Camp Gagnon - Nazi Billionaires: The REAL Winners of WW2

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

David de Jong is an investigative journalist and the author of 'Nazi Billionaires', a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how the world allowed them to get away with it. WELCOME TO (a live episode of) CAMP! Shout out to our sponsors Prizepicks, Huel and SculptNation. Prizepicks: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/ivHR/CAMP SculptNation: https://sculptnation.com/Camp Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 5:11 Meet David de Jong 8:42 Inspiration Behind Nazi Billionaires 12:03 Start of Campaign Financing 15:02 Hyperinflation 19:34 Automation Of Companies 26:57 Political Interest Enabling Business Manipulation 31:14 Porche Family + Henry Ford 40:19 Nuremberg Trials + Denazification 50:26 Unit 731 52:25 Morality Of Decisions 57:21 Hugo Boss 59:57 Coca-Cola + IG Farben 1:05:37 Power of Leverage 1:07:34 Forced Labor 1:09:49 David’s Grandfathers Story 1:11:26 Eastern Laborers 1:12:50 Concentration Camp Business Ties 1:18:07 Quandt Family + Magda Gobbels 1:29:30 Hitler’s Escape 1:34:11 Aryanization Of Companies 1:38:30 Klaus-Michael Küne 1:41:36 Responsibility Of Family Heirs 1:46:40 Why These Families? 1:50:32 Reimann Family 2:00:12 Dutch Involvement 2:05:05 Similarities To Today 2:11:09 Importance Of Transparency 2:15:57 Goal Of Nazi Billionaires 2:17:32 Being Held Liable For Crimes 2:22:13 What If The War Went The Other Way? 2:24:22 Impact On Today’s European Society 2:25:22 Things Not In Nazi Billionaires 2:28:39 Oetker Family 2:34:08 Check Out David’s Book’s 2:37:00 SNEAK PEAK

And we're live, David DeYoung. How are you? Mark, I'm well, how are you? I'm doing excellent. Of course, of course. Thank you so much for being here in our beautiful tent, deep in the woods. Deep in the woods of Williamsburg. Yeah, but no, we're not in New York.

We're far, we're far away. Big Sur, right? Yeah, we're in Big Sur, exactly right. No, we're live right now. Thank you to everyone that's tuned in, that's commenting. A lot of people have actually been saying, is this really live? Everyone's like, oh, have you guys really live? Right now it is 1227.

Actually, that's round up. It's 12.30. We're in the future. That's how live we are. We've never been more live. Thank you so much. You just traveled all the way from Amsterdam. I did. Yesterday. The night before. A little jet lagged? Actually, I am. Yeah. I called out last night at like 8.30.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, right now in Amsterdam, it's probably like 6 o'clock. You should be ready to go. I am. I'm ready to party. I'm ready to go. Amazing. Really excited to chat. You have a very interesting life and story, some of which we're not going to be able to get into. Currently, you're working as a Middle Eastern correspondent, obviously covering the war in the Middle East, which is fascinating, not the discussion today. You wrote a book a couple years ago called Nazi billionaires.

That is correct. Which is very interesting. Basically looking at and examining the elite dynasties that still persist in Germany today that got very wealthy off of World War II in a bunch of different ways. And I guess I want to unpack those stories, who those families are, you know, the heirs today,

where they are and go through the details of that. But then additionally, the conversation has brought in a larger moral argument that I think is very fascinating. What is the responsibility of these families? What do they do now? And yeah, what are the precedents for that throughout history and what are the common or the modern ties to, you know, our current political landscape? Yeah, I just think there's a ton to unpack.

People that are listening along, if you want to comment, whenever we go to a break, we will look at some comments from the audience. so please feel free to jump in. And also, you being Dutch, we were just talking about, you know, obviously you guys were very vivacious. You were making a lot of fun of the Dutch. I was not. David, don't do that.

I was not. I was said that the Dutch were vivacious, and you guys were very gregarious, and you're in your, yeah. You said they didn't laugh at your show. That, no, no, no, no. They said it was great afterwards, but they didn't laugh. And you were like, why are they not laughing?

We did do a show in Amsterdam, okay? And for all the Dutch people watching, just lighten up a little. Okay, just we do the show and the show, I mean, it was awesome. The venue was beautiful and everyone was very sweet. But there's just a stoicism. I'm deeply insulted you've mistaken us for Scandinavians. We were, it's annoying too because we were in Dublin like two nights before.

Oh yeah. That's right. And that show, I mean. But the Irish are more stoic though. They're like really unfazed. I think way more than the Dutch, for sure, 100%. Unphased perhaps. Stoic, I don't think you can, I don't know if you can say. the Irish are stoned.

All right, fair enough. Yeah. I guess when they're sober, maybe. But they're never sober, so. They're resistant to psychoanalysis, the Irish. What do you mean? They don't, they don't do therapy. It's like they're, they don't, they're like resistant to therapy.

That is true. All my Irish American friends, that is carried over. They're like, what do I need to talk to some guy about it? I'll just go to the bar, talk to my buddy, and that's free. And like, yeah. Honestly, good point. I mean, so far, I mean, particularly the last few decades worked out well for Ireland. That's what I'm saying, right?

They've been doing pretty good. Absolutely. They've been having a good time. Absolutely. So this book, Nazi billionaires, very interesting. What inspired you to examine these families? Why did you want to write this book? So I was a reporter here in New York, at Bloomberg News,

and I was hired on a new investigative team back in 2011, late 2011. Actually, it's this week today that I started 13 years ago, week of Thanksgiving. And I started on this, so this investigative team, which focused on family-owned companies and family offices and hidden wealth in North America. But I was soon asked by my American bosses

because I'm Dutch. Can you also cover the German-speaking companies and family businesses and families, like you're ruling families of Germany, basically? And I didn't have the heart to tell them that my German at that point wasn't very good. They were like, you know,

they've just felt Dutch, German, you know, it's all the same. We'll give this Europe, We'll give this Dutch guy, you know. Is it different? I guess it is different. It is very different. I mean, I would say, I would say it.

I would say it. The German language is more broad. And the Dutch is kind of this basic. I don't want to insult my fellow compatriots, but it's this mix between English and German, basically. It's a bastardized language. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I said yes.

And so what I ended up doing was I would spend a month a year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, going to the Bloomberg bureaus in Germany, Austria, Switzerland. And the stories that I came back with were always this mix of the financial and the historical and the business side of things. And what really struck me in my reporting was that companies like BMW and Porsche and Audi and you name it, mainly the car brands, which are really the backbone of the German economy, even still today. But particularly the families that control.

them today you know would celebrate their fathers and grandfathers for their business successes but would leave out any mention of their war crimes and their nazi affiliations after they had prepared them to have reckoned with these crimes particularly on you know like global major global foundations major museums academic chairs um you know corporate headquarters named after these men you know and and and i found it to be such a brazen one whitewashing of history, such a distortion of history that I wanted to shine a light on that. So initially in a series of articles for Bloomberg News and then I ended up leaving New York in 2017 and actually moving to Berlin to research and write a book on the topic and that ended up being

Nazi billionaires. And I spent four years being completely delved into archives and other things to focus on the topic. Interesting. There's a great quote that I I saw, and I thought was quite funny. Never ask a woman her age. Right. Never ask, you know, someone their weight. And then never ask

a German company what they were doing between 1939 and 1945. It was one of my favorite memes. Yeah. And we're violating the last one today. Totally. We're going to be violating it brutally. Yeah. So I'm curious. I would just... We're going to... Paden back in kind, basically.

So I'm curious, could you just take me through the first of maybe a couple families that will be examining. And I guess, just take me through the whole story, I guess, like from Weimar Republic to eventually sort of working with the Third Reich and the National Socialists and then what ultimately comes of them.

Totally, yeah. So the book, just set to see, the book starts in February 20th, 1933, with Hitler having seized power three weeks earlier in Germany. And his right-hand man, Hermann Gering, who send the president of the German parliament, not yet defunct, sends a telegram to two dozen of Germany's,

you know, see most influential and wealthiest industrialists and financiers, CEOs and business heirs. And what he says that Hitler is going to do there is to explain his economic policy. But what it actually turns out to be, gives a speech, rambles on for 90 minutes. Then Gering gives a speech rambles on for 90 minutes. And what is very clear is that they want to raise money

from the industrialists and the financiers and the CEOs and the business errors because they want to stage one last election campaign. And what the industrialists don't know, what the businessmen don't know is that the Nazi parties in dire straits, the finances are, you know, they're 12 million Reichsmark in debt.

And they're, you know, they're hold on power. is pretty tenuous. And I think, you know, what is very clear is it's explicitly promised to them by both Hitler and Gering in their speeches, this is going to be the last election that's going to happen in Germany for the next 10 to 100 years. So it's very clear to them to the man assembled who have never met Hitler before or Gering in many, you know, in many instances, that if they get their checkbooks out,

they're going to sign over a German democracy basically and they have no qualms doing that. They have no qualms, you know, selling out the end of German democracy. They get their checkbooks out. And that whole, the whole campaign financing becomes irrelevant in the end because a week later, the Reichstag is set on fire and, you know, martial law is declared by Hitler and all the socialists and communists are rounded up. the election of March 5th, 93, doesn't even become relevant anymore

because even the Nazi party doesn't get a majority. But by mid-March, Hitler has suspended, has suspended parliament, and it's the end, he becomes a furor. It's a coup, effectively. It's a coup, it's a coup.

It's a coup. It's the end of German democracy for the next 12 to 17 years, depending on you look at it. How did the industrialists, by 1933 in Germany, accrue, I guess, so much wealth post-World War I. It seems like, you know, the Treaty of Versailles really, you know, hamstrung, the German economy. But yet you have these, you know, automotive industry and like, you know, culinary industry and other industries within Germany that are still seemingly doing very well.

What was happening with that? So it was really hyperinflation, which caused, you know, some of the industrialists that I write about in the book to speculate. I mean, it becomes speculators. and they make huge profits by buying up companies on the cheap, which are, you know, this is the early 1920s, you're totally right. I mean, the Treaty of Frazai has hamstrung. The entire German economy has, you know, pushed it to the edge.

And hyperinflation really allows these men who have become very wealthy of producing, whether it's steel or uniforms or, you name it, during World War I, to, you know, punt these profits. into buying up companies on the cheap. Now, of course, fast forward to 1933 and you're at the tail end of the Great Depression and these men, you know, are, they're only interested in protecting their bottom line

and protecting their fortunes and their companies and they're, you know, by and large opportunists, right, who thrive in any political system, whether that's the German Empire or the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, you know, occupied West Germany, West Germany, reunified Germany. They adapt to whatever political system is in power. I would argue they would have even adapted in a commune,

they would even come out on top in a communist system. And they really, you know, they, Hitler, what Hitler initially promises them also in this speech is that he's going to initiate the largest rearment program that the world has ever seen. And he delivers on that promise, right? I mean, before you know it, by late 1930, early 1934, you know,

there's billions of rice marks are flowing into the coffers of the industrialists and their steel and armaments companies. So the German economy is churning again. But, and that in itself, of course, is not criminal. But it quickly devolves into criminal behavior with, you know, the expropriation of Jewish owned businesses and then, of course, the expropriation in German occupied territories during World War II. And with the, you know, really the low point being the mass exploitation of people forced into

forced or slave labor, estimated 12 to 20 million Europeans, you know, were exploited in German companies and minds during World War II. Right. So you would say World War I was a wealth transfer moment as well. Yeah, I mean, yeah, totally. Because the five families that I write about, you know, one of the myths I wanted to dispel of the book was that, oh, these families all have become, became rich during the Third Reich, under the Nazi regime or off of World War II.

No, most of these families were already incredibly wealthy prior to Hitler seizing power. with the exception in the book of the Porsche Pierre family, which today controls not only Porsche and Volkswagen, but also Audi, Seahat, Lamborghini, Coda, and many other car brands. They really laid the foundation for their wealth because as a result of the Nazi regime and supported by Hitler

due to the production of the Volkswagen, which Vernon Porsche was commissioned by Hitler. to develop it yeah the Volkswagen the people's car the people's car exactly but the people didn't actually end up receiving it during the Third Reich it was only the British military after the war put the Volkswagen into production and and it was it was only delivered to the elite to the elite it was on 500 Volkswagen's made prior to to the war breaking out in 1933 and they all went to the Nazi elite so it was never the people's car as conceived by the Nazis.

