The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews

For his new book about the Deutsche Bank during the Nazi era, Princeton University professor Harold James draws upon newly available archival resources within bank and other archives. James focuses on the question of the participation of the powerful Deutsche Bank in the purge of German Jews from German economic life and in the expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses. He finds no black or white answers. Writing that "large corporations, complex social organisms as they might be, are made up of individuals who make choices about their actions," James argues that the motivation for the bank's complicity is complex and that relying on profit motivation as the primary explanation is certainly incomplete. This is a thorough picture of one company's role in the economic persecution of German Jews.