Nazi Billionaires: German Big Business and Antisemitism

Following Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in early 1933, most German businessmen started to vigorously capitalize on Nazi Germany’s newly codified antisemitism. These men began to remove Jewish executives from their company boards, before indiscriminately seizing Jewish-owned businesses—first in Germany then across Nazi-occupied Europe. Many of the German moguls ended up using Jewish men and women as slave laborers in their factories and mines during World War II. But were many of these tycoons ardent Nazis, who unquestioningly embraced Hitler’s ideology and antisemitism to begin with? Or were most simply calculating, unscrupulous opportunists looking to expand their business empires at any cost?

David de Jong is a journalist who previously covered European banking and finance from Amsterdam and hidden wealth and billionaire fortunes from New York for Bloomberg News. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the Dutch Financial Daily. A native of the Netherlands, de Jong currently lives in Tel Aviv. He spent four years reporting from Berlin while researching and writing this book.

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