It was only becoming to keep people's car after the war. Oh, interesting. So I guess that kind of sets the stage, right? You have these large industrialist families. You know, Hitler comes into power. And I'm curious, how much autonomy did they have, right? Like, if we look, maybe like a modern parallel,

and again, I don't know this to be necessarily a fact. I'm not an expert in, you know, Chinese foreign affairs. But there's, you know, the Chinese government and then Chinese industry. And it seems like they're not particularly decoupled. There seems to be like a lot of alignment. So sometimes I look at Chinese companies that are working within the CCP

and it's like, do they have a choice to sort of engage with this? Or is it basically like, hey, join us or die? What is the sort of political bargain? I understand early on there's an economic incentive like, hey, just give us the money and we will pump cash back into the economy. Does that change once there's military aggression?

into Poland, et cetera. And how much of time do these companies actually have? I mean, there's definitely devil's pact, which is made in the winter of 1933, starting with that speech by the implicit or explicit support by these industrialists of Hitler's regime, this kind of, you know, quid pro quo, where they would implicitly or explicitly support the regime

and as long as they kept their mouth shut, you know, they would have the orders flowing to them and they could rob, you know, competitors or, you know, house competitors or take over competitors at a fire sale price. And again, you know, it's a sliding scale of morality. It starts with the weapons production and the veneer of legality

that many of the business transactions had in the second half of the 1930s, but it quickly devolved into outright criminal behavior or that companies get seized without, you know, families not being compensated at all, for example. And of course, again,

with the low point of being the mass exploitation of people in slave and forced labor, the millions of them. But I always, you know, the two examples that I would say show the agency that the industrialists had during the third rug was first and foremost, many of you,

you know, would know Tissen Krupp, right, the big steel company or Tissen or Krupp, like the big, the steel behemoths. And Fritz Tissen was this, you know, establishment industrialist, heir to the Tissin Steel Empire. And he was an ardent Nazi sympathizer, one of the first, because the industrialists didn't support the Nazis. There were conservative, there were establishment conservatives. They didn't support the Nazis.

They were, you know, kind of these gauche clowns. from the impoverished hinterlands and they wanted nothing to do with Hitler only when he came into power and he promised them wealth that they started supporting them or promised them more wealth and the protection of their businesses

that they started supporting them. But Fritz-Siesin was an outlier and was already from 1925, supported Hitler, financed him. But for some, and even became a symbolic member of parliament in a defunct parliament But for some reason, which has never become entirely clear to anyone,

he decides to vote against, in this symbolic parliament, vote against Hitler's invasion of Poland of September 1933. And as a result, he has to flee. He initially flees to Paris and has an American journalist pen, his kind of whitewashing memoir, which is still available, which is titled I paid Hitler. And subsequently, once the Nazis

invade France is arrested and is then sent to multiple concentration camps and his entire steel empire is expropriated and is given to the right hand man of one of my main characters in the book

Friedrich Flick and as a result so he's not only you know sent to concentration camps by the Germans but after the war ironically whereas all the other industrialists don't

or most of the other industries don't get indicted the allies also indicted him because he was such an early supporter of Hitler so he gets it he gets it from both sides twice and he ends up dying in a car crash in 1950 but my point being is that Tissin who was his ardent

supporter chooses for whatever reasons to you know to turn against the regime and flees and you know he He knew that he would lose a steel empire as a result, but he still, you know, they still had a choice, right? Right.

The choice being that they would lose their companies and their livelihoods, but, you know, they had a choice. So there was agency to turn against the regime. The consequences were dire, but for anybody that used the excuse always, oh, but they had no choice, they did have a choice. It would cost them, but they had a choice. You become an economic martyr, effectively. Exactly. Yeah, you do. You do.

Right. Yeah, that's a, I mean, it's a, it's a perfect dilemma. Right? Like, I, you know, I've accrued millions, potentially billions of dollars in this country, and a regime takes over, and they ask me to be a part of it. And if I join, I'll get richer. And if I leave, I lose absolutely everything and potentially even my life, you know, he's in a concentration camp. And, you know, ostensibly he could have been, you know, killed or died of disease or whatever. So, yeah, that's, again, you look at, once you get into the nuance, you're like, yeah, that sucks. But good for him, right? doing the right thing i mean doing the right thing but it's of course very it's very dual right because he's actually one of the earliest supporters of hitler right and then 14 years later for whatever reasons his conscience you know starts to play up already in september 1939 and he then decides to kind of make a stand to vote against the german invasion of poland and the start of world war two so in a way you know the history is on his side in terms of being early early in making a stand, right?

Because another example is the well-known industrialist called Robert Bosch, of Bosch, all the electrical engineering, which is still one of the largest electrical engineering companies today. And he's actually an avowed pacifist and a social democrat and one of the richest men in Germany. But and ardent, you know, absolutely detests Hitler. But even he is unable to get away And even through his right-hand man finances the fledgling German resistance

To the extent there was a resistance But you know Tries to get money to the resistance in Germany But even he didn't escape from using He dies in 1942 But doesn't his companies don't escape from using force and slave labor During the war and being a mass armaments producer So even those that were explicitly opposed to Hitler

end up, you know, profiting in some way from the regime. Wow. Were there any business interests that were leading the political interests, or was it primarily political interests that were then pulling in the business interests? Definitely the latter. It was for sure the political interests that bathed away for made it, you know, excessive or made it, not necessarily appropriate, it's probably not the right word, but enabled these men to say, well, you know,

we're going to work with the regime that is in power. You know, mind you, you know, there was enormous political and economic volatility in the Vima Republic, right? I mean, it's not only hyperinflation of the early 1920s, but then the Great Depression hits in the late 1920s, and you have, you know, millions of Germans, just like in the U.S., you know, out on the streets, It's really the situation economically and politically is so dire.

You know, you have three subsequent different governments. You know, there's elections every other six months. And what these men want for their businesses to thrive is economic stability. And again, this is what Hitler initially delivers on. But there is no, I know we're going to discuss some of the families that were actually high up, you know, within the National Socialists, that were, you know, very sympathetic to the cause. But were there any that were sort of encouraging, you know, high brass Nazis to invade Poland,

go actually take on like an offensive war to justify or sort of line their pockets financially? No, because one thing I've learned from the research of this book is that contrary to popular opinion, war is actually not profitable. War is only profitable if you're on the winning side, which they initially were. right but once it turns once a tide turns after in salingrad after february 1943 it becomes it becomes a very unprofitable endeavor and the industrialists know this because yes world war one has been good to them but

in the end you know germany was on the losing side and now and then you know in the midnight of indi by 1943 it also turns and and of course the industrialists are aware of the experience that they've had in World War I, which yes, was profitable, but in the long run, of course, was not profitable at all, given the state of Germany following the war. So they didn't, they certainly didn't encourage anybody to go to war. It was really the Nazi regime, which was, you know, clamoring or Hitler for really, because they were worried because, again, in the long run, war is not good for business.

It's good the first few years, but then as particularly as it turns, you know, it's terrible. And probably particularly domestic war. I can imagine that probably changes the equation a little bit. Right. So I can see these industrialists saying, look, we were able to grow our empires after World War I. We ate up all these smaller companies. We absolutely grew our market share and potentially monopolized the entire nation. But in the long run, there's so much volatility. It's like, okay, we own the whole pie, but the pie could be worth nothing, you know, one month and be worth something the next month, and that is stressful from a business perspective.

Yeah, exactly, because you have loans, you have, you know, I mean, let's you think about the banks, right, like Deutsche Bank, Comerzbank, all these banks which financed or Allianz, which, you know, these companies financed and insured things like concentration camps, extermination camps, all of that, right? I mean, they're so deep in with the regime. And they have all these loans out as well

for these massive industrial projects, right? As the war turns, I mean, credit also dries up. Banks are not willing to extend loans anymore to the regime and to other companies. And it becomes, you know, the war becomes adverse to business. I mean, it's just not a good value proposition anymore. I mean, it's literally dead. And it starts off in 1933 to being a good value proposition.

I see. So who is, you mentioned Portia, who is that family and who was the sort of main person that was friendly with the National Socialists and how did that entire story sort of unfold? Yeah, so there's three co-founders of the Porsche car design firm in 1930. The first is Ferdon Porsche, who is the engineering brain later in the development of the Volkswagen,

but also the engineering brain behind the Porsche car design firm. There's a son-in-law that's very combative. lawyer called Anton Pierre. And there is a third man called Adolf Rosenberger. It was actually the Jewish co-founder of Porsche. Rosenberger gets pushed out of Porsche in 1935 after the Nuremberg race laws are, or just before the Nuremberg race laws go into effect

because he's a Jew. Oh, wow. Is that after Crystalknock? That is before Crystalknock. There's three years before Crystalnuck. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. And he actually ends up fleeing to the U.S.

I settled in Los Angeles but it's subsequently erased from Porsche history so you have two men Ferreinand Porsche and his son and Anton Pierre who were running the show and Fernando Porsche brings in his son Ferry Porsche who later becomes known

as the mastermind behind the Porsche the first Porsche sports car so between father and son you have the brains behind the Volkswagen and you have the brains behind the Porsche sports car sports car. Now as I said earlier the Volkswagen actually doesn't get produced for for the people during the war. Hitler was commissioned Ferennan Porsche to build the Volkswagen or to produce the

Volkswagen actually also commissions the largest car factory in Europe or in the world at that time which is in the center of Germany modeled after the River Rouge car factory in Detroit. Because Henry Ford was a huge, Henry Ford and Hitler had a mutual platoon. You know, they loved it. They adored each other. Right.

Henry Ford also, you know, virulent anti-Semite, you know, and idolized Hitler. And Hitler idealized him too. Did Ford ever fund or financially back the Third Reich? No. So there's a memoir of one of Hitler's right-hand man. goes to the US to raise financing for the then fledgling Nazi party. We're talking late 1920s, early 1930s.

And he actually goes to Henry Ford and Henry Ford doesn't want to give money. He just gives us, you know, vocal support. I mean, he also had this newspaper that he published in Dearborn, Michigan, which, you know, was, again, a lot of anti-Semitic vitriol and, you know, propagating a lot of, a lot of, you know, conspiracy theories, but he was also very focal in his support for the, for the German Nazi party and also for, yeah. And why did he not want to fund it? Was he concerned about, you know, blowback to his company? Well, there were, that's a good question. It's just like,

he didn't want to spend money in a foreign, on a, you know, on a fledgling foreign political party. Interesting. Yeah, I guess, I wonder if you got wrapped up with the sort of isolationist ideals of America at that time. Right. Like, look, there is a, you know, distant, And Lufflin and all those things. Right, like a distance of port. Lindberg. Yeah. But I'm not going to necessarily fund this in some capacity.

Yeah. That's interesting. And I'm curious, is it just pure coincidence? I mean, we're talking about Ford, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, that these are all automobile companies? Is this just pure coincidence? I mean, yeah, in a way it is, well, it's coincidence in the sense that the car companies were, because, mind you, at that time, right, in the early 9-30s, you had the start of the automotive era.

in a way. And of course, Hitler's pet project, the People's car, the Volkswagen, is so important to him, right? It's so central to his idea of mass mobilization.

But in a way, he was quite prescient because it becomes, in the 1950s, of course, Germany becomes the economic powerhouse built on mass motorization.

And still is today, again, the car companies, but also a lot of the manufacturers that produce car parts globally are hugely profitable enterprises and they're all based in German and they're all and they're all based or many of them are based in Germany and we're talking about you know not the famous names but also companies you've never heard of which could produce produce power car parts they're they're based in the

most remote parts of Germany and these are global multinational enterprises which with tens of billions of revenue each year so he certainly was on to something. But in terms of from an ideological perspective, it is, you know, it is just, that is a coincidence. Strange. Yeah. So back to Portia family. So they're, you know, they are now involved with Hitler and they're kind of, they've ousted one of their co-founders. Yeah. Was that an internal sort of ousting or was that just pressure from the government to get Rosenberger out? No, it was an internal ousting. It was really, because they were sympathetic to the cause. So, Ferland Porsche was just wanted to get his, was a sheer opportunist.

Right. Right. He was just interested in making his designs. You know, he was honorary named an SS officer, all of that, but he never showed up in uniform. Now, his son-in-law, Anton Pierre, was a different story. He joined actually the Nazi party twice, one in his homeland, Austria, which was Hitler's homeland, too. And again, in Germany. and also later joins the ss the yeah the paramilitary yeah group um as an honorary officer um but so is

very very Porsche very non son who um you know runs the Porsche once once very non Porsche and his son-in-law are busy with the Volkswagen and running you know the largest car factory in the world in the center of Germany um and really retooling that at the beginning of the war from a car product, you know, a car factory to an armaments factory, one of the largest armament factories in the world, as a matter of fact. You know, they're busy with getting forces, getting tens of files of force and slave laborers in or building a satellite concentration camp, courtesy of TSS, on the Volkswagen factory complex. you know and you have horrific stories of hundreds of babies dying in in a nearby orphanage

that they're taken away from the forced and slave laborers will give birth in the camp and and and and and and their most horrific circumstances i mean thousands of people died at the Volkswagen factory and it was really one of the you know most horrific places to to be forced to work at, and this is run by Féinand Porsche and his son-in-law, Anton Pierre. Because they are building, they're building, you know, bombs, they're building, you know, parts for tanks, or the forces, you know, people, you know, forced into slave and forced labor, are coerced into building these parts.

