Trading with evil

IBM and the Holocaust: The strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s most powerful corporation. By Edwin Black. Crown; 416 pages; $27.50. Little, Brown; £20.

Deutsche Bank and the Nazi economic war against the Jews. By Harold James. Cambridge University Press; 224 pages; $24.95 and £22.95.

Doing business with the Nazis: Britain’s economic and financial relations with Germany 1931–39. By Neil Forbes. Frank Cass; 280 pages; $59.50 and £42.50.

UNDERSTATED histories are often more powerful than sensationalist ones. Two of these three books are matter-of-fact accounts of business dealings with the Nazis. Yet the mundane motives that they find many people had for collaborating with an evil regime leave you more shaken than Edwin Black’s melodramatic exposure of IBM’s alleged involvement in the Holocaust. By representing the IBMers as blinkered technocrats and wicked capitalists obsessed with profits, he dehumanises them.

Harold James’s and Neil Forbes’s histories are more persuasive. Both authors are aware that managers in a large business hierarchy are not exclusively intent on maximising profits; the prospect of promotion or corporate empire-building can be a more compelling incentive.

Mr James is one of five historians who in 1998 were invited by Deutsche Bank to examine the bank’s behaviour during the Nazi era and to write an “uncontrolled, uncensored and unexpurgated” account of it. Concentrating on the so-called aryanisation policy, he finds that Deutsche Bank’s profits from transactions involving seized Jewish businesses and property were neither extravagant nor excessive. The Hitler regime’s prejudice against money-lending, which it regarded as an inherently Jewish activity, caused it strictly to limit the gains made by commercial banks from its policy of aryanisation.

But the slimness of its profits, Mr James contends, did not mitigate Deutsche Bank’s actions. Choosing his words with care, he says: “It might be argued that transactions that fundamentally undermined trust in contracts, and that extended the arbitrary and capricious exercise of power, are discreditable enough by themselves—but even more discreditable when they cannot be legitimated in terms of the traditional logic of business decisions.”

The bank’s junior employees often behaved worse than their seniors. Top executives tended, initially at least, to be more worried about the loss of business resulting from aryanisation than enthralled by the prospect of profiting from it. Some also had close personal as well as business links with the victims of aryanisation and tried as best as they safely could to protect their Jewish associates’ interests.

Ambitious bank employees had no such inhibitions. Any scruples they had about the policy were overcome by their desire to step into the jobs of purged Jews in acquired “Jewish banks” and in Deutsche Bank itself. Bankers elsewhere behaved just as badly. Mr James says he found nothing in any German files to match “the rancour of the post-Munich (September 1938) submissions of Czech bank employees’ associations, which demanded the closure of Jewish banks and the sacking of Jewish employees.”

Mr Forbes looks not at a single company but at a whole country, and finds that Britain tried through most of the 1930s to conduct business as normally as possible with Germany. British businessmen and bankers argued, self-interestedly but also probably quite sincerely, that a fat Germany was in everyone’s interest. Germany was, after India, Britain’s best customer and a prosperous Germany would, they claimed, be good for British business and would enable supposed Nazi moderates to exercise a stabilising influence. In consequence, the German war machine continued to be fuelled with oil and armed with metals from British sources.

It sounds an entirely misguided policy until Mr Forbes begins to examine how the British war machine would have suffered from German counter-sanctions. Britain imported German machinery for manufacturing shells and bombs. The Chamberlain government had learnt from its Industrial Intelligence Centre that these machine tools were not readily obtainable elsewhere and that their loss would seriously retard Britain’s rearmament programme.

Such subtleties of argument and motive have no place in Mr Black’s book, which alleges that without IBM’s punch-card technology the Nazis could not have found, transported and killed 6m Jews. The charge is not sustained. Less precise genocide is not necessarily less bloody. It is hard to imagine Hitler’s goons giving the benefit of the doubt to people they suspected of being Jews but who denied it. And, as Mr James shows, there was no shortage of ordinary people keen to benefit from the Jews’ misfortune.