The Daily Beast Podcast - The German Billionaires With a Grotesque Anti-Semitic History

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

Nazi Billionaires author David de Jong joins this bonus episode The New Abnormal to discuss the findings from his book, including the ugly, anti-semitic history of German oligarchs, including the family who owns the German car brand BMW. Plus, co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy discuss Kevin McCarthy’s latest witch hunt that somehow involves Nancy Pelosi and Peloton and roast George W. Bush and Justice Clarence Thomas for being really bad at telling jokes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Info. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objective. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special episode with David Dijan. He's the author of Nazi billionaires, the dark history of Germany's wealthiest dynasties.

And we're going to talk to him about his book today. But first, let's have some fun. All right, are you guys ready to listen to some really fun clips this weekend? Let's do it. You sound very enthusiastic. Yeah. Come on. Okay.

This is the high point of my weekend. So, former President George W. Bush, he gave a little speech. Remember what we used to care about these things called gaffs? I think he made one. Let's listen. In contrast, Russian elections are rigged. Political opponents are imprisoned or otherwise eliminated from participating in the election. electoral process. The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision

of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq, I mean of Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway. 75. It's hilarious. Nothing funnier than war criminals making jokes. I know. You know, it's not too funny, too? Iraqis. Yeah, no, I know, I know. But that said, it's still pretty funny.

You're the worst. You guys aren't as a joke and not a senior moment. Oh, it was completely a gaff. Yeah, no, I don't think he was making a joke. Some people seem to think it was a joke. No, I don't think so at all. No, I don't think so. I think he's 75, and he was thinking about how he's a war criminal.

I think he thinks about Iraq all the time, right? Iraq was the biggest thing on his mind since the day he got elected. Yeah. That's all he wanted to do was finished out his job. So this is a guy with a really long, rich history of saying the wrong thing. Yes. So I do not think this was a joke. It was a little interesting that if you listen to it, like after he corrects himself and he gives his little laugh,

and then he says Iraq too, like under his breath. So it was... No, I think he says he's 75. No, that's when he says after that. After that. Now you really just hold on yourself. I saw that happen and my jaw just hit the floor. Like, he said it.

He actually said it. Amazing. Yeah, I just can't wait for those Kissinger deathbed confessions. Oh, God. You people with your Kissinger, he's never going to die. It's not. It's not funny. When you're undead, you can't then die.

It's true. Okay, well, let's move on to another cursed person from the Republican side of things. One Clarence Thomas had some thoughts. Oh, good. We haven't heard from him in like an hour. Well, I have good news. He says he's going to resign from the Supreme Court. Just listen.

What? I think I would have heard about that. One of the things I'd say in response to the media is when they talk about, especially early on about the way I did my job. I said, I will absolutely leave the court when I do my job as poorly as you do yours. And that was meant as a compliment, really. It's hilarious.

And some might say ironic, since he is terrible. I don't even know how that was meant as a joke. Does he know what a joke is? No. I think we can agree that he has no idea what he's talking about. The thing I think about is that, you know, he has a job that's in common with us in the media,

which is that you're supposed to ask questions. And yet for 10 years, he asked no questions on the job. He was sleeping. Yes, he was saying sleeping all the time. Look, sometimes when you need to oppose the wokesters, the best way to do that is to literally sleep. That shows your opposition to being woke. That's right.

And so I think that's what he's doing. It's a form of protest when he sleeps. It's a peaceful protest. Exactly. Very peaceful protest, except for the snoring. Some might say very peaceful. Yes. Yeah, no, I mean, I hearty fuck you to that guy.

Yeah. I know we're not even on that part, but I still think we should be. It's a bonus, fuck you. Yeah, I think that's good. I think, yeah. This is the same guy, by the way, who is fretting about the leak, destroying the integrity and credibility of the Supreme Court while his wife is out there trying to overturn elections.

Right, the credibility of this concord. So in other news, Kevin McCarthy, a man who goes by the Twitter tagline GOP leader, he has some very, very crucial thoughts about what's going on in Congress today. You may be asking, what's Peloton? It's a bike that costs about $2,000. Not only that, each month you pay a monthly subscription fee to ride your $2,000 bike. And best of all, it's stationary. And they charge you about $300 to set it up.

So it's a $2,000 bike that you pay to use and pay to set up that doesn't go anywhere. What's a business like that? Now, Speaker Pelosi decided to give everyone in Congress a Peloton gym membership. Okay. He's learned about stationary bikes. something. I wonder how long it took him to understand about that. Peloton, the company that famously invented the stationary bike.

Tell me more. He kind of looks like a guy who would have been an 80s commercial for a stationary bike to me, if I'm being honest. I could absolutely see him wearing leg warmers in the 80s. I don't know. I love the whole fucking thing. Oh, no. I'm not opposed to it, but I can see him with like the sweat band.

the leg warmers and the sort of the, not the tank top, but like the sweat shirt with the sleeves cut off. I could see him in a tank top. No, I see him more in like a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. And he really doesn't like Peloton. Well, I mean, the good news for him is Peloton is going to hell as a company. Yeah, lucky for him. Lucky for all of us.

