The Elephant in the Room: Explorations in the Development and Implications of American Corporate Power

Jack Beatty, Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America (New York: Broadway Books, 2001)

Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Harcourt, 1968)

Alfred Chandler, Jr., and Mark Mazlish. Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997)

Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, Constructing Corporate America: History Politics, Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002)

Harland Prechel, Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s-1990s (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000)

Warren J. Samuels and Arthur S. Miller, Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)

Understanding the history of corporate development in the United States is a tricky business. Due to the sprawling and interconnected nature of these organizations, studying their history necessarily requires a large scale approach that encompasses many facets of modern life: economics, politics, law, labor, organizational structures, and culture. Evidence of the influence of corporations is present in many of the well-known histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when corporate power began to seriously compete, and some cases eclipse, other forms of power within the U.S. Matthew Josephson gave a face and a name to the apprehension people felt about these new sprawling behemoths in The Robber Barons (1934). Likewise, Gabriel Kolko wrote in The Triumph of Conservatism (1963) that by the turn of the twentieth century, it was the corporate leaders, not the reformers, who advocated and pushed through policies of federal intervention and regulation to serve their profit-seeking ends in the Progressive Era. Subsequently, Historian Robert Wiebe noted that by the 1920s, transformations that had been occurring since the Reconstruction era had made America into an unrecognizable, new type of society – driven by the rise of rationalized bureaucratic structures that populations hoped would bring order and stability.[1] Behind all of these histories, the rise of corporate power plays an essential role.

While these and many other histories touch upon this influential, albeit confusing, phenomenon, much of this scholarship takes place from outside these institutions. Business history itself requires advanced knowledge of economic, organizational and legal structures that create challenges in explaining clearly what actually occurs within these businesses and how they operate. Thankfully, many business historians have risen to the task to help us understand the complex dynamics involved. In this paper, I will present a handful of texts that are representative to this field in an attempt to evaluate their usefulness in understanding the growth and activities of American corporations.

Before we turn to more recent endeavors, it makes sense to look at work that has created a foundation for this scholarship. Thus, a fitting book to start with is Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1968). Berle and Means have produced a now classic repository of statistical data, which situates the corporation at the center of modern U.S. business activity, focusing specifically on property law. The authors argue that industry has become increasingly concentrated and that the ownership of these organizations has been separated from their management structures, creating unique problems in discerning the motivations and development of corporate structures. Beyond this, Berle and Means do not ignore the growing imbalance of corporate power relative to the rest of society. Along with several other of the authors reviewed here, they recommend constitutional checks and controls on corporate power.

To that end, the volume is divided into four books; book one showcases the authors’ argument in demonstrating the divergence between corporate ownership and management structures. Book two provides a history of the evolution of the modern corporate structure both from the perspective of financial markets and in the development of American contract law. Book three expands upon the dynamics of the modern stock exchange and book four returns to the tension between corporate power and society. In each section, Berle and Means marshal statistical data to build a socio-economic framework for their arguments.

The Modern Corporation and Private Property is rightly considered an important work. The authors demonstrate the unequivocal tendency for corporations to strive toward increasingly larger scales of capital consolidation. That being said, the Berle and Means also concede that there is incontrovertible proof of the growing participation of smaller investors, which helps to stave off any overtly Marxist interpretation. The deluge of statistical data creates a substantial learning curve in teasing out the authors’ arguments, yet the argument that the traditional linkage between investing, making decisions, and reaping profits has been dissolved is clear, compelling and powerful.

Next, we turn to Alfred Chandler, Jr., and Mark Mazlish’s Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (2005). Chandler’s participation is noteworthy due to the continuing influence of his landmark book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), in which he provides a highly detailed history of the development of corporate models of mass production and the associated development of modern management structures.[2] In the collection of essays that constitute Leviathans, we fast-forward to corporate development in the latter half of the twentieth century, in which predominantly American corporations have become multinational. The authors concede that the global balance of power has decidedly tilted toward multinational corporations; however, they reject the notion that globalization entails an inevitable de-emphasis of the state. The editors, Chandler and Mazlish, take the opportunity to emphasize the need for further research to illuminate the ways these institutions both undermine, as well as support, the sovereignty and power of states.

The text is separated into nine essays divided into two sections; the first on the growth and scope of multinationals and the second on their socio-cultural effects. The essays themselves consider three interrelated themes: descriptive accounts of corporate development in the twentieth century, generalized discussions of the social and cultural implications of their global dominance, and challenges related to their regulation and governance. The initial chapter by the editors and two later ones by Bruce Mazlish and Elliott Morss, and Stephen Kobrin respectively, concerning the rise of global elites and anti-globalization movements stand out among the others.

The text is not without significant shortcomings. Like several other books reviewed here, it is a collection of essays; while this is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, the challenge of adhering to an overriding theme is where Leviathans falls short. Likewise, the essays exhibit an overridingly relativistic tone about the more negative effects of globalized corporate activity such as worker exploitation, environmental damage, and the domination of public spaces. While these problems are acknowledged in the essays, analysis of these subjects are given only passing treatment or purposefully avoided.

In another collection of essays, Constructing Corporate America: History Politics, Culture (2004), Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia also seek to explain the development of the corporation as America’s predominant form of business organization. The editors show their colors in their critical approach; they question the rationality of managerial decision making, the focus on efficiency and profits, and the purported distance between the corporate world and the political. The bias of Lipartito and Sicilia aside, the collective aim is to offer a more complex alternative to the narrative of American corporate development.

Within the context of each other, the essays are quite good due to their diverse orientations. Colleen Dunlavy provides an interesting sketch of the corporation as a plutocratic democracy with its “one share one vote” rule. Naomi Lamoreaux explores the legal interpretation of the corporation and argues that the corporate form, far from being inevitable, rests on historically contingent legal phenomena. In other legal perspectives, Gerald Berk explains the relationship between Justice Louis Brandeis’ support for scientifically managed bureaucracy and market regulation. David Hart also adds an important contribution on the relationship between the U.S. government and corporate development, arguing that business history tends to take an overwhelmingly internalist approach, which ignores the enormous effect of corporate activity upon society.

Like Leviathans, Constructing Corporate America has similar problems with continuity. To be fair, most of the essays strike a revisionist approach, intent on moving beyond the Chandlerian business history paradigm; however, the results are mixed. The later chapters on corporate identity politics seem out of place and undeveloped. Additionally, the functionalist approach championed by Chandler, which the authors purport to call into question, is still readily apparent.

In order to further address the inward-looking nature of business history and its functionalist roots, it is worth looking at text that exemplifies these qualities. Such is Sanford M. Jacoby’s Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (1997). Jacoby looks specifically at American corporate-styled welfare capitalism as a historically and geographically specific phenomenon. Reading from more of the positivist school of thought, Jacoby sees corporate projections of power to be an impressive if imperfect system, one whose notions of order, community, and paternal responsibility recalled the preindustrial household economy. Jacoby contends that the firms pursuing welfare capitalism were, in effect, industrial manors.

The author utilizes three separate case studies of corporate firms to illustrate a wider picture of the evolution of industrial and governmental relations throughout the twentieth century. Jacoby concedes that this type of corporate domination of the American workforce was not entirely positive, noting that workers have increasingly been split between the affluent and the poor. The most interesting portion of the text deals with how major industries united to exert the greatest possible influence on labor policy in the 1920s and 1930s. Under the Special Conference Committee (SCC), executives from ten of America’s leading companies formed a committee to coordinate labor relations and responses to changes in legislation in order to maintain continual growth and maintenance of profit.

The success of Jacoby’s text is mixed; it fits well within a functionalist framework and provides a detailed snapshot of the internal calculus of managers in dealing with labor. That said, his primary source analysis only extends to the early 1960s making his examination of corporate welfare into the later part of the twentieth century limited in its usefulness. More problematically, Jacoby falls victim to the relativistic tunnel-vision of many other business histories; he fails to acknowledge the underlying imbalance of power between management and workers, or corporations’ role in exacerbating this problem due to increasingly extreme drives toward capital consolidation. Jacoby notes that this has led to the weakening of unions, but provides little insight on how the situation might be remedied beyond tepid calls for “market individualism.”[3]

Drawing inspiration from Chandler, Harland Prechel also seeks to explain corporate development in America in Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s-1990s (2000). Prechel, however, is more critical of this trajectory than his predecessor. His main argument is that, over time, corporations’ ability to influence the state has grown considerably. Prechel employs what he calls “capital dependence” theory to explain this phenomenon. Prechel argues, via this theory, that corporations were impelled to transform from trusts to holding companies in the nineteenth century, to multidivisional, multilayered subsidiary forms in the twentieth century in order to maintain their abilities to consolidate capital. The author explains that it was the influence of top corporate managers, rather than bureaucratic processes, in reshaping corporate forms in order maintain liquidity of capital.

Structurally, Prechel periodizes his text into three sections: In the first period, the 1870s through the 1890s, the author explains that business leaders utilized federalist legal arguments to secure legal protections for corporations, which ultimately led to the development of the holding company. In the second period, the 1920s and 1930s, rampant capital accumulation culminated in economic distress, which led corporations to reform their structures into multidivisional formations. In the final period, the 1970s to the 1990s, corporations developed multilayered subsidiary forms to globalize consolidation of capital and avoid labor and tax regulations.

A key deficiency in Prechel’s text is the absence of labor. Unlike Jacoby, Prechel ignores the influence of workers on the formulation of corporate policy in the eras he analyzes. As with other business history texts examined here, Prechel’s socio-economic approach utilizes methodology and models as a replacement for broad-based historical analysis. The resulting effect is akin to the other limited, functionalist approaches we have seen so far; Prechel is good at articulating policy out of large data sets (most notably the American steel industry in this case) but falters in making larger claims about the relationships between corporations and the historical environments in which they operate.

While larger-scoped studies are helpful in demonstrating historical change over time, it is also useful to more closely analyze key historical moments for corporate development. Likewise, in Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (2002), Charles Perrow specifically traces the concentration of economic power in the U.S. in its crucial beginning stage in the nineteenth-century. Perrow lucidly notes that the ubiquity of bureaucracies has created a unique problem for historians and requires deeper analysis in order to expose their historical significance. Perrow argues that in many accounts of social change, wealth and power are “not associated with organizations; wealth is resident in an individual, a family or a class, and power is resident in persons or ideologies.”[4] Thus, Perrow states, organizations are at best unproblematic resources for other expressions of wealth and power.

Perrow’s main contention is that the development of the corporate form was neither necessary nor inevitable, but rather, influenced by small groups of capitalists interested in greater organizational flexibility. In order to support his argument, Perrow divides his study into two parts: the first examining the American textile industry, and the second focused on railroads. The author utilizes a comparative framework, first contrasting the Philadelphia and New England textile industries, and then evaluating the American railroad industry against its French and British counterparts. In both sections, Perrow stresses the historically contingent nature of American corporate development, demonstrating that alternatives could be just as efficient, and with more regulatory oversight, than they turned out to be.

As with many other texts we have seen, the sociological method plays a primary role in explaining the phenomena discussed. The synthetic, over-reliance on secondary works to build methodological models lends itself to an often confusing and convoluted narrative. Perrow would have done well to ground this work by referencing more broad historical studies to provide context. Nevertheless, his contention that the rise of corporate power was due to a purposeful effort pushed by capitalists and investment houses, is compelling and important. Likewise, Perrow exposes that the trajectory of these corporate leaders push for capital consolidation often included corrupt financial dealings rife with bribery, flagrant violations of regulatory statutes, and deceptive financial dealings, which provide an important historical lesson.

Continuing down the path in the study of historically critical moments for corporate development, the work by Warren J. Samuels and Arthur S. Miller in Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility (1987) has special significance. These authors specifically take on the phenomenon known as “corporate personhood,” which developed out of a particular interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in the case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad.[5] In yet another collection of essays by legal historians Martin J. Sklar, Morton Horwitz, Aviam Soifer, Samuel Loescher, and others, the balance of the formulation and development of this concept is juxtaposed with an exploration of its moral implications.

Following a dedication to Berle and Means, the thirteen essays that constitute Corporations and Society are broken up into four themes: the doctrinal origins of corporate personhood, development of legal precedents relative to social control and economic planning, policy consequences, and the tension between democracy and corporate power. The Santa Clara case looms large in the text, directly referenced in nine of the essays. Morton Horwitz’s first and longest chapter stands out in tying this legal precedent to the accelerated capital consolidation by corporations in the late nineteenth century and beyond. Martin Sklar expands this theme by demonstrating how the Sherman Anti-trust Act was basically a failure due to the legal protections for corporations already in place. Martin Benjamin and Daniel Bronstein cut through technical ambiguities, arguing that corporations are entirely goal-oriented and incapable of understanding the moral consequences of their actions, which creates a serious problem in their legal designation – as only natural persons can be incarcerated for criminal violations of the law. In sum, the threat of corporations to democracy is an overriding motif of the text.

There is little to criticize here. The editors have done a better job than most in keeping the essays in conversation with one another. Additionally, each piece is well argued and has prodigious documentation. To be sure, the authors are fixated on the concept of corporate personhood, and it is worth noting that other developments, such as the holding company, play at least as important a role in corporate gigantism.[6] This text is also the most revisionist of the works reviewed in this paper thus far; business historians used to a more relativistic tone may be taken aback by the frank assertions the authors make about American-styled oligarchy and the subversion of democracy.

