Nazis All The Way Down E-Book

Katharina Gallant

• Herausgeber: Westend Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 391

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

In Deutschland ist das alltägliche Leben, einschließlich Unternehmen, Verbänden, Kommunalverwaltungen, Parks, Schulen, Kirchen und Medien, immer noch von den Nazi-Verbrechen belastet, die im öffentlichen Bewusstsein nicht anerkannt werden. Das sagen Zachary und Katharina F. Gallant, die die derzeitige deutsche Praxis des Gedenkens an die Verbrechen des Nationalsozialismus kritisieren, weil sie die Stimmen und die Handlungsfähigkeit der Opfergruppen ausgeklammert. In ihrem Buch fordern sie eine "Entnazifizierung 2.0", die darin besteht, das Vermögen der deutschen Unternehmen und Familien zu enteignen, die direkt mit den Naziverbrechen in Verbindung gebracht werden können, um dieses enteignete Kapital zur Bewältigung der dringendsten Katastrophen unserer Zeit einzusetzen.

Leseprobe

Ebook Edition

Zachary Gallant Katharina F. Gallant

Nazis All the Way Down

The Myth of the Moral Modern Germany

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ISBN: 978-3-98791-017-3

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Umschlaggestaltung: Buchgut, Berlin

Satz: Publikations Atelier, Dreieich

Dedication

The tapestry of Jewish life and peoplehood is rich, it’s not just rabbis, doctors, lawyers and bankers, and it’s not just tragic heroes and righteous victims. This book is dedicated not simply to the survivors, but to the unstoppable. The Nazi Hunters, the rebels like Albert Einstein, Dr. Ruth, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Helga Newmark, Henry Morgentaler, Hannah Arendt, John Slade, Simone Veil, and even Henry Kissinger, Paul Gelb, Max Eisenhardt, and Abba Kovner, and so many others who refused to let the Nazis win and refused to be defined by their victim status.

Zachary Gallant holds an M.A. in International Politics from the University of London’s Goldsmiths College and a Fulbright Scholarship in post-conflict redevelopment in the former Yugoslavia. He has been running antidiscrimination and climate justice projects throughout Germany since 2015, funded by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and by the European Union. He is a former board member of the American Jewish Congress (MD Chapter) and has taught at universities across Europe on identity, ethnicity, migration, economic injustice, and concepts of Jewishness.

Dr. Katharina F. Gallant is a senior researcher at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn. Her research as an ethnologist and psychologist covers interculturality and interethnic conflict, from the treatment of Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe to the roles of the indigenous and African American minorities in North and Latin America. She has lectured at universities in Germany and Austria on interethnic conflict, interculturality, peaceful coexistence, postmodern society, and development cooperation. She served as a member of the Unkel City Council from 2019 until 2021.

This book started as a simple investigation, but morphed into an ethical examination of Germany as a whole through honest but difficult conversations between Zachary and Katharina, and with numerous ethicists, economists, historians, and humanitarians. In addition to Middle Eastern rabbis, Zachary traces his Jewish roots to shtetls that were wiped out during the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe, as well as to Jews who fled to the United States before the Nazis took power. Katharina can trace her roots both to co-conspirators in the 1944 plot against Hitler, and to generals in the Wehrmacht who led their platoons at exactly those places where Zachary’s ancestors once lived. Jewish perspectives in the book are Zachary’s, as Katharina does not presume to have a voice there, but these specifically Jewish issues have all been discussed with rabbis and other Jewish humanitarians to ensure that they represent a broader Jewish perspective. This book is a loving, peaceful cooperation between these two histories in the hopes of finding a strategy toward a true reconciliation at a higher level. We hope that this end product can be seen as a first step towards a »dialogue in difference« between Jews and Germans, and a first step toward truly overcoming Germany’s overwhelming Nazi legacy.

Contents

Cover

Introduction: Turtles and Nazis

Section I: The Roots of Modern Germany

Everyday Germans

Snowflakes and Avalanches

“If You Want to Read the Future, You Have to Leaf Through the Past”17

EDEKA

Melitta

Bahlsen

Dr. Oetker

Vorwerk

Tempo

Wishful thinking

Henkel’s Persilschein46

Henkel – A Family in Unkel and Their Profits from the Nazi Era

What Was Denazification, Really?

Were There Any Willing Nazis at All?

The Real McCloy: The Role of the US and UK in Non-Denazification

Eastern Denazification

Reparations – Individual or Structural?

Villains and Heroes

Section II: “Memorial Theater”

Never Forget193

Aufarbeitung Without the Jews

The International Significance of German Aufarbeitung

What Makes a Jew a Jew?

Societies That Have Begun to Hear Non-Dominant Voices

Nestbeschmutzer ********

Section III: All the Way Down

Municipal Complicity

Brown Foundations

Political Influence342

The New German Nationalism

“Who Controls the Past, Controls the Future. Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past”:358 The Nazi History of Modern German Publishers

The Reichsbahn Today

Coming Home

Counterargument – Underneath the Turtles?

