10. The Oppenheims and their Bank under National Socialism

In general, the Oppenheims, both the bank itself and the members of the family, got through a time of acute difficulty for “non-Aryan” enterprises and of extreme danger for “non-Aryans” themselves better than most. Private banks, of which there were an unusually large number in Germany—1,406, of widely varying size and importance, in 1925¹—were in fact viewed positively by some supporters of National Socialism inasmuch as it was possible to argue that they were rooted in local communities and contributed to the welfare of those communities.² This was not how they were viewed, however, if they happened to be Jewish owned, which many (notably the larger ones) were.³ The process of “Entjudung” [elimination of all Jewish influence] of German banks and businesses has been described in a number of meticulously researched scholarly studies.⁴ As a result of various anti-Jewish measures affecting both businesses and the individuals running them, hundreds of smaller Jewish-owned private banks went under or were bought up at bargain basement prices by “Aryan” firms and institutions between 1934 and 1938.⁵

As has often been noted, however, for several years after Hitler seized power in 1933, and for as long as the pragmatically minded Hjalmar Schacht was in charge of the Reich’s finances (so until 1937–1938) the great Jewish-owned private banks—such as the Warburgs, the Mendelssohns, and the Oppenheims—were considered essential to the national economy because of their importance to the German export trade, their international reputation and connections, their access to much needed foreign capital and foreign currency, and in some cases their role in the financing of German industry.⁶ Schacht saw to it, therefore, for purely practical reasons—but often in the teeth of opposition from fanatical, ideologically committed members of the Nazi Party—that they were allowed to continue operating.⁷ “Aryanizing” them, moreover, was not as easy as Aryanizing small or medium-sized commercial or industrial concerns. While many of the smaller private banks had sold out or been liquidated by 1935–1936, as one scholar has put it, “it was frequently difficult to find qualified purchasers for businesses that produced nothing but relied on personal contacts and business judgments.” Thus Mendelssohn “remained a successful bank for the first five years of the Nazi regime and continued to be a member of the consortium issuing government debt.”⁸

This does not mean, however, that the anti-Semitic propaganda of the National Socialist Party, even before it came to power, the boycotts it organized after it came to power, and the many methods it used, both legal and informal, to harass, humiliate, and ostracize Jews,⁹ did not have negative consequences for businesses that depended greatly on trust, longstanding relations, and personal contacts. As one scholar wrote recently, “the withdrawal of community respect and social status narrowed the sphere of activity of the bankers and thereby prepared the way for their exclusion from economic life. Any investigation of the repressive preliminaries and basic conditions of the ‘Aryanisation’ of private banks cannot therefore be limited to the effects on the banks’ balances of boycotts and formal measures of economic exclusion but must necessarily also take extra-economic processes of exclusion into account.”¹⁰ As any dealings with Jews, whether commercial or purely social, were frowned upon and taken note of by the Gestapo, Aryan clients gradually withdrew their business from Jewish-owned banks, and this loss was only partly compensated, for the surviving Jewish banks, by the transfer to them of the accounts of Jews shut out of “Aryan” or “Aryanized” institutions. In general, the volume of business at Jewish banks shrank drastically.¹¹

Pressure was also put on firms to remove Jewish members from their supervisory boards. While a few resisted as best they could, all, in the end, had to yield. Even businesses which had long associations with Jewish bankers, as the great HAPAG-Lloyd shipping company of Hamburg had, for instance, with the Warburgs, urged their Jewish board members to retire or forced them out.¹² Relatively slow at first, this process gathered momentum in 1935 with the publication of the Nuremberg “Laws” and then again at the end of 1937, when the Economics Ministry, the Reichswirtschaftsministerium (at the helm of which, in November of that year, Schacht had been replaced, thanks to the machinations of Göring, by Walther Funk), announced that any business with even a single Jew on its board would be defined as “non-Aryan” and thus subject to “Aryanization.”¹³ Of 108 board seats occupied by partners of M.M. Warburg & Co. at the beginning of 1933, eighteen had to be vacated during the course of the year. Between 1936 and 1937, however, the Warburgs were removed from eighty more.¹⁴ Holding positions on multiple boards obviously provided access to a great deal of information about companies and about economic conditions. The individuals holding such positions, often the partners of the largest private banks, were thus in a position to offer valuable advice on mergers and similar policy decisions and were, aptly enough, referred to in German by the English-language term “big linkers.” It has been shown that, while the number of “Aryan” “big linkers” (where a “big linker” is defined as an individual sitting on at least ten boards) and the number of board positions they occupied remained fairly steady in the range of twenty-two to twenty-six individuals and 318–373 positions for the years 1932–1938, the number of non-Aryan “big linkers” dropped precipitously from thirty-four in 1932 to sixteen in 1934, eight the following year, and only one in 1938; correspondingly, the number of board positions held by non-Aryan “big linkers” declined from 496 to 246 between 1932 and 1934, to 126 in 1935, and to fifteen in 1938.¹⁵