Indeed, staunch revisionism of corporate power is much more common outside the realm of business history. In order to emphasize this feature, the final book reviewed here is Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America (2001) by Jack Beatty. Beatty is not a business historian; he is a journalist and editor for the Atlantic magazine. It is clear from his introduction, however, that he is familiar with the territory explored in this essay. He drops references to Chandler, Berle and Means, and John Kenneth Galbraith, who also shares Beatty’s critical attitudes toward a corporate dominated society.[7]

Despite a difference in methodology, which we will deal with in a moment, Beatty’s argument is similar to many of the other authors reviewed here: that constitutional power must be exerted to check the power of corporations, who have subverted democracy both in the U.S.and elsewhere. To support this claim, Beatty breaks up his text thematically and along vague chronological lines, dealing with diverse issues of production, consumption, legal precedents, labor, and culture. The author picks out various corporations for case studies, such as Standard Oil and AT&T. Beatty also brings in literary voices such as John Steinbeck, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Joseph Heller to add cultural context.

While entertaining and clearly meant for a general audience, this scattershot approach has grave problems. First of all, Colossus does not contain an index, almost immediately excluding it as a useful academic source. The footnoting is quite limited, as is its bibliography. While the iconoclastic tone is likely to garner a sympathetic readership, the narrative is disjointed and is seriously lacking in continuity. The textbook-styled case studies that interrupt the main body of the chapters are distracting and unnecessary. One reviewer suggested the work be utilized by college students.[8] I strenuously disagree; the tone of the book is mismatched by its lack of academic rigor and provides a misleading example of literature on the topic. There is no doubt that Beatty’s claims have merit, but his methodology is severely lacking.

Collectively, the texts reviewed here present a conundrum: books that offer deep technical analyses tend to present a formalist, relativistic stance that ignores the social consequences of corporate power. Alternatively, there are plenty of books like Beatty’s Colossus that address these consequences, but lack a disciplined, empirical approach needed to more fully address the topic. Samuels and Miller’s Corporations and Society strikes a good balance here, yet a high learning curve is still required in the arenas of business and legal history to fully understand the empirical data being presented. This creates a barrier – not only between historians and this valuable information, but also effectively keeps the public out of the conversation as well.

A more comprehensive approach is likely needed. While it is clear that many of the editors took this idea to heart by cobbling together diverse groups of essays, what is more accurately required is historical context. As noted earlier, the inward-looking nature of business history is quite good at producing texts that supply enormous amounts of technical information and discerning the organizational trajectories of individual firms; however without being situated in their environment, these books are limited in their usefulness to both historians and the public. Given that there is widespread consensus regarding the importance in understanding the corporation’s place within society, business historians have an important responsibility to fulfill. This task would be best accomplished with more historical representation and sensitivity toward the individuals, populations, states, and environments that are affected, often adversely, by corporate activity. This proposed approach does not necessarily have to be revisionist; it is quite likely that there are some scholars who feel that corporate consolidation of political power and capital is a good thing, however, such a task must be done openly, clearly, and independent of corporate influence.

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[1] Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967).

[2] Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). Unlike Berle and Means, critiques of the socio-political effects of this activity are almost completely absent in the text.

[3] Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 263.

[4] Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (New Jersey:PrincetonUniversity Press, 2002) 10.

[5] Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R.R. (118US 394). This case involved a tax dispute between the railroad andSan Mateo county, which wanted to prevent the corporation from deducting its debts from its tax obligations. The case was appealed up to the Supreme Court, which unanimously held that the corporation had the right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment – just the same as a natural person. Chief Justice Morrison Waite stated in this fateful ruling, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

[6] Jason Weixelbaum, “Harnessing the Growth of Corporate Capitalism: Sullivan & Cromwell and its influence on late nineteenth-century American business.” http://jasonweixelbaum.wordpress.com/2010/12/25/harnessing-the-growth-of-corporate-capitalism-sullivan-cromwell-and-its-influence-on-late-nineteenth-century-american-business/

[7] John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). Essentially Galbraith saw the problem of “conspicuous consumption” vigorously promoted by corporations plaguing American society in its overproduction of luxury goods without providing for society’s basic needs.

[8] Roger L. Adkins, Reviewed work(s): Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America  by Jack Beatty, American Journal of Business Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall, 2001): 63.

Collaboration in Context: New Historiographical Approaches to Alleged American/Nazi Business Ties

The contentious issue of corporate collaboration between Nazi Germany and businesses in the United States has been fermenting ever since the end of World War II. Although historical analysis of this phenomenon has continued ever since, in recent years there has been significant growth of scholarship that deals with this subject. This has been due in part to revelations that have emerged in lawsuits from the former victims of the Nazi regime against American corporations, which has also produced correspondent histories sponsored by the organizations to defend, legitimize, or obscure their activities.[1] Additionally, particularly since the end of the Cold War, there has been a steady declassification of documentation that exposes this activity both in the U.S. and elsewhere, which has provided fresh source material for new historical investigations.

The study of this subject matter is challenging for several reasons. First, the field itself is quite diverse. Historical investigations have involved a multitude of different types of organizations, from automotive firms to financial institutions. Second, primary source materials often reside behind the closed doors of large corporations and law firms. Privileged access to this documentation and corporate funding of historical studies further complicates this already controversial issue. Third, national narratives from the World War II period tend to obscure, rather than illuminate the highly complex transnational phenomena of cross-border corporate activity, capital flows, and wartime industrial development.

In the face of these difficulties, the implications of this field of research are profound. Several major narratives could be called into question. For Americans, the notion of the “Good War,” in which the U.S.plays the incorruptible good guy in a Manichean struggle against Nazi Germany is still used as a moral standard for U.S. foreign policy, which often intimately affects the rest of the world. For Europeans, particularly German historians, the inclusion of outside actors in the culpability of the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi militarism further complicate an already expansive, diverse, and deeply emotional subject matter. Finally, in the realm of research on globalization, transnational history, and international diplomacy in the twentieth century, this field presents a challenge, not only for the study of the relationships between multinational corporations and international relations, but also for the study of the Cold War, which naturally involves all of these aspects.

It is not surprising then, given all of these complicating factors, that the emerging standpoints in this study of American business collaboration with Nazi Germany have engaged in a “dialog of the deaf,” writing past each other in an effort to seize hold of the narrative. For lack of better terms, I have labeled these two dominant groups the “collaborationists” and the “corporatists.” For their part, the corporatists argue that business relationships between American corporations and the Hitler regime were sparse, small scale, uncoordinated, and had no relationship with U.S.policymakers. Furthermore, this group contends that American parent companies lost control of their European subsidiaries when these businesses were seized by the Nazis and retooled for war. The collaborationists argue the opposite: that these business interactions were widespread, large scale, coordinated, and had connections to influential American personalities.

If there is insight to be gained from this historiographical controversy, a more accurate portrayal of these events lies between these two camps. Despite unknown amounts of corporate funding and avid public interest in the subject, neither side has taken into account the infinitely large volumes of historical research that can help provide context for American businesses’ alleged Nazi ties. Thus, the goal of this paper is to evaluate the representative literature on both sides of this debate and then explore the larger history of economics across social boundaries during World War II by bringing into context historical works in multiple fields in order to approach a more nuanced and solid foundation for future research.

The Collaborationists

There are not many defining features of this group of literature other than the notion that, as mentioned earlier, many of the writers argue that corporate collaboration between American firms and the Nazis was more widespread and more coordinated than originally thought, and control of German subsidiaries were actually retained by their U.S. based parent companies through the use of lawyers, intermediaries, and managers loyal to the organizations. Additionally, many of the texts in this group involve single businesses or industries rather than the topic of business collaboration as a whole. Problematically, sensationalism also tends to be a common theme that undermines their empirical value. With titles like America’s Nazi Secret by John Loftus and American Swastika by Charles Higham, these books are specifically marketed to the conspiracy crowd. Finally, one problematic feature of this collection is that many, but not all, of the works have been produced by journalists rather than academics, which has caused this field of research to be glossed over or dismissed by specialists.

It is worth noting that this field has deep roots going back to World War II itself. For instance, formal inquiries into U.S.business collaboration with both Japan and Germany started near the war’s end with a congressional committee established by U.S. Senator Harley Kilgore to oversee war production efforts and investigate the relationship of monopolies and international chemical cartels. This committee reported that patent agreements, specifically between American and German firms to produce materials essential to building armaments such as synthetic rubber, beryllium, tungsten carbide, optical glass and plastics, were monopolistic in nature and designed to keep all competitors out of the market. The revelations of the Kilgore committee prompted writers Joseph Borkin, Charles A. Welsh, Richard Sasuly, and Josiah DuBois to argue that these business relationships were essential to Nazi war production both before and after the U.S.and Germany were at war.[2]

Moving forward several decades, one of the more comprehensive books on the subject of corporate collaboration with Nazi Germany is Charles Higham’s Trading with the Enemy (1983). Oddly enough, Higham is an author who writes tabloid-style accounts of Hollywood personalities.[3] In Trading with the Enemy Higham identifies a group he calls “the Fraternity,” a collection of prominent and wealthy Americans who lent their fortunes and their businesses to the Nazi cause. Of all the individuals he discusses, Higham pays special attention to German lawyer Gerhard Westrick, who helped companies like International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) keep their subsidiaries in American hands both before and after a state of war existed between Germany and the U.S. Another innovative aspect to his study is Higham’s treatment of the activities of American banker Thomas H. McKittrick, who utilized his presidency at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to launder stolen gold for the Nazis.[4]

Because it is written in a highly dramatic and colorful style with very little documentation other than a selected bibliography, scholars have mostly ignored this text; however, Higham states that he was responsible for taking out the initial Freedom of Information Act requests to get information in the book released – including particular documents related to the BIS, other banks (including Chase Bank and JP Morgan), and Gerhard Westrick. My own inspection of his archive at the University of Southern California demonstrates that the author did collect copious documentation from the National Archives to support his claims.[5] These sources include detailed, declassified investigations of Chase Bank, JP Morgan, and the BIS by the offices of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Higham’s documentation also includes postwar interrogations by Allied intelligence agents of Gerhard Westrick and Baron Kurt Freiherr von Shröder, who acted as intermediaries for several of the businesses named above. It is unfortunate that his overwrought writing style and lack of references do not serve his cause.

Higham’s work draws inspiration from another more comprehensive book, Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976). Sutton argues that multiple financial organizations in the U.S., many of which already had global reach, helped provide finances to the Nazis throughout the twelve-year Reich. Sutton’s argument closely resembles Higham’s, except with more references to primary source documentation. Sutton’s work also suffers from a dramatic retelling of the events and has been subsequently reposted in many places on internet conspiracy websites. Like Higham, Sutton pays particular attention to the BIS, Ford Motor Company, ITT, and Standard Oil. This work has also been ignored by the academic community for its overly conspiratorial overtones, even though later works have established the veracity of a few of his claims. Unfortunately for Sutton, no comprehensive analysis of his work and sources has occurred as of yet; his text remains unreliable for future research until such a review has been done.

One of the books that lend credence to the claims of Sutton and Higham’s work is Working for the Enemy (2004). The argument of this text, encapsulated in a series of essays by historians Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis, revolves around the premise that Ford and General Motors (GM) controlled a majority of Third Reich armaments industries through their subsidiaries, Ford-Werke & Adam Opel AG, and maintained in contact and control of them throughout the war via managers loyal to the companies. The text also contains oral histories from former forced laborers who worked at the Opel and Ford-Werke plants. These testimonies, including those by Elsa Iwanowa, were published in tandem with Holocaust restitution lawsuits that were brought against both Ford and GM during this period. This text is much more copiously sourced and the language is considerably more measured than the aforementioned books; however, the writers admit that the documentation regarding GM’s German subsidiary is particularly thin, given that their main plant Russelheim was bombed repeatedly by the Allies toward the end of the war.

In the category of “collaborationists” author Edwin Black stands out as one of the most significant contributors. Black has also written similar material about Ford and GM for his book Internal Combustion (2006), a conspiratorially-toned text about the American auto industry’s resistance to the development of the electric car. His main contributions to the study of collaboration with the Nazis are The Transfer Agreement (1986), War Against the Weak (2003), and IBM and the Holocaust (2001) – the latter being the most well known. He also produced an anthology, Nazi Nexus (2009), which contains excerpts from all of these works. The Transfer Agreement, Black’s first book and the one that earned him the most notoriety, involves backroom deals between German Zionists and Nazi officials, who agreed to allow Jews to escape Germany and emigrate to Palestine in exchange for assistance in stymieing Jewish-led boycotts. War Against the Weak describes the work of American eugenicists who both influenced, financed, and worked for Nazi eugenics programs.

IBM and the Holocaust deserves closer scrutiny. Like Working for the Enemy the book was intended for release at the same time as Holocaust era lawsuits were being brought against International Business Machines (IBM). Black argues that the corporation’s biggest client was Germany during the 1930s and 40s and forcefully maintained control of its subsidiary, Dehomag, through the use of lawyers, loyal managers, and Swiss holding companies. Furthermore, Black argues that IBM’s information services were critical to perpetrating the Holocaust by seeking out Jews and organizing their detainment, forced labor, and execution. As a secondary argument, Black also notes that IBM’s organizational services were greatly useful for German war production. Black assembled a large team of researchers to assemble the prodigious source material for the book. He also had it reviewed in its preproduction stage by a few specialists, including Robert Wolfe, a key consultant for the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG) at the U.S. National Archives, adding credibility to the project.