In meantime, your Ferry Porsche was running the Porsche car design firm in Stuttgart in the south of Germany. And he is also, like his brother-in-law, an ideological Nazi. He joins a Nazi party in the late 1930s and then also applies to become an SS officer. And actually, after the war, he surrounds himself with former high-ranking SS officers in the boardroom of Porsche, which is done and becomes a global brand. And one of the man who introduces Porsche to the U.S., which becomes one of its most important markets, Markets is this high-ranking, former SS officer called Albert Prinzing. So he surrounds himself with SS officers in the Porsche boardroom after the war.

And he also, you know, writes, you know, a lot of anti-Semitic vitriol about Adolf Rosenberger, who, you know, manages to escape to the U.S. and is, you know, lives his life in Los Angeles. So it's really kind of a continuation that even after the war, you know, Ferry Portia particularly could be named an ideologue as opposed to his father. Wow. And why did the Nuremberg trials not affect that family? Because the Nuremberg trials, for many reasons,

become very curtailed as the Cold War emerges. Right. You have, you know, the U.S. For the Truman administration, the Nazis and Nazi Germany become ancient history, and the focus is now on containing the Soviet Union and spread of communism. And as a result, you know, the aim becomes rebuilding West Germany as a viable democratic state and as the economic powerhouse it once was, as a buffer and a bulwark against the Soviet Union and against occupied Eastern Germany,

communist Eastern Germany. So the scope of the Nuremberg trials becomes very limited. There's only three industrialist trials that end up happening. But the majority of suspected Nazi war criminals and are the Nazi sympathizers are actually handed it back

to West German authorities for these so-called denazification trials which end up devolving into kind of a show trials and not of the Stalinist kind, but of the everybody goes scot-free kind, because there was of course no incentive on the side of the West German authorities to judge their fellow compatriots on crimes that they had committed themselves or that they had participated in or sympathies that they had held.

So one of the other myths I really tried to dispel with this book is that denazification, which in the US is often seen as kind of this successful product that, you know all of Germany was seen we conquered that country and then we denazify Germany was it was an abject failure as a matter of fact and was never in and not only on the business you know on every level of society not only on the on the on the business side of things but but on in the legal world in the medical world in education you know there was a continuation of money and power from the third Reich to West

Germany and those five years that the allied occupation authorities the US being leading in that between 1945 and late 1949 had a chance to properly denatified Germany or at least give supervision to the circle denatification trials that that was a huge misopportunity to properly you know to properly supervise that but you know Germany was in total chaos yeah I mean I can see the geopolitical yeah problem here And I wonder, do you think that they looked at, you know, post-World War I Treaty of Versailles and how that affected the German state? I talked to a friend of mine, a professor, Dr. Benjamin Hett.

He's just a professor of specifically like 20th century history. And he broke down, sort of he kind of weighed in on World War I, specifically that Treaty of Versailles, some historians believe either should have been more lenient or way more stark, either, you know, a complete sort of dissolution of the, you know, German state and, you know, the Austro-Hungarian state, and all of it should sort of be sort of compartmentalized or just kind of forgive and move on and help them rebuild their economy. And instead they sort of took like a half measure, which, you know, destroyed the economy,

created a ton of volatility, created a very angry populace of, you know, young people that wanted to, you know, basically get their get back. And we're looking for a leader and they were and so much disarray, which created, you know, the events of World War II. So I'm curious, do you think they saw World War I and said, okay, if we need to create a buffer with the Soviet Union and we need a now democratic German state, we can't just destroy all their industry.

So unfortunately, we have to kind of look the other way. I mean, that was a major consideration. Because initially what you had at the end of the war in the Roosevelt administration, you had the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who proposed the Morgenthau plan, which called for the complete destruction of German industry and the wholesale summary, summarily execution of old German industrialists

without a trial, right? And that that plan was viable for a while and then it was thrown out for this more cautious approach initially with the nerve which led to, you know, restitution and compensation claims and the Nuremberg trials. But all of that also quickly went out of the window once the Cold War started, right? That's a small window.

Yeah, the Cold War immediately shifted focus. Early 1947, right? So you have basically, you know, there's US, Germany concedes the war on May 8, 1945. And so you basically have 18 months of a punitive policy, right, under Truman, which then shifts from early 1947 onwards to a accommodating policy vis-à-vis Germany

and, you know, focusing on containing the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. Wow. Do you think the industrialists knew this? Did they have any premonition? Did you think they hedged at all to say, like, hey, if we win the war, then everything's great. but if we lose, we are too big to fail, so to speak.

Totally. There was a lot of writing on the wall already where industrialists who would get arrested, would say to the soldiers that arrested them, you know, I'm happy to come march with you all to Moscow and things like that, right? Or saying that, oh, it's better to be the Nazi fight in the American occupation part of Germany

because the Americans are more sympathetic to capitalism. So I will go scot-free in it. it turned out to be, it turned out to be right. Wow. That they even had a permanent issue. It was denatification arbitrage where they would be, you know, you didn't want to be in the French zone because they, French zone. You don't want to be the French zone either.

You don't want to be the French zone either. In the French zone because, you know, the communists were a big part of the French government at the time. So they would come down hard on the industrialists. You know, the Brits, which were also an economic dire straits, you didn't want to, you know, You'd prefer they didn't want to be Natsified by the Brits either. So the Americans, you know, the American economy was booming.

You know, they didn't want to put capitalism on trial, you know. The Soviet Union was not their big enemy. So, I mean, the exact opposite, you don't want to put capitalism on trial. You want to promote capitalism. You want to promote capitalism and here, you are your capitalist, right?

Right. We have participated in, you know, in mass war crimes. You know, tens of thousands have they have exploited, you know, that thousands have been killed in their factories or have died in their factories. Wow. But, you know, what are you, you know,

this is the, this is the conundrum that you're faced with. Wow. And I mean, let the record show, right? It wasn't only the German industrialists that were able to sort of get leniency and had leverage, you know, post-World War II. I think that's actually an important point that I never really fully understood that when a war ends, it's not like, oh, this side is fully the winner

and this side is fully the loser. When you're losing a war, you still have some leverage and you're still able to negotiate a little bit. And it's an interesting concept that I never fully grasped. And America, I don't think, is it by any means

sort of alleviated of this because if you look at German scientists, America was like, all right, you did some bad stuff, but we need some rockets. So come on over here, Operation Papercliff. Yeah, totally. Right?

Burn it from Brown. Absolutely. Exactly. And many others. So we can look at, you know, obviously the denazification in Germany, be like, oh, this was a sham, but it's like, these people had leverage. It's like, look, we did war crimes. We were a part of a regime that was wholly evil by, you know, every definition. But we also have something that's invaluable to you, and you have another war. So what are you going to give me? And so we bring over all these Nazi scientists. We're like, all right, build a rocket, get us up there. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a fascinating conundrum. Again, I think most people, or at least for me, I should speak for myself, didn't realize that. Like, yeah, even when you're losing a war, there's still leverage. Totally. And I mean, also in the chaos that was post-war Germany, right? I mean, it's divided into all these occupation zones. And of course, the irony is that there were all, all the industries that wrote about

were wholesale expropriated in the Soviet occupied eastern Germany. But the Allies, in the end. allowed them to keep everything because once you were denazified you got all your assets which were frozen and and your board positions you got everything back and you could just go back to work you know they didn't need to go anywhere either they could just stay because you learned your lesson exactly exactly well the last 10 years my bad i mean you know the denatification was your clean bill of health so to say but it was this german expression also which was called um perilschein which was a ticket you got or a figurative ticket you got once you received denatification

or during the desification, which was basically somebody had cleaned you, you know, it's like the laundering product, personal made by this also this famous German industrialist family called Henkel, you know, you had a personal ticket, you know, you had been cleaned. You were inoculated. You've been washed of all your Nazis since, basically.

I'm so curious what those classes would have been, the denatification. Do I, hey, don't do Janice. You're like, oh, that's what we should have done. It's not genocide. That's a good point. Yeah, it's just, again, it's fascinating. I mean, I think the same thing happened in Japan post-World War II.

Are you familiar with, what is it, Unit 761? No, I'm not. Gabe, would you mind Google on this? I believe it's Unit 761. The number might be, oh, 731. This was basically a chemical warfare research and development. unit in Imperial Japan. And it was, it was devious.

I mean, if anyone is interested, it's not for the faint of heart. I recommend reading the Wikipedia article. Deaths estimated up to 300,000, 400,000 or higher from biological warfare. I mean, just the extent of the inhumanity here was just beyond. I mean, doing live vivisection. I mean, there's things here that I won't read because we're going to get demonetized. But the true horrors of war you couldn't imagine. And I believe the sort of leader in the medical head

of the specific unit was given full immunity with trade of what he found. And he was basically like, here's everything and then died at like 80 years old or something like that. Are you able to go down to, I'm curious, maybe known unit members? Yeah. Known unit members is on the left there

if you click that little part. A little prince is a lot of aristocrats also involved. Oh yeah. They're always involved. Yeah, they got prints in the name. Can you click this top guy? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. And then go down, yeah, he died in 1959.

But yeah, it was a, you know, ostensibly a war criminal that was able to trade some information. Including the bubonic plague attacks at Chinese cities. I had no idea. You try to release the bubonic plague. Yeah. Crazy, right? 600 years on. It's insane.

And yeah, you're just able to trade this stuff, which again, I just think is an interesting and important thing when looking at history. That even when you're losing, you have leverage and these folks, you know, despite all of their atrocities, are able to be like, all right, this is what I have. And I always wondered, and that's an interesting point, if they know that they can hedge. If they know, like, look, I have something that they need. So I'm going to work with impunity and we're going to try to win. But even if we lose, I'll still be okay. Which is more insidious to me because they truly have no interest in like the ideological cause. It's purely self-interested.

Absolutely. Which you could almost argue is worse in a way. Yeah, that's something that I always appellate over the past few years, right? What's worse? The ideologues or the opportunist, right? Because there's one family in my book where they actually make disqualmie. There's such Nazi ideologues to actually make business decisions which are con which are bad for them But but in in in a way to benefit at a Nazi part or so they emerge a very profitable newspaper that they own with a with a Nazi publication that is bleeding money and

So they do it all in order to you know in for the did the the Nazi cause yeah so to speak yeah I mean it's sort of splitting hairs with with evil but it isn't interesting sort of of moral kind of philosophical question, right? Like if you are enraptured in the ideology and the propaganda of a regime and you believe it wholeheartedly and you commit war crimes because of it, that is bad. But then the person that doesn't believe it, but still commits war crimes because it benefits them.

You could say it's worse. I don't know. That's bad too. Yeah, I mean, of course, yeah, which one is worse is a fascinating question. But it's, yeah, I think one worth considering. I want to discuss kind of, of the modern day and where some of these companies go to. But really quick, we're going to take

a break just to hear from our sponsors that make this show possible. Maybe we'll run to the restroom as well. If you have any questions for David DeYoung, please write those in the comments. We'll check them out and we'll come back with a question. Thank you all so much and we'll be back in just a couple seconds. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because if you're anything like me, you're probably running late all the time. I am. I'm always leaving right when I was to be somewhere and I never have time to sit down and grab a nutritious meal. And that's why I want to talk to you about this little product right here called Hewle. Heel is absolutely amazing. It's got everything you need, all the essential vitamins and minerals, all the nutrients, all the

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Trust them. They're the best. Anyway, let's get back to the show. And we are back with David De Jong. We're live here discussing Nazi billionaires, your book that you wrote, which is, again, fascinating. We have a question from MH. I'm sorry, dude. I don't know what your actual name is here. Similar to Porsche, how did Hugo Boss avoid prosecution for implementation of slave labor during the 30s?

