Nazi Billionaires
The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
‘Lucid and damning … an absorbing – and infuriating – tale of complicity, coverup and denial’ PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of EMPIRE OF PAIN
A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II – and how the world allowed them to get away with it.
In 1946, Günther Quandt – patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW – was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz and still control Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight – until now.
In this landmark work, investigative journalist David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave labourers and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burnt around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how the wider world’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.
About the author
David de Jong is a journalist who previously covered European banking and finance from Amsterdam and hidden wealth and billionaire fortunes from New York for Bloomberg News. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the Dutch Financial Daily. A native of the Netherlands, de Jong currently lives in Tel Aviv. He spent four years researching and writing this book from Berlin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Opportunism and greed served tyranny and war, according to this scathing study of Nazi Germany's leading businessmen. Bloomberg journalist de Jong investigates five plutocrats who funded Hitler's rise to power: industrialists Günther Quandt and Friedrich Flick, financier August von Finck, automaker Ferdinand Porsche, and baking-goods mogul Richard Kaselowsky. These men boosted their fortunes by "Aryanizing" Jewish-owned businesses, acquiring them through coercion at below market prices; ensured the Wehrmacht was supplied with weapons, uniforms, and pudding mix in its campaigns of conquest; and staffed their factories with forced laborers and concentration camp inmates, thousands of whom died of abuse, hunger, and outright execution. Later chapters probe the lies and bribes they deployed to escape punishment after the war, their climb back to wealth and power, and the shame-faced contrition of their billionaire heirs when their misdeeds were exposed decades later. De Jong's colorful narrative features cutthroat corporate intrigue, sordid kowtowing to Nazi potentates—at one meeting, SS chief Heinrich Himmler strong-armed Flick and Kaselowsky into funding his Aryan breeding program—and a melodramatic feud between Quandt and Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who married Quandt's ex-wife. The result is an intimate and vivid history. Photos.
