Friedrich Flick fled from Berlin to Bavaria in February 1945. He absconded to his Sauersberg estate, just an hour south from where Günther was hiding out. Flick had acquired the Sauersberg property from the persecuted Jewish beer brewer Ignatz Nacher years earlier. (The estate is still owned by one of Flick’s granddaughters.)
Just before Allied forces liberated the Rombach steel complex in France, in late summer 1944, Otto-Ernst Flick fled back to Germany, where his father tasked him with yet another job. This time, it was leading the Gröditz weapons plant in Saxony. More than a thousand underfed concentration-camp prisoners were making artillery cannons and shells there. The captives were brought in from Flossenbürg and Dachau in Bavaria, Mauthausen and Gusen in Austria, and finally, Auschwitz. They were held and abused by the SS in the plant’s attic. In October 1944, Flick inspected the Gröditz factory hall when he came to install the twenty-eight-year-old Otto-Ernst as its director. Afterward Flick went for dinner at the factory’s casino to celebrate his son’s new job. As at Rombach, this appointment backfired. Within weeks of his arrival, the rash Otto-Ernst tried to oust two of his father’s trusted longtime executives.
Otto-Ernst had failed in each of his management positions since the war started. His father gave him another major promotion anyway. On February 1, 1945, Flick appointed Otto-Ernst as the CEO of Maxhütte, a major steel company with mills and ore mines across Bavaria and Thuringia. As at Rombach, Otto-Ernst succeeded his father-in-law, who was pushed into early retirement. The Flick heir started his new job on March 7, 1945, as the entire world seemed to be collapsing.
At Maxhütte, factory managers had been working the Ostarbeiter and prisoners of war for almost a hundred hours a week. The workers became far too weak to press on. Still, the managers cut their already minimal food rations as punishment for “faking” being incapacitated. “The Russian eats a lot, and they didn’t get that much,” an employee later concisely concluded. Accidents and deaths were frequent; women who performed forced labor worked barefoot in the steel mills — “a bad thing in bad weather,” one of the firm’s executives dryly remarked.
In mid-March 1945, an epidemic of spotted fever spread through Gröditz, killing some 150 prisoners in a matter of days. Weeks later, with the Red Army and US troops fast approaching the plant, the SS sent the remaining Gröditz captives on a ten-day death march toward Prague. But not before shooting about 185 prisoners who were deemed too weak to walk and burying them in a gravel pit near Flick’s factory.
While prisoners were being starved and massacred at his firms, Flick — safe and sound at his Sauersberg estate, on a hill west of Bad Tölz — initiated the so-called Tölzer program. He had already split his headquarters between Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Bavaria. Now, to provide himself with a postwar nest egg, Flick tried to transfer assets from his conglomerate to his personal ownership. But the maneuver failed.
In June 1945 the US Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), the military security agency tasked with detaining and questioning many of Nazi Germany’s most notorious suspects, put Flick under house arrest. By that time the industrialist had been able to transfer only one of his businesses. As it happened, the Fella firm hadn’t made weapons during the war — it was Flick’s sole machinery company that hadn’t done so. Flick’s steel and coal conglomerate was now at risk of being seized entirely. More than half of his factories and mines lay in the Soviet zone and would soon be expropriated. The rest of Flick’s plants were placed under the Allies’ control, for now. His continental empire of weapons, slaves, and plunder had finally fallen.
Flick’s arrest had been months in the making. In a memo of May 1945, the OSS called him “the most powerful individual business leader sharing the formulation and execution of Nazi economic policies,” who “has shared in the spoils of Nazi conquest in Europe.” After weeks spent under house arrest, Flick was officially detained and moved to Kransberg Castle (code name Dustbin), an Allied detention center north of Frankfurt. Other high-profile suspects such as Albert Speer, Hjalmar Schacht, and Wernher von Braun were being interrogated there. Robert H. Jackson, a Supreme Court justice and the recently appointed chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, received a memo written by an aide, which outlined a possible trial of industrialists, listing Flick, “Germany’s most powerful industrialist,” as a potential defendant.
In early August 1945, Flick was transferred from Kransberg to Frankfurt and handed over to the US Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS), which had occupied IG Farben’s former headquarters in the city’s Westend district. Days before Flick was moved, the last Allied Conference concluded in Potsdam. There, the American president, Harry Truman; the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin; and the new British prime minister, Clement Attlee, came to an agreement on their goals for the occupation of Germany: “democratization, denazification, demilitarization, and decartelization.”
Truman had long sanctioned the first official American occupation policy for Germany, which would keep certain parts of industry, instead of destroying all of it, and hold proper judicial proceedings against Nazi war criminals, rather than summarily executing them. Days after the Potsdam Conference concluded, the Allied powers, including France, signed the charter to establish the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg. The IMT would indict and try twenty-four of Nazi Germany’s most important political and military leaders on war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. The IMT was to be just the first of many Nuremberg cases, however, including a possible second trial held by the Allies to be focused exclusively on German industrialists, financiers, and CEOs. Given how deeply intertwined with the Nazi war machine these industrial conglomerates and cartels had been — take Flick and Krupp’s steel and coal conglomerates and IG Farben’s enormous chemicals interests, for example — the Allies opted for a divide-and-conquer approach. They planned to break up these industrial behemoths and prosecute their owners and executives.
After his father’s arrest, Otto-Ernst seized the chance to fill the power vacuum and embarked on a rash reorganization. He started firing longtime Maxhütte managers whom he didn’t trust and replaced them with those he perceived as loyalists, including two former members of the SS and the SA. The American authorities in Bavaria didn’t take kindly to that move. They promptly arrested Otto-Ernst and held him for a few days; they canceled the changes to personnel he had made at Maxhütte. But after his release, the Flick heir picked up right where he’d left off. On July 30, 1945, Otto-Ernst reinstated himself and the Nazi managers. The US authorities had seen enough and barred the twenty-eight-year-old from entering Maxhütte. Otto-Ernst was soon rearrested and brought to the Frankfurt prison where his father was confined. With both of them jailed and all their mines and factories occupied, the future of the Flick conglomerate was looking grim indeed.