Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust

Summary

What role did German big business play in the persecution of European Jews during the Holocaust? What were its motivations? And how did it respond to changing social and economic circumstances after the war? Profits and Persecution examines how the leaders of Germany's largest industrial and financial enterprises played a key part in the catastrophes and crimes of their nation in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on evidence concerning the roughly one hundred most significant German firms of the Nazi era, Peter Hayes explores how large German corporations dealt with Jews, their property, and their labor. This study unites business history and the history of the Holocaust to consider both the economic and personal motivations that rendered German corporate leaders complicit in the actions of the Nazi Party. In doing so, it demonstrates how ordinary, familiar thought processes came to serve the ideological purposes of the Third Reich with lethal consequences.