By: Dan Stone / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com
Since the end of the Cold War, a large body of scholarship has emerged on the role of business during the Third Reich. In the new Germany of the 1990s, corporations were pressured to open their archives, and most did so willingly—not least because it made sense from a market perspective. The studies that followed, mostly in German, include analyses of banks, insurance companies, financial institutions, and others, and are both technically complex and shocking in their conclusions.
Therefore, it is to be appreciated that Peter Hayes, in his new book Benefits and persecution [Profits and Persecution], not only summarizes this literature and archival findings in less than 200 clear and understandable pages, but does so while offering interesting and original analysis. His argument, expressed in the preface, is that “by acting rationally in the context of the Third Reich, corporate executives were in fact acting ideologically, as their choices usually served the regime and its goals.”
Hayes develops his argument through a detailed chronological analysis of how German firms “coordinated” with the regime, “de-Hebraized” their boards of directors, and, during World War II, attempted to take advantage of the opportunities created by Nazi demands, including the brutal exploitation of foreign workers and concentration camp prisoners. In the most severe cases, they provided the workshops and factories of the ghettos and concentration camps (Allianz), melted down the gold and precious metals that the Nazis had stolen from the victims, including from their mouths (Degussa), and were contracted to provide the electrical systems of some of the killing installations at Auschwitz-Birkenau (AEG) – although many of these activities were not particularly profitable.
German businesses made a lot of money from waves of “Aryanization” of Jewish firms – that is, from stealing them at symbolic prices. However, they were always limited by the state, by the Nazi Party’s determination to maintain control of the economy, and by the desire of individuals, such as Hermann Göring, to enrich themselves personally. The fact that “the benefits of cooperation were generally small” raises the question of why these corporations acted in this way.
Hayes argues that in the years after the Nazis came to power, the leaders of big German businesses settled into a “deceptive middle ground in public policy” – meaning that, even if most of them looked down on Nazi fanaticism, they were unwilling to speak out against it, for fear that it might harm their companies’ interests.
This reflexive “conformism” led them to conform to the demands of the state to finance the continued provision of armaments, especially when it became clear that meeting the Nazis’ demands brought them funds: a kind of “permanent blackmail” in which big business willingly engaged. As Hayes writes of this strange and mixed economy: “The state determined the ends of production, but the ambitions and energy of individuals provided the means to realize them.”
The result, in Benefits and persecution, is a nuanced analysis of the role of German business, which goes beyond simple claims about rogue industrialists – the liberal explanation – or predatory monopoly capitalism – the Marxist explanation. Drawing on his own archival research and that of other historians, Hayes has crafted a scholarly yet readable book that offers a sophisticated analysis, sensitive to the complexities of real life.
By late 1941, when it began to become clear that the Nazi war economy was unraveling, big business was too deeply involved to make any significant changes. The best their leaders could do was to implement cautious measures to disassociate themselves from the Nazi regime, such as the creation of “secret peace planning groups.” As Hayes notes, many of them succeeded—including some of Germany’s wealthiest families today. “Their rational calculations led them to ideological service,” as Hayes puts it, yet they survived very well in a world of “competitive barbarism,” with profits enough to cover reparations payments in the decades after the war.
A year earlier, English authors Douglas Brown and Christopher Serpell had published an extraordinary book titled If Hitler comes [If Hitler Comes], in which Britain falls under German domination. At one point, the narrator, a New Zealand journalist, describes how British businessmen had misjudged their position in the new Europe: “There’s one thing about these Germans,” the big business leaders would say nervously, trying to encourage one another; “they really want to see things through.”
Some believe that the writing of history should not be tied to the issues of the present day. But as the heads of major US corporations – some with revenues greater than the GDP of several small countries – sit at the table with Donald Trump, it is hard not to think about Hayes’ book about how easy it is for business to slip into collaboration with dangerous forces – always in the name of “business interests”. /Telegraph/
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