Beate Heister & Karl Albrecht Jr Portrait Painting Collage By Danor Shtruzman. Photograph Source: Danor Shtruzman – CC BY-SA 4.0
Poverty and wealth remain two sides of the same coin – at times, minted in Germany. Germany’s super-rich own very obscene levels of treasures – mostly thanks to unsavory capitalism, dirty business dealings, white collar crime, and the Nazi past of many of Germany’s businesses. Furnished with all that, Germany’s businesses and its super-rich have even taken on a supermarket-like attitude towards the state, its public goods, its administration, and the government – without the checkout, of course.
They have powerful allies in politics, political parties, the state, and federal and state governments. Euro-billion heirs of German family dynasties, for example, have done well in the business-to-politics arrangement. Like the infamous Russian (and plenty of other) oligarchs, Germany’s super-rich have occasionally attracted – albeit often unwanted – attention.
Recently, the yacht of one of Germany’s super-rich was literally “screwing up” the view of the Statue of Liberty. That was the mistake made by German $14-billion-dollar-man and screw manufacturer – The Screw King – Reinhold Würth and daughter Bettina.
Yet, the world’s corporate media never grows tired of camouflaging the opulence, decadence, environmental carelessness, and staggering wealth of the super-rich, the self-appointed do-good and the not-so-do-good elite. The media do this by cooking up fantasies about them. And this comes with a hefty dose of creativity spiced with a bit of reality, with make-believe poems, silly stories, and myths.
Ideologically, these myths help sustain capitalism and ever-increasing global inequalities. Yet, myth-making is nearly always inspired by some true event, half-truth, or real characters. These stories conjure up one of the greatest myths of all: the legend of personal achievement and heroism. This is cranked up by the ideology that hard work leads to riches.
Yet, there are real capitalists like Reinhold Würth. Corporate media like his story because it can be used to support the rags-to-richesfantasy – a useful ideology that stabilizes stark inequality. Herr Würth started small. He made it to the top. As an utter exception to 82 million Germans, he did so on his own through tremendous effort. Würth is presented as a so-called art promoter – a term added to create the image of the great philanthropist.
Adding further to his story, his donations – in relation to the stratospheric wealth of the super-rich – are miniscule. Worse, they benefit mostly one kind of “culture”. This happens to be of his personal liking: a local Kunsthalle, or art gallery. This one is in his 40,000-person strong regional mini-hometown of Schwäbisch Hall, which might (one day) even have a Würth Airport.
To make such rags-to-riches stories even more plausible – and this always implies the ideologically most relevant myth that everyone can do it with a little bit of hard work – the story continues with Würth’s being a school drop-out. This is an almost classic feature of such stories. At the age of fourteen he left school to start working in his parents’ screw business.
After seven decades of ruthless business activities by Würth, Germany’s Minister-President of the southern state of Baden-Württemberg and regional pro-auto Green politician Winfried Kretschmann congratulated the “man with the unique success story” on the company’s 80th anniversary.
Today, the Würth corporation is active in eighty countries with 83,000 employees worldwide and an annual turnover of €14.4 billion. And, judging by scandal-ridden soccer player and Bayern München boss Hoeness and VW boss Winterkorn’s dieselgate, Würth and his business career can be held up as a model. Only “burdened”(!) by a little scandal like a trial for tax evasion, through which he is said to have gained no advantages of his own. This is according to Baden-Württemberg’s Stuttgart prosecutor’s office – the home state of the NSDAP member, brutal Nazi judge, and long-time Minister-President (a regional leader) Hans Filbinger (1966-1978).
Not really surprisingly, big boss Würth was quickly off the hook. His trial for tax evasion was suddenly dropped in exchange for a little payment. Undesirably, $$$-boy Würth resurfaced when his 85-meter Vibrant Curiosity anchored in front of the Statue of Liberty, disturbing the panorama. A newspaper wrote, “another jackass billionaire blocked the view of the Statue of Liberty with his mega-yacht.”
Unlike tax-dodging Würth, other German oligarchs had it way easier to get to their billions. Yet, the carefully crafted make-believe media image almost always tells the story of diligence and inventive spirit that are supposed to be the golden virtues of entrepreneurial success.
A similar story starts with the colorfully presented corporate chronicle of the 125th anniversary of one of Germany’s favorites: the Dr. Oetker pudding. Similarly, this story too starts small – in the back room of a local pharmacy where August Oetker once handled various powders late at night. The myth-making continues with the image that he worked hard, eventually developing ingredients that revolutionized baking.