Artists

Music

Philosophy and Academia

Churches

Science

Sustainability

Hitler as the Only Turtle?

Section IV: Conclusion

How Much Are We Really Talking Here?

Reform as a Moral, not Legal, Obligation

Denazification 2.0 – Germany Saves the World

Acknowledgments

Landmarks

Cover

Table of Contents

Introduction: Turtles and Nazis

The title of this book, Nazis All the Way Down, is a provocative proclamation, so we will start by saying that we have a great deal of love and respect for German colleagues, German family members, German friends, and indeed much of German society, and are not accusing any individual German of Nazism.* When, shortly before this book went to print, a storm damaged our house, the first person who came out to help us, as the storm had barely passed, was our 70-year-old German neighbor in his wooden workmen’s shoes, helping us sort through splintered wood and repair what was salvageable. It didn’t matter to him where we came from, it didn’t matter the color of our skin, hair or eyes: He saw a neighbor in need, and he saw it as his duty to help. Time and again, we have seen our German friends and neighbors put themselves out there for others, German and non-German alike. We’re not talking about the individuals when we talk about Nazis today. It’s the difference between “Nazis everywhere!”, which would be calling individual Germans Nazis, and “Nazis all the way down,” which is institutional, systemic.

Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest thinkers of our times, relates in his 1988 work A Brief History of Time the story of an astronomer giving a lecture:

“At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’”1

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited a similar story in an opinion on a legal case, though in his version the Earth is supported on the back of a tiger, and the tiger in turn is standing on the back of an elephant, and the elephant is standing on a turtle, or indeed, infinite turtles.2

The point of the turtles is this: There is the world we see, the Earth. Under the world we see, there is the world that we know supports the world we see: our institutions; in Scalia’s version: the tiger. Under that is the world we believe we understand; a world we cannot actually see but that we know is there, supporting the institutions that keep our world standing. This underlying world is Scalia’s elephant. And under all that are the turtles, the recursive basis of society, under which nothing else exists.

So, what do turtles have to do with Nazis? Over the past half-century, Germany has gained a global reputation for dealing honestly with the crimes of the Nazi era. This process, generally known as Aufarbeitung, is, on its surface, the systematic working through of history, the admission of individual and systemic guilt for the genocide against the Jews as well as against other individuals (e. g., political enemies) and groups (e. g., Roma and Sinti) whom the Nazi regime sought to eliminate for various reasons. It is the national apology: not just a one-off, not just lip service, but perpetual and eternal. You mean it, and you keep meaning it, forever. Your national actions are, if not governed by, at least ever mindful of your national guilt, pursuing an agenda of “Never again” committing the same crime against any group. Additionally, you take special care to protect from further harm, in any form, the specific group(s) your nation has previously victimized.

This process, admittedly focused on Jews, has been the social centerpiece of modern Germany; a multi-decade-effort following the ostensible Denazification of Germany at the founding period of the Federal Republic of Germany, the post-Nazi West German state.** It involved public discussion of the role of everyday Germans, as well as non-Nazi-affiliated institutions such as churches and even literary and academic figures, in the rise of the Nazi regime leading to the Holocaust, or Shoah.*** It turned into, through the next generation known as the 68ers, a full political and social review of national privilege and of personal, familial, and national narratives.

Aufarbeitung continues today, with, among other things, brass cobblestones (Stolpersteine) laid in front of the houses where victims of the Shoah lived, upon which are inscribed their names, year of birth, and year and location of death. By 2023, there should be some 100,000 of these stones throughout Europe, the vast majority in Germany.3 This is in addition to the construction of massive Shoah memorials in many cities, over 300 memorials across the country, and the Shoah and the horrors of Nazism being taught in-depth in schools. The theme first enters the mainstream curriculum of German schools in ninth grade (15 to 16 years old) in history, politics, religion/ethics, and even literature classes.4 Classes are moreover encouraged to visit former concentration camps to get an up-close understanding of the subject.5 However, there is also a movement in favor of teaching about the Shoah as early as fourth grade (ten years old).6

Unlike Poland, Croatia, Romania, or even France or the Netherlands, Germany has critically reflected on its Nazi past and created a whole new identity founded on never ever repeating it. By and large, Germany does not seek to be released from this history, which is exceptional among national apologies. The day when the Germans cease to live in the shame of the cold-blooded slaughter of six million Jews due to the simple fact of their ethnic heritage is hard to imagine.

What is exemplary in Germany (though this is unfortunately shifting in the 2020s) is the complete acceptance of that shame, that guilt. Living in the knowledge of the guilt of one’s nation and accepting that guilt not as a burden, but as a responsibility: this is a phenomenon unprecedented elsewhere in the Global North, and it puts a damper on the toxic nationalism that poisons so many countries.

