Grubstakers - Episode 131: Friedrich Flick and the Flick Family

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

We take a deep dive on two of the world's youngest billionaires, Victoria-Katharina Flick and Karl Friedrich Flick (born 1999). How did they get so rich? Well, hard work and inheriting their grandfather's slave labor war crimes fortune. That's right: many of the people who carried out and profited from the holocaust were able to pass on the profits they accumulated first to their children and then to their grandchildren. The effects of that stolen wealth are still being felt today, but remember the rich are only rich because they do more for society than the rest of us! Some of the sources used: The Book "Nazi Steel" by Marcus O. Jones https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-03/world-s-youngest-billionaires-are-shadowed-by-ghosts-of-german-past https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-inadequacies-of-justice/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/22/germany.secondworldwar https://web.archive.org/web/20041219072628/http://www.adl.org/braun/dim_13_2_flick_print.asp

Once a night, in a babbitt's ballin', the wind bind the bone. It went like this. Big up the youth them way out of Kingston. You wake up this morning and you see the thing turn up. Internet gone mad. Respect, you done now. The Sun far with the yard. morning and we see the thing turn up internet gone mad respect you don't know the sun fire what i got full of voices ancestry howling at you you bring stories it's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke and look at this system and say,

yeah, you know, what's going on? The red countries are the countries we sell arms to. The green countries are the countries where we wash our money. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. The evil has gone.

Hello, welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here by... Yogi Poliwog. Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffers. And you heard there on the intro a little bit from the heir to Tom Hanks' fortune. Because we're talking today about those children who inherit the great fortunes created by their parents, their grandparents, their great-great-grandparents. And specifically, I wanted to start with just kind of a question for you guys, which is... What do you think of Chet Hanks?

Did you know he existed before this? We only knew about the other one. Colin. I mean, I don't know if Chet Hanks speaking patois is that impressive or depressive, but I know it's something. Yeah, it sure is a thing. Well, and I guess even related to that, what I would ask you guys is, what do you think of when you hear the phrase, world's youngest billionaire? I mean, upstanding individuals that have worked hard and spent more time working than other people, and really putting their strength to the test of becoming the best that they can be.

Right. I imagine Richie Rich typing into a cartoon computer, surf the internet, and then it's a little video of a guy surfing. Has had the least time to be a policy failure. Just coming out of your mother's womb in a five-star hotel in Dubai, like, had to grind for this view. But what I think of is that Balzac quote, is made famous by the godfather, is behind each great fortune, there is a crime. And you could even extend that to the greater the fortune,

the greater the crime. Sure. Hence Chet Hanks and his patois, inheriting his father's Pagate money empire it's like everybody's roasting him but clearly he's having a mental break having discovered what steven spielberg and tom hanks are up to and how they made their fortunes he's disassociating and everybody's just roasting him on twitter we live in a sick society i mean mental health is a serious issue i mean to quote well though in tom hanks defense to quote a movie poster i saw in midtown um that mr rogers movie is what america needs right now oh it was also i

didn't take a picture of it because it was in poor taste, but it was also perfectly framed over a limbless homeless person begging for money. That is in poor taste. Yeah. But, you know, behind each great fortune, there is a great crime. There is a crime. And, you know, really, when you think about the youngest billionaires in the world, as of 2018, Bloomberg Business wrote an article that describes who the youngest billionaires in the world as of 2018 uh bloomberg uh business wrote an article that describes who the youngest billionaires in the world are um and i'm just uh well first of all i'm just going to tell you the title of this article uh the title is quote the world's

youngest billionaires are shadowed by a world war ii weapons fortune unquote this is by david de jong and so we're doing good so far yeah a world war ii weapons fortune were they you know u.s industrialists who uh their parents dropped you know firebombs on dresden well where are we going from here well it's two twins their names are victoria katherine flick and carl frederick flick they're born in 1999. Just for reference, Kylie Jenner born 1997. So they are younger billionaires than Kylie Jenner. Not quite as great of a crime

associated with the fortune, but the Flick twins are born in 1999 and then this will give it away. They're born in Germany. I'm just going to say the Nazis would have never acquitted OJ. So the Flick family traces their fortune.

And again, these are kids born in 1999 worth, as of 2018, according to Bloomberg, 1.8 billion U.S. dollars. They trace that money to their grandfather, Friedrich Flick, who was an industrialist for Nazi Germany during World War II. And in fact, according to this same Bloomberg article, they also have two half-sisters, Alexandra Butz and Elisabeth von Brunner, both of whom also have $1.8 billion. Her name is Alexandra Butz? Yeah, B-U-T-Z. Oh, okay, all right right at least it's respectable

it's like brats ah gotcha uh so they they also each have 1.8 billion dollars so this is a total of a 7.2 billion us dollar fortune entirely passed down from being the largest private uh privately controlled enterprise for the production of iron steel and armaments in the entire third right well hard work just like i mentioned earlier that's them putting the pedal to the metal literally it's funny because like it's it's an echo of what you see in the tech sector which is that like the people who make the most money it's not necessarily that they were the best it's that they had no morals whatsoever and just did whatever it took to profit off of uh whatever circumstances thrown in front of them.

Yes, according to the same Bloomberg article, they also utilize slave labor throughout their business empire. Again, the largest privately controlled enterprise for the production of iron, steel, and armaments, according to The Guardian, in the Third Reich. According to Bloomberg As many as 40,000 laborers May have died working for flick companies According to a study of his Nazi era Businesses published in 2008 I mean if that's so bad Then how come Werner Von Braun Who did the same thing is an American hero That's fair, that's a good point Andy

You put us on the moon Only 50,000 or so slaves went through Well I say only Where I was going with that was of 50,000, 40,000 died. So it was like considered a death sentence. High turnover.

A death sentence on par with going to a camp. Mary Fulbrook wrote a book called Reckonings, Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, and just quoting from that book, based on transcripts and documents from the Nuremberg trial of Flick corporate executives, it came to light that, quote, In his many enterprises in the iron, coal, and steel industries during the Third Reich,

Flick had employed somewhere in the region of 48,000 slave laborers, some 80% of whom did not survive. Booyaka, booyaka. So, I mean, that holds up against the Holocaust camps. And that also matches up with your math. Oh, wait, yeah. That is probably pretty close to death camp numbers. Isn't it? Yeah.

So, wait, are they dying because they're being worked to death or are they being killed? I mean, death camp numbers are probably like 95%, but still. That's a horrifying number. Worked to death, starved. Yeah. And we'll kind of go through all of that. But, you know, first of all, credit. I mean, efficient employee handling, if you ask me.

