Interview with David de Jong
David de Jong is a reporter in the Middle East for the Dutch Financial Daily. He is the author of Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties.
Hidden Nazi Billionaires
Contents
Max Raskin: Which Nazi fortune were you proudest to have uncovered?
David de Jong: It's difficult to choose between 'Nazi Goebbels’ Step-Grandchildren Become Hidden Billionaires' and 'World’s Youngest Billionaires Are Shadowed by Ghosts of Nazi Past'.
But it’s hard to beat discovering the hidden billionaire fortune of Goebbels's step-grandchildren.
MR: Which Nazi fortune would you say is the largest or had the most impact on Germany today?
DDJ: Most of the business families I write about in the book were already very rich before Hitler seized power in 1933, with the exception of the Porsche-Piëch family, who laid the foundations for their wealth during the Third Reich. The other families were leading in business during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, in West Germany, and still today in unified Germany. They thrived in any political system. I would even argue that they would have somehow risen to the top even in a communist system. Their main goal was to maximize profit and expand their business empires and fortunes, regardless of the political system in place.
Steel, coal, and arms magnate Friedrich Flick was the largest profiteer of the Nazi regime and probably the Third Reich's richest individual by the end of World War II. Flick was convicted at Nuremberg to seven years in prison for exploiting tens of thousands of forced and slave laborers, bankrolling the SS, and looting a steel factory. He was released in 1950 and eventually became controlling shareholder of Daimler-Benz, then Germany’s biggest car manufacturer. Deutsche Bank bought the Flick conglomerate in 1985, turning his descendants into billionaires. In the 1980s, Flick's only remaining son was involved in the biggest corruption scandal, to date, of post-war Germany.
MR: Did you ever feel endangered in any of your research? Was it ever like a movie at all?
DDJ: Never. Sometimes it did feel like being in a movie. That had more to do with the people I met socially in Berlin. Some of them had, to put it mildly, deep familial ties to Germany's dark past. But more on that some other time.
This is Not a Language School
MR: You had to get good at German to write Nazi Billionaires and now you’re living in Israel. What’s your method for getting good at languages?
DDJ: It's to surround myself with people who are native in the local language. My group of friends in Berlin was mainly German. Everybody speaks English, but, language-wise, they're not as accommodating to other people, compared to the Dutch or the Israelis, so that forces you to learn the language pretty quickly.
MR: How accommodating are Americans?
DDJ: [Laughs for a long time.]
MR: But for a language like Hebrew where you're starting fresh, what do you do?
DDJ: I take private classes and I take ulpan [immersive Hebrew class].
I wouldn't say I had critical mass in German when I arrived, but it was by immersing myself into the research that I got there. My threshold for Hebrew is much higher because it's a different alphabet, even though the language is more limited in a way.
MR: Do you use any apps?
DDJ: Yeah. Duolingo. Love Duolingo.
MR: You use it a lot?
DDJ: Yeah.
MR: Do you have a language partner?
DDJ: Sophie [von der Tann] is my language partner. Her Hebrew and Arabic are very good because she studied both, so she has a very good grasp of both already. Even though she's German, she's being falsely modest about it. Of course.
MR: Are you watching TV in Hebrew with English subtitles, Hebrew with Hebrew subtitles? What do you do?
DDJ: It's Hebrew with English subtitles.
MR: Which ulpan are you going to?
DDJ: This is not an Ulpan. And Sophie went to Citizen Cafe.
MR: You recommend any of them?
DDJ: I think This is not an Ulpan is very good.
The Creative Habit
MR: When you're doing research for a big book, how do you keep track of your contacts and then how do you keep track of your notes?
DDJ: I use Scrivener for all my notes. Both the notes for those that I interviewed as well as all the secondary source or primary sources that I worked through. Before I transferred it into Microsoft Word, I did all the work in Scrivener for the rough manuscript, which was amazing.
MR: What about for contacts?
DDJ: For contacts, I basically always have a Word file with headers and then I just update with whatever contact I have under the header for which company, family, or source is appropriate.
MR: For anyone reading this, I should tell them that we used to be roommates.
DDJ: Right. Full disclosure is important.
MR: What do you do to take breaks when you're writing?
DDJ: I have to force myself to take breaks when I'm in a flow, but I basically stop writing when I get hungry.
MR: What do you eat?
