In March of 1938, as Hitler’s troops stormed across the Austrian border in the Anschluss, Max Keith convened the ninth annual concessionaire convention, with 1,500 people in attendance. Behind the main table, a huge banner proclaimed, in German, “Coca-Cola is the world-famous trademark for the unique product of Coca-Cola GmbH.” Directly below, three gigantic swastikas stood out, black on red. At the main table, Keith sat surrounded by his deputies, another swastika draped in front of him.
Although acknowledging glorious past efforts, Keith urged his workers to forge onward into the future, never to be content until every German citizen was a Coke consumer. “We know we will reach our goal only if we muster all our powers in a total effort,” he said. “Our marvelous drink has the power of endurance to continue this march to success.” If he sounded like Hitler, it was probably deliberate. The meeting closed with a “ceremonial pledge” to Coca-Cola and a ringing, three-fold Sieg-Heil to Hitler.
Far from expressing horror at Nazi aggression, Keith and his men swiftly followed the troops into Austria, establishing a Vienna branch in September. Keith registered no protest a month later when, on November 10, 1938, Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” heralded a new level of terror for Jews, whose Austrian businesses were demolished and synagogues set on fire. Nor were Woodruff or Powers disturbed, though the Anschluss did cause friction between the two men. Powers felt that his royalty should cover all Coca-Cola sold within German borders, wherever they might extend because of Hitler. Woodruff demurred, saying the contract specified the borders as they existed when it was signed. Shortly after the argument was settled, Powers was killed in an automobile accident, and Keith was left the undisputed leader of the German Coca-Cola business.
Keith presided over the tenth anniversary of the German Coca-Cola business in April of 1939, lavishing praise on the recently deceased Ray Powers, though Keith’s joy at achieving control could scarcely be concealed. The past year, he gloated, had been historic because Hitler had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, bringing those lands back into the German fold. The phenomenal spread of Coca-Cola during 1938 was a close second, however. Then Keith ordered a mass Sieg-Heil for Hitler’s recent fiftieth birthday “to commemorate our deepest admiration and gratitude for our Führer who has led our nation into a brilliant higher sphere.”
BOMBED-OUT BOTTLING PLANTS
On September 1, 1939, when Hitler’s troops rolled into Poland, and England and France finally declared war, Max Keith realized he was in trouble. While Göring may have previously permitted the flow of 7X, it was only a matter of time before the supply was severely curtailed or cut off altogether by the exigencies of war.* Not only that, Keith feared that as a “foreign” business, Coca-Cola GmbH might be nationalized and its leaders imprisoned. Quickly, he moved on two fronts to forestall disaster.
First, he maneuvered to become a part of the vast German bureaucracy. Hitler may have had ultimate power, but he was bored with the details of governing, leaving much of it to old-line civil service men, many of whom were quite sympathetic to the plight of businessmen. Fortunately for Keith, Walter Oppenhoff was good friends with the head of the Ministry of Justice. Oppenhoff managed to get himself and Keith appointed to the Office of Enemy Property to supervise all soft drink plants, both in Germany and captured territory. As German troops overran Europe, Keith and Oppenhoff followed, assisting and taking over the Coca-Cola businesses in Italy, France, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Norway.
Keith’s second move was to find another product. While rationing Coca-Cola carefully to the different plants, he asked his chemists to invent an alternative drink that would see the Company through the war. They created a fruit-flavored drink. Like Coca-Cola, it was a unique caffeinated blend not readily identifiable as orange, grape, or lemon. Relying on available ingredients—often the leavings from other food industries—the new drink used whey, a cheese by-product, as well as apple fiber from cider presses. Keith later commented that the drink was made of “left-overs from left-overs.” The mix of fruit ingredients shifted, depending on the availability of Italian produce. At first, the drink had to be sweetened with saccharin, but in 1941 it was exempted from sugar rationing and allowed to use 3.5 percent beet sugar, resulting in a beverage far better than any wartime competitor’s.