Black’s sensationalist tone pervades the text, which elicited criticisms in the academic press. Although some made claims of shoddy footnoting, his critics have not elaborated on specific problems. The IBM case itself was dropped, with the insistence of the U.S. State Department, in part due to its late timing with other Holocaust restitution cases that were about to be settled. IBM remained silent on the allegations and agreed to open its archives to historians at a future, undetermined date.[6] Like the other books in the “collaborationist” set, future historians will have to check up on the author’s sources to verify their veracity. Regardless, IBM and the Holocaust remains the most well known text on the subject due to its popularity.

In a positive development, historical commissions designed to address Nazi war crimes are also useful in expanding the scope of the field of research on alleged American/Nazi business ties. One such text to come out of these commissions is Richard Breitman’s U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (2005). The book itself is the work of four independent historians, Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, all consultants to the IWG, who actually did the declassification work. What has resulted is a commentary and sampling from some of the eight million declassified pages organized around three basic questions: What did American intelligence agencies know about the Holocaust? Did American corporations benefit from Nazi activities? And finally, which American agencies used former Nazis during the Cold War? The authors make several general conclusions in their survey of this collection of documents: There was a war on, and the Final Solution and its components were known by Allied intelligence agencies but never actively studied. Additionally, they add credence to the collaborationist school by noting that some American corporations did benefit from Nazi activities. Finally, the authors note that substantial numbers of Nazi intelligence and policy officials remade their reputations late in the war or immediately thereafter and worked for western intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Brief mentions are made of IBM, Chase and JP Morgan bank, although the emphasis is on intelligence agents and their Nazi counterparts, rather than corporate collaboration.

As a final addition to this survey of the so-called collaborationist historiography, The Myth of the Good War (2003) by Jacques Pauwels may represent a future direction for the field. Pauwels argues that despite the view espoused by American popular history, media, and politicians, U.S. corporate involvement in World War II was primarily for materialistic rather than ideological aims. Drawing influences from the revisionist school of U.S foreign policy that grew up around the questioning America’s motives in the Cold War, Pauwels demonstrates that the major concern of U.S. business leadership during World War II were markets for their products and political leverage over as much territory as could be gained. Pauwels selectively integrates material from Working for the Enemy and Edwin Black’s books to show how various corporations acted in concert, rather than separately, in order to support the funneling of profits from neutral Switzerland back to the U.S. Although this final claim is tenuous, Pauwels backs up this argument with numerous references to secondary literature. Unlike Black, Higham, and Sutton, Pauwels tempers his argument with a more measured and careful tenor.

Despite the revelations that have come out of this body of research, there are significant shortcomings worth addressing. Many of the works presented here are dramatically toned and not academically rigorous, making the job of separating fact from conjecture challenging. While some claims have been identified as factual, many others still require close and careful scrutiny. Scrupulous sourcing also continues to be problematic and primary source documentation needs be clearly identified. Finally, few of the books engage the larger context of scholarship that has been done on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, or World War II in general. This tendency isolates the field from other scholars and academia more generally, where more scrutiny could strengthen their claims.

The Corporatists

Like the collaborationists, the corporatists are a diverse group; however, their work also shares a handful of common themes worth mentioning. First, several of the monographs have either been commissioned directly by corporations indicted in Holocaust-era business exploitation, or have provided funds directly to the historian to produce the works in this category. Second, many of the authors in this group argue that the businesses they study lost managerial control to the Nazis. Third, some of the works suggest that only individuals can be guilty of genocide, not institutions. Whether or not this is a convenient argument for businesses accused of collaboration with the Nazis remains to be seen; suffice it to say that it is a common contention among the works reviewed here.

Regarding commissions, Gerald Feldman was hired by the Allianz insurance company to look into its own role in Nazi Germany while it was being sued by Holocaust victim groups. Because of the company’s historic ties other insurance agencies, particularly within the U.S., this work is worth looking closely at. The result of Feldman’s commission was Allianz and the German Insurance Business (2001). As with other histories in this section, the author contends that companies do not commit crimes; their directors do. Feldman also argues that the insurance company’s managers did their best to honor their policyholders’ contracts while adhering to Nazi policies. He notes that Allianz insured Nazi military hardware, expropriated assets in occupied territories, and underwrote concentration camp-related machinery. Feldman focuses on the psychology of survival of the managers in their business dealings with the Nazis. In the process, he affirms a more general thesis about group behavior, particularly within businesses, stating that they are heavily affected by the external institutional incentives in which these groups operate, and that these incentives are to a great degree the product of political processes. Thus, whether or not the narrowly rational pursuit by businesses and their material interests lead to a socially beneficial or destructive outcome, they are contingent on the environment in which they operate.

While nearly all the books discussed here involve American parent companies, it is worth noting the work by Neil Forbes, Doing Business with the Nazis (2000) for comparison. Forbes sees Britain’s economic interconnections with Germany during the interwar period as a larger problem involving Britain’s soul searching as a declining imperial power intent on preserving the fidelity of its markets while simultaneously wrestling with the growing concern that these connections were contributing to grave external threats. The author’s main sources are parliamentary debates, the pronouncements of industry leaders, and major media responses. Forbes’ fairly terse explanation that British multinational corporations collaborating with German armaments industry was that they were “largely left to decide for themselves whether to exercise self-restraint.”[7] Thus, the author’s text is remarkably free of judgment. Forbes also does not explain the activities of the corporations he explores, such as Dunlop, after the war begins. Although Forbes does not note any ancillary connection to the corporations he discusses, his uncritical assessment of Unilever belies a fairly pronounced pro-business standpoint.[8] As with the other corporations he looks at, Forbes is convinced it was self-interest and political naiveté, rather than capriciousness, which drove British corporations to operate against their home country’s self-interest.

Another exemplary work in the corporatist category is Peter Hayes’ Industry and Ideology (1987). In this case the company under investigation is IG Farben, which constructed the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. Although this was primarily a German company, the organization shared a cartel with other large American chemical producers, managed American subsidiaries, and retained the legal advice of American corporate lawyer and policymaker, John Foster Dulles. For his part, Hayes argues that throughout the twelve years of Hitler’s rule, IG attempted to influence German state policy on multiple levels. Hayes demonstrates that these endeavors basically failed; however, the corporation benefited greatly from its relationship with the Nazis: it enjoyed low labor overhead, courtesy of “leased” slave labor, monopolistic protection, huge government contracts, and opportunities to expand into conquered nations.

Hayes concedes that the managers of IG Farben were hardly innocent. He notes that after the war, several directors were tried for war crimes, albeit most served short prison sentences. Nevertheless, Hayes demonstrates that Nazi society was structured so that individuals within organizations could perpetrate heinous acts without particularly malevolent motives. Such was the case of IG Farben. Likewise, much of the book is dedicated to revealing the political impotence of the corporation’s managers. Hayes concedes that the company did prosper significantly under the Nazi regime, which stretches the credulity of its supposedly passive role; however, with a reasonable amount of qualification, this is the type of argument that Hayes makes. Jay Weinstein, another scholar reviewing Hayes work noted, “One can imagine that another analyst, given the same material, might successfully ‘prove’ that the Nazi’s were a bit more inclined to follow the lead of IG, and that IG played a more important policymaking role than the book would lead us to believe.”[9] Thus, more research may be required to determine IG Farben’s precise role within Nazi Germany, not to mention its relationship to American companies like DuPont, who shared a cartel arrangement with the German company.

The defining factor of this work may be in the acknowledgements. Hayes states that he received undefined “ancillary support” from IG Farben to produce the text.[10] This fact raises questions about the conclusions Hayes comes to in this work. Although respected historian Hans Mommsen has supported the objectivity of Hayes research, author Edwin Black has drawn similarities between Hayes and other authors that have been hired by corporations specifically to produce histories that could be used as plausible legal defenses against further Holocaust restitution lawsuits.[11] Whatever the case may be, Industry and Ideology, represents an openly pro-business orientation.

This orientation may be due to Hayes’ mentor, the late Henry Ashby Turner, who presided over Hayes’ doctoral studies at Yale. Turner produced two books worth mentioning here: German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (1987) and General Motors and the Nazis (2005). Turner argues that businesses played a minor part of Hitler’s ascension compared to the sway of right-wing ideology. Furthermore, he contends that business executives only came on board and subscribed to the Nazis’ political agenda once it was clear that they would become the dominant political force in Germany. Turner contends that businessmen initially took Nazi anticapitalist rhetoric seriously, a view opposed by several later historians.[12] Rather than analyze business activity within Germany once the Nazis took power, Turner takes the opportunity to promote Knut Borchardt’s controversial thesis that the preceding Weimar Republic’s excessively generous welfare policies were the main cause of Germany’s economic problems.

While German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler stakes out Turner’s pro-business standpoint, General Motors and the Nazis is more controversial. Turner claims that GM’s German subsidiary, Opel, was drawn into the German armaments industry against the wishes of the parent company’s managers and efforts were made to pull American board members back to camouflage its involvement. The author argues that there was no real alternative for American managers but to allow this collaboration to continue. Turner notes that Opel was designated as enemy property even though it was not confiscated by the Nazis.

At the end of his career, Turner may have softened a bit – conceding that Opel was liable for compensation of surviving victims of forced labor. That being said, his methods and conclusions raise questions worth further consideration. GM provided Turner exclusive access to their archives in order to produce the text. When author Edwin Black tried to access the same material, which was moved to the Yale University Sterling library, he claims he was denied access and was forced to threaten to sue in order to obtain it.[13] Subsequently, he found the material in an unusable computer database that none of the Yale librarians knew how to operate. Furthermore, Turners’ conclusions of GM’s misgivings are contradicted by overseas manager James Mooney’s own memoirs, which praised the partnership.[14] Finally, and most controversially, Turner clearly and unequivocally states at the beginning of General Motors and the Nazis that he was not sponsored by GM in any way to produce the book.[15] When Turner died three years later, it came out that he had been hired by the company to do exactly that.[16] Despite these shocking revelations, his former student, Hayes, has asserted that Turner was not commissioned by GM to produce his last work in an obituary on the American Historical Association website.[17]

Another book that does not strictly deal with World War II business but is worth mention here is Michael Salter’s Nazi War Crimes, US Intelligence and Selective Prosecution at Nuremberg (2007). Salter offers a detailed examination in his study of the role played by United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of today’s CIA, in the pursuit of Nazi war criminals. A central figure in Salter’s investigation is SS General Karl Wolff, a notorious Nazi who oversaw the murder of thousands of Jews. Salter argues that Wolff and his associates surrendered to Allen Dulles, a high level OSS agent, who sheltered them in order to gain intelligence that could shorten the war and limit Allied casualties. The first part of the book focuses on Dulles’ violation of Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals as well as treaties made with the Soviets by granting Wolff immunity from prosecution. In the second half, Salter presents a defense of the OSS and Dulles’ actions. Salter makes a blanket argument that the rule of law is often subverted by pragmatic, geo-political considerations; however the legal normality which Salter grounds much of his analysis of the Wolff/Dulles bargain is more problematic than the author expresses in the text. Salter concludes that we should “discard the mainstream reaction of one-sided and partisan outrage at the existence of such deals.”[18] Likewise, Salter’s relativism puts him more into the orbit of the corporatist camp. Critically, Salter fails to mention that Dulles and his older brother were also the corporate lawyers for Chase, JP Morgan, Ford, GM, IG Farben, the BIS, Standard Oil, IBM, and ITT – all companies that had alleged ties to the Nazis.

As this group of representative works demonstrates, there is a significant divide in opinion about the implications of transnational business activity during World War II. Although it is quite likely that the historians featured here had a pro-business orientations prior to producing the works in question, the influence of corporate money and privileged access to sources casts a shadow over their scholarship. Allowing access to their source materials for further investigation would help allay some of these concerns. Like the collaborationists, the corporatists tend to be myopic in their focus and ignore the wider scope of the transnational business activities in question. While the selection of books reviewed here is quite limited, many historians share a dismissive attitude toward further research in this field. For instance, Richard Evans concludes in the final pages of his extensive trilogy on the Third Reich, “…the businesses and companies that profited from the Nazi regime and its policies have opened their archives and admitted their complicity.”[19] Such an unequivocal statement denies the complexity of the issue.

Contextualizing the Field

In order to widen the scope of alleged American business collaboration with Nazi Germany, it is worth looking at a few selected works outside the realm of these two fields. In the interest of providing empirical insights, it is important to note that direct connections to collaborative business relationships are not explored by these works; the purpose of this section is to highlight other historical contexts that are missing from the aforementioned schools of thought in order to provide a more holistic perspective to the field.

One useful place to look is at the historiography of Holocaust restitution, where many of the businesses in question are also discussed. This literature also necessarily involves some aspects of American business ties to the Nazis as individuals have brought suit against these organizations for multiple reasons, including forced labor, appropriated bank accounts, and unfulfilled insurance claims. Additionally, these books be can be useful in exposing the way information on the topic is presented in legal frameworks, political action groups, and corporate public relations.

In Some Measure of Justice (2009) by Michael Marrus and William Schabas, there are some similarities to the corporatist school. For his part, Marrus is critical of the restitution cases, and worries that “monetizing justice” has more negative outcomes than positive ones. Thus, the book promotes an overriding ambivalence to the possibility of justice for the crimes of the Holocaust. One distinctive element of his argument is his dismissal that corporations should be included in the list of perpetrators. As observed earlier with the corporatists, Marrus argues that only people can be guilty of perpetrating genocide. This argument stands in direct opposition to much of the litigation against banks and industrial concerns, verging on reproducing their own legal defenses. Problematically, Marrus announces in his acknowledgement that he was funded in part by the Ford Foundation, a charitable organization linked to a corporation that has been subject to a Holocaust reparation lawsuit in the forced labor case of Iwanowa v. Ford Motor Company. Whether or not this represents a conflict of interest for the authors, this work demonstrates that scholars are still formulating policy positions relative to the topic.