In 1893, the baking powder’s exact mixture guaranteed that everyone succeeded in making a cake. Years later and long after the death of the original Oetker, a certain “closeness” (as it is framed in Oetker’s corporate PR) between the company’s management, led by Oetker’s grandson, and the rulers of the Third Reich occurred.
The wording of the company’s management assures that Oetker disappears from the crime scene. The Oetkers celebrating with local Nazis, his pudding for Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and Rudolf-August Oetker’s Waffen SS membership vanish. Meanwhile, the wording rulers of the Third Reich eliminates unwanted images like Nazis, SS guards, beatings, concentration camps, Jewish slave labor, and so on.
Yet, what is played down as “closeness” assured that corporate and personal wealth remained (and still remains!) inside the Oetker family. Thanks to free-of-charge slave labor, it even grew in Nazi-Germany – whether Oetker, Siemens, Adidas, Deutsche Bank, Boss, BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen, Porsche, Lufthansa, BASF, Bayer, thyssenkrupp, Bertelsmann, Continental, C&A, and many others.
In any case, hardly any company did not grow under the Nazis. Worse, many grew to become significantly larger companies compared to pre-Nazi times: Nazism was good for capitalism. Even worse still is the fact that the origin of inherited billion dollar fortunes – of the Reimanns, the Quandts, the Flicks, the Finks, the Kühnes, the Stoscheks, the Schaefflers, and others – was the result of taking significant advantage of what the Nazis called Aryanization. This is the seizure of property (read: theft) from Jews and its transfer to non-Jews and the forced expulsion of Jews from economic life in Nazi Germany.
Corporate profiteering ranged from Hitler’s war of extermination to mass murder and concentration camps. In the case of the Oetkers, whose wealth is now estimated at €10 billion, it wasn’t the aforementioned “closeness” to the Nazis that was vital. This so-called “closeness” actually meant that virtually the Oetkers weren’t “close” – they were Nazis.
Like many others, their recipe for success was lavish corporate donations to the Nazis. These secured orders from the state: Pudding for the Wehrmacht. Supporting Nazi terror turned into a highly lucrative investment: some had handsome ROI (return of investment),while others died a gruesome death.
To achieve this, German capitalists like August von Finck, Sr., Friedrich Flick, and Günther Quandt –among many others – were present at a secret meeting with Adolf Hitler on February 20, 1933. At this meeting, very generous financial contributions by German business to the NSDAP were made.
Only a few years later – in post-Nazi Germany – the ultra-conservative political party, the CSU, which is the Bavarian opera of Merkel’s CDU, harbored many ex-Nazis, such as party member Georg Bachmann (NSDAP), SS-man Georg Bauer, Walter Eckhardt, Alfons Goppel (member of the Nazi thugs called SA), Georg Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck, Hermann Höcherl, Volkmar Hopf, Wolfgang Klausner, Gisbert Kley, Josef Listl (SA), Nazi lawyer and SA member Theodor Maunz, Philipp Meyer, Wolfgang Pohle, Richard Ringelmann, Hans Schütz, Alfred Seidl, Hermann Strathmann, Richard Stücklen, Hans Troßmann, the all-powerful ex-Nazi Friedrich Zimmermann (known as Old Schwurhand because of his perjury), and Siegfried Zoglmann (who joined the NSDAP in 1934).
The list also includes the rather infamous Ochsen Sepp (or Oxen Joe), providing legal counsel during Nazi Aryanization. After WWII, Ochsen Sepp’s CSU had a great idea for the northern Bavarian city of Coburg. How about a Max Brose Street? After all, Brose was a local patron, billionaire, and party friend.
However, the ex-Nazi and Wehrwirtschaftsführer Brose exploited slave labor. The city council initially rejected the street-renaming application. Yet it all changed rather quickly when $2.4 billion man Stoschek (top Nazi Brose was his granddaddy) turned off the money tap, greatly reducing his financial support for regional projects. Suddenly, there was a majority in Coburg’s city parliament honoring the slave labor-using Nazi with a Max Brose Strasse.
Seemingly, rich people like Michael Stoschek can shape German politics and society easily. After all, super-Nazi Joseph Goebbels had once characterized Brose as a “smart, energetic, brutal capitalist.” Adding to Nazi business links is the fact that more than 50,000 forced laborers were used and abused just in the factories of the BMW-owning Quandt family. Today, it might be hard to imagine the feeling of despair of concentration camp prisoners working for the Quandt company.