DDJ: In Berlin I had such a strict structure. I would go to the REWE, a local supermarket, which was right next to my office. Every morning I biked fifteen minutes from home to the office. I parked my bike. I went into the REWE, I would buy chopped up mangoes and I would get my one euro coffee from the machine at REWE. And then I would eat my breakfast behind my desk, which is also a remnant from my days at Bloomberg News, and then start writing. This is the process that I had over 2020, 2021 when I actually started writing the book.
I'd done most of my research at that point. And then I would write or research for about three, four hours. And around 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM, I would always get late lunches. I would go to a coffee place. It's called Nothaft & Seidel on Schönhauser Allee and I would get a cappuccino there and something like an avocado croissant or sandwich, and then I would get back to work.
Depending on the night, I would finish anywhere between six and eight and I would do groceries and would go home.
MR: What do you do for exercise?
DDJ: I run, I swim, I play tennis sometimes. Not enough. And we have an amazing personal trainer in Berlin called Lydia.
Writer’s Block
MR: Did you ever have writer's block on this project or others?
DDJ: In the beginning, yeah. Just because the research was so much. I started writing in May 2018. In the beginning, you feel that the research is such an insurmountable mountain — you feel it’s such a Herculean or Sisyphean job. Sometimes you feel it's not moving fast enough, but you just have to work at it every day and there are going to be days where you're not as inspired or you don't feel it, but you just have to get through it.
MR: What do you do when you have writer's block to just push forward?
DDJ: I don't know. I started reading other stuff. I started procrastinating. I started reading, mainly online. Mainly feature articles. Mainly nonfiction, long-form reporting. And then at one point, I just switched back to the book.
I think actually to get through writer's block is to read a lot of good writing because it inspires you and also to get back on it and put it to task, as it were.
MR: What news journals and periodicals do you have subscriptions to?
DDJ: New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Guardian, Dutch Financial Daily, and various other Dutch media.
MR: New York Review of Books?
DDJ: I actually don't.
MR: What's the first thing you read in the morning?
DDJ: I read my daily dose of football news.
MR: Where do you get your football news?
DDJ: Voetbal International it's called. It's a Dutch website.
MR: What football team you support?
DDJ: I support Ajax Amsterdam.
MR: Who's your favorite soccer player of all time?
DDJ: Wow. That is a very difficult question. I would say Jari Litmanen. He was a Finnish attacking midfielder, who played for Ajax a long time, won the Champions League with Ajax, but also played for Liverpool and Barcelona. And he's the best Finnish football player that ever played. He's really boring. I tried to read his autobiography and it was like, "Wow, this guy is so boring." But he was so good.
City Bike
MR: What's your favorite bike?
DDJ: How did I not mention cycling as my favorite thing to do as exercise? But it's so ingrained into my being as a Dutchman that I don't even consider it exercising anymore. And actually because of Sophie, I've also been hiking a lot because she's an avid hiker.
MR: What kind of bike do you have?
DDJ: I have a city bike here in Israel. The first thing I do when I move to any city is to buy a bicycle. And that's what I did in Tel Aviv as well.
MR: What did you buy?
DDJ: I bought a secondhand city bike. I tend to buy my bicycles secondhand because I'm from Amsterdam, the global capital of bike theft. Cities like New York and Tel Aviv where you have a lot of cyclists — they don't have shit on Amsterdam when it comes to bicycle theft. I tend to never buy a new bike.
MR: Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If you know that those places don't steal bikes, why would you not buy a nice bike?
DDJ: I'm so paranoid because of growing up in Amsterdam that even cities like New York and Tel Aviv, which have relatively high bike theft percentages, but not as high as Amsterdam, I've become so conditioned to never buy new bikes. Last year when I arrived in Tel Aviv in mid-August, I bought a crummy second-hand bike and it breaks down a lot, but then I get it fixed. And then it's been working pretty solid over the last couple of weeks.
MR: What language do you dream in?
DDJ: Depends. But I would say generally it's still Dutch. But sometimes it's also English.
MR: And then what language do you think in?
DDJ: I also alternate, but I would say still majority Dutch.
DDJ: It’s funny, actually — I never take a step back and think, "Oh, am I thinking in English or in Dutch." But generally I think most of the conversations are in English, actually. Maybe at this point, it's probably 50-50.
The Warby Parker Twins
MR: Where are your glasses from?
DDJ: They're from Warby Parker.
