Controversies
In 1993 Henning Schulte-Noelle commissioned a new Archive for Corporate History, becoming the first Allianz CEO to address the company's activities during the Third Reich. The Archive opened in 1996. In 1997 Schulte-Noelle asked Gerald Feldman, historian from the University of California-Berkeley, if he would undertake a larger research project on Allianz's past involvement with the Third Reich. Feldman started the research in 1998 with a team of young historians. A few months later, Jewish World War II survivors and their descendants took Allianz and other European insurance companies to court, accusing them of unpaid insurance policies. Allianz and four other insurers supported the creation of the "International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims" (ICHEIC). Furthermore, Allianz became a founding member of the German Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future". Both organizations took care of payments for the victims. Feldman published the comprehensive results of his research in September 2001. Based on these results Allianz established an exhibition in the Archive for Corporate History and on the Internet.
The research concluded that Allianz, as an organization and through its corporate officers, was forced to comply with the Nazi Regime and the Third Reich, starting as early as the early 1930s and continuing all the way through to the collapse of the Third Reich.
Among the more notable examples:
Allianz managers held senior positions in the administration of national socialist Germany. Kurt Schmitt, director general of Allianz until 1933, was Hitler’s Reich Economics Minister from June 1933 until January 1935. He became a member of both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1933, rising to the rank of Brigadeführer, which is a one-star general in the SS. Eduard Hilgard, member of the board of Allianz, became head of the "Reich Group for Insurance" in 1934. He represented the insurance industry in a conference summoned by Hermann Göring after the November Pogrom of 1938. Hilgard reported on the material damages caused during the Kristallnacht Pogrom and the estimated amounts of money insurance companies had to cover.
Feldman summarized his findings stating: "It was just one more piece of business in the Third Reich, but it demonstrated that such pieces on any large scale made contact at some point with all that is represented by the name “Auschwitz” – from slave labor to extermination – virtually inescapable.“
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