In August 1945, the Allied powers of France, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR created the world’s first International Military Tribunal, with the goal of bringing those responsible for the Third Reich’s wartime atrocities to justice. While important political figures like Hermann Göring, Karl Dönitz, and Rudolf Hess were successfully imprisoned or put to death—either by the tribunal itself or, in Göring’s case, by their own hands—the same cannot be said of the businessmen with whom they had cooperated. Shielded from the law by capitalist sympathizers in the US, the fate of these Nazi billionaires—whose companies, including Volkswagen and Dr. Oetker, remain in operation today—demonstrates that the ultra-wealthy have ways of evading even the worst of crimes.  

Fascism and capital first joined hands in the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler secured financial support from several German industrialists by promising to stop the spread of communism. What began as a simple business transaction quickly flourished into a political partnership: in addition to bankrolling the Nazi party, tycoons like Günther Quandt, Rudolf-August Oetker, and Friedrich Flick facilitated and profited from the regime’s innumerable war crimes, supplying the German army with weapons and consumer goods through lucrative government contracts, buying out their Jewish and European competitors at rates far below their actual market value, and manning their factories with unpaid, underfed slave labor.

The wealth of Nazi billionaires grew in proportion to the Third Reich’s attacks on civil liberties. Baron August von Flinck, an aristocrat who opened Hitler’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst, received permission to expropriate or “aryanize” Berlin’s Jewish-owned Dreyfus bank and Vienna’s Rothschild bank before the war had even begun. Friedrich Flick replaced the waged laborers of his weapons plants with concentration camp inmates from Dachau and Auschwitz, who reportedly worked more than 100 hours per week under the supervision of SS officers. Similar practices took place at factories owned by Quandt and Ferdinand Porsche, whose Volkswagen assembly lines were repurposed to build armed vehicles for the Wehrmacht.  

Following the example set by their political counterparts, the business practices of German industrialists became more and more callous, sadistic, and exploitative as the war neared its conclusion. In his 2023 study Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties, Dutch historian David de Jong describes how, when Allied forces neared one of Quandt’s arms factories in Hannover, more than a thousand workers were locked into a nearby barn which SS officers set on fire, shooting down anyone who managed to escape.

In the first few months following the fall of Berlin, plans to prosecute Nazi billionaires for their role in the war seemed promising. The US Treasury Department drew up a list of 43 German business leaders to be indicted by the Military Tribunal. Featured on this list were Quandt—labelled a “reactionary capitalist” and early military activist by Allied investigators—and Flick, whom the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) identified in a memo as the “most powerful individual business leader sharing the formulation and execution of Nazi economic policies” who had “shared in the spoils of Nazi conquest of Europe.” Ferdinand Porsche and his partner, Anton Piëch, were likewise accused of having played “an important part in equipping the Nazi war machine,” as was Rudolf-August Oetker. 

Even after being detained and questioned, none of these billionaires assumed responsibility for their actions during the war. Quandt, whose ex-wife Magda married Joseph Goebbels, claimed he was coerced by Hitler’s propaganda minister, who fought and won a lengthy battle for the custody of Quandt’s youngest son, Harald. Ferdinand Porsche told investigators that his collaboration with the Nazis had been transactional rather than ideological, claiming “Hitler’s support was simply necessary in order to successfully implement my ideas.” Friedrich Flick and his son, Otto Ernst, provided Allied interrogators with confusing and contradictory responses. Like Quandt, they claimed they were coerced by politicians and the military, and said their workers—though unpaid and unable to leave the factories—had enjoyed the best possible conditions. “The food was excellent,” Flick insisted. “Barbed wire fencing? I don’t know.” When the investigators, tired of these obvious lies, threatened to subject him to ten years of hard labor, Flick even complained about being kept at the same facility as some SS officers who had been part of Heinrich Himmler’s so-called Circle of Friends, an exclusive group to which he himself had belonged as well.

Rudolf-August Oetker insisted he was guilty by association only due to his relation to his Nazi step-father, Richard Kaselowksy, despite the fact that he had himself been named an honorary Waffen SS officer. Even Baron von Flinck, whose former business partners described him as a genuine believer in both Hitler and Nazism, asserted that he had aryanized the Dreyfus and Rothschild banks to protect their Jewish owners, even going as far as to tell the Dreyfus family—who eventually approached him to demand recompensation—that they should “thank him for the decent take-over of [their] business.”

