The Banks That Never Changed Sides: JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Three World Wars

Same institution. Three wars’ worth of entries. Nobody ever closed the account. All images generated by author unless stated

Arms manufacturers get the historical scrutiny. Krupp, Rheinmetall, I.G. Farben, their names carry the weight of what they built and who used it. The banks that financed all of it get almost none. That asymmetry is worth correcting, because two institutions, one American, one German, have been present, on the wrong side or adjacent to it, in all three of the conflicts this project has documented and neither has ever faced anything resembling the accountability moment the arms manufacturers eventually did.

The bank that financed Auschwitz

Deutsche Bank’s role in the First World War was unremarkable by the standards of its era, it financed the German war effort, as every major German bank did. What its Katowice branch did in the second war is not unremarkable at all. In February 1999, Deutsche Bank admitted that loans approved through that branch, in German-occupied Poland, had financed construction at Auschwitz, a fact recovered from files that had sat behind the Iron Curtain until the Cold War ended. The bank’s own historian, Manfred Pohl, offered a precise and telling qualification: the branch and local officials knew exactly what the loans were funding, he said, but “it is not certain whether it was known in Berlin,” where formal approval would have had to be granted. Whether the insulation of the central board from what its own branch was doing was real or convenient is a question the historical record cannot fully settle, but the timing of the eventual reckoning is unambiguous either way. The revelation surfaced precisely as Deutsche Bank was seeking regulatory approval for its $10.1 billion acquisition of Bankers Trust; New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi threatened to block the merger until Holocaust-era compensation claims were resolved. The settlement that followed was not primarily an act of conscience. It was a condition of being allowed to complete a deal.

The bank’s post-Cold War chapter is where the pattern becomes structural rather than historical. Between 2011 and 2015, Deutsche Bank ran a scheme investigators called “mirror trades”: clients bought roubles denominated stock in Moscow while counterparts simultaneously sold the identical position through the bank’s London branch, trades with no discernible economic purpose beyond converting roubles into dollars while evading compliance checks, moving the proceeds on to accounts in Cyprus, Estonia and Latvia. Regulators found the bank had missed “numerous opportunities” to stop it. New York’s Department of Financial Services fined it $425 million; the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority added its largest-ever fine at the time, £163 million. The scheme is estimated to have moved roughly $10 billion out of Russia. Individuals connected to that Russia-facing business went on to figure in the same political financial apparatus now targeted by the sanctions regime the bank must help enforce.

Three wars. Financing the aggressor in the first. Financing, at branch level at least, the site of industrial genocide in the second, with the parent company’s knowledge left conveniently unresolved. Laundering roughly ten billion dollars for the network around a state that would become the aggressor in the third. Each time, the accountability arrived late, partial, and only under external pressure, in 1999, only because a merger depended on it.

One institution’s two lineages, merged into a single vault.

The merger that fused two war records into one bank

J.P. Morgan & Co.’s First World War role was, in its own way, just as consequential as Deutsche Bank’s, though it sits on the opposite side of the ledger. The firm was designated the exclusive purchasing agent for the British and French governments in the United States, one of the most lucrative single contracts in American history, earning the firm a $30 million commission on more than $3 billion in Allied war material purchased before America had even formally entered the conflict. Morgan separately arranged a $500 million bond issue for Britain and France, the largest foreign loan Wall Street had ever underwritten at the time. This created a documented, structural alignment between one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions and the outcome of the war, well before it was politically acceptable to say the United States had picked a side. When the Nye Committee investigated financial influence over America’s WWI entry in the 1930s, it examined Morgan directly, and, notably, “stopped short and never produced any substantial findings.” The scrutiny arms manufacturers eventually received, Morgan largely escaped.

