The Deutsche Bank’s chief rival in this effort was the German state-owned VIAG industrial combine, which owned a major Berlin bank, the Reichskredit Gesellschaft (RKG).
About a week before the Germans marched into Austria, Abs met with the Creditanstalt board to offer a deal that the Deutsche Bank team had hammered out over the previous three months: Cooperate with the Deutsche Bank and become its leading agency for further German corporate penetration into southeastern Europe, or face a takeover and probable liquidation at the hands of the VIAG when the storm troopers moved in. The Creditanstalt board considered Abs’s ultimatum overnight, then appointed him to its board the following morning. The bank’s directors did not reveal their knowledge of the coming Nazi invasion to the Austrian public, nor so far as can be determined, did they inform Austria’s government. Two weeks after the Nazis’ invasion, Creditanstalt formally became a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank.44
The transaction did not go smoothly thereafter. VIAG, its subsidiary RKG, and the Dresdner Bank objected vehemently and blocked the deal. VIAG used its status as a German state-owned syndicate to establish itself as a trustee for a large block of Creditanstalt stock on behalf of the Reich government.45
Different factions within the Reich offered competing strategies for empire-building in Europe. Nazi state agencies and government-owned companies such as the VIAG favored direct government control over most of the large enterprises in the countries coveted by Germany. They wanted production in these territories to be organized along a relatively centralized, planned-economy model, with maximum emphasis placed on satisfying the needs of a self-sufficient Third Reich. Private enterprises should be strictly subordinate to the needs of the Reich and to the racial ideology of Nazism. The “de-judification” of subject economies would be carried out as radically as possible, with little concern for its impact on private German businesses or for how Germany’s behavior might be perceived outside of its borders. All these would be steps toward true National Socialism, they contended.
In contrast, much of the banking and industrial elite of Germany favored a more traditional, imperial approach to acquiring a new empire in Europe. Among their principal spokesmen were Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, Hermann Abs, and a young Reichsbank director, Karl Blessing. Their strategy favored integrating businesses in countries occupied by the Germans into private industrial syndicates coordinated through German-based cartels and through private institutions such as Deutsche Bank. The private companies in turn pledged their loyalty to Hitler’s government. German military conquest should be used to create conditions through which German corporations could buy up the key enterprises in newly subjugated countries at very favorable prices, this faction contended, but only in rare instances should the state take direct command of industry. Much of the senior leadership of the Deutsche Bank, IG Farben, the Siemens group of companies, and other German-based cartels maintained that Germany should reenter the world marketplace rather than attempt to build up the orthodox Nazi dream of a self-sufficient German empire in Central and Eastern Europe. This faction’s attitude toward Aryanization was often more complex than that of the Nazi ideologues. It was fine to absorb Jewish properties, but might the National Socialists’ radical economic measures one day be turned on the bankers themselves?46
The Anschluss with Austria and Germany’s reemergence as a major military power crystallized the debate over German strategy. Abs’s rivalry with the state-owned RKG over control of the Creditanstalt and other Vienna banks soon became a focal point of the struggle.
SS Brigadeführer Hans Kehrl confronted Abs shortly after the Anschluss and told him that the Reich “could not consent to the acquisition by the Deutsche Bank of the [Creditanstalt] share capital” because with it would inevitably come “control over the entire structure of Austrian industry.”47 SS banking specialist Wilhelm Keppler was more blunt: The Deutsche Bank wants to “rob” the Third Reich by acquisition of Creditanstalt, he wrote. “It came to Vienna with twenty men to take over.”48 The SS men were comfortable with Deutsche Bank’s playing a subordinate role in Creditanstalt, but no more.
Hermann Abs replied in kind. He argued in policy meetings that “Deutsche Bank would be in a better position to exploit [Creditanstalt] for the Reich” if VIAG and the RKG were “not permitted to interfere.” Using his strategy, Abs contended, Creditanstalt “was in a position to reinforce German economic influence in southeastern Europe, provided that its friendship with the Deutsche Bank were further cemented.” His bank alone, he concluded, should be given the authority to select staff and set policy for the Austrian institution.49
Abs won undisputed control of Creditanstalt through a series of stock swaps with RKG over the next three years. He became Creditanstalt’s vice chairman, and two other Deutsche Bank directors joined the board.50 Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank carried out the transformation of Creditanstalt into an “Aryan” institution so abruptly and thoroughly that it was recognized during and after the war as a “model” of Nazification. A postwar investigation indicated that within days after the Anschluss the bank purged its Jewish employees, brought in new German directors from Deutsche Bank and IG Farben, and re-staffed the bank’s senior management largely with Nazi party members.51
Abs helped Aryanize scores of properties in Austria, depriving hundreds of Jewish families of their livelihoods and setting the stage for their deportation to concentration camps. Creditanstalt eventually became the single most active bank in the Aryanization of Austrian businesses, according to captured records of the Nazi agency for “de-judification” in Vienna. Typically, these transactions involved provision of Creditanstalt loans to Nazi activists and to German businessmen interested in purchasing Jewish businesses at a fraction of their value. In some particularly promising transactions, Creditanstalt bought up Jewish assets for the bank’s own portfolio.52 Hermann Abs was at that time vice chairman of the Creditanstalt board with direct responsibility for approval of all of the Vienna bank’s larger transactions, a later U.S. investigation reported.*53
The Nazi takeover in Vienna linked the special anti-Semitic machinery of the Nazi state—the Agency for Capital Transfer, the SS’s Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, and so on—to the powerful existing social institutions of commerce, contract law, exchange, and other day-to-day structures of conventional enterprise. The Germans stressed observance of purported legality, orderliness, and careful paperwork when carrying out expropriations. In this way, the Nazis succeeded for a time in harnessing the vast inertial movement of ordinary society to their project of wiping out Jews.