This is how Germany views its own modern, post-1945 identity. This surface exploration is also the reason why many Jewish scholars and activists in the United States promote German Aufarbeitung as a model for dealing with America’s own racist history. This is the world, riding on the tiger. Yet this surface understanding ignores a plethora of factors like international pressures and the racism inherent in Aufarbeitung itself which become evident if we explore a bit deeper to find the elephant. And below the elephant, in certain very important areas, Auf­ar­bei­tung has been actively prevented from taking place, leaving something festering at the root of German society. Although there are many in Germany who take Aufarbeitung to heart and use it to make German society and politics more ethical, this active hindrance of Aufarbeitung at the root level reduces the rest of Aufarbeitung to a hypocritical mask, whitewashing some of history’s most heinous crimes.**** This book will peel away that mask to show what truly lies underneath Germany’s moral modern façade.

Section I: The Roots of Modern Germany

Everyday Germans

We sit comfortably in the dining room of our little house in a small town in the Rhineland at the pretty antique table that has been in our family since the late 1930s. On it are a few cups of steaming coffee, which we quickly bought at the EDEKA supermarket this morning and have now brewed with a filter from the coffee company Melitta. Next to the coffee cups are two bowls of cookies for snacking: for the adults, Butterblätter, the cookies with the beautiful oak leaf shape, and for the children, chocolate-covered Leibniz butter cookies, both from the cookie company Bahlsen. On the table are also two national newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, so that we can get two different perspectives on the news and feel that we’re not being manipulated by any one side. Also on the table is The Big Dr. Oetker Baking Book.*****It’s getting a bit dated, having been published back in 1983, but occasionally we still like to leaf through it when we’re looking for sweet culinary inspiration – which of course we can prepare much more easily today with our Thermomix kitchen machine from Vorwerk – or remember the fragrant Bundt cake that grandma used to bake when we were kids. At the thought of our recently deceased grandmother, a tear rolls down our cheek, which we quickly wipe away with a Tempo-brand tissue.7

Follow now the children from this scene, on their way along the town’s cobblestone streets, kept historically accurate by the local historical association, past the sports field where they’ll practice soccer later in the week, kept clean by the sporting association.

On their way down those streets, they pass a bronze plaque dedicated to “Jewish fellow citizens” which tells the story of the synagogue that was burnt down on November 10, 1938. The children attended the commemorative event at this spot on the anniversary of the pogrom last year, where dozens of residents gathered to tell the stories of the trials and tribulations, and in the end the deaths of the town’s Jews. Residents acknowledge that these crimes were not perpetrated just by top Nazis, but that it was townspeople, neighbors in fact, who actively participated in these crimes or at least willingly let them happen. As one Jewish leader in Germany said, “you’re more likely to win the lottery than meet a Jew in Germany,” 8 and the children have never met a Jew themselves, but through these events and plaques, they know the history of their hometown’s last Jews.

The children then arrive at their school, supported by the local school’s booster club. After school, they stop by to swing on the playground at the newly renovated local park, named for one of the town’s local patrons, before getting on the Deutsche Bahn train to go to choir practice at the church the next town over. After singing, the kids then head home to a house where the parents pay surprisingly low rent to a German couple whose family has owned this home since 1939, and who rents low to make sure that a nice family like theirs can afford it.

It’s a lovely little snapshot of life in a small German town. While this snapshot was inspired by the town where we spent nearly a decade, living just that kind of life, and it’s the town that is the main focus in this book, it could really be any town in western or southern Germany. That scene is the world we see, and it looks innocent enough. Even the focus on the Shoah history here fits, as such plaques and events do play a significant role in modern German life, nearly on par with the visibility of those companies, associations, and institutions mentioned before and after. But of course, the companies mentioned were not chosen arbitrarily.******Those companies all have a sinister Nazi history, and when the German Federal Republic was founded upon the ruins of Nazi Germany in 1949, the crimes of the Nazi years were not simply erased.

Snowflakes and Avalanches

When we began this research, we truly believed we’d just stumbled upon a singular case of a family who had profited from Nazi crimes, and that we were working to help our local community to deal honestly with the past. Our subject was the family and company Henkel, from whose philanthropy we had personally benefitted. We reached out to famous historians, and some of them, especially Peter Hayes, former Chair of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, responded and ended up guiding our research in ways we’d never expected.

The deeper we dug, the more horrible every aspect became, and the more interconnected. Henkel ended up linked to crimes we’d never considered due to cooperation with other Nazi enterprises and through the trade of assets stolen from Jews, as this book describes. And as we learned which threads to pull, we discovered that companies like Adidas and dozens of others could be linked through correspondence with other companies to some of the most brutal murders committed at Auschwitz.

