Episode 2: The German Who Bought Hawaii
How One Man Built an Empire — and Lost It All?
Heinrich Hackfeld didn’t come to Hawaii to save souls.
He came to make money.
And that made him different from almost everyone else.
Step 1
: The Store That Sold Everything
When the sugar plantations started growing in the 1850s, somebody had to feed the workers.
Thousands of immigrant laborers were arriving in Hawaii — from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, Puerto Rico. They had nothing. They needed everything.
Rice. Salt fish. Work boots. Rope. Blankets. Medicine. Tobacco.
Hackfeld opened the store.
Not just any store. A company store — right next to the plantations, right where the workers lived. You got paid on Friday. You spent it at Hackfeld’s store on Saturday.
The prices? Hackfeld set them.
The credit? Hackfeld controlled it.
Workers who ran out of money before payday? They borrowed from Hackfeld — and paid it back with interest, in labor, in loyalty.
It was brilliantly simple.
The plantation owners got rich from sugar. Hackfeld got rich from everyone.
Step 2 : Sell Them the Machine. Then Ship the Product.
Hackfeld looked at the plantation owners and saw another opportunity.
These men needed equipment. Steam-powered sugar mills.
Iron pipes. Imported machinery from Europe. Modern tools that couldn’t be made in Hawaii.
Hackfeld imported everything they needed.
He became the exclusive agent for European industrial equipment across Hawaii. Every new plantation that opened — and dozens opened — bought their machinery through Hackfeld.
But he didn’t stop there.
Once the sugar was harvested, it needed to go somewhere.
Hackfeld bought ships.
Not one ship. A fleet.
He built a direct shipping line from Honolulu to Bremen, Germany. Hawaiian sugar going out. European goods coming in. Every voyage made money in both directions.
He wasn’t just in the sugar business.
He was the pipeline that sugar traveled through.
Step 3 : The Department Store of the Gods
Here is where the story gets truly elegant.
The Hawaiian royal family and the noble class had a serious problem.
They loved beautiful things.
French perfume. English china. Italian silk. Belgian lace. The finest furniture from Vienna. The latest fashions from Paris.
And they absolutely could not stop spending.
Hackfeld saw this and smiled.
He opened Hawaii’s most luxurious department store — right in the heart of Honolulu.
The kind of place where Queen Liliuokalani could shop for imported European goods without getting on a boat to San Francisco.
The Hawaiian elite came. They shopped. They spent.
And when they ran out of money — which happened constantly, because Hawaiian royalty treated budgets as optional — Hackfelt lent them more.
With interest, of course.
And with one small condition.
Step 4: The Land Play
“If you cannot repay the loan — no problem. We will take land instead.”
This was Hackfeld’s masterstroke.
The Hawaiian nobility were cash-poor but land-rich. They had inherited vast estates from generations of kings. Beautiful valleys. Fertile coastal plains. Prime Honolulu real estate.
They borrowed from Hackfeld to buy silk dresses and imported wine.
They couldn’t repay.
Hackfeld took the land.
Quietly. Legally. Politely.
By the 1880s, H. Hackfeld & Co. owned or controlled enormous pieces of Hawaii — not through conquest, not through war, but through compound interest and unpaid debts.
The German merchant from Bremervörde had become one of the largest landowners in the Hawaiian Kingdom.
And he had done it with a smile and a ledger book.
1893: The Moment of Truth January 1893
American sugar planters — led by missionary descendants like the Baldwins, the Castles, the Cookes — were plotting to overthrow Queen Liliuokalani.
These men were different from Hackfeld. Their fathers had come to Hawaii to save Hawaiian souls. They themselves had stayed to take Hawaiian land.
They wore Christianity like a business suit — useful, respectable, profitable.
Hackfeld watched the conspiracy developing and faced the hardest decision of his life.
Side with the Queen?
And the Queen herself — brilliant, proud, fiercely independent — was fighting to keep Hawaii Hawaiian. She wanted to give power back to her people. She wanted to limit the influence of foreign businessmen.
Foreign businessmen like Hackfeld.
Side with the Americans?
The American planters were offering something irresistible.
If Hawaii was annexed by the United States, Hawaiian sugar would enter American markets duty-free. No tariffs. No trade barriers. The sugar business would explode.
And the Americans were promising something else too — exclusive business arrangements. The Big Five would divide Hawaii’s economy among themselves. Hackfeld would get his share.
Hackfeld chose the Americans.
It was arithmetic.
The Betrayal Nobody Talks About
Here is what the history books don’t emphasize enough.
When the American marines surrounded Iolani Palace, they had the support of Hawaii’s biggest businesses.
Including the German one.
Hackfeld had played both sides perfectly — cultivating the royal family for decades, taking their land, lending them money, selling them luxuries — and then, at the critical moment, quietly stepping aside while the Americans finished the job.
The Queen surrendered.
The Kingdom died.
And Hackfeld went back to his office, opened his ledger, and calculated his new profits under American rule.
The sugar tariffs disappeared.
Business boomed.
The purple stamp kept moving across the Pacific.
1914: The Clouds Arrive
When World War One started in Europe, Hackfeld’s managers in Honolulu tried not to worry.
America was neutral.
Business continued.
But everyone with German blood in Hawaii felt it — a new coldness in the air. American neighbors who had been friendly for years suddenly became quiet. Newspaper editorials started asking uncomfortable questions about German businesses on American soil.
Hackfeld’s managers wrote careful letters to Bremen.
Bremen wrote careful letters back.
Everyone was very careful.
For three years.
The Day America Declared War on Germany
April 6, 1917: The Last Day
The day America declared war on Germany, everything changed in an instant.
Federal agents didn’t waste time.
They had lists.
They had legal authority. They had the Trading with the Enemy Act — a law that gave the US government the power to seize any business owned by enemy nationals.
H. Hackfeld & Co. was German-owned.
Therefore, H. Hackfeld & Co. was the enemy.
The German managers were escorted out of their offices. Some were arrested. Some were put on ships and sent to the mainland — then to detention camps.
Some were eventually deported to a Germany that no longer resembled the country they had left years ago.
68 years of business.
Gone in a day.
The government sold everything — the stores, the ships, the plantation contracts, the insurance companies, the warehouses — to American investors at prices that historians still describe as “suspiciously convenient.”
The buyers renamed it quickly. Patriotically.
American Factors, Ltd.
AMFAC
Every trace of Hackfeld was erased.
And the German dream in the Pacific was over.
The Final Irony
He had betrayed the Hawaiian Queen to side with America.
And 24 years later?
America took everything he had.
The man who had played every angle perfectly, who had survived every political change, who had made every calculated decision correctly —
Was destroyed by the one thing he could not calculate.
His own passport.
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