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Corporate Complicity in the Holocaust

German Big Business in the Nazi Era

Author Peter Hayes will join us virtually for a talk and question and answer session about his book, "Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust."

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What role did German big business play in the persecution of European Jews during the Holocaust? What were its motivations? And how did it respond to changing social and economic circumstances after the war? Profits and Persecution examines how the leaders of Germany's largest industrial and financial enterprises played a key part in the catastrophes and crimes of their nation in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on evidence concerning the roughly one hundred most significant German firms of the Nazi era, Peter Hayes explores how large German corporations dealt with Jews, their property, and their labor. This study unites business history and the history of the Holocaust to consider both the economic and personal motivations that rendered German corporate leaders complicit in the actions of the Nazi Party. In doing so, it demonstrates how ordinary, familiar thought processes came to serve the ideological purposes of the Third Reich with lethal consequences.

This event is cosponsored by the Northwest Arkansas Holocaust Awareness Project and Northwest Arkansas Community College.

About the author

Peter Hayes holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale and was from 1980 to 2016 Professor of History and German and from 2000 to 2016 Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University. His publications have won several prizes and been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, and Spanish. His acclaimed study of IG Farben, "Industry and Ideology", received the Biennial Book Prize from the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association. In his monumental history of the Nazi economy entitled "The Wages of Destruction", Adam Tooze called "Industry and Ideology" "the best book on IG, indeed the best book on business in the Third Reich." Hayes has long supported the work of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, notably in preparing "How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader", and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he formerly chaired the Academic Committee. Also an award-winning teacher, he lectures widely on German and Holocaust history in the United States and abroad.

All abilities are welcome. For disability accommodations, call 479.856.7250 or email questions@faylib.org 2-3 weekdays before a program. Plan your visit by viewing our building map and details on accessibility services.

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