“Business as usual.”
After four years of crisscrossing the European countryside while piecing together the unabridged history of German insurance giant Allianz during the Third Reich, Professor Gerald Feldman will never again be able to hear those three little words without a shiver running down his spine.
“What surprised me the most was the extent to which a white-collar company became implicated in so many aspects of the National Socialist regime and, ultimately, at the very end, even the more criminal aspects,” said Feldman, a longtime U.C. Berkeley history professor and author of the new 595-page book, “Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933-1945.”
Insurance executives “were not murderers themselves. They were anti-Semitic, yet it was more the garden variety of anti-Semitism, and you could have found that in the U.S. too at that time. Yet there they were, up to their ears in the whole system. In a way, they were hostages but not unwilling hostages. That seems to me to be the most astonishing thing.”
Feldman and six research assistants put together “Allianz” at the behest of the insurance company itself. Embarrassed by a hagiographic 1990 study that whitewashed the firm’s dealings during the Third Reich — and the 1997 revelation that Allianz had insured SS-run concentration camp factories — younger company executives pushed for an independent, full and honest historical study.
“I had just turned 60, I’m Jewish and I never really researched the Holocaust,” recalled Feldman. “So, I did it.”
He received total access and complete cooperation from Allianz — and it shows. The portrait he paints of the insurance giant’s sharklike behavior as Germany dumped its Jews overboard is, to put it quite mildly, not a flattering one.
Feldman and his team spent four years sifting through the documentation of Allianz and its subsidiaries in archives throughout Germany, Italy, Lithuania, France and Russia. They book reveals the company’s disturbingly casual disregard for human suffering.
“Allianz” highlights case after individual case of Jewish employees cut loose, Jewish property bought up on the cheap and business ethics tossed by the wayside while currying favor and profit within the Nazi regime.
Perhaps the best example of how deeply corrupted the German business establishment had become was Allianz’s willingness to play along with the Nazis’ economic repression of the Jews following Kristallnacht.
In the wake of 91 murders, the burnings of synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses, and countless shattered windows on Sept. 9, 1938, any compensation for Jews was outlawed by both Hitler and his right-hand man, Hermann Goring.
Instead of paying compensation to the victimized Jews, Goring insisted the insurance companies could maintain the image of propriety by funneling the money owed to Jews into a government fund, which the Nazis would keep.
Thanks to frantic legal tap-dancing, heavily anti-Jewish politicking — often blaming the Jews for the “righteous” and “spontaneous” action — and the institution of punitive taxes on German Jews, German insurers paid just 1.3 million reichsmarks (roughly $5.2 million in today’s dollars) to the state treasury. German Jews, out of an estimated 46.1 million reichsmarks in damages (about $184.4 million today), got the shaft in what Feldman labels “a state-sanctioned exercise in collective moral turpitude.”
“Jews were never going to get anything; there was no question the Jews weren’t going to get anything. That’s not the point,” explained the professor. The insurance companies “became party to fraudulent payments allegedly made to the Jews. They became party to the legitimization and justification of the pogrom.”
While Allianz executives had been honestly pained by the compulsory firings of their productive Jewish employees in the early ’30s, Feldman contends the company — and German businesses in general — became increasingly callous about such matters by 1937 or ’38.
Similarly, Allianz didn’t lose any sleep over insuring production facilities within the Lodz Ghetto or concentration camps (including Auschwitz).
Insurance inspectors toured the concentration camp factories and were fully aware of what was going on. Inspectors were expressly forbidden from entering the ghetto, however, which should have raised an immediate red flag. Of course, it did not.
The agent who closed the deals for Allianz, Max Beier, was an enthusiastic Nazi and the contracts he brokered were large and quite profitable. In fact, Allianz was actually beaten out by competing insurance companies in 1945.
When it came to restitution payments following the war, Feldman characterizes Allianz’s record as hit and miss, no worse and certainly no better than German industry on the whole.
The company often acknowledged it had bought up properties sold by threatened Jews at far below market value, but such cases often dragged on for decades.
German insurance companies are probably in the clear, however, when it comes to Jewish-held life insurance claims — but not because of corporate benevolence. The anti-Jewish taxes of the late 1930s forced most Jews to sell back their policies in a desperate effort to monetize their assets. “Most Jews left Germany dirt poor,” Feldman said.
“It’s important people know what actually happened, what the company did and did not do,” added Feldman, who noted that the book is selling very well with Allianz’s German employees.
“This is kind of a coming clean. I’m sure [Allianz] is ashamed. Most Germans are. But coming to terms can also have a very positive effect.”