The fact that Allianz’s chief executive, Kurt Schmitt, had been an early supporter of the Nazis, attending the dinner for Hitler at Goering’s Berlin villafn1 in February 1933 which raised over 2 million DM for the subsequent election campaign.
The fact that Schmitt, while continuing on Allianz’s board of directors, also became Hitler’s Reich economy minister on 29 June 1933, serving until January 1935.
The fact that Schmitt not only joined the Nazi Party but also became a member of the SS, and the ‘Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS’, a group which donated around 1 million DM a year to Himmler.
The fact that Allianz’s director general, Eduard Hilgard, was also head of the Reichsgruppe Versicherung (the Reich Association for Private Insurance), which worked to support the Nazi government and ensure that German insurance companies maximised profits between 1933 and 1945.
The fact that Hilgard, following Kristallnacht in November 1938, created a policy which blocked insurance payments to Jewish claimants for their destroyed property, and instead diverted these payments to the Nazi state responsible for the terror.
The fact that Allianz played a key role in financing the Nazi government, and used its position to become the leading insurer in all occupied countries.
The fact that Allianz insured not only the property, but also the personnel of Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, including the IG Farben staff at Auschwitz, and those involved directly in the implementaion of the Holocaust. Allianz inspectors were fully aware of the operations carried out at the camps, and continued to take payments for insurance policies throughout the war years.
I always think it is interesting to consider how these companies present themselves in recent advertisements when compared to their historical record.
Where today are the profits gained from these policies? Are they in the fabric of the headquarters building at Fritz-Schäffer-Strasse in Munich?fn2 Or in the salaries paid to its senior executives? Or can we see the result of the financial bonanza of the 1930s and 40s in the fact that eighty years later the company is operating in over seventy countries in the world and has a current annual revenue of €126.1 billion? Remember those words of Balzac, ‘The secret of great wealth is a forgotten crime.’
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Allianz is only one example of a corporation which made significant profits during the Third Reich. A myriad of German companies, and some international ones too, also benefited greatly from the twelve years of Nazi government. Let’s look for a moment at a single sector of the economy – that of banking and insurance. I recently learnt that Deutsche Bank, today one of the most powerful banks in Europe, established its position primarily in the twelve years of Nazism, when it quadrupled its wealth. Significant contributions to the bank’s early success was capital created from Aryanisations and forced purchases of Jewish companies. Hitler’s government built Auschwitz and IG Farben built the Buna plant at Monowitz with huge loans from Deutsche Bank. They were also the chosen bankers for the Gestapo. Yet how visible are these historical truths today?
And what about Deutsche Bank’s ‘sister’ company, Dresdner Bank?fn3 They too took a leading role in the Aryanisation of Jewish property and businesses. I learnt more from another (remarkably short) article in February 2006, this time buried deep within the Financial Times:
Dresdner Bank controlled a company that built Nazi concentration camps, funded the SS and was intimately connected to the economic infrastructure of Hitler’s Germany. Those are the broad conclusions of a 2,374 page analysis of Dresdner’s Nazi past, commissioned by the German bank, which was released last week. Dresdner, now part of the Allianz insurance group, owned 26 per cent of Huta, the construction company that built parts of the Auschwitz camp. There were also close connections between Dresdner directors and IG Farben, the company that made the gas for Jewish extermination camps.
Patrick Jenkins, Frankfurt
I am intrigued by that reference to ‘a 2,374 page analysis’ and what it tells us about visibility or invisibility. We have this vast analysis and yet the journalist, quite understandably, refers only to the ‘broad conclusions’ of the report. From the bank’s perspective, the sheer length of such a publication goes a long way to ensuring it will hardly be read at all. Or only by a handful of historians. And yet they would be very keen that the fact there are 2,374 pages is reported, as this demonstrates how thoroughly the bank has ‘come to terms with its difficult past’. They would also no doubt be delighted that reference to such a report is then buried in a couple of column inches deep inside the financial pages of the newspapers.
The sheer scale of complicity of banking and insurance companies with Nazi Germany defies the imagination. Between 1997 and 2001 it emerged that companies throughout Europe were incriminated. At first the charges were laid against Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank in Germany for their roles in the Holocaust – an $18 billion lawsuit was issued against Deutsche and Dresdner banks alone in July 1998. This lawsuit partly concerned the fact that both banks had bought huge quantities of gold from the Reichsbank during the war, some of which had come directly from the concentration camps and extermination camps – melted down often from the teeth of those murdered in the gas chambers, extracted by special squads of the Sonderkommando with pliers. A spokesman for the bank said that it ‘deeply regrets any injustices’ and that Deutsche Bank were in contact with the World Jewish Congress on this question.
And then the ripples spread wider. It soon became apparent that many of Europe’s most well-known banks had also tried to profit from the Holocaust:
The Swiss government and the two major Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse were forced to pay out $1.25 billion in 1998 in compensation for their roles in looting Jewish bank accounts and assets in the war.fn4
Creditanstalt and its parent company Bank Austria were also both involved in the illegal sale of Jewish assets. Compensation of $40 million was agreed in 1999.
Seven French banks were sued in 1998 for seizing the accounts of Jewish clients killed in the Holocaust, and subsequently not returning these assets to any surviving relatives. These banks were Banque Paribas, Crédit Lyonnais, Société Générale, Crédit Commercial de France, Crédit Agricole, Banque Française du Commerce Extérieur and Banque Nationale de Paris. In January 2001 these banks agreed to pay an undisclosed ‘substantial, multimillion-dollar sum’ into a compensation fund for relatives of these victims.
Barclays Bank also settled this case for compensation, as part of the above lawsuit, and agreed to pay $3.6 million to relatives of victims (whose accounts Barclays had appropriated in France) in December 1998.
Then, in 1999, attention switched to the international insurance industry, and all the companies in this sector which had profited from the Holocaust and not accepted their responsibility up to this point. The year before, in August, the International Commission on Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) had been established, a group comprising the six European insurance companies most heavily involved in compensation claims – Allianz from Germany, Generali of Italy, AXA of France and Winterthur and Zurich from Switzerland – Basler from Germany later withdrew from ICHEIC. These companies, together with the Claims Conference (co-ordinating ongoing German compensation for the Holocaust), the World Jewish Restitution Organisation and the Israeli government, formed the commission, which was chaired by former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Between 2000 and 2007 the insurance companies paid $550 million into the ICHEIC compensation fund, and $300.1 million was paid out in claims in the same period. This is the breakdown of payments into the fund by the culpable insurance companies across Europe: