Nazi Billionaires by David De Jong

Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
By David De Jong
Mariner Books, 2022

Journalist David De Jong spent years investigating the Nazi backgounds of several German industrial empires and writing up his findings for Bloomberg News, and those quiet bombshell articles he has now expanded into a book, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties, which delves into the dark collaborations of families like the Quandts (BMW), the Porsche-Piechs (Volkswagon and Porsche), The Oetkers (“who own global empires of baking ingredients, prepared foods, beer, and luxury hotels”), and others. “These families still control billions of euros and dollars,” he writes. “Many own well-known brands, whose products blanket the globe – from the cars we drive, to the coffee and beer we drink, to the houses we rent, to the land we live on, and the hotels we book for vacations and business trips.” 

Chapter by chapter, De Jong explores each of his target families, and despite the hideous nature of the subject matter, these chapters make very good reading. Readers thinking this might be an extended dry economic history will be pleasantly surprised; this is a book at least as much about personalities as payouts.

Repulsive personalities, right down the line, man and woman, generation after generation. As De Jong points out in some disarmingly mild-mannered tones, many of the patriarchs of these family firms weren’t ardent Nazis. They were, if anything, worse than Nazis: they were willing to write bank drafts to the Nazis in exchange for profit, “calculating, unscrupulous opportunists looking to expand their business empires at any cost.” 

Time and again, the “at any cost” was nightmarish. For example, Ferdinand Porsche, patriarch of the firm that still sells coveted cars today, ingratiated himself to the Nazis during the debut of his “people’s car,” the Volkswagon: he delivered the first Volkswagon to Hitler on his birthday in 1939, and as De Jong notes, “The ‘people’s car’ was not, in fact, delivered to the people. Only 630 of them were built during the Third Reich, and they all went to the Nazi elite.” When Porsche thus created demand for his cars back in 1939, he needed a factory to mass-produce them – and like all the other financiers in these pages, he was willing to make a Devil’s bargain to make that happen:

German men were barely available, as most had been called to military service. By the time the brutally cold winter of 1939 arrived, Volkswagon’s main factory halls remained unheated, and its stairwells were missing window glass. Many more workers were needed to finish the job and keep the place running. Ferdinand Porsche did not care whether they came voluntarily or by force.

That iniquitous indifference crops up over and over in Nazi Billionaires, and it fills the reader with a mounting sense of outrage. These industrialists allied themselves with the Nazis and built their fortunes with Nazi-supplied slave labor, and the more of their stories De Jong tells, the more that outrage seeks some kind of moral catharsis. But it never comes. These families never paid for their complicity, and they prosper today, usually without even the fig-leaf of a brand-name change. Reading Nazi Billionaires in 2022, when the world is every bit as thoroughly ruled by ghoulish, opportunistic plutocrats depressingly likely to make deals with the Devil, is crushingly relatable. De Jong has done valuable work shining his investigative light into the dark cellars of evil’s bankers, and Nazi Billionaires is an undeniably valuable book. The fact that it’s not “the beauty of whales”-style valuable is hardly the author’s fault.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.