I mean, it goes back to all the other companies that have avoided any kind of repercussions following the war. Everybody always asks me about Hugo Boss. I want to take the chance to also dispel it. I mean, Hugo Boss, yeah, they made uniforms for the SS and for the Nazi party and for other paramilitary Nazi-affiliated groups. But the main family in my book, right, the Kuant dynasty, which. controls BMW or the BMW group today which is not only BMW but also Brawl's Royce and Mini they during the Third Reich controlled you know a large battery brand called which today known as Varta right it's the brand which

produced the batteries in your in your airports oh wow and they controlled one of the largest armaments factor producers in the third Reich and they were an even larger uniforms manufacturer uh during the third Reich and even before that because they made their fortune producing uniforms for the military during World War I and you never hear I mean you everybody always focused on Hugo Boss for some reason but you go both you go boss and there's no family uh attached to today anymore was really a comparatively minor player but somebody always for some reason everybody always latches on to hugo boss i think those shirts it's you see some guy in the airport the hugo boss shirt and you're like i don't like i don't like that guy and then you try to figure out a reason

why you're like oh he's a nazi that's right yeah every every time i don't know you see those huger boasts you know what i mean just the giant do you go right in the boss or the you go on what i mean who wants to walk around in that yeah exactly that is criminal that is criminal that should be you got to go to nuremberg for that one The suits, though, the Nazis had, I don't want to say it, but they were pretty sharp. Hugo Boss did a decent job. I'll give that one up to you.

Unfortunately. That one's all yours. That's fair. I mean, compared to the shirts, the shirts are just too much. But that's an interesting point. I mean, there's very many companies during this time. I mean, Coca-Cola created Fanta, I believe, in order to sell product to the Nazis.

Is that true? Have you heard that before? I have not heard that before. Gabe, could you Google that? I had read this. Google Coca-Cola Fanta Nazis. Yeah, I believe they wanted to distribute there. I mean, I might be...

This is an AI review, so we'll see if this is correct here. But, yeah, Fonza was created a Nazi journey during World War II as a Coca-Cola alternative. Oh, interesting. I don't know if it was created by Coca-Cola. Due to an American trade embargo that cut off supply. The Coca-Cola bottling company was loyal to color over his own country oh that's interesting yeah that's interesting so yeah i don't know if they

were controlled or if they were just acquired later but yeah it seems like they were they were the the soda they're the cola of choice it seems like a nazi germany but there's so many of these types of brands i think bayer is another yeah buyer yeah buyer yeah they used to be what is i gay farben dek bayr came out of igfarmine which was the largest pharmaceuticals and chemicals conglomerate and actually their entire executive board was sentenced at Nuremberg. I mean, they created a version or the whole, you know, chemical makeup of Zyclombie. That is a joint venture between IGA Favre and Deguza, which was another chemical company. I mean, yeah.

But buyer was the pharmaceutical branch because, you know, the only company which was broken up by the allies after, or one of the few companies, which was broken up by the Allies after, the war was IG Farben, right? There's this famous picture. Maybe you can pull it up of IG Farbron, the IG Farben Octopus, which... IG Farben Octopus. Could you pull that out?

Yeah. There's a famous... And it's a... It's a... It's a photograph by, I think, an American illustrator, which shows kind of the... the what is it i you said octopus yeah it it shows it as an octopus or like a where it has its tentacles and everything oh interesting no no hmm all right i don't know if we'll be able to find it

all right Gabe you try to pull that up we'll we'll we'll continue so so iG farm right was was broken up after the war in three into three companies one being uh buy which is still one of the largest chemical companies, pardon pharmaceutical companies today, and the other is BASF, which is one of the largest chemical companies today. And one, which is not very, not that relevant anymore. But their entire executive board was one of the three industrialist trials at Nuremberg. And so there were sentenced,

and there actually, their sentences were commuted along with many other industrial, or the industrialist that were sentenced at Nuremberg, by the U.S. Commissioner for Occupied Germany, man named John J. McCloy, who did this out of political expedient reasons because by 1950, and the Korean War starts,

for initially Truman and then Eisenhower annex the so-called War Defense Act, which has American factories producing on the armaments for the Korean. war and there's a huge consumer gap there's demand there's a huge gap in consumer demand for for consumer products and west germany is like they're the key ally which is able to newly re-industrialize which is able to fill that consumer gap and produce products and um you know you have the den german

Chancellor, which says to, you know, which says to, initially to Truman and then to Eisenhower, oh, you know, if you want us to be our full partner and your full ally, you know, you're keeping our men locked up, you know, on our territory. So we want to have, you know, we want them to be free. So what ends up happening is not only some of the high-ranking industrialists who are released, the Nuremberg convicted industrialists, who are. released. But you have many high-ranking SS officers who oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands whose death sentences are commuted to live sentences and are then by the mid-1950s are commuted to freedom, are released and are back on the streets of Germany and they then start working for say

Porsche or as the marketing director after overseeing the murders on the east front of hundreds of thousands. Wow, I had no idea. That is wild. I just assumed, like, oh, all the really, really bad guys, they, you know, they're in prison. They got put to death. Well, some of them did. Some of them you couldn't avoid of being, of being sent to death and actually hanged. But many of them who had done, you know, who had committed equally, you know, equally grave, you know, equally mass-skilled genocidal crimes.

Wow. And we mentioned this term before, I mentioned rather, like, leverage. Like, these people are doing evil things, but they have something that, you know, the allies want in this new war. And so they're able to negotiate. This is just what happened rightly or wrongly. This is what they did. I'm curious, why did some industrialists have less levers than others?

Like, why did the, you know, auto manufacturers seem to get off fairly, you know, leniently, whereas others, they were actually sentenced and then later commuted? I mean, it was, it was. more the power the more the more powerful you were right I mean the more leverage you had basically but the more powerful you were also put you in the crosshairs of B of ended up at Nuremberg so so the three industrialist trials in addition to at Nurember in addition to the executive board of E.K. Farben is the Flick trial Friedrich Flick which is one of the main families in the book to the

main dynasties in the book they he later came to control became the controlling shareholder of Daimler Benz but during the the Third Reich, he oversaw the largest steel, coal and armaments, conglomerate, and was the largest profiteer of so-called aryanization, so the expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses, and also the largest, you know, the largest purveyor or exploiter of force and slave labor among the private industrialists or as a private citizen, or, you know, as somebody who owns a namesake conglomerate,

of the 120,000, of the 120,000 employees that he had, I think by 1944, more than half were, or pardon me, of the 120,000 laborers that he had by early 1944, more than half, were forced and slave laborers. Wow. That's a point that I've,

actually feel like, for me at least, was underrepresented in my understanding of World War II history. I think in my mind it was like, okay, there is a military component, there's an aggressive, you know, sort of an aggressive war effort. There's a genocide component, of course. But the forced labor component,

I just feel like maybe I'm ignorant. It never exactly came up. Can you explain how that came to be, what that looked like? And, yeah, who was doing the labor and how was that organized? So, of course, you know, as as World War II develops right I mean there's a huge there's you know all German men are are called or all German able-bodied men are drafted and called to the front right so there's a huge you know

there's a huge absence or there's huge shortage of of of labor so what happens is is the largest forced labor program that the world had ever seen to date um which saw the deportation of 12 to 12 to 20 million Europeans from all across the continent to round it up and to be exploited in German factories and mines, right? Of that estimated 12 to 20 million, about 2 million died in German factories and mines. Which is a huge proportion because they had to work under the most

horrific of circumstances. Now, even there, in the force and slave labor, there was a hierarchy, kind of perverse hierarchy, where you had, you know, for example, Western European or Nordic forest laborers from the Netherlands, from Denmark, from other Scandinavian countries, which were considered closer to the, you know,

Aryan ideals of the Nazis. So they were treated comparatively in many cases. in many cases, you know, comparatively, relatively okay, particularly in terms of, particularly compared to the other force and slave laborers.

Sometimes they would receive a bit of money, you know, but they were still, you know, they were rounded up in the streets of the occupied territories and were shipped off to Germany, including my own grandfather who

was, who tried to sail to England with his best friend and was a very avid sailor and was blown back to shore and was arrested by German soldiers because he wanted to join so they sailed to England to join the Royal Air Force

and he so he ended up being arrested in sentence as a political prisoner to 20 months in a German factory or to 20 months in German prison and he ended up being you know exploited as a slave

of laborer in a steel factory in the German rural area, the industrial area. And, you know, he was six foot five, and he came out weighing 100 pounds. And, you know, he barely survived. And he was, he was leapt up. And, you know, he was recovered in a Swiss sanatorium. You know, soon thereafter, married my grandmother who was his neighbor. So, so, but, but, but, you know, these are, you know, he was a, a Dutch guy, you know,

Protestant, you know, 25, yeah, he was from 1916, so he was, he was, he was, he was when he was arrested. And, and so, you know, they were on the top of the, of the, of the Forest and Slave Labrotharitanpo. So, as we were, and he barely survived already, right? Just to keep that in mind. Wow.

Now, now, below that, you had the, the prisoners of you had the so-called you had the so-called laborers from the east, Osterbiter as the Nazis called them, which were deported from all the, from Ukraine, from Russia, from all the eastern countries and they were treated very poorly because they belonged to the, you know,

the accorded, what the Nazis saw as, you know, the degenerate Slavic race and they were horrifically treated right but they were many of them most of them were treated as for deported as forced laborers and the difference between force and slave labor is that those who were forced you know

they were coerced they were rounded up they were arrested but they received some support of payment not of course on par with the German employees they received much less but they were forced but they were paid and slave laborers were literally enslaved and did not receive any kind of payment. So those were the O-Star Blyde. This was huge category. It was about

six million, six to ten million people. And then beneath there was the prisoners of war, Soviet prisoners of war, many other prisoners of war, who were slave laborers and were, you know, treated horrifically, were executed summarily. And of course, at the bottom of the total of the tournament, were concentration camp captives, whether Jewish or otherwise, who were leased out. I mean, it's so perverse to say, but we're leased out to the SS, by the SS, we run the concentration camps to

German factories and German companies. And there were these kind of collaborations. I mean, there's another way to put it. Collaborations between you had BMW and Dachau. You had Auschwitz and EJ, IG Farben.

You had Volkswagen with several concentration camps nearby. who made these deals with the SS, these companies did, where they would lease concentration camp captives from the SS. So they would pay the SS, of course, the slave laborers didn't receive a penny, where they would receive four Reichsmark per day, or they would pay, the companies would pay the SS for Reichsmark a day

to lease an unskilled concentration camp captive, and they would pay them, they would pay the SS eight Reichsmark per day for a skilled concentration camp captives. And of course, this led to the so-called the build establishment of the satellite or sub-concentration camps on the premises of German companies or German factory complexes or near German mines. Wow. So it's a gulag effect. It is a gulag. I had no idea of this.

Wow. It was a huge, it was a huge operation. And many companies participated in that, including the, companies controlled by by gunter quandt which is one of the main characters in the book and frederick and companies like um Volkswagen BMW IG Friberbenz Siemens Kropp and they were fully aware of the nature of the labor absolutely they were on the factory premises right they would erect the SS would be responsible for building a concentration camp on on a factory on a factory complex and they would also then were tasked by protecting the factory.

And they would get from, say, an Auschwitz or Ravensbrug or a Dachau or any of the other concentration camps would basically get thousands or hundreds or thousands of concentration camp captive would deport them over to a factory complex where they were, you know, exploited under the most horrific circumstance imaginable, right? And that is, for example, what Vernon Porsche and Anton Piag did at the Volkswagen factory. I mean, they were still a sliver. I mean, we're talking about thousands of concentration camp captives as slave laborers among tens of thousands of forced laborers at a factory complex like that.

But it would be the same at Gunterquant's, uh, uh, after. battery factories, right? Or at Friedrich Flix, steel and coal, and armaments factories. Wow. I had no idea of that. And again, we're talking about at this time, this notion of total war, where all of these industries are now focused

on this war effort. So I'm curious, and not that it makes a ton of a difference, to be honest, but were they, like these forced laborers, were they working on, I guess, like, automobiles for these automobile manufacturers, or were they working on armaments and weapons? No, they were working on armaments and weapons because it was a completely...

There was a total war. started with there was not consumer, there was no consumer production, right? But they still benefited financially from this? Yes, they would. They would because, you know, you had the regime, which, well, again, until until February in 1943 when the economic tide is turning against Nazi regime. But they're getting paid by the Nazi regime. They are. And then they're paying a very small fee to the SS to get the labor.

Exactly. And that arbitrage, they're obviously making millions of millions. Delta is they're making off of that. Wow. But I mean, again, the question also goes to how effective are these forces instead of, you know, you, you know, you are rounded up people or have deported them in from concentration camps, right? I mean, these people are already deeply malnourished, you know, they're there, they're imprisoned, they're horribly treated against how much of effective.

labor are we talking about right I mean this is not this is not you know the question also goes is you know how how production wise how much sense did it actually make I mean it was really destruction through labor I mean there was literally there was literally the model of of some of these companies and the assess it was just that they could literally work them to death destruction through labor yeah wow I mean that is even more insidious like yeah you can see the financial thing and say okay look they were you know immoral but they had a financial means destruction through labor is just hey give them something to do until they die i mean it's like truly disturbing and so this the quant family that's another uh character that

comes up in the book yeah um can you just detail the uh i guess sort of the main family member there and what they did and what their association with uh the national social so totally so So, so Gunderkwand was a patriarch of the, of the Qandinacy, which today is the Qandinansi is considered to be the, you know, the wealthiest and most influential business dynasty in Germany. One branch today controls the BMW group. It's two siblings, actually. They control 47% of the BMW group.