The speed and efficiency of this form of looting startled even the Germans. The SS in Vienna used an early type of computer known as a Hollerith machine acquired from IBM to register Jewish properties and keep track of their liquidation. The Vienna edition of the Nazi party newspaper crowed that, as a result of this modern registration system, “within six weeks we shall have laid hands on all Jewish fortunes over 5,000 marks; within three years, every single Jewish concern will have been Aryanized.”54 Private German banks and businesses used the SS registration data to take over about 5,000 of the most prosperous Jewish companies in less than eighteen months, according to contemporary SS reports, and liquidated about 21,000 smaller Jewish businesses to make room for competing German enterprises. About 7,000 cases were still left to process in early 1940, according to the SS, though as a practical matter many of the Jews who nominally owned the remaining enterprises had already been deported to the forced labor center at Mauthausen.55 Most did not survive.
* One of these was the acquisition by the Deutsche Bank and Siemens of the Aronwerke Elektrizitäts AG of Berlin, a manufacturer of electric meters and radios. According to a later U.S. government study, Aronwerke’s owner Manfred Aron had until 1935 been determined to hold on to his firm and to wait out the years of Nazi rule. But after the Gestapo arrested him several times and threatened his family, Aron decided to sell his company for a fraction of its value in the late sum
mer of that year. The Deutsche Bank financed the deal on behalf of a Siemens holding company. The Siemens group dismissed the Aron family directors, installed its own men, and changed the company name to Heliowatt AG. Once under Siemens control, Heliowatt became a holding company for a number of other new Siemens acquisitions. The Siemens companies eventually emerged as one of the largest contractors for concentration camp labor in Germany.
* Here is Schacht speaking in his own defense in his memoirs, explaining why he did not consider himself to be an anti-Semite: “As I see it there is one single factor which gives rise to the widespread unpopularity of the Jews. It is not the religious antithesis; rather it is the fact that owing to his ability, and whenever he resides in a non-Jewish community, the Jew endeavors to insinuate himself into the intellectual and cultural leadership of that community … No one grudged the Jews a free hand in commerce and industry. But when the legal and medical professions showed an unusually high percentage of Jews; when most of the theaters, the press, the concerts, were under Jewish management, then this constitutes the incursion of a foreign element into the hostess nation … A nation whose civilization is rooted in Christianity will therefore always be at pains to preserve Christianity as the basis of its civilization and to discourage foreign elements in its cultural life. So long as the Jews fail to appreciate this fact they will come up against difficulties.…”
Thus it is the Jew’s fault that there is anti-Semitism, as Schacht saw things. Further, he continued, it was entirely appropriate for a “Christian” nation such as Nazi Germany to take measures to attack the Jewish “foreign elements” in its midst, despite the fact that most German Jews had been resident in Germany for generations, and even for centuries.
Schacht’s self-defense then goes on to claim that it was “almost painful [for Schacht] to have to recount all that I had done for the Jews—painful because to champion such persecuted people is, at bottom, no more than the duty of any decent man.”
* Jewish businesses taken over as their owners sought to flee the country included the Delka shoe factory (purchased by Creditanstalt at 40 percent of the owners’ asking price); the Brunner Brothers’ lamp and metalware factory (asking price not disclosed); Samuel Schallinger’s Hotel Bristol and the Imperial Wine wholesalers (at 64 percent of the asking price); and the Toffler family’s “Tiller” brand textile and uniform company (at less than 25 percent of the asking price). The Aryanization of the Brunner factory was jointly handled by Creditanstalt and by Deutsche Bank’s Berlin office, captured records show. Meanwhile IG Farben, which was also represented on Creditanstalt’s board, Aryanized and took control of one of Austria’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, Serum Union AG.
6
“Who Still Talks of the Armenians?”