You know, you don't need to give health benefits when they're working themselves to death. I think that's i was gonna say we should credit his incredibly efficient strategy to save money on pension costs right that's right one of the most efficient hr departments yeah corporate germany has ever seen wow but like it's a model that is used today at Tesla. From the Maria Fulbrich book, she tells the story of a guy who's imprisoned for telling a political joke in Nazi Germany, and then he's put in, you know, slave labor, and by the end of the war, he survives.

When the camp is liberated, he weighs 86 pounds. Wow. So, you know, I mean, and of course, everybody's familiar with these stories, but... How tall was this person that's my weight loss plan as america gets more fashion it's just tell enough tell enough political jokes that i go in a camp what was the joke he was like doing stand-up and they just immediately yeah was it any good he was doing a radio show and he asked if he if anybody thought

himmler eats butt. Oh, no. He was playing really annoying sound effects that people were complaining about. Oh, fuck. For context, Sean read a one-star review of Grubb's Takers before we started recording and now he's in a mood. There is another one-star review on our iTunes. They don't want to hear our dangerous truths, which are half-grubs. By the way, Sean mentioned that there was a one-star review,

and then I immediately look, and there's a three-star review where they're like, Sean's pretty good, but Yogi's unbearable. And I had to read that and go, well, I like the bear pun you did, but other than that, fuck this review. Those are like, whenever I see the reviews that trash everybody else and then say,

I'm quote-unquote okay, I just see the image of the success kid in my head. Doing God's work, if you ask me. Yeah. If you don't hate us, you ain't us. Yeah. But, you know, so I guess what I would say here is it's, you know, people are familiar with the story of the Holocaust and, of course, you know, mass death and all of that. But I think what people, for a lot of people, doesn't quite register in their head is that if you made money

off slave labor in the holocaust that doesn't fucking go away right it just keeps on going generation to generation and so to the point where unless you were like some loser who uh tried to save more and uh then uh then you're i mean you know then you're, I mean, you know, then you're just, I'm just saying, Schindler's kids, they didn't succeed because their dad was a loser. Rich dad, poor dad. That'd be kind of funny if, like, one of those alpha leaders Instagrams was, like, roasting Oscar Schindler for not wanting it bad enough.

Do these kids have a social media presence? Are they on Instagram and Twitter and shit? They're all very private. Just according to Bloomberg, the twins' lives have remained intensely private. No photographs of them have gone public. Carl Friedrich won a regional junior saber fencing title in 2017. Easiest kind of fencing.

Little is known about his sister. And, you know, this is also just partly the culture of German billionaires. Less ostentatious. Also the most fun kind. I was actually going to say, the culture of German billionaires is generally less ostentatious than Americans. But also just like all of the episodes we've done on German billionaires tell you why that is. Why they might want to keep their heads down about where that fucking startup capital came from. Yeah, we are a very private society because of

the legacy of the stottsy um yeah and so you know so um friedrich flick uh he died in uh 1972 and we'll go through mainly his life today because that's what we know the most about um but it should be noted that up to his death, he never apologized, never paid any compensation to any of his 48,000 slave workers, the 80% of whom were dead by the end of the war. And because he didn't pay any compensation, didn't pay any pensions, didn't take care of health care costs or disability benefits, he was able to... Kind of the perfect business model.

He was able to pass $7.2 billion U.S. dollars down to his descendants as of 2018, and he could have, you know, his grandson win a junior saber fencing title. So... So it was all worth it, is what you're trying to say. I mean, you know, 40,000 deaths. If you've got to get a junior saber fencing title,

you need to do something to get that. You just go for the head. It's really hard to defend. I did it for like one month, and Sabre was really fun. You can just thwack. I like that we have a resident fencing expert on the show. Expert's a stretch.

But I guess if we can just start the biography of Frederick Flick, we could go back all the way to the year 1883 in ernstorf segerland northwest germany is near the border of the uh the netherlands after michael brooks said who the fuck cares when i was correcting sean now i'm just gonna let him go uh thanks michael but so he's born in 1883 and uh he's the son of a farmer and my main source for this is the book nazi steel by marcus jones how's steel spelled uh s-t-e-e-l damn uh his origins of just quoting from it his origins betray little of the potential for later successes revealed uh he was the son of a farmer with connections to the iron ore mining industry in the area. At 21, he performed military services, obligatory at the time,

and thereafter attended a trade school in Cologne, where he graduated in 1907. Flick's first job after his schooling was that of a procurist, a corporate official with power of attorney with the Bremerhaut ore processing plant in Widenau. He remained there for five years, departing in 1913 to take up a position on the governing board of Menden & Schwert, a steel enterprise in his home region of Seagerland. His prospects brightened in April 1st, 1915, with his appointment to a seat on the governing board of uh charlatan hot ag an old steel firm founded in 1864 um and then uh world war one was mainly what uh allowed him to build his fortune because he was appointed to the board of this steel firm in 1915 and then by 1918 flick had nearly doubled the value of his original holdings from 5 to 9.5 million Reichsmarks through an aggressive series of acquisitions.

Wow. So basically, he graduates trade school. He gets appointed to a job at an iron ore mining company. He, by 1915, works his way onto the board. And then he pursues an aggressive strategy of acquisitions. And it's just because World War I is going on and the price of you know steel and iron ore is through the roof because there's a fucking war on that he's able to build his first fortune just on the backs of the mass slaughter in the european theater right right and this is all prior to 1930 yes this is all like so

his first fortune was entirely based on his success in world war one yeah so like from about 1917 to 1928 he's just consolidating his board position and using money to buy up various steel coal and uh ore processing assets yeah right and you know i mean it's a smart bet to be long in the middle of a war because you know just the more he buys the higher the prices go up. And then, of course, you know, shortages all over Germany and this kind of stuff. So, you know, he certainly makes a good fortune there initially. And he's able to, you know, keep that fortune until after the war. Of course, in 1918, World War I ends. And then he's trying to expand his steel fortune throughout the early 1920s, his steel and iron ore fortune. And initially, he wanted to buy into the Ruhr Valley region on the border with France, kind of the main industrial zone in Germany at the time. But, you know, the established people there didn't want to let him in. So instead, he starts buying up in Upper Cilicia. And according to the book Nazi Steel, he put together the components of a regionally-based steel concern, acquiring in the short span of three years an iron foundry, mining operation, and steel processing plant.

