On December 27, 1954, Günther Quandt traveled to Egypt for a holiday. Since his denazification trials concluded he was working harder than ever, laboring away in a nondescript office in Frankfurt to restructure what remained of his business empire. But his health was frail. He had rapidly recovered from a minor stroke in 1950, but he still had to check in at a hospital every three to six months for a few weeks to address various other health issues. Günther always arrived at the hospital with a suitcase full of work documents. Now he wanted to flee Germany’s brutal winter and spend a couple of weeks down in Africa. For this post-Christmas holiday, the traveler had assembled an itinerary that included a sightseeing trip to the pyramids at Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo. He stayed at the capital’s famed luxury hotel, Mena House. But he never made it to the pyramids. On the morning of December 30, 1954, Günther died in his hotel suite, with its views of the Sphinx. Whether he died alone remains a mystery. It was long rumored that the mogul succumbed following “a little death.” Günther was seventy-three years old.
The mood in West Germany had changed earlier that year. German pride was back. After the country beat Hungary in the 1954 World Cup soccer final, the Nazi era chant “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” (“Germany, Germany above all”) rang through the stadium in Bern. Germany was back, but Günther was gone.
The 1950s were more than just a new decade. They were the dawn of a new German era, all of it thanks to the US government. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 was the spark that ignited West Germany’s economic resurgence. As the Truman administration began spending billions on rearmament, it turned many American factories over to the manufacture of weapons. As a result, production of many other goods bottlenecked, and scarcities spiked. West Germany stepped in to pick up the slack. A key Western industrialized nation, it was able to fill that manufacturing vacuum and likewise could handle the massive global demand in consumer goods by means of its export prowess. By 1953, West Germany’s economy had quadrupled. Any lingering aversion to buying German products clearly and quickly vanished from other countries.
In the new federal republic of West Germany, led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, heralded an age of unprecedented economic growth and massive prosperity for most Germans. In particular, those “denazified” tycoons and their heirs in the West entered an epoch of unfathomable global wealth, which persists to this day. But this newfound windfall entirely bypassed the millions living in the Soviet-led Communist state of East Germany. And as that inequity festered, a culture of silence also permeated the divided Germany. It buried the horrors of the Third Reich and the diabolical roles that many Germans had played in it. As West Germany’s moguls turned their tens or hundreds of millions of reichsmarks into billions of deutsch marks and dollars, and (re)gained control of swaths of the German and global economy, they rarely, if ever, looked back. These tycoons left their heirs with firms and fortunes worth billions — but also with a bloodstained history waiting to be uncovered.