MR: When we were at Bloomberg, they called us the Warby Parker twins, but I had Oliver Peoples.
DDJ: Yes. It's true. You had the more expensive glasses, which you still wear today. It's the same pair, right? Turns out the Warby Parker twins was total misnomer. What a bummer.
MR: Where's your favorite place to shop for clothing?
DDJ: I generally hate shopping for clothing so whenever I do it, it's on a spur. I enjoy it the most that way.
MR: Do you have a favorite place in the Netherlands where you buy clothes from?
DDJ: I like Cos. It’s the upscale H&M. It’s Swedish but they pretend to be French. I like Scandinavian, simple aesthetics. Suitsupply, which is Dutch. The founder of Suitsupply, Fokke de Jong, is Dutch. And I actually go to the store in New York or Berlin and because we have the same last name I say, "Oh, Fokke is my cousin." And they give me a discount. But not in Amsterdam.
MR: Do you have a lot of possessions?
DDJ: I accumulated quite a bit of art over the years, but I can’t really move around with that as much. I think the material things that I care about most of my life are books and works of art.
MR: Let me ask you some rapid-fire questions.
DDJ: Sure.
MR: What's the first book that comes to your mind right now?
DDJ: It's always The Stand by Stephen King, always. Particularly now that we're living in the end times.
MR: What's the first nonfiction book that comes to your mind right now?
DDJ: It's actually the book I'm reading right now — Putin's People by Catherine Belton.
MR: Got it. What's the first song that comes to your mind right now?
DDJ: “Reminiscing” by Little River Band.
MR: And what's the first piece of art that comes to mind right now?
DDJ: I just went to the Guggenheim exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky and I was just so mind blown that I still think about all the works that were there.
MR: I love Kandinsky. He was a great theorist of art as well.
DDJ: Was he (laughs)?
MR: He wrote a great pamphlet called Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
DDJ: I'll look it up. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), the name of the art group that he cofounded, became the name of my first bike in New York. My dad came up with the name so, I guess, it all comes back to cycling and art.
MR: Yes. Let me ask you now about traveling. You travel a lot. What suitcases do you use?
DDJ: I use a red Rimowa suitcase.
MR: Do you have a bag packed at all times?
DDJ: No. I hate packing and I try to put it off — I avoid it as much as possible until the last moment.
MR: Do you have any travel tips as someone who travels a lot? What kind of adapters do you use?
DDJ: I have this Lufthansa adapter, which I use for everything. The main adapters I use are European to American and American to European. That is basically the story of my life so far. I have two constants in my life: American to European and European to American.
For travel tips — don’t think about travel until you can’t avoid it. Just put it out of your mind until the day before you leave.
MR: That's fantastic.
Pizza Bagels
MR: Do you have a favorite place to eat in Tel Aviv?
DDJ: I love Shine. It's on Shlomo HaMelekh, the street we live on. It's very good Italian, even so much so that many Italians eat there as well. And that's one of my favorite surprises of Tel Aviv so far. Something I noticed last summer in Israel — there are a lot of Italians. Israeli-Italian is really my favorite combination. They have the best cuisines, and the Italians have the best personality.
MR: What was your favorite place in New York to eat?
DDJ: Wow. I loved going to Fish, which has been shuttered on Bleecker. And I love going to the Noho Star, which has also been shuttered on Lafayette so both of my favorite places are gone.
MR: What about in Amsterdam?
DDJ: In Amsterdam, I love this place called l’Entrecote et les Dames. They always serve the same thing — steak frites. That's it. It's great. It's simple. And it's very difficult to get a table.
MR: If you could only be in five places for the rest of your life, where would you choose?
DDJ: It would be Amsterdam. It would be Berlin. It would be New York. It would be Tuscany and it would be Tel Aviv.
MR: Do you think you'll stay in Tel Aviv for a while?
DDJ: Yeah. It's going to be a couple of years. It's going to be at least, I would say, four years.
MR: Of all the places you've been, where do you think you want to raise your children?
DDJ: That's a good question. It's something I think about a lot. I really like Germany. I think it's a great country to raise kids in. The education system is good, but then I have to consider the fact that my children will be native German speaking, which is a barrier that I haven’t yet psychologically overcome. Amsterdam is a nice place to grow up, but it's a village. I'd rather have Berlin. Berlin is good. I miss it a lot. It's just a great place to live, even with children.