The Absolute Power of a Technocrat

I. Preliminary note

This text passes no judgement. It assembles what is stated in generally accessible rendering about Hermann Josef Abs, and in doing so separates three things: what is documented, what is disputed among historians, and what could not be clarified because the files are missing or sealed.

The judgement remains with the reader. Whoever wishes to form one should know what he is basing it on.

All particulars are to be verified against the sources before use; the encyclopaedia article they follow itself carries a notice that it requires fundamental revision.

II. The rise

Hermann Josef Abs, born 15 October 1901 in Bonn, died 5 February 1994 in Bad Soden am Taunus.

Son of a lawyer and notary who was also a board member of a lignite company. Bank apprenticeship, one semester of study, then abandoned for lack of money. Foreign exchange dealer in Amsterdam, England, the United States, Latin America. Married in 1928 into a Cologne banking family.

In 1935 he became junior partner at Delbrück Schickler & Co. in Berlin — as successor to a Jewish partner, after the Nuremberg Laws came into force.

In 1937 he moved to Deutsche Bank, in 1938 he was appointed to the management board, where he remained until the end of the war. Responsible for foreign business and industrial financing — and in that capacity he canvassed in neutral states for the subscription of the war loans of National Socialist Germany.

He belonged to no party throughout his life. In 1943, in the course of the discussion on banking reform, the NSDAP pressed without success for the dismissal of the Catholic board members Clemens Plassmann and Abs.

III. What is documented

The remit. On the board of Deutsche Bank, Abs was charged with the Aryanisation of Jewish banks and companies.

The Creditanstalt. Immediately after the annexation of Austria he negotiated, accompanied by Walter Pohle, a former official of the Reich Ministry of Economics, over the takeover of what was then Austria’s largest bank. Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild was arrested by the SS and released on 11 May 1939 after fourteen months in solitary confinement — upon surrender of the entire Austrian family property.

Adler & Oppenheimer. Deutsche Bank’s largest Aryanisation of an industrial company. Abs and Pohle handled it; Abs joined the supervisory board in 1938. A consortium led by Deutsche Bank took over 75 per cent of the shares. On the sale of the company, renamed „Norddeutsche Lederwerke“, the bank made a profit of some 2.75 million Reichsmark. After restitution to the owners in 1947, Abs remained chairman of the supervisory board.

I.G. Farben. From 1940 a member of the supervisory board — one of his first such mandates. I.G. Farben built, for 900 million Reichsmark and as its largest construction project ever, a Buna works near the Auschwitz extermination camp. 25,000 prisoners died on the site or in the Monowitz sub-camp, which the SS ran for I.G. Farben.

Mechanik GmbH Rochlitz. In autumn 1944 Abs was supervisory board chairman of this hydraulics manufacturer for war production, which operated an underground concentration camp sub-camp at Wansleben near Halle under the cover name „Kali-Werk Georgi“ — with some 1,000 forced labourers and prisoners.

The letter to Finland. Shortly after the attack on the Soviet Union, Abs welcomed the war against the Soviet Union in a personal letter to the Finnish banker Rainer von Fieandt as a struggle „against the greatest enemy of all freedom and humanity“.

The Abwehr. He maintained intensive business relations with the leadership of the OKW office Ausland/Abwehr, particularly with Colonel Hans Piekenbrock, head of foreign intelligence. Abs acted both as an agent of the Abwehr and as its principal.

IV. What is disputed

The Böhmische Union Bank. Deutsche Bank took it over in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939; it handled the Aryanisation of Jewish assets. A direct involvement of Abs in these proceedings is disputed.

The historian Lothar Gall, author of the 2004 biography, sees no direct entanglement: Abs was only deputy to Oswald Rösler, the board member responsible for the Protectorate. Rösler himself, also chairman of the supervisory board of the Böhmische Union Bank, assessed Pohle’s activities highly critically only in 1943, in a memorandum.

Knowledge of Auschwitz. The historian Tim Schanetzky surmises, given the size of the construction sum, that Abs must have had extensive knowledge. To this day it remains unclarified what Abs, as a supervisory board member of I.G. Farben, knew of the extermination camp and of the construction site there.