As we continued to dig, we learned that Henkel wasn’t alone in not having dealt with its history. But what was worse, we discovered that in the numerous cases of companies and families who had commissioned studies about their Nazi crimes and histories, these studies had rarely if ever resulted in a systemic reform or restitution. As we tried to sweep away the snow from the peaks of Mt. Henkel to uncover what we assumed was a single case of failed denazification, those snowflakes landed on other nearby peaks, and they unsettled the pristine landscape there. We originally published these findings as a case study on Henkel,9 in which we do our best to untangle the family’s and company’s ties to the Nazi era. While we also attempted to discuss what our findings mean for the place Jews have in Germany today, a more in-depth analysis of the Nazi ties of major players in the German economy was clearly beyond the scope of this case study. Yet looking beyond Henkel was unavoidable and morally necessary. Thus, we left behind the borders of our original case study, allowing for this particular snowball sampling to show the extent of Henkel’s Nazi-related network. In so doing, snowflakes became compacted into snowballs, then into little snowslides, before they all met together to form what could be seen as an avalanche.

We found household supplies like those fabricated by Henkel were connected to other prominent companies in the same field, as well as to companies in food production or household appliances, clothing and footwear, leading companies in mobility, industrial technology, energy technology or logistics, in addition to pharmaceutical giants, the world of publishing, entire supermarket corporations, and core players of the German financial sector – to give just a brief overview. While some of these companies remain family businesses to this day, others have long been turned into stock corporations with little or no involvement of the founding families. Other institutions like renowned banks or federally owned enterprises fall into neither of these two categories. Yet, what unites the snowflakes and snowballs piling up in this book is their link to the Nazi era and the German genocide against the Jews in such a way that the persecution and death of Jews and other minorities allowed these companies to build up a fortune which many of them use to shape German society to this day.

These profits do not stop with the companies mentioned in the following chapters. They are not limited to products, brands, and companies with an obvious German name or entirely German ownership. For the best example we can imagine, we turn to the Thomas Built Bus company. What could be more American than these ubiquitous yellow school buses? Well, Thomas Built Bus company has been owned since 199810 by Nazi profiteer company Daimler Trucks.11 According to Thomas Built’s own website, “Thomas Built Buses … is the leading manufacturer of school buses in North America, with a 37 % share of the conventional school bus market.”12 Every time a school district in North America needs new buses, there’s a high chance the contract is going to companies associated with Nazi profiteers. Similarly, there is VW, whose origin is directly associated with Hitler’s intention to create a German car for Germans, which heavily relied on forced labor (both Jewish and non-Jewish), and which “operated four concentration camps on eight forced-labor camps on its property.”13 VW owns quintessentially Italian brands Lamborghini and Ducati, as well as Bentley,14 a cornerstone of British automotive culture, while equally British brands Rolls Royce and Mini Cooper are owned by BMW,15 the company of Nazi-profiteer Herbert Quandt.16 It’s not just impossible to avoid engaging with Nazi profiteers in Germany, but also globally.

The Nazi taint is so systemic, once you budge a single case, the rest simply follow. Once you explore one aspect of daily life in Germany, you can’t help but see the traces of the crimes all around you. We recommend reading all the way through, as watching the avalanche develop is breathtaking. We’ve done our best to control the Snowball Effect and keep the narrative organized, despite the abundance of horrible information.

From a short exploration of the Nazi histories of numerous German products, we dig deeper into Henkel and the Henkel family’s local philanthropy. We then explore what Denazification was, and what it wasn’t, and the idea of “reparations” and whether Germany ever paid them, before shedding light on the mainstream German heroization of war criminal industrialists. Building off of this, we show why Germany’s dealing with its history should not be a model for other countries, how victimized groups are treated not as equals but as tokens of an extinguished people, Germany’s lack of interest in doing better, and examples of countries who have made much greater strides in dealing with their historic crimes.

In the end, we reveal how Nazi money continues to influence German society, from local governments to national political parties, from NGOs to sports teams, from the press to home ownership, and everything in between. We highlight how celebrated aspects of German culture, which at first seem unrelated to the country’s Nazi history, can indeed be linked to this very same part of Germany’s past and we drill down on the actual US Dollar/Euro figure of how much of the German economy is built on Nazi profits, and how this signifies an imbalance in favor of German interests at the expense of the interests of the victims of the Nazis over the past ninety years. And ultimately, we propose a solution, a way to truly remove the Nazi stain from Germany.

Not all themes will interest all readers. Yet all of these themes are interconnected, coming together to create a modern Germany that is still thoroughly tainted by the profits of Nazism and has created a mere façade of historical responsibility, without actually learning from the past. The fact is, the shortcomings of Germany’s “Culture of Remembrance” has a great deal to teach other countries, and is highly relevant for how other groups deal with their histories of violence, colonialism, war and genocide (often as a cautionary tale). And the specifics of how these companies made their fortunes through mass murder and then managed to keep their power after the fall of Hitler’s regime is especially interesting in the context of other global companies who similarly survived after the end of slavery and colonialism with their profits still intact.

We recommend reading the entirety, watching the entire avalanche in all its strange, terrible glory. But of course, the choice is yours.

