8.

Rudolf-August Oetker, the “pudding prince,” knew he had a special position in life. Named after a father and a grandfather he never knew, he grew up with a sense of purpose and entitlement in the family villa on the Johannisberg in Bielefeld. As the sole male heir, destined to carry on the family food company and surname, Rudolf-August realized early on that “the most valuable thing I inherited is the Oetker name.” His stepfather, Richard Kaselowsky, whom he considered his real father and always addressed him as such, diligently prepared him for the task of taking over Dr. Oetker. Yet Rudolf-August was a bad student. He preferred riding horses, much like Kaselowsky, who was an avid rider and breeder himself. Whereas his thrifty mother disliked her husband’s expensive hobbies, Rudolf-August’s grandmother had no such reservations. She spoiled the boy rotten, gifting him a BMW convertible for Christmas in 1933. When he later had to sell his BMW motorbike, as a consolation she gave him a horse.

Rudolf-August began riding horses when he was twelve. When his local riding school was incorporated into the Reiter-SA in 1933, the sixteen-year-old Oetker was automatically enrolled as a member of the paramilitary organization’s horse-riding division. It was hardly a political statement on his part. But another membership was. Rudolf-August’s stepfather joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. His mother followed, and then his older sister. Rudolf-August was the last one to do so. They were a Nazi family, through and through.

Rudolf-August Oetker standing between his grandmother (right) and her chauffeur (left), 1933.

Courtesy of Dr. August Oetker KG, Company Archives

When Rudolf-August finished high school in September 1936, he took part in six months of Nazi-mandated labor service. For the labor service’s graduation ceremony, he bused in two hundred female employees from Dr. Oetker in Bielefeld as dance partners for his comrades. He would remember it as “a fun party.” After dropping out of military service because of health problems, he moved to Hamburg in 1937 to complete a bank apprenticeship. Hardly your average apprentice, Rudolf-August first lived in the Four Seasons Hotel on central Hamburg’s Inner Alster Lake, but soon he started searching for a suitable residence on the banks of the Outer Alster, Hamburg’s priciest location.

He quickly found a property at Bellevue 15. There, Rudolf-August bought an Aryanized lake villa with a large plot of land previously owned by Kurt Heldern, a Jewish tobacco executive who had fled Nazi Germany for Sydney, Australia. Rudolf-August was aware of the acquisition’s dubious provenance; even his Nazi stepfather was initially against the purchase. “It’s out of the question,” Kaselowsky told him. “Tears stick to this house.” Undeterred, Rudolf-August bought the villa and the land through Dr. Oetker, at far below their market value. His new neighbors included Hamburg’s Nazi mayor, whom his stepfather knew from Himmler’s Circle of Friends. Rudolf-August then Aryanized a plot of land behind his new villa from a different neighbor: the Lipmanns, a Jewish couple. They were forced to sell their land, among other belongings, to finance their “desperate emigration efforts.” The land was worth at least 119,000 reichsmarks. “After lengthy negotiations,” Rudolf-August stated that he was willing to pay just half. The local Nazi authorities, who had to approve the sale of any Jewish-owned asset, lowered the final price to 45,500 reichsmarks. The Lipmanns eventually managed to flee to Uruguay.

Rudolf-August, meanwhile, was making the most of his move to Hamburg. He often spent weekends with friends along the Baltic Sea, in fashionable beach towns like Heiligendamm. There, he ran into Joseph Goebbels, who was on a family holiday. Rudolf-August approached the propaganda minister and introduced himself, and they exchanged a few “friendly words.” At the town’s racecourse, Hermann Göring awarded Rudolf-August the prize when a stud from his stepfather’s stable won a race. The Oetker heir’s group of friends in Hamburg included Jews, who “must have suffered from the reprisals,” but like so many other Germans, Rudolf-August was indifferent to their plight. He also knew about the concentration camps but accepted the regime’s line that the camps held only enemies of the state. “We thought nothing more of it. After all, those who came out of the concentration camp said nothing,” Rudolf-August later recalled. But the heir had gotten to know concentration camps much better than he let on. After all, the SS had trained him in one.