jews; some even allied
themselves with the anti-Nazi underground. But there were relatively few such
people. Greed drove all too many "apolitical businessmen" to engage
in odious conduct. This behavior, however, was not an exclusive function of
capitalism. Rather, it was the result of the social and political realities
that existed in the Third Reich. Most industrialists were opportunists who saw
the occupation of Europe and the Nazis' persecution of the Jews as a chance to
enrich themselves and their companies. Undoubtedly, latent and overt
anti-Semitism, anti-Slavic sentiments, and German nationalism also allowed
some industrialists to work with the regime out of a sense of patriotism, and
without ever reflecting upon the moral boundaries they were crossing. Fear and
the desire for self-protection were also important factors motivating
businessmen. (Indeed, few Germans demonstrated the courage to speak out
against the Nazi regime. Finally, as the war escalated, the desire to merely
survive into the postwar period prompted many companies to take advantage of
concentration camp labor.9 The point is that industrial behavior
under Nazism cannot be reduced to simple structural explanations. Even within
the context of a dictatorship that demanded high levels of production for war,
industrialists made choices as individuals. They approached the SS for cheap
labor; they decided whether to buy a Jewish company at a fraction of its
value; they determined how forced and slave laborers would be treated in their
factories.
Today, companies are finally addressing this shameful record.
Since the unification of Germany in 1990, increasing numbers of German
businesses -- Volkswagen, Krupp, DaimlerChrysler, to name a few -- are
allowing scholars to study their archives. Why the change? The end of the Cold
War has greatly reduced the fear in many companies that the dissemination of
information about German industry's relationship with the Nazi regime will
somehow undermine the contemporary German economy. And no doubt a fair amount
of political calculation -- even desperation motivates most of the
businesses assisting scholars. "Candor" is seen as a good public
relations ploy when a company is sued by former forced and slave laborers.
With few exceptions, I personally have been treated quite magnanimously by the
large German companies -- Krupp, Siemens and Bayer -- whose assistance I have
sought for my own research. Some businesses have been quite open in their
discussions with me about their use of slave labor and about National
Socialism, even though they would rather not have their names splashed across
the headlines.
The decision by certain businesses to actually pay historians
to research their past, has, however, sparked some recent controversies. Since
late 1998, there has been a running debate between the British historian
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky and several scholars who have written or are in the
process of writing company-sponsored histories. Pinto-Duschinsky has suggested
that these scholars have compromised themselves by accepting money from
organizations they are writing about.10 In my opinion, Pinto-Duschinsky's
accusation is unjustified. The many historians who are now looking not only
into German corporate behavior, but that of American companies like Ford and
General Motors -- both of which had subsidiaries in Nazi Germany -- have
established their credentials as rigorous scholars who are not afraid to
expose the ugly facts about forced and slave labor, and corporate opportunism
during the Nazi era. I believe it is unfair to accuse these historians of
somehow "selling out."
Undoubtedly, as noted, German business's new openness has been
influenced by the lawsuits initiated in the past few years by former forced
and slave laborers. Moreover, the German and American publics are following
the negotiations over the establishment of a joint German government and
industry fund to compensate slave and forced laborers who are still alive.
This, too, is a factor in the decision of many German businesses to be more
forthcoming about their past. (German companies have been sued before by
individuals who were forced and slave laborers during the Second World War. In
the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Conference on Material Claims Against
Germany, an organization representing Jewish Holocaust survivors, approached
Germany's major companies -- Siemens, Krupp, Rheinmetall, and others -- and
requested compensation for people they had abused during the war. Several
years of acrimonious negotiations and corporate stubbornness eventually
yielded meager payments for some Jewish victims. The companies involved
disingenuously portrayed their grudging recompense as a generous gesture of
good will.11 Today, hundreds of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish
survivors of forced and slave labor -- many of them from former communist
countries -- who were not covered by these earlier settlements, are seeking
compensation.)
The current fund negotiations and lawsuits have,
unfortunately, brought about some disturbing developments. Some Germans have
made anti-Semitic remarks about the plaintiffs in the lawsuits. They have also
intimated that the plaintiffs' attorneys are greedy opportunists, who are
seeking to make money off of the suffering of old and dying Holocaust
survivors. This kind of reprehensible rhetoric must, of course, be monitored,
and condemned whenever encountered.
Moreover, some German politicians and industrialists are
intent on portraying themselves and German companies as the victims of unfair
legal demands. (This view is not new in Germany. During the Cold War, West
German industrialists often felt they were being persecuted by critics who
pressed them to account for their companies' past misdeeds.) Earlier this
year, the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, referred to the lawsuits by
former coerced workers as "a campaign being led against German industry
and our country."12 There is still a long way to go before the
great majority of German business leaders and politicians acknowledge the full
extent of German industrial complicity in the Holocaust. But there has been progress.
A German commentator recently bemoaned the fact that the more
positive developments pertaining to these issues have not received enough
media attention in Europe or the United States. Certainly, businesses must be
credited for their new openness. Individual companies, like Volkswagen, have
been quietly establishing their own foundations to pay former forced and slave
laborers. But corporations currently being sued are probably hoping that
positive news stories, financial settlements and company biographies will
swiftly consign the subject of German industry's complicity with Hitler to a
kind of limbo. This, however, is wishful thinking. The theme of corporate
complicity will remain in the news for many years to come. It is not so easy
to bury the past; companies cannot do so simply by acknowledging their
behavior during the Nazi era. Moreover, it is inevitable now that damning new
facts will emerge. It remains to be seen what companies and the publics of
various countries do with this information.
1 Historians, politicians,
industrialists, and attorneys are now struggling with the distinction between
"slave labor" and "forced labor." There is by no means a
consensus on how the terms should be differentiated, but in recent
discussions, the category of "slave laborers" has come to include
all Jews who worked in death camps, concentration camps, and other work camps
in Nazi-occupied Europe. In most cases, industry's use of slave laborers was
in keeping with the SS's intention to eventually work these particular Jews to
death. "Forced laborers," on the other hand, included anyone who was
compelled to leave his or her home in order to work for Nazi Germany. These
are hardly precise distinctions.
2 Richard Willstätter, Aus Mein Leben:
Von Arbeit, Musse und Freunden (Munich: Verlag Chemie, 1949); the English
edition is Willstätter, From My Life (New York: W.A. Benjamin, 1965).
3 F. C. Delius, Unsere Siemenswelt:
Eine Festschrift zum 125jährigen Bestehen des Hauses S. (Berlin: Rotbuch
Verlag, 1972).
4 William Manchester, The Arms of
Krupp (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968).
5 William Manchester, William
Manchester Discusses The Arms of Krupp with Columnist Robert Cromie (Tucson: Motivational Programming Corporation, 1969).
6 David Abraham, The Collapse of the
Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1981).
7 Henry A. Turner, German Big Business
and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford: University Press, 1985).
8 See Peter Hayes, Industry and
Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987).
9 On the use of forced and slave labor by
business to keep factories running, see Neil Gregor, Daimler-Benz in the
Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
10 Michael Pinto-Duschinsky,
"Selling the Past," Times Literary Supplement (October 23,
1998): 16-17.
11 See Benjamin Ferencz, Less Than
Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979).
12 "German Companies Set Up
Fund for Slave Laborers under Nazis," New York Times (February 17,
1999)
Sources: Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies, Volume 13, Number 2. Copyright Anti-Defamation League
(ADL). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
S. Jonathan Wiesen, an assistant professor of modern European history at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, teaches courses on modern German history and the Holocaust. He is the author of the book, Reconstruction and Recollection: West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past (University of North Carolina Press) |