In 1920, he took over the Bismarck Schutt. In 1921, the Katowice for Bergbau. So much German here. I'm just not even going to try. You can look it up, the firms that he bought, if you're curious. 4.5 stars on iTunes. Finally, the Oberschlosschen Einsenindustrie-Aktenschlauchschat, and its assorted subcomponents becoming through these acquisitions an

extraordinarily large force in sales uh salesia salesia uh so it sounds like he's he's purchased he's essentially purchasing himself a vertically integrated corporation yeah for heavy industrials and minerals right because the uh the coal and the steel industry are heavily intertwined so you know he gets you know the iron ore and the coal mines, and then he also gets, you know, the finishing steel plants, the steel foundries, and he kind of integrates. Yeah, the slide pits. Right.

He integrates the entire thing. Well, that's progressive for his time. But he's building an empire. I mean, he's building all the pieces he'll need to build the fortune that his grandkids are going to inherit. Yeah, because he wants his great-grandson to take up fencing. But so, by 1923, the established steel barons actually do start to take a note of his empire, and they form a cartel. It's called Wernicht Stellwerk, VST for short.

And VST, German for roughly United Steel Works, was throughout the 1920s second only to U.S. steel globally for steel production. It was a huge cartel. And, you know, they had domestic competitors, including, you know, Krupp Steel and these sorts of things. But they were, again, the second largest global steel producer. And they invite him in in 1923. He gets to take a stake in it. And this, you know, gives him, let's say, mainstream acceptance in the German business community. And, you know, also allows him to participate in a fucking cartel.

Because, of course, this is kind of the way things worked throughout the 1920s. Right. But so the VST was initially set up in 1926, actually. He gets to, Friedrich Flick gets to buy his stake in 1923. This trust is established in 1926, according to Nazi Steel, quote, to regulate the production, distribution, and pricing of steel and steel products in the German market. Flick got a sizable stake as the result of his holdings. And so, you know, in 1926, they set up this thing.

But then in 1929, of course, the Black Friday crash happens. The American stock market crashes and according to nazi steel this dealt the vst a heavy blow since it had chosen to finance a substantial portion of its rationalization program with american money in the boom years of the mid-1920s and um again according to the book the market worth of frederick flicks holdings uh he buys in you know 1923 1926 by 19, it had declined to only 22% of their previous value. And it was at risk of like totally unraveling because the American stock market had fallen apart. What's, are you going to go into the manipulation? Well, so essentially what happens is in 1932, you know, it's looking like he, uh, the VST might even go bankrupt or his stake might just get wiped out.

It's again at only 22% of its value. I think this is the part in that German documentary where his assistant starts stacking Reichsmarks and putting them into envelopes for politicians. Is that an accurate assessment? Yeah, I think so. And he watched a German language documentary on Friedrich Flick. And most of my takeaways were visual.

But so, basically, what he's able to do is, according to the book, he's able to negotiate with the Weimar Germany government, the government that preceded the Nazis. He's ordered to negotiate with them in order to buy his stake in VST for about 92% of its previous value. So on the stock, about three times what it was worth, thereabouts. And this actually causes a wide scandal within the government of Germany at the time. And yes, he probably managed to do it by putting Reichsmarks into envelopes and distributing them to background uh background actors

getting their big breakthrough he made well didn't he make a flurry of political contributions in these years or is that later he did he made a lot of political contributions in 1932 i mean when you said like youngest billionaire my initial thought was like well you know in weimar germany in the 20s like everyone was the youngest billionaire yeah yeah briefly yeah sort of like in zimbabwe yeah um but so this actually causes a scandal when it's reported on by the german press uh but the uh the weimar government declines to investigate. However, Friedrich Flick, this is his introduction to the German Nazi Party, because a Nazi periodical around 1932 after the scandal comes out, says that he betrayed Germany by stealing all the people's money to recapitalize himself at three times the market price.

And this periodical says that his assets should be nationalized and returned to the German people if the Nazis take over. So Friedrich Flick meets with Hermann Goering around this time, around 1932, and this is where he starts getting friendly with the Nazis, because he essentially even describes it at the Nuremberg trials as something like an insurance policy, where he claims that he wasn't into the Nazi ideology, he just needed to give them money as an insurance policy where he claims that he wasn't into the Nazi ideology. He just needed to give them money as an insurance policy.

By the way, the archive footage of Goering is always hilarious. He always looks like he's stuffed into a suit that's one size too small and like a tight military suit. It's one size too small and like a tight military suit. It's one size too small. And also, uh,

he just discovered morphine. And so he's just grinning and like shaking hands with everyone and flopping around. That's great. Hmm. But according to LM stall bomber, uh, flick gave about 50,000 Reichsmarks,

uh, equivalent at that time to about 25 000 to the nazi party uh however most of his donations actually went to you know other sort of mainstream right-wing parties he even gave money to the social democrats he claims he spread sped uh spread money around to kind of provide an insurance policy for whoever takes power after 1932 yeah and he uh i read another book called a couple sections of a book called who's who in nazi to kind of provide an insurance policy for whoever takes power after 1932. Yeah. And he, uh, I read another book called a couple of sections of a book called who's who in Nazi Germany, which is basically just a giant encyclopedia written for the CIA later on.

Uh, and they said he, like he'd ended up donating the most to the re-elect uh paul von hindenburg like about 20 times more than he gave to the nazi party it's also like this is how our current billionaires like um back when we did an election episode, we looked into who they were supporting and the answer is everyone. Yeah. Like if there, if a Nazi party comes to prominence in America,

like they're just going to be another line item in the campaign donation list. You know, Facebook pack to better America. I think it was the case that like the Nazi party in the late twenties was doing most of their financing internally or through small donations oh really the bernie sanders model for the nazi party and like only later did they start getting mega donors

from like concerned industrial capitalists huh right i mean it was it was an interesting story with the nazi party where essentially there were a few you know industrialists or bankers or major players who were nazis but for the most part they were just supporting hindenburg and the bourgeois right parties um but they were very much afraid of you know the marxists and then once hitler was appointed chancellor then they very quickly lined up behind him because they recognized which way the winds were blowing and it's i mean and we've made this kind of a theme on the show is that you know as as soon as it becomes a theme on the show is that you know as

as soon as it becomes a choice between fascism and socialism you know where all the rich people are going to go um it's just it's the same story every time yeah and it is something interesting where i mean i guess when it comes to political donations and i think most people are aware of this but it gets obscured a lot when it comes to political donations to believe that they are not malicious that if somebody you know gives five thousand dollars to some presidential candidate or something that some businessman gives them five thousand dollars to believe they're not malicious or bribery or whatever you would have to believe that these business people that we're always told are the smartest people the best businessmen the best strategists on earth you would have to believe they're just setting money on fire right essentially

if they're not expecting something for that money yeah just like as an aside like i think who someone most people don't don't donate any money to any candidate but if you do donate someone some money it it's like one of the most meaning dense statistical items you could find for someone's political ideology yeah like i i and it's funny the hoops that liberals will jump through like i saw something on twitter recently where someone said you know i don't mind michael bloomberg funding small races because you know we need to fight voter suppression. And it's like, if you think that Mayor Stoppin' Frisk is donating to congressional candidates for a reason such as racial equality,

like you... Well, he believes we stop whites too much. And that's a man that I can trust with all opinions and all ideologies. And you know what? Bloomberg 2020. But so, you know, of course, in 1933, the Nazis come to power. And Friedrich Flick has ingratiated himself with Hermann Goering. He's given them, the party, a bit of money.