Slowly starved to death while worked excruciatingly hard, some slave laborers were forced to eat material mixed with water from which car batteries were made. Unsurprisingly, the $20 billlion Quandt family was grateful for the opportunities that the Nazis opened up for them. By the end of 1940, Günter Quandt (1881-1954) – who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – mused,
In view of the impending turn of the year, we look back once again on the incomparable feats of arms of our glorious Wehrmacht on land, on water and in the air, and with a grateful heart we look proudly at the greatest German of all time: our beloved Führer!
In a self-aggrandizing biography (1980), BMW/Nazi Herbert Quandt (1910-1982) shared his thoughts as to why Hitler came to power, “I’m not afraid to say in a very heartfelt way that Hitler came to power because he had declared war on communism.”
After the end of their beloved Nazism, the Quandt family was allowed to keep their assets made possible by brutal exploitation. In post-Nazi Germany, the Quandts and their heirs became the richest Germans with €40 billion. Yet, many of their forced slave laborers were living in abject poverty. Quandt and their ilk waited until it was mostly too late, eventually compensating only a few of the former slave laborers.
Between 2001 and 2007 – about sixty years after the downfall of the Quandts’ beloved Hitler – some of the thousands of Quandt survivors – those who survived the SS’s starvation, hunger, the whip, brutality, and death – received a minuscule “one-time” payment of between €500 and €7,700 – barely enough for a BMW roof rack, which sets you back $1,140.
The insultingly low compensation – after decades of waiting – was paid from the fund of €4.6 billion. Yet, at the same time, prisoners of war and Western European civilians forced into labor have been excluded from any form of compensation.
Built on exploitation, the Quandts have become part of Germany’s political landscape, although mostly hidden from public view. Their power is kept out of view while they are celebrated by an ever-supportive press as Germany’s most successful entrepreneurial family.
Yet again, their story, too, is full of personal triumphs, spiced up with some minor tragedies to make it look plausible. The overall ideology is that we all can learn lessons about entrepreneurship from them. According to Germany’s www.lobbycontrol.de, BMW and the Quandts have handed out around US-$10.4 million (€10 million) to political parties in political lobbying. Given their €20 billion: peanuts, really! It is about 1/2000th of their wealth. Corporate lobbying isn’t expensive. It is cheap to ensure that Germany, too, “has the best politicians money can buy!”
Yet, the Quandts are one of the largest lobbyists in Germany. Unsurprisingly, Merkel’s conservative CDU received most of the Quandt money. However, the environmental Greens, the social-democratic SPD and neoliberal FDP did not go empty-handed – unlike the socialist die Linke. The big donations of corporate lobbying flow – as BMW itself said – to strengthen socio-political commitment, read: to support the car industry and their extremely anti-environmental stance.
However, corporate lobbying to maintain the political landscape is part of what Eberhard von Brauchitsch does – the corporate lobbyist, Flick manager, and member of an old Prussian Nazi clan. In 1981, a tax investigator named Klaus Förster discovered a secret cash book of one of Flick’s general accountants (Rudolf Diehl).
The book listed cash payments to politicians of all parties represented in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. Yet, most of the corporate money went to right-wing CSU boss Franz Josef Strauss and CDU boss Helmut Kohl.
These payments strongly influenced politicians in their decision-making. It worked well when Flick sold Daimler shares to the Deutsche Bank that would have incurred taxes of DM 986 million. However, then-acting Finance Minister Hans Friderichs and later Otto Graf Lambsdorff approved an exemption from this – as they called it – burden.
In a rather exceptional case, the all-too-open bribery had minor consequences. Long before all that, Nazi war criminal – later decorated with Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit – Friedrich Flick was sentenced in December 1947. Long after this sentencing, the so-called Flick Affair of the 1980s ended in probation for Flick subordinate Brauchitsch.
Most importantly, there were no consequences at all for the billionaire at the top of the entire setup. At the center of the 1980s scandal was Friedrich Karl Flick, son of Nazi war criminal Friedrich Flick (Nazi Party membership #5.918.393). The old Flick had begun “cultivating” (a lovely word) German politics well before financing the rise of the Nazis – which he financed. Flick was a donor to all political parties – except communist, of course. Yet, he concentrated his money on the rising Nazi Party.
After the expropriation (read: theft) of Jewish companies and the appropriation (read: more theft) of them by Flick, up to 100,000 people were forced most brutally to perform forced labor in Flick’s companies.
At the Nuremberg Trials in December 1947, Flick was sentenced to seven years in prison for slave labor, deportation, plundering Nazi-occupied territories, and for participating in SS crimes. However, he was quickly released in 1950 after Germany’s staunchly conservative federal government (itself filled with ex-Nazis) campaigned for Nazi member Flick.