In a christening contest, Keith asked his assembled employees to let their fantasy—Fantasie in German—run wild, and veteran salesman Joe Knipp immediately blurted the winning name, Fanta. Walter Oppenhoff registered the new trademark in Germany as well as all occupied countries, though in Belgium manager Carl West opted for the name Cappy, thinking that Fanta sounded too Germanic for angry Belgians. A new, distinctive bottle was created, and Fanta sold well enough to keep the business alive during the war, even after the U.S. entered late in 1941 and all Coca-Cola supplies ceased. In 1943, Keith sold nearly three million cases of Fanta. Many bottles weren’t drunk but were used to add sweetness and flavor to soups and stews, since wartime sugar was severely rationed.
At the same time, Max Keith did everything possible to keep the name Coca-Cola before the German public. The Nazis outlawed “reminiscent advertising” for products no longer available. Still, in all Fanta advertising, he included the phrase, “a product of Coca-Cola GmbH.” Before the supply of Coca-Cola itself ran out at the end of 1942, he reserved his German supply only for hospitals with wounded Nazi soldiers, though branches of the German military also managed to snag a few cases.
When the army requisitioned his best trucks, Keith’s mechanics nursed the old ones with constant repairs. Ford Motor Company also continued to do business inside Nazi Germany, supplying the Geschäftsführer with special coal-fueled trucks. To ensure that his remaining trucks weren’t confiscated, Keith (like Woodruff) rendered his business “essential” to the war effort by capping carbonated water in his now-idle Coca-Cola bottles and storing them in mine shafts, safe from air raids. His trucks then became emergency vehicles to distribute free “catastrophe water”—and to maintain goodwill.
Keith could hide his bottles from the bombs, but not his plants. All forty-three Coca-Cola plants were bombed at some point during the war—a few on several occasions. The Company’s Essen headquarters and plant were hit more times than any other. Located in Germany’s industrial heartland, the town was completely demolished by the end of the war, not one building left whole. Nonetheless, Keith continued to bottle both Fanta and water, even at the height of the bombing. “I arranged for so-called siding plants on the outskirts of the cities where we had our bottling plants,” he explained. Housed in old farmhouses or dairies, the makeshift operations kept the Fanta supply steady while the main plant in the city was repaired.
When his employees were drafted, Keith replaced them with ex-convicts unacceptable to the army. “One of our best salesmen in Essen,” Keith proudly remembered, “had killed his father and was imprisoned for twenty years.” Later in the war, Keith used Chinese labor and “people who would come from anywhere in Europe—the war brought them from everywhere.” For Keith to say blandly that “the war brought them” implies that they were willing refugees, which is somewhat misleading. In fact, the wartime railroads carried not only Jews, Gypsies, and others to concentration camps but some nine million Fremdarbeiter, or foreign forced labor, who accounted for a fifth of the German labor force by 1944.
Clearly, Max Keith was willing to do almost anything to keep the Coca-Cola business going, including collaborating with the Nazi government. His associates later excused his behavior, asserting that he had no other alternative. “Yes, Max Keith tried not to offend those in power,” Klaus Pütter admitted. “He was a very skilled negotiator, a cautious man. You know, when you live in a country governed by a dictatorship, you have to watch your tongue and be very careful. If your neighbor heard you say anything against Hitler, they came at night and fetched you and off you went. It’s impossible for you here in the United States to understand.” As a result, Keith honed a fine-tuned diplomacy w
hile representing a foreign company. “One false step, one false remark would have been fatal.”
When his loyalty to Coca-Cola came under fire, Keith proved himself willing to die for his drink rather than submit to the Nazis. By the beginning of 1945, it was clear to everyone except Hitler and his fanatical followers that the war was lost. In reaction, devoted Nazis turned paranoid, looking for an enemy within to blame. Keith and Oppenhoff were summoned that January to report to the general in charge of the Ministry of Commerce and told to nationalize their company. “Change the name to anything else,” the general ordered. “Call it Max Keith GmbH if you want, but change it within two days, or you will be placed in a concentration camp.”
Keith remained obdurate. He and Oppenhoff went to see their old friend at the Ministry of Justice, who was afraid that if he interfered he too might be imprisoned. Unsure what would happen, the two Coca-Cola men prepared for the showdown the next day, but it never came. The general was providentially killed in an air raid, saving the business. Three months later, in a Berlin bunker, Hitler shot himself through the mouth. The war was over.