“If You Want to Read the Future, You Have to Leaf Through the Past”17

In the following pages, we will go through the companies named in the snapshot above to explore their involvement. Nonetheless, as we describe the crimes of Nazi profiteers, we want to avoid spending more time than absolutely necessary describing people whose names should be resigned to the dustbin of history. For this reason, these Nazi histories will be kept as short as possible, to give you a grasp of the scope of the contamination without further biographizing the villains.

It is important to note here, we primarily use the term “Nazism” to describe the crimes committed by Germany, Germans, and collaborators with Hitler’s regime in the first half of the 20th century, including those supportive of Hitler’s ideology in the decade before he came to power, and we use the term “Nazi” to describe the individuals. We do this for multiple reasons. First, because the terminology is almost surreally complex if you let it be. NSDAP is the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which is generally known as the Nazi Party. National Socialism is a far-right political ideology, a form of fascism which in fact oppressed and murdered socialists. Second, we do this because it reads more easily, especially when we are describing a system that is so thoroughly tainted by Nazi crimes that it barely makes a difference who was an official member, who was a non-member but profiteer, and who was a non-member but active accomplice: It’s all Nazis to us. In certain examples, we may choose to use “National Socialist” or “NSDAP” to highlight a specific element of the story, but in a certain reading, the repeated use of these terms seems to take the viciousness away from the crimes, and thus we generally stick with “Nazi.” The final reason is specifically that the word “Nazi” was an insult, a word that basically meant “ignorant yokels,” and the Nazis did not like being called Nazis. What better reason to use it?

Then again, the majority of Jews and English-speakers today use the term “Kristallnacht” to refer to the pogroms that destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues, and cemeteries on November 9 and 10, 1938, an event seen by many historians as the kick-off of what was to become the so-called Final Solution, the Shoah. Outside of Germany, “Kristallnacht” is the established agreed-upon terminology, for this event, such that, four years before he would become the US Vice President and 18 years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Al Gore drew a parallel between the Nazi destruction of Jewish life and climate change. Roughly 50 years after Kristallnacht, Al Gore titled an op-ed article in the New York Times in which he warned about deforestation and ozone depletion “An Ecological Kristallnacht,”18 the event that ushers in an ecological Holocaust. Nevertheless, the term itself is controversial in that it was created by the Nazis as a way of idealizing the destruction, focused on the crystals of broken glass from the smashed windows of Jewish shops and homes. Given that Germany is the country of the perpetrators of these crimes, it shows a sensitivity to the issue that Germans today prefer to use “Reichspogromnacht,” or the Night of the Reich Pogrom, or even just “The November Pogrom” in order not to use Nazi terminology. For this book, we, too, will be using “November Pogrom” when discussing this book, in a bow to German sensibilities.

Back to the companies mentioned in our little scenic snapshot. Historian Lutz Budraß refers to three criteria for a company to have been particularly involved in the crimes of Nazism: the involvement of these companies in Aryanizations (the economic expropriation of Germany’s Jewish population between 1933 and 1945),19 the use of Jewish forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners, and the appropriation of businesses in occupied territories.20 Let’s see how our snapshot stacks up.

EDEKA

We took the title of this chapter “If you want to read the future, you have to leaf through the past” directly from the preface of a book on the history of the cooperatively organized EDEKA supermarket group, one of Germany’s largest supermarket chains,21 and currently its fastest growing.22 Founded in 1898 by a group of 21 sellers of “colonial goods” in Berlin, Fritz Borrmann, one of these founders, became General Director in 1921. Borrmann had joined the Nazi Party in 1933,23 but was succeeded in 1937 by Paul König, who remained EDEKA’s chief operating officer until 1966. The association’s own publication24 shows König’s active role in spreading Nazi propaganda, especially in denying the regime’s disenfranchisement of the Jews. The same publication also admits that, as part of the Aryanizations, EDEKA took over three Jewish wineries, and at least two of the Jewish victims from whom EDEKA plundered assets did not survive the Shoah. EDEKA had not only profited directly from the Aryanizations, but had also used the Anschluss of Austria and the Sudetenland to increase its sales. Given the company’s refusal to pay damages to the descendants of their victims in the post-war period, no evidence can be found of any corporate or personal remorse for their actions.25

Melitta

Hatred of Jews is even more evident in the history of the family-owned Melitta coffee company. Horst Bentz headed the company from 1929 to 1980, becoming a member of the Nazi party and SS as early as 1933 and working for the secret service within the SS structure (Reichsführer SS).26 Under Bentz’ leadership, the factory newspaper explictly called for the exclusion of Jews and their persecution through pogroms27 while also promoting Germany’s military expansion,28 which may help explain how the company managed to expand during the Nazi era, despite the fact that the Nazi economy systemically favored military industries over consumer goods. Melitta was honored as a Nazi model company in 1941; in response to the honor, Bentz promised: “The company and its work always belong to the Führer.”29