The origin of the gold. An international commission of historians investigated, on behalf of Deutsche Bank’s Historical Institute in the late 1990s, whether Abs had knowledge during the Nazi period of the origin of certain gold holdings which Deutsche Bank continuously acquired from the Reichsbank: gold of murdered Jews from the extermination camps in the east, remelted by Degussa.

The commission found a series of reliable indications of Abs’s knowledge. For want of conclusive proof it could not settle the question beyond doubt.

Lockheed. According to statements by the former Lockheed salesman Paul White, recorded in US State Department cables of 1975 and 1976, Abs and the then federal minister Franz Josef Strauß received monies in connection with the sale of aircraft to Lufthansa. This is the reproduction of a statement, not a judicial finding.

V. The second rise

After the war Abs was suspended on Allied instruction and imprisoned for about three months. In the denazification proceedings he was placed in Category V — exonerated.

The article notes a comparison. While his board colleague Karl Ritter von Halt, a former NSDAP member, spent five years in Soviet detention, Abs used the waiting period to cultivate contacts with the economic specialists of the British military administration at Bad Oeynhausen and the American one in Frankfurt — and to make himself available at Nuremberg as a witness for the prosecution.

From 1948 to 1952 chairman of the board of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, which administered the Marshall Plan funds. Financial adviser to Adenauer.

VI. The London Debt Agreement

In 1952 he led the Federal Republic’s delegation in London at the negotiations on German foreign debt. In early 1953 the talks concluded with the London Debt Agreement: repayment of 14 billion Deutschmarks in small annual instalments and a moratorium on reparations until a peace treaty.

And here stands the sentence at issue:

A side effect of the London Debt Agreement was long left out of view from the German perspective, for reparations were at that time understood to include compensation for foreign victims of the Nazi regime. Foreign forced labourers were denied compensation by German companies and courts, with reference to the London Debt Agreement, into the 1990s.

Whether this effect was intended, the source does not say. It says that it occurred and operated for forty years.

VII. The power

In the 1960s Abs held up to 30 supervisory board mandates, 20 of them as chairman — according to the article, a key figure of the German economy and the most influential banker in Germany.

Spokesman of the board of Deutsche Bank from 1957 to 1967, thereafter chairman of the supervisory board until 1976, and honorary chairman until his death in 1994. From 1968 to 1970 additionally chairman of the supervisory board of Fried. Krupp GmbH — that is, from the year in which the company, after Alfried Krupp’s death, was converted from a stock corporation into a limited company and the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation became sole shareholder.

Federal President Heinrich Lübke pressed for his appointment as foreign minister; Abs was hesitant, and Lübke abandoned the plan. Adenauer thanked him by letter „warmly“ for his „readiness to make himself available should the situation seriously escalate“.

He was never elected and never held office. David Rockefeller called him, in Der Spiegel’s obituary, „the world’s leading banker“.

VIII. What hangs on the mandates

Thirty supervisory board mandates, twenty of them chairmanships — a figure that says nothing in itself. What it means follows from what a supervisory board does.

It appoints and dismisses the management board. It approves major investments. It sees the books. And the chairman sets the agenda — he decides what is discussed at all.

To this comes the question in whose name he sat there. Deutsche Bank was not one company among others but the lender. Whoever sits on a supervisory board for it sits there as the one on whom the financing depends.

The actual finding, however, lies elsewhere. The article notes that Abs was able to exert influence on economic and financial policy measures — the first foreign bond issue, the revaluation of the Deutschmark — and on legislation: the Bundesbank Act and the Act on the German Large Banks.

That is to say: he did not merely sit on the supervisory boards. He helped write the rules under which they stand.

And there the nature of the power changes. A supervisory board chairmanship ends when one steps down. A statute does not.

IX. The Lex Abs

The timing is telling.

The limitation to ten mandates came in 1965 with the amendment of the Stock Corporation Act — at an age at which others retire. Abs was sixty-four and at the end of his time as board spokesman; two years later he moved to the chairmanship of the supervisory board.

It is one of the few legislative changes that popularly bear the name of a single person. The legislature had to intervene in order to limit what one man alone had accumulated.

Two qualifications belong here.

The source says the limitation was popularly called the Lex Abs. It does not say that it was enacted on his account. That is a difference.

