ABSTRACT
The Austrian insurance industry commissioned the economic historian Dieter Stiefel to investigate wartime insurance activities on Austrian territory. An open research effort was designed in 1998 in order to begin a concentrated study of the Nazi past of the Austrian Postal Savings Bank, which had been absorbed by the German Postal Service in 1938. The slave labor contingent in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen consisted of more than seven thousand people. It is also important to point out that these histories do not end abruptly in 1945, but also deal with the postwar stigmatization in the former Soviet Union and the war crime tribunals against the perpetrators. In Austria, only the Bank Austria Commission has been criticized—despite the fact that it is the only privately funded commission established by a court decision as a completely independent committee with a fixed budget.
