FRANKFURT — Weighing in on a problem that revived questions on the function of German enterprise in World War II, a historian has partly confirmed and partly refuted experiences that a well-known marketing consultant falsely portrayed his father as a Nazi resister when in actual fact he was head bookkeeper for the Hitler Youth.
Roland Berger suffered important harm to his picture as consigliere to chancellors and to chief executives after The New York Times and different information media reported last year that he had constructed a legend about his father that was at finest incomplete.
Mr. Berger, who was a youngster throughout the battle, defended himself by saying that he had believed the tales his father advised him. He employed Michael Wolffsohn, creator of quite a few books on German and Jewish historical past, to research. Mr. Wolffsohn’s report, which was printed on-line on Sunday, made it clear that Mr. Berger’s father was no battle felony but additionally not the hero his son had usually portrayed.
Georg Berger, the father, was an early member of the Nazi occasion who profited from the regime and had held a number of influential jobs, together with a high-ranking put up at the Hitler Youth. But he later fell out of favor and suffered Nazi injustice, together with a number of months in a Gestapo jail, based on Mr. Wolffsohn.
“Georg Berger definitely did not have blood on his hands and was, in that respect, not a criminal,” Mr. Wolffsohn wrote. At the identical time, he stated, Georg Berger “was not a man of the resistance.”
“He was not, as Roland Berger often falsely asserted, a victim of Nazi persecution,” Mr. Wolffsohn stated.
Roland Berger, who’s 82 and now not manages the consulting agency that bears his identify, declined to remark for this text.
German firms have usually needed to apologize for utilizing slave labor or offering Hitler’s battle machine with cash and weapons. Mr. Berger’s case was uncommon as a result of he was a younger boy throughout the battle. His father’s previous solely turned a problem as a result of he usually cited him as an inspiration and function mannequin.
In Mr. Berger’s telling, his father had joined the Nazi occasion in the early 1930s however give up in disgust after Kristallnacht, an orgy of anti-Semitic violence in November 1938, revealed the occasion’s malevolent intentions. Georg Berger then turned a goal of Nazi prosecution, based on his son.
Roland Berger additionally advised a story of heartbreaking visits to his father in Gestapo detention and stated his father was later held at Dachau, the infamous focus camp close to Munich.
Parts of that story have been true, and a few weren’t, based on Mr. Wolffsohn.
Georg Berger didn’t resign his put up with the Hitler Youth till September 1939, practically a 12 months after Kristallnacht. After a stint managing a manufacturing facility that produced a variety of cracker, Mr. Berger turned director of Ankerbrotfabrik, at the time Europe’s largest bakery, in Vienna. The appointment in 1941 was a sign that Mr. Berger was nonetheless properly regarded by the regime. The bakery, in addition to a villa in Vienna rented by the Berger household, had earlier been seized from Jewish house owners.
Mr. Wolffsohn stated that Georg Berger performed no function in stealing Jewish property and, on the opposite, had tried to guard the pursuits of the former house owners of the bakery, who have been members of a Jewish household who had fled to Switzerland.
The house owners bought their shares in the bakery to a German businessman residing in Switzerland. The businessman was in all probability a frontman for the unique house owners, Mr. Wolffsohn stated, and after the battle bought the bakery firm again to the household for a modest worth.
Georg Berger resisted makes an attempt by native Nazis to take full management of the bakery, although it was unclear whether or not his motives have been altruistic or tactical. But Mr. Berger’s stance seems to have angered the occasion. In 1942, he was fired as head of the bakery after the Gestapo searched the household residence and accused Mr. Berger of hoarding rationed gadgets like butter, eggs and cleaning soap.
Mr. Wolffsohn stated that the accusation of hoarding was in all probability a pretense. Denunciation was a generally used weapon in the bureaucratic energy struggles that permeated the Nazi regime.
Mr. Wolffsohn additionally discovered paperwork to bolster a poignant story that Roland Berger usually advised about visiting his father on his birthday in a Gestapo jail in Munich.
Georg Berger additionally, as his son had claimed, spent a number of months in Russian prisoner of battle camps after Germany’s give up in May 1945, Mr. Wolffsohn stated. Reporting by the newspaper Handelsblatt, quoted by The Times, solid doubt on whether or not the elder Berger had ever been incarcerated by the Gestapo or the Russians.
Georg Berger additionally frolicked at Dachau, however solely after the battle when it was being utilized by the Americans as an internment middle and never throughout the battle when it was a brutal Nazi focus camp, based on Mr. Wolffsohn.
Mr. Wolffsohn, who was extremely vital of media reporting on the case, was inclined to present Roland Berger the profit of the doubt. “Every son tells or writes his own father’s story,” Mr. Wolffsohn wrote. “Rarely is the perception and portrayal of the son identical to the reality of the father.”
