Hitler's bank bares its dark past
Dresdner's self-financed study reveals that greed rather than ideology inspired its zealous support for the regime, even helping to finance Auschwitz via a construction company based in Breslau (modern day Wroclaw)
There's no way to put a positive spin on German industry's collaboration with the Nazi regime before and during World War II, so Dresdner Bank Chief Executive Herbert Walter didn't try. Presenting the results of an independent study of Dresdner's role in the Holocaust, Walter admitted: "It confronts us with bitter historical truths. We accept these truths, even when they are painful."
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Painful is hardly a strong enough word. According to the study by a team of historians from German universities, Dresdner functioned as the house bank to Hitler's Schutzstaffel (SS), lending more money than any other bank to the organization that was at the forefront of the most ghastly atrocities. Dresdner, co-founded by Eugen Gutmann, who was Jewish, quickly expelled its Jewish employees after the Nazi takeover and arbitrarily cut the pension payments of Jewish retirees. The bank even owned a stake in the construction company that built the crematorium at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
It has become almost a ritual for big German companies to finance detailed studies of their Nazi collaboration. Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler (DCX ), Siemens (SI ), and even menswear maker Hugo Boss (HUGSF ) have owned up to their histories. Part of the motivation may be genuine remorse, but companies also have learned that attempts to spin history can backfire.
MONEY MOTIVE. Bertelsmann suffered severe embarrassment in 1998 when a German journalist, Hersch Fischler, punctured the myth that the Gütersloh-based media giant had resisted the Nazis and suffered a shutdown of its book-publishing business as a result. In fact, the company later conceded, Bertelsmann had profited handsomely from supplying morale-building books to German troops and was shut down near the end of the war only to save paper.
Since then, companies have learned that it's better to confront the past themselves than to wait for an enterprising historian or journalist to do so. The self-examination is a prerequisite to being a global player from Germany. "Apparently, they expect to be more involved in the global community in the next decade. They want to start in a clear position," says Cees B.M. van Riel, a professor who teaches corporate communications at RSM Erasmus University business school in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
As Walter conceded in a statement, Dresdner suppressed its own history until the mid-1990s when, under pressure from critics, it commissioned the study. Dresdner's close ties to top Nazis were already well-known; Chief Executive Karl Rasche, an SS member, was tried and sentenced to a prison term at Nuremberg.
But the study makes clear that Dresdner's wartime culpability was much deeper, and the motive was money rather than politics or Nazi pressure. The bank "took advantage of all the business opportunities opened up by the aggressive and racist policies of the Third Reich," study co-author Johannes Bähr concludes.
OVERZEALOUS COOPERATION. Despite the bank's own Jewish origins, it played a key role in the persecution of German Jews, according to the study. After Jewish employees were expelled in 1933, Dresdner exceeded even Nazi race laws in cutting their pensions or severance payments. As Jewish businesses were being "Aryanized," the bank hired thuggish "business consultants" to intimidate owners and seize control.
After the war began, bank executives knew early on about crimes taking place in concentration camps, according to the study. Dresdner provided banking services to numerous SS facilities. The bank was a major shareholder in a construction company, based in Breslau (now the Polish city of Wroclaw), which built crematoriums at the Auschwitz death camp. "Particularly in the case of its most reprehensible activities, the bank could have operated differently," Bähr writes.
That is perhaps the most damning aspect of the study: Even Dresdner top managers who had no love for the Nazis exploited the war unscrupulously (and often kept their jobs after the war). While it was true that the Nazis exerted massive pressure on German businesses to cooperate with the regime, they did not need to do so as zealously as Dresdner.
"There was no exit option against the control mechanisms of the Nazi dictatorship," the study concludes. "However, there was substantial room to maneuver in the degree of cooperation.... No company was forced to actively take part in the robbery of Jewish property."
CRIMINALS AS MENTORS. Of course, none of Dresdner's current management bears personal responsibility for these crimes. CEO Walter was born eight years after the war ended. In fact, by the 1970s, practically no bank executives who had collaborated with the Nazis were still at Dresdner, says Dieter Ziegler, dean of the Ruhr University in Bochum and a co-author of the study.
So why did it take so long for Dresdner to confront its past? Until recently, many managers had known the World War II generation as mentors rather than war criminals, strange as that may sound. Until the '80s, the myth persisted that Nazi crimes were largely the work of an evil group close to Hitler, and everyone else was just following orders.
"The managers of the 1980s knew their predecessors as heroes of the economic wonder. They didn't want that white image stained by Nazi brown," says Ziegler. Sixty years later, the past still weighs on German business.
By Jack Ewing