My thoughts

The book tracks Friedrich Flick, August von Finck, Herbert Quandt, Ferdinand Porsche, and Rudolf-August Oetker.

Some of them were already established businessmen involved in the steel or weapons production industry, while others were aspiring entrepreneurs. All of them will ended up working for the Nazi party, supporting their campaigns with donations, and once the Nazi party rose to power, they collected the benefits and got even richer.

I’m going to leave here a bunch of annotations I made while reading, along with some comments, just to give you a taste of what you can find in the book.

Hitler’s decision helped Porsche turn things around financially. And when the time came for Hitler to look for a man capable of realizing his prestige car project - the Volkswagen - he knew just where to find him: at his drawing desk in Stuttgart.

You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Porsche helped Hitler’s war machine by designing and producing weapons.

It also helped get Volkswagen started and created the Beetle as the first car dedicated for the people. The Beetle never actually made it to the people during Hitler’s reign, because those factories were too busy making weapons instead.

An asset was considered Aryanized in the Third Reich when the Jewish “element” of ownership has been removed.

During the 1930s (especially the late 30s) a lot of Jewish businesses were involved in hostile takeovers, where they were forced to sell for prices up to 10x lower than the actual value. A lot of them accepted because there was no other way and they just wanted to escape the country or the German occupation.

These assets were then be entrusted to those inside the inner circle of the Nazi party and managed for profit, increasing their wealth even more.

And most of the women were Ostarbeiter, forced workers from Eastern Europe. The women performed hard labor in twelve-hour shifts, repairing railway tracks, loading and unloading coal and wagons, and even working in the steel-smelting furnaces. Pregnant women had to keep working up to the point when they gave birth. These workers were given half a liter of soup for lunch, “a mixture normally given to pigs”, one women later said.

This part of the book is pretty disgusting, it makes you sick to your stomach to think about it. They decided to create special detention camps close to the factories that belonged to the party favorite businessmen, so that extra work force can be accessible at low costs (almost nothing).

You know your mother - we share the same blood, I didn’t even consider it. Our glorious idea is perishing - and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have known in my life. The world that will come after the Fuhrer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, which is why I brought the children here as well.

This is Magda’s letter (Joseph Goebbels’ wife) to her eldest son (Harald) who was captured by the Americans in Africa. She took the other 6 younger siblings down into the bunker with her during the last days of the war.

Those 6 kids will have a dark faith as stated below:

The SS dentist Helmut Kunz gave each kid a morphine injection. When they were in a drugged stupor, Magda inserted a cyanide capsule into each child’s mouth and made sure they bit down on the glass, assisted by one of Hitler’s personal Physicians, Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger.

She was so deluded about reality, thinking there would be nothing after the Führer and National Socialism fell.

Such a declaration become known as a Persilschein, a Persil ticket, named after a famous German laundry detergent. It was tongue-and-cheek term for any statement meant to wash clean the stain of Nazi collaboration and sympathies.

All those who were facing trials once Germany had lost the war were in a rush to get a Persilschein from Jewish people. The idea was to get a written statement saying they did good deeds, helping Jewish people in any way possible. A lot of these Nazi protégé businessmen were able to purchase these tickets from Jewish people who escaped the country by giving them back money- money that represented an insignificant amount compared to the actual value of the assets that were taken from them.

As for von Finck, he wasn’t completely satisfied with the trial’s outcome and appealed his sentence. He applied for amnesty based on a World War I knee injury, to avoid paying any restitution. The amnesty was granted. Von Finck was “denazified” and returned to work.

The guy paid 500.000 deutsche marks (about $120.000 USD at that time) to make sure the witnesses did not appear in court, got away without a sentence, and after that, he APPEALED to get restitution for his trial expenses (lawyers and all). ¹

Over 1950 and 1951, McCoy oversaw a series of controversial acts of clemency.

McCoy’s decision was political. It was intended to placate an important new ally: the West German government and citizens.

These “acts of clemency” were directed at, you guessed it, some of the wealthy people associated with the Nazi party.

By 1970, Friedrich Flick, August von Finck, Herbert Quandt, and Rudolf-August Oetker made up West Germany’s top four wealthiest businessmen, in descending order of fortune. All four were former members of the Nazi Party; one of them had been a voluntary Waffen-SS officer; they had all become billionaires.

This pretty much sums up what happened to the businessmen who were involved directly and indirectly into the horrors of WWII.