From Aryanization to Auschwitz: German Corporations and the Holocaust
October 20, 2014
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Professor Peter Hayes
Most Germans could and would not have anticipated how complicit nearly all large German firms became by 1943 in the persecution of the Jews. This was so in part because most of the nation’s leading industrialists, themselves having exhibited relatively little overt anti-Semitism, had been mistrustful toward Hitler and his movement prior to his appointment as Chancellor. All of this began to change once the Nazis came to power. Hayes contends that the mainsprings of corporate action in the 1930s were more familiar and prosaic forms of corruptibility and that these then escalated in many cases into racist rationalization during the war years.
Professor Hayes is the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University, specializes in the history of Germany in the 20th century, particularly the Nazi period. He is Currently working on a study of German big business and the persecution of the Jews, and a manuscript on German elites and National Socialism.
Date posted
Jun 4, 2020
Date updated
Jun 4, 2020