Most importantly, Flick was allowed to keep his assets – apart from a coal company, which he had to sell at the market price. By 1963, Flick had become one of the richest Germans again. With the generous help of conservative politicians, all was forgiven and forgotten.
Flick was honored for his life’s work (never mind the countless slaves in his factories who had died or – more often – were simply killed). Suddenly, Flick became the creative entrepreneur. He was even awarded Germany’s Grand Federal Cross of Merit – of course, with star and shoulder strap. In other words, all the trimmings his ex-Nazi friends could muster.
Both Flick Senior and his son, who inherited 330 companies with around 300,000 employees and an annual turnover of DM 18 billion (about $9 billion), consistently refused for a very long time to pay even a penny into the compensation fund for forced laborers. Not until 2005 was Friedrich Christian Flick able to bring himself to make a skimpy donation of just €5 million ($5.2 million). Some points are noteworthy. It occurred:
+ a whopping sixty years after the Flicks’ beloved Nazi Reich was destroyed;
+ only after many of those who had survived the inhuman mistreatment meted out by Flick plus SS had died;
+ only after persistent public criticism by the global media; and,
+ after a planned museum of the so-called art collector (Flick) in Switzerland was not allowed to be built.
While the super-rich hate to pay even minimal sums to those they exploited, their wealth has other effects. With the notable exception of Turkey and Lithuania, in no country in Europe is social inequality greater than in Germany. Germany is also the country with the largest low-wage sector – one in five workers.
Meanwhile, a good one third of Germany’s population has no savings at all, was in debt even before the coronavirus crisis, and is now coming under increasing pressure due to inflation and rising energy and food prices.
But not everyone is affected equally. There is no crisis for Germany’s super-rich and the wealthy elite. Instead, they have been able to further increase their wealth. Worse, the number of German billionaires has increased by 24 in the year 2021 alone. Today, it is higher than ever, with 213 billionaires. The ever- increasing, extreme inequality between rich and poor is socio-economically explosive.
Even more devastating is the fact that there is an existing tendency of ever-increasing polarization. This has been worsening for years. Meanwhile – and this is the smokescreen of the rags-to-riches ideology – there is a stark decline in social mobility. This means: you are locked into your social class with next to no chance of moving upward.
Back to the super-rich, very few who reach the club of those with stratospheric – if not obscene – wealth actually start from scratch. They have never dressed in rags, so to speak.
Much more common is that they build on what their parents and grandparents have left behind – what they inherited. And that is – rather often – a lot. One example of inherited money is German choco Leibniz biscuit heiress – Verena Bahlsen, who once rather arrogantly announced, “I want to earn money from my dividend to buy sailing yachts and stuff like that.”
Ms. Bahlsen holds almost a quarter of the shares in the family business. In 2019, she claimed that her family’s SS overseers treated the forced laborers well. At a marketing conference in 2019, Ms. Bahlsen also declared that she wanted to prove, as she said, that “an economy isn’t about exploitation, but an economy is about doing something for society.”
Her belittling of Nazi slave laborers brought a stiff rebuke issued by Lars Klingbeil (SPD) saying, “Whoever inherits such a large fortune also inherits responsibility and should not appear so aloof. It’s no wonder that people lose faith in justice when millions-heirs are talking about yachts, and not about responsibility.”
While Germany’s super-rich sit on their yachts believing in the good life of their family’s former slave laborers, much of their Nazi part is conveniently disguised by the wording “entanglement”. The Bahlsens were just a bit entangled with the Nazis. In reality, the Bahlsens benefited from slaves. Verena Bahlsen’s grandfather and two of his brothers were NSDAP members and SS supporters.
Hans Bahlsen had been a Nazi member (NSDAP) since May 1933 and brothers Werner and Klaus became Nazi Party members in 1942. SS member Hans Bahlsen joined his brothers in supporting the SS financially, preferring to sign his letters with, “Heil Hitler – H Bahlsen, Keks factory K.G.”
Of course, totally unconnected to the inherited wealth of the super-rich and their Nazi past, poverty in Germany continues to increase. In 2013, poverty affected 15.5% of Germany’s population. In the years since, it has risen to 15.9%.
Worse and, of course, this, too, is unconnected to the super-rich, more than one in five children in Germany grows up in poverty – that is 2.8 million children. Meanwhile, Germany’s super-rich enjoy their billions.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Klikauer.
Thomas Klikauer | Radio Free (2022-07-06T08:58:23+00:00) Germany’s Super-Rich. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/06/germanys-super-rich/
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