More useful historical context is found in the collection of essays edited by Roger P. Alford and Michael Bazyler in the book Holocaust Restitution (2007). Bazyler, who specializes in the history of Holocaust restitution, argues that the legal actions against corporations were justified and that most businesses involved received fairly light penalties in the amount of restitution they were forced to pay in comparison with their crimes. Many in Europe considered Holocaust restitution blackmail, and in response Bazyler produces balanced indictments for the individual companies’ behavior. Elsewhere, Bazyler has noted, in a somewhat bitter fashion, that claimants attorneys were often shut out of restitution agreements between corporations and governments.[20]

Peter Hayes also has contributed an essay for Holocaust Restitution. Hayes argues that Holocaust restitution groups have a “fixation” on corporate profits and that penalizing corporations after the fact is simply “collateral damage.” Hayes contends that corporate profits derived by the Nazis had been consumed by the war effort and the destruction that followed. Hayes comes to this conclusion by citing his own research on the company Degussa – which manufactured the poison Zyklon B, used in the Nazi gas chambers. This reasoning is questionable, as Hayes characterizes all companies that collaborated with Nazis like Degussa, when in fact, many corporations’ parent companies were overseas and were not only free from war damage, but were able to repatriate profits after the war.

Oliver Rathkolb’s Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy (2004) is also worth looking at for insight in the realm of Holocaust restitution. This collection of essays is derived from the 2001 conference hosted by the Bruno Kreisky Archives Foundation on Holocaust-Era Assets. Edited by Rathkolb, the essays provide a thorough and scholarly discussion on the role and limits of national historical commissions, in both their political and social compositions, which form a kind of contemporary debate over the Nazi Past. These discussions are highlighted by the tensions described between historical scholarship, media coverage and politics surrounding the resolution of Holocaust restitution suits. One interesting feature of the text is the essay by Jean-Francoise Bergier, for whom the commission to investigate the activities of Swiss banks was named.[21] Bergier has reservations about the contradictory nature of the word “neutrality” and how it was used by Switzerland and other places during World War II. Although he does not specifically name American corporations, the commission concludes that there is more to be learned from the declassification of American intelligence documents related to the topic.  In his essay, Bergier also laments the public perception of historians as the ultimate arbiters of historical judgment for Holocaust-related crimes, exposing a frustration with irreconcilable scholarship that has, in part, been explored in this paper.

Business histories can also be useful in filling out the picture in this contentious field of research. The learning curve for this material can be steep in understanding the legal and financial terminology as well as making sense of the large volumes of statistical data, but some of the findings related to the context of studies involved in this paper can help provide a foundation for further scholarship. Business history is also useful in describing how multinational corporations operate, which can help educate future researchers attempting to provide a clearer picture of cross border capital movements during the World War II era.

Visions of Modernity (1994) by Mary Nolan endeavors to explore how the discourses of efficacy in American corporate models shaped economic and social transformations in Germany. Furthermore, she describes how the process of economic restructuring and related political struggles subverted both the assumptions and expectations regarding their results. Nolan demonstrates that at the beginning of the Weimar era, there was great interest in Germany for American economic models. German industrialists traveled to America to investigate rationalized business methods and created lasting ties with U.S. corporate leaders. Likewise, many American corporations expanded their operations in German markets. Nolan describes that German business rationalization efforts did not keep up with political reforms and ended up exacerbating wage, consumption, and unemployment problems. The Depression did not destroy the belief in rationalization, but severely limited its ideological appeal. Elements of American-styled business rationalization were kept into the Nazi era, but crucially, were divorced from their political implications.

Another recent text that addresses Nazi era business is The Wages of Destruction (2006) by Adam Tooze. According to Tooze, Hitler considered his real enemy to be the “Jewish-dominated” United States, a large nation that Germany could only compete with if it acquired a comparable amount of farmland or “living space.” Tooze also contends, as Nolan does, that Hitler wanted Germany to adopt Americanized advanced production methods to develop a bigger consumer economy. Most importantly, the author argues that every major policy initiative of the Nazis reflected Hitler’s efforts to improve economic competitiveness – from the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, to the mass murder of Jews. While Tooze ignores the American corporate presence in Germany and tends to fixate on military statistics, his emphasis on economic concerns as a primary driving force behind Nazi expansionism helps to explain the Nazi desire for collaborative interaction between U.S. business leaders and German policymakers.

A significant book that helps tie together some of the disparate studies that have been reviewed so far is Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius’ The Untold Story of Sullivan & Cromwell (1988). Lisagor and Lipsius demonstrate that the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell was centrally involved in helping American corporate leaders consolidate economic and political power in the late nineteenth century.[22] They then explain that under the direction of John Foster Dulles from the early 1920s through the end of World War II, the firm helped create a network of holding companies, corporate managers, and lawyers, to facilitate corporate development within Germany.

Although Lisagor and Lipsius meant to simply produce a history of the firm from its inception to the 1980s, this work inadvertently presents a significant challenge to historians who would argue that American corporate cooperation with the Third Reich was uncoordinated and small scale. The authors demonstrate that Sullivan & Cromwell specialized in both maintaining managerial control and obscuring overseas corporate operations in providing legal representation for nearly all the businesses discussed here: Ford, GM, IBM, the BIS, IG Farben, ITT, Chase Bank, JP Morgan, and Standard Oil. Additionally, the authors show that influential policymakers, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles on the American side, and Heinrich Albert and Gerhard Westrick on the German side, were intimately involved in these business relationships – dispelling the notion that their respective governments were completely uninvolved in these collaborative activities. Lisagor and Lipsius have called attention to a crucially important organization involved in these events, exposing the need for more research into the role they played in facilitating Nazi war aims.

Finally, some selected works from U.S. diplomatic history can also help provide some tentative context to the landscape of U.S.business relations with Germany during the World War II era. Because some of these works deal with the cross-over between American corporate leaders and policymakers, this body of literature has the advantage of exposing the complex linkage between U.S. business activity and its foreign policy.

In order to study the phenomenon of corporative collaboration more closely, American historian Michael J. Hogan founded a school of thought aptly named “corporatism.”[23] In describing this methodology, Hogan emphasizes the importance of examining the role of non-state actors, not only in shaping policy, but also the part they play in creating the international environment in which policy is operated. Hogan notes, as he does in his book The Marshall Plan, that American leaders have tried to build a world order along lines comparable to the economic order domestically. Hogan also contends that a corporatist perspective is useful when doing comparative and transnational history. Referencing Akira Iriye’s work on transnational economics and culture, Hogan stresses that the corporatist approach adds a needed dimension to any study rooted in the relationship between American business and politics.[24]

Eschewing the most controversial implications that American policymakers may have purposefully promoted business with the Nazis for geopolitical reasons, Hogan’s school of thought does allow room for some interesting insights. If, in fact, some policymakers were involved in corporate activity with the Nazis, this may help to explain why many businesses did not have their activities exposed until decades later. For instance, Joseph Borkin notes in his book, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben, that future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ principle expertise was obscuring American subsidiaries in European holding companies in order to avoid regulatory oversight.[25] In another example, Bradford Snell, an attorney hired by the U.S. Senate in 1974 to inquire into anti-competitive practices of Ford and General Motors, lamented that policymakers’ relationship with the automotive corporations were exacerbating the problem.[26] As a surprise to his congressional colleagues, Snell’s report also contained detailed evidence that both of these businesses had also been an integral part of Nazi military production, monopolizing the manufacture of the Third Reich’s planes, tanks, and trucks. Snell’s research was later used as a foundation for scholarship in Working for the Enemy, which was reviewed earlier. Although there were plenty of American policy makers who were staunchly anti-Nazi, further study of individuals like John Foster Dulles may be helpful in illuminating the nature of the relationship between policymakers and corporate managers as is applies to the study of American/Nazi business ties.

Conclusion

So what have we learned here after this long procession of diverse and detailed texts? For one thing, many histories outside the realm of alleged corporate collaboration with the Nazis underscore the historical importance of business institutions and markets. The allusion to the growing importance of non-state actors, particularly in the twentieth century, is a recurring theme. These actors, primarily represented by transnational corporations, have yet to be clearly nailed down in an interpretive framework. Many authors introduce the issue and underscore its importance, but avoid engaging it directly. For this reason, it is perhaps unsurprising that the so-called corporatists and the collaborationists cannot find common ground on which to debate their differing interpretations of American business activity in Europe during World War II.

Given the work that remains to be done, the field of corporate collaboration between American businesses and Germany under the Nazis prior to and during World War II is only just beginning. As noted earlier, neither the corporatists nor the collaborationists have made significant efforts to contextualize their research in other historiographies. Authors who avoid this scholarship are likely to extend the “dialog of the deaf” into the future.

Partially, this is a problem of marketing. For their part, the collaborationists benefit from emphasizing the drama and sensationalism of their accounts, which sell books in the already crowded field of popular World War II histories. On the other side, corporatist historians are supported by a more conservative audience that encourages a skeptical, relativistic, and even reactionary approach to the controversy.

Regardless, most of the works presented here miss the opportunity to shed light on instrumental actors that have yet to receive thorough historical treatment. A good example of this is the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Here we find a nexus of many industrial and financial concerns with significant reach into European economics: Ford, GM, IBM, ITT, Chase Bank, JP Morgan, Standard Oil, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and IG Farben. Their principle contacts were the Dulles brothers, who, as mentioned earlier both played significant political roles during the war and after. It is imperative that more research be done on institutions like this one in order to break the stalemate between scholars and reach a more detailed understanding of exactly what occurred behind the closed doors of powerful corporate interests.

In another respect, the work of understanding the historical dynamics of this business activity is likely to continue. This current period now represents a “first wave” of history writing since the aftermath of restitution lawsuits that occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. An opportunity now exists to further analyze and evaluate past studies and break new ground on sources that have been languishing for decades. Future historical analysis of recently compiled archival sources, such as those catalogued by the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG) at the National Archives in Washington D.C., The Independent Commission of Experts on Swiss Banks (also known as the Bergier Commission), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Bad Arolsen files, which is in the process of digitizing more than forty-six million documents currently archived in Germany, has the potential to reveal new and interesting insights. Allegations of corporate collusion with Nazis are a not to be taken lightly, particularly for businesses that continue to be patronized today. If evidence of war crimes do emerge, they deserve to be scrutinized carefully both in the academic and public spheres. It is imperative that researchers examine past forays into this topic critically and incorporate their most useful elements in future research.

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[1] Barry Meier, “Chroniclers of Collaboration; Historians Are in Demand to Study Corporate Ties to Nazis,” The New York Times, Feb 18, 1999, C1. In the late 1990s many corporations ramped up their legal and historical defenses against accusations, creating a market for researchers willing to work with these institutions.

[2] Richard Sasuly, IG Farben (New York: Boni & Gaer Press, 1947). Joseph Borkin and Charles A. Welsh, Germany’s Master Plan: The Story of the Industrial Offensive (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), Josiah E. DuBois, The Devil’s Chemists (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952).

[3] Some representative works include Charles Higham, The Films of Orson Welles (California: University of Berkley Press, 1973), Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (New York: Dell Publications, 1984), and Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (New York: St. Martins, 2004). Higham claims he became interested in sympathy for the Nazis originating in theUnited States when studying Errol Flynn’s alleged Nazi ties.

[4] In the process of verifying and analyzing Higham’s sources and interpolating them with McKittrick’s papers at the Harvard Business School and Morgenthau’s diaries at the FDR Library in Poughkeepsie, New York, I have produced two articles on the subject of American financial firms and the Nazis. See Jason Weixelbaum, “Following the Money: An Exploration of the Relationship between American Finance and Nazi Germany” and “The Contradiction of Neutrality and International Finance: The Presidency of Thomas H. McKittrick at the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland 1940-46.” http://jasonweixelbaum.wordpress.com/ [accessed May 16, 2011]

[5] I have reviewed Higham’s book and documentation in more detail here: Jason Weixelbaum “Jason Weixelbaum: A Review of the Shocking Revelations of U.S. Corporate Collaboration with Nazi Germany” History News Network, July 9, 2009.  http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/98124.html [accessed May 15, 2011]. This is an excerpt of the original article posted here: http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=11392&pageid=23&pagename=Arts [accessed May 16, 2011]

[6] Department of State, Richard Boucher, “IBM Suit and Legal Peace for German Companies,” Feb. 21, 2001. http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2001/664.htm

[7] Neil Forbes, Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with Germany 1931-1939 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000) 163.

[8] Neil Forbes, “Multinational enterprise, ‘Corporate Responsibility’ and the Nazi Dictatorship: The Case of Unilever and Germany in the 1930s,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2007), 166-7.

Earlier interactions with the Nazis have added fuel for contemporary critics of the corporation in the light of various lawsuits against Unilever inBrazil,China, andWestern Europefor massive pollution and misrepresenting the genetically modified content of their products. In the context Unilever’s interwar activities, Forbes gives his opinion on the present moral orientation of the company: “Many profitable businesses espouse philanthropic causes…Unilever itself has always exemplified this tradition.”

[9] Jay Weinstein, “Review: Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era by Peter Hayes,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), 275-277.

[10] Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), xx.

[11] The conflict between Hayes and Black is discussed in Michael Allen’s critical review of IBM and the Holocaust, “Stranger than Science Fiction: Edwin Black, IBM, and the Holocaust,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 43, No.1 (Jan., 2002), 153.

