Departing Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann presided over his final annual press conference on Thursday. His legacy will be that of transforming Germany's largest financial institution into a profit machine. But in the end, he lost control of the specters he unleashed.

Once again, it was Josef Ackermann's day. On Thursday, the Deutsche Bank CEO strode into the limelight for a press conference to present his bank's annual results. It was the 10th -- and final -- time that Ackermann would preside over such a gathering.

It wasn't the kind of departure for which he had been hoping. At the beginning of 2011, he had confidently predicted pre-tax profits of €10 billion ($13 billion), a record that he wanted to be his legacy. But the euro crisis ruined it for him. The total came in at €5.4 billion -- nothing more than an average Ackermann year.

When the Swiss banker turns over his position in May of this year to the leadership duo of Anshu Jain and Jurgen Fitschen, he will leave behind a Deutsche Bank that is radically different from the financial institution that he took over in 2006. What was once a successful yet conservative German credit institution has become a global investment bank -- one which plays a role in all important markets and earns gigantic profits.

Many in Germany, however, view the bank's growth with skepticism. Ackermann has become the poster boy in the country for unscrupulous financial capitalism and the media has done little to counter that view. He is seen as only being interested in maximizing profits -- an economic principle that Germans have long been skeptical of, and one which has lost all acceptance since the beginning of the financial crisis.