Kurt Herrmann
Kurt Herrmann (1888–1959) was a German architect, publisher and businessman who became very wealthy during the Nazi era by taking over Jewish businesses and assets.
He was born in Leipzig and grew up as the son of a craftsman. He trained as a bricklayer from 1902 to 1905, then studied building trades and became a master builder. He worked in Leipzig and later ran his own architectural work. In 1913 he designed a building for a Leipzig publisher, and in 1914 he married the publisher’s daughter. When the publisher died in 1917, Herrmann inherited large business interests and became a leading figure at the aircraft maker Deutsche Flugzeug-Werke (DFW) and in publishing.
After World War I, he shifted into manufacturing and, by turning a DFW plant into a producer of mining equipment, built a successful business. He also founded financial companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. By 1931 his empire employed thousands of people, and he moved to Eschen in Liechtenstein, gaining citizenship there while hiding this fact from German authorities. In 1937 he formed a large publishing group, Universalverlag, and by 1939 published thousands of magazines.
Herrmann built close ties with Nazi leaders, especially Hermann Göring. He joined multiple Nazi-controlled bodies, such as the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts and the Reich Press Chamber, and in 1938 was appointed to the Prussian State Council. He profited from Aryanization, the Nazi policy of taking Jewish-owned businesses and handing them to non-Jews. He took over the Berlin jewelry firm Gebrüder Friedländer and renamed it the German Goldsmiths’ Art Workshops, allowing him to buy jewelry confiscated from Jews at very low prices. He also helped take over the C.F. Peters music publishing house and used his influence to acquire looted art and jewels. During the war he traveled to Nazi-occupied countries to arrange deals for valuables and acted as Göring’s special representative for diamonds in the Netherlands. He was awarded the War Merit Cross.
As the war ended, Herrmann left Leipzig and fled to Liechtenstein, arriving on 30 April 1945. He claimed Liechtenstein citizenship since 1931 and said he opposed the Nazi regime. After the war, the Soviet zone in Germany sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes and confiscated his assets there. In Liechtenstein he kept access to wealth held in Swiss bank accounts. Denazification proceedings in West Germany in 1950 labeled him a follower and imposed no punishment.
Herrmann died in Vaduz in 1959. After the East German regime fell, his heirs tried to recover properties he had owned, but German courts repeatedly rejected their claims. In 1994 Leipzig rejected a claim over the Hôtel de Pologne property, valued at about 11 million DM. Appeals followed, but by the end of 1998 the Federal Administrative Court and the Federal Constitutional Court had not overturned the earlier decisions.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:16 (CET).