6.

Friedrich Flick came to praise Himmler’s Circle of Friends as a “mirror image” of German business. But at the next Nazi Party convention, a new member joined who didn’t quite fit that description. Richard Kaselowsky was a pudding executive from the provinces, far removed from Berlin and the Ruhr area and the mighty moguls who exercised power there. He hailed from Bielefeld, a sleepy city in the region of East Westphalia, not far from the Dutch border. Kaselowsky, a stout man with oily brown-gray hair and a meaty face, was determined to put Bielefeld on the map. The forty-seven-year-old was the CEO of Dr. August Oetker, a food company whose namesake founder had pioneered packaged cake and pudding mixes and ingredients like baking powder in Germany. Kaselowsky had married into the family business through Ida Oetker, the widow of his best friend. His main task, besides serving as CEO, was to prepare Rudolf-August Oetker, his teenage stepson and the designated company heir, to one day succeed him.

Kaselowsky with his Nazi Party badge.

ullstein bild – Teutopress

What Kaselowsky lacked in business stature, he made up in zeal for Hitler. He handed out signed copies of Mein Kampf to new employees and hung a portrait of the führer in his office suite. Moreover, Kaselowsky and Himmler shared a common background as poultry farmers. Kaselowsky and the SS leader were both intrigued by the agrarian aspects of Nazism, specifically its (re)settlement of people to the countryside. The idea went hand in hand with Hitler’s desire to gain more Lebensraum (living space) for the German people; Himmler and his acolytes propagated the concept of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) — a “racially pure Nordic” people would leave the decadent and depraved cities to settle and work as peasant farmers in grounded rural communities.

Kaselowsky’s dedication to Nazism often came at the expense of the firm he led. Between 1933 and 1935, he spent hundreds of thousands of reichsmarks in company money on settlement projects in the east of Germany, which failed. And he clearly learned nothing from those experiences. In the summer of 1935, he merged a profitable regional newspaper, owned by an Oetker-controlled publisher, with a local Nazi Party publication that was losing money.

Bad business decisions aside, Kaselowsky’s financial devotion to hopeless Nazi causes put him in excellent standing with Westphalia’s Gauleiter, who invited him to the Nazi Party convention that September. As second-tier guests of honor, Kaselowsky and his wife were put up at Nuremberg’s Hotel Bamberger, where Hitler’s secret girlfriend, Eva Braun, and the movie director Leni Riefenstahl were also staying. Word of Kaselowsky’s spending had somehow made its way to the grand hotel, and Fritz Kranefuss soon invited the provincial pudding boss to join Himmler’s inner circle.

Kaselowsky readily accepted. He was hooked from the start. Present at every meeting, he loved the perks and elite access that came with membership. Every second Wednesday of the month, Kaselowsky traveled from Bielefeld to Berlin to meet up with Himmler’s Circle of Friends at the Aero Club. In the heart of the capital, Göring had repurposed Prussia’s majestic parliament as a lavish clubhouse with a round-the-clock bar, a beer room, and a famous restaurant, all next door to the Ministry of Aviation and opposite the headquarters of Himmler’s security apparatus. After a drink to welcome them, the forty men would dine lavishly, in a seating order that rotated from meeting to meeting. Afterward, they withdrew to clubrooms to talk shop but never politics.

Himmler came to collect his dues just before Kaselowsky joined. On a bright, cold morning in January 1936, Flick, Steinbrinck, and the rest of the circle met the SS leader at Munich’s Regina Palace Hotel on Maximilianstrasse, from which they embarked on a day trip. A bus waited outside the luxury hotel to take them to a destination northwest of town: Dachau concentration camp. When they arrived, Himmler walked the men into the camp, passing a group of inmates in prison uniform. The SS leader’s personally guided tour of Dachau was “very carefully prepared and dressed up,” one member later declared. He first showed the men to the camp barracks and workshops, where imprisoned tailors, carpenters, and shoemakers plied their trades. The tycoons had lunch in the camp canteen, after visiting the kitchen to taste the food that was being prepared. Himmler even led the men into a passage of cells, unlocking one to personally check on a prisoner. Afterward the group visited a nearby SS-run porcelain factory before returning to Munich, where they dined together.

After dinner, Himmler stood to make a short speech. Now that he had showed the men that concentration camps weren’t as bad as the rumors made them out to be, he had something to ask of his wealthy friends. Himmler said, in a humble tone, “For the SS and my other tasks, I need no money and want no money, but for some cultural tasks and for doing away with certain states of emergency for which I have no funds at all, if you want to place funds at my disposal for that purpose, then I would be most grateful to you.” His pet projects included the Lebensborn, a human-breeding association in whose maternity homes children were bred for the “master race.”

Of course, none of the businessmen dared say no. Kranefuss suggested an annual membership contribution of at least 10,000 reichsmarks. He had already lined up Baron Kurt von Schröder, the financier at whose villa Hitler and von Papen had sealed Germany’s fate, to serve as group treasurer. To collect the fees, von Schröder opened “special account S” at his private bank in Cologne. Steinbrinck would be in charge of fundraising. Millions soon flowed in. Flick started giving 100,000 reichsmarks a year to the circle. Kaselowsky gave 40,000 reichsmarks. Although he had missed the Dachau excursion, Kaselowsky was present for Himmler’s personally guided tour of another concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin. Different camp, same spiel.