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September 10, 2008
Naming Rights and Historical Wrongs
The New York Times
by Richard Sandomir
The Times's business-of-sports columnist sees big problems with a brewing deal to sell naming rights to the new Giants/Jets football stadium to the Holocaust-tainted German company Allianz, but he failed to express any similar concern over Bruce Ratner's selling of naming rights to Barclays, the British bank with Holocaust — and slavery- and war-profiteering — problems of its own.
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.
...A deal with Allianz would not be easy to sell publicly, like Citigroup’s with the Mets. The possibility of an Allianz Stadium will make some people cringe, especially in a market that is home to many Jewish people, and in which the Tisch family, which owns half of the Giants, has supported many Jewish causes.
NoLandGrab: One can argue that the Allianz and Barclays situations are not wholly equivalent, but in his January 2007 column about the Barclays deal, Sandomir devoted a scant two sentences to critics' concerns about Barclays' past: "[Demonstrators] also said Barclays profited from the slave trade yet is aligned with Ratner, who is marketing his team to African-American fans. A company spokesman said Barclays had not been involved in slavery."
The Times's headline writers may also want to consult the paper's own archive before plunging again into the murky waters of naming rights, given the similarities between the headlines on today's Sandomir column and this January 2007 column by George Vescey: Naming Rights and Wrongs Transcend Time Zones.
Posted by eric at September 10, 2008 4:40 PM