. NMT06-T0639
Volume VI · Page 639
| Q. According to your
recollection, when did the whole affair with the Petscheks take an active
course? A. Maybe you can clarify this first of all. What do you mean by "Petschek affair" and what do you mean by "taking an active course"? Because be it Julius or Ignaz Petschek, they usually were put in the same bread basket, and as long as I worked in the steel industry near Lauchhammer they had the worst possible reputation in Germany. Whether that was justified or not, that does not have to be discussed here, but the main reason probably was the policy of their trading companies and the methods they used against the Viag; that is, the German Reich-owned holding company for the industrial property of the Reich, especially in the case of Ilse. Last, but not least, the Karo-Petschek trial * was one of the reasons, and the struggle for the Hohenlohe holdings which the Petscheks also took over, but all that was before 1933, Your Honor. Q. Now, what were the Petscheks charged with? What was the subject of the attacks against the Petscheks? A. Apart from these special cases which I just mentioned namely, Hohenlohe, Ilse-Viag, and the Petschek-Karo trial; first of all the Petscheks were charged in their trade, and that is the Petscheks as entrepreneurs, that their influence in the syndicate was the reason why the coal price was kept artificially high for the consumer, because the difference between the purchase price which the large dealers paid to the syndicate and the sales price for the consumer, was too high; those were the charges the consumers made against the Petscheks. Now, the independent dealers, that is, the dealers who had nothing to do with the Petscheks, complained that they were not allowed to buy directly from the syndicate, but that they were obliged to buy from the sales representative at the mine, that is, the Petschek dealer of the syndicate. That brings up also the third charge, according to which the Petscheks made profits on both sides; that is, on production and on trade. But, first of all, that these high double earnings and profits did not remain in Germany but went to Czechoslovakia. I think that is the reason why the charges made by the Party and by many consumers against the whole of the syndicate policy were directed in the first place against the Petschek group. I remember a special case in 1936 when one Petschek group wanted to purchase the Fortschritt mine and that was quite exaggerated in the newspapers and was stirred into a big scandal. |
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* This refers to a divorce suit in the Petschek family.