I guess he's happy about that. Man. I mean, we have a Peloton power user on this podcast. Do you care to defend this, Molly? I stopped using the Peloton. Did you? Yes. You know why?

You realize it didn't go anywhere? Yes, that's why I stopped. No, my shrink made me stop using it. Because I was too obsessive. No, that doesn't sound like something that would happen to you. Oh, go fuck yourself. And I was too obsessive, and I spent hours and hours and hours on it, and my shrink made me stop using it, so I've gone cold turkey.

and over the last month, I have been not using the Peloton. Thank you. Wow. What are you doing with all that free time? This has become free therapy for me. I can't believe how much free time. I have about nine hours a week of free time. Did you take up smoking or something?

Like, how do you fill that time? Yes. Hunting in Central Park. Hunting. Oh, okay, good. Good. With the bow and arrow in Central Park. Excellent.

That is great exercise. People who say it isn't. I've never done it. They obviously have not. All right. So our last clip, it is on the Jesse Waters show. He has on a lady, she's wearing cross earrings that are very large, and she's suing her school district that her son goes to. Oh, this is amazing.

Because of critical race theory being taught in the district, and now, well, I'll let her explain. All right. So, Melissa, your son is the father's black, you're white, and he'd never mentioned issues with race before. you're saying, what exactly changed? Right. We didn't have issues before. He's in eighth grade. They introduced this critical program, and now he's having racial issues. That was not there before. What kind of racial issues is he having?

Well, he's seen himself just as a black man. He's seen things that don't go his way as racism, and he's finding safety in numbers now. So when you're saying he gets a bad grade at school, he blames racism or a girl rejects him on a date. Racism. Are those the kind of things you're seeing? Yes. I ask him to clean the house. Racism. Yes. You're kidding, right? Are you serious? No, I'm serious. They have totally changed his perspective. They have put him in a box. I, again, I want to just take a minute to talk about how stupid Jesse Waters is.

Like, you can't even ask a question without being the dumbest person in the room. Yeah. No, he's the dumbest person on cable news. As I have said over and over again. This is the worst mom in the world. Like, she has just ensured that her son is going to be bullied. Oh, yeah. Speak for yourself, man.

I love that mom. She's the best. Molly, Molly. If he doesn't, if he doesn't, want to clean his room, that's racism. And Jesse Waters thinks she's kidding. I mean, but to go on national TV and talk about your son like that, who's in eighth grade, she just ruined his life. Well, you and I have very different ideas of parenting. That's all I think of that. Well, she's well within her right. It may stem from the fact that I've, that I'm not a parent. Yes. If you had children,

you would be much more cavalier with destroying their lives. Oh, okay. I too would be going on national TV to denounce them. No question. Yes. I was kind of shocked when he said, can't get a date. He didn't say, you know,

you should try letting the air out of the girls tired. That'll make them go out with you. Yeah. It's okay. Once he has interns, he'll be able to get dates. Yeah. Oh.

I hope Jesse's not listening to this. Don't tag him. David De Jong is the author of Nazi billionaires, the dark history of Germany's wealthiest dynasties. Welcome to New Abnormal, David. Thank you. It's good to be here. I love David De Jong, no relation, same last name. Indeed, we are. Yes, that is good for transparency sake. You know, we should state that up front.

Yes. I have a feeling you're from the Dutch de Jong. I am from the Dutch. Let's talk about this book, not billionaire. explain to me how you got to write this book. I was a reporter at Bloomberg, and I was reporting for a team that investigated hidden wealth and billionaire fortunes. I was actually hired as a US reporter

to cover like the Cokes and the Waltons who control Walmart. Because I'm Dutch, they soon asked me to cover the German-speaking countries from New York, actually. And I stumbled upon these stories of business and finance and history, you know, very closely interlinked. And what struck me was that these German business dynasties that I was writing about were basically still, you know, who had the most brutal Nazi histories profiting, you know, from slave labor, from slave and forced labor, from mass weapons production, from stealing the companies of Jews or other people in Nazi occupied territories,

that they were still laundering, you know, the, or whitewashing the patriarch's names, the men who had committed these crimes during the Third Reich through global philanthropy. So today, you have, for example, you have the BMW Herbert Quant Foundation. Herbert Quant was a save, he saved BMW from bankruptcy in 1959, but he also oversaw the planning building and dismantling of a subconcentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944, 1945. He had the responsibility over a factory in Berlin, where, among other people, 500 female slave laborers from concentration camps for help. He stole companies or he acquired companies. So he seized from Jews in France.

He used forced laborers and prisoners of war in his private at his estate during the war. But now you have the BMW Herbert Quan Foundation, which is, which the motto is inspire responsible leadership. You can't make it up. And there's no, there's nothing on the website. I mean, it's a global foundation, right? I mean, there's many grantees in the United States as well. And there's nothing on the website except for the fact that he saved BMW from bankruptcy in 1959 on any of his crimes or there's no historical transparency, whatever.

