Last Updated on July 23, 2020
In April 2017, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden signed a three-book deal with Flatiron Books for a reported $8 million. Following the deal, the Bidens spent $2.7 million for a six-bedroom vacation house in Delaware. Biden’s first book for Flatiron, “Promise Me, Dad,” came out in November 2017, and is currently featured on the website for Macmillan, the parent company of Flatiron Books. Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a German company. Holtzbrinck came to prominence in the publishing world because its Nazi founder printed Nazi books and magazines during World War II.
The Observer wrote in 1999: “…the Stuttgart-based von Holtzbrinck Group, has a Nazi past. According a June 1998 Vanity Fair article by David Margolick, company founder Georg von Holtzbrinck was a member of the Nazi Party who published Nazi-sanctioned magazines and produced books for German soldiers.”
Fintan O’Toole wrote of Holtzbrinck for the Irish Times in 1998: “The founder of the firm, Georg von Holtzbrinck, was until the early 1930s an impoverished student who sold books door to door. He joined a Nazi student group in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933, and stayed loyal to it until the end of the war. He published four Nazi-approved magazines. He also produced books for the German army, in which, from 1943 onwards, he himself served…He profited in three ways. First, his publication of Nazi magazines and books for the storm troopers helped him to build up the capital which turned a door-to-door salesman into a substantial publisher. Second, he managed to squirrel away several tons of newsprint, a scarce commodity which very few people had access to in the aftermath of the war. This gave him a lucrative head start in the race to re-establish publishing operations after the defeat of the Nazis. And third, much of his competition, the great Jewish-owned publishing houses of pre-Nazi Germany, was destroyed.”
