Ludolf Herbst, Thomas Weihe. Die Commerzbank und die Juden 1933-1945. München: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2004. 444 S. EUR 29.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-406-51873-7.
Harold James. The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. x + 286 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-83874-0.
Reviewed by Mark Spoerer (Department of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hohenheim (Stuttgart))
Published on H-German (July, 2006)
German Banks in the Third Reich
After Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, Commerzbank has occupied the number three position in Germany for the past seventy-five years. This statement also holds true for their efforts to come to terms with the past. By publishing a generally well-received volume on its history from 1870 to 1995, Deutsche Bank set the stage for further efforts.[1] After some hesitation, Dresdner Bank followed suit, launching an even larger project first settled at the Hannah-Arendt-Institut in Dresden but then detached from that ill-fated institution. Both Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank have not followed the example of the Deutsche Bank, which produced a single-volume history (with occasional follow-ups), choosing instead to publish topical studies. While the collaborators on the Dresdner Bank project have published their work since 1999, Commerzbank has only recently begun to publish its findings.[2]
Ludolf Herbst, chair of the department for contemporary history at the Humboldt Universität, heads the Commerzbank project. The volume starts with a survey by Detlef Krause, chief archivist of Commerzbank, on the traces of Jewish traditions within the Commerzbank since its foundation in 1870. Thomas Weihe describes the supersession of Jewish employees after the Nazi takeover and inter-bank competition for customers. Both topics are indeed interrelated: Jewish employees were important in the acquisition and retention of Jewish customers, whose ultimate fate was not necessarily foreseeable in the mid-1930s. Herbst addresses Commerzbank's participation in the Aryanization of Jewish enterprises in Germany. Hannah Ahlheim describes the role of Commerzbank in the process of confiscating Jewish private property. The perspective then widens to occupied Europe. In a joint article, Jaroslav Kucera and Christoph Kreutzmüller deal with Aryanization in the Protectorate and the Netherlands, respectively. Ingo Loose wrote the two final chapters. The first examines the participation of German banks in the Aryanization of Polish enterprises. The second article, which concludes the volume, considers Commerzbank's business relations with firms and other institutions active in the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, above all the notorious firm J. A. Topf & Söhne, which provided Auschwitz with crematoria. The book has no summary or conclusion.
The volume builds on earlier publications about Commerzbank's competitors--a scholarly strategy by no means taken for granted among business historians--and Herbst and his team also drew extensively on the archives of Deutsche Bank. So the fact that this volume appears after earlier studies contributes to its strengths. The authors carefully define the keywords they use to describe the displacement of Jews from the German economy. While this activity is generally quite helpful, I am not convinced that "annihilation of Jewish businesses" (Vernichtung jüdischer Gewerbeunternehmen, the subtitle of Herbst's contribution) makes much sense. Aryanization aimed at transferring Jewish assets into the hands of non-Jews--not destroying them. What was annihilated was Jewish business activity, as the titles of most other contributions correctly specify (curiously, Herbst's subtitle in the table of contents does the same) (p. 9). But this point is minor. In general, Herbst and his contributors reveal great reflection. They raise questions explicitly and expose very carefully the ways sources can be interpreted to find answers to our questions. The contributions are not narratives in the sense that they tell an easy-to-read story. Readers with a taste for clear judgments will not approve of the style, but those familiar with the difficulties of interpreting documents--especially in a dictatorship--will find the collection exemplary.
Nearly ten years after Die Deutsche Bank 1870-1995 (1995), Harold James has updated his highly-regarded contribution for the period 1933-1945. The structure of the book follows his earlier article. After setting the stage in 1933, he describes the problems that (anti-finance) Nazi ideology posed for the bank. The chapters on antisemitism (including Aryanization in Germany) and a portrait on the banker Emil Georg von Stauss are also basically unchanged. The chapter on foreign expansion, however, has been enlarged considerably. Here James has included sections from his book on Deutsche Bank and the expropriation of Jewish-owned property.[3] These sections cover Austria, Czech lands, Slovakia, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and southeast Europe. An additional section on gold and securities is also new.
As a collage of James' previous work, this book has an entirely different emphasis than other recent publications on German non-finance sector firms during the National Socialist period. Studies on manufacturing firms in the Third Reich have had a clear "home bias"--a term quite common in finance--primarily because their authors have not been able to find much documentary evidence on the firms' participation in the exploitation of the occupied territories. In contrast, it seems that the large German banks kept documents from the war that were destroyed (or successfully hidden) elsewhere. James devotes nearly half of this volume to Deutsche Bank's activities in Germany's "Greater Economic Area."
This emphasis on the occupied countries, which can also be found in the publications of the Commerzbank and the Dresdner Bank projects, is all the more justifiable as the banks were fundamentally misperceived in the research of the 1960s and 1970s. Banks were not active in helping to install Hitler, nor were they in an enviable position in the 1930s. Confronted with Nazi anti-finance rhetoric on the one hand and the mounting profitability of manufacturing firms on the other, banks were on the defensive. Most manufacturing firms were increasingly in a position to finance their growth by retaining profits so that the influence of the banks, traditionally very strong in Germany, receded. It was the German military expansion into central, eastern and southeastern Europe that provided German banks with new business opportunities. And it was primarily here that German banks became involved in the crimes of the Nazi regime. Had they at times been reluctant to participate in the expropriation of long-standing Jewish customers and even helped some of them, German banks showed many fewer qualms when it came to exploiting opportunities in the newly occupied territories, whether the victims were Jews or non-Jews.
In sum, James's book is a very valuable contribution to the (currently) ever-increasing literature on German banks in the Third Reich. If there is one shortcoming, it is the book's conclusion. Although James incorporated his own new research and that of other authors in the book, the summary is, except for one quote, identical to the earlier version of ten years ago.[4]
Notes
[1]. Lothar Gall et al., Die Deutsche Bank 1870-1995 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995). English version: Lothar Gall et al., The Deutsche Bank, 1870-1995 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).
[2]. The first monograph was Johannes Bähr, Der Goldhandel der Dresdner Bank im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Ein Bericht des Hannah-Arendt-Instituts (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1999). The Dresdner Bank project has been completed recently with the publication of Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ed., Die Dresdner Bank im Dritten Reich, 4 vols. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006).
[3]. Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War against the Jews: The Expropriation of Jewish-Owned Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[4]. In the conclusion of the German edition, which, strangely enough, is one paragraph longer than the American version, James added one more new sentence.
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Citation:
Mark Spoerer. Review of Herbst, Ludolf; Weihe, Thomas, Die Commerzbank und die Juden 1933-1945 and
James, Harold, The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12067
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