Economy

xchrom

(108,903 posts)

25. Nazi-Forged Fortune Creates Hidden German Billionaires

Mon Feb 3, 2014, 08:02 AM

Feb 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-03/nazi-forged-fortune-creates-hidden-german-billionaires.html

Rudolf-August Oetker was weeks away from becoming an officer in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS when he received word that his mother, two stepsisters and stepfather had been killed by an Allied bomb dropped on their family home in Bielefeld, Germany.

The loss wasn’t just a personal tragedy for the 28-year-old cadet. It was a blow to one of Adolf Hitler’s front-line suppliers, Dr. August Oetker OHG, whose dry goods were being shipped to German soldiers fighting in World War II.

Oetker was granted permanent leave from his duties to take control of the family business in October 1944. Over the next six decades, the former SS officer, who trained at Dachau concentration camp, would add interests in shipping, food, beverages, banking and hotels, creating a conglomerate that has more than 26,000 employees and 10.9 billion euros ($14.8 billion) in annual revenue.

“People at the company still regard him as a hero, who made the company big after the war,” Sven Keller, co-author of an Oetker-commissioned study about the family’s involvement with the Third Reich, said in an interview in Munich. “One needs to see both sides of the person.”

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