Non-fiction book: Honorable merchants in the Nazi era?

Felix Matheis opens a macabre chapter in the history of German capitalism. He is reminiscent of Hanseatic merchants who followed German weapons or even moved ahead of them, always ready and no matter where to do profitable business.

The “Assembly of an Honorable Merchant” was founded in Hamburg as early as 1517. It still exists today, has 1,200 members and proudly calls itself “the largest value-oriented association in Germany”. During the Nazi era, it was celebrated as a New Year’s event, the author knows, and then explains: “If ‘respectability’ did not just refer to the socially elite status of merchants, it also meant economic ethics norms. Attitudes and practices that form the basis for an honest and trusting business relationship between entrepreneurs, for example fairness, reliability, sense of responsibility and loyalty, were and are considered “honorable.”

Based on meticulous archival studies in Germany and Poland, Matheis shows that such “respectability” did not apply to the locals in the German colonies, nor to the peoples of the East who were invaded and subjugated by Nazi Germany, not to mention the Jewish population. In the conquered areas of the Soviet Union alone, over 180 Hamburg companies were involved in the extortion of the land and its people.

Matheis focuses his investigation on the traces of Hanseatic merchants and their “employment companies” in occupied Poland, who, from the treacherous attack on September 1, 1939, followed on the heels of the Wehrmacht and the SD and SS task forces. The author shows that at least 51 companies from Hamburg and Bremen operated in the “General Government”. Nazi Germany reduced the neighboring country to a colony, whose population became “second-class people, in the case of the Jewish Poles even third-class people” and became fair game for exploitation and robbery. Occupation authorities and economic agents worked hand in hand.

Matheis reports on the German merchants’ service to the Nazis, which offered them a way out of the economic crisis and the opportunity to open up new objects for maximizing profits after they were “suddenly cut off from their transoceanic fields of activity” as a result of Germany’s defeat in the First World War were. Czechoslovakia and Austria were among their first new prey, where – as in Germany – they particularly benefited from the “Aryanization” of Jewish property. However, the large-scale “Hanseatic Eastern Mission” from 1940 until the end of the war brought them immeasurably rich profits. »The Hanseatic city merchants confidently announced their origins not only in occupied Poland. Back home, too, the chambers of commerce in Hamburg and Bremen were undoubtedly proud of their members’ activities in the newly developed market.” Opportunism and unscrupulousness had paid off for these “honorable merchants.”

A final chapter is devoted to the post-war situation. The Hanseatic traders showed no remorse, were not ashamed of their fraudulently and violently acquired wealth, and even sued as “expellees” or “expropriated” (by the Soviet occupying power) for compensation, some of which they received from the Nazi bureaucracy in the last days of the war had.

Mathei’s conclusion: »The Hanseatic city merchants formed an integral part of the occupation rule, which many of them interpreted and justified against the background of colonialist perspectives. The supposedly inferior local population, over which they had control as ‘master people’, as well as the spatial environment could be compared with African territories and their populations, in some of which they had been active until 1939. This colonial resonance space offered the people of Hamburg and Bremen the mental and moral resources to justify their own actions in the conquered territory and, moreover, to embed them in Hanseatic traditions, from whose point of view Poland was still considered ‘terra incognita’ in 1940.”

Felix Matheis: Hanseatics in the “Eastern operation”. Hamburg and Bremen trading companies in the General Government 1939–1945. Wallstein, 456 p., hardcover, €42.

Subscribe to the “nd”

Being left is complicated.
We keep track!

With our digital promotional subscription you can read all issues of »nd« digitally (nd.App or nd.Epaper) for little money at home or on the go.
Subscribe now!