deal and secure finance for the acquisition. After the acquisition, Burda invited Reiss to stay on at the company to help manage the transition of ownership. Reiss’s son Hans would later write that the pair established a good working relationship, despite the circumstances of the acquisition, with Reiss mentoring Burda's transition to managing a much larger business and Burda enjoying the firm’s more informal culture. Burda interjected on Reiss' behalf when the latter was interned as part of Kristallnacht. The Burda and Reiss families developed a friendship after 1945, with Hans Reiss contributing to later Burda projects. Despite his cordial relationship with Reiss, Franz Burda was a member of the Nazi Party from 1938 onwards. In 1933 he declared that his company had no Jewish employees or shareholders, although, preceding this statement in Sürag, advertisers of the National Socialist program guides NS-Funk and Der Deutsche Sender had claimed Burda did employ Jews. In reality, Burda knowingly employed a Jewish woman and rejected calls for her dismissal; this may explain why the company was never designated a "model National Socialist company". Burda also intervened against the deportation of an employee's Jewish wife, which led to Burda being reported to the Gestapo. An unauthorised biography of the family, Die Burdas, characterised Franz's membership of the Nazi party as more financial expediency than political ideology. In later official hearings Franz was held to be a Mitläufer, referring to those who were not charged with Nazi crimes but whose involvement with the Party was such that they could not be wholly exonerated. Franz's son Hubert went on to assume a significant role in the issue of German industrial reparations, for which he was decorated by a number of German Jewish interest groups, including the Ohel Jacob Medal award. The publishing company's history during the Third Reich was described by Salomon Korn, a former Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, as a "case study for coming generations as to the question of guilt and conscience, of entanglement and dealing with the burden of this legacy". At the beginning of World War II, Burda had a staff of roughly 600 employees. In 1941, production of the magazine "Die Sürag" was curtailed due to the war, and instead the company printed maps for the High Command of the German Army and aerial photographs for the Luftwaffe, in multi-color gravure printing. The map of