It may not be fortuitous that of the thirty-four Jewish or part-Jewish “big linkers” counted in 1932 the only one remaining in 1938 was Waldemar von Oppenheim or that, of the total of twenty-five board seats still occupied by any of the thirty-four “big linkers,” Waldemar held fifteen (ten of them in companies heavily involved in German rearmament)¹⁶, his younger brother Friedrich eight, and the Breslau banker Ernst-Heinrich Heimann two. All three men were classified, according to the Nuremberg laws, as “Mischlinge zweiten Grades”—that is, “three-quarters” Aryan and only “one-quarter” Jewish. The Oppenheims’ business activities, in short, were by no means unaffected by the new political regime; they did lose seats on company boards. But they were considerably less drastically affected than those who, however acculturated and assimilated, still remained and identified themselves as Jews, like the Warburgs. Likewise, both the overall balance sheet and the net assets of the bank shrank between 1932—when they had already been diminished as a result of the bank crisis of 1931—and 1935. But by 1936 the balance sheet had begun to pick up quite sharply and it maintained itself throughout the years of the Second World War.¹⁷ It is true that the company encountered hostility from some local competitors and was subjected to various more or less petty inconveniences. In addition, in 1936 two of its Jewish partners (Wilhelm Chan and Otto Kaufmann) had to withdraw from the firm. Above all, despite its having obtained an attestation from the local branch of the Nazi Party in June 1933, certifying that “the capital of your bank is overwhelmingly in the hands of the Christian families von Oppenheim and Pferdmenges,”¹⁸ Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. had to undergo a change of name, Oppenheim being generally perceived as a Jewish name. (That, it will be recalled, had been one of Herbert von Bismarck’s reasons for closing the door of the Auswärtiges Amt on Max von Oppenheim.)

On 1 January 1931 Simon Alfred von Oppenheim, Max von Oppenheim’s cousin,¹⁹ then head of the firm and nearing the age of seventy, had brought in the highly respected and experienced banker Robert Pferdmenges as a partner, perhaps with the intention of providing support and guidance to his still relatively young and inexperienced sons, Waldemar, then thirty-seven years old and a partner since 1922, and Friedrich Carl, then thirty-one years old and a partner only since 1929. Fortunately, Pferdmenges—who was later to be a close financial adviser of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer—was not only impeccably Aryan, but no friend of the NSDAP. He also appears to have been a fundamentally decent person. Thanks to him a “friendly” Aryanization of the bank took place and in May 1938 its name was changed to Bankhaus Robert Pferdmenges & Co. No doubt the disappearance of the name Oppenheim from their venerable firm caused the family pain. “I was always proud to have been an Oppenheim,” Max von Oppenheim had written to Waldemar, the son of his cousin Simon Alfred, at the end of 1935, “and I was always proud of our bank in Cologne, which has grown and prospered with such distinction from the very beginning, and which has contributed so much to the economic and indeed to the cultural development of the western provinces of Prussia.”²⁰

