Allianz was Germany’s largest insurance company throughout the Nazi period. It insured the SS, the concentration camps, and the looted property of murdered Jews. Its chairman joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and became Hitler’s economics minister within months. Its senior executives negotiated with Göring on behalf of the German insurance industry over the claims arising from Kristallnacht. The company’s underwriters visited Auschwitz to inspect the premises and assess the risk. This was not peripheral involvement.
Kurt Schmitt, the Allianz chairman, served as Reich Economics Minister from June 1933 to January 1935 before returning to the company. His successor as the industry’s political representative was Eduard Hilgard, also an Allianz man and head of the Reich Group for Insurance. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Jewish policyholders held valid claims for around twenty-five million Reichsmarks of damage to their shops, synagogues and homes. Hilgard met Göring on 12 November 1938 with other insurance industry representatives. The outcome was that the claims were not paid to the Jewish policyholders. The money went to the Reich. Göring put it plainly at the meeting: the Jews would carry the damage themselves.
The camp insurance files are among the most specific evidence of corporate complicity in the Holocaust. The Allianz archive contains policies for Auschwitz-Birkenau listing the insured structures: the administration buildings, the warehouses, the crematoria. The crematoria are listed as industrial plant. The same files exist for Buchenwald, Dachau, and other camps. Allianz also insured the Krupp plants where camp prisoners worked, the IG Farben site at Monowitz, and the railway sidings of the Reichsbahn. The company knew the addresses, the activities, and the workforce of every camp it carried on its books.
The most direct profit came from the life policies of murdered Jews. German Jews had bought life insurance throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. After 1938 the regime ordered Jewish-owned policies to be surrendered to the state, with the proceeds going to the Reich rather than to the holder or the family. Allianz cooperated. Where the holder was deported and killed, the company subsequently refused claims from heirs on the grounds that no death certificate existed, that the policy had been seized by the state, or that the premium had lapsed. Decades of obstruction followed. Class actions in American courts in the 1990s forced a reckoning.
Gerald Feldman’s commissioned history of Allianz, published in 2001, was one of the most thorough corporate histories of the Nazi period. Feldman had complete archive access and his judgement was severe: the company had not been coerced. Its directors had chosen the work, lobbied for it, and profited from it. Allianz accepted the findings.
Allianz paid into the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, established in 1998 under Lawrence Eagleburger, which processed claims for unpaid policies until 2007. The company also contributed to the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft compensation fund for forced labourers. By 2007 it had paid out around $102 million on Holocaust-era policies. The original face value of the policies in 1938 money was considerably more.
See also
Sources
- Gerald Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Gerald Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924, Oxford University Press, 1993
- International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, Final Report, ICHEIC, 2007
- Neil Levin, The Holocaust Industry, and the ICHEIC proceedings, 1998-2007
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Insurance and the Holocaust, encyclopedia.ushmm.org