Nazi or Hero? Historian Looks at the Stories a German Consultant Told of His Father

Roland Berger also told of heartbreaking visits to his father in Gestapo detention and said his father was later held at Dachau, the notorious concentration camp near Munich.

Parts of that story were true, and some were not, according to Mr. Wolffsohn.

Georg Berger did not resign his post with the Hitler Youth until September 1939, nearly a year after Kristallnacht. After a stint managing a factory that produced a kind of cracker, Mr. Berger became director of Ankerbrotfabrik, at the time Europe’s largest bakery, in Vienna. The appointment in 1941 was an indication that Mr. Berger was still well regarded by the regime. The bakery, as well as a villa in Vienna rented by the Berger family, had earlier been seized from Jewish owners.

Mr. Wolffsohn said that Georg Berger played no role in stealing Jewish property and, on the contrary, had tried to protect the interests of the former owners of the bakery, who were members of a Jewish family who had fled to Switzerland.

The owners sold their shares in the bakery to a German businessman living in Switzerland. The businessman was in all likelihood a frontman for the original owners, Mr. Wolffsohn said, and after the war sold the bakery company back to the family for a modest price.

Georg Berger resisted attempts by local Nazis to take full control of the bakery, though it was unclear whether his motives were altruistic or tactical. But Mr. Berger’s stance appears to have angered the party. In 1942, he was fired as head of the bakery after the Gestapo searched the family residence and accused Mr. Berger of hoarding rationed items like butter, eggs and soap.

Mr. Wolffsohn said that the accusation of hoarding was probably a pretense. Denunciation was a commonly used weapon in the bureaucratic power struggles that permeated the Nazi regime.

Mr. Wolffsohn also found documents to bolster a poignant story that Roland Berger often told about visiting his father on his birthday in a Gestapo jail in Munich.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/business/roland-berger-father-nazi-historian.html