On June 12, 1933, the supervisory board of Berlin’s electricity utility, Bewag, met fully for the first time since the Nazis had come to power four months earlier. It was always going to be a tense event. The supervisory board comprised not only municipal officers from Berlin and representatives of Prussian and Reich power utilities, but also delegates of leading international banks holding shares in the utility. Some of these bankers — as city officials had been keen to highlight in advance of the meeting — were Jews.
The meeting began innocuously enough with presentations by Bewag’s two directors, Johannes Adolph and Martin Rehmer, on the historical development of electricity in Berlin and the city’s power generation and distribution system. Neither made any reference whatsoever to what had happened since January 1933. Then a Herr Plüer took the floor to talk about “staff issues.” He launched into a diatribe against the way the utility had been run in the past and on how it was already changing under the new regime.