Mental patients and disabled people appear to have been the first ones the Nazis actually gassed; they killed at least 50,000 in an experimental euthanasia program code-named Aktion T4 that began in the fall of 1939.1 Reports from German-occupied Poland suggest that the SS gassed a number of Polish prostitutes at about the same time.2
The bulk of the Nazi killings prior to 1941 were what the Poles termed “cold pogroms”: deportation of tens of thousands of people to barren wastelands or to desperately overcrowded Jewish ghettos where death came slowly through hunger, disease, or exposure to the elements. Nazi concentration camps during this period were prison camps, not extermination centers. True, German security troops and paramilitary gangs undertook thousands of massacres of Jews, Communists, Romanis (Gypsies), and others. But they carried out these killings on a local scale, generally taking the lives of between five and fifty persons at a time.3
The cold pogroms were kindred to Turkey’s World War I extermination of Armenians in several ways. Both were driven primarily by a determination to achieve “security” through wiping out a race of people, rather than by conventional economic or military actions. The Germans used administrative methods similar to those of the Turks, and both campaigns chose local pogroms, hunger, and exposure to the elements as their chief instruments of death. The Nazis organized the extirpation of between 700,000 and one million Jews and Poles between September 1939 and the summer of 19424—a casualty rate approaching that which the Turks had achieved in a comparable time using nearly identical methods.
Hitler was well aware of Turkey’s genocide of Armenians and of the failure of the international community to respond adequately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler commented in an interview that the “extermination of the Armenians” had led him to “the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine” over which Aryans would eventually triumph.5 He returned to this theme in a formal talk to his commanding generals on the eve of their invasion of Poland in 1939: “Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality,” he exclaimed. “Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder.… Thus for the time being I have sent to the East … my Death’s Head Units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”6 On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of Turkey’s regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a worthy model for his own government.7
A new and more terrible wave of slaughter began when the Germans invaded the USSR during June of 1941. Special SS troops dedicated to mass murder now followed close behind the advancing German army. Within thirty-six months, these Einsatzgruppen and their subunits, the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, shot about two million people, according to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. The large majority of the dead were Jews, although the Einsatzgruppen’s net also caught hundreds of thousands of Communists, Slavs, Romanis, Poles, homosexuals, hospital patients, unarmed prisoners of war, and even orphan children. These two million murders, moreover, do not include the gassings at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death factories that began in the wake of the invasion.8
A 1942 report on the fate of Jews in eastern Poland smuggled out of Warsaw by the Jewish Labor Bund provided remarkably detailed and accurate early documentation of the work of the Einsatzkommandos.
From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil, using the Ukrainians and Lithuanian fascists for this job. It began in Eastern Galicia in the summer months of 1941. The following system was applied everywhere: men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place—a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered, or shot by machine-guns, or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed on the streets. In many towns Jews were carried off to an “unknown destination” and killed in the adjacent woods. Thirty thousand Jews were killed in L’wow [Lvov], 15,000 in Stanislawow, 5,000 in Tarnopol, 2,000 in Zloczow, 4,000 in Brzezany (there were 18,000 Jews in this town, now only 1,700 are left). The same has happened in Zborow, Kolomyja, Sambor, Stryj, Drohobycz, Zbaraz, Przemyslany, Kuty, Sniatyn, Zaleszczyki, Brody, Przemysl, Rawa Ruska, and other places.… The number of the Jews murdered in a beastly fashion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithuania is put at 300,000.9
The extermination campaign gathered momentum by integrating itself with the day-to-day activities of Hitler’s government and German society. In January 1942, fourteen senior German government bureaucrats met at SS offices at Lake Wannsee, in the suburbs of Berlin, to coordinate efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Up to that point, the various German ministries had often worked at cross-purposes in their approach to the “Jewish Question.” Officials in charge of the economic exploitation of the Nazi-occupied territories in the East had sometimes advocated retention of able-bodied Jews as slave laborers, while Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had pushed for mass execution by the
Einsatzgruppen. Still other ministries had favored a variety of deportation and resettlement schemes, though they were unable to agree on exactly where to relocate the refugees and the extent of terror to wreak upon them.
The Wannsee meeting changed all that. There, SS security chief Reinhard Heydrich enlisted the support of each of the major government ministries and Nazi party organizations in a concerted effort to “clear … the German Lebensraum [“living space”] of Jews in a legal way,” [emphasis added]. The tactics were relatively simple. “Europe will be cleaned up from the West to the East,” Heydrich commented. “Able-bodied Jews will be taken in large labor columns to these districts [i.e.: Nazi-occupied territories on the Eastern Front] for work on roads … in the course of which action a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, as it must undoubtedly consist of the toughest, have to be treated accordingly, as it … would, if liberated, act as a bud cell of a Jewish reconstruction.” All German government agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan; it was to be the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe.”10
Heydrich’s assistant, Adolf Eichmann, estimated that there were approximately 11 million Jews to be “cleaned up” in this fashion; he provided a country-by-country breakdown of Jewish populations to help plan tactics. There were 5 million Jews to murder in the Nazi-occupied USSR, according to his list, and 2.3 million more in the former territories of Poland. Long-range plans called for the SS to eliminate all 4,000 Jews in Ireland once the German troops arrived.11
The Splendid Blond Beast Page 9