The Oppenheims had to endure other humiliations aimed at eroding their reputation as one of the most prominent and respected families in the city of Cologne. A street in Cologne named in their honour had its name changed. At the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, though pictures from the bequests of Dagobert and Albert von Oppenheim were still, in 1937, identified as such, the source of new acquisitions purchased with Oppenheim Foundation money was not acknowledged. On the fiftieth anniversary, in 1938, of the children’s hospital founded by Abraham von Oppenheim’s widow Charlotte, the original endowment of which had been regularly supplemented by further gifts from the family, the name Oppenheim was not mentioned either in newspaper reports of the celebrations or in the speech given by the man who had chaired the hospital board for 25 years. Likewise, the Freifrau von Oppenheim Hospital in Bassenheim, which Charlotte had founded in 1885, was officially renamed. At St. Mary’s Hospital, which had enjoyed generous support from Abraham, Charlotte and Dagobert, the marble plaques bearing their names were removed.²¹ Max von Warburg has described in his memoirs what happened on a personal level to people perceived to be Jewish or of Jewish extraction. Social relations withered, as acquaintances and even friends sought to avoid associations that might get them into trouble. Even though, unlike the Warburgs, who had remained Jewish, the Oppenheims were Christian, the Oppenheim children were made to feel uncomfortable at school and their education had to be entrusted to private tutors. Still, the two Oppenheim brothers, officially classified according to the Nuremberg Laws as “Mischlinge zweiten Grades” [mixed-breeds of the second degree, i.e. with only one Jewish grandparent] stayed on as partners, albeit now keeping discreetly in the background.

That the “Aryanization” of Sal. Oppenheim jr & Cie. had made little substantive change to the bank did not escape the attention of the most rabid National Socialist ideologues. An article entitled “Aryanizing Cologne” in Das Schwarze Korps, the organ of the SS, for 14 July 1938, asked the pointed question: “Why suddenly Pferdmenges, when the firm carries on unchanged?”²² In fact, with Pferdmenges and the two Oppenheim brothers as partners, the bank continued to operate throughout the Second World War—in marked contrast to all the other major Jewish private banks, which had either been taken over by non-Jews or absorbed by big public banks such as the Deutsche Bank—and inevitably, like other major German banks, it helped to finance the German war effort. Had it not prepared a press announcement in May 1938, on the 150^th anniversary of its founding, which emphasized that “the bank now going under the name of Pferdmenges & Co. stands today fully engaged in the struggle to carry out the enormous tasks required by the new Germany”?²³ It has also been claimed that it was involved in and benefited from the Aryanization of Jewish businesses in German-occupied countries. At the end of the War Pferdmenges was even accused of being a “Nazi banker” and between 1946 and 1947 was banned by the British from engaging in any financial or commercial activity.²⁴ The issue of its wartime record and of the conduct of the partners themselves is evidently a sensitive one for the bank and since the end of the War the Oppenheims have financed a number of scholarly studies in an effort to show that the bank and its partners have nothing to hide. Quite recently, in 2007, the bank took the extreme step of going to court over a book by a popular journalist that was critical not only of its postwar behaviour but of its wartime record. Though they failed to have the book banned altogether, the bank’s lawyers succeeded in obtaining a court order requiring the publisher to black out passages in the book that the bank deemed defamatory.²⁵

Footnotes

1   Wilhelm Treue, Das Schicksal des Bankhauses Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. und seiner Inhaber im Dritten Reich (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983; Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte, Beiheft 27), p. 1. This number was reduced by half, as a result of the financial crisis of 1931, to 709 at the end of 1932.

2   Ibid., p. 10.

3   Ingo Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken im Dritten Reich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005), pp. 92–93.

4   E.g. W. E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Keith Ulrich, Aufstieg und Fall der Privatbankiers (Frankfurt a.M.: Fritz Knapp, 1998); Ingo Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken (2005). For useful summary accounts see Klaus-Dieter Henke, Die Dresdner Bank 1933–1945: Ökonomische Rationalität, Regimenähe, Mittäterschaft (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2006), pp. 49–51 and Gerald D. Feldman, review of Köhler’s Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken, in Business History Review, 80 (2006): 404–06.

5   See Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken, pp. 94–104, especially Table 8 on p. 103; Michael Stürmer, Gabriele Teichmann, Wilhelm Treue, Wägen und Wagen, p. 368; Wilhelm Treue, Das Schicksal des Bankhauses Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie., p. 13; Keith Ulrich, Aufstieg und Fall der Privatbankiers, pp. 309–53.