So he's kind of insulated himself from the possibility of any, uh, any lookings into this shady deal whereby the government bought his stake in the VST for three times its worth. So, you know, the Weimar government doesn't investigate and he's paying off the Nazis, so they don't investigate. This was, you know, one of the first times he was seen with Herman Goering, but certainly not the last but uh so an interesting thing happens uh hitler's unofficial economics advisor uh was a guy named wilhelm kepler um and he sets up what's called the uh the kepler circle uh in 1932 he sets it up which is like kind of a a loosely affiliated conference of german industrialists and bankers who meet with you

know hitler's unofficial econ advisor and they chat with him and, you know, this kind of stuff. So in 1932, Friedrich Flick is invited to this. He instead sends his subordinate, a guy named Otto Steinbrink, to join this. So he's kind of has his representative there. Otto Steinbrink joins the Nazi party in 33, later goes on to be, later moves on to the staff of Heinrich Himmler. Because what happens in 1935 is the Kepler circle is actually taken over by Heinrich Himmler. And it becomes called the, quote, circle of friends of Himmler. And this is basically just a conduit. I mean, it is also like a business meeting consortium, but it's also a conduit where businessmen, industrialist bankers pay bribes directly to Heinrich Himmler because very quickly after the Nazi takeover, the SS are basically the state within a state. They are running every, not everything, but they are the main power force within Nazi Germany. So, according to various accounts, its members, quote-unquote, donated about one million

Reichsmarks annually to a special account S, which was paid directly to Heinrich Himmler. Friedrich Flick said that he paid about, I think, 100,000 Reichsmarks, something in the range of that, directly to Heinrich Himmler. Yeah, according to the book Nazi Steel, Flick's contribution amounted to about 100,000 Reichsmarks annually. So every year he's paying Heinrich Himmler and the SS 100,000 Reichsmarks. And this will be very important because he gets favored by the Nazi government for taking over various formerly Jewish-owned businesses. But so he's paying these bribes directly to Heinrich Himmler, directly to the SS. And what's called, what happens throughout Nazi Germany is called the quote-unquote Aryanization process. Deutsche Bank, you might be familiar with, became a course, Bayer came from IG Farben, you know, Krupp Steel, all these other companies benefited from Nazi German policies that destroyed their Jewish competitors. And so, and also it should just be noted, another thing that the Nazis did that was very important for german industrialists was there was the total suppression the violent suppression of labor unions factory councils

any workers organizations they were all at gunpoint you know the labors the leaders were either killed or put in concentration camps uh or just said hey if you don't fucking toe the line we will kill you or put you in a concentration camp so all all workers in germany like two week vacations all workers in germany were put into an official nazi party union there was one union and it was a nazi party union and it was vacations it was hopelessly corrupt and almost always sided with management because the the nazi obsession was of course especially during the war avoiding any labor agitation that might disrupt armaments manufacturing so they always almost always sided with management and the point of you know who gives a fuck if people are working 80 hour weeks we have to produce this for the good of germany or the war effort or whatever the fuck

right it's going to be interesting to be the um someone who's like believed in the union and then but doesn't really care about politics otherwise and then you're like three years into the war and you're like you know i think that i think that this union's kind of in bed with management and it's flipped and you only care about politics and you don't care about the union anymore yeah yeah but you're like i mean something something smells bad here i i feel like this union doesn't have and you're in the middle of nazi germany and none of that registers to you like all your jewish neighbors disappeared and you're like i i think something's hinky um but yes the uh oh and i did just want to mention regarding himmler's circle of friends you know again so this is a german industrialist kind of meet semi regularly and also pay bribes directly to Himmler.

But it's a way of getting their concerns directly contacted to the Nazi regime. According to The Guardian, as part of his time in Himmler's circle of friends, Friedrich Flick personally in 1937 took a tour with Heinrich Himmler of the Dachau concentration camp. Oh. And he was apparently, according to other sources, Friedrich Flick was made aware of some Einsatzgruppen's document. These were the mass killing squads in the Eastern Front. Apparently, an Einsatzgruppen general gave a presentation to the Himmler's Circle friends group uh at some point in the early 1940s uh which uh friedrich flick was uh in attendance for he had like charts and graphs but so you know in uh initially nazi germany is trying to keep global opinion on their side

where they're doing these arianizations like they're you are, you know, of course, there's all sorts of unofficial state terror against the Jewish population, which they try to bring under control, like, at least for the Olympics and this kind of stuff. Right.

But it's more of an international concern where they don't just want to start seizing, you know, Jewish property, especially not if it also has foreign ownership, because you'll have, like,

Jewish companies that have, like, a 20% stake by some American or whatever, because they're worried that if they just start, you know, grabbing these things, that German businesses abroad will be seized in retaliation, you know. So they're kind of doing it cautiously, where essentially initial Nazi policy is, let's have German businesses take over these things, so it doesn't really look like de facto nationalization.

And let's just, you know, first of all, encourage, you know, unofficial state terror against Jewish people. Right. And second of all, all Jewish businesses are denied any business loans from the Third Reich. They're given, you know, absolute lowest priorities for allocation of raw materials. And then even in particular, once 1936-37 rolls around, the German economy enters the first of its four-year plans, which is where state planning becomes a lot more important in the economy. So if you can't get access to raw materials, you're fucked.

So it is just essentially creating the conditions where German businesses have no choice but to sell, or sorry, Jewish businesses have no choice but to sell to germans quote-unquote aryans right under duress yeah squeezing them out yeah and so like it's essentially what the process of redlining did as well of course like it's the it's not like you know this, this is unique to Nazi Germany. It's the same logic. Yeah, same. Yeah, Bank of America in New York City in the mid to late 2000s. Yeah, definitely.

