Reflecting the long-standing "hands-on" approach of banks in Germany, Schlitter was involved in several major commercial and industrial mergers.
Schlitter's father, Albert, served as a soldier as a young man and later worked in a post office at Lennep [de], at that time a separate town, but subsequently subsumed into Remscheid.
[3] He also became a supervisory board member for various other major corporations including IG Farben (1931–1935), the industrial conglomerates Deutsch-Luxemburgische Bergwerks- und Hütten-AG and Phoenix AG für Bergbau und Hüttenbetrieb [de], the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG [de] mining company, the power company RWE and Mannesmann.
Their son was Oskar Hermann Artur Schlitter who in 1932 married the film actress and former Miss Germany, Daisy D'ora,[2][6] joined the Nazi Party in 1934 and spent the twelve Nazi years working in a succession of important diplomatic and government posts; after 1952 Oskar (junior) resumed a diplomatic career.
[7] Oscar Schlitter lived in the Berlin quarter of Schwanenwerder, which on German language Monopoly boards before 1933 occupied the square that English players of the game associated with Mayfair.
Schlitter sold his own home, and the substantial plot that it occupied at 8–10 Island Street (Inselstraße 8–10) in the summer of 1935, to Joseph Goebbels for a price of 270,000 Reichsmarks, described later by one authority as "a very modest sum".