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Flick: Eine Konzerngeschichte vom Kaiserreich bis zur Bundesrepublik [Flick: A Corporate History from Empire to Federal Republic]. By Kim Christian Priemet Goettingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007. 864 pp. Photographs, tables, figures, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, euro48.00. ISBN: 978-3-835-30219-8.
"Other than the enormous personal fortune of his heirs and their tarnished family name, Friedrich Flick's lifetime of restless activity in German industry spanning the period from 1907 to 1972 left behind no lasting technological innovation, no durable brand, and no notable social contribution. There was a blank where a legacy might have been." These are the devastating final lines of Kim Priemel's study of the Flick Corporation in the twentieth century. They conclude almost eight hundred pages of dense narrative recounting the truly remarkable story of how Friedrich Flick managed not once but three times to build a gigantic industrial empire. Between 1907 and 1931, Flick rose from provincial obscurity to become the co-owner of the imposing Vereinigte StahlwerkeGBAG coal-and-steel complex. Having lost his grip on that conglomerate during the depression, Flick built a new industrial megacorporation during the Third Reich. Having profited exorbitantly from both rearmament and the forced sale of Jewish assets, he was by 1944 employing a workforce of 130,000, much of it forced labor. For this and for his plunder in Western Europe, along with the financial support he gave to Heinrich Himmler, Flick was found guilty by the war-crimes tribunal at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in jail. Released, unrepentant, in 1950, having lost much of his fortune in the East, Flick rebuilt once more. Having been forced by the Allies to sell off his remaining coal assets in West Germany, Flick used...