6   In June 1933, for instance, nine “Jewish” private banks were still participating in a consortium of twenty banks led by the Dresdner Bank, the object of which was to finance works projects to relieve unemployment (Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken, p. 140, note 153).

7   On Hjalmar Schacht and Jews in the German economy, see Max M. Warburg, Aus meinen Aufzeichnungen (New York: Eric M. Warburg, 1952), pp. 153–54; Edward N. Peterson, Hjalmar Schacht: For and against Hitler (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1954), pp. 245–50; Schacht’s own account in his autobiography, My First Seventy-Six Years, trans. Diana Pyke (London: Allan Wingate, 1955), pp. 353–57; Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1966), pp. 105–08, 136–37; Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), pp. 122–24, 133–36; E. Rosenbaum and A.J. Sherman, Das Bankhaus M.M. Warburg & Co. 1798–1938 (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1976), pp. 207–08; W.E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820–1935, pp. 374–76; Reinhard Rürup, “Das Ende der Emanzipation,” in Arnold Paucker, ed., Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1943 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck] 1986), pp. 97–114 (pp. 102, 104–05); A.J. Sherman, “A Jewish Bank during the Schacht Era: M.M. Warburg & Co. 1933–1938,” in Arnold Paucker, ed., Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1943, pp. 167–72; Christopher Kopper, Hjalmar Schacht. Aufstieg und Fall von Hitlers mächtigstem Bankier (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2006), pp. 219–30, 240–41, 274–93, 317–18; Gabriele Hoffmann, Max M. Warburg (Hamburg: Ellert & Richter, 2009), pp. 144–45. A memo of 3 May 1935 from Schacht to Hitler (“Imponderabilia des Exports”), cited by Rürup, appears to convey Schacht’s position well: “Let the Jews be stamped by means of appropriate legislation, in whatever degree is desired, as residents with fewer rights, but for whatever rights are left to them, let them be granted the protection of the state against fanatics and ruffians.” Genschel’s work indicates that the elimination of Jews from the German economy accelerated rapidly after Schacht was replaced at the Economics Ministry in November 1937 and dismissed from his position as President of the Reichsbank in January 1938: of 39,532 firms still in Jewish hands in Germany in April 1938, 14,803 had been liquidated and 5,976 “entjudet” [dejudaized] by April 1939, after the Reichskristallnacht (9–10 November 1938), while 4,136 were in process of “Entjudung” and the remaining 7,127 were being investigated for likely “Entjudung” (p. 206). The intensification, in 1938, of regulations intended to achieve the “Entjudung der Wirtschaft” [“dejudaizing of the economy”] emerges clearly from Peter Deeg’s depressing compendium, Die Judengesetze Grossdeutschlands, published by Julius Streicher’s Verlag Der Stürmer in 1939.

8   Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War against the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 68.

9   See Max Warburg, Aus meinen Aufzeichnungen, pp. 148–49; Treue, Das Schicksal des Bankhauses Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie., p. 15; On the boycotts, see especially Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtchaft im Dritten Reich, pp. 43–56, 108–11.

10  Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken, p. 104.

11  Keith Ulrich, “Das Privatbankhaus Simon Hirschland im Nationalsozialismus,” in Manfred Köhler and Keith Ulrich, eds., Banken, Konjunktur und Politik (Essen: Klartext, 1995), pp. 129–42 (pp. 134–35); idem, Aufstieg und Fall der Privatbankiers, pp. 277–78. On the massive loss of business sustained even by the larger Jewish private banks between 1935 and 1938, see Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken, p. 103, table 8.

12  As early as May 1933, Jewish directors Theodor Frank and Oscar Wassermann resigned from the managing board of the Deutsche Bank in an arrangement brokered by Reichsbank president Schacht “as part of the political concessions made by the bank to National Socialism.” Though Wassermann had agreed to leave by the end of 1933, his departure was announced by his colleagues in advance of the annual general meeting scheduled for 1 June. Wassermann, who had been the spokesman of the board and had been in charge of the bank’s overall policy in the late 1920s, “was thus pushed out prematurely” (Harold James, The Deutsche Bank, p. 25).