[12] See the historiography section in Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 203-224.

[13] Edwin Black, “GM and the Nazis—Part Four: How will history remember General Motor’s collaboration with the Nazis?” The Cutting Edge News, June 30, 2008.

[14] Reinhold Billstein, et al., Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors and Forced Labor in Germany During the Second World War, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000) 37. Documentation of Mooney’s attitude is recounted clearly here.

[15] Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe’s Biggest Carmaker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). In the introduction on page viii, Turner states, “This book was not commissioned by General Motors. It was written after the documentation project was completed and without any financial support from GM.”

[16] William Grimes, “Henry Turner, 76, Historian and Author, is dead,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19turner.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

[17] Peter Hayes, “Henry Ashby Turner, Jr.: German historian: Designed history major at Yale.” American Historical Association, Perpectives May 2009.  If, in fact, the findings of the New York Times turn out to be baseless, both Hayes and Turner’s family have a responsibility to address the comments of the periodical directly.

http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0905/0905mem7.cfm.

[18] Michael Salter, Nazi War Crimes, US Intelligence and Selective Prosecution at Nuremberg: Controversies Regarding the Role of the Office of Strategic Services (Abingdon,U.K.: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 446.

[19] Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2009) 763.

[20] Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

[21] Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War (Zürich: Pendo Verlag GmbH 2002).

[22] See also Jason Weixelbaum, “Harnessing the Growth of Corporate Capitalism: Sullivan & Cromwell and its influence on late nineteenth century American business.” http://jasonweixelbaum.wordpress.com/ [accessed May 16, 2011].

[23] Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (1991). [complete citation] See also Jason Weixelbaum “The Corporatist Approach and the History of U.S. Foreign Policy” http://jasonweixelbaum.wordpress.com/ [accessed May 16, 2011].

[24] Akira Iriye, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Vol. 3, Globalizing

of America, 1913-1945 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008).

[25] Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (New York: Free Press, 1978) 164-197.

[26] Bradford Snell, U.S. Congress Senate Committee on the Judiciary, American Ground Transport (1974).

Reevaluating Shoah: Contemporary Responses to Holocaust Restitution Lawsuits

Review Essay

Reevaluating Shoah: Contemporary Responses to Holocaust Restitution Lawsuits

Itamar Levin and Natasha Dornberg, The Last Deposit: Swiss Banks and Holocaust Victims’ Accounts (Santa Barbara: Praeger Trade, 1999).

Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

John Authers and Richard Wolffe, The Victim’s Fortune: Inside the Epic Battle Over the Debts of the Holocaust. (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

Ronald W. Zweig, German Reparations and The Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference. By Ronald W. Zweig. (Kentucky: Routledge, 2001. 248 pages.)

Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Michael R. Marrus and William A. Schabas, Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

Roger P. Alford and Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis, Working For The Enemy: Ford, General Motors, And Forced Labor In Germany During the Second World War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004).

Oliver Rathkolb, Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy: Coming to Terms with Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation, and Restitution (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004).

Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, Philipp Ther, eds., Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe. By Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, Philipp Ther, eds. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).

John K. Roth, Holocaust Politics (Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).

Elazar Barkan.The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthaus, eds., Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust (Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2004).

David Patterson and John K. Roth, eds., After-Words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2004).

Stutthof, the last Nazi concentration camp left in operation located in a wooded area east of the Polish port city of Gdańsk, was finally liberated by the Allies in early May of 1945. As the final survivors left this camp, few had any inkling that over sixty-five years later, individuals and organizations would continue to debate how to bring justice for the crimes that would become known as Shoah, or the Holocaust, an event so dramatically horrific that it would continue to cause deep divisions among people as they attempted to process, conceptualize, and understand it.

For their part, the triumphant Allies faced tremendous obstacles to this task. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the near immediate emergence of the Cold War, the United States, in particular, never explicitly stated where restitution stood as part of their postwar policies. The goal of rebuilding Germany’s government took immediate precedence, and by encouraging Aryanizers to be part of early efforts in the restitution process, they failed to address the obvious conflict of interest that emerged.[1] Aside from the geopolitical considerations, the sheer number of Jews murdered and the degree of willingness for individual countries to forget their role in the robbery of assets also created significant impediments to reparations efforts.

Although attempts at reparations went on through the Cold War era, the fall of communism allowed some survivors and their heirs new opportunities to seek restitution, despite the long delay. Around this same time period in the early 1990s, Western European societies also reexamined their roles in the destruction of European Jewry with the release of Cold War archival documentation. What followed were an ambitious number of legal and political negotiations, culminating in settlements with Swiss Banks, German industrial companies, European insurance agencies, French and Austrian banks, and the creation of several historical commissions. In the aftermath of this flurry of activity, numerous books have been published attempting to chronicle it and draw out lessons.

One key issue surrounding this literature is the targeting of corporations as the object of reparations for past crimes of theft and genocide.  Clearly, many lawsuits are aimed at organizations, rather than people, simply because most of the remaining individual Nazis that perpetrated the war crimes are deceased. From a methodological standpoint, the problem that emerges is that many of the corporations the Nazis used in order to perpetrate the Holocaust are considered substitutes or surrogates to which recompense can be extracted, instead of legitimate actors that are guilty of war crimes themselves. Initially, this may have been done out of expedience, as Holocaust lawsuits necessitated at least a baseline cooperation between the accused organizations, lawyers, survivor groups, and the courts. In the literature, however, this idea of the corporation as an actor that can be responsible for war crimes, surfaces repeatedly. Although it is not explicitly mentioned, this concept is particularly compelling when it comes to dealing with American corporations’ alleged ties to genocide, as the legal status of such organizations constitutes a “legal person” with, at least theoretically, the same rights and responsibilities as their human counterparts.[2] Therefore, the argument can be made that several of the corporations accused, whose parent companies are American in origin, do not share the same statute of limitations that human beings do and are still subject to lawsuits involving war crimes. The texts reviewed in this essay demonstrate that the related lawsuits do not address the issue of “corporate personhood” even though the legal strategy of extracting justice via financial compensation from an institution, like a bank, when the majority of the perpetrators of genocide are now deceased, naturally lends itself to this particular argument. To put this point another way, the authors of these texts have missed an opportunity to look at the legal framework that allows an organizational perpetrator to continue to operate without reproach long after the human perpetrators that instrumentalized it are gone. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, some corporations continue to behave in similar patterns as they have during the Holocaust. Armaments manufacturing corporations, for example, can easily flood weapons into many unstable parts of the world, keeping the specter of genocide close at hand.

Informed by a variety of different methodological and ideological orientations, the field of Holocaust restitution history has yet to find an organizational coherence; however, one can discern some common features and influences. This essay will attempt to extrapolate these features while simultaneously drawing out and examining the problem posed by corporate actors. In the group of texts detailed here, two rough categories emerge: First, several texts deal with Holocaust restitution from a journalistic point of view, chronicling the individual cases, involved personalities, and circumstances. The second group is concerned with theoretical interpretations and debates over how to deal with Holocaust-related crimes. Before diving into this second group, which lends itself to a foray into the realm of thorny legal arguments and even less clear philosophical debates, we will examine the more straightforward accounts of the first category.

In this group, The Last Deposit by Itamar Levin and Natasha Dornberg details the story of Jewish Swiss bank accounts that were either expropriated by the Nazis or kept in Switzerland after victims of the Holocaust failed to claim them. When the authors wrote this book in the late 1990s, negotiations between Swiss banks and various Jewish claimant groups were still ongoing and Levin argued that more pressure was needed in order to bring resolution to Holocaust restitution claims. Books of this type were often used as boosters for the various suits, providing a detailed chronological (though less empirical) account of the struggles for restitution and end with an appeal for support for the continuing claims. Because of their vested interest in arousing sympathy for the restitution suits, books like The Last Deposit not only contain highly judgmental language, but unconsciously place themselves in the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” school identified by A. Dirk Moses and exemplified by the work of Steven T. Katz and Yehuda Bauer.[3] This approach is utilized in order to elevate the importance of the Holocaust to argue the importance of the successful resolution of the restitution suits.

In Holocaust Justice, Michael Bazyler has written a similar account to the Last Deposit, tracking the various lawsuits by Holocaust claimants through the late 1990s and into the first few years of the twenty-first century. Essentially, Bazyler argues that the actions were justified and that the various corporations involved received fairly light penalties in the amount of restitution they were forced to pay in comparison with their crimes. Many in Europe considered Holocaust restitution blackmail, and in response Bazyler produces balanced indictments for the individual companies’ behavior. Bazyler credits the swift action by lawyers who prosecuted the various forced labor cases with Germany, and various Austrian and French banks for the Holocaust survivors, which he contrasts with the ongoing and slow process of settling the Swiss bank accounts and life insurance claims. In the latter case, Bazyler argues, in a somewhat bitter fashion, that attorneys were excluded from the process.

Aside from the trial lawyers, Bazyler makes the innovative argument that the American legal system was the main positive force in the Holocaust restitution, providing “the best-and often the only viable- forum in which such claims can be litigated” (251). Bazyler’s work is more far reaching than simply retelling the story of Holocaust litigation; he convincingly argues that the lawsuits were instrumental in the creation of historical commissions, which provided a strategic framework for other restitution movements. As a concluding theme, Bazyler argues that the Holocaust restitution movement has, in part, inspired these other movements. In sum, Bazyler comes closer than Levin and Dornberg in indicting corporations themselves for Holocaust-era war crimes, but still falls short in looking at their behavior as a historical phenomenon in and of themselves.

Largely bereft of historical analysis, John Authers and Richard Wolffe in their book, The Victim’s Fortune, have produced a highly detailed narrative account of the restitution proceedings. This is more of a work of journalism than history, which has the potential to be a useful primary source in the future but does little to ground the reader in the larger histories of Nazi plunder or reparations for the Holocaust. Its over-wrought style threatens to backfire and lend credence to the argument that reparation attempts resulted in opportunism, chaos, and ultimately unsatisfying results for the survivors of the Holocaust. Much like The Last Deposit, the text blurs the line between contemporary history and journalism to such a degree that it renders most of its conclusions of recent events contingent on a much longer view, which will only be obtained well into the future.

German Reparations and The Jewish World by Ronald W. Zweig, also falls into the category of “activist” literature, mainly presenting a narrative account in order to argue for resolution of various lawsuits. Although this text only covers reparation efforts immediately following World War II through the mid-1960s, the timing of its publication at the turn of the twenty first century when interest in Holocaust restitution peaked was precipitous. Zweig’s account is overwhelmingly positivist in tone, and despite his established aim to examine the actual effects of reparations on Jewish communities, Zweig does more to detail interagency cooperation than examine the actual resulting application of the aid money.

Because the text is acutely preoccupied with numerous and varied dollar values of reparations, Zweig’s text risks becoming far more useful to opponents of future Holocaust restitution claims, rather than demonstrating the successes of earlier reparation efforts. For instance, Peter Hayes has rebutted the targeting of corporations for Holocaust restitution arguing, “Billions and billions of dollars have already been extracted from Germany…Now that these victories have been won, however, the time has come to take stock of the collateral damage.”[4] Hayes rightly isolates a “fixation on corporate profits.” A casual read of Zweig’s text would seem to indicate Hayes assertion by the figures that permeate the text; however, one of the facts that neither Hayes nor Zweig prefers to accentuate gets only a brief mention: 70 percent of the initial postwar “payments” to Israel in these early settlements came in the form of West German-made goods, which both provided a boost to the West-German economy and helped rehabilitate its image (79).[5]

Although Zweig demonstrates that reparations negotiations in the 1950s between the Conference on Jewish Material Claims and the German government were difficult and often contentious, they were by no means crippling to Germany. Large sums were paid, but the story is more complicated than Zweig lets on or that Hayes repeats. The danger is that in less discerning hands, Zweig’s preoccupation with dollar values could be damaging to future claims against corporate perpetrators, whose involvement is still being debated.

The final text in this group of narrative accounts is Divided Memory by Jeffrey Herf. The author constructs a political history comparing Holocaust memory in West Germany to East Germany. For West Germany, Herf focuses on the rehabilitation of Nazis as a mixed blessing of both avoiding a right-wing resurgence but also as an act of burying the past. Meanwhile, Herf argues that East Germany clamped down on Holocaust remembrance. Additionally, he demonstrates, as John K. Roth does in Holocaust Politics, which will be examined in the latter category, that Holocaust memory both added to external support for Israel in the West German case, and ideological blindness in the East German support of Palestinian causes. While Herf’s work comes closer to historical analysis akin to the Bazyler text detailed earlier, these are essentially geopolitical histories that gloss over the involvement of transnational corporations in the Holocaust. Even though they are constant protagonists in this collection of texts, the authors never make the jump to analyzing their own significance in collaborating with the Nazis to perpetrate war, theft, and genocide.

The category of theoretical interpretations of Holocaust restitution, in turn, is a much larger group and contains more widely varied approaches. As far as organization is concerned, the one conspicuous detail that becomes apparent is that a majority of the books in this category are collections of essays. Considering the wide range of opinions on Holocaust restitution, this organizational strategy makes sense; however, it also makes the texts challenging to review as a whole or classify within larger literary groupings.