Chase National Bank’s Second World War record sits less comfortably and the documented detail is worse than a general description of “managing frozen assets” suggests. Under German and Vichy regulation, Chase’s Paris branch was required to report on its Jewish customers’ holdings; on 20 December 1941 it supplied the occupying authorities a list of thirteen people who were Jewish or presumed to be. Between October 1940 and July 1942, 549 safe deposit boxes at the branch were opened under German order. Chase and J.P. Morgan, still separate institutions at the time, were the first two US banks accused of complicity in the seizure of Jewish assets under occupation, named as co-defendants in a single 1998 lawsuit alleging wrongful seizure of accounts and safe deposit holdings. Chase maintained fewer than 100 accounts were actually at issue; talks with the World Jewish Congress collapsed without a settlement in 2000, the same year the two banks stopped being separate defendants and became one company.

On 31 December 2000, Chase Manhattan merged with J.P. Morgan & Co. in a $33.2 billion deal, creating a combined institution with roughly $660 billion in assets, fusing the Allied-purchasing-agent lineage and the occupied-Paris-branch lineage, two firms that had been named together in the same Holocaust-restitution lawsuit only two years earlier, into a single corporate entity. JPMorgan Chase today sits at the centre of the dollar clearing system used to enforce sanctions on Russia and the entanglements are concrete rather than abstract: the bank sued Russia’s state owned VTB Bank to block it recovering $439.5 million from a sanctions blocked account, and in 2024 the US government halted a $2 billion JPMorgan transfer, routed from the unsanctioned Gazprombank through Turkey’s Ziraat Bank, that investigators concluded Russia and Turkey were using to fund a Rosatom nuclear plant specifically to bypass sanctions on Russia’s central bank. The bank whose predecessor firm helped finance one world war’s winning side, and whose other predecessor firm kept its Paris branch open through the next war’s occupation, is now the institution standing directly in the path of Russia’s attempts to move money around the third.

What accountability actually looked like, and didn’t

The Nuremberg trials held individual bankers to account in a handful of cases and prison sentences were handed down to some financiers connected to the Nazi war economy. But the institutions themselves, Deutsche Bank, the precursor entities that became JPMorgan Chase, were never dissolved, never structurally broken up and never subjected to anything resembling the industrial dismemberment briefly imposed on Krupp or Rheinmetall before Cold War necessity reversed it. Banking secrecy, jurisdictional complexity and the sheer utility of an intact financial system to the post-war order all worked in the same direction: preserve the institution, prosecute a few individuals if absolutely necessary and let the balance sheet carry on.

That is the throughline worth naming. Arms manufacturers get dismantled, then quietly rebuilt when the next war makes their capacity useful again — a pattern this project has documented in detail with Krupp, Rheinmetall, and the Röchling family. Banks never get dismantled in the first place. Their capital is fungible, their records are private and the specific harm they finance is one degree removed from the harm itself, a credit line, not a rifle. That one degree of removal appears to have been enough, across three wars, to spare them the reckoning the arms industry occasionally had to at least perform.

The building never moved. Only what it was allowed to finance changed, and only sometimes.

Part of the What If AI Investigated series. Sources: Deutsche Bank’s February 1999 admission regarding Auschwitz construction financing via its Katowice branch, and bank historian Manfred Pohl’s contemporaneous statements; reporting on the Bankers Trust acquisition and NYC Comptroller Alan Hevesi’s intervention; 2017 New York Department of Financial Services and UK Financial Conduct Authority findings on Deutsche Bank’s “mirror trades” scheme; historical record of J.P. Morgan & Co.’s WWI Allied purchasing agency and the Nye Committee investigation; the 1998 lawsuit against Chase National Bank and J.P. Morgan concerning Jewish assets under Nazi occupation, and the World Jewish Congress negotiations; JPMorgan Chase’s 31 December 2000 merger documentation; reporting on JPMorgan Chase’s VTB Bank litigation and the halted 2024 Gazprombank–Ziraat Bank–Rosatom transfer. This piece draws on background research already compiled in this project’s Apparatus Across All Three Wars document.