In October 1940, Günther Quandt, his right-hand-man Horst Pavel, and Herbert explored Nazi-occupied France for almost ten days. Günther had drawn up a “wish list,” noting a dozen takeover targets in France, including Jewish-owned firms, for his AFA battery business. And 1940 was a big year for Herbert. He turned thirty; he joined AFA’s executive board in charge of staffing, advertising, and the AFA subsidiary Pertrix; he divorced Ursula; and, befitting his new status as an executive, he became a member of the Nazi Party. The start of World War II had reconciled Herbert and his competitor Pavel. Herbert later recalled how their rivalry ended: “When the war came, the work became harder . . . I had to solve some tasks together with my colleague Dr. Pavel . . . In short, the war brought us . . . closer.” These tasks included buying up Aryanized firms formerly owned by French Jews. Or, as Herbert later cryptically put it, “Industrial firms or factories there had been offered or suggested to individual firms for acquisition.”
Now that war had arrived, Günther was determined to do what he did in any circumstance: profit from it. In August 1940, two months before the scouting trip, Günther sent one of his most trusted employees, Corbin Hackinger, to France. For the sake of appearance, Hackinger quit his job at AFA in Berlin before moving to Paris, where the mustachioed man in his early fifties set up shop on the fourth floor of 44 rue La Boétie, near the Élysée Palace. “Bureau Hackinger,” a barely camouflaged branch of AFA, covered Nazi-occupied and Vichy France. Hackinger’s many tasks there included identifying Jewish-owned companies and aiding in their Aryanization. Hackinger helped appropriate such firms for AFA via the use of front companies, trustees, straw men, and straw women, including his own mistress.
Günther, Herbert, and their cronies regarded French battery firms as easy marks for takeover. But they were wrong. Whereas the French authorities did eagerly collaborate with the Nazis, they didn’t want their companies falling into the hands of German industry, and they obstructed most Aryanizations that the foreigners tried to carry out. The French authorities preferred expropriating the Jewish citizens themselves. Hackinger lamented at the control exercised by French bureaucrats, but he dared do little more than complain.
Out of AFA’s seven known attempts at Aryanization, five failed. The two Aryanized French factories that Günther did succeed in buying came into his hands thanks to his elder son’s eager efforts. On behalf of Pertrix, Herbert and Pavel negotiated the takeover of the Aryanized Hirschfeld sheet-metal factory in Strasbourg, the capital of Nazi-occupied Alsace. It was much easier for German firms to operate in that region because Nazi authorities ruled it. Still desperate to prove himself to his father, Herbert would sometimes negotiate over the weekend in Strasbourg, so that he could be back in Berlin at the start of the week. This earned him praise from his fellow executives.
After his success with Hirschfeld, Herbert helped AFA acquire a majority stake in Dreyfus, another Aryanized sheet-metal business, this one located in the suburbs of Paris. Hackinger called it the “best . . . object” he had come across. The sheet metal factories could be used to produce flashlights, a staple product of Pertrix. Herbert had carved out his own territory at Pertrix, where he had started his career and was now a leading executive. But it wasn’t until he took on these new wartime responsibilities at AFA that Herbert finally earned the respect of his father. “Since that time . . . I have rarely made a decision, or considered a possibility of some significance without consulting him,” Günther later wrote of his elder son. It didn’t matter to father and son that they took over the seized livelihood and life’s work of Jews. To them the only thing that mattered was the expansion of the Quandt empire. And expand it they would. Belgian, Polish, Croatian, and Greek firms soon fell prey to the Quandts’ gang of corporate raiders.