Bahlsen

Similarly, the management of the Bahlsen family cookie company had already joined the Nazi party at an early stage and supported the SS. This may have been a purely economic decision instead of an ideological one, as Bahlsen managed to triple its production capacity during the Nazi era, as well as profiting from the occupation of Ukraine by managing a cookie factory in Kiev.30 Whether dyed-in-the-wool Nazis or not, Bahlsen used connections to the Nazi regime to increase their bottom line, and when the company showed interest in taking over baking industries in the Netherlands, Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo, supported this attempt.31 Bahlsen also benefitted from forced laborers, and company head Werner Bahlsen himself may have made the trip to Kiev to select hundreds of the strongest Ukrainian workers to transport them back to Hannover to work as slaves in his factory.32

Historian Manfred Grieger comments:

“The entrepreneurial matter-of-factness with which these [forced laborers] were integrated into everyday operations as an available resource is, after all, quite well known in general and, of course, did not only affect family businesses. Perhaps the only difference: In retrospect, family businesses particularly liked to pretend that they had been especially good to their people.”33

Dr. Oetker

The pudding and packaged food giant Dr. Oetker is almost unavoidable in Germany, yet research shows considerable involvement by the company in the Nazi economy: Richard Kaselowsky, who ran the company in trust until his stepson Rudolf-August Oetker took over after Kaselowsky’s death in 1944, was already a member of the Nazi party in 1933 and later joined the SS, while young Rudolf-August Oetker ended up a member of both the mounted division of the Nazi Stormtroopers (Reiter-Sturmabteilung or Reiter-SA) and later the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party (Waffen-Schutzstaffel or Waffen-SS).34 The company had been classified a Nazi model company in 1937, having already dismissed their Jewish employees, and was benefiting from the the Nazi economy by providing both troops and civilians with food and cooking supplies. Since the company was classified as significant for the war economy, Dr. Oetker wasn’t threatened by raw material shortages to the same degree as other companies which were less important to the Nazis. As Dr. Oetker primarily employed young women, the company also didn’t suffer a labor shortage, even in wartime, and therefore didn’t need to make use of forced laborers. Rudolf-August Oetker as a person did profit from Aryanizations. A news article on the subject tells what his actions meant for the Jewish victims:

“Next door [to Rudolf-August Oetker] … lived the Jewish couple Carl and Elli Lipmann. Harassed by the Nazi state, they wanted to flee to South America in 1940. They urgently needed money to leave the country. The sale of a plot of land behind their house was supposed to provide this. The young neighbor Oetker was interested. With the help of the Nazis, he got hold of the prime piece of land, including the tennis court, for a ridiculously low price. […]

Elli Lipmann … was a scion of the Elsbach family of textile entrepreneurs. Her brother Kurt ran one of the largest linen factories in Europe – until the Nazis forced him to sell in 1938. … Her sister Käthe Maass later died in a concentration camp. […]

Carl Lipmann had paid 117,000 Reichsmark for the property in 1925. … [Nazi officials] reduced the purchase price even further – to 45,500 Reichsmark. […]

‘It can be assumed that they [the Lipmanns] could hardly take anything abroad, since Jewish accounts were blocked and monitored,’ he [historian Christoph Laue] explains.”35

The company Dr. Oetker also benefitted more indirectly from Aryanizations conducted through an intermediary, so that the family business did not appear as a direct initiator or direct profiteer, but still pulled profits from the Aryanized companies. In these companies, relying on forced laborers was a part of day-to-day operations, but it gets worse. Beyond willingly profiting from these thefts and enslavements, Dr. Oetker’s shareholding shows direct involvement in the mass murder of the Jews. One example of this is the company’s shares in the shoe manufacturer Salamander, which had Jewish concentration camp prisoners tortured to death during the brutal testing of their shoes.36

Dr. Oetker is also implicated in the crimes of the Shoah through the founding of the Hunsa-Forschungs-GmbH in 1943, in cooperation with the Hamburg Phrix-Werke and the SS, where artificial foods were to be developed and marketed. Thanks to Dr. Oetker’s lobbying of the SS, the forced laborers already working at the Phrix-Werke were supplemented by as many as 500 concentration camp prisoners. The Phrix plant in Wittenberg, again, had in 1942 set the inglorious record to be one of the “first purely private-sector enterprises to have its own concentration camp subcamp.”37 Whether Hunsa-Forschungs-GmbH ever became functional is still in question; either way, Dr. Oetker managed to show through this enterprise its strong business relationship with the SS.38

Vorwerk

The Nazi involvement of the family-owned kitchenware company Vorwerk & Co. appears to be much less significant than that of Dr. Oetker, though that is not to say insignificant. There’s no evidence of a strong ideological support for Nazism among the family, but a study published by the company’s own publishing house39 confirms that the company was engaged in arms production for the Nazis, that it relocated some of its production to Lodz/Litzmannstadt in 1942, and furthermore made use of up to 600 forced laborers. While the Nazis opened 96 factories in the Lodz ghetto to capitalize on the forced labor of the ghetto’s inmates,40 and both the Nazi military and private companies profitted thereof,41 Vorwerk’s publication does not confirm the employment of Jewish forced laborers.42

