On January 8, 1955, a memorial service was held for Günther Quandt in the assembly hall of Frankfurt’s Goethe University. Hermann Josef Abs — one of the Third Reich’s most influential bankers, who was now rapidly becoming West Germany’s most powerful financier as the chairman of Deutsche Bank — had this to say of Günther in his eulogy: “He never submitted servilely to the overbearing state.” It was the exact opposite of what Abs had said about Günther during the mogul’s lavish sixtieth-birthday bash in Berlin, in 1941. Back then, speaking to the Nazi elite, the banker had lauded Günther’s servility: “But your most outstanding characteristic is your faith in Germany and the Führer.”
Horst Pavel, Günther’s closest aide and a key architect of AFA’s Aryanization strategy, also delivered a eulogy, which barely mentioned the Nazi era, except to say how extremely hard his boss and mentor had worked during the war. Instead, Pavel spoke admiringly about Günther’s “brilliant” ability to capitalize on Germany’s many financial and political disasters: “He . . . prepared his actions carefully and then operated as skillfully as he did tenaciously until the set goal was ultimately achieved.”
Although the Soviet authorities had expropriated Günther’s firms, factories, houses, and estate in East Germany, he still retained many assets in West Germany: the AFA battery factory in Hannover, several DWM weapons plants plus its subsidiaries Mauser and Dürener, and what remained of Byk Gulden, a massive chemicals and pharmaceuticals firm that had already been Aryanized when Günther bought it during the war, to name just a few. He also had an almost one-third stake in the oil and potash giant Wintershall left and a 4 percent interest in Daimler-Benz; until 1945, he had served as a supervisory board member of the Stuttgart-based car giant. It was a prescient move. Mass motorization was growing around the world, and West Germany’s economic future lay with the auto industry. In the years before his death, Günther restructured AFA, positioning it as key supplier of accumulators and starter batteries for cars.
Restructuring in West Germany meant reckoning with some ugly truths. DWM’s full name — Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken — was changed to something that sounded more innocuous: IWK (for Industriewerke Karlsruhe). Plus, the firm was barred from making weapons and ammo, for now anyway. Günther’s Byk Gulden had grown into one of Germany’s largest pharmaceuticals businesses by the end of the war, but it partly consisted of Aryanized subsidiaries. After the war, heirs of the original Jewish owners initiated restitution proceedings. These negotiations were discreetly concluded, and land, buildings, and machinery were turned over to the heirs. Günther’s attorney approached these matters pragmatically: “There wasn’t a single German company that did not conduct Aryanizations during the war, so there were restitution proceedings here and there, and lawyers were needed for this,” he later recalled.
Günther had fought these proceedings tooth and nail where he could. In 1947, Fritz Eisner, a German Jewish chemist who had fled to London, filed a restitution claim against AFA in the British occupation zone. Günther had Aryanized Eisner’s electrochemical companies outside Berlin in 1937, and now Eisner wanted to be compensated to make up for Günther’s pittance of a payment to him. But the firms now lay in the Soviet occupation zone and had been expropriated. Instead of apologizing to Eisner for extorting and underpaying him, Günther had AFA’s lawyers fight the claim on jurisdictional grounds. Eisner’s restitution claim was rejected in 1955, not long after Günther died.