In a more recent work, Some Measure of Justice by Michael Marrus, provides a sharp counterpoint to the positive view of financial awards resulting from Holocaust restitution cases examined in the previous texts. While Bazyler, for example, applauds Holocaust restitution litigation and the attorneys that were involved in this process, Michael Marrus stands at the opposite end of the spectrum. Marrus is highly critical of the restitution cases, and worries that “monetizing justice” has more negative outcomes than positive ones. Marrus concludes with an overriding ambivalence to the possibility of undoing historical wrongs, putting him at odds with many of the other authors discussed here. One distinctive element to his argument that stands in particularly stark contrast to the other texts is his dismissal that corporations should be included in the list of perpetrators. For Marrus, only people can be guilty of perpetrating genocide. This argument stands in direct opposition to much of the litigation against banks and industrial concerns, verging on reproducing their own legal defenses.

Among other people, Edwin Black, a journalist that has written several books about corporate collusion with Nazi Germany, has attacked Marrus for this line of reasoning, questioning Marrus’ motives in an environment where many corporations were hiring historians to defend their past actions.[6] Even more problematically for Marrus and giving some credence to Black’s claims, Marrus announced in his acknowledgement that Some Measure of Justice was funded in part by the Ford Foundation, a charitable organization linked specifically to a corporation that was subject to a Holocaust reparation lawsuit in the forced labor case of Iwanowa v. Ford Motor Company. While the Ford Foundation has had many critics espousing the charity’s various alleged agendas since its founding in 1936, it is safe to assume that the organization exists in part to create a positive and philanthropic image for Ford Motor Company, which exposes a troublesome conflict of interest for Dr. Marrus.

Holocaust Restitution, edited by Roger P. Alford and Michael Bazyler, is a large collection of essays typical of this category. Its division is similar to other works, separating its themes based on the various types of restitution cases: forced labor claims, disgorgement of Holocaust-era accounts from various banks, insurance claims, and recovering looted art. While these themes have become familiar in the historiography, two unique elements from this book are worth mentioning. First is the contribution of an essay by Stuart Eizenstat, who was one of the more directly involved participants in the lawsuits as a State Department envoy during the Clinton administration. Eizenstat’s job was to seek resolution to a variety of long-standing Holocaust restitution cases, which provides an insider account to balance out many of the other claimant-oriented arguments in the text.[7]

The other unique contribution to the text is an argument against restitution by historian Peter Hayes. The premises for Hayes’ claim, as detailed earlier, is that corporate profits during the Holocaust were fairly limited and restitution lawsuits only confuse Holocaust history by hyping corporate malfeasance. As with Michael Marrus, Hayes argument is problematized by claims that he has received funding from an organization on the list of the accused corporations.[8]

While receiving support from an organization in order to access its archives is uncontroversial, in the context of Hayes assertion that corporations were wrongly accused in general because of their supposedly modest profit margins directly contradicts other recent historical work, such as Working for the Enemy by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis. The argument regarding compensation for forced labor is best exemplified in this collection of essays, in which a substantial portion of the text is dedicated to the personal testimony and experiences of former forced laborers working for Ford and General Motor’s German subsidiaries. The authors argue that American management of its subsidiaries was continuous throughout Nazi rule and post-war profit recovery was maximized. In one of the more shocking passages in the text that stand in stark contrast to Hayes’ argument that Nazi-era corporate profits were limited, Anita Kugler demonstrates that not only did GM recover its profits from its German subsidiary, Opel, after the war, but it also billed the U.S. government over $100 million dollars for damages caused by the Allies during the war (75). In judgment of the collaborative activities detailed in this book, historian Hans Momsen noted, “securing the growth of the respective companies was reached at an intolerably high moral price.”[9] As mentioned earlier, former forced laborers sued Ford in the U.S., who in turn had their lawsuits dismissed because they were outside the purview of national restitution settlement efforts.

In contrast to Working for the Enemy, the text Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy is presented in a more traditional academic format. This collection of essays is derived from the 2001 conference hosted by the Bruno Kreisky Archives Foundation on Holocaust-Era Assets. Edited by Oliver Rathkolb, the essays provide a thorough and scholarly discussion of the role and limits of national historical commissions, in both their political and social compositions, which form a kind of contemporary debate over the Nazi Past. These discussions are highlighted by the tensions described between historical scholarship, media coverage and politics surrounding the resolution of Holocaust restitution suits.

One interesting feature Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy is the essay by Jean-Francoise Bergier, for whom the commission to investigate the activities of Swiss banks was named after. Bergier has reservations about the contradictory nature of the word “neutrality” and how it was used by Switzerland and other places during World War II. Although he does not specifically name American corporations, a read of the commission’s finding hints that there is more to be learned from the declassification of American intelligence documents related to them.[10] In his essay, Bergier also laments the public perception of historians as the ultimate arbiters of historical judgment for Holocaust-related crimes (48).

Robbery and Restitution, edited by Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, and Philipp Ther, is another collection of essays that focuses mainly on creating a comparative framework in order to analyze the theft of Jewish property in various European locales. In the group of essays that deal with restitution in the final section of the book, the essayists, such as Gerard Feldman and Jürgen Lillteicher, do a decent job of guiding the reader to the main factors that led to the impetus for settlement: the end of the Cold War, litigants utilizing the American legal system, and the self-examination of Western European societies of their own role in the Holocaust via historical commissions. The more forceful calls for further research are focused on the impersonal mechanisms that deprived Jews of their property, rather than the restitution litigation (262-3). In this framework of expanding beyond the Nazis into the transnational organizations they utilized to plunder Jewish assets, Robbery and Restitution comes a bit closer to the original problem posed by this essay in integrating corporations into the framework of Holocaust-era war crimes.

Moving away from academic discussions and into the theoretical sphere, John K. Roth seeks to create a philosophical framework in his monograph, Holocaust politics. Roth’s philosophical questions revolve around the historical interpretation as it relates to the memory of the Holocaust. While Roth is in the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” camp, he concludes that education about the event can have a constructive conscious-raising effect and create awareness of future injustice (284). How this process would actually work is left fairly vague in the text. In the same vein, Roth allows the text to meander with very little framework. Memory is an understandably difficult subject to nail down, but Roth attempts this subject without much evidence of an organizing methodology.

Coming closer to overarching framework in which memory of the Holocaust could lead to the development of human rights is Elazar Barkan’s The Guilt of Nations.

Barkan’s book utilizes a purposefully wide scope, taking the idea of Holocaust restitution as a possible settlement for historical injustices and transforming it into a political model of “ethical globalization” (88). Barkan explores the typologies of apology, reparation, and restitution with a dose of cynicism, noting that these could be seen as an inexpensive way for the powerful to project the image of just governance while maintaining their hegemony (347-9). This admission sets the Barkan text apart from those like John Roth’s Holocaust Politics, who puts a much more idealistic spin on the positive effects of Holocaust restitution.

In yet another collection of essays, Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthaus in Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust have sought to uncover the inadequacies in explanations for the Holocaust, which they argue has limited the development of historical memory of the event. This standpoint is exemplified by the essay written by Yehuda Bauer, who argues for the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared to other genocides, citing the limitations of language skills by historians in investigating and describing the depth of the tragedy (12-13). Several other contentious issues are addressed by various authors in the text, such as Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein’s contention that the Holocaust is negatively instrumentalized in contemporary politics. Other unique features not found in other aforementioned texts include a comparative analysis of Holocaust-related films.

What is conspicuously missing from this text aiming to collect contemporary responses to the Holocaust are accounts of the restitution lawsuits of the 1990s. Although an essay from Ronald Zweig is included, who has contributed to the literature on contemporary Holocaust restitution efforts, the work chosen for this collection is focused solely on restitution efforts that followed in the immediate years after the conclusion of World War II.

As with many other books discussed here, After-Words, edited by David Patterson and John K. Roth, is a collection of essays that deals with various responses to Holocaust memory. Rather than focusing specifically on restitution, the authors look at contemporary views within the Jewish community of processing Holocaust grief, anger, and dysphoria. By far the most theoretical of the works presented here, After-Words is much more akin to other recent histories utilizing the “memory turn,” such as the World War I history on bereavement, 14-18: Understanding the Great War by Stephanie Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker. Presented in a point-counterpoint format, After-Words debates the relationship of the Holocaust to Jewish identity. While the text does not go into detail on any particular restitution case, the overall exploration of Jewish reconciliation and forgiveness for the Holocaust resonates strongly with the other material on restitution presented here.

In the realm of what could be considered the end point to the prosecution of Holocaust-era crimes and the beginning of a post-Holocaust era, Lawrence Douglas aptly posed this question in Holocaust Justice: “If the greatest achievement of the restitution effort was the precedent it created for future movements, how salutary is this legacy? Is the check-book the most efficacious tool for settling historical wrongs and reckoning with traumas of the past?” Considering the nearness of the restitution suits from the perspective of history writing, more time is needed to fully assess the implications of Douglas’ question; however a few observations can be made: First, the lack of coherence in the field, far from being negative, demonstrates a great diversity in responses to draw upon, both inside and outside the Jewish community. Second, the consensus that recent Holocaust lawsuits have brought to the fore a new flowering of Holocaust scholarship is self-evident; as an emerging historiography, the field shows great potential for growth. Third, the growth of human rights scholarship is a highly positive development to which the Holocaust history, by extension, helped in part to bring about.

But how does the historiography presented here measure up to the initial question posed by this essay? Are corporations actually being included as valid actors in Holocaust scholarship? Based on the group of works here, there is little evidence to suggest the growth of such a model of scholarships; however, there are a few exceptions. Working for the Enemy provides a good example, both by laying responsibility at the feet of the organizations in question on a functional level, as well as using the contemporary device of oral history to provide a human-scale view to the story of corporate collaboration with the Nazis. Robbery and Restitution also approaches this framework, albeit on a more theoretical level.

Why is the focus on corporations so important? Access to weapons manufacturing, bureaucracy, and capital can easily increase the likelihood of genocide in tyrannical regimes. As this body of Holocaust-era history has taught us, these events can happen quickly and with unprecedented brutality. Behind the tanks, planes, gas, and bullets lie rationally planned businesses. On the other side of this coin lie financial corporations, who, within the context of the literature presented here, have shown every bit as much duplicity, capriciousness, and recalcitrance as their industrial counterparts. Once these organizations have been provided agency as independent actors in their own right, perhaps a more holistic view of the Holocaust can be obtained.

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[1] Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, Plunder and Restitution: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims’ Assets-Report to the President of the Presidential Advisory on Holocaust Assets in the United States (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government, 2000) SR-172.

[2] Morton J. Horowitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,” in Warren J. Samuels and Arthur S. Miller, eds., Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987),16-19.

[3] A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the ‘racial century’: genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust.” Patterns of Prejudice, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2002) 12-14.

[4] Peter Hayes, “Corporate Profits and the Holocaust: A Dissent from the Monetary Argument,” in Roger P. Alford and Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 197.

[5] “Treaties: Amends,” Time (Sept. 22, 1952). http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,822468,00.html [accessed Dec. 16, 2010]. See also Sonja Mekel, “Nahum Goldmann: Court Jew without a Court?” H-Net Online, (Oct. 2009). http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25718 [accessed Dec. 16, 2010].

[6] Edwin Black, “Michael Marrus falters badly in Some Measure of Justice,” The Cutting Edge News, March 1, 2010. http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=11999&pageid=&pagename= [accessed Dec. 16, 2010]. See also Barry Meier, “Chroniclers of Collaboration; Historians Are in Demand to Study Corporate Ties to Nazis,” The New York Times, Feb 18, 1999, C1. In the late 1990s many corporations ramped up their legal and historical defenses against accusations, creating a market for researchers willing to work with these institutions.

[7] It is also worth noting that Eizenstat produced his own memoirs of his experience. See Stuart Eizenstat,  Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).

[8] Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Hayes claims to receive ancillary support from IG Farben is on the acknowledgments page, xx.

[9] Hans Mommsen, “Review: Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, And Forced Labor In Germany During the Second World War,” The International History Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, (Dec. 2001), 970.

[10] Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland,  Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War (Zürich: Pendo Verlag GmbH 2002), 524.

Business as Usual: Journalistic, Academic, and Synthetic Responses to Allied Corporate Collaboration with the Third Reich

Review Essay

Business as Usual: Journalistic, Academic, and Synthetic Responses to Allied Corporate Collaboration with the Third Reich.

Reinhold Billstein, et al., Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors and Forced

Labor in Germany During the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2000).

Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishing, 2001).

Neil Forbes, Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with Germany 1931-1939 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000).

J.R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War (London: Merlin Press, 2003).

The underlying story of transnational corporate collaboration with Germany under the Nazi regime has been the object of historical fascination (and contention) since the conclusion of World War II. Due to the emergence of several Holocaust restitution lawsuits at the end of the last decade, a renewed interest in the topic of collusion with the Third Reich has expanded in both the public and academic spheres.[1] At the same time, this field of inquiry has found affinity with the growing chorus of critiques of U.S. foreign policy after its triumph in the Cold War, which have materialized not only because of the availability of new archival sources from ex-Soviet bloc countries, but also in the context of accelerating globalization and the unpopular unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq. Informed by a variety of different methodological and ideological orientations, new works in this field have yet to find an organizational coherence; however, one can discern some common features and influences. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of those features, evaluate a collection of the most prominent works, and chart a possible direction for future analysis of this topic.