It was up to things on the similar line. Well, it's interesting how, you know, we've come across corruption throughout the, you know, last 150 years and how it doesn't ever really go away. It's just the loopholes and how it's technically legal continue to change. Right. And so kind of what happens in the coal and steel sector is with the first four-year plan in 1937, Germany actually does set up a state coal and steel conglomerate. It's called the Reichswerk Hermann Göring, RHG, in 1937 because they say Paul Pfleger is a German official in Göring's economic organization. They wanted to use this kind of poor quality native iron ore in the Salzgitter region. This is from the book nazi steel uh they wanted to use

this kind of poor quality uh steel but you know the german industrialists didn't want to flood the market they thought the price was already like low they were trying to keep the price high whereas you know of course hitler is building the rearmament they want as much steel as much iron as possible so the nazi state does intervene here and set up its own you know state company and um at this point you know some of the steel industrialists make an initial bid of opposing the regime but herman goering tells them you know this will be considered sabotage like you will be killed or put in a concentration camp and friedrich flick actually has a very pragmatic approach here where he realizes which way the wind is blowing and he says you know according to the book that he wanted to accommodate the government but you know keep it

in private hands but meet the directives of you know the state or whatever right uh but this is you know just kind of important because he doesn't make any pretense of opposing the regime which will make him that much more favored when it comes to allocation of stolen war booty by the regime in 1937. And so, kind of what happens is, in 1938, in March 1938, Germany takes over Austria, mass violence against Austrian Jews break out, and this is 37-38 is where you really start seeing a big clip of pace for these Aaronizations, these takes over takeovers of Jewish businesses. So in 1937, 38, the pace of this really wraps up. And the Hoffenwerk Lubeck was the largest in the city of Lubeck. This is

like an iron steel works with Jewish, but also, you know, foreign ownership. And so Friedrich Flick starts getting in on the game. He buys up kind of its smaller firms that have sizable holdings in the parent company. He, by like late 37, has about 51% of the stock of these smaller firms. And then according to the book Nazi Steel, at a December 1st, 1937 meeting, pressure from the Nazi regime divided the unified front, thrown up by three of the holding company's foreign shareholders. So, you know, there were foreign shareholders. The Nazi regime, like, told them, hey, you got to fucking get out of this thing. And what happens is that Friedrich Flick enters negotiations with the firm's remaining Jewish owners, who had founded the Lubeck Works and retained control of 60% of its shares. And, you know, the negotiations aren't really going anywhere.

Frick drives a hard bargain. But what I find extremely ominous, the owners offered to settle with Friedrich Flick, provided that he secure a reassurance decree guaranteeing their exemption from further persecution. So what Friedrich Flick does from them is he gets a letter from the Nazi government that says to these Jewish owners, we will not persecute you anymore if you sell your steelworks to Friedrich Flick, which I'm sure was worth all of the paper that it was printed on, because oppression immediately stopped. But so, you know, and that's just like one example. There were hundreds of these expropriations and these essentially gunpoint sales, where it's like,

it's not even a negotiation at this point where you have all this state terror and um when uh in march 1938 when germany takes over austria violence against jews just like from the citizenry and you know quote-unquote unofficial state elements really ramps up then in november 38 you have the night of the broken glass which was a pogrom state-sponsored pogrom within germany so you just have like all of this violence ramping up and you know a regime that is very clearly telling jewish people that we are going to get rid of you so this is not a fair negotiation this is like you know if you're playing civilization and you set all of the sliders in a trade and then you go control the other side of the trade and you trade everything to yourself

that's the kind of negotiation friedrich flick was conducting here with these businesses sean why are you hard yeah um but then you know just one other example is called the uh pacheck mining concern uh p-e-t-s-c-h-e-k um and it's interesting where this is a uh a jewish family that owns mines in what was then czechoslovakia but also within germany but you know like they're based in czechoslovakia they own some german mines uh this is primarily um i believe coal mining um but interestingly enough in uh 1938 uh january 1938 herman Goering personally granted Friedrich Flick exclusive authority to conduct negotiations with this group to buy them out. So this is like, this significantly reduces the price because he's the only one who can negotiate with them. He doesn't have to compete

with any other German businesses. And that just kind of shows that by 38, he was very close to Hermann Goering and the regime in general and uh the pacheck family you know they hold out initially but then with uh we mentioned the german occupation of austria in march 1938 and then uh the threats against czechoslovakia they see which way the wind is blowing they sell to him in 38 and they actually the entire family has to flee to new york city with the munich agreement which gives a part of czechoslovakia to nazi germany because you know at the conclusion of every fair business transaction it is traditional for all of the opposite party to flee the country out of fear for their lives that's what happens here yeah well maybe they were worried that their uh family singing troupe was too subversive. But so it's like these are just two representative

Aryanization transactions where he's able to use his relationship with the regime, the bribes he's paying to Himmler, his relationship with Goering, presumably he's paying bribes to Goering as well, and other people within the regime. He's able to use that relationship to get first access to these kind of uh

concerns yeah in my research for this episode i found an interesting paper that kind of bears out what most researchers in the post-war germany kind of surmised was that like the within industries that did work heavily with the nazis the ones whose corporate board members had personal connections to nazi party leadership had unusually high stock market returns yeah so this is a paper that's titled betting on hitler the value of political connections in nazi germany and is written by thomas ferguson and hans joachim waff at the university of zurich and basically within an industry like uh should be noted before we were recording steven was getting really into political betting he told no i was in the mindset i guess of a political corruption or just political betting

i guess but uh so that like the benefits extended beyond the boardroom basically to wealthy investors in germany so they're essentially making bets of their own uh buying up shares of the companies that they knew that they knew were politically linked in order to bid up the asset values and gain these returns. They did an analysis of the personal relationships of companies and then looked at their stock returns. And it said that they experienced unusually high returns outperforming unconnected companies.

Wait, so the people invested in companies that were attached to the Nazis and then people invested in the companies that were attached to the Nazis and then people invested in the companies that were attached to the Nazis to increase their value? By doing so. Yeah. So it was a little bit of both. They knew that because they were connected to Nazis, they would have high returns as the Nazis increased in power and they wanted to also inflate those companies. Yeah. power and they wanted to also inflate those companies yeah so like these uh the returns these companies were getting were unexplainable by random like oscillations in the stock market alone

okay so either these investors they just knew who was connected to whom and over time it allowed them to it made them believe that the price would rise on these stocks in particular. Right. Yeah. Yeah, but that's not real capitalism, Steve. Real capitalism has never been tried. What I'm saying is they did that. They put in the hard work to both be corrupt and also realize who was doing the corruption and bet on them.

