The Respectable Career of Fritz K.

Hartmut Berghoff is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen in Germany. From 2008 to 2015 he was the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.. His latest book, together with Ingo Köhler, is Varieties of Family Business. Germany and the United States, Past and Present (Campus/University of Chicago Press, 2020). Recently he co-edited The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I (Berghahn, 2019).

List of Figures

Foreword

Abbreviations



Introduction



Chapter 1. Kiehn’s Rise to the Middle Class: A Traveling Salesman Becomes a Factory Owner

Chapter 2. Rapid Ascent through the Nazi Ranks: From Local Party Leader to Reichstag Delegate

Chapter 3. Fritz Kiehn, “Leader of the Württemberg Economy”

Chapter 4. Riding Nazi Party Coattails: Kiehn’s Industrial Ambitions

Chapter 5. Between Corruption and Camaraderie: The National Socialist Campaign to Curb Abuses

Chapter 6. Kiehn and Gustav Schickedanz in the Race for Aryanization

Chapter 7. Wartime Deals and “Marriage Politics”

Chapter 8. “The King of Trossingen”: Fritz Kiehn as a Local Grandee in the Third Reich

Chapter 9. From “War Criminal No. 1” to Sought-After Employer

Chapter 10. “Scot-free, by the skin of their teeth”—Denazification and Compensation

Chapter 11. “Ripe for Satire”: Entering the Social Market Economy with Public Loans

Chapter 12. “Kiehn left no one behind”? The “Factory Community” as a Network of “Old Comrades”

Chapter 13. Honorable Citizen Again: Kiehn and the “Economic Miracle”  

Chapter 14. The Twilight Years of an Honored West German

Chapter 15. Coming to Terms with the Past in the 21st Century



Conclusion: The (A)Typical Life of an Industrialist?



Bibliography

Index