Corporate Complicity in the Holocaust: German Business and Nazi Crimes, Oct. 10

In his monograph “From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich,” he examines a corporation that played a vital role in Nazi industry and was complicit in Nazi crimes, from processing precious metals stolen from Jews, to utilizing slave labor, to furthering genocide through the manufacture and distribution of Zyklon B. As in his earlier, prize-winning study of IG Farben, Hayes turns the sharp lens of historical scholarship on the ways that business furthered the aims of the Third Reich and perpetuated its power. His study raises provocative questions about the guilt of those whose defense after the war was that they had thought Nazism to be “about pageantry, pride, and prosperity, not conquest, oppression, plunder…and ethnic cleansing.” (p. 320) Copies of “From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich” and “Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era” will be for sale before and after the event. Book signing follows lecture.