Background
Friedrich Flick was born on 10 July 1883 in Ernsdorf, Westphalia.
Friedrich Flick was born on 10 July 1883 in Ernsdorf, Westphalia.
Shortly before World War I he began to work in the iron industry and rose rapidly in the ranks of the Ruhr industrialists until by the early 1930s he had achieved a dominant position in the largest steel- producing firm in Germany, United Steel Works (Vereinigte Stahlwerke).
In 1932 Flick gave 50,(XX) Reichsmarks to the Nazi movement as a political insurance premium against the eventuality of their coming to power; but he gave nearly twenty times this sum to the campaign to re-elect President Paul von Hindenburg, as well as backing the liberal and Catholic parties. Flick increased his financial support for the Nazis in 1933, providing seven million marks for Hitler and the NSDAP during the next decade; as a member of the Circle of Friends of Heinrich Himmler, he also contributed 100,000 marks annually to the activities of the SS.
In 1937 Flick formally joined the NSDAP and a year later was made a Wehrwirtschaftsfuhrer. Flick, who was especially skilled in stock-exchange affairs and forming syndicates, was Director or Chairman of the Board of innumerable iron, steel and coal works in the Third Reich. During World War II Flick's enterprises bought and used 48,000 slave labourers, 80 per cent of whom died. Jewish concentration camp inmates were often sent to work in his various munitions plants.
At his trial in Nuremberg in 1947 for complicity in helping Hitler achieve power and extend his conquests, Flick assumed a pose of injured innocence with regard to this and other crimes, asserting that ‘nothing will convince us that we are war criminals’.
By January 1951 all the German industrialists imprisoned for war crimes, including Flick who had been sentenced to seven years, had been released as an act of clemency by the American High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy. Though the Flick group lost many of its assets, it was rapidly rebuilt, controlling by 1955 over a hundred companies with a registered capital of more than twenty-two million dollars and an annual business turnover exceeding two billion dollars, including Daimler-Benz, the makers of Mercedes cars. Flick was reported to be the richest man in post-war Germany and the fifth wealthiest individual in the world. Yet he consistently refused to pay any compensation to the slave labourers on whose backs part of his earlier fortune had been built.
Flick died in Konstanz on 20 July 1972 at the age of ninety, leaving a fortune of over one billion dollars to his playboy son, with not even a cent for the concentration camp inmates who helped make him rich.
A typical example of the politically amoral capitalist.
Quotes from others about the person
In 1968 his company Dynamit Nobel stated that it had ‘neither a legal nor a moral obligation to make payment' for the use of slave labour during World War II and in 1970 his lawyers, replying to an appeal from McCloy, repeated that the Flick group ‘categorically refused to fulfil the demands of the Claims Conference (Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany).