18.

While most of the Third Reich’s tycoons were walking away with little more than a slap on the wrist, one industrialist notably did not. On March 15, 1947, Friedrich Flick was led into the cramped dock at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, alongside five of his associates. Telford Taylor, the US chief prosecutor for the trial, read out the indictments against them. Flick and the other defendants were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for the mass use of forced and slave labor. Flick and four of the other accused were indicted for the looting of expropriated companies in Nazi-occupied France and parts of the Soviet Union. Flick, his former right-hand man, Otto Steinbrinck, and Flick’s cousin Konrad Kaletsch were indicted for several major Aryanizations in Nazi Germany before the war. Flick and Steinbrinck were also indicted for financially supporting the SS and its crimes as members of Himmler’s Circle of Friends. The six defendants all pleaded not guilty.

The Flick case was the fifth out of twelve American-led trials at Nuremberg’s Military Tribunal, and the first of three trials involving industrialists. The cases against Alfried Krupp, his directors, and the executives of the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben rounded out the business triumvirate. (Nazi economic functionaries Wilhelm Keppler and Paul Pleiger were each sentenced to a decade in prison in the so-called ministries trial.) Flick had been one of the Third Reich’s largest arms producers, Aryanizers, and exploiters of forced and slave labor through his steel, coal, and machinery conglomerate. During the war, the number of people coerced into making cannons and shells in Flick’s steel factories, or digging coal in his mines, may have been as high as 100,000.

No other tycoon had benefited from Nazi Germany as Flick had. Only Alfried Krupp, the other steel giant, whose trial would commence later that year, and his father, Gustav, who was too senile to stand trial, could compete in magnitude of weapons production and appetite for forced and slave labor. But Flick had built his own industrial empire from the ground up in only thirty years, rather than inheriting it over a century, as the Krupps had. Hitler had often publicly invoked the Krupps as a model for German industry — even creating an inheritance law just for them, to regulate succession — but Flick had done it all under the radar, in stealth and silence, since 1933. The press-hating mogul would now, for the first time, be exposed to the entire world.

Friedrich Flick standing between court marshals at his Nuremberg trial, 1947.

SZ Photo/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo

On April 19, 1947, Flick’s trial began in earnest. In his opening statement, Telford Taylor emphasized the broad co-responsibility of German industrialists for Nazi crimes and for keeping Hitler afloat. “A dictatorship is successful, not because everybody opposes it, but because powerful groups support it,” he contended. “The Third Reich dictatorship was based on this unholy trinity of Nazism, militarism, and economic imperialism.” Taylor then quoted from the speech Hitler had given during the now-infamous February 1933 meeting in Berlin with the group of tycoons that had included Flick, Günther Quandt, and August von Finck, in which the führer had said: “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy.” The titans of industry and finance had agreed with the Nazi leader, the attorney declared. As their moral values became corrupt, so did their business practices, Taylor argued.

The prosecutor concluded his opening statement on a stern note:

The story of this case is . . . a story of betrayal. The defendants were men of wealth; many mines and factories were their private property. They will certainly tell you that they believed in the sanctity of private property, and perhaps they will say that they supported Hitler because German communism threatened that concept. But the factories of Rombach and Riga belonged to someone else. The defendants will tell you that they were not anti-Semitic, and even protected individual Jews against the Nazis. Yet it was not beneath them to appear in public with, and pay a king’s ransom to Himmler, who all but rendered the Jews extinct in Europe. They fattened on the misfortunes of wealthy Jews. Their mines and factories were worked by human labor and they, of all men, should have understood the true dignity of toil. Yet they turned back the clock and revived slavery in Europe. These men shamelessly betrayed whatever ideals they might have been expected to possess and, in the end, they betrayed Germany. In this lies their true guilt.

Over the next five weeks, Taylor and his deputies presented the prosecution’s case against Flick and the five other defendants. There was overwhelming evidence for the use of forced and slave labor in the Flick conglomerate, as well as the firm’s Aryanization and expropriation of companies. But it wasn’t easy for the prosecutors to pin down Flick and the others who stood accused when it came to individual knowledge of and responsibility for these mass transgressions. The three judges from American state courts didn’t help. They struggled at times with the complexity of the case and the reams of corporate documents translated from German.

On July 2, 1947, Flick’s lawyer, Rudolf Dix, opened the case for the defense. Flick had beat Günther Quandt to Dix and retained him just after the lawyer had successfully defended Hjalmar Schacht in the main Nuremberg trial. In his opening statement, Dix spoke about the powerlessness of German industry and the accused businessmen in the face of the all-powerful Nazi state. He argued that the regime, not Flick, was responsible for slave labor and Aryanizations. The mogul hadn’t plundered the expropriated companies abroad — he had invested in them, Dix contended. And just being a member of a group like Himmler’s Circle of Friends could hardly be considered criminal, he said. Overall, Dix argued, the Americans had indicted Flick only to serve as a symbol, a representative of all of German industry.