Right. And, you know, we went through two particular cases, like, um, I guess the book Nazi Steel goes through in, you know, very painstaking detail, some of his bureaucratic maneuverings, Friedrich Flick's, because what actually happens with the, um, the, the mining company, uh, the Czech mining concern that we mentioned, uh, is that initially the government nationalizes it because by late 38, early 39, they just totally threw away any pretenses of legality and started seizing property because they knew World War II was about to break out. So they nationalize it. And then he actually exchanges some of his other properties with the government in order to get

a whole bunch of the stake of the recently nationalized property. So it is like he does kind of start engaging in horse trading and this sorts of stuff. But the point here is that, you know, he's able to make, you know, gunpoint negotiations with Jewish businesses, which means that, according to the book Nazi Steel, by 1941, his companies accounted for 6.2% of the total um uh german iron and steel production and then he's later given um these french territories uh lorraine is a french border region which was um initially german then taken back by the french well i mean it was always kind of on the border of germany and france it was like annexed by france in something like 1766 then it was a um you know a split between German and French speakers. Then it was taken by Germany in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

Then it was taken back by France in the 1918 War. So it's this contested region. But, you know, there's a German industrialist set up a steelworks there, which was taken over by the french at the end of world war one and then with the nazi invasion of france the germans take it back over and friedrich flick is first in line to be uh able to buy this out and you know again the book nazi steel goes through some of the bureaucratic maneuverings he does to do that including like he gets somebody in the nazi economics ministry to write up a paper assessing this plant that says that he has like the best chance of connecting a coke supply to it

like a coke iron supply yeah he has like the he has the best most reliable supply chains leading to the factory right which is just completely not true but he managed to convince or pay off or whatever somebody within the Reich's economics ministry who writes this fucking report that says like, yeah, this guy would be perfect to take it over. So it's, you know, there's just a bunch of, and that's what you see throughout the Third Reich is this kind of weird overlapping bureaucracy where that's how people make their fortunes is by manipulating that. So he gets kind of first claim to this massive steel production region in France. And, you know, the book Nazi Steel says he would have been a lot richer had the war gone a different way. Oh, really? Yeah, because essentially another thing that the Nazi german government does is they have um these conquered territories particularly once they open up the eastern front against russia they tell german industrialists hey you manage this as a trust on behalf of the german government you maybe pay us

rent you meet our production quotas or whatever and you you know technically we own this but you're the trustee and then as soon as the peace comes this will pass to you like so wait he would have been richer if half of his country hadn't been taken over by a communist government he wouldn't he would have been richer if his country hadn't been leveled in a mass bombing campaign which is even more impressive because like when he died he was still the richest person in germany in 1972 he was the richest person in germany one of the richest people in germany oh wow despite like half his fortune just being fucking sovietized but again that's what happens when you don't pay your pensions yeah he what was it he he went to jail after the nervenberg trials for seven years

and then when he came out three years right or three years yeah he was sentenced to seven he served three oh okay yeah and when and if it's pretty astounding i i guess it really more speaks to how america was dictating uh things in their part of germany how he was allowed to you know be sentenced for war crimes and then just walk out of jail and just straight back to the bank where he's got just all this money already stashed. The fact that

if someone's sentenced to war crimes, they can still keep their assets is just morally indefensible yeah that would be like a central contradiction of the remainder of his life in his children's yeah yeah like morally speaking yeah exactly like the descendants of those slaves exactly we'll get into it right so that's where we're going is he takes over this french plant in the lorraine region this is called the rombach steel mill it's you know massive mill it's got all these connected you know mines and stuff uh you know and this would uh had he been able to get it up to full operation we said he was more

than six percent of the total steel and iron production in the uh nazi regime they estimated that had he been able to get it up to full production he would have come uh come up to about nine percent so you know this would have been a huge increase on his contribution to the overall steel and iron market. But what happens is, you know, there's all sorts of fucked up supply chain issues within the Nazi German government. They actually talk about how the German merchant fleet had to seriously rely on the Swedish merchant fleet

in order to meet logistical needs. And the railroads were always fucked up they wouldn't invest in like more railroad maintenance so it was something where the plant never got to full capacity because you know uh german rail networks were all snared and they couldn't deliver the um precursor you know coke and other such things iron ore um and then later the allies started bombing the shit out of it. So he never really actually, he probably didn't even make that much money on this thing. But, yes. But it was something where Hermann Goering, I think, said explicitly that after the peace,

all of these assets would be reprivatized and returned. So he was just kind of making up. He called it up with, where are my perks at? So Friedrich Flick was just making a bet on this up with where my perks at uh so friedrich flick was just making a bet on this thing on the idea that uh once the war ends i'll be able to make a fortune um but so i guess just to kind of go to the slave labor thing is uh there's various uh sources that say he initially i call it the war of british aggression i think it was more of a lost cause situation to move on to the uh the slave element of this empire apparently according to like

sources i found he initially did not oppose slavery on any moral grounds it was just he was running a steel empire so there's actually a certain amount of skill to operate a steel foundry where uh you know a russian prisoner who weighs 70 pounds and has never worked in a steel mill in their life might not be as efficient as a worker you actually trained sure but you know the actual labor situation in the reich was because once they introduced all this state planning uh they would uh it became illegal in many cases for people to leave their jobs if they were considered essential to the war effort, which a lot of things were. And basically everything that wasn't war production was over the course of the war shut down and the workers were converted to war production. So, you know, the Reich's labor ministry would essentially give you your workers and they could at will take away their workers and employers could even be fired or could even be imprisoned for firing workers or uh hiring unauthorized workers without permission

so it was essentially as the war went on the labor shortages got so acute that he was like okay sure yeah we'll we'll take these slave laborers and um and you know just like the thing is, when we talk about 48,000 slaves, probably 40,000 of whom died, the businesses were very much aware of what was going on. The Reddit by LM Stahlbommer, they wrote this up for the Anti-Defamation League for a paper they published. They talk about one of Friedrich Flick's mines. I believe this is a coal mine or an iron mine called Harpen, which a company that still exists in Germany today, and its German language Wikipedia article seems to just skip over the years 1939 to 1945. We were all on vacation.