They're the richest siblings in Germany. They have an estimated net worth of 60 billion. and they get about a one billion dividend each every year from BMW and the other branch stems from which is the quote unquote poor branch and still multi-billionaires too but but don't control BMW group stem from Magda Gubbles or the late who ends up becoming market Gables because Guntt who during the Third Reich controls this massive battery factory

then known as AFA, today known as Varta, as well as this massive armaments company. His second marriage is to a young woman called, then named, known as Magda Ritchell and after the divorce becomes known to the world

as the first lady of the Third Reich through her marriage to a Nazi minister of propaganda, Yosef Gubbles. And the marriage between Gunt and Magda Goebbels produces one son,

Harald. He has one son from his first marriage that Guntur Qantas called Herbert Kvant. The Herbert Kwan branch ends up owning the BMW group, controlling the BW group

and the Harold Kwan branch ends up owning the 15% stake in Diamonder Benz, which is sold to the Kuwaitis, and then they've been investing that money since. Wow. So, Kunter-Quant is married to Magda Goebbels.

Yeah, before she becomes Magda Goebbels. They get divorced, and then she marries Joseph Goebbels. Yes. Wow. I mean, that's a bad ex-wife. Like, if you want to talk about ex-wives. Exactly, especially what she ends up doing, right? The murder of her six children in the Furibunker in April 30 of 1945.

So she is a proper ideologue. She has no desire to flee. So he's such a fascinating character because her high school boyfriend is this man named Chaim Arlaozov who later becomes one of the largest Zionist immigrants to the British Bandit of Palestine and becomes, you know,

if you go to Tel Aviv, you know, there's all these streets, there's one of the main streets named after Alozorov. And that is Magda Gubels or then Magdaafhidlind. Macla Richel's high school boyfriend is one of the most important Zionists, you know, and is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, um, eliminated on a very murky circumstances in February 1930, in, in, in, in 33 actually on a beach of Tel Aviv, which has never been cleared up.

So that's her first boyfriend. Then she ends up married as a 17 year old. She met she, she, she, she, she, she meets the 39 year old industrialist, Gunter Quant. I marry his image, a total mismatch of a marriage. But he's one of Germany's most powerful industrialists, recently widowed, you know, is enamored with Magda Koubel, becomes enamored with Magda Richel, who actually has a Jewish stepfather as well at the time.

And, you know, they produced, that marriage produces one son. Gunter Quant, and the Quantinacy become the, you know, most powerful business dynasty in Germany. And then she ends. up in 1931 falling head over heels to Joseph Goebbels right was kind of this unsightly gnome looking figure and they of course become kind of the most talked about most known most known couple in nazi germany because hitler is also in love with muftar gobbles and but he says i need to be

celibate i'm married to the german people so he has this you know covert relationship to eva brown And so they have this kind of platonic arrangement called the arrangement where Joseph and Magda Goebbels are his kind of verb should be to the German people kind of the propaganda, what a nuclear family should look like. You know, six billion children, you know. So Harold Quantz and also, again, Magda Goebbels is a son from her first marriage to to Gunterquant is abused basically as a propaganda prop by Hitler and Gubbles to show what a young Aryan boy

or a strong male should look like. And he actually never joins the Nazi party, Harold Quant does, because he has this kind of, you know, he becomes this paratrooper, German paratrooper. And it's the only one of Magda Gubbles's children who survives the war because while she murders her six children in the furrow bunker, He's in a British prisoner of war camp after being arrested in Italy at the end of the war,

because he was, again, a paratrooper that would, you know, be shot into behind enemy lines and would do operations there. Wow. And why does he never join the Nazi party? Because, you know, he was basically kind of a spoiled rich kid who wasn't really interested in joining the, the we had no interest in Nazi ideology. Wow. And gets away with it because his stepfather is Joseph Goebbels.

Wow. And does he distance himself from sort of the Nazi politics and his mother's legacy later? So interestingly enough, during the war, he's very clear to his mother and his stepfather where he says, you know, the war is being lost, right? I mean, he's serving at the Easter Front. He can see what's happening, right?

Germany's losing the war, which is of course something that his propaganda stepfather does not want to hear. So he's very clear. He's very aware that the war, that Germany is losing the war. And, you know, later in life, of course, due to the tragic death of his murder, suicide of his mother, stepfather, and of course their murder of his six step-siblings, or half-siblings, you know, he's very reluctant to talk about the war. and he's totally traumatized.

And I think the only thing he says about it is that, you know, he never forgives his mother and stepfather for murdering his six half-siblings. But he also becomes, together with his half-brother Herbert, they become the two of the most dominant industrialists of post-war Germany. Wow. I mean, Magda Goevel, that is a fascinating and morbid story.

Yes. But this was a woman who was really out for power, right? But the murder of her own children, I mean, for a mother to kill her own kids, it's truly pathological. Yeah, totally. Oh, totally. Totally. Totally. Beyond, like, even just having a child now after like six or seven weeks, seeing the way my wife is with our baby, I mean, it is such a primal protective instinct. Totally. The idea of what she did. Why did she not try to flee or broke her a deal? Is there any speculation on it? Yeah, well, no, there is. I mean, Gunderquant offers her kind of this refuge. offers his ex-wife saying you know you can flee I will pay for you to

flee to Switzerland you know but she has hung herself up so you know she's tied herself so closely to Hitler and a Nazi cause that there's no way out and she in this very fatalistic totally nihilist way she says you know if we

we were dying for our fatherland and she writes this very emotional letter from the furor bunker to to Harold she does as though Yosef Gubbles, just before they, just before she murders her six children

and commits suicide with her husband, you know, saying we're, we're, you know, children, there will be no life for the children and to live on after, after Germany falls and kind of rationalizing her decisions. It's totally perverse. Wow. Yeah.

That's, I mean, did they recover, there's more of a detail. I don't know if you even know the answer is. Did they recover her body and his body? They do. They do. There's pictures of them made by Soviet soldiers after. Yeah.

Don't look those up. Yeah. No, thank you. Yeah. Because they, so they, she gives cyanide to her six children, right? Famously, right? She has them kind of, you know, or the doctor in the fur bunker, it means her to cyanide.

And Magra says, you know, and then because these are capsules. they have to break them, right? So that's one thing. And then she and Goebbels go up into the garden of the Reich's chancellery, right, which is completely destroyed. And then they take cyanide and then her girls as asked an aide to shoot them so that they sure they're dead and then set their bodies on fire ablaze. So that is how they are discovered by Soviet soldiers, you know, a few days later.

And when you say the Fura bunker, they're in... The heart of Berlin, in the... Below the Reich Chancellory or the Garden of the Reich Chancellery, really. Is it the same place where Hitler is? Exactly, same place where Hitler is. Wow. Have you ever seen the movie, it's called Their Untergang? It's really famous for memes.

The Downfall, it's called. Pull it up because it's one of the... It won an Oscar for... depicting kind of the scenes at the you know the scene inside the fur bunker as as the nazi empire as a nazi germany falls in its last week's it's it's a really excellent movie um and i can very much recommend you you watching it oh wow this is a yeah darwinter gone oh it's a german film yeah oh wow but it's your subtitled it's you can right it's it's it's well-known it's one an oscar and it's really I can very much recommend it you to watch it.

Wow. It's 20 years old. I mean, like I couldn't even imagine. Like on the one hand, it's just like a tragic society. Like just the collapse of humanity in those moments is so morbid and bizarre. And I need to ask. I mean, everyone, every time I discuss World War II history, there's always a comment where people go, did Hitler escape? Right.

I'm curious if you've read into this at all. I mean, no, I mean, he didn't escape. He was, he was, he got, you know, he killed himself together with Eva Brown and, and shot himself and took cyanide. Mm-hmm. And shot her, then shot himself. Right. And that's it, so does. Yeah.

He's not living in South America. Right. As the, as the legend goes, as people speculate. Yeah. It is, uh, it is an untrue speculation. Right. Yeah. I mean, even just hearing the story of Magda and Joseph Goebbels, the brutality, again, kind of leads me to think like there probably was, you know, Hitler's downfall was likely the same thing. If they did it, you know, Hitler certainly.

Yeah, so they survived. So Joseph Goebbels ends up serving as one, for one day as Chancellor of Germany following Hitler's suicide. He appoints his closest kind of support, you know, aid of your supporter. And Hitler gives his pin, his golden pin to. Maktar Goebbels is a kind of a less tribute to her, you know, to her support. And, yeah. Wow. I mean, there is a theory that the Soviets, you know, got Hitler's remains and that they were, again, this is just as the theory goes. I'm just explaining to you, the broad theory. That there was a test that was done in like the early 2000s on the skull,

and they discovered that it was the skull of like a 30-year-old woman is what the story is. And then it was never looked at after that. Is that true? I can't say. But this is where I think the legend comes from. Yeah, where the legend starts. Besides the legend of his escape to South America. Right.

I mean, many, I guess, I shouldn't say many, but certainly some SS officers did escape to South America. Oh, for sure, of course. And there's really good books written about it, like The Red Line by Philip Sands. Yeah, no, that is absolutely true. That is absolutely true. And of course, the families I write about didn't have to flee, right?

They could just stay. Right. And somebody like Gunter Kwan, for example, later, or later after the war, in his denatification trial, uses his antagonistic relationship with Yosef Gubbles as an excuse to say, well, actually, I was persecuted by the Nazis and used it as his plea to go off Scott Free, which ends up happening, right? He's only deemed a fellow traveler. Mind you, this is Gunter Kwan was. one of the largest industrialists of the Third Reich, who exploits about almost 60,000 force and slave laborers, including thousands of concentration camp captives.

And, you know, is one of the largest profiteers of arionization, expropriates many companies in occupied territories, and is also one of the largest armaments producers. And he goes, Scott Free, in denatification trials. And his son, Herbert Quant, who ends up saving BMW from bankruptcy and becoming also a legendary industrialist figure. Today, BMW has named the foundation after him called the Herbert Quant, the BMW Foundation Herbert Quant,

with a motto saying, inspire responsible leadership of a man who, you know, exactly. That's it. We believe in the power of collaboration. with the Nazis. You know, as a man, you know,

Herbert Quant was somebody who built a sub-concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, you know, exploited thousands of force and slave laborers in a Berlin battery factory, including hundreds of female concentration camp captives

from Auschwitz, acquired companies stolen from Jews in France, and today you have a massive foundation named after him by BMW without any mention, of his, of his, you know, his Nazi war, his past as a Nazi war criminal. And that is really the reason why I wrote this book

is to, is to show this kind of widewashing and this kind of hypocrisy and, you know, make people aware also of, of, you know, the need for historical transparency by some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful families. Wow. Yeah, I want to jump to the modern day and examine sort of where are these

dynasties went and the wealth that they've continued to accrue. Yeah. Before that, I actually want to ask, and I think it's an important distinction, the aronization of industry is another detail about World War II that I don't know if gets brought up often, which correctly, if I'm wrong, effectively you have businesses that are controlled and operated by non-Arians, you know, many of which Jews. Yeah. And when there is effectively a cleansing and there is a, you know, a push to arionize all

these industries, have them be controlled. by proper German pure-blooded men, they round up and kick out and trap all these non-Arians that are controlling these industries, which, of course, is a massive transfer of wealth. You have an entire, you know, industries, I'm sure, controlled by specific groups of people that now have nothing, many of them are killed,

and then all of that wealth gets transferred to these people that effectively have, you know, no claim to it. I just think that's an interesting detail that never really gets brought up, least I don't hear about it as much. No, so the practice of arionization, right, there's also this perversely cynic term, which denotes the wholesale expropriation,

mainly of Jewish-owned assets, right? Initially have this, it starts with the firing of board members or supervisory board members from 1933 onwards by German company of, you know, executives of Jewish descent. But it quickly devolves into, as the persecution of German Jews ramps up, devolves into this circle practice of arrogynization,

which initially is the, as this veneer of legality, where competitors or Nazi authorities coerce, you know, entrepreneurs or business families to sell their assets at a fire sale price, Or they want to sell it because they want to gather the means to get the hell out of the country. But as the persecution ramps up in the second half to 1930s, you know, you really have, it just evolves into outright theft and robbery, which is a practice, of course, that continues also with businesses in German occupied territories, may be they Aryan or non-Aryan, right? is it becomes this kind of tried and true method in which it is it becomes attractive for industrialists to to acquire companies to acquire competitors on the cheap or acquire foreign competitors on the cheap in German occupied territories wow so it's really and then it's mainly called expropriation

it doesn't have the the Aryan non-Aryan factor um but uh yeah aryanization is this, you know, is really, is, again, the perversely cynic term, which is the removal of any, of any trace of, of, of, of, yeah, Jewish ownership from any asset, whether that is, you know, company shares, bonds, real estate, artworks, diamonds, you name it, you know, anything of relative value, until it, of course, devolves into any of, anything of basic value. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, again, I think an important detail when looking at the atrocities of World War II that I feel like it's not always highlighted. I believe a similar thing happened in Uganda under Ediamine, if I'm not mistaken. I hope I'm getting my details here. But effectively, there was like a class, like a minority class that controlled certain industries in Uganda at the time. And he basically gave, I think there were like Southeast Asian, Indian, Pakistani descent, and effectively gave them a date and said,

you have to leave the country and abandon all your industry and turn it over to our government by this date or you'll get killed. Wow, that's even, in a way, that's even more brutal because again, ironization initially has this veneer of legality, right?

