Bank ‘part-owned firm that built Nazi crematoria’

ONE of Germany’s leading banks financed Nazi arms makers and owned a stake in a company that built crematoria at the Auschwitz concentration camp, authors of a bank-commissioned report found yesterday.

The 2,400-page study is the result of seven years of work by a team of historians who scoured a huge number of Dresdner Bank’s files to detail its involvement with Adolf Hitler’s regime before and during World War II.

Wulf Meier, a member of the bank’s management board, said the report “calls things by their proper names, and we accept these truths, even if they are painful”.

The bank, which was government-owned during the early years of the Nazi regime and remained under strong government influence after it passed back into private hands in 1937, was long known to have done business with the Nazi government - as did German big business in general.

Now a part of insurer Allianz, it is Germany’s third-largest bank.

What emerged from the study, the historians said, is that Dresdner was a part owner of Huta Hoch und Tiefbau, a construction firm that built the crematoria used to dispose of bodies at the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland.

According to economic historian Johannes Baehr, it was “the most extensive involvement by a bank in an accomplice firm in Auschwitz”.

The company financed Nazi arms plants and did extensive business with Nazi occupation authorities in Eastern Europe.

Two top bank executives, Emil Meyer and Karl Rasche, were members of the SS, a paramilitary group whose involvement in Nazi crimes included running concentration camps.

The report said the majority of the bank’s top managers were not Nazi Party members but nonetheless sought to take advantage of the business opportunities presented by close co-operation with the regime.

Meyer committed suicide at the end of the war and Rasche was sentenced to seven years in prison for his activities.

Dresdner Bank said it gave the scholars a free hand to probe the bank’s archives and reveal what they found.

The bank was one of the business contributors to a $6 billion (€5.02bn) business-government fund that began paying out compensation in 2001 to people forced to work as slave labourers to the Nazis.

Mr Meier said the bank would conduct internal discussions about any further steps today’s bank needed to make in response to the findings.