INVASION OF THE TECHNICAL OBSERVERS
Max Keith had prevailed. “Coca-Cola GmbH still functioning,” he telegraphed to Woodruff. “Send auditors.” Astonished, Woodruff promptly dispatched Stephen Ladas, the New York lawyer for Coca-Cola Export, to try to locate Walter Oppenhoff in his home city of Cologne, whose bombed-out population of a million people had been reduced to only thirty-five thousand. Ladas couldn’t find Oppenhoff, but he did learn from neighbors that he was alive. Leaving an encouraging note, Ladas returned to America.
In the meantime, the Technical Observers poured into Germany just behind the liberating American troops, quickly commandeering a mineral water plant at Niedermendig and bottling Coke there by April, just before the German surrender. The three top T.O.s hopped in a jeep and set out to find Max Keith and “whatever remnants of our pre-war German company we could,” as one later remembered. When they found Keith, he was busily bottling Fanta in a half-destroyed plant.
To the Company executives back home, Max Keith was a hero. Harrison Jones, in his 1946 speech to the newest batch of Technical Observers headed for Germany, told them that Max Keith was “a grea-a-t, grea-a-t man” who had united the bottlers during the war. At the time, however, such praise rang hollow for Keith, who felt betrayed and angry. He had survived the war, keeping his little bottling kingdom intact, only to have it usurped by the American T.O.s. Later, he called this postwar period an “even worse breakdown” for him than he had suffered under the Nazis.
Keith’s distress was understandable, but so was the attitude of the Technical Observers in their U.S. military uniforms, ordered not to fraternize with Germans. Eisenhower had ordered that industry be “de-Nazified.” Together with Walter Oppenhoff (who had surfaced intact), Keith attempted to negotiate with Army officers and the American Coke men. “We had quite some discussions,” Oppenhoff remembered later. T.O. George Downing, who flatly called Keith “a second Hitler,” was appalled at his effrontery. “Could you imagine a German in a defeated Germany coming and telling Americans how to do something?” Downing was sure that Keith planned to take over Coca-Cola’s worldwide operations if Germany had won the war. Those might well have been Keith’s aspirations, but he was well schooled in patient diplomacy, and he now tried to ingratiate himself with the victors. At first, the Americans not only refused to give Keith any Coke syrup but curtailed his Fanta production. They eventually compromised, allowing Coca-Cola GmbH to bottle Fanta while the T.O.s monopolized the American drink for GI consumption.
In the uneasy truce, the Technical Observers bottled Coke on one side of the Frankfurt plant, while Keith capped Fanta in the other half. But in the devastated postwar economy, he couldn’t scrounge enough sugar or fruit—nor could most Germans afford to buy his drink. Sales fell from over two million cases in 1944 to a half million in 1945, even though he also started bottling soda water and a new flavor called Rosalta.
Keith was determined to take over the business when the American soldiers eventually left. He instructed his men to infiltrate the T.O. operations, and the Americans were more than happy to find experienced help. “As life around this plant took shape,” reported the T.O. in Stuttgart in August of 1945, “native Coca-Cola men became once again part of a great business. From the fields and prison camps old employees returned to the business. Good machinists and diligent effort have made what first appeared to be a hopeless mess a shining success.” No wonder one T.O. said, “I couldn’t teach myself to hate the Germans—they were so industrious.” No one seemed unduly concerned that these “native Coca-Cola men” were ex-Nazis or collaborators, partly because a magical transformation had taken place overnight with the Allied victory. “It was amazing,” one Technical Observer noted sarcastically, “but not one member of the populace was a Nazi, all were anti-party members and were definitely against Hitler and his objectives.”
Despite his precarious position, Max Keith tried to keep in touch with these former employees while offering his “help” to the T.O. operations. In Augsburg, Cliff Johnson explained to his assistant Don Sisler that “this Kraut, Max Keith, is coming to visit, and we’ve got orders to be nice to him.” When Keith arrived, clad in a huge fur coat, his former employees, now working at Augsburg, were “practically fainting with ecstasy,” as Sisler recalled the scene. “Elsie was swooning because Herr Keith was there, and Herr Kohler was bowing all over the place.” Sisler himself was impressed with Keith’s “regal presence.”
