Fifty years after the end of World War II, the willingness of German companies to re-examine their role in the Nazi regime varies widely.
When the country’s leading financial institution, Deutsche Bank, chose to fund a recent book about its 125-year history — including its Nazi past — the decision was seen as part of a recent, yet growing trend among German companies to openly deal with their war records.
Not all German corporations are as willing to look back.
In some two dozen interviews with representatives of more than 10 German companies, evidence emerged of a tendency among several corporations with either significant Nazi involvement during World War II or important Jewish founders to ignore their past.
The remarks of Renate Saenger were not unusual.
“The beginning period with Hitler was good,” said Saenger, a media spokeswoman for Stiftung Automuseum Volkswagen, a foundation set up by the automaker.
“You have to remember it was a time in Germany where there was no bread and no work. And then everyone had work and something to eat,” she said.
But at some point, Hitler “flipped out,” she said, adding, “At some point, he went crazy.”
When reminded that German Jews were mistreated from the beginning and that for them Hitler was never “good,” Saenger said, “Oh, you’re right.”
At BASF, the giant German chemical corporation, Ruth Fromm, an assistant to the company’s historian, first asked this reporter about her religion and whether she lives in Israel. German official said the proper home of Ignatz Bubis, the leader of German Jewry, was Israel, not Germany.
Despite such comments, several companies, such as Deutsche Bank, have sought the services of historians to document their past.
A book published last month revealed that Deutsche Bank aided in the expropriation of Jewish possessions during the war and offered little resistance to Nazi pressures to remove Jews from the Bank’s board.
The rival Dresdner Bank has produced an remarkably frank account of the bank’s Nazi period. In a book published in 1992 on the occasion of the bank’s 120-year anniversary, the fate of its many important Jewish board members was painstakingly detailed, in addition to the nothing of the Nazi links of others at the bank.
The book repeated the infamous saying about Dresdner board member Karl Rasche: “Right after the first German tank comes Dr. Rasche from the Dresdner Bank.”
This, the book’s authors said, came from Rasche’s hefty involvement in expropriating property in Czechoslovakia and Holland.
In contrast to the effort of the Deutsche and Dresdner banks, a book designed to be a history of the 125 years of the Commerzbank, published this year, begins the bank’s history in 1945.
Another important German company, Volkswagen, commissioned Hans Mommsen, a noted historian, to write a book about the company’s use of slave labor during World War II.
Mommsen has been working for eight years on the book, titled “The History of the Volkswagen Factory and its Workers in the Third Reich.” Although he did not give details about his findings, he said the book is expected to be published this year.
Another auto manufacturer willing to explore its history during World War II was Daimler Benz, which provided the financial backing for a book published last year about prison laborers at the company.
The three major German chemical companies that formed I.G. Farden, a major owner of the company that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to exterminate Jews in the concentration camps, have had varying ways of dealing with their World War II involvement.
Two of those companies, BASF and the chemical firm Hoechst AG, admit that the third, Bayer AG, has been the most forthcoming about the past.
In a 95-page document published in 1990 on the occasion of BASF’s 125-year history, the company devoted only four pages to its World War II history, including sections on I.G. Farben and the Third Reich, the employment of prison labor and the use of Zyklon B at the Auschwitz death camp.
BASF historian Lothar Meinzer said it is only now that German historians are beginning to broach the topic of the war years.
“You can’t expect that people who were involved” would write about themselves, he said.
He also talked of the difficulty in obtaining key documents until after the reunification of Germany in 1990.
But, Meinzer said, the passage of time is the main reason that historians are picking up the subject.
Now, 50 years after the war, it is easier to discuss the Nazi past and to find an audience interested in what really took place, he said.
Meinzer said his lectures on the role of German businesses during the war are always well-attended.
At Bayer, there was an evident willingness to discuss the past.
The company’s mammoth 623-page 125-year history of the company contains 18 pages covering the period of the Third Reich, including chapters on I.G. Farben and the Nuremberg trials.
The book also quotes from the trials, nothing that while “it is clear that I.G. Farben did not deliberately pursue or encourage an inhumane policy with respect to the workers,” the company did apply to the Nazi government for workers.
“Responsibility for taking the initiative in the unlawful employment was there and, to some extent at least, they must share the responsibility for mistreatment of the workers with the Nazi SS and the construction contractors,” the book said.
The book also noted that the tribunal had determined that Zyklon B was not directly produced by I.G. Farben, but by Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Schaedlingsbekaempfung, known as Degesch, in which Farben had a stake.
Unlike companies such as Bayer, other firms have not been as willing to confront their past.
The Krupp Konzern, which was a major supplier of military equipment any key user of slave labour during the war, has not researched its history.
Asked whether the company felt it had any responsibility to publish a history, Krupp spokesman Heinz-Joachim Weisse said, “From here, I cannot make a judgment on that.”
Nothing that there is only one part-time person employed at the company’s archives Weisse said the archives “are not a research institute,” adding that outside historians have free access to the information.
A company that has little to say about its past is Hertie, a major department store chain that takes its name from Hermann Tietz, a Jewish retailer who founded the store together with his nephew, Oscar.
Today the company also owns the Wertheim chain, founded in 1885 by Jewish retailer Georg Wertheim, and KaDeWe, the Berlin flagship store known for its lavish gourment department.
The Tietz family was one of the most prominent pre-war Jewish business families in Germany. Yet in a 26-page brochure commemorating more than 100 years of the company’s existence, the company has little to say about the fate of its namesake.
In four short paragraphs recounting the events of 1993, the year Hitler came to power, the company notes that “the political situation worsened the living conditions for a large company that found itself owned by a Jewish family.”
As to their fate, the book said, “The Tietz brothers removed themselves from the company and left the country.”
Hertie spokesman Elmar Kratz acknowledged that the wording made it sound as if the Tietz family voluntarily gave up its business and decided to move abroad.
“This is not an easy period to deal with,” Kratz said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
