More than 60 years after its founding, the Bundesbank has examined its history. Today’s Central Bank President Nagel also sees the results as a reminder for the present.
As the predecessor of the German Bundesbank, the Reichsbank contributed significantly to the functioning of the Nazi system between 1933 and 1945, according to researchers. Since 1936 at the latest, the Reichsbank has been “a politically powerless institution and a willing handmaiden of destructive politics,” according to an academic study on German central bank history that was commissioned by the Bundesbank in 2017.
The Reichsbank therefore supported the financing of war armaments, the financial exploitation of the territories occupied by Germany and the capture and exploitation of captured assets. Early on in National Socialism, the Reichsbank participated in “the confiscation, expropriation and sale of Jewish assets.” In addition, the Reichsbank took over stolen gold and foreign currency from people murdered in the concentration and extermination camps.
“Even during the war, the Reichsbank worked intensively on the policy of conquest and annihilation,” said the deputy director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Professor Magnus Brechtken, who led the research project “From the Reichsbank to the Bundesbank” together with Professor Albrecht Ritschl from the London School of Economics.
“Unbearable” continuities
The period under investigation begins in 1923/24 with the stabilization of the new currency after hyperinflation and Hjalmar Schacht’s assumption of office as Reichsbank President and ends in 1969, when Karl Blessing, the last Bundesbank President, left office, who had been part of Hjalmar Schacht’s closest circle of employees.
Neither the Bank of German States, founded in 1948, nor the Bundesbank, founded in 1957, are legal successors to the Reichsbank. Nevertheless, after the Second World War, “many of the people who worked in the Reichsbank between 1933 and 1945, especially at the second and third levels, returned to work in similar areas in the central bank after 1945,” Brechtken explained.
Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel called such continuities “unbearable.” The study proves that “one should not develop a glorified image” of the history of the Bundesbank. Nagel generally emphasized the importance of the comprehensive investigation: “Your work traces how central bankers became willing accomplices of a criminal regime. And it shows how susceptible they were to racism, anti-Semitism and anti-democratic attitudes.”
Bundesbank President warns against anti-Semitism
The results of the study are also a warning, said Nagel: “There must never be anti-Semitism in Germany again. There must never again be exclusion and state arbitrariness against minorities. Never again must state authorities such as the central bank trample on democratic values,” emphasized the Bundesbank President. Democratic values must be defended on a daily basis: “Keep your stance when it matters.”
The scientific work is available as a summarized brochure online and in printed form. In addition, an anthology and monographs on eight sub-research projects are to be published.
Source: Stern