Yeah. Just quoting from his write-up, the conditions for Harpens' forced labors were appalling and difficult to approve even when government officials and employers acknowledged the negative impact this had on productivity. So basically, Flick's Harpen Coal Mining, the management,

tried to resolve the problem of food supply. The Harpens business records disclosed that the most persistent problem pertaining to forced labor was the lack of nutritious food. The Harpen board of directors recognized that malnutrition lowered worker productivity, but beyond official complaints of government officials and the food supplier Harpen found no creative solution to this fundamental problem. Temporarily increasing rations for workers who arrived in physically weak condition

and scheduling the heaviest meal at the beginning of the worker's shift brought no significant improvements in productivity and certainly had no long-term beneficial impact on the worker's health. There wasn't a technocratic solution to starvation. This is the level they're at, is where they're just like, maybe if we fiddle with caloric intake, the prisoners will feel better about being forced to be here. Let's develop an app that reminds prisoners

to eat their most calorie-dense meal right before being forced to build things. Basically, a Harpen board member suggested that Harpen plant a garden of potatoes and cabbage. Harpen officials discussed the proposal, but there was no indication that they followed through on it. And then Harpen eventually took the position that it was nearly impossible to improve the quality of food for forced laborers when the company's German employees were being subject to increasingly strict food rationing. Humanitarian concerns could not or would not be contemplated by harpen's board of directors um and this is of course throughout the entire flick group company this is kind of a

similar thing but it was just something to show where they said oh hey we had no control over the food situation in germany but you know they didn't give it they were aware of everything that was going on they were aware of the 80 death rate their workers. They only cared insofar as like, oh, productivity is lower when people are fucking starving to death going into a mine. I don't see why we got to feed these people that are working for us.

I mean, shouldn't they figure out their own food situation? I mean, they got boogers. They got other people's boogers. Why can't they feed themselves on boogers? Yeah, and another thing is like Friedrich Flick denied producing munitions for the German army, which is just flatly untrue. Here's you producing them. Yeah.

That photo is not me. That guy's got a hat. I got no hat on my head. But just from the book Nazi Steel, although the evidence does not reveal how much of his Lorraine plant, how much of its output consisted of finished armaments, it does point to armament contracts that required rather sizable investments in equipment and entailed a notable degree of oversight from Reich and military authorities uh the plant's level of output probably would not have escaped his notice

making his post-war claim of ignorance seem improbable and it also talks about you know in 1943 they get some big contract to build anti-tank munitions and oversee these french plants building anti-tank munitions in 1943 who's also some of his companies were involved in the luftwaffe production supply chains so you know he claims that he just built uh just gave you know um fucking steel or iron rail rails iron bars much better yeah uh cement he says they just did this thing but they almost certainly by every piece of evidence also did armaments for uh the german military while it was engaged in the holocaust and you know um he's tried by the allied authorities at the nuremberg trial in 1947 he's sentenced to seven years in prison he's released on good behavior in 1950

uh minor chuck legot was reading his encyclopedia Britannica article, which says that the Allied authorities seized 75% of his business empire, and then finding another source that said, yes, 75% of his business empire disappeared because it was in the Soviet zone of occupation. You know what else disappeared there? His son. Yes. his son yes it's not it's not like he won or he lost a judgment right in like west german court and they took it away or something right i mean it was like they his lorraine factory was given back to the french uh or given back to french concerns but other than that they left his business empire entirely intact in west germany and And just according to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Allied administration in West Germany, they followed a course of decartelization where they just wanted to avoid cartels. So they forced him to either sell its steel or its coal operations.

So Flick chose to sell his coal resources. So he got to maintain basically all of his steel uh foundries and operations so of course you know the marshall plan dumps all this money into western germany there's the uh the west uh european recovery so he's the one who has all this steel that they need to fucking rebuild everything that was bombed to shit in the war so this is just like how he became a billionaire was not getting a bomb dropped on his head between 1941 and 45 oh my god did he benefit from marshall plan funds i mean 100 even if not directly it was just like you know the marshall plan goes and so all these governments need to spend money rebuilding so where the fuck are you going to get the steel from if the government says yeah you can

keep all these steel properties you own what's the marshall plan uh it was a it was a u.s plan to help europe rebuild basically man god forbid they break up that company and distribute it to the workers and you know undermine the hard-working capitalists that were the backbone of german society uh just according to lm stallbraumer, apparently he also transferred 90% of his holdings to two of his surviving children. So he didn't technically count as a conglomerate

because just according to this, conglomerate laws technically did not apply to someone who only owned 10% of a company. So by just giving his kids 90% of his flick group company, Flick KG, Flick KG. Flick KG remained in...

His dumb son got killed in Ukraine, didn't get anything. Flick KG remained in existence, and the Flick family retained control of its steelworks in Bavaria, Eisenwerk, Gestalfet, Maximilschut, its blast furnace operations, Hockenwerk, Lubeck. lubeck oh yeah that one was of course we mentioned the arianization one he got to keep uh his arianization steel work that he stole from jewish people at gunpoint uh and it's rare rare valley coal operations uh flick ag played a major role in the post-war reconstruction of west Germany while enjoying renewed prosperity.

Sometimes when people talk about the history of post-war Germany, they talk about the American plan of denazification. And I think that's technically spelled with a wink. Right. And he was able to use this money that, you know, from selling his coal businesses and from the money he gets from the reconstruction to buy into Damier benz ag the company that makes mercedes-benz so he's dies in 1972 west germany's richest man because he also expands out from steel to buying into you know luxury cars and all these other products that are soon very much in demand from the German market. Oh, I did just want to mention the Rombach steel plant, the French plant that he took over.

It probably didn't produce an actual profit in his lifetime just because of bombings and supply concerns, and it never really ran at full capacity, but he was able to extract enough money from it to, according to the nazi steel uh in 1944 september the flick concern had little of value to show for its years of trusteeship aside from some 8.345 million french francs in large bills from its paris marketing accounts which it trucked to uh salbach rosenberg for safekeeping so basically they got a ton of of Swiss francs, like eight and a half, almost eight and a half million, which they trucked out into a safe storage in Germany. And we're of course able to get access to back after the war. But so he had three sons, one of whom was killed in the war. The other one, Otto was heavily involved in his slave empire, but it was actually his son, Friedrich Karl Flick, who buys out three other family members in 1975. Friedrich Flick, the grandfather,

dies in 1972. But Friedrich Carl Flick, in 1975, becomes the sole heir to the fortune. And he sells the remaining assets in the 1980s to Deutsche Bank for about 5.36 billion deutsch marks which was 2.17 billion in u.s dollars in 1985 and this is in the middle of a political scandal in west germany yeah so the affair like the political affair that he was involved, he was trading shares of the flick company worth about in 1975. He sold shares worth about 1.9 billion. Deutsche marks of Daimler, AG and Deutsche bank. Um,

in 1981 though, uh, there's a tax fraud investigator um who after studying it for a while he found that the flick company had money transfers to all of the political parties that were represented in the bundestag like the top party brass um nothing like following your father's path to success playing all sides of the field um he actually kept like a just just like uh some some other nazi parties he kept very detailed records uh were kept by the flick company accountant uh listing all these transfers so it wasn't actually that hard once the tax fraud investigator got onto the trail to find the rest of it.

