“I’ve almost become a bestseller”, enthused Gerald D. Feldman. The reason: the employee’s edition of his book “Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933-1945” (C.H. Beck Verlag / Cambridge University Press) is selling extremely well. By the beginning of December, 6000 Allianz employees in Germany had demonstrated their interest in getting precise information on the history of their company between 1933 and 1945 – and the demand continues unabated.This book has around 700 pages, so it doesn’t exactly make easy reading. And it’s not as if Allianz – even then a market leader in Germany – comes off with a clean slate. The investigation was published in German and English and the aim was certainly not to give Allianz a “whitewash”, as Chairman of the Board of Management Henning Schulte-Noelle emphasized in an interview with weekly business broadsheet “Welt am Sonntag”: “We wanted to have an independent, honest and incisive analysis of our past during the era of National Socialism. And that’s what we’ve got.” Allianz has lived up to Schulte-Noelle’s announcement in 1997 that the company’s history during the Third Reich should be subjected to scrupulous analysis. Over the same period of time, Allianz has demonstrated its commitment to the German Economy Foundation Initiative and the foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future” set up by German companies, to the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC), and to people making individual claims. The company has proven its willingness to accept responsibility and meet the few claims that remain outstanding.

The German-speaking press has praised the achievement of Gerald D. Feldman in a series of extended articles. The fact that today’s Allianz has provided comprehensive support for the critical study has also received some recognition.

Journal for books and topical issues “Literaturen”, for example, calls the work a “masterpiece of corporate history” and “an outstanding study among the books published this autumn”. National daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung gives this assessment: “The book is one of the most important contributions toward German corporate history during the Third Reich.” Intellectual weekly “Die Zeit” describes Feldman as a “Master of political biography” and his work as “a study that sets benchmarks”. The newspaper adds: “The current Allianz board of management deserves full credit for making this research work possible despite the fact that the results of the analysis are by no means positive for the commissioning company.”

The employees in the Center for Corporate History provided Feldman with support right from the beginning, and the archive is continuing on its mission within the company. There has been a permanent exhibition on the corporate history of Allianz since 1996, and this will be expanded by aspects of National Socialism and post-war history.

There are also plans to set up a virtual tour of Allianz corporate history on the Internet. The exhibition is primarily intended for customers and employees of Allianz, but on special occasions such as “Archive Day” or “Open Day” it will also be accessible to a wider audience. Anyone who does not have the opportunity to visit the exhibition or will not be visiting Munich but who still wants to gain access to a thorough analysis of the subject can obtain a copy of Feldman’s book.


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