Four books can be broken down into three categories. First, Working for the Enemy and Doing Business with the Nazis represent a handful of books that attempt to put forth their evidence in an empirical academic format. Working for the Enemy is a collection of essays that characterize the linkage between the subject of collaboration and the literature on Holocaust restitution, which includes the oral histories of several former forced laborers. Also in this category, Neil Forbes’ exercise in bilateral financial and economic diplomacy in Doing Business with the Nazis reopens the debate surrounding British appeasement of Nazi Germany leading up to World War II. In the second category, Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust is written from a journalistic vantage point and meant for a broad audience. Black himself is a touchstone in this group and has written several books on the various interactions between American and German political and economic actors during World War II, with the IBM book being the most well known. Finally, The Myth of the Good War by Jacques Pauwels is exemplary of a large-scale, synthetic methodology that is based mainly on a comparison of secondary sources. Like other authors who use broad strokes to describe transnational historical dynamics, such as Immanuel Wallerstein or Eric Hobsbawm, Pauwels’ work is a big-picture analysis of American corporate and foreign policy during the war.

Before diving into these categories, a brief look at the historical context of the period is in order. Corporate penetration into Germany was not a special or unique feature to the Nazi era. By virtue of Germany’s loss of World War I and the ensuing reparations treaties at Versailles, Germany’s markets and industrial sector were opened up to the international community. To be fair, what is meant by the “international community” was mainly the U.S., which fashioned the reparations agreements into a circular system that started with loans to Britain and France, in order to finance their wartime production, and ended with German reparations payments to the European victors in the form of goods and services, which could then take the form of loan repayments back to the U.S. This system ensured a vested American interest in the German economy, and along with the need to expand all of its European markets to stave off a postwar recession, started the process of an accelerated corporate colonization of German industries.

This process began with financial and industrial institutions, which laid the groundwork for later Transatlantic business. The first of these organizations was the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which was set up in Basle, Switzerland. The BIS was founded in 1930 to facilitate large scale transnational financial activity and to encourage nonpolitical interactions between the central bankers of various nations much like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank today. Originally meant to streamline German reparations payments, the BIS became intimately connected to the economies of Europe and the United States. Under primarily American stewardship, the BIS continued to do business with its member countries in the lead up and during World War II, and persists as a meeting place for international bankers into the present. Other large financial corporations would follow, such as Chase Bank and JP Morgan (now combined), forming partnerships with European banks and opening major branches on the continent. Meanwhile, the automotive manufacturers Ford and General Motors (GM) looked to Germany to expand their markets as this industry heated up all around the globe. By the early 1930s, their German subsidiaries, Ford-Werke and Opel, made up major portions of their parent companies’ growing transnational manufacturing empires. Because of their access to raw materials via their corporate partnerships with other global conglomerates, such as DuPont and Standard Oil, these subsidiaries enjoyed a distinct advantage over their domestic German competitors.

The interwar period also saw the growth of American corporate involvement chemical and electronic industries in Germany. IG Farben, a German chemical manufacturing corporation and one of the largest companies in the world, was organized into an international cartel that included directors from the aforementioned corporations, such as DuPont, Ford, GM, and Standard Oil. When American regulators sought to prevent the monopolization of the chemicals industry during the 1920s, the well-connected corporate lawyer, John Foster Dulles at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, worked with the chemical industry to develop cleverly disguised holding companies in Switzerland, which then served to further accelerate the cartelization of the chemical industry. Moving forward into the 1930s, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) also expanded its global corporate empire by buying the majority of shares in domestic German companies like Siemens and Telefunken. ITT’s aggressive expansion ensured a near monopoly on all German communications manufacturing by the outbreak of World War II. During the same decade, International Business Machines (IBM) also bought up all of Europe’s burgeoning information technology companies. Punch card technology was revolutionizing bureaucratic organizations and increasing efficiency in an enormous range of business and government functions. IBM ensured that its subsidiary, Dehomag, was in the dominant position not only Germany, but on the European continent as a whole.

Once the Hitler regime took power in Germany, American corporations found that despite calls for nationalization of various industries, the Nazis were a willing partner in American corporate expansion. German contracts for military vehicles expanded operations at both Ford and GM subsidiaries. IBM found its business increased substantially as the Nazis obsessed over census data, looking for efficient ways to marginalize Jews and seize their assets. The BIS had its hands full processing plundered gold from the central banks of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. After France fell to the Nazis in the spring of 1940, Chase and JP Morgan Bank set up new headquarters in Vichy in order to facilitate a growing need for financial services as the Third Reich retooled the European economy to suit its interests.

As Hitler’s war aims continued, the corporate activity in question had grave consequences. Ford and GM ramped up their manufacture of military vehicles. Ford developed the V2 rocket to rain death and destruction over England. Planes fueled with oil from the English Anglo-Persian Oil Company with rubber tires made by the German subsidiaries of the English Dunlop Company bombarded London during the blitz. IBM catalogued and organized Nazi extermination by labor programs. Concentration camp inmates were tattooed with the corporation’s number systems to keep track of them. Chase and JP Morgan seized Jewish accounts of those trying to flee the Holocaust. The BIS handled gold stolen from Jews that failed to escape.

As one might expect, the organizations named here did not readily reveal the extent of their involvement with the Nazis and much of the story of their activities has still yet to be told. Despite nearly eight decades for researchers to examine various related documents and talk to witnesses, no clear historical consensus on this subject has emerged. Additionally, the businesses detailed in this essay are merely the most prominent institutions that were useful to the Nazis; not only did several other corporations in various neutral or Allied countries provide material, ideological and political assistance to Germany throughout the war, but so did individual actors from these places. The three categories of literature examined here will deal primarily with the most well known cases.

In the first category, representing an academic approach to this topic, falls Working for the Enemy and Doing Business with the Nazis. Through the essays in Working for the Enemy authored by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis, they collectively argue that American management of Ford and GM subsidiaries was continuous throughout Nazi rule, despite their knowledge of slave labor utilized at their plants, and post-war profit recovery was maximized. This research originates with work done by Bradford Snell, an attorney hired by the U.S. Senate in 1974 to inquire into domestic anti-competitive practices of Ford and GM. Surprisingly, this report contained new evidence that both of these organizations had also been an integral part of Nazi military production, in both before and during the war. Snell demonstrated that Ford and GM built a majority of the Third Reich’s planes, tanks, and trucks. In Working for the Enemy, a team of German historians investigated Snell’s research and discovered much statistical evidence to support his claims: Ford produced 48% of all the 2-3 ton military trucks in Nazi Germany, and an additional 90,000 civilian trucks were used by Nazi troops in occupied Europe, which were crucial to Nazi supply lines (115). As mentioned earlier, Ford-Werke also helped develop the V-2 rocket for the Nazis through a holding company, Arendt GmbH, to obscure its involvement (115-116). GM Opel owned a significantly larger market share than Ford-Werke and built engines for all types of military vehicles. One popular model with the Wehrmacht, or German military, was the “Blitz Truck” which was developed specifically for the Blitzkrieg in 1936 (21-24). GM Opel also took special pride in building armor for the Panzer tank and the engine for the JU-88 medium range bomber (37, 82).

The documentation in Working for the Enemy also has an affinity with other works involving Holocaust memory, which brings it closer in line with evidence presented in recent restitution lawsuits. Although the case of the former forced laborer against Ford, Iwanowa v. Ford, was thrown out by the State Department, Ford found it expedient to compile a report of its actions after the conclusion of the case.[2] In the long compilation of testimonies by Karola Fings, Elsa Iwanowa and others remember their experiences as forced laborers at the Ford and GM plants in Nazi Germany. These stories have familiar themes, not only to the arguments presented in restitution cases, but also to Holocaust memory in general: senseless brutality, small kindnesses done at great risk, and unimaginable hardship. The testimonies also add a human dimension to the sterile statistics found in other parts of the text and are exemplary of the contemporary “memory turn” in history writing.

Doing Business for the Nazis by Neil Forbes, on the other hand, has a more traditional, scholarly approach to exploring issues of collaboration. The author’s main focus are parliamentary debates, the pronouncements of industry leaders, and major media responses. Unlike Working for the Enemy, there is little to no reference to the Holocaust; although to be fair, Forbes is more interested in internal British politics than genocide. Forbes sees Britain’s economic interconnections with Germany during the interwar period as a larger problem involving Britain’s soul searching as a declining imperial power intent on preserving the fidelity of its markets while simultaneously wrestling with the growing concern that these connections were contributing to grave external threats. Disappointingly, Forbes’ chronology ends as Germany and Britain declare war on each other, leaving the reader to wonder how the author’s examined corporations, the BIS, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and Dunlop, fare after the war. This omission creates a discontinuity between his book and many of the others in the field. Forbes leaves us with a pre-Blitz Britain, which “failed to devise mechanisms which could reconcile a panoply of political, financial, economic and strategic considerations” (230).

With Forbes’ text, the reader is barraged with statistical data, creating a much more distant account of economic collaboration between financial and industrial concerns. As with much of the literature in this topic, Forbes’ text has a provocative title, Doing Business with the Nazis, which arguably lends itself to an audience that seeks culpability in the horrific acts of Nazism; however, Forbes shrinks from actually assigning blame to any one party: “Anglo-German economic and financial relations self-evidently exhibited a quality lacking elsewhere…they offered a measure, however small, of stability and continuity” (218). Considering the tremendous damage and loss of life Britain faced at the hands of the Nazi assault during and after 1940, Forbes’ fairly terse explanation that British multinational corporations collaborating with German armaments industry were “largely left to decide for themselves whether to exercise self-restraint” is remarkably free of judgment (161). Forbes’ analysis could either be applauded as the triumph of empiricism over post-Holocaust partisanship, or an apologia of transnational corporate activity. In order to determine the historian’s standpoint, some digging is required. For instance, Forbes excuses the actions of Unilever executives, both in Doing Business with the Nazis and elsewhere, for renegotiating lucrative foodstuffs contracts with Nazi officials even when it was clear that this activity posed a strategic risk to Britain. These earlier interactions with the Nazis have added fuel for contemporary critics of the corporation in the light of various lawsuits against Unilever in Brazil, China, and Western Europe for massive pollution and misrepresenting the genetically modified content of their products. In the context Unilever’s interwar activities, Forbes gives his opinion on the present moral orientation of the company: “Many profitable businesses espouse philanthropic causes…Unilever itself has always exemplified this tradition.”[3] As with the other corporations he looks at, Forbes is convinced it was self-interest and political niaveté, rather than capriciousness, which drove British corporations to operate against their home country’s self-interest.

In the journalistic category of the historiography of collaboration between Allied corporations and Nazi Germany, the judgments against these actions are often far more unequivocal, and as a result, have spawned a few contentious debates. Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust exemplifies this type of work; beyond the prodigious empirical data, Black is not shy about delivering withering criticisms of the results of cooperating with the Nazis: “The destruction of the Jewish people became even less important because the invigorating nature of IBM’s technical achievement was only heightened by the fantastical profits to be made…” (8). Edwin Black is no stranger to controversial statements or subject matter. His first book, The Transfer Agreement, was about Zionist groups negotiating with Nazi officials to allow the emigration of Jews to Palestine in exchange for breaking Jewish boycotts against Germany. Black has also exposed other facets of the transnational interactions between actors in the U.S. and the Third Reich in War Against the Weak, which deals with American eugenicists who helped shape Nazi racial policy.

The essential component of Black’s argument in IBM and the Holocaust that is important for other literature in the genre is the way in which Black exposes how transnational corporations dealt with keeping control of their subsidiaries and siphoning off profit, even while the war raged in Europe. Breaching the realm earlier explored in Working for the Enemy, Black demonstrates the importance of obscure holding companies, neutral countries, and sympathetic lawyers, who acted as representatives of their Allied CEOs, in keeping German subsidiaries within larger multinational corporate empires. With the outbreak of war between the U.S. and Germany, Black states that IBM European subsidiaries could be “managed by Nazi-appointed trustees. IBM Europe was saved” (291). As with other big multinationals, this meant that the Nazis had access to a Europe-wide system of production and distribution to assist their aggressive expansion across the continent.

Black’s bombastic style brought many pro-business historians out of the woodwork in exchanges that exposed ugly implications for the subject. For instance, when the historian Peter Hayes came out and criticized IBM and the Holocaust, Hayes own potentially pro-business perspective was called into question. As a point of reference, Hayes critiqued earlier works on the chemical company, IG Farben, arguing that they were conspiratorial in tone and the collaboration with the Nazis was overblown. Hayes took particular aim at The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben by Joseph Borkin, arguing that the organization’s executives had no choice but to go along with controversial measures, such as building the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.[4] Black drew attention to the acknowledgements section in Hayes’ IG Farben book, Industry and Ideology, in which Hayes said he received “ancillary support” from IG Farben in order to produce the work.[5] Black subsequently made a similar argument regarding the work, Some Measure of Justice, by Holocaust historian Michael Marrus. Marrus, for his part, argued that “monetizing justice” as a form of Holocaust restitution, such as the lawsuits against IBM and Ford, had more negative than positive outcomes.[6] Black accused Marrus of a conflict of interest in making such claims, noting that Marrus had received a grant from the Ford Foundation to produce his book.[7]

As if the swirling controversy surrounding Edwin Black were not already contentious enough, a row also formed between Black and the business historian Henry Ashby Turner. Turner himself made no secret of being pro-business when it came to the study of Nazi Germany, and expressed a dim view of Black’s work.[8] Turner argued in his seminal work, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler that corporations played a minor part of Hitler’s ascension compared to the sway of right-wing ideology.[9] Black and Turner subsequently both became interested in GM’s involvement with Nazis during this past decade, as the corporation was also being sued by former forced laborers, with Turner getting exclusive access to GM’s archives in order to produce the work General Motors and the Nazis.[10] Turner specifically denied being hired by GM to write book in which he argued that the U.S. lost control of its German subsidiary, but Black’s suspicions immediately arose when he was denied access to Turner’s GM archives at Yale.[11] Turner passed away while Black fought for, and eventually received, access to the GM material to write his own book on the automotive corporation’s involvement in Nazi Germany, at which time it became a known fact that Turner had, in fact, been hired by GM to write a history for them.[12] In sum, Black’s work blurred the line between journalism and history as he responded to critics and investigated their own work. As these conflicts have unfolded, the question emerges: Are contentious debates like this the future of this field, or are other options possible?