So that actually, Porsche is doing a similar thing with its icon Ferry Porsche who designed the first Porsche sports car. And he was in, he applied to the SS in 1938, was admitted as an SS officer in 1941. In the 50s and 60s, he surround himself at Porsche with former. or high-ranking SS officers, some of whom's death sentences have been commuted by the United States, but they were responsible for the most horrific massacres. And in 1970, in his first biography, he broke down the most vitroly, anti-Semitic, you know, sentences about Porsche's co-founder out of Rosenberger, who was pushed out of the company in 1935 and was erased from Porsche's history.

So the fact that these men are today being held up as these kind of examples solely because of their business success, right? It led me to ask this question, you know, does business success trump morality? Is that so it's because somebody's successful in business, you are not going to include, you're going to basically erase any of their crimes and sympathies that they had during a Nazi era. And so it was these contemporary findings that led me to dug into this history. I moved to Berlin. I did research and writing there for four years, and that's how it came about. You know, it's this idea that behind every great fortune is a great crime. Yes.

Which is something that I always talk about in my house. What were you the most sort of surprised by? Because we know that a lot of people got away with it after the Holocaust, right? But what were you the most sort of, what was the most brazen of the things you encounter while writing this book? I think the sheer magnitude of the crimes stunned me. I went in expecting naively perhaps that it was going to be somehow contained, but it was just so not only the size of the crimes, like tens of thousands of slave and forced laborers, people, you know, these men used in their factories and mines for hundreds, if not thousands

that did not survive as part of this corporate exploitation system, but also just the sheer magnitude of the companies that they stole and the assets that they stole of Jewish people, of people living in Nazi occupied territories whose livelihoods were just taken away from them. And it was the sheer magnitude still and a cover-up after the war and today

that struck me most. Because in Germany, what they do is whenever a business family or a global brand like Portiaenbw are confronted with a media story that investigates their Nazi histories, the first thing they do, is they commissioned an academic study to pacify it. And then four years later, you know, this academic study in dense academic German is published. And they say, well, it's all in there.

But the reckoning, it's not a sincere reckoning because who is the reckoning with, right? It's not with the, I mean, the Germans weren't the victim, you know, for the most part, weren't the victims here. People from the majority of forces slave laborers came from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus. There's no reckoning with them. It's not a reckoning with the victims and the errors. This blade of the laborers. This blade. and the cover-up, it's just what shocked me. What family do you think is the most egregious? I think the quons, or the part of the quons that control BMW today,

which is Germany's wealthiest family today, are most egregious as the Porsche family, because they maintain these global foundations and, you know, have to not only control these global brands that, you know, many people use in the U.S. as well, many people use and consume daily, but the fact that they launder, you know, that they try to launder the names of their patriarchs through global philanthropy, I think, is most brazen. I mean, what could be done? I mean, reparations. What do you see as a possible fix to this?

So most of these families actually paid compensation to force of slave laborers. After the Iron Curtain fell, you know, there were all these survivors of force and slave labor who started suing, you know, German companies, mainly from the U.S. where all these litigations, like Class Act, were instigated. And as a kind of mass compensation fund was initiated through the German government together with German business, most of the families in my book paid into that fund. It wasn't forced, and they also didn't have to admit any guilt. That was kind of the deal.

What I am arguing for in this book, and that's also the driving argument of the book, is historical transparency. is when you maintain global corporate foundations, headquarters, and media prizes in the name of somebody who may have designed the first Porsche car or may have saved BMW and made their family control tens of billions, you should also be transparent about their crimes during a Third Reich. Because only somebody learns from history by being transparent by showing the good and the bad. And if they refuse to do that, they should rename these foundations or these headquarters or. or these media prizes. I mean, it's obscene that today in Germany, you have a media prize named after a known Nazi war criminal.

Right. Interesting. Did you feel that these families felt that they still had sort of guilt and shame for what the families had done earlier on during the Holocaust? I think they found it extremely difficult. Listen, these people are eras, right? Right. They are completely in the shadows of their fathers and grandfathers because who are they without their fathers and grandfathers?

Because, you know, they did not create unfortunes themselves. So their entire identity, in my view, hinges upon the successes of their fathers and grandfathers. It is only when they are forced to deal with it, that they respond to it, but that they do it in a way where it remains contained to Germany, where they also, I feel that they lean on a certain culpability in Germany. Oh, you know, everybody was involved, right? So the reckoning is that sort of with the Germans, but that's strange because, you know, I mean, after all, yeah, it was the Germans, again, for the most part, were not the victims of Nazi crimes.

So that is a kind of a way that they're dealing with it, but in my opinion, for the most part, this reckoning is not sincere. They have a billion-dollar brands and fortunes on the line. So they have to find a sophisticated way to say that they've dealt with it, but not actually dealing with it. Thank you so much for joining us. This was fascinating. Thank you, David. Thank you, Molly. It was a pleasure. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the New Abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science.

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