In the spring of 1997, the Board of Management of the Allianz AG commissioned me to write this history of Allianz in the National Socialist period and to do so as an independent historian accountable only for the completion of the study according to the standards of my profession. The immediate reasons for their decision to promote such a study at that time were very clear. On the one hand, Allianz — along with a number of other German and European insurance companies — was charged in class actions in United States courts with failure to properly discharge their obligations toward Jewish policyholders. Allianz thus had the problem of explaining what had happened to the policies of its Jewish customers, and this involved explaining not only how Jewish assets were expropriated by the National Socialist regime but also the postwar restitution policies. On the other hand, Allianz found itself confronted with press reports about insuring SS-owned factories in the concentration camps, among them factories in Auschwitz. The revelations inevitably lent new importance and significance to what had previously been known but unappreciated or neglected. One example is that of Kurt Schmitt, the general director of Allianz between 1921 and 1933, who had been Hitler's second Reich Economics Minister in 1933–1934 and regularly appeared in an SS uniform while in office.