Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, the two largest universal banks in Germany, played central roles in the financing of the German war economy and the Aryanisation of Jewish-owned property between 1933 and 1945. Both banks acted as the principal commercial agents in the forced sale of Jewish-owned businesses to non-Jewish German buyers from 1933 onwards, profiting from the transactions as commission agents and from the post-Aryanisation business of the new owners. Both banks operated branches in occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia from 1939 onwards, and both banks held custodian accounts for the deposits seized from deportees at the killing camps. The role of the German banks in the Holocaust is the case where the financial machinery of a modern banking system was integrated into a state programme of dispossession and murder.
Aryanisation
The Aryanisation of Jewish-owned businesses, the forced sale at well-below-market prices of Jewish enterprises to non-Jewish German buyers, accelerated through the 1930s and reached its peak in the wake of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and the subsequent decree of 12 November 1938 mandating the elimination of Jewish ownership in the German economy. The Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank acted as the principal commercial intermediaries in the transactions, valuing the assets, finding the buyers, structuring the sales, and providing the financing for the new owners. The banks profited from the transaction commissions and from the long-term banking relationships with the new owners.
The 1995 commissioned history of the Deutsche Bank by Lothar Gall, Gerald Feldman and others (Die Deutsche Bank 1870-1995) documented the bank’s role in around 363 specific Aryanisation transactions in the period 1933 to 1938. The Dresdner Bank record, documented in the 2006 commissioned history by Dieter Ziegler, Klaus-Dietmar Henke and others, was comparable in scale.
The occupied territories
From September 1939 onwards both banks established branches in occupied Poland (the Deutsche Bank in Krakow, Warsaw, Kattowitz and others; the Dresdner Bank in Krakow, Warsaw and Lemberg) and from 1940 in occupied France, the Netherlands and Belgium. The branches conducted the financial side of the Aryanisation in the occupied territories, the financing of German firms operating there, and (in some cases) the holding of accounts associated with the SS killing operations.
The Dresdner Bank, in particular, had a closer relationship with the SS than its competitor. The Dresdner financed several SS-owned enterprises including the SS construction company Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH, which operated quarries at multiple concentration camps, and held the principal banking relationship for the Reinhard funds, the moneys recovered from the Operation Reinhard killing camps and laundered through the Reichsbank into the German treasury.
The Reinhard funds
The personal property of the deportees murdered at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, the cash, jewellery, gold dental work, watches, and personal effects, was systematically collected, sorted, and transferred back to Germany. The cash and the gold (including dental gold from melted-down crowns and fillings) were deposited at the Reichsbank under the SS account number 1058 in the name Max Heiliger, a fictitious account holder. The Reichsbank credited the account, melted the gold into bars, and lodged the bars in the Reichsbank gold reserve. The two German banks acted as commercial intermediaries in some of the related transactions. The total value of the Reinhard funds was around 178 million Reichsmarks; the gold component was around 8 to 9 tonnes.
The Nuremberg follow-on
The Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg considered cases against senior bankers but the principal banking case, against the Dresdner Bank chairman Karl Rasche, was conducted as part of the Wilhelmstrasse trial of 1947 to 1949 (the Ministries case). Rasche was convicted of slave labour and looting and sentenced to seven years; he was released in 1951 and resumed banking. The senior management of both banks was substantially preserved into the post-war period.
The post-war commissioned histories
The Deutsche Bank commissioned a fully independent academic history of its wartime conduct in 1990, published in 1995. The Dresdner Bank commissioned a comparable study in 1999, published in 2006. Both studies were conducted to high academic standards by named external historians with full access to the bank archives. Both confirmed substantial wartime complicity in the Aryanisation, in financing the war economy, and (more comprehensively for the Dresdner) in financing SS operations. The two banks merged in 2009; the merged Commerzbank-Dresdner inherited both archives.
What it was
The German banks are the case of the modern financial system folded into the wartime regime’s programme of dispossession. The Aryanisation was the principal commercial driver in the pre-war period; the financing of the war economy and the SS in the wartime period. Both banks emerged from the post-war period with substantially preserved senior management and corporate continuity, and have over the following decades commissioned academic histories of their wartime conduct that have produced some of the best documentary work on the financial side of the Holocaust.
Sources
- Lothar Gall et al., Die Deutsche Bank 1870-1995, Beck, 1995
- Klaus-Dietmar Henke (ed.), Die Dresdner Bank im Dritten Reich, four volumes, Oldenbourg, 2006
- Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War against the Jews, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Christopher Simpson (ed.), War Crimes of the Deutsche Bank and the Dresdner Bank, Holmes & Meier, 2002
- Reichsbank archives: Max Heiliger account records