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The Early Years of a German Institution: The Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau in the 1950s

In 1998, the oldest German institution from the post-war years, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), initially established under an English name as the Reconstruction Loan Corporation, which had survived without major changes to its structure or name, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The Kreditanstalt’s work and history are closely linked to the German ‘economic miracle’. The surprisingly quick recovery experienced by West Germany after the Second World War, especially during the 1950s, has been the centre of much scholarly research and debate. Whether one follows Borchardt and Buchheim’s theory that the currency reform and the Marshall Plan were decisive for the ‘economic miracle’, or Abelshauser’s, which suggests that the recovery took off because the Gross Capital Investment in 1945/48 was higher than in 1936, or Milward’s, which sees the recovery as the result of international developments and co-operation, is a matter of opinion. However, a key problem of the West German recovery process, acknowledged by all these scholars, was the lack of investment. Not only did Germany suffer from much more extensive war damage than the rest of Western Europe, it had also to undergo a currency reform which reduced the money supply by a factor of ten. Furthermore, and again in contrast to the other European countries, the capital market in Germany had virtually ceased to exist because of the war and the currency reform. Providing long-term investment funds became paramount for the reconstruction process. This task was assigned to a institution newly established in late 1948: the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau. The operations of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau did not initiate, but certainly helped to sustain, the process of economic growth in the crucial years 1949–53. During these years, it played a more prominent part in the government’s economic policy than is usually suggested. The Kreditanstalt’s activities, its task and structure made it into a ‘German institution’ in the sense that it was a very important part of what Abelshauser had called the ‘corporate market economy’, not a mere distributing institution for Marshall Plan counterpart funds. This point is