Right, oh, we'll buy it from you. Exactly, or you have to sell it or else we will take your company, basically. I recently did a big investigation for Vanity Fair, which took me a year and a half, about what is currently Germany's richest man, man named Klaus Mikhail Kuhne,

who was 87, as an estimated network of 44 billion, and doesn't have any errors. And his family profited off of the so-called M-Action, which was the Furniture Action, which was the Kune Nagel, which is the company that he controls, is one of the largest freight forwarders

in the world. And they transported all of the looted goods of families that had been deported to extermination of contraption camps. They, Kununaga, would transport them from the Netherlands, from France, from Belgium, from Luxembourg to Germany.

So they would empty the houses after people had been put on trains to the gas chambers and they would empty the houses or they would transport the goods from the occupied territories to Germany to be either auctioned off or handed out to families. It was houses that have been destroyed by Allied bombings, etc. And, you know, his father and uncle, Klaus Michael Kuhn's father and uncle, were the, had made his deal with the Nazi authorities to profit or to execute or to use Kunanago as the freight forwarder of these looted goods of murdered families.

And he refuses today to own up to that history. He commissioned a study which he shelved after it included a chapter on his companies and his father and his uncle's Nazi history and Nazi activities. And it's going to be one of the, because he's airless, it's going to be one of the largest after he dies and the 44 billion is a low estimate after he dies his entire funder his entire fortune will go to a foundation and it will be

as big as it will be one of the largest world's largest charities you know and with no kind of reckoning or recourse regarding it's you know brutal a Nazi history wow this guy had no kids no I got married at 50 bizarre yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean that's i think that is an excellent uh greater moral question that i think a lot of people are probably wondering so you have all of these families that have profited off of this genocide atrocity of war whatever you want to call it and now the airs

have carried on that wealth uh grown the wealth ostensibly this book you know i kind of wish came out in 1950 i think i think it would have been It would have been like, oh, let's shine the light there. Unfortunately, you were not born yet. You were just... No, I'm a late 80s. This is 40 years on. You were late.

Yeah, because I was late. I was late. So it's one of these questions to say, okay, what do we do now, right? We have, you know, BMW, all these companies you have named that are obviously massive players in global industry today with children probably or grandchildren or grand nephews or maybe even people not related at all to these families that did these terrible things.

What is their responsibility morally? Should they carry the sins of their father? Is there a reparation system? What, how exactly, what is the best framework to look at this? They shouldn't carry the sins of their father, but what they should do is be, and, you know, what I'm arguing for is,

is, you know, not to donate money or anything, is just to be transparent about history. That's the least one can ask, right? Is if you so have to name, you know, your charity, major global charitable foundations, museums, academic chairs, media prizes, you name it, after men who committed mass war crimes, then at least own up to it, you know, and not what, whitewash it because, you know, these families and these companies, I would say, have a

responsibility to be transparent about history at the minimum. right is to show history for what it is to show the good and the bad and we live in this era right of of of of good corporate governance apparently where where these companies where it would be kind of good governance to be say hey you know our founder our largest shareholder you know our owning family did horrific things to the third Reich in the third right but we're coming clean with that and this is and this is what you did. We're showing both sides of it because you can only learn from history by showing the good and the bad. If you only show the good, it's just a whitewash. It's just a distortion of the past. Interesting. So this foundation, like the Quant Foundation, for example, if they were to say, hey, look, history is complicated. Our ancestor did terrible, atrocious things, but also helped our business grow and is, you know, intrinsic to the business and we're not going to, you know, just erase them from the history of our business. So we're going to try to do is

make the best of an awful and, you know, criminal situation. And in his name, donate to XYZ charities in the hope of creating a better future and atoning for what we've done. Like, would that be satisfactory or appropriate? Well, again, with the caveat that as long as you're transparent about the full history, right?

And not try to widewash it, not try to close over it. Right? because there is, because for some reason, these heirs, these billionaire heirs, who are stewarding these, you know, 40, 50 billion dollar fortunes, find it incredibly, have shaped their entire identity as heirs,

and I find it incredibly difficult of disavowing publicly their fathers and grandfathers, because what is left of their own identity then, basically? I mean, I reached out to all these families that I write about in the book, and only one of them, you know, either declined to be interviewed, they declined to comment or their spokespeople,

you know, gave such answers, which were non-answered. You know, only one grandson of Friedrich Flick, who's, you know, his grandson is 80 now. You know, I had on the record email correspondence with him, and he said, yes, my great, many bad things have come out about my grandfather, mind you,

this grandfather was convicted in Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But he gave us so much more than wealth alone. You know, so there is this, you know, he was quite candid, you know, but even there's there's a complete lack of distancing. And I think in this day and age, you know, I think, again, being transparent about all the history, not glossing over it. But now what they're doing is championing Nazi war criminals without being,

yes, successful businessman, but yes, also Nazi war criminals, without being transparent about the Nazi part. And I think that's where the rub is. They said they should. These companies and these families are so concerned with protecting the myth of the brand, right? Protecting the myth of BMW, of Porsche, of Audi, of all these big car brands,

that they're so afraid to hurt the share price or the sales or the standing of these brands, that that is another aspect of why they're refusing to fess up to history, they're refusing to be transparent on a global consumer-facing level about who these men were that made these companies that made these brands what they are today, which is some of the world's most recognizable brands. Right.

Now, you had mentioned, I forget, you had given a talk, I believe, but you had mentioned that there were certain families that profited greatly and then kind of disappeared, that sort of divested and, you know, kind of moved away with their fortune and are no longer major global economic players. Could you touch on that and sort of like, you know, why you think it is important to address, you know,

the current global players and not necessarily, you know, focus on these other folks that profited from the conflicts that have now gone away? Yeah, so, I mean, I really focus on the book is kind of the contemporary reasons why I chose these five dynasties in the book is that they still have to be, you know, they still have to either have a consumer facing company like BMW or Porsche or Volkswagen.

They still have to be relevant in global business basically. Or they have to have family offices which invest billions in private equity, art, you name it, real estate. But they still have to be one of the conditions that you need to, they need to be relevant in global business today. And secondly, these dynasties have to live on, right? They still have to exist. There has to be a next generation

because there needs to be some kind of reckoning or recourse, right? At least in the book. But with a guy like Klaus Michel Kuhna, who doesn't have any heirs, right? That's why he's not in the book. That's why it became a standalone piece for Vanity Fair. It's because the reckoning needs to happen now or it needs to happen with this foundation

before it becomes one of the world's large foundations. And the third condition is, I really wanted to focus on those families which have effective economic control over their companies. They have a say in the policy of where the company is going, right? Because, for example, you know, the BMW group is controlled effectively by two people who are Germany's wealthiest siblings, each a net worth of estimated 30 billion. And they own 47% of the BMW group, right?

So they have effective economic control over the companies. But if you talk about a company like Siemens, for example, where you have 200, 300, 400, 400, 500, 600, 600, 600 shareholders, it's so diffuse the ownership. You don't really have it. They don't really steward the company in one way or another. They don't really can make the decisions that end up, you know, either affect the company, the direction of a company, but also saying, hey, we are not going to, we are stopping the whitewashing of history and we're going to fess up to our history. which companies controlled like by the by the quant dynasty with BMW or the Porsche Pierre dynasty with Porsche and Audi and Volkswagen have have a say in it because they only have two two dozen shareholders and they're very much involved they are the controlling shareholders which if you're talking about hundreds of shareholders they have not right and as I mentioned earlier these these dynasties that have gone away like the Krupp like the Krupp the famous Krupp steel dynasty or the Tissin steel dynasty, you know, they don't have any airs anymore. So they don't play, these families don't play a relevant role in the companies

anymore. Either in the case of Krupp, it was left to a 25% stake was left to a major global foundation. To the Krupp Foundation. And the Tissin didn't see literally move to the Pampas in Argentina and no longer play a role of relevance in, in, in, in, in, in, in, and global business. It is important to focus on those which are really, which are really still have skin in the game, as it were, because they can actually make changes for the good,

you know, or for the bad. But at the end of the book, I also give an counter example of a family called the Rhymins, which have this really crazy story. And the Rhymen is, is Germany's new wealthiest dynasty and they control most of the American consumer goods

like Snapple, Seven-Up, crispy cream donuts, Einstein Bros. Pekles, Curric Green Mountain, Panera Bread, and many other Jimmy Chu, many other consumer brands, particularly in the US.

And they had this father and grandfather we were this huge, you know, virulent anti-Semites, you know, our Nazi sympathizers, you know, served in their local municipality for the Nazi party. But their grandfather actually from the other side, from their maternal side, was actually a Jewish man named Alfred Landekar who was murdered during the Holocaust. So they stemmed from both perpetrator and victim. And they only found all of this out in 2019. And in New York Times ended up writing a lot of,

about it too, where they didn't know about this history. So they were confronted with this in 2019 after a build, which is Germany's largest tabloid, wrote about, you know, the dark history of Germany's newly wealthiest dynasty. And then three months later, they came out with an interview in New York Times saying, you know, yes, our father and grandfather, all from our father's side were major Nazis. but the father of our mother, our maternal grandfather, was a Jewish man who was murdered in the Holocaust. So they actually ended up putting their money where their mouth is

and renaming their foundation named after their father to their murdered grandfather and endowing it in perpetuity with 250 million euros, which is huge, enormous amount. Wow. And doing very cutting-edge research on, you know, discrimination, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, et cetera, and still being transparent about who their father and grandfather were, i.e. huge Nazis. So you would say they handled it effectively.

They handled it well. So I give them at the end of the book as a counter example, right? But of course, that's a unique situation. Yeah, of course. You know, you stem from both victim and perpetrator. I mean, that really happens. I mean, what a bizarre, morbidly ambiguous, like, you know, a situation to be in as the child, to say like, oh, like, my great-grandparents stemmed on completely opposite sides. Totally. Yeah, and it gets even crazier

because their father was married. That marriage remained childless, but on the side, he has this affair with this woman. They have three children, and that woman's father was actually one who ended up murdered in the Holocaust, and those children become the controlling shareholders of all these, you know, American consumer companies.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, but also maybe like a beautiful kind of show of unity that like these two oppositional, you know, forces like the victim and the aggressor, they were able to find some unity and we're able to, you know, rename the foundation and, you know, use these funds for something good. Yeah, yeah, in the end, yeah, but I would say that the other business families or the other companies that are right about in my book could take an example out of the way to handle it so far. Yeah, I want to ask about the families that have like a very one-sided, you know, history and what they, you know, should do. Additionally, you know, like expounding this to the greater conversation of, you know, there's, I don't know if there's any necessarily, you know, a nation that is, you know, purely clean. Absolutely not. And very few corporations that have been around, you know, over 100 years

that have, you know, sort of no misdeeds. And, you know, if they should also follow suit, I think it's an interesting question. But really quick, we're just going to hear from our sponsors. Additionally, anyone that's, you know, listening right now, we're live with David DeYoung. If you any questions regarding this topic, please drop them into the comment section. We'll be checking them out during the break. And we'll come back for the question as well as all the other questions that I just mentioned. Thank you guys so much. We'll be back in just a minute. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to help you make sports more fun. That's right. If you like watching sports, there's a way to make it 10 times more fun, and that is with

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I'm going to say more in J.K. Dobbins. J.K., I mean, just having the first name is just kidding. That's going to make me lose confidence. I'm going to go less on that, to be completely frank. Again, knowing virtually nothing about, I think this is football. I'm pretty sure this is football. If you guys want to play along, absolutely by all means. You can go to prize picks, download the app on your smart device,

or click on the link in the description. Thank you again for prospects for making the show possible. Again, we are here with David De Jong. We're live discussing his book Nazi billionaires and the dynasties. They got rich in Germany, but also, I guess, across all of the Third Reich. This question comes from Audrey Hans. He asks, and I think this is pointed at you, okay? This is going to be, this is racial.

