Their grandfather was said to be Nazi Germany’s richest man after building a weapons empire on the backs of slave labor.Their father was involved in one of postwar Germany’s biggest political scandals. He almost frittered away the family fortune.
Enough remained for Viktoria-Katharina Flick and twin brother Karl-Friedrich Flick to lay claim, at 19, to being the world’s youngest billionaires. Each has $1.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Behind the riches, discreetly managed by their family office in Austria, lies a dark history of one of Germany’s wealthiest industrial dynasties.
The Flicks’ wealth traces its roots to Friedrich Flick, who spent three years in prison after he was convicted by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal of using slave labor to produce armaments for the Nazis, among other crimes. He created a steel empire, which expanded by seizing companies in Nazi-occupied territories and in Germany through Aryanizations—the expropriation and forced sale of Jewish-owned businesses. As many as 40,000 laborers may have died working for Flick companies, according to a study of his Nazi-era businesses published in 2008.
