Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945

by Gerald D. Feldman

• ISBN13: 9780521809290
• ISBN10: 0521809290
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis. He touches on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labour camps, and the problems of de-Nazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study - cooperation with Nazi policies, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision-making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated - are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on free access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
List of Abbreviations	xix
The Allianz Concern and Its Leaders, 1918-1933	1	(59)
Building the Concern	2	(24)
The Allianz Concern in the 1930s: Structure, Organization, and Personnel	26	(13)
The Politics of the Insurance Business	39	(11)
Schmitt, Goring, and Hitler	50	(10)
Allianz, Kurt Schmitt, and the Third Reich, 1933-1934	60	(46)
Disorder and Delusion: An Economics Minister for the Third Reich	60	(18)
The Schmitt Intermezzo: Reorganizing for the Third Reich	78	(28)
Adaptation and Aryanization	106	(44)
The Extent and Limits of Nazification at Allianz	106	(19)
Allianz, Its Jewish Employees, and Aryanization	125	(25)
Allianz and the Reich Group: Politics of the Insurance Business in the Period of Regime Radicalization, 1936-1939	150	(40)
The ``Night of Broken Glass'' and the Insurance Industry	190	(46)
The Pogrom as an Insurance Problem and the Conference of November 12, 1938	190	(15)
Hilgard, the Reich Group, and the Aftermath of the Air Ministry Conference	205	(23)
The ``Night of Broken Glass'' and Business Ethics in the Third Reich	228	(8)
Allianz, the Insurance Business, and the Fate of Jewish Life Insurance Policies, 1933-1945	236	(42)
Indirect Confiscation of Jewish Life Insurance Assets	236	(26)
Direct Expropriation of Jewish Life Insurance Assets	262	(16)
Allianz, Munich Re, and the Insurance Business in ``Greater Germany''	278	(67)
Allianz in 1940	278	(11)
Allianz and ``Greater Germany'': Expansion into Austria and the Sudetenland	289	(15)
The Nationalization Conflict Redivivus and the Rewards and Travails of Collaboration	304	(41)
Allianz and Munich Re in the Second World War	345	(99)
Expansionist Efforts and Business Opportunities in War	345	(70)
Total War and Doing Business in the Face of Defeat	415	(29)
Confronting the Past: Denazification and Restitution	444	(95)
Self-Exculpation and Image Reconstruction	446	(51)
Allianz and the Problems of Restitution	497	(42)
Bibliography	539	(10)
Index	549