I'm ready. I'm ready. I apologize in advance. That's okay. You as a Dutchman. You as a Dutchman. You as a Dutchman. People are asking.

who the collaborating Dutch war, they got richer from the war. What about that, David? Yeah, yeah. It's totally fair to point of scrutiny at my own people. Particularly, you know, I would say a brand which is very well known, which has a kind of ambiguous status in the Netherlands regarding its war time is Phillips, the large electronics maker, because at one hand, they were able to save a lot of concentration camp captives of deportation to the

concentration extermination camps. At the other hand, they also had their own satellite or subsidiary at their own satellite concentration camp just over the border in Germany, where thousands of concentration camp captives were exploited as slave laborers. So it is often, you know, that there is this. kind of it's gray skills right i mean they in many ways they tried in that case they tried to do yeah or the phillips family tried to do some good but also end up um you know brutally exploiting thousands of of of concentration camp captives so there is this kind of ambiguity of uh of you know

um trying to save people but at the same time you know brutally exploiting others yeah I think it again raises just the point that we talked about right before the break What do we do with any of these corporations like do you believe that this scrutiny that is being applied to obviously this war this tragedy and all the you know families they got rich from it should it apply to All Tragedy right like war profiteering is you know It's time you know it tailors all this time Yeah so I'm curious like how does the framework of this book how does it line up with I guess your philosophy on that at a greater scale.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you look at, for example, you know, let's take the Netherlands again, right, as an example, you know, the Netherlands has barely reckoned with its kind of trifecta of colonial past which brought huge riches to the Netherlands, right, from the 1600s onwards, with its slavery pass

and with its collaboration past, with the Nazis because relative to population the most people in Western Europe were deported or the most Jews were deported from the Netherlands for example

and if you take all of the German occupied territories Netherlands is furred behind Poland and Hungary relative to population so it's really a you know it's really a major you know

it's been a may the Netherlands has been so has basically dodged kind of the scrutiny of history that you know if you compare it with with Germany but it's also a smaller economy but but still you know you know

sunlight is a best disinfectant I mean it should what I'm arguing for in the book of historical transparency of a case of moral transparency you know or moral his or a a moral reckoning of history

should apply to my own country and its horrific colonial slavery and passive collaboration. In a way, of course, the scrutiny is so much on Germany, but it applies to so many other companies and corporations and, you know, the argument that I make is a global one, is one that applies

across the board, not just to Germany. Yeah. Just get it out in the open. Exactly. Be honest about it. You don't have to turn your companies in. You don't have to self-flagellate. You don't have to say, oh, we're the worst.

Just be open and say, hey, this is what our ancestors did. And this is what it was. And here are the bad parts. And here's what they meant to us as family member ancestors, et cetera. And that is what it is. And now we're able to move on, but not whitewashing it or just erasing it completely. Is that fair? Yeah.

That is absolutely fair. Yeah. It is absolutely fun. I mean, obviously, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with this, having lived in America. Were you in America at the time, I mean, this was only a couple years ago, when all the Confederate statues were getting torn down. It's similar. I think the... Yeah, no, I mentioned it in the introduction of my book, right? Yeah, yeah, the facing of the past, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it creates an interesting moral dilemma where it's like, you know, Robert Lee was

fighting, you know, for the Confederates against the Union. Yeah. And means something to a certain subset of people, but also means a very different thing to a different subset. You know, was fighting against the union, ostensibly the side that won the war. Yeah. Should he be, you know, depicted in public spaces? Or should that be something that's reserved for, you know, a museum? Exactly. So my argument is always for radical transparency, right? That is in either, you know, whether you want to display something like that in the museum or, you know, the families that I write about, I mean, it's really radical transparency. And if you don't want to submit to radical transparency regarding your past, then you should only then should want to rename things. But, you know, there's so many solutions now to apply radical transparency.

transparency with regards to the past. You know, it's painful, but it's also necessary because it's an holistic approach, right? You want to judge people on the entirety of their life's actions. Right. Would you make a distinction with a personal basis versus, I guess, a corporate one? You know, like if, you know, because again, I think we're sort of philosophizing on a grand scale. Yeah, totally. But, you know, if I'm bringing up my great, great grandparents, I'm sure if I dig deep in the history, there's probably some terrible thing. Right. You know, I don't doubt that my, you know, 1800's relatives were all perfect people.

What they did, I don't know, is it to the extent that we're discussing, probably not, but certainly there's bad things. Do I need to preface that every time I just discuss my family and say, oh, you know, here's, you know, my great-grandfather. Who was a terrible racist and an awful guy, but, you know, also. No, we're talking about public figures, right? We're talking about public historical figures with a modicum of whether this was political power or financial influence, which is still, you know, which continues all. living right i mean it is about a multi-generational uh relevance because again you know as we just saw of the the the the example of the bmw foundation herbert quant but there's also the fairy Porsche foundation you know at neither of them is there any mention of their brutal SS pass or

their brutal pass of exploitation right and where the people that are in control now are the children of Herbert Quant or the you know the children of Ferry and the grandchildren of Ferrynon Porsche so it is you know it's something because these are still public figures right they they are named in the automotive whole fame in Dearborn Michigan for example right and they're held up as examples you know through all these entities whether it's these massive global charitable foundations or or these academic chairs or these museums or these corporate headquarters or these media prizes right without it transparent who these people actually were and i wanted also to make that

accessible to a global audience and not just you know even even germans are not aware of their own history in that sense because they're so inundated with revelations with regarding the third rites still on a daily basis, and are slightly desensitized to these revelations that, you know, oh, another company with a Nazi, you know, with a Nazi past or another beloved patriarch, famous, without a behavior, you know. So in a way, these people are also, these families are also able to, or these companies, to hide these histories in plain sight.

Because people are so desensitized. It's like, you know, all of our ancestors living in this nation were guilt. in some way, shape or form. Yeah, and one of the questions I also ask myself is, you know, why did nobody in Germany write this book, right? And, you know, Germany at its core is still a very conservative, a provincial, and in many ways, you know, so very hierarchical country.

And for, and with much stricter libel laws or press laws than the US, right, which where thankfully it's, you know, protected by the First Amendment, many things are. And, you know, for a German, you know, to scrutinize power in Germany is still a very difficult thing in a very deeply hierarchical and conservative society. It's something much easier to question power in the U.S., I find. And the, you know, to go after one of these very powerful families, right, not only economically and financially, but also politically, because they're big donors to ruling political parties. And, you know, these families can always.

always turn a question around, you know, what did your father and grandfather, what did your family do during the Third Reich, and who are you to question us, basically? Because power is not that easily scrutinized in Germany still because of its deeply hierarchical nature of society. And then it just seems like you create a, you know, a constant scorekeeping of history. Tell you, right. Who is historically the worst and who is actually the most oppressed. Yeah, it's not, you know, it's not about what aboutism, you know, it's relativism.

It's not, you know, it should be on a ad hoc, you know, you should judge examples on, on the, on its own merits, right? Or on its, like a Ferry Porsche Foundation or a B of NW Foundation, Herbert Quant. Look at what these people did and then make up your own mind, you know, of whether it's appropriate to name, you know, major global institutions after them without, any kind of realization of what these people are. Right. Yeah. And I think, again, I think that, I wonder if there's something to be said for duality here.

Right. Culturally speaking. And not only in America, but I think probably across the world. Just to leave nuance and recognize that, you know, history is extremely complex. And, you know, there are evil people that do good things. And there's good people that do evil things.

And I think maybe leaving room to be truly honest about, you know, the misdeeds of someone, but also things that they did that contributed in some way to our current world. And again, you don't have to make some type of value judgment

that is so binary. Am I off base here? No, no, because I'm just talking about gracious skills, right? I mean, it's new. It is important to have nuance, but there is no nuance when you don't show the history, right?

Again, you don't learn from history by only showing the good. You need to learn from history. You need to be informative, you know, and I would say in a day and age where there's so much miss and disinformation going around globally, you know, it's even more important, particularly by these families, who hold so much power and wealth.

You know, the least one can ask of them is to just be honest about history. You know, if you can't even submit to that. You know, one of the things that really came out of the book was, my book was published in April 22, and I wrote an essay for New York Times. at the day the book was published or it was published the day that the book came out and at the time you know Porsche was the Portia was very busy with

spinning out Porsche from the Volkswagen Group it was a huge you know huge public stock market listing an IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and they were you know just as my book and this essay was published were going around to the Porsche Pierre family with their bankers and lawyers going around to institutional investors

in the US and the UK you know asking if they want to be cornerstone investors in these IPO in this stock market listing and you know because of the fate of Adolf Rosenberger the Jewish co-founder of Porsche

was erased from Porsche history you know, people started asking, or investors started asking them, particularly in the US and the UK, if you're going to lie about your history, are you also going to lie about your financials? And so they had to put in a clause in the SEC form here in the US listing,

then, well, revelations regarding the period, 1933 to 45 might come out, which may adversely affect the stock price. And as a result, they decided to clean house and come to a, you know, a moral settlement or a moral compensation for the heirs of Adolf Rosenberger who live in California, in Claremont, California,

that would rewrite Adolf Rosenberger back into the history of Portia. Now, of course, one of the world's most recognizable and most coveted brands, right, because the financial compensation had already happened back in 1950, where Adolf Rosenberger's lawyer went behind his back and settled with Porsche Pierce and gave Aldo Rosenberger a for his 10% share as a compensation 50,000 Deutsche-March and a choice between a Volkswagen

Beetle or a Porsche sports car. Mind you, his 10% stake in Porsche today would have been worth $7 billion. Yeah, a bit of a pittance. Right. Yeah. To say the least. Yeah. It's an understatement. Yeah, that is, that's interesting. Yeah, in these types of cases, I'm like two specific families that were, you know, ousted, like Rosenberger. Right. Those types of, you know, like payment systems, I think makes sense. You know, you would just hope that they would be equal to whatever the value was, which in this case, this is not, obviously not what happened. Right, because he was Aryanized in 1935 for his stake in Porsche was aryanized in 1935 for the nominal value.

of his shares that he paid for and that he put in to the company when he co-founded in 1930. So he wasn't given the market value of his share. So that already made an ironization because he wasn't paid what he was supposed to be paid. And then subsequently, you know, to add insult to injury, he was also erased from Porsche history, even though he was the driving commercial force in the first few years of the Porsche car firm. Wow. Yeah. I'm curious, is there something specific about this?

this time in history, World War II, that makes kind of the cover-up and the whitewashing, you know, specifically morally contemptuous to you versus other conflicts, right? Like every bullet that's ever been fired or every weapon that's ever been made, was made by a company? Totally.

So I'm curious, like, was your goal with this focused on specifically World War II because of the evils of the Nazi regime? No, I would think it was about the continuation. of power and money that still exists and kind of the brazen I mean the starting point again is contemporary it's about kind of the contemporary cover-up that's what I wanted to you know the history is the backstory but the the story in the end is about two days it's about the contemporary cover-up by some

of the world's most powerful and richest people today right and if you look at historical parallels I would think that you know The economic and political volatility of the Weimar Republic and the devil's pact that the German industrialists made with Hitler is similar to, say, the economic and political volatility of the out since Russia in the 1990s. The oligarchs, you know, profiting greatly off of debt by the privatization of state assets in Russia and then making it devil's pact with Putin in the early 2000s, which of the privatization. of course, still and yours to this day. Right. Yeah, I mean, you could look at America, right? There's very many companies and corporations

that profit off of, you know, foreign wars that America engages in. In some cases, it seems like some of the companies might even lobby to instigate the wars, right? And that, you know, hold, you know, government positions to try to create the wars to then profit off of the back in which is, you know, insidious in its own way.