Finally, Keith seized an opportunity to outwit the Americans in 1949, when he discovered that a large supply of stale Coke syrup, shunted around the world during the war by the military bureaucracy, had arrived in Germany. He persuaded Paul Lesko, then in charge of the German Technical Observer operation, to sell him the syrup so that he could extract sugar from it for Fanta. To guard against its being reused, Lesko nearly dyed the syrup green, but Keith convinced him that such precautions were unnecessary. Putting his chemists to work, Keith clandestinely filtered and reworked the syrup, then hastily bottled his first Coca-Cola since 1942. Lee Talley, head of Coke’s operations in Europe, happened to call Keith to say he was planning to visit Frankfurt. “That’s wonderful,” Keith said, “because I want you to cut a ribbon tomorrow morning. We are starting with the Coca-Cola business again.” On October 3, Talley, who was quite surprised that Keith had all that syrup, nevertheless snipped the ribbon, and Keith’s trucks ventured forth with huge signs proclaiming “Coca-Cola ist wieder da!” (Coca-Cola is back again!). Lesko was infuriated at being hoodwinked, but with Talley tacitly approving the operation, he was powerless to do anything about it.
Keith’s timing was perfect. As the American military presence and T.O. operation dwindled, Woodruff decreed that the bottling should be returned to natives, and Lesko suddenly found himself having to answer to Keith, who was once again in command. To make peace with the American, Keith allowed him the Bremen bottling rights. It didn’t take Keith long to rebuild the German industry, now that he had free access to Coca-Cola concentrate. It was impossible to find Germans who had the capital requirements set down by the Export company—one dollar for every person in the franchise territory. Keith arbitrarily reduced that amount, demanding one deutsch mark per capita, the equivalent of a quarter. Still, few had such resources, so Keith had to cosign loans for many of them, extorting oaths of lifelong fealty. “I pick you,” he told his bottlers, “and I will make you rich, but you do what I tell you.”
Keith was true to his word. When former T.O. Don Sisler returned to Germany many years later, he found that Elsie and Herr Kohler owned the Augsburg bottling plant and were “rolling in wealth.” They treated him at the town’s best restaurant and laughed tolerantly at memories of those difficult days just after the war. One thing had not changed, however: they still groveled before Max Keith, now Coca-Cola commander throughout Europe. Braver bottlers, in hushed tones, called him “Super-
Führer.”
THE GREAT WHITE ARYAN HOPE BECOMES A COCA-COLA MAN
Even Max Schmeling showed proper obeisance to Keith when Schmeling became a Coca-Cola bottler in 1957. The German hero contacted James Farley, New York’s boxing commissioner in the prewar years, when the Coke executive came to Essen in 1954 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Coca-Cola in Germany. Farley immediately recognized that Schmeling would be a real catch. Down on his luck, the boxer jumped at the chance to bottle Coke in Hamburg and would serve as a goodwill ambassador for the drink in Germany for years to come. Once the personification of Nazi superiority, the man who kept a signed autograph of Hitler in his study joined the gemütlich Coca-Cola family.*
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* Not surprisingly, Powers admired a fellow propagandist: Adolf Hitler. In 1930, Powers defended Hitler to Robert Woodruff, and in the spring of 1936 the American closed a letter to the Boss with the salutation, “Heil Hitler.”
* Hitler himself learned valuable lessons from Western advertising techniques. “All effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans,” Hitler wrote. “It has to confine itself to little and to repeat this eternally.”
* Two years later, however, the Brown Bomber knocked out the German in the first round.
* Woodruff was traveling with his wife, Nell, but though a devoted husband, he apparently derived little comfort from her company. He rather plaintively asked Sibley to sail across the Atlantic, spend less than a week with him in Germany, then accompany him back on the cruise ship. Sibley politely declined. Woodruff apparently preferred the company of close male friends to the somewhat rarified company of “Miss Nell,” who frowned on cigar smoke and poker games.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 35