Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945

Abstract

This history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis. He touches on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labour camps, and the problems of de-Nazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study - cooperation with Nazi policies, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision-making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated - are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on free access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era.

Using history in the creation of organizational identity

“…An opposite approach, often in the form of commissioned corporate histories, comes in the form of a mea culpa. Exemplary is Feldman's (2001) study of the Allianz insurance company and its association with German National Socialism. These studies are predicated on a forensic examination of an organization's role in a disturbing national story, an attempt to acknowledge rather than conceal locutionary meaning that relies on the illocutionary force of its being timely to do so, and the perlocutionary effects that such an apology might carry.…”

Understanding West German economic growth in the 1950s

“…Now, most 32 The influence of large banks on German big business and the possible unofficial cartel structures created by this has continued to attract scholarly attention (e.g. Edwards and Fischer 1994), although historical research seems to imply that the influence of banks and financial conglomerates on German industry may in fact have been quite limited (see Wellhoener, 1989, for the imperial period, Wixforth, 1995, for the Weimar Republic, and James, 1995, James, 2001, and Feldman, 2001, for the Nazi years). cartels were made illegal, but with exceptions precisely in the areas that had been regulated after the Great Depression.…”

Painful memories as mnemonic resources: Grand Canyon Dories and the protection of place

“…Reinterpretations of darker remnants of the past—pain, trauma, destruction, horror, and so forth—have received far less attention. Only a small collection of articles has begun to examine how organizations choose to engage with darker parts of the past (Booth et al, 2007; Feldman, 2001). For example, writing within the historic corporate social responsibility approach, Schrempf-Stirling et al (2016) discuss how present-day German firms atone for their own crimes committed in the 1940s, while Van Lent and Smith (2020) examine how Hudson’s Bay Company takes responsibility for their century-old exploitation of Indigenous workers.…”