From prison, Flick had to delegate tasks in order to rescue what remained of his industrial empire. Whereas about half of his conglomerate had been expropriated by the Soviet authorities in their occupation zone, the other half stood under American and British property control. That latter half had to be safely guided as the Allies planned a restructuring of West Germany’s steel and coal conglomerates. The Americans and the British wanted to deconcentrate the German economy and eliminate the risk of rearmament. After his trial ended in December 1947, Flick dispatched two acquitted associates to the American and British occupation zones, one to each. The two would negotiate with Allied and German authorities about what that restructuring would look like.
These complex negotiations were still going on when Flick was released from Landsberg Prison. After the establishment of West Germany, President Truman appointed John J. McCloy, a Republican lawyer who had been an architect of American occupation policy and the Nuremberg tribunal, as the first US high commissioner for occupied Germany. Over 1950 and 1951, McCloy oversaw a series of controversial acts of clemency affecting more than a hundred Nuremberg convicts. He not only pardoned industrialists such as Alfried Krupp, even returning his assets, but he also commuted death sentences and reduced prison time for many high-ranking SS officers, all of them responsible for massacring hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jews, across Nazi-occupied Europe. McCloy’s decision was political. It was intended to placate an important new ally: the West German government and citizens. Many were pushing for these reduced sentences.
Telford Taylor was furious. In early 1951, the former Nuremberg prosecutor condemned McCloy’s decision in The Nation as the “embodiment of political expediency, distorted by a thoroughly unsound approach to the law and the facts, to say nothing of the realities of contemporary world politics.” But those politics now favored the convicted German war criminals. The Truman administration was getting bogged down in the Cold War and the Korean War, and it needed a good relationship with West Germany. Certain sacrifices had to be made.
Flick was released on August 25, 1950, after McCloy reduced his sentence by two years for good behavior. The sixty-seven-year-old tycoon had spent five years behind bars, partly working as registrar at Landsberg Prison’s library. Flick had neglected this job so much that his successor had to work off a four-month backlog of returned books. Now it was time for Flick to get back to the real work. As the prison gates opened, reporters and photographers were awaiting the mogul and the other Nuremberg convicts released alongside him. Flick, who still abhorred press attention, hid behind an umbrella and made a beeline to a waiting limousine, where he joined his wife, Marie, in the back. The limo then sped off into the Bavarian countryside. Friedrich Flick was a free man.
When speaking to friends and colleagues, Flick was dismissive about his conviction at the Nuremberg trial: “My court was clearly an American court. Everyone, secretaries, auxiliary staff and judges, were Americans. Besides, they prayed for the USA twice a day. The rejection of my appeal was only in accordance with the national interest of the USA.” Flick had undergone denazification proceedings in prison and was classified as exonerated in the British occupation zone. Because he had moved the seat of his conglomerate to Düsseldorf, which lay in that zone, Flick was allowed to return to work directly after his release and take over the delicate negotiations for the restructuring of his business.
And he did that quite successfully. In late 1951, Flick sold a quarter stake in his massive Maxhütte steel firm to the Bavarian state. One year later, the Allied High Commission signed off on Flick’s restructuring plan. By May 1954, Flick had sold the majority stakes in his two remaining coal companies. All these sales netted Flick about a quarter billion deutsch marks. He reinvested part of the proceeds in a French and a Belgian steel firm, which made Flick a most undesirable trailblazer of the nascent economic integration of Western Europe. And he still had some 150 million deutsch marks left to invest. What to do with all that money? Flick soon found a place for it in one of the world’s largest car companies: Daimler-Benz. By the end of the decade, the convicted Nazi war criminal was once again on top. He was Germany’s wealthiest man.