Peter Hayes has writ­ten a short but rich­ly detailed account of how Ger­man big busi­ness act­ed dur­ing the Nazi era. Prof­its & Per­se­cu­tion: Ger­man Big Busi­ness in the Nazi Econ­o­my and the Holo­caust con­tains some sur­pris­es, but its major con­clu­sions will sur­prise no one: Ger­man big busi­ness con­tributed its full ener­gies and tal­ents to real­iz­ing Hitler’s mon­strous vision, nev­er raised any mate­r­i­al objec­tion to that vision as Ger­many plum­met­ed to history’s nadir, and that nei­ther the CEOs nor the com­pa­nies they led received condign punishment. 

To para­phrase a well-known line in the Hag­gadah: even if one is well acquaint­ed with this his­to­ry, Hayes’s book is still worth read­ing. We need to under­stand how insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­u­als can fail to pre­vent, or at least not par­tic­i­pate in, a head­long charge to rad­i­cal evil. Hayes con­cen­trates on Germany’s hun­dred largest com­pa­nies. You may have done busi­ness with some of them, and you sure­ly know their names: Siemens, IG Far­ben, Allianz, Daim­ler-Benz, Dres­d­ner Bank, and Deutsche Bank.

Were Germany’s most dis­tin­guished cor­po­rate stew­ards mal­leable or malev­o­lent? The recent open­ing of cor­po­rate archives reveals that, in most cas­es these man­agers had work­ing rela­tion­ships and social inter­ac­tion with Jews, while at the same time hold­ing anti­se­mit­ic views. Hayes gives the exam­ple of Fritz Roessler, chair­man of the board of Degus­sa, as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of that era’s cor­po­rate mind­set. Roessler believed Jews exert­ed too much influ­ence on Ger­man cul­ture and should there­fore be restrict­ed from cer­tain pro­fes­sions. At the same time, he called the idea of Aryan suprema­cy ​“absolute­ly with­out sci­en­tif­ic basis,” and dis­missed Nazi fears of a Jew­ish-Marx­ist con­spir­a­cy a ​“fix­a­tion.” 

If his peers saw Ger­man Jews sim­i­lar­ly, how did these men become cocon­spir­a­tors to a geno­cide? Hayes does an excel­lent job of answer­ing that ques­tion. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, part of it was, in Hayes’ words, choos­ing ​“prag­ma­tism over prin­ci­ple.” Once in pow­er, Hitler rapid­ly took con­trol of the Ger­man econ­o­my. The state became, for most big busi­ness­es, the dom­i­nant or sole cus­tomer — in effect a monop­sony. Prof­itabil­i­ty, which mat­tered most to these CEOs, required strict com­pli­ance with Nazi orders.

Hayes does an excel­lent job of describ­ing how the Nazis rein­vent­ed the Ger­man econ­o­my. Rather than mil­lions of con­sumers send­ing sig­nals as to what to make through their pur­chas­es and sales, the Nazis installed a planned econ­o­my focused on pro­duc­ing arma­ments and achiev­ing autarky. Cap­i­tal allo­ca­tion deci­sions were made by the state with these objec­tives in mind, and the results were, as any free-mar­ket econ­o­mist would pre­dict, poor. Hayes quotes a respect­ed eco­nom­ic his­to­ri­an who writes that by late 1941, ​“the Ger­man econ­o­my began to come apart at the seams.”

Indeed, though Hayes nev­er says this, a read­er is left with the impres­sion that Germany’s inef­fi­cient econ­o­my was itself an impor­tant Allied advan­tage, a metaphor­i­cal fifth col­umn inflict­ing the equiv­a­lent of sab­o­tage by mak­ing resources scarce and incen­tiviz­ing low qual­i­ty pro­duc­tion. Imag­ine, too, the morale of a Ger­man con­sumer liv­ing in an econ­o­my that strove for a 100%-0 out­come in the guns – but­ter tradeoff. 

The book held three sur­pris­es for me: con­trary to what you may have read, IBM had no role in the Holo­caust. Albert Speer did not work mir­a­cles increas­ing Ger­man pro­duc­tion, and he retained a fanat­i­cal belief in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of vic­to­ry until the end. And final­ly, Hayes argues that Han­nah Arendt’s famous phrase ​“the banal­i­ty of evil,” while a poor descrip­tion of Adolf Eich­mann, is tai­lor-made for Germany’s cor­po­rate leaders.

Peter Hayes writes that his book was ​“five decades in the mak­ing.” His mea­sured prose, sound judg­ment, and mas­tery of the facts show that that was time well spent.