Rogue Financier - The Adventures of an Estranged Capitalist

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it . . . it’s just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.

Henrik Ibsen

My home was never a model home. It was already broken.

On my mother’s side the family roots can be traced back to the sixteenth century, and include Peter Josef Valckenberg, mayor of the Holy Roman Imperial City of Worms in the early nineteenth century. As well as being mayor, Peter Josef was a sharp entrepreneur and was the man who globalized liebfraumilch, having bought the monastery and surrounding vineyards where it was made.

There are a few bluebloods down the line of this powerful and influential family originating from the Rhineland-Palatinate and Franconia. A family emblem depicts a fire-spewing dragon holding a shield embellished, oddly, configured with the Star of David. When I had an emblem ring made for my then wife in Boston, the Armenian jeweler asked me whether I wanted to keep the Jewish star or whether I might not prefer the more Christian pentagram as a more suitable alternative for a non-Jewish couple. We looked at each other for a moment, laughed simultaneously and went for the David star. We were not going to distort history for the sake of appearances.

Was it possible that Mayor Valckenberg had Jewish origins? Necko would scream in his grave if he heard me right now. Valckenberg would certainly not be the first German with Jewish ancestry who bought into the industrial nobility and forgot his Semitic origins in the process. We have some strange family portraits, which surfaced from our neighbor’s attic after World War II, depicting my mother Uschi’s wonderful Mexican grandmother with the name Maria Eva Peres, not great, who had been unceremoniously obliterated from the original family tree shortly after World War I. My ex-wife was convinced my mother and I are partially Jewish.

In addition to moneyed patriarchs with hidden Semitic roots are generations of commodity traders; textile and coal barons; a member of a parliament; a former resistance fighter who conducted espionage for the Allied Forces; and a central figure in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Olympic gold medalist and retailing tycoon, my great-uncle Dr Josef Neckermann. Necko, as we called him, became my role model and also my de facto grandpa.

I never got to know my maternal grandparents, nor my uncle Mockel, because they were either killed in a car accident or murdered by American soldiers in 1948. Nobody knows for sure. My grandmother, the sister of Necko, according to various accounts was an elegant and attractive woman. She enjoyed a privileged upbringing with maids, drivers, cooks and private tutors. She was outgoing and emotional and more grounded than my grandfather was. Both loved the good life. My grandparents led an open marriage, almost an inconceivable notion at the time. Yet their diaries and personal letters reveal an intense and happy relationship. My mother has nothing but fond memories of her parents in spite of the obvious philandering. They were liberal, extremely tolerant and forgiving. The children enjoyed all privileges and few restrictions. Without a doubt, their parents showered them with love.

My grandfather, Dr Hans Lang, had been the top graduate among thousands of German university students, held a PhD in law and moved weapons for the opposition in the 1930s. He wrote two articles sharply criticizing the Nazis and as a consequence lost his license to practice law. In his early thirties he moved from Bavaria to Berlin to pursue a successful career as a textile manufacturer and wholesaler. After the Anschluss in 1938, he had been seconded to the Reichswehr’s Logistics Headquarters in Berlin, where he stayed until 1945. According to relatives, it is highly likely he provided the Allies with highly sensitive information throughout the war from a clandestine communication base in Hofheim, Germany. He was never drafted. His language capabilities (Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, English, Greek and Serbo-Croatian), organizational skills and extensive international contacts were simply too critical for the Nazis to waste on the battlefield. As a senior technocrat in the war effort, he was never drafted nor did he see any military action. I would like to have known this enigmatic opportunistic agent provocateur, surely an interesting man.

He was de-Nazified the same day the Allies arrived in his hometown. Normally such a process involving a major technocrat would take months, if not years. Necko, for example, was found guilty of war crimes. Even after his incarceration, Necko was subject to severe travel and work restrictions for several years. Yet immediately after the war, my grandfather became Senior Liaison between Allied Forces Procurement and the German southern and central municipalities. In the autobiography of my aunt (Kristin Feireiss, Wie ein Haus aus Karten, Ullstein Verlag), I read that he was supposed to be one the largest German black-market dealers of his time.

My mother and relatives suggest he was also a spy for the Allied Forces for most of the war, in particular for the Americans, explaining his immediate clearance and remarkable privileges once the Allied Forces arrived. His “official” enterprises showed millions in sales and profits. It is likely his clandestine operations were even more profitable. His mother said, “He lived a very dangerous life,” and his daughter Tini concluded, “My father had numerous powerful enemies.” Just like me he tried to hedge his personal risks. While I hooked up with the dark side, powerful Kurdish operators and later on Irish Republicans, my grandfather counted Frankfurt’s Police President among his “preferred” business partners to secure protection. One associate was offered a fortune and spent three years in prison in order to keep my grandfather out.

Germany’s black market activity was organized according to zones. The French had their operations in the west; the British in the north and the Americans were active in central and southern Germany. The Russians had very little to offer in terms of merchandise, so the eastern zone saw action from all groups.

Few Germans got in on the game at a senior level, and even fewer were independent operators. However, given his profound grasp of logistics and senior contacts within the US procurement system, Hans was a natural to hawk US goods to his fellow countrymen. This would also explain his ascent from a man whose empire was destroyed by the war to a nabob in only three years. He wore Russian sable coats, drove the most expensive cars and lived in a palatial residence. Without the slightest doubt Hans Lang was a tycoon and he lived on the edge or on the other side of legality, just like me.

Only a few years after the War, the black market easily constituted a third of all economic activity in monetary terms. According to primary sources his chief competition was no other German operator but black market organizations run by mid-level American military and Special Operations personnel in Munich, Heidelberg, Wurzburg, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The American organizations only employed Germans for menial tasks such as packaging and retail distribution. Hans had his own organization with sizable warehouses and other smaller distribution facilities throughout the American occupation zone. Both groups were sourcing much of their merchandise from similar outlets. This would result in regular conflicts, and violent disputes were frequent. While not defenseless, Hans lost consignments to his more powerful and more connected American adversaries in organized raids on his warehouses. Was Hans Lang and most of his family the victim of an unfortunate accident? This is highly unlikely. A very large US army track literally ran over Hans’ Opel. It is likely all the passengers died immediately being crushed to death. Then the truck backed up, pushed the car about thirty yards along the autobahn and shoved it down a cliff on the side of the road. This assured the hit and run accident or the deliberate murder of Hans Lang and most of his family would go unnoticed for a while, leaving the perpetrators ample time to escape the scene without detection. The German police investigation was handed over to the US military police because the tire tracks and paint residues conclusively showed the crash resulted from impact with a very large and heavily motorized US army truck. The American truck would have had considerable damage.

A simple inventory review would have revealed which US army vehicle was involved in the “accident” and who drove the truck at the time. Yet nothing happened. The Americans never even bothered to respond to the German police’s requests for clarification. The Americans had won the war and like all victors were acting with impunity. End of story!

My mother tells me how much I remind her of her father. According to her, my language skills, physical attributes, facial expressions, attitude in the face of extreme adversity and gestures are remarkably similar. She does not see her father as an unscrupulous profiteer but as a brilliant man and caring father, a free market advocate, a rebel and at worst a risk taker who did his utmost to assure the wellbeing of his family and friends in desperate times.

The funeral in Wurzburg was attended by...