A former Nazi-era banker led the postwar push for international investor protection

Evidence

The German Society’s president, the Deutsche Bank head Hermann Josef Abs, who had overseen the expropriation of Jewish property in the Third Reich, became an international spokesperson for property rights in the second half of the 1950s. ­After the Society drafted an “International Convention for the Mutual Protection of Private Property Rights in Foreign Countries,” Abs made his case before the American Society of International Law in 1956 and, most influentially, in a San Francisco speech at the International Industrial Development Conference on October 15, 1957, in which he cited the ICC statement. The speech, titled “The Safety of Capital,” was reported in Time magazine ­under the headline “A Cap­i­tal­ist Magna Carta” in an issue that featured Ludwig Erhard on its cover. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 463

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that the chief architect of the investor-rights code had previously overseen expropriation of Jewish property is a striking, specific fact worth telling someone interested in the genealogy of neoliberalism.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did Abs’s Nazi-era role shape or delegitimize his 1950s property-rights advocacy among contemporaries?