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.

‘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