The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank (review)

In the mid-1990s, the Deutsche Bank took the unprecedented steps not only of opening its company archives to historians but also of commissioning a team of senior historians—including Harold James—to publish a book in honor of the 125th anniversary of its founding.¹ Not surprisingly, the chapter dealing with the operations of the bank during the Third Reich attracted the greatest attention. Since this initial study was published, James and other historians have mined company archives, newly available documents in archives in Eastern and Central Europe, and recently declassified materials in the National Archives in the United States. The result has been a deeper historical understanding of the complex interaction between banks (and other large-scale commercial operations) and the government and policies of the Third Reich. The new research effectively debunks the myth of monolithic Nazi control and replaces it with a more nuanced, and therefore, more troubling explanation of both active and passive collaboration. The fruits of this research have been seen already in James's earlier book, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews (2001), which concentrated on the Aryanization of Jewish businesses.

In his latest work, Harold James probes the economic and moral dimensions of the Deutsche Bank's policies during the Third Reich in order to understand how banks operated within the political constraints of Nazism. He explores a host of entangled moral and economic responses at the individual and institutional levels, including outright complicity, acquiescence, and compromise. In analyzing the Deutsche Bank within the context of the Zeitgeist of National Socialism, James also presents a new dimension of their interaction—namely, that banks believed they had to defend themselves and their position within the economic system from direct, ideologically-driven criticism. He ultimately concludes that banks and their leaders offered little direct resistance to government policies, and that the bankers' passivity—which was due in part to their precarious position as "parasitical finance capitalists"—played a role in the Holocaust and in the exploitation of non-Aryan workers and resources across occupied Europe.

James acknowledges the historiographical difficulties of reconstructing the motivation and strategy of bankers and the Deutsche Bank. Due to the climate created by denunciations and fear of the Gestapo, written sources that critique the regime and its policies are scarce. Therefore, the work relies heavily on documents from the Deutsche Bank Historical Archive and the holdings of the Bundesarchiv Berlin that are, in many cases, bereft of individual opinion and/or critical assessment. James also uses documents of the Office of Military Government, US Zone (OMGUS) held in the National Archives of the United States, and documents held the Berlin Document Center. In addition, he uses files from other major banks and regional and local archives in Germany and German-occupied countries as well as a host of historical monographs. However, the lack of an abbreviations list and the omission of archives from the bibliography may make it difficult for readers to get a complete picture of James' primary source base. James treats both OMGUS files and works based heavily upon them with a fair degree of skepticism, noting the hostility of New Dealers to banks and big business. This criticism ignores, at least in part, the more complicated relationship between New Dealers, banks, and business. Early New Dealers, including President Roosevelt, were somewhat hostile to big business, at least in terms of their rhetoric; however, by the end of the war, most New Dealers had adopted a Keynesian approach to economic growth and development that left intact the basic structures of capitalism. The author also criticizes earlier Marxist works for their simplistic interpretation and their ideological assumption that banks were concerned only with increasing their own profits.

The early chapters of The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank set the stage for one of the book's central questions: how antisemitism and the Zeitgeist fostered by National Socialism affected bank policies concerning dismissal of Jewish personnel and...