13  Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken, p. 140; Kopper, Hjalmar Schacht. Aufstieg und Fall von Hitlers mächtigstem Bankier, pp. 317–18.

14  W.E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy, pp. 377–78; see also Stürmer, Teichmann and Treue, Wägen und Wagen, p. 377.

15  Köhler, Die ‘Arisierung’ der Privatbanken, p. 139, table 11. In absolute terms, the total number of positions on company boards still held in 1938 by the thirty-four non-Aryan “big linkers” of 1932 had dropped to twenty-five; of these, fifteen were held by Waldemar von Oppenheim, making him the only remaining “big linker” in the group, eight were held by Friedrich von Oppenheim, who in 1935 had still held fifteen, and two were held by Ernst Heinrich Heimann of the Breslau bank of that name, who by the end of 1933 had already lost five of the fourteen he held in 1932 and thus fallen below the level required to count as a “big linker” (see p. 141, table 12).

16  Treue, Das Schicksal des Bankhauses Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie., p. 24. Citing a police document, Treue gives the number of board seats still held by Waldemar von Oppenheim in 1938 as eighteen.

17  Ibid., pp. 14, 21; Stürmer, Teichmann and Treue, Wägen und Wagen, pp. 377–79; see also chart, p. 489.

18  Facsimile of document in Treue, Das Schicksal des Bankhauses Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie., Appendix 1.

19  It will be recalled that Simon Alfred took over the running of the bank after Max, who was first in line for the job, decided that he did not want it.

20  Quoted in Stürmer, Teichmann and Treue, Wägen und Wagen, p. 372. On the Warburgs’ similar attachment to their banking business and acceptance of a “friendly” Aryanization in order to preserve it, see Ron Chernow, The Warburgs (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 469.

21  Treue, Das Schicksal des Bankhauses Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie., p. 15.

22  Ibid., p. 20.

23   Quoted in Stürmer, Teichmann and Treue, Wägen und Wagen, pp. 381–82. Significantly, no newspaper, it appears, dared to print the announcement. The implicit allusion to Sal. Oppenheim & Cie. was doubtless deemed too dangerous.

24  Ulrich Viehöver, Die EinflussReichen (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2006), pp. 254–55. “Waldemar von Oppenheim, Mitinhaber von Pferdmenges & Co. sowie des Bankhauses Salomon Oppenheim” and “Dr. Robert Pferdmenges, Mitinhaber von Pferdmenges & Co., Vorsitzender des Vorstandes der Kabelwerke Rheydt AG, Vorstandsmitglied der AEG, von Harpener Bergbau, usw” were both named in the report of the Kilgore Committee of the U.S. Senate on the responsibility of German monopolies for Nazi war crimes, as cited in the U.S. Army’s publication Allgemeine Zeitung (Berlin) for 12 October 1945 (Cit. In Dietrich Eichholtz and Wolfgang Schumann, eds., Anatomie des Krieges: Neue Dokumente über die Rolle des deutschen Monopolkapitals bei der Vorbereitung und Durchführung des zweiten Weltkrieges [Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1969], pp. 493–94).

25  The text—by the prolific popular writer Werner Rügemer—was originally accepted as an article for publication in a collective volume, edited by Carl Amery, the spiritual father of the German Greens and the author himself of many books critical of establishment politics and policies. As Alfred von Oppenheim, the heir to the bank and its highly successful CEO, died in 2005, just as the volume was going to press, the publisher, Luchterhand, decided out of a sense of propriety to drop Rügemer’s highly critical article. Rügemer expanded it into a book, which was put out in 2006 by the Nomen-Verlag of Frankfurt a.M. under the title Der Bankier—Ungebetener Nachruf auf Alfred Freiherr von Oppenheim [The Banker: An Unsolicited Obituary of Alfred Freiherr von Oppenheim]. The censoring and blacking out of passages in the book provoked strong protest at a meeting of the German PEN club. On the whole episode see Marxistische Blätter, 46, Heft 1 (2007): 108–10; http://www.zeit.de/2006/30/l-Oppenheim/seite-1; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_R%C3%BCgemer; http://www.attac-koeln.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=602&Itemid=149.