Allianz grew into the world's biggest insurer by always adding another kind of risk
For thirteen years after 1911, one Berlin company was the only insurer on Earth that would cover a broken-down machine. That habit of stepping sideways into new kinds of risk, marine to fire to cars to life, made Allianz the planet's largest insurance group, though its history includes a deeply compromised chapter.
Founded in Munich in 1889, Allianz opened for business in Berlin on 5 February 1890 with 4 million marks of capital. Its creators were Carl von Thieme, then running Munich Reinsurance, and banker Wilhelm von Finck. Marine and accident policies came first. In 1900 it became the first insurer licensed to sell corporate policies, and under Paul von Naher from 1904 it pushed abroad. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake cost it 300,000 marks, an early lesson in how far-flung exposure could bite.
Product lines kept multiplying. Fire cover arrived in 1905, machinery breakdown in 1911, car insurance in 1918, and life policies in 1922, making it Europe's biggest life insurer by the end of that decade. Mergers in 1927 and a Depression-era takeover of the bankrupt Favag followed, and by 1938 it employed more than 24,000 people. Historian Christian Stadler held it up as a case study in hedging against upheaval by diversifying into related fields.
That same era produced its darkest record. Director-General Kurt Schmitt became Hitler's economics minister on 30 June 1933 and backed pushing Jews out of German life. Between 1933 and 1945 the firm absorbed Jewish insurers through Aryanization, and from 1940 it insured SS factories and camp property at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau.
After Allied bombs wrecked its Berlin headquarters, the company moved to Munich in 1949 as Germany split. In 1956 it became the first major European insurer to run a mainframe, an IBM 650 that paid for itself within three years. Expansion reached Britain, Brazil and America in the 1970s, and a 2001 deal to buy the rest of Dresdner Bank for 20 billion dollars ended with a sale to Commerzbank in 2008. A 2022 settlement of 6 billion dollars over its collapsed Structured Alpha funds was costly. Today it serves more than 100 million customers in over 70 countries with around 150,000 staff.
Source: Allianz
