Holocaust Assets and German Business History: Beginning or End?

Abstract

I would like to begin this discussion with an anecdote that will, I believe, illuminate some of the problems I want to discuss here.* In February of 1999, the Deutsche Bank reported the discovery of records showing that its Kattowitz branch had given operating credits to a middle-sized construction firm involved in the building of the IG Farben Bunawerke at the Monowitz concentration camp which was supplied with slave labor from nearby Auschwitz.' The relevant documents had been found in the cellars of the Hannover branch of the Deutsche Bank in the course of a general effort by the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute, that is, its archive, to comb out its branches and centralize its archival holdings. The Hannover branch had served as a place of storage for the accounts and records of the Kattowitz branch at the end of the war, but as customers of the former branch transferred their accounts and there was no longer much call for the Kattowitz records, these and other records were stored in the basement of the Hannover branch and more or less forgotten. In any case, there they were, and they obviously implicated the bank in the financing of a firm-one, in fact, of a number-that employed forced labor from Auschwitz under what could only have been terrible conditions. This had not been the first time the Deutsche Bank had been unpleasantly surprised by the discovery of previously unknown or unreported documents. Two years earlier balance sheets had turned up showing that the bank had been engaged in the purchase and sale of gold, all of which was stolen by the Nazi regime and some of which was victim gold, that is, gold in the possession or from the teeth of murdered Jews. This triggered the creation of the Historical Commission of the Deutsche Bank in November 1997 composed of three of the original authors of the history of the bank published in 1995,2 Harold James, Lothar Gall, and myself along with Jonathan Steinberg, then of Cambridge, now of the University of Pennsylvania, and the distinguished Israeli historian Avraham Barkai, for the purpose of pursuing