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  • International Business and National War Interests. Unilever between Reich and Empire, 1939-1945
  • Samuël Kruizinga
Ben Wubs . International Business and National War Interests. Unilever between Reich and Empire, 1939-1945. London: Routledge, 2008. xiv + 256 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-41667-2, $135 (hardcover).

In the decade prior to the Second World War, Unilever—founded in 1930 by merger of the Dutch N.V. Margarine Unie and the British Lever Brothers Ltd.—had become one of the largest multinationals in the world. Its core business was the manufacture of margarine and soap. Originally a conglomeration of a wide variety of different subsidiaries, it underwent a "managerial revolution" in the 1930s. The influence of the company's founding families (principally Lever, Jurgens, and Van den Bergh) was diminished in favor of specialized managers, and one board of directors supervised all the assets of this combine the world over. As Ben Wubs rightly observes, these characteristics of Unilever's strategy did not mean that the company was following a global strategy. That would have been impossible since many countries erected trade barriers and employed other protectionist strategies as a means to stem the tide of the post-1929 international economic crisis. This made it difficult to shift raw materials, finished products, and sometimes even funds between countries; therefore, Unilever treated each country as a, mostly separate, economic unit.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in Unilever's second-most important market (responsible for 18.6 percent of the company's total sales in 1937, p. 162): Germany, as Wubs makes abundantly clear in the book's third and best chapter. The 1933 Nazi takeover inaugurated a period of ever closer State control over the national economy, which did not fail to impact Unilever. Challenges faced by Unilever's companies in Germany included Nazi's efforts to protect their farmers by limiting the production of margarine in favor of butter. Unilever's [End Page 712] German subsidiaries responded by diversifying their business portfolio by investing in the frozen food industry. They also invested in a whaling fleet, which promised to supply the Third Reich with much needed fats. In return for these economic services—which created an even greater independence for the German Unilever subsidiaries—the company was offered more freedom to slush funds back to its London headquarters.

When the threat of war appeared imminent, Unilever decided to "re-split" the company into separate Dutch and British halves, which was to prevent any legal trouble in case Britain declared war on Germany while Holland remained neutral. When the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis in May 1940, the Dutch half became subject to immense German political pressure. Various Reich departments, Nazi ministers, and even Unilever's German competitors insisted on a German takeover of the company's continental assets. These plans, however, floundered. "Dutch" Unilever was simply too important for Germany in the short run (supplying frozen foods to the Wehrmacht as well as soap, oils, and fats, increasingly from domestic and Rumanian sources as the Allied blockade made overseas imports and whale fishing impossible) to disrupt or dismantle the company.

Meanwhile, the British half of the company was as engaged in war work for the other side. The Board volunteered to up glycerine production to stimulate the manufacture of explosives at the risk of making losses to stocks, waived any profits made from having its factories used to fill shells, and volunteered to create a pool of British margarine and soap factories in order to rationalize production (missing valuable marketing and branding opportunities in the process). Patriotism was not the only explanation for this seemingly selfless behavior, Wubs claims. Rather, the London Unilever directors felt that by closely allying them with the British (and Dutch) war efforts, they would be remembered after their eventual victory over Germany, which would ease the repossession of Unilever assets in enemy or occupied countries. This would indeed pay off after the war, when the British Government helped Unilever save the Company's German subsidiaries from being broken up into smaller units as part of Washington's drive to break up former enemy concentrations of economic power.

Wubs' book, based on diligent research...

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