They’re Germany’s billion-dollar babies.
Just 19, twins Viktoria-Katharina Flick and Karl-Friedrich Flick are the world’s youngest billionaires.
Both inherited a breathtaking $1.8 billion from their late father, Friedrich Karl Flick.
“They’ve been getting pocket-money since second grade, age-appropriate, not more than their friends,’’ their mother, Ingrid Flick, told Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung in 2009. “This is how they’ll learn how to deal with money and its significance. I want them to be no different from their friends.”
However, the Teutonic twosome have also inherited a fortune that it is drenched in blood.
Building a steel, weapons and munitions empire on the backs of slave labour, their grandfather Friedrich Flick took the title of Nazi Germany’s richest man.
He became wealthy by seizing Jewish-owned companies in Nazi-controlled Europe. Hitler and his henchman called the program Aryanizations.
A 2008 study revealed as many as 40,000 slave labourers could have died working for the Hitler sycophant.
The twins grandfather was tried at Nuremberg following the Nazis obliteration by the Allies. He served three years for war crimes.
“Leaving aside all moral standards, Friedrich Flick had the genius ability to become the richest person in Germany—twice,” Thomas Ramge, author of The Flicks, told Bloomberg News.
Eventually, the family sold the last of their Aryanized assets and became the largest investor in Daimler-Benz, another German company with a troubling past.
Their father died in 2006, but before he left this world he was involved in a slew of corruption scandals involving German politicians.
While other German conglomerates with ties to the Nazis have made restitution, the Flicks never have. Oppa Friedrich and his heir never bothered.
The elder said before he died in 1972 he didn’t have a legal — or moral — obligation to do so.
torontosun.com