And who introduced it could not be established here. Whether the ten-mandate limit stood in the government bill or was added only in committee, and whether Abs was discussed in the process, is recorded in the Bundestag papers of the fourth legislative period — and in the commentaries on the Stock Corporation Act. Whoever wishes to test the thesis must look there.

X. How long does such a thing last?

Hans Ley:

The structures and rules of the Federal Republic were substantially shaped by Abs, and they remain in force to this day.

Note by the co-author: Between „exerted influence“ — which is what the source says — and „substantially shaped“ lies a step I cannot substantiate. How far the influence went and what would have turned out differently without him is not stated there.

What can be said is how long the three bodies of rules lasted.

The London Debt Agreement of 1953 — and here the after-effect is expressly documented: into the 1990s, compensation was refused with reference to it. Forty years, twenty-one of them after he left the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank and two after his death.

The Bundesbank Act — the Bundesbank is the institution whose design went into the European Central Bank.

The Act on the German Large Banks — it governed the reunification of the three successor institutions and thereby the structure in which Deutsche Bank continued.

And from this arises the question this text does not answer:

If someone unelected helps write the rules under which a country conducts its economy — where and when does his influence end?

The „where“ could be estimated. The „when“ could not. A person steps down, dies, is forgotten. A rule does not end of itself — it ends when someone changes it.

And who is to do that, when nobody remembers any longer that it is there?

XI. The trial

In 1970 Abs sued the East German historian Eberhard Czichon and his publisher Manfred Pahl-Rugenstein. In a biography Czichon had asserted that Abs had enriched himself in the course of Aryanisations, had held a „position of power in the fascist system“, and was responsible for the forced labour of concentration camp prisoners and even children.

According to the article’s account, Abs initially wished to let the matter rest and instructed his lawyers only when Czichon threatened for his part to sue Deutsche Bank for defamation.

In June 1972 Czichon and his publisher were ordered to pay 20,000 Deutschmarks in damages for false statements of fact in 32 instances. The book could no longer be distributed.

Two circumstances belong to this.

The court ruled on purely positivist grounds. No assessment of Abs’s active participation in the racial policy of the Nazi regime took place.

And Abs waived enforcement of the sum, which would have ruined the publisher — after his lawyer had agreed out of court with Czichon’s that further attacks would cease, in particular a publication of the OMGUS reports, which contained incriminating material about him.

XII. What remains sealed

And here what can be said comes to an end.

His archive comprises a number of Deutsche Bank files from the Nazi period and was sealed until 2014. It contains a considerable quantity of index cards recording the content of conversations — but no information on conversations with Pohle, with Hans Kehrl, and with Joachim Riehle, the banking specialist of the Reich Ministry of Economics, with whom Abs is documented to have been in close contact.

The tax office files are sealed for 80 years. They could settle the question of the profit associated with the Aryanisations.

XIII. Two houses

Two addresses stand side by side in the account, without any connection being asserted.

From 1953 until his death in 1994 Abs lived in Kronberg im Taunus in the Villa ter Meer — built in 1936 for Fritz ter Meer, a board member of I.G. Farben. 1,200 square metres of living space, garden hall, music room, dressing room.

And he was a patron: he had the cemetery chapel of St Gertrud at Remagen-Oedingen restored at his own expense and received in return, in 1952, the right from the Bishop of Trier to be buried there. In 1983 he acquired at auction the Gospels of Henry the Lion for 32.5 million Deutschmarks on behalf of the Federal Republic — until Bill Gates’s purchase of the Codex Leicester, the most expensive book in the world. He donated one million Deutschmarks to the Beethoven House in Bonn and in 1993 founded, with Helmut Schmidt, Michael Otto and Gerd Bucerius, the German National Foundation.

XIV. What follows

Nothing that is to be drawn here. The reader draws it himself.

What can be recorded is only the shape of the matter, and it is unusual.

What is disputed has remained disputed — on the Böhmische Union Bank, on the knowledge of Auschwitz, on the gold. The commission found indications and no proof.

What might have supplied the proof is missing. The index cards for precisely those three interlocutors with whom he is documented to have been in close contact. The tax office files, sealed into the 2020s of the coming century.

And the publication of the incriminating material was averted in 1972 by an out-of-court settlement — in exchange for the waiver of a sum in damages.

This is not an indictment. It is a description of what stands in the way of forming a judgement.