Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
EMIL HOFFMAN AND HIS CIRCLES - Nazis reloaded
EMIL HOFFMAN AND HIS CIRCLES to open offices in Hamburg and Bonn, in addition to the one in Frankfurt.70 Given that he worked together with Becher and Triska, who represented Atlas and Donau Handel, it seems highly likely that Bickenbach represented West German trade exclusively when you look at things from the Hungarian side, but several companies could also have been involved in the background. Suffice to say that the information gathered by state security shows that Bickenbach was so deeply embedded in Hungarian foreign trade that, by the mid-1950s, all major export transactions to West Germany passed through his hands, and Hungarian companies automatically paid him a commission without a written agreement even when the given transaction was concluded by Hungarian foreign traders who travelled to West Germany themselves.71 Supporting Bickenbach was actually not uncommon: paying commissions to trade intermediaries was an established practice of illegal party fundraising invented by the Soviets, and the system was utilised by the leading players in Hungarian foreign trade for their own opulence. So very much so that staggering amounts had landed in secret Swiss and Lichtenstein bank accounts by the 1970s. The intermediary would channel some of the commission paid generously from the state company’s budget back to the account of the corporate employee granting him preference, so a secondary corruption network that skimmed a great deal off the profits of Hungarian foreign trade was built on top of the system of commissions designed and operated on ideological and political grounds.72 The reason Bickenbachs person merits particular attention is that it is in him and the former Nazi officers working in the background that we find the starting point of the network that fundamentally shaped economic relations between Hungary and West Germany right until the change of political system. 70 ÁBTL 3.1.5. 0-12344/7 p. 43 Executive report, 1 June 1960 71 Ibid. 72 For more details, cf. Borvendég 2017; Borvendég 2018 Bickenbach became involved in the businesses, transactions and credit deals of industrial companies as well as in re-export agreements, which netted him the foreign-exchange equivalent of 1,216,400 forints and 1,327,000 forints from ten Hungarian foreign trade companies in commission fees in 1956 and 1957 31