These kinds of remarks were not the product of desperation or delusion: many Nazi billionaires kept up with global affairs, and correctly assumed that elements within the US government considered them potential allies in the coming Cold War with the USSR. Despite promising investigations into their wartime conduct, then, no German industrialist would end up being tried at Nuremberg. The acquittal of Hjalmar Schacht, a Weimar-era economist and politician who had downplayed concerns about the Nazis’ rise to power but played no significant role in the administration of the Third Reich, had, according to De Jong, set a poor precedent: that the tribunal would only try those who were directly responsible for the Third Reich’s actions. More importantly, the Americans worried about a “Soviet-dominated, anti-capitalist show trial” which would cast their own economic system in a negative light and push the European nations closer to socialism. As the financially depleted governments of France and Great Britain retreated from Nuremberg, the Truman administration shifted its postwar priorities from neutralizing Nazi allies to empowering them in an effort to stimulate the recovery of the West German economy, which had the potential to become the biggest in Europe and, consequently, act as a dependable bulwark against Soviet expansion.

Quandt understood as much when, while detained, he started working on his memoir slash defense statement, The Political Persecution of Dr. Günther Quandt, adding sections where he waxed poetic about the United States: 

America! How often I think: the rise of this continent is one of the most wonderful chapters in the history of mankind.

The Republicans [he wrote to a friend around the same time, anticipating a conservative victory in the upcoming US midterm elections] won’t share the view that money is theft. One can already feel a breath of fresh air.

A breath of fresh air it certainly proved to be. Even before the Nuremberg trials concluded, the Western allies started collaborating with the Nazi billionaires in much the same way Hitler had done before. The British army, for example, not only used Quandt’s Hannover factory to produce batteries, but also put one of Quandt’s wartime colleagues (Horst Pavel) in charge of operations. Meanwhile, French companies approached Ferdinand Porsche about the possibility of producing Volkswagens for France. Porsche also became a business partner of the British and Americans, billing the occupying powers more than 1.25 million reichsmarks for his company’s services.

Truman’s policy shift from prosecution to cooperation excluded the possibility of a second series of Nuremberg trials, which—due to Soviet hostility towards Nazi capital—would have inevitably resulted in heavy punishments. Instead, most Nazi billionaires were tried in the same way low-ranking Nazi officers and ordinary German civilians were: through denazification courts. In these courts, relations with and sympathy for Hitler’s regime could be excused if enough witnesses—especially Jewish ones—maintained that the defendant had not actually been a true believer of Nazi ideology. Quandt, for his part, not only acquired such accounts from family members like his brother’s wife Ello, who provided a statement saying that Goebbels “hated Quandt” and had roped him into Hitler’s network against his will, but also Georg Sachs, a Jewish businessmen whom Quandt had helped emigrate in the early days of the regime. 

Quandt’s ultimate fate is representative of that of other Nazi billionaires: a denazification court heard his witnesses, determined the defendant “apolitical,” and acquitted him. Although the prosecutors—one of whom referenced Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to argue that amoral pursuit of profit does not absolve a capitalist from criminal acts—appealed Quandt’s case on two occasions, the verdict stood, meaning the only thing Quandt had to do before he could walk free was pay his trial costs.

Although they lost many of their businesses and personal properties, which were either taken over by the Allies or returned to their original, mostly Jewish owners, many Nazi billionaires emerged from the war relatively unscathed. Ferdinand Porsche’s virulently antisemitic partner Anton Piëch fled Germany with 10 million reichsmarks taken from Volkswagen’s company coffers—a sum which, in addition to the 20.5 million reichsmarks he and Ferdinand had syphoned into their private accounts throughout the war, was likely used, according to German historians Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger’s Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, to lay “the foundation for the successful post-war development of the house of Porsche.” Baron von Flick, although removed as supervisory board chairman of Europe’s two biggest insurers—Allianz and Munich Re—remained a major shareholder of both for several years. Friedrich Flick’s Sauersberg estate in Bavaria, which he had taken from a persecuted Jewish beer brewer named Ignatz Nacher, is, according to De Jong, still owned by one of Flick’s granddaughters. Rudolf-August Oetker, in addition to funding Stille Hilfe, a relief organization for SS veterans, did not retire as Dr. Oetker’s executive director until 1981, after which he was succeeded by his own son. He passed away as recently as 2007, with an estimated net worth of $8 billion.

The fact that so many Nazi billionaires managed to evade the law despite their culpability is not just an affront to justice, but also promoted an erroneous notion that German industrialists were coerced by the Nazis, when, in fact, they willingly joined hands and actively enabled Hitler’s rise to power. As our own day’s billionaires increasingly make explicit their political projects, it’s good to remember that the uber-wealthy have typically been active agents of right-wing reaction and oppression rather than mere pawns of authoritarian strongmen. 

Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist and researcher based in the US. He studied European history at New York University and has written for Jacobin, New Lines Magazine, Big Think, Freethink, JSTOR Daily and more.