But he actually ended up transferring about 565 Deutschmarks to the chairman of the, then the chairman of the CSU, one of the major parties at the time. It's still a major party. That's Angela Merkel's party. Oh, this is before they, the CSU and the CDU. Right, before they split, I guess. Well, they came together, right? Oh, they came together? Oh.

Now it's the CSU-CDU. Oh, as one single party. Yeah. I don't know anything about German politics after 1945. Stop paying attention. Well, anyway. Now you only keep track of the AFD. 250,000 Deutschmarks were transferred to the CSU chairman, Franz Josef Strauss,

and 565,000 Deutschmarks were transferred to the CDU chairman, Helmut Kohl, as well as payments to the FDP and the SPD chief politicians. That last one is the Social Democrats. And you wonder why they're such wet blankets when it comes to capital. There's a hint right there. Even in the Weimar Germany period, I believe we said Friedrich Flick was paying off the Social Democrats,

who were, for a time, the largest party in Weimar Germany. And he was paying most of his money to the bourgeois right parties but again it's all just an insurance where you just kind of give the social democrats some money to hopefully keep them at bay you know keep them like focused on other people not on you yeah and it's weird that a party that's calls themselves social democrats but is taking payments from industrialists was not able to prevent a uh populist demagogue from taking power so like this scandal was made public first made public by a newspaper dr spiegel and they these transfers like the some of the top officers within the flick family companies were the ones who were actually doing these transfers.

They went to trial. And they were only found guilty of tax evasion and assistance to tax evasion, respectively, these two officers. Flick himself actually got off. I don't think he went to trial actually yeah yeah no but i mean that's a it's interesting where like in the mid 80s this is like the a huge scandal in germany because of course the the flick group is uh i don't know if at that time they were the biggest but certainly one of the biggest uh corporate conglomerates in germany was paying bribes to the entire political spectrum yeah at the time this was like trending towards watergate level of scandal oh wow and like it's used like flick affairs just used as like a phrase to denote serious scandal now in germany right and so it is like it is this scandal that has him sell off his business assets

which uh irony of ironies so in 1985 we mentioned he sells to deutsche bank so essentially he stole off sold off his stolen assets uh for another person who bought them with stolen money so So, they get their original fortune raiding Jewish industry and funding the Nazi war effort. Then they're part of the biggest political bribery scandal in the later half of the 20th century. And then their kids are now still the youngest billionaires in Germany. There's zero accountability beginning to end. It's great. Apparently, Friedrich Karl Flick gave some sort of interview where he talked about how he sought safe assets and 4% annual return after taxes on his fortune. Because, again, he sells all the money to, or all the assets to Deutsche Bank.

And then he just has this big pile of cash and so from 85 to um his death in i think 2006 yeah 2006 he uh you know just kind of like invest the money and this is just what we have talked about a lot here is just you know if you're getting a four percent return after taxes well that fortune is just going to grow he gets you know two two billion some from deutsche bank and then he is able to leave 7.2 billion to his kids what's a little slaves and bribing politicians and even now the flick family has a large art collection oh yes yeah so the main thing with like the flick family art collection was the Jewish groups were protesting Berlin and Munich art galleries for accepting donations from them. Because they felt like this is just the fruit of slave labor.

Yeah, of course. Which is obviously correct. is correct but um flick didn't the flick family never really agreed to any like comprehensive form of reparations for the descendants of these the slaves themselves or the descendants and so like these art transactions are just going through on the scrutiny unscrutinized now i don't think those kids should be held responsible for their parents crimes i think that's unjust and the kids must be like man thank god there weren't more survivors because that would have been a much bigger bill but yeah the kids have paid no restitution some of the other german nazi

billionaires have paid at least token restitution but friedrich flick up to his death denied any wrongdoing didn't pay any compensation none of his kids have either actually i think the after the bloomberg article came out in 2018, the youngest kids might have paid something, but it is just entirely a result. Was it 90% of their net worth or 80% of how much they're worth? Somewhat less than that.

Come on. It should at least match the death rate. Yeah, exactly. 40,000 people. Not murdered, not just straight. We killed them. They worked to death. And this fucking kid's like, I'm going to be a good fencer. Fuck you. You don't need to sword fight, son.

Your family's done enough damage to the world. Probably doesn't even have the scars on his face. I mean, like, and the fact is, is that they're the youngest billionaires. And then what? Their self-made billionaire score is what? Through the roof? Get the fuck out of here. Like, listen all neither of these people eat but they're not generous at all i know that for a fact and i don't even think that there's twins i think there's just

one and if he dies he's gonna pretend to be his sister i think it's one of those situations where one's gonna just kind of merge into the other slowly and wanted to double that inheritance if you know what i mean yeah but their productivity is much higher than anyone who worked in their minds so they were able to eat a full breakfast that morning uh but yeah i mean that's basically just kind of the story where you know they made some sort of token donation after this bloomberg article comes out in 2018 because it's entirely like none of these people give a fuck everybody has everybody rich has this idea in their head that they somehow earned it or deserved it but if you trace every fortune far enough back you will find a crime and in this case you will find a huge crime perhaps the

greatest crime of the 20th century and a lot of people who participated in that or whose ancestors i thought whitewater was pretty bad a lot of people whose ancestors participated in that are still fucking cashing the checks that came from it from mass murder and slavery and it is just something where you know everybody who critiques uh any leftist policy prescription talks about you know the innovation and all the hard work and bootstraps and all this bullshit and it's just the reality of capital is if you have enough money you're just collecting 4, 6, 8% a year for doing

fucking nothing and usually the initial pool of capital came from something fucking horrible and with that this has been Grubstakers I'm Andy Palmer I'm Yogi Poyle I'm Steve Jeffers I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening.

See you next week. Bye. ... ...... Die können dann ein bisschen träumen. Doch immer wenn der Sommer kommt, beschäftigt mich seit Jahren schon ein eher philosophisches Problem. Die Frage ist zu schwer für mich, ich stelle sie jetzt öffentlich, doch Vorsicht, sie ist ziemlich unbequem. Scheint die Sonne auf, wir Nazis, ich kann's nicht verstehen. Sie ist ziemlich unbequem Scheint die Sonne auf für Nazis Ich könnt's nicht verstehen Dürfen Faschos auch verreisen? Das wär ungerecht

Können Rassisten etwa auf den blauen Himmel sehen? Scheint die Sonne auf für Nazis Wenn's nach mir geht, tut sie's nicht. Ich will nen Sommer nur für mich. Ich will nen Sommer nur für mich.