Three days later, Flick was the first of the accused to take the witness stand. Over the next eleven days, and for up to six hours a day, the aging industrialist defended himself in cross-examination, standing upright the entire time. Flick painted a picture of himself as someone who in 1933 had entered the Nazi era with a target on his back. He said that he was nationally despised after secretly selling his majority stake in the country’s largest industrial conglomerate, the VSt, to a weakened German state at the height of the Depression, and at a major premium, no less. He also contended that his large donations to political parties and candidates other than the NSDAP, just before Hitler seized power, made him a mark. Flick denied that the Nazi regime had helped him build his fortune: “I was glad if I was left alone and if I had my security. I did not ask for more because I wanted to live in peace and quiet and continue with the work of my life. Of course, I needed some protection for that, because after all, I had a political record.”

Flick fashioned himself a victim of the Nazis, a man with ties to the Resistance, and a defender of the dispossessed and oppressed. He said that he had been “an advocate” of the Jewish Petschek families, whose massive brown coal assets he actually had looted, and stated that he had been “representing their interests in this desperate economic situation.” Flick dismissed any anti-Semitic actions or statements attributed to him as “howling with the wolves.” He claimed that his membership in Himmler’s Circle of Friends was part personal insurance, part networking, and part support of the SS leader’s hobbies and cultural interests. Flick also said that he had invested in seized factories such as Rombach and had made improvements to the nutrition provided for those in forced and slave labor there.

Faced with the prosecution’s enormous documentary evidence, the defense chose to deploy an array of strategies. One was to shift all responsibility to coercion from the state. Another was to emphasize the decentralized nature of the Flick conglomerate, making it seem as if all decision-making authority lay with individual managers, not with Flick himself. The defense flooded the judges with Persilscheine, submitting 445 affidavits for the defendants, many attesting to their apolitical or anti-Nazi virtues. The defense also took to discrediting the prosecution’s witnesses, most notably those who had survived forced and slave labor in Flick’s factories. This led to several bizarre confrontations. One defense lawyer lectured a woman, a former Ostarbeiter, stating that the average German currently had less to eat than she had in a Rombach forced-labor camp. Dix trivialized a description of the use of French forced labor in one of Flick’s factory kitchens by saying that the French were, after all, the “best cooks in the world.” The presiding judge epitomized just how painfully uninformed the American magistrates were when, in all seriousness, he asked a former concentration camp prisoner at Flick’s Gröditz factory whether there hadn’t been red wine for dinner there.

Flick’s feckless elder son, Otto-Ernst, played along with the charade. He had somehow escaped indictment for his leading roles at the Rombach and Gröditz steel plants; still, he was called up as a defense witness. The thirty-one-year-old heir testified about “strolling” around the Rombach complex in the French Lorraine, observing what he considered to be the more or less comfortable living conditions of the coerced workers. He also declared that he had provided underused female laborers with the opportunity to work in his garden on Sundays, so that they “would get something particularly good to eat.”

The defense took three months to present its cases for the six accused men. Then, in late November 1947, the prosecution began closing arguments. Telford Taylor urged the American judges not to give in to the defense’s argument that this trial was “a mere anachronism” in a rapidly changing Germany. Instead, Taylor argued that “the reconstruction which the world needs is not merely material but also moral reconstruction.” The prosecutor stated that while the accused gave “every indication of devotion to the profit system . . . they are less ardently attached to certain other fundamental principles upon which the business community of any civilized nation must depend.” Their “devotion to the capitalist system” wasn’t above the law, he said. “Free enterprise does not depend upon slave labor, and honest business does not expand by plunder.” The attorney concluded, “Surely . . . businessmen must be held to the same standard of steadfastness, and of unwillingness to commit crimes, whether in the face of temptation or threat, that the law requires of all individuals.”

Dix summarized his closing arguments in defense of Flick with words from his opening statement: “The defendants lived in the Third Reich under a government which forced those they governed to do impious and iniquitous acts. It was their tragedy, but not their guilt, not even their tragic guilt.” The lawyer for Bernhard Weiss, Flick’s nephew, wasn’t as subtle and questioned the “large scope” of the prosecution in the proceedings: “This first trial of industrialists is not an attack on Dr. Flick and his assistants, but an attack on the entire German economy, on German capitalism and its industrialists.”

Flick agreed. He had the final word before the judges, making a statement on behalf of all six defendants. He had worn a scowl, black-rimmed reading glasses, and a fading gray double-breasted suit almost every day over the past eight months. “I am here as an exponent of German industry,” thundered the white-haired mogul. “By having sentence passed on me, the prosecution is endeavoring to lend truth to their contention that it was German industry which lifted Hitler into the saddle, which encouraged him to wage aggressive wars, and instigated the ruthless exploitation of the human and economic potential of the occupied territories . . . I protest against the fact that in my person German industrialists are being stigmatized in the eyes of the world as slave owners and spoliators . . . Nobody . . . who know [sic] my fellow defendants and myself, will be willing to believe that we committed crimes against humanity, and nothing will convince us that we are war criminals.”

The presiding judge then ordered a recess. The magistrates would return to the court in four weeks to rule on the Flick case — just in time for Christmas.