Tempo

The patent for disposable cellulose paper tissues goes back to the Jewish entrepreneur Oskar Rosenfelder in 1929. This became Tempo tissues, the worldwide competitor to the American company Kimberly-Clark’s 1924 invention Kleenex, made of cellucotton. Rosenfelder and his brother were among the early victims of Nazi persecution, and when they fled abroad, their company Die Vereinigten Papier­werke fell victim to Aryanization and “went for a fraction of its actual value to one of the greatest opportunists among German entrepreneurs in the Nazi era: Gustav Schickedanz,”43 At this point, Schickedanz had already made a name for himself as the founder of the Quelle mail order company. He rebranded the Aryanized company to Tempo tissues, and the paper tissues of Jewish origin were so successful that the brand name has long since become synonymous with the product category in the German-speaking world, very much like Kleenex in the US. While Tempo tissues may be the most prominent example of how Schickedanz, who had joined the Nazi party as early as 1932, profited from the Nazi economy, there are at least nine other Aryanized companies and properties that Schickedanz called his own.44

Wishful thinking

These are horrible histories that cannot be ignored. Yet all immediate atrocities occurred before the end of World War II, and none of this information is hidden. It is all publicly available, often even to be found directly on the websites of these companies themselves. This is a part of Aufarbeitung, where families and companies lay bare their Nazi pasts, in the hopes of moving forward without being accused of hushing up their history.These are the facts, and they are not in dispute. After the war, however, Germany underwent a deep, intense process where the Nazi-contaminated industrialists, politicians, and generals were tried at the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and imprisoned or even executed for their atrocities. Modern Germany could not be modern Germany without this moment of Denazification. The fact that these companies are still a part of modern Germany necessarily implies that they, too, have undergone a process of Denazification. Right?

As Ernest Hemingway once cynically summed up the essence of disillusionment, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”45

Henkel’s Persilschein46

A city patron, whose generosity has contributed to the revitalization of art, culture, and public spaces in a tranquil small town, wishes for a park named after his grandfather to be renamed in honor of his mother. That grandfather has long been connected to the small town as a benefactor, and the mother has also contributed to the welfare of the town and the local church through donations. The city council decides unanimously in favor of the name change; and a large donation for the beautification of the park is accepted. This process in Unkel am Rhein, a small town 20km southeast of Germany’s former capital city Bonn, is by no means unusual.

Unkel reveres the Henkel family as the epitome of philanthropy and social commitment: Fritz Henkel Jr., son and heir of the company’s founder, is valued for his industrial successes as well as his monetary contributions to this small town and its 5,000 residents. And why shouldn’t Unkel appreciate and honor him? After all, Fritz Henkel Jr., also known as “Mr. Persil”47 by the local press, donated several extensive plots of land to the city as parks and recreational areas. Today, these are among the few centrally located green spaces in the town.

Fritz Henkel Jr. died in 1930 at the age of 55, before the company was Nazified and benefited from the expropriation of the Jewish population or the Nazi war machine.*******The gift he had given Unkel for recreational purposes was untainted. No one would question the value of honoring him as the town’s patron saint of thoroughfares – Fritz-Henkel-Strasse and Fritz-Henkel-Park. After all, these landmarks have been associated with his name since the 1920s, long before the Nazi era.

However, when Unkel chooses to honor the Henkel family in more recent times, it is worth more deeply exploring the family’s and company’s deeds in the Nazi period and beyond.

Henkel is a multinational chemical and consumer goods company, with sales in 2021 of roughly 20 billion Euros.48 Its brands are generally ubiquitous across Europe and the US, from Snuggle fabric softener to detergents All and Perwoll, Dial soap, Bref toilet cleaners, adhesive brands Loctite, and Pattex, Pritt glue sticks, hair care products Schwarzkopf, got2be and others, but their most well-known product is the laundry detergent Persil.

The company was founded in 1876 by Friedrich “Fritz” Henkel (1848–1930). He died, as did two of his sons, before the Nazis came to power. His son Hugo (1881–1952), on the other hand, and daughter Emmy Anna (1884–1941), mother of Werner Lüps (1906–1942), lived through the Nazi regime. Hugo Henkel, who had held the post of Managing Director of Henkel & Cie GmbH from 1922 to 1938 and had taken over sole management of the company after the deaths of Fritz Henkel Sr. and Fritz Henkel Jr. in 1930, joined the Nazi party in 1933. In 1938, the Nazi regime induced Hugo Henkel to move to the Advisory Board and Supervisory Board of the family company and, at the same time, to vacate his position as managing director. His son Jost (1909–1961), his nephew Werner Lüps, and Carl August Bagel (1902–1941), the son-in-law of Fritz Henkel Jr., became the new managing directors.49 Jost was himself a member of the Nazi party, while Werner Lüps was known to be an unconditional Nazi supporter and was also considered to be highly regarded by Nazi vice-chancellor Hermann Göring.50 Carl August Bagel’s ideological orientation is not known. Together, the three young managing directors represented the three branches of the Henkel family, following tradition. The descendants of Emmy Lüps nominally held only 20 percent of the voting shares in the company, while the descendants of Fritz Henkel Jr.’s two sons each held 40 percent.

