Profits and Persecution

'In a masterful synthesis of current scholarship, Peter Hayes shows how the German business community cooperated with the Nazi regime for multiple reasons: partially-overlapping political values; a near total absence of anti-antisemitic sentiments; but above all the perceived need not to be outdone by economic rivals in the race for profits, spoils, and government favor. Within the framework of Germany's directed economy, the business community became increasingly complicit in the atrocities of the Nazi regime, including ultimately the despoiling of Jews, the lethal exploitation of forced and slave labor, and genocide. As Hayes concludes, when the German business community faced Nazism's 'corrupting mix of compulsion and temptation, controls and opportunity,' then sadly 'rational calculation served Nazi criminality.'' Christopher R. Browning, author of Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers Peter Hayes's mastery of the sources and scholarship drives this riveting, shocking account of the widespread complicity of every major German business sector - banking, chemicals, weapons, energy, transportation pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and insurance - in the systematic persecution of Jews as well as the atrocities of the Third Reich. The leaders of industry were not all Nazi antisemites, as Hayes accurately portrays, but they were uniformly lacking in ethics and virtue. They conformed to the German corporate behavior of the day, asserting they were pragmatic, not ideological, while quickly subordinating themselves to Hitler, and profitting. The Flicks, Quandts, Porsche-Piechs, and Oetkers remain among the richest families in Germany, yet, Hayes discovers that greed was not the prime reason for complicity; rather, it was personal and professional ambition. This brilliant, courageous book is a disturbingly precise assessment of corporate conduct in a criminal dictatorship, a rare reckoning with broader applications to similar regimes historically and to the world today. Wendy Lower, author of The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed