ShalomNewYork.com

Upd “N.Y. football teams end talks with company with Nazi ties over naming rights” The Giants and the Jets face moral and public-relations questions as they negotiate the possible sale of the naming rights to their new stadium with Allianz, a Munich-based insurer and financial services company with disturbing connections to Nazi Germany. Allianz insured facilities and personnel at concentration camps like Auschwitz and Dachau. Kurt Schmitt, its chief executive in the 1930s, served as Hitler’s second economics minister and can be seen in a photograph from a rally wearing an SS-Oberführer’s uniform and delivering the Nazi salute with Hitler standing in front of him. Like other insurers in Germany at the time, Allianz followed anti-Semitic policies by terminating or refusing to pay off the life insurance policies of Jews, and sent cash that was due beneficiaries and survivors to the Nazis. It also became the insurer of Jewish valuables taken by the Nazis. Gerald Feldman was a historian asked by Allianz in 1997 to produce an unfettered history of its role in Hitler’s Germany. He wrote in “Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933-1945” about when the company extended its group accident insurance for engineers working for the notorious I.G. Farben chemical company at Auschwitz. more@NYtimes