8.

In late November 2018, Der Spiegel published a bombshell cover story titled “The Billionaire and the AfD.” In the 2017 federal elections, the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) became the largest opposition party in the country’s national parliament, and the first far-right party to hold seats there in almost sixty-five years. Since its founding in 2013, the AfD has risen rapidly.

But the octogenarian billionaire mentioned in the headline, Baron August von Finck Jr., still kept to the shadows. After selling his family’s private bank, Merck Finck, to Barclays for about $370 million in 1990, the aristocrat rose to become one of the world’s wealthiest and most reclusive investors. A few of his investments, at least the ones that are known, have included German and Swiss firms such as the construction business Hochtief, the hotel chain Mövenpick, the goods testing company SGS, and the insulation maker von Roll. Von Finck Jr.’s fortune, estimated at more than $9 billion, is managed at the family’s corporate headquarters on Munich’s tony Promenadeplatz. Though the von Finck assets are said to include about half of Munich’s city center, and much of the land around it, he mostly lived abroad. In 1999, von Finck Jr. immigrated with his wife, Francine, and their four children to tax-friendly Switzerland. One of their bases there became a medieval castle bought by his father. It overlooks the town of Weinfelden, near the German border.

Von Finck Jr. was even more secretive than his father. The heir, nicknamed “Gustl,” never gave an interview to the press. The few images of him showed a tall man with white hair and sharp green eyes, often dressed in a dark-gray suit, wearing a Hermès tie, and alternating between two facial expressions: a stern look and a smile. He inherited some of his father’s oddball thriftiness. Although he liked to commute between his stately homes by helicopter, he drove his cars until they rusted through and broke down. He brought his own meat, cheese, and bread to parties, and he served his wealthy guests a slice of meatloaf at family celebrations. Von Finck Jr. never commissioned a study of history that reckoned with his father’s adulation of Hitler, his Aryanizations of private banks, and his dubious denazification. Among the traits inherited from his father, Gustl had a preference for reactionary politics. Whereas his father raised twenty million reichsmarks for Hitler’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst, von Finck Jr. became well established as a donor to German right-wing and far-right political organizations.

August von Finck Jr. in the 2000s.

Andreas Heddergott/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo

The documented start of Gustl’s political giving began soon after he sold the family’s private bank. In 1993, a banker friend of the aristocratic investor quipped to Der Spiegel: “To the right of Gustl is only Genghis Khan.” Flush with cash after the sale to Barclays, von Finck Jr. started backing reactionary causes. Between 1992 and 1998, he gave 8.5 million deutsch marks (about $5 million) in cash to the founder of a fringe right-wing party in Germany, which campaigned against the introduction of the euro. The politician was later convicted for tax evasion related to the donated cash, which was often hand-delivered by Ernst Knut Stahl, Gustl’s right-hand man.

After this initial failure, von Finck Jr. moved on to support parties that were better established. To retain a certain anonymity, he only once donated under his own name. All other donations came from entities he controls. Between 1998 and 2008, some of his subsidiaries donated about 3.6 million euros (about $5 million) to Bavaria’s Christian conservative CSU. In 2009, one of his entities gave 1.1 million euros (approximately $1.5 million), in three tranches, to the free-market FDP. Soon after receiving his donations, the coalition parties successfully pushed for lower tax rates on hotel stays; it happened that von Finck Jr. owned a part of the Mövenpick hotel chain at the time. The FDP was ridiculed as the “Mövenpick party.” The media viewed the scandal as a small-scale version of the Flick affair, a German synonym for bought politics.

Von Finck Jr. donated to causes that could be categorized as free-market conservative, anti–European Union, and anti-euro; his political outlook was best described as libertarian. In 2003, he donated millions to a lobbying organization that advocated for a smaller German government. The now defunct group’s longtime chair, Beatrix von Storch, is currently one of the AfD’s deputy leaders. Germany’s Ludwig von Mises Institute — named for the economist whose writings in favor of the gold standard are a longtime staple of libertarians, as are gold investments — is based at the von Finck headquarters in Munich. So, in 2010, with Europe in the grip of a financial crisis, Gustl entered the gold-trading business. His venture came with a lurid though not entirely unsurprising lack of historical sensitivity.

To brand his gold-trading firm, one of Gustl’s entities paid two million euros ($3 million) for the trademark rights to Degussa, an acronym for German Gold and Silver Separation Institute. The infamous chemicals conglomerate Degussa had helped produce the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B and had smelted precious metals plundered by the Nazis. In a 2004 company-commissioned study, a Northwestern University history professor, Peter Hayes, detailed how a subsidiary of Degussa developed the pesticide and how the SS became one of its trusted customers. Between 1941 and 1945, the SS used Zyklon B to gas more than a million people, almost all of them Jews, in extermination camps. After murdering millions in the camps or the ghettos, the Nazis stripped the corpses of gold teeth and fillings. Many of those metals ended up in Degussa’s smelting factories, generally in compressed form but sometimes in their original state. Degussa also refined and resold gold and silver worth millions; some of it had been stolen by the Nazis across Europe, some of it from Jews sent to concentration camps and death camps.

In a perverse twist of history, von Finck Jr., a right-wing billionaire whose Hitler-obsessed, anti-Semitic Nazi father grew his private bank by Aryanizing Jewish-owned assets in the Third Reich, ended up carrying the Degussa banner. Today Degussa gold and silver are marketed in high-end shopping locations across Europe. A Degussa shop sits next to the von Finck headquarters in Munich, and anyone can buy and sell precious metals there. But von Finck Jr. didn’t stop at this. He also installed a far-right CEO at Degussa, who once described the monetary policy of the European Central Bank as the “engine room of autogenocide.”