Abstract
Reviewed by: Andrew G. Bonnell, University of Queensland, Australia
Fritz Kiehn, born in 1885, was a ‘social climber’ (323). A travelling salesman and the son of a Prussian policeman, he settled down in the small Württemberg town of Trossingen after marrying the daughter of the prosperous local innkeeper. After army service in the First World War, Kiehn set up a small manufacturing business making cigarette papers. This proved to be a lucky choice in post-1918 Germany, as cigarette papers sold well in tough times. Kiehn managed to profit from the inflation period of the early 1920s, and developed an ambition to join the local business elite, which was dominated by musical instrument manufacturers, notably the Hohner harmonica firm (also the subject of a much-acclaimed monograph by Hartmut Berghoff). In 1930, Kiehn joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and founded a party branch (Ortsgruppe) in Trossingen. The following year he led the party to success in local government elections. In 1932, he became a member of the Reichstag for the NSDAP.
Kiehn enjoyed a successful career as a regional Nazi powerbroker and business leader, his party career oiled by copious but carefully targeted financial donations. As Kiehn was a friend of Gregor Strasser, Strasser’s downfall and later murder in the Röhm purge of 1934 was a potential setback, but Kiehn had already bet on the SS over the SA, becoming an SS officer and donating his way into Himmler’s club of big business sponsors, the ‘Freundeskreis’ of the Reichsführer-SS, and an honorary position on Himmler’s personal staff. Kiehn’s assiduously cultivated SS connections helped him survive party infighting and the allegations of corrupt behaviour to which his aggressive business conduct repeatedly gave rise. The ‘Gau (regional) Economic Leader’ Kiehn also engaged in profiteering from ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish-owned property, forced labour and wartime expansion. Berghoff and Rauh provide an admirably well-researched picture of a Nazi provincial activist from the economic Mittelstand, and of the networks of corruption and cronyism that characterized the workings of the ‘Third Reich’ at the local and regional level.
Kiehn’s exemplary twentieth-century German career did not end in 1945. He had to undergo a period of detention and denazification (which he later dramatized as being in a ‘concentration camp’), but even before his denazification procedure was concluded he was able to secure a Württemberg state loan of 3 million Marks to help him rebuild his business. The post-war period saw Kiehn, like so many other former Nazis and profiteers from the ‘Third Reich’, enjoy rehabilitation and restoration to the position of a respected local business leader. He cultivated good connections with Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union, despite his maintenance of a network of old Nazis among his employees (and a connection by marriage to former Hitler Youth leader and Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, who had been convicted as a major war criminal at Nuremberg).
To this reader, Fritz Kiehn is irresistibly reminiscent of another small-town paper manufacturer, Heinrich Mann’s Untertan Diederich Hessling, albeit a generation younger (a comparison the authors only draw in relation to their subject’s conventional bourgeois musical tastes (151), but many other parallels suggest themselves). Berghoff and Rauh do an exemplary job of integrating Kiehn’s biography with local, regional, and national history, in a fine example of the use of microhistorical analysis (of an inherently mediocre figure) to shed light on business history and the workings of the Nazi regime at the provincial level. As they rightly argue, Kiehn’s biography ‘had many representative features’ (ix). Their outstanding, fine-grained research was helped by the cooperation of Kiehn’s grandson and other interview subjects in an initial stage of the research. Numerous well-chosen photographs from the Kiehn family albums are effective in conveying the character of the subject and his milieu.
This revised English-language edition includes newly available material (including on one of Kiehn’s competitors in ‘Aryanization’ profiteering, the Quelle mail-order magnate and ‘icon of the (West) German economic miracle’ (335), Gustav Schickedanz), and an interesting chapter on Trossingen’s response to its Nazi past since the appearance of the book’s original edition in 2000. The authors have an open mind on the issue of Adenauer’s successful integration of ex-Nazis in the Federal Republic and Hermann Lübbe’s concept of (asymmetrical) ‘communicative silence’ about the Nazi past in West Germany, acknowledging some pragmatic benefits of reintegrating the likes of Kiehn into the liberal-democratic polity, but their narrative shows that there was a moral price paid for this policy by West German society. Whatever the merits of the arguments for selective historical amnesia were in the Adenauer era, the time for ‘communicative silence’ has long gone, and this fine study is a valuable contribution to the replacement of that silence with a fuller picture of the continuities of twentieth-century German history. Let us hope that Berghahn issues a more affordable softcover edition.