In order to answer this question, the final category of this historiography will be examined, specifically in regard to those synthetic works dealing with a large range of secondary sources that look at the field as a much larger picture. In this category, Jacques Pauwels’ The Myth of the Good War looms large. Pauwels argues that despite the view espoused by American popular history, media, and politicians, U.S. involvement in World War II was primarily for materialistic rather than ideological aims. Drawing influences from the revisionist school of U.S foreign policy that grew up around the questioning of the Cold War, Pauwels demonstrates that the major concern of U.S. leadership during the war were markets for its products and political leverage over as much territory as could be gained (10). Pauwels integrates the material from Working for the Enemy and Edwin Black’s books to show how the various corporations acted in concert, rather than separately, in order to support the funneling of profits from neutral Switzerland back to the U.S. (204-5).  Ultimately, argues Pauwels, the Pentagon developed a system during World War II by working with various corporations to continue massive levels of military spending indefinitely (250-1).

One work Pauwels utilized to make the more conspiratorial claim that various U.S corporations actually worked together in a clandestine way to support the Nazis was Trading with the Enemy by Charles Higham.[13] Higham shared a similar methodological orientation to Pauwels, looking at a broad range of corporate interactions. In contrast to the other author, Higham also included declassified American archival sources to support his claims. The resulting effect is an integrated view of corporate involvement, in which the corporations named in this essay both collaborated with the Nazis and each other. The main problem for Higham is that he does not disclose much information about the declassified sources he uses. They exist, but had to be independently verified.[14]

Another work reminiscent of Pauwels overarching synthesis is Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.[15] Published in 1978 before both the Pauwels and the Higham book, Sutton builds up a framework for later accusations of JP Morgan, Chase, ITT, and Standard Oil for helping to facilitate Nazi geopolitical goals. Although it lacks the mastery of an interpretive sweep more reminiscent of world systems theorists that Pauwels has achieved, Sutton’s work fills an important gap between immediate Allied postwar reactions to revelations of corporate collaboration with the Third Reich and later historical analysis stemming from renewed interest in the wake of Holocaust settlement cases.

The Myth of the Good War is the most successful of these texts at interpreting the work that has come before without succumbing to deeply to the inflammatory excesses reminiscent of Edwin Black’s work. Pauwels is also adept at bringing the texts into conversation with each other without stretching their limits. This approach makes sense in the context of ongoing restitution lawsuits and the release of new archival data. In endorsing this particular methodology, Pauwels states that interpolating sources is exposing “the tip of the proverbial iceberg” (205).

In surveying the three methodological categories, the tendency to choose one over the others for simplicity’s sake is compelling; however, all three groups have features that both detract and enhance the topic. As far as the less constructive features are concerned, they are varied and not always easily apparent. For instance, the empirical standpoint of the academic group detailed earlier has the tendency to underplay the human cost of Nazi activity. As with the danger of Forbes’ work, very little mention is ever made of the genocide as a resultant effect of the collaborative activities he discusses. Forbes’ choice to avoid this subject leads to a larger question: Is it possible to talk about the Nazis without addressing the Holocaust? The problem of moral relativism in the social sciences becomes quickly apparent in this context.

On the journalistic side of the spectrum, Black’s overwrought arguments have invited a range of critics. As we have seen, not all of his detractors were coming from a purely objective standpoint, with some having questions of their own to answer regarding the veracity of their work. On the other hand, if he had compartmentalized his biases and made them more apparent in his introduction, as well as made an effort to remove overly judgmental language, would his core argument be better received? This question leads to a more fundamental one mirroring the issue above: Is it possible to empirically approach the Nazis and the Holocaust without breaching the realm of moral relativism?

Pauwels synthetic methodology closes the gap between these two categories considerably by virtue of taking in both more and less empirically-based works. The significant deficiency for this model is that contains little in the way of new research. In the academic realm, particularly for specialists, this is more of a problem; for a wider audience, there is still plenty of interest making a closer read of primary sources less important. That being said, integrating sources into a larger framework does allow the reader to access a wider historical scope to consider the overall causes and effects of this controversial transnational economic activity.

An ideal model would incorporate elements of all the works discussed here. The measured, empirical voice of Forbes; the investigative and accessible method of Black; the oral history included in Working for the Enemy; and the sweeping geopolitical standpoint of Pauwels. Future historical analysis of recently compiled archival sources, such as those catalogued by the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group at the National Archives in Washington D.C., The Independent Commission of Experts on Swiss Banks (also known as the Bergier Commission), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Bad Arolsen files, which is in the process of digitizing more than forty-six million documents currently archived in Germany, would be well served to include these methodologies. Allegations of corporate collusion with Nazis are a not to be taken lightly, particularly for businesses that continue to be patronized today. If evidence of war crimes do emerge, they deserve to be scrutinized carefully both in the academic and public spheres. It is imperative that researchers examine past forays into this topic critically and incorporate their most useful elements in future research.

---

[1] Barry Meier, “Chroniclers of Collaboration; Historians Are in Demand to Study Corporate Ties to Nazis,” The New York Times, Feb 18, 1999, C1. In the late 1990s many corporations ramped up their legal and historical defenses against accusations, creating a market for researchers willing to work with these institutions.

[2] Ford Motor Company, Research Findings About Ford-Werke Under the Nazi Regime (Dearborn, MI: Ford Motor Company, 2001).

[3] Neil Forbes, “Multinational enterprise, ‘Corporate Responsibility’ and the Nazi Dictatorship: The Case of unilever and Germany in the 1930s,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2007), 166-7.

[4] Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (New York: New York Free Press, 1978); Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Hayes thanks to IG Farben is on the acknowledgments page, xx.

[5] This debate is discussed in Michael Allen’s critical review of IBM and the Holocaust, “Stranger than Science Fiction: Edwin Black, IBM, and the Holocaust,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 43, No.1 (Jan., 2002), 153.

[6] Michael R. Marrus and William A. Schabas, Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

[7] Edwin Black, “Michael Marrus falters badly in Some Measure of Justice,” The Cutting Edge News, March 1, 2010. http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=11999&pageid=&pagename= [accessed Dec. 16, 2010].

[8] Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Review: IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, The Business History Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001) 636-9.

[9] Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

[10] Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe’s Biggest Carmaker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). In the introduction on page viii, Turner states, “This book was not commissioned by General Motors. It was written after the documentation project was completed and without any financial support from GM.”

[11] Edwin Black, “GM and the Nazis—Part Four: How will history remember General Motor’s collaboration with the Nazis?” The Cutting Edge News, June 30, 2008. http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=113&pageid=22&pagename=Investigation [accessed Dec. 16, 2010].

[12] William Grimes, “Henry Turner, 76, Historian and Author, is dead,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19turner.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries [accessed Dec. 16, 2010].  The article details GM’s employment of Turner.

[13] Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983, 2007).

[14] Jason Weixelbaum, “Jason Weixelbaum: A Review of the Shocking Revelations of U.S. Corporate Collaboration with Nazi Germany,” History News Network, June 15, 2009. http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/98124.html [accessed Dec. 16, 2010]. Additionally, for a more detailed account of Higham’s sources, see Jason Weixelbaum, “Following the Money: An Exploration of the Relationship between American Finance and Nazi Germany” http://jasonweixelbaum.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/following-the-money-an-exploration-of-the-relationship-between-american-finance-and-nazi-germany/ [accessed Dec. 16, 2009].

[15] Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (California: ’76 Press, 1976).

The Corporatist Approach and the History of U.S. Foreign Policy

 

The Corporatist Approach and the History of U.S. Foreign Policy

The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952. By Michael J. Hogan. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 445 pages + index)

Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millennium. By Michael Hogan. (Bangor: Booklocker.com, 2009. 216 pages)

America‘s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After. By Thomas McCormick. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.  258 pages + index)

Oil, Banks, and Politics: The United States and Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1917-1924. By Linda B. Hall. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.  180 pages + index)

Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal. By Sanford M. Jacoby. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 332 pages + index)

 

The origin of the corporatist approach to the study of American foreign relations has its roots in the work of William Appleman Williams and other revisionist historians of the left-leaning “Wisconsin school.” This group of historians developed a more critical analysis of U.S Cold War policy during and after the conflict in Vietnam. Essentially, they posited that the nature of Western capitalist regimes was to extract the raw material and labor from peripheral nations to support the core, imperialist nations (i.e. Europe and the U.S.).[1] These historians set themselves against the traditional “orthodox” U.S. historians, such as George Kennan who defended this policy as being fundamentally anti-communist, rather than exploitative.

Meanwhile, the revisionist historians continued to focus on the ideological and economic influences on policy makers in the domestic sphere. As debates between the traditionalists and the revisionists waned, this economic interpretation of policy was carried over to a group who dubbed themselves the “post-revisionists,” attempting to provide balance to the critique of Cold War strategy. Development of this particular method led to the study of various bureaucratic offices, financial institutions, businesses and associations outside the government sphere. Michael J. Hogan labeled this new approach “corporatism,” which he claimed had the potential to bridge the gap between revisionist and traditionalist positions as well as addressing more directly the role of non-state actors, linking their influence to both the domestic and the foreign policy arenas.

Hogan defined corporatism as a “system that is founded on officially recognized functional groups, such as organized labor, businesses, and agriculture…this collaboration creates a pattern of interpenetration and power sharing that makes it difficult to determine where one sector leaves off and the other begins.” Hogan himself takes a positivist view of this process, seeing it as a move toward greater efficiency in formulating and executing state policy.[2] This is a bone of contention for other scholars, including John Lewis Gaddis, who is skeptical of what he views as a purposefully vague framework that can be conveniently used to support the traditional, triumphalist view of American policy.[3] Other scholars, exemplified by historian Thomas McCormick, have carried forward the critical standpoint of Williams and Wallerstein, while embracing the corporatist framework in their analysis.[4]

While Charles Maier called for a new framework beyond postrevisionism to subsume the corporatist model, other historians such as Michael Wala have praised the current state of scholarship in this direction, stating that the corporatist approach of American foreign relations “has proven to provide an excellent framework particularly in those areas of foreign relations in which the influences on the decision-making process and the process itself are closely scrutinized.”[5]

In that vein, Michael J. Hogan’s Marshall Plan is considered the seminal work on corporatist model of U.S. foreign policy. Hogan explains that at its core, a “corporative collaboration,” between the US government and private institutions charted the course of American diplomacy post-World War II. Rather than a strictly diplomatic Cold War model, Hogan demonstrates that the Marshall plan was a hybrid of the earlier interwar experience which combined “an American brand of corporative neo-capitalism that went beyond the laissez-faire political economy of classical theory but stopped short of a statist syndicalism.” (p. 3) Hogan asserts that the Marshall plan continued and solidified the trend of corporate involvement with US foreign policy initiatives, which fundamentally altered the shape of American diplomacy and “for all practical purposes sought to restructure the world economy along lines similar to the corporative order that was emerging in the United States.” (p.3)

For Hogan, the corporatism of the Marshall Plan was based on operating links between private economic groups and government authorities. By forging such links, Hogan argues that “American Marshall Planners hoped to build a transnational alliance behind the ERP [European Recovery Plan], equip participating countries with American production skills, fashion American patterns of labor-management teamwork…maximize[ing] the chances for economic integration and social peace” (p. 136) The productivity teams, dollar boards, investment groups, and advisory panels, according to Hogan, “attest to the broad front on which the American leaders operated…to head off the dangerous division of the ‘free world’ into rival economic blocs” (p. 257) Thus, Hogan asserts, the “neo-capitalist” order could be maintained that would be equal to the Soviet challenge by blending both “traders’ and planners’ approaches, combining market incentives with administrative coordinators and using them to integrate economies and boost productivity.” (p. 378)

Hogan traces the thread of partnership between private central bank institutions, oil, financial, and radio consortiums and U.S. policy makers, linking them “backward to the technocorporatism of the National Civic Federation and the associationalism of Herbert Hoover…and forward to the ‘corporate commonwealth’ of the Eisenhower years.”(p.13) Combined with the social welfare and open market proponents of New Deal ideology, Hogan argues that a core bloc of capital-intensive firms and their allies among labor, agricultural, financial, and professional groups successfully remade the economy of Western Europe in the American image. Hogan further asserts that the American achievements with the Marshall Plan emboldened U.S. policy makers and their corporate partners that similar initiatives could also help to achieve American political and strategic objectives elsewhere. (p.429-432) Thus, American and European colleagues cooperating in a “transnational system of elite management” that arose out of the Marshall Plan constituted what Geir Lundstad has named an “empire by invitation” and what Charles Maier identifies as a “consensual American hegemony.”[6]

In sum, Hogan offers a constructive view of American corporate involvement in the formulation of policy. Hogan’s encyclopedic account of the national actors involved in the Marshall Plan has earned this text the place as a premiere reference work on the subject. While the Plan itself may be considered a more benign incarnation of the projection of U.S. corporate power, Hogan misses some opportunities to qualify his description of American non-government actors with some of their less constructive actions. For instance, in Hogan’s mention of the U.S. participation in the inception of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Switzerland during the interwar period as an example of collaboration between American policymakers and private financial