Hermann Josef Abs

Hermann Josef Abs (15 October 1901, Bonn – 5 February 1994, Bad Soden)[1] was a leading Nazi banker and advisor to Chancellor Adenauer.

As the most powerful commercial banker of the Third Reich, he was, according to economic journalist Adam LeBor, "the lynchpin of the continent wide plunder".

[3] The Allies arrested him in January 1946; however, British intervention got him freed after three months, and German courts later dropped all charges.

[4] In 1974, the artist Hans Haacke revealed the supposed role of Abs with the Nazi regime in a project for the exhibition Manet-PROJEKT '74' which detailed, in ten panels, the ownership history of Édouard Manet's Bunch of Asparagus (1880).

[7] In 1995, studies of the Deusche Bank archives by Harold James show that, while the DB helped the Nazi in different variating degrees, direct and indirectly, there has various links between Abs and anti-Nazi resistance during the war, while Abs decided not direct participate in resistance organized acts, he went to various secret meetings and such links were described as something that made James "astounded".