Echoes & Reflections | Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust

In this talk Peter Hayes traces the ways by which the German corporate world became deeply implicated in—and in many respects indispensable to—the Nazi regime’s persecution, exploitation, and murder of Europe’s Jews. He argues that these developments stemmed inexorably from decisions made and actions taken by the nation’s leading corporate executives in 1933, at the very outset of Nazi rule. Subjected to a corrupting combination of intimidation and temptation, Germany’s leading executives became participants in “the normalization of barbarism.” Yet, as Hayes also shows, few of these individuals later paid any price for their actions, thanks to the mistakes of American prosecutors, the onset of the Cold War, and a widespread cover up by German corporations that lasted until the 1990s.

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