According to the company’s own publication, Henkel was recognized in 1940 as a Nazi model company.51 At that point, it was practically aligned with the Nazi regime, as shown in reports on Hitler’s public events and speeches, and sought to use National Socialism for public relations and financial gain.52 This approach could also have been an expression of economic pragmatism and did not necessarily correspond to a perceived ideological closeness to Nazism. However, in his investigations of German industrial complicity in the Third Reich, Peter Hayes, Academic Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, explicitly points out that the new youthful leadership of the Henkel company identified closely with the Nazi regime and met it with enthusiasm.53

The fact is that Jost Henkel, Werner Lüps, and Carl August Bagel must have been actively involved in critical decisions as high-ranking representatives of the Henkel company. During their tenure, Henkel saw the Four-Year Plan implemented on behalf of Adolf Hitler, which, according to the company’s own publication Menschen und Marken (trans. People and Brands), affected not only manufacturers of high-quality consumer goods but also raw and basic material companies.54 In plain terms, this means that from 1936 to 1940, the company was directly and comprehensively involved in building the Nazi war machine, expanding its production base, and seeking to profit from political events.55 This information already suggests a proximity of Henkel to the Europe-wide implementation of the Final Solution.

Lutz Budraß, whose list of criteria for involvement of companies with the Nazi regime (Aryanization, Jewish forced labor, and the appropriation of businesses in occupied territories) is mentioned at the start of the last section, considers the Henkel company – along with another 40 of the 100 largest employers of the Nazi era – to be particularly tainted through its proximity to the Nazi regime. The takeover of shares in Böhme Fettchemie, originally a Jewish firm, by the Henkel company in 1935 would fit in with this, given that this takeover came about as a result of “horse-trading” with the chemical company Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheide-Anstalt (trans. German Gold and Silver Refining), better known as Degussa. In this trade the two Aryan chemical companies seemed to divide up Jewish victims of the Aryan­izations among themselves according to their respective centers of interest.56

Another example of the company’s profit from Aryanization is the case of Salamander, formerly Germany’s largest shoe manufacturer, which had been founded by Jakob Sigle and Max Levi at the end of the 19th century. As early as 1933, Sigle, a non-Jew, managed to have the Jewish Levi family’s half of the shares of the company Aryanized through deals with Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, and Henkel.57 Though the Levi family held on to nearly a fifth of the company shares for a few more years, in 1939 they were forced to flee Germany. When the Jewish owners of the company had no choice but to part with their property, the Henkel company took over shares in the profitable company worth 1,250,000 Reichsmarks.********Half of this had to be repaid after the war. According to the historian Harold James, a considerable part of these repayments was paid by the banks that had negotiated the takeover during the Nazi era.58 The company’s share of the repayments, on the other hand, seems to have been little more than a pittance. James goes on to point out the role that Deutsche Bank, of whose supervisory board Hugo Henkel was a prominent member, played in the Aryanization process and in the dispossession of the Jewish population.59

The second criterion listed by Budraß, the use of Jewish forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners, is strictly rejected by Henkel’s own view of its history, which only admits the use of prisoners of war and foreign civilian workers.60 Hayes supports this statement to some extent by pointing out that concentration camp prisoners were used in war-related companies, which Henkel itself had not been.

At the same time, however, Hayes emphasizes in his 2004 book on the crimes (Aryanization, forced labor) of Degussa, the close ideological, personnel, and economic ties between the Henkel company and the Degussa Group, which was clearly tainted by the Nazis and clearly guilty of Budraß’s second criterion. Degussa’s work was instrumental in the Nazi war effort, and the company was deeply complicit in the Shoah. Degussa wasn’t just engaged in the theft of Jewish property through Aryanization: The gold from the teeth of Jews murdered in concentration camps were melted down in Degussa’s metal smelting ovens.61

Partly in the interest of breaking the supremacy of the Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (trans. Dye Industry Syndicate Stock Corporation), better known simply as IG Farben, in the German chemical industry market, the management of Jost Henkel, Werner Lüps, and Carl August Bagel arranged for Henkel’s extensive purchase of Degussa shares. The availability of these shares was in turn directly linked to the expropriation of German Jews in the context of the November pogroms in 1938. Hayes puts the proportion of Degussa shares held by the Henkel company at more than 25 percent in January 1938, around 40 percent in September 1939, and finally, before the death of Carl August Bagel in 1941, at 48 percent.62 Degussa, in turn, had around 3,000 concentration camp prisoners working for it, around 40 percent of whom were Jewish.63 Degussa thus followed the principle of Extermination Through Labor, which, as clearly formulated at the Wannsee Conference of 1942, was directly aimed toward the Final Solution.64