Profits and Persecution

Peter Hayes is Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University. He is the author of the best-selling Why? Explaining the Holocaust (2017), as well as thirteen other books and more than one hundred articles and chapters on the history of the Nazi era. Hayes served for twenty years on the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and as its chair from 2014 to 2019.

'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

• Part I. Prologue, 1918–1933: 1. Path-dependence; 2. Ambivalence; Part II. Autarky and Armament, 1933–1939/41: 3. Compliance; 4. Monopsony; 5. Dejewification; Part III. Total War, 1939/41–1945: 6. Mobilization; 7. Exploitation; 8. Annihilation; Part IV. Aftermath, 1945–2024: 9. Outcomes; 10. Summary.