Karl Blessing

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Karl Blessing
The German representative in the Transfer Commission, 1934, from left: Hjalmar Schacht, Blessing, Emil Puhl, von Wedel
President of the Deutsche Bundesbank
In office 1958–1969
Personal details
Born	(1900-02-05)5 February 1900 Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
Alma mater	Handelshochschule Berlin [de]

Karl Blessing (5 February 1900 – 25 April 1971) was a German

from 1958 to 1969.

Early life

He was born in

Business Administration

in 1925.

Pre World War Two

In 1929 he became an assistant to then Reichsbank president

]

He joined the

Third Reich

.

World War Two Era

Recent historical evidence undercuts Mr. Blessing's statements that he was unaware of Nazi treatment of Jews: in 1941, he wrote a letter asking to take possession of an apartment which the Gestapo had recently taken from a Jewish family.[1]

As the American historian Christopher Simpson notes in his book The Splendid Blond Beast, a ground-breaking study of the links between big business and genocide, Blessing attended 30 out of 38 meetings of the Himmlerkreis, the secret group of financiers and industrialists who bankrolled the private projects of Heinrich Himmler. He went on two group trips to visit concentration camps, guided by Himmler himself.^[2]

During the war Blessing joined the board of

, a senior executive at IG Farben. Like IG Farben, Kontinentale-Öl was built on slavery, plunder and murder. It ran a network of concentration camps in Poland where the workers were “leased” from the SS until they died of starvation or overwork.

Blessing was a classic example of the intelligent, amoral Nazi technocrat that smoothly transitioned to the new

after the plot failed.

Post-war

After the war Blessing was arrested while the Allied authorities considered charging him with war crimes. But Allen Dulles also had Blessing in his sights. In the summer of 1945, U.S. occupation authorities asked Dulles to provide whitelists of suitable candidates for posts in the new German administration. Dulles provided an A list and a B list. The A list included Ernst Hulse, the former head of the BIS banking department. Blessing's was the first name on the B list. Dulles termed him "a prominent businessman and financial expert with considerable experience in international trade", which was one way of describing him. John J. McCloy also wrote a letter of support for Blessing.

With Dulles's support, Blessing was freed to return to his former employers Unilever. In 1958, Blessing was appointed president of the Deutsche Bundesbank, successor to the Reichsbank. Blessing served as president until 1969, regularly attending the central bankers’ meetings at the BIS. After 1945 Blessing reinvented his wartime past as a “lowly functionary” in a government ministry, a myth swallowed by a credulous press.^[3]

Shortly after retiring as President of the Deutsche Bundesbank in 1969 Blessing died in Rasteau, France aged 71, garlanded with praise from his fellow bankers and the German establishment, his wartime role at Kontinentale-Öl forgotten or glossed over. His grandson, Martin Blessing, was CEO of Commerzbank from 2008 to 2016.

References

• Simpson, Christopher (1995). The splendid blond beast : money, law, and genocide in the twentieth century. Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press. p. 400.
  ISBN 1567510620
  .

External links

• dmh de Biography of Karl Blessing
• New York Times 08 Nov 2017 "Germany's Central Bank Backs Study of Role in Nazi Crimes"
• Newspaper clippings about Karl Blessing in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• [1]