They tried to erase the Jews behind Europe’s most famous brands.

Before Auschwitz, there was Aryanisation.

The Jewish man who helped create Porsche lies almost forgotten. (photo: Adrien Vajas/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Andrea Baur, an entrepreneur and cultural strategist based in Germany.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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It didn’t begin with broken glass or burning synagogues. It began with files, signatures, and perfectly stamped forms.

The Holocaust of ideas and ownership — what the Nazis called “Aryanisation” — was not improvised terror; it was an organised transfer of brilliance. An administrative machine designed to strip Jewish citizens of their companies, their patents, their dignity, and finally, their names.

When I first started researching the “erased founders,” I thought I was collecting individual tragedies. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became: This was not a series of coincidences. It was a system — cold, legalistic, and lucrative. And it worked.

“Aryanisation” was a euphemism that sounded harmless enough to bureaucrats: a process, a regulation, a form to be filed. In reality, it was the wholesale expropriation of Jewish property, orchestrated jointly by the Nazi state, the banks, and a willing private sector.

The ministries issued decrees that forced Jewish entrepreneurs to sell their businesses “voluntarily” — at a fraction of their value — to so-called Aryan trustees. The banks provided the credit lines to finance the takeovers. The accountants and notaries documented the “transfers.” And in the end, new owners walked away with thriving firms, patents and factories — all neatly sanitised by law.

It was an economy of looting dressed in legality. A moral collapse hidden beneath rubber stamps and ledgers.

Words like Entjudung (de-Judaization) and Treuhänder (trustee) disguised what was happening. They turned theft into policy and persecution into paperwork. The victims were not only stripped of property but of authorship — of the right to be remembered as the builders of the modern world they had helped to create.

To understand the scale, we only need to look at three men whose creations still surround us every day, three Jews whose ideas became global symbols of German innovation: Adolf Rosenberger, Josef Ganz, and Arthur Eichengrün.

Long before the Porsche brand became synonymous with speed and prestige, there was Adolf Rosenberger — a gifted engineer, test driver, and businessman. He helped fund Ferdinand Porsche’s early projects and co-founded the company that would one day bear only the Porsche name. He was the first to test its racing cars, risking his life for the machines he helped design.

In 1935, Rosenberger was arrested for “racial defilement,” imprisoned in KZ Kislau, and forced to sell his shares. The price: 3,000 Reichsmarks, a pittance for a third of the firm. When he fled Germany, his name disappeared from company documents. For decades, Porsche’s official history began conveniently after him.

Today, the brand thrives. The man who helped create it lies almost forgotten. His only crime: being born Jewish.

Then there was Josef Ganz, a journalist, inventor, and relentless visionary. He dreamt of a “people’s car” — a lightweight, affordable automobile for every family. He designed prototypes, tested them, and published his ideas in Motor-Kritik, the magazine he edited.

Hitler, who admired the concept, later seized it for propaganda. When the Nazi state launched the KdF-Wagen project — the car we now know as the Volkswagen Beetle — Ganz was already in exile. His patents were quietly appropriated; his name vanished from the narrative.

The irony is almost unbearable: The “people’s car,” a symbol of post-war recovery, was born from the ideas of a man who was declared an enemy of the people.

Every household knows Aspirin. Few know the Jewish chemist who invented it.

Arthur Eichengrün was a pioneer of modern pharmaceuticals. At Bayer, he developed not only Aspirin, but also the first soluble cellulose acetates — the foundation of plastics and photographic film. When the Nazis took over, Bayer’s parent company IG Farben erased him from its history, crediting a younger “Aryan” colleague instead. Eichengrün was later imprisoned in Theresienstadt. He survived, but his authorship did not. For decades, textbooks taught that Felix Hoffmann had created Aspirin alone.

It took half a century for historians to restore Eichengrün’s name. By then, the drug had healed millions, while its creator’s story remained a wound.

Rosenberger, Ganz, and Eichengrün were not exceptions; they were examples. The pattern repeated itself from Berlin to Vienna, from Amsterdam to Budapest. The mechanisms changed languages, but not handwriting.

In Austria, Louis Rothschild was effectively held hostage until his family’s banking empire, the Creditanstalt, was signed away. In Berlin, Georg Wertheim’s legendary department stores — temples of modern retail — were stripped of their name and handed to “Aryan” competitors. In Hungary, Miksa Goldberger, who had modernised the textile industry and built social housing for his workers, saw his family’s company nationalised and his descendants murdered. In the Netherlands, Simon Philip Goudsmit, founder of De Bijenkorf, created one of Europe’s first department-store chains; it was confiscated, its Jewish directors deported.

Dozens more followed. The network of dispossession reached from Parisian ateliers to Polish factories. Different borders, same intent: to erase Jewish economic life from Europe, and to profit from the erasure.

When World War II ended, the paperwork survived. It was still neat, still legible, and still profitable.

The Allies dismantled IG Farben for good reason: Its crimes were too vast to ignore. But countless other firms, banks, and insurers simply re-branded. Executives who had facilitated the expropriations returned to their offices, now under new letterheads.

Germany and Austria embarked on reconstruction. The “economic miracle” became the new myth. Few asked what miracle could grow from confiscated capital. The same hands that had signed away Jewish assets were now signing export contracts.

And across Europe, restitution was partial, slow, and selective. Many heirs never returned. Many files were never opened. Memory itself became another commodity, too inconvenient for the new beginning.

Writing about these stories is never purely academic. Once you have seen the pattern, you start recognising its traces everywhere — in brand museums, corporate anniversaries, and glossy heritage books that begin their timelines one year too late.

You also start seeing how the narrative of European modernity (its cars, its medicines, its architecture of progress) was built on selective memory. The erasure was not only physical; it was cultural. A deliberate act of forgetting that allowed post-war Europe to celebrate innovation while ignoring the Jewish minds that had created it.

Sometimes, when I walk through a department store or see a Porsche engine or take an Aspirin, I think of them. Rosenberger’s steady hands on a steering wheel. Ganz sketching his people’s car. Eichengrün writing lab notes in a precise, steady hand. Men of reason, imagination and purpose — all branded as enemies by the very society they helped modernise.

We can’t return what was taken, but we can return the names. Remembering Rosenberger, Ganz, Eichengrün — and Rothschild, Koppel, Goldberger, Goudsmit, Wertheim — is not nostalgia. It is a moral correction. They remind us that Europe’s prosperity was never the work of one people or one ideology, but of pluralism, intellect and faith in progress.

Each story is a fragment of that larger truth: that civilisation depends on diversity, and the moment it destroys it, it begins erasing itself. When the Nazis wrote Aryanisation, they meant purification. What they achieved was impoverishment — spiritual, cultural and human.

There are dozens more names. From Riga to Lyon, from Prague to Antwerp. Each deserves their page back in history’s ledger. Because behind every famous European brand, there might be an erased founder, a name waiting to be spoken aloud again.

I often say: We can’t rewrite the past, but we can finish the sentence. That is what this work is — completing the missing pages. Rosenberger, Ganz, Eichengrün. Them and all the others.

They built the modern world. Europe simply signed its name beneath theirs.

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