I guess I'm curious, like, should these companies also, you know, come outright and say, hey, you know, Iraq war, we're sorry. You know, like, I wonder if they also have the same moral standard. Because it seems like, again, these things are happening all the time. Yeah, that is true. I mean, I do think that either through public scrutiny, right, or through hard-hitting reporting, you know,

these companies should be held accountable. You know, it's similar what I would say, like the book that Jeremy Scale wrote about, Blackwater for example right the private mercenary and he also did a lot of research about it he also did a lot of reporting on Hallie Burton and and and these kind of companies how they profited off the Iraq war right if these companies don't want to fess up you know about their role in in wars or profiting from wars it is up to you know the public to exert that that kind of scrutiny or that pressure or up to the media to do its role

of holding these companies and these governments accountable. And, you know, and whether that leads to lawsuits where these companies, you know, fess up or, you know, often these claims end up in settlements, right, where the company doesn't acknowledge any kind of wrongdoing or culpability. Because that's exactly what happened with the German companies during the 1990s, which allowed them to cover it up today. When they settled in the late 1990s,

the Clinton administration initiated negotiations with the German federal government because mass claims by survivors of force and slave labor were being, you know, were being filed here in the U.S. against some of Germany's most well-known companies like BMW Volkswagen, Daimler, Allianz, you name it. right and they you know they were so afraid of their shares standing a sale price that they started negotiating with the u.s government for a wholesale compensation of surviving force and slave

laborers at the same time of course with the end of the cold war you had millions of former force and slave laborers from the soviet union suddenly being saying hey we lived under the iron cur we lived behind the iron curtain for 45 years but prior to that we were also exploited by the Nazi regime, by Germany, by German companies and mines. So you had these two forces that collide in the 1990s. So what ends up happening is a settlement or the German federal government pays $5 billion into this compensation and restitution fund

or compensation fund for surviving force and slave laborers. And German business as a whole pays up $5 billion into this compensation fund. Now, of the five billion paid by German businesses, 60% was paid by only 18 companies like Daimler and BMW and Volkswagen. You know, thousands of German companies paid in, you know, 500 euros, like a pittance, like a symbolic gesture. And the highest payout for surviving slave laborers was about $10,000,

which is, you know, which is a pittance, but I think most grievously, you know in that settlement there was a you know there was a clause which said um german companies as a whole to do not admit any kind of wrongdoing culpability or guilt for the crimes that happened or that they perpetrated during the third ruck so they paid money but they never took any kind of moral responsibility kind of like a civil history yes exactly yeah it was a civil suit uh yeah so we'll pay you but we will It was a settlement, yeah, exactly.

We'll pay you, but we don't acknowledge any wrongdoing. So after that, right, their slate was wiped clean, and they could pretend like nothing happened, which in turn, for the past 25 years or the past two decades, let these companies to pretend like nothing happened and they didn't do anything wrong, right? Only if they're forced to admit any kind of culpability through, again, public scrutiny or media reporting.

Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating dilemma. Again, if you look at, you know, had the war gone the other way, right? Had the Third Reich been victorious. Yeah. I don't think that's necessarily what happened because I think America probably would have, you know, been fine, generally speaking.

Did you watch the men in the high castle? I didn't. My parents watched it and they thought it was great. Did you like it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much. It was good, right? Yeah, it was good. Yeah, I haven't seen it.

I probably should. I mean, it's like raid in the line of, like, you know, things I'm weirdly curious about. But, you know, I wonder if the, you know, financiers that supported the French and the British, they would have been put on trial. I wonder if they would have been, you know, brought in front of some type of committee and said, you funded these terrible, you know, allied forces that tried to, you know, stop German imperialism, I don't even know.

Right. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure. Or they were probably all would have been summarily executed. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think there would have been any trials or any, there would have been shot trials. You're right.

Right. Yeah. Which, again, yeah. And then they would have had a war with, with Russia. show, which is... Right. Yeah. And I wonder if they would have done

the same thing if they would have said, all right, just show trial, get rid of these people and move on. Right. It's a... Yeah, it's a bizarre... It's a bizarre situation, but I think transparency, I think is reasonable.

I think transparency is a reasonable sort of request just to be like, hey, just acknowledge what has happened in the past. You don't have to, you know... It's not your fault necessarily as the air that got a fortune. You were born into this bizarre situation,

but just acknowledge what happened. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there is this, you know, it's not you know again it's not the sins of the father they're responsible for but they are responsible for coming to terms with shepherding this huge fortune with the all these economic interests to at least do good by that and be and be and be transparent right and there's also you know I think that's really what's what's still missing not only in Germany but in but in many other countries is is

yeah is is is is historical transparency with regard And people, they don't learn anything, you know, again, they don't learn anything from history that way. Interesting. There's a question here from A.A.RON, 86, 83. Are the impacts and outcomes of World War II top of mind for the average European, or is it seen as a distant memory, especially relevant in the current world context? No, I think it's very much top of mind at the moment. You know, as Europe is going through its own right-word, populist shift, you know,

where it is you know there are a lot of concerns um with regards to how and when and you know will history repeat itself in some form of another and it is doomed to so yeah it's very much top of mind it was just in amsterdam you know i mean it's uh yeah it's it's a very pertinent topic uh at the moment uh unfortunately yeah due to the politics or the political situation on the continent. Wow. Yeah, it's, I'm curious in your research. I mean, you spent four years working on this book living in Germany the whole time. Was there anything in your research, just generally speaking, that you uncovered that you found particularly interesting or fascinating to you that didn't

necessarily make the book or you feel like is not highlighted in the book? I mean, I think it is a complete lack of reflection on the side of the patriarchs. which on kind of the way they profited from other people's lives literally and livelihood, I think that it was really what, you know, I could have given so many more kinds examples of the way that they just, you know, again, without any kind of reflection or compunction, robbed other people from their livelihoods or ended up robbing people from their lives through force and slave labor or through you know people being deported to concentration or extermination camps I think that is really something that you

know I could have you need to keep these narratives tight right because you can't take the readers attention for granted so it's really important to you know to focus on perhaps the most abject examples but It's really, you know, I could have given so many more examples, but you know, so not many of, I cut about 100 pages from the book in the end. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you had mentioned, I believe, that the attorneys of these families never came after you or never persecuted you. No, I didn't.

They didn't because, you know, that's the adverse PR strategy, right? Because for them, or from their perspective, because going after a foreign journalist, they want to sweep it under the rug. these histories so going after a foreign journalist would was writing a book about them would only bring attention to the subject that you know and and that's what they don't want they want to sweep it under the rock they want to ignore it right so i didn't get i never got any kind of threats or or lawyer letters is your research on this topic the reason you've never purchased a Porsche is this why you're boycotting you're saying you know what it's exactly exactly you could have It's my lack of royalties, which is keeping me from it.

But, you know, I, aesthetically, I just find, I just find a Porsche. I just, I would never buy a Porsche. Just also prior to this book. It's just, then I just find it a little, I'm trying to gush. Yeah. Also not. That's why I didn't buy it. I'm such a square.

Mark, I'm so sorry, I'm such a square. I like my vulvas. Oh, right. Was it Swedish? Yeah, well, they're owned by Chinese now. But it's still made in Sweden. They're owned by Chinese company, but they're still made in Sweden. Let's say a friend of yours is like, hey, take my car.

It's a Volkswagen. Oh, totally fine with that. As long as it's a stick. It's automatic. I can't drive stick, unfortunately. This is 2019. Exactly. If it's a 1939 Volkswagen, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't have that.

The 2019, or the 2019, you're like, yeah, I'll take that all day. That's fine. This has been a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed looking at it. looking at this through a historical perspective and sort of unpacking all the details and where it leaves us in the modern time. We had mentioned the Ryman family.

Yeah. And you had said, obviously, because they had sort of a disparate history of both being the aggressor but also the victim, that they did a good job. What is an example of a family that had, you know, only,

I guess you could say, negative patriarchs that were involved in the Third Reich that also handled it in an appropriate and reasonable way in your opinion so there's one family i have one dynasty i write about in a book which called the utgers which is they control you know a slew of luxury hotels around the world they control germany's largest beer brewer um they um but they most famously own a brand called dr utger which is a mix of which is pudding mixes and baked goods

and you know they're mostly known in the US but they're you know they sell their products globally also very famous in Canada the UK European continent you name it and they had a very interesting split because their patriarch Rudolf Iris Utker was with the ideological Nazi who became a voluntary SS officer who was trained in Dachau concentration camp you know as an officer and his stepfather who was the CEO of Dr. Utker really trained him to be, it was really a family full of Nazis. And Rudavajatka ended up having eight children from three marriages, which many of the industries that I write about did, and, you know, six children, eight children, seven children. And the family actually split literally into the five older ones wanting to investigate

after his death, you know, unequivocally come out and say, our father was a Nazi. And the three younger siblings were born in the late 70s to his third wife who was still alive, saying, you know, we don't want to disaffour our father. And it ended up actually splitting up the conglomerate

not only because of the history, but it literally broke up this one of Germany's biggest and most well-known family conglomerates into the five siblings splitting, keeping the doctor, which grew part in three younger siblings, getting a slew of luxury hotels and some other assets.

And again, it didn't only have to do with breaking up about the father's Nazi past, but also about CEO succession and things like that. But this being a part of it, you know, where the younger siblings continue to maintain the root of Ruther's, Rudolf August Utker Foundation, named after their SS trained, Dachau trained father, and the five older ones wanting nothing to do with that history,

or, well, nothing to do with history, don't want to continue the name of their father and their step-grandfather were such a vowed Nazis. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's actually, it ends up, you know, splitting these, you know, competitive family dynasties into two. even this topic. So the, I guess the first generation

children, they handled it well where they said, hey, we're going to discontinue it, we're going to acknowledge it, exactly, we'll move on. And one would think, right, the closer it is to the generation, right?

I mean, these, the eldest five were born between, I think, 1949 and like 1959 or something, right? That's interesting. Because you're closer

to the modern age, but also farther from the atrocities. Well, Well, the younger ones are from the late, are from the 70s, right? You would think that they had it more distance. But because they couldn't distance themselves from their father. And you see that in many of these families that I write about,

these billionaire families that I write about. That's an interesting ripple. The later the children come, the more proximity they have. Exactly. Wow. Yeah, I guess you're farther away. And I also wonder if your relationship with your father's probably different, right? if he's an old man you're like oh he's an old man yeah how could he have been trained as an

SS officer of daca right yeah oh that's an interesting real oh wow uh this has been a fascinating conversation david i really appreciate you spending the time to come into my my my quaint little tent here i love your quite little i love their conversation so thank you for having me yeah of course um we uh we we talked briefly about about russia and uh tomorrow i'm actually having a conversation uh with curtis fox he is a former green beret uh that is now dedicated his time to sort of studying Russian history as well as their military strategy, which is just a really interesting conversation. And that'll be tomorrow.

So anyone that's watching if you're interested in that, it goes through a lot of the Russian history of the, you know, kind of the same period, roughly like the 20th century leading into the invasion of Ukraine and sort of the entire historical narrative, as well as their actual strategy of chaos of like, you know, sort of placing ethnic Russians and creating chaos and then utilizing that chaos to then, you know, roll into, you know, occupying land. Fascinating conversation, that'll be tomorrow. If the people are interested in reading your book or reading any of your other works, where can they find you?

They can find me, well, they can Google Nazi billionaires. They will find everything. They can visit my personal website, daviddejong.net, or follow me on Instagram or Twitter or X, as it's called now, at David the young. So it's anglicized the the, the, the younger. You should call it the young one, David, the young one. David, the young one. Unfortunately, it was already taken.

Yeah, darn it. Damn. Well, thank you so much. Are you working on another book right now? Are you cooking on something? Well, I'm really busy in the Middle East with my correspondent, but I do have another book that I have been wanting to work on for a few years now, which focus on Dutch American business dynasties.

Yeah, probably having a lot to do with New Amsterdam right here. Later, later generations. Oh, interesting. Yeah, Russell Schorter wrote this great book about New Amsterdam and the positive, the progressive influence or the liberal influences that the Roosevelt's and the Vanderbilt and all these Dutch families brought in with their wealth, kind of the Dutch May flowers to, or via New Amsterdam to the U.S. at large. and I'm focusing on five

Dutch American business dynasties with their very dour and pure Calvinism that brought in, that have funded many things that go against their social beliefs and are, but are helping their business interests. Oh, interesting. Wow. I think we do need to thank the Dutch

for showing us how to sort of clear out water. I don't know if, I don't know if you know this. I mean, I'm sure you probably did. That in New York, I believe, the island of Manhattan, when it was sort of settled by the Dutch, they used the same techniques to sort of clear out the water

and make livable, sort of a habitable land that was done into the Netherlands. Obviously, the Niederlands, like the lower lands that were full of water and swampy and they were able to move the water to create a livable place. I'm pretty sure they did the same thing in Manhattan,

using the same strategies. Mana Hatha, as the island was then called, you know, and the Native American name to and make, and make Peter Stuyvesant who made it, who, yeah, who founded New Amsterdam and made it into this commune that we then later traded the English to.

Right. Yeah, and we got Suriname in return. Oh, wow. Which remained the colony until 1975. Oh, I got to do a deep dive on that. That sounds fascinating. Anyway, David, thank you so much. I really appreciate this.

And when your new book is out, I would love to have you back. Let's talk about it. We'd love to be back. Let's talk about some more things. I already missed the dent. Until next time. Thank you.