Business Books: David de Jong – “Brown Legacy”

“I am a capitalist. I own a quarter of Bahlsen, so I’m happy about it.” In 2019, Verena Bahlsen didn’t realize that she had just talked her head and neck on stage. The social networks reacted immediately. The focus of the shit storm was not the biscuit manufacturer’s economic success, but the insensitive handling of the then 26-year-old company heiress with the dark past of the Hanover-based company. Several family members had once supported the NSDAP, Bahlsen did good business with the Wehrmacht. In addition, the company employed forced laborers from 1942 to 1945, including many women from the Ukraine. A few days after her speech, Verena Bahlsen delivered a half-baked apology, which the FAZ also reported: “That was before my time, and we paid the forced laborers just like the Germans and treated them well.” The company was not guilty of anything Let it come, said Bahlsen.

It is a clever move by David de Jong to place this seemingly nondescript scene from a digital marketing conference at the beginning of his book, Brown Legacy. Bahlsen’s spontaneous statement and the following statement revealed (as de Jong writes) the “biggest moral faux pas that one can commit in Germany”: the consistent hiding of the family biography in the Third Reich. Many Germans never faced the heavy burden of guilt after enriching themselves personally through the Aryanization of companies and the use of foreign forced labourers.

The author, whose Jewish family was persecuted and in some cases murdered by the Nazis, does not accuse the Germans in general; his research focuses on the richest entrepreneurial families in the country: the Quandts, the Flicks, the Oetkers, the Reimanns, the von Fincks and the The Porsche and Piëch families. The book is based on numerous articles by de Jong for the Bloomberg business service. He wants to bring more transparency to chapters of the company’s history that he believes have not been adequately examined up to now. In fact, not all large German companies have faced up to their history in the Third Reich, but de Jong’s accusation is too sweeping. Many German corporations and banks have opened their archives in recent years in order to take responsibility. The Quandt family of industrialists, for example, commissioned the well-known historian Joachim Scholtyseck. His expert opinion is considered groundbreaking for the scientific processing of company histories during the Nazi era. Other companies such as Adidas, Porsche, Oetker, Sartorius, Continental and Freudenberg also gave well-known researchers access to face the uncomfortable truth. After the faux pas, Bahlsen also commissioned an economic historian to investigate the role played by forced labor in the company. It cannot be said that these are just euphemistic commissioned works, as de Jong suggests. But he deals with them on just 40 pages.

Focus on Quandt and von Finck

His book is still worth reading: with a few exceptions, the protagonists of “Braunes Erbe” were already wealthy during the German Empire. Her commercial flair, paired with her extreme opportunism, met the up-and-coming National Socialist organization, which was initially chronically on the verge of bankruptcy. It was only this encounter that laid the basis for the ascent to even higher spheres for the industrial and financial barons. The reader can follow her family history in the appendix through family trees up to the present day.

It’s about reclusive families whose products are bought by almost everyone, whose cars are on the streets by the millions and whose services are used every day. He gives a lot of space to the people Günther Quandt, whose heirs later rose to become the major shareholders of BMW, and to the banker August von Finck. For historically savvy readers, the chapters on Quandt’s close family ties to Magda Goebbels and Fincks’ national-conservative attitude will bring little added value. The role of Ferdinand Porsche in the Third Reich deserved a clearer weighting. If you want to find out more about the expulsion of the Jewish Porsche co-founder Adolf Rosenberger and the history of the origins of Volkswagen, you have to read a separate Porsche biography.

Despite this criticism, de Jong’s work will not only find readers because of the prominence of the subject. The book convinces with a lively narrative structure and depth of detail. After reading it, you will better understand the origins of many large German corporations and the mentality of family businesses in the Nazi era. However, because the families contacted all refused to be interviewed, “Brown Heritage” only creates transparency to a certain extent. After all, the reader must search for rare statements such as those by August Oetker. It was a “reminder to everyone to work for an open, free society and to decisively oppose any totalitarian currents,” said Oetker in an interview with “Zeit” a few years ago. In any case, De Jong’s book is a great support to keep this warning alive.

David de Jong: Brown heritage. The dark history of the richest German corporate dynasties, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022, 496 pages, 28 euros.