Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
By David de Jong
William Collins, £25
I have owned a series of German cars over the years, starting with an ancient two-tone Volkswagen Beetle and including a couple of rather smart BMWs rather later. I hadn’t realised how they were linked, however tenuously, to both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels respectively until I read David de Jong’s painstaking and well-researched investigation into the rise, fall and rise again of five German family businesses – de Jong rightly prefers the term ‘dynasties’ – who threw in their lot with Hitler in the early 1930s, prospered mightily in Nazi Germany, especially during the war, and then got away with it in the post-war era.
Dutch by birth and now living in Tel Aviv, De Jong first became interested in the subject as a reporter for Bloomberg News in 2012 and has spent the last four years working on this book. Of the five dynasties he concentrates on, some are household names, others less well known, but all followed remarkably similar trajectories. They are the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks, the Porsche-Piechs, and the Oetkers. Günther Quandt, Goebbels’s wife Magda’s first husband, transformed the family textile business into one of the Third Reich’s leading arms suppliers; Friedrich Flick built up Germany’s biggest conglomerate, based on steel; Baron August von Finck was a leading banker and insurance mogul who thought Hitler had been “sent by God” to save Germany.
Although the family name has become synonymous with expensive sports cars, Ferdinand Porsche was the man behind the Volkswagen, the ‘people’s car’, the first model of which was presented to Hitler, wastefully, as he couldn’t drive; and Rudolf-August Oetker, the “Pudding Prince” heir to the Dr Oetker empire, a huge wartime food supplier to the Nazi forces, was also a keen member of the Waffen-SS.
