During the 1990s, external pressures forced German businesses to deal with a part of their Nazi past that they had avoided for decades: the brutal use of millions of people in forced and slave labor. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union fell. The Cold War ended, and Germany was finally reunified. More than a million surviving coerced laborers were freed after decades behind the Iron Curtain, and some turned their anger on the German firms that had exploited them under the Nazi regime. In the United States, survivors sued German businesses in class action lawsuits, while advertisements called for boycotts of German companies and their products. In a globalizing world, German firms began to feel the damage that their unresolved involvement with the Nazis could do to their share prices, sales, and standing. Some firms opened their archives to allow historians to research the company’s role in the Third Reich; a few even commissioned the research themselves. Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, Allianz, and Deutsche Bank were the most prominent among them.
By the time these studies were initiated, none of the global German companies that had commissioned them were controlled by a business dynasty. The Flicks and Quandts were long out of Daimler, as were the von Fincks from Allianz and Munich Re. The dynastic influence over Volkswagen was limited to Ferdinand Piëch, a mighty descendant of Anton Piëch and Ferdinand Porsche. He began leading the Volkswagen Group in 1993, years after a study was commissioned but not before disgruntled executives who had been passed over for the job leaked the story that Piëch was an inappropriate choice to head the company, given that his father and grandfather had used tens of thousands of people as forced and slave labor during their reign at Volkswagen. Piëch’s enemies insinuated that his appointment would cause bad press in America, Volkswagen’s most important growth market. Piëch survived the attack, and none of the other German business dynasties made any effort during the 1990s to shed light on their families’ roles in the Third Reich.
A branch of the Flick dynasty — specifically the sons of Otto-Ernst Flick, Muck and Mick — was the first to experience public blowback, after attaching their surname to philanthropic giving in academia and art. The two had been bought out of the Flick conglomerate for hundreds of millions of deutsch marks by their uncle Friedrich Karl, back in 1975 — alongside their sister, Dagmar, who received much less money than her brothers, as she had been given half as many shares to begin with.
In 1992, Muck, who was based in London, was appointed to Oxford University’s court of benefactors, following his initial donation of 350,000 pounds. This money was used to create a professorship under the Flick name at Balliol College. But in 1996, Muck withdrew his name and his money amid a wave of protests over the Flick family’s past. Protesters were incensed that the Flicks had thus far refused to compensate any survivors of forced and slave labor. Although, in an open letter to the Daily Telegraph, the multimillionaire Muck expressed his “total abhorrence of what took place in Germany during the Third Reich” and his “profound personal shame for the involvement of my grandfather in these dreadful events,” he told the Jewish Chronicle that compensation could leave him “destitute,” adding, “How can you compensate for human tragedy with money?”
Although the uproar in Oxford died down after Muck withdrew his money, the Flick controversy concerning compensation was only just beginning. In August 2000, a foundation named Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future (EVZ) was established in Berlin by the German state and German companies. The EVZ was founded following an agreement between the US and German governments. Compensation payments would be made to survivors of forced and slave labor on the condition that no more legal cases would be brought against German firms before American courts. As one historian put it: “In this way, the German government and German industry together developed a rhetoric of responsibility with, yet again, no explicit or individual admission of legal liability . . . the German government occupied the moral high ground, while significant perpetrators conveniently disappeared behind a veil of apparent responsibility without actual guilt.” The negotiator for the German state was Count Otto von Lambsdorff, the only minister who had been forced to resign because of the Flick bribery scandal. The former politician was even convicted of tax evasion in the affair, but that was clearly no impediment to becoming the head of the negotiations for compensation.
Between 2001 and 2006, the EVZ paid out about 4.4 billion euros (around $5.85 billion by December 2006) to more than 1.66 million former coerced laborers. To the almost 300,000 surviving slave laborers used in concentration camps and ghettos, the highest compensation was 7,670 euros each (about $10,000). To the 1.35 million who had survived forced labor, it was 2,560 euros each (about $3,500). In all, the state of Germany and German businesses contributed equally to the 5.2 billion euros (almost $7 billion) that the foundation had at its disposal. But more than 60 percent of that money had been contributed by just 17 firms out of the 6,500 German companies paying into the EVZ fund. These 17 businesses included major global names such as Allianz, BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen, Siemens, and Krupp. About 1,560 German firms contributed only some 500 euros each ($665) to the foundation — a symbolic gesture at best.
All the money that was pledged by German companies was supposed to have been paid by the time the EVZ foundation was established in 2000. However, when the EVZ started its operations that year, it was still missing hundreds of millions in contributions that various German firms and their owners had pledged. Companies controlled by the Quandts and Reimanns had already paid in, as had those owned by the Porsche-Piëch clan and the Oetkers. Now, the Flicks were called upon by the foundation to do the same. But with no immediate effect.
In 2001, when Muck’s younger brother, Mick, announced the building of a museum in Zurich, to be designed by Rem Koolhaas as a place to house Mick’s contemporary art collection, the compensation controversy reignited. Major protests broke out against the proposed museum. Mick withdrew the plan and instead lent his collection to a museum in Berlin in 2004. Again, the story caught fire. At the height of the uproar, Mick’s sister, Dagmar, wrote an open letter in Die Zeit, announcing that she had anonymously contributed millions to the EVZ in early 2001 and that she was commissioning a group of German historians to chronicle the Flick firm and family during the twentieth century. Dagmar’s brothers soon followed her example. Mick mimicked his sister particularly closely: he first donated millions to the EVZ, and then funded the work of five historians who investigated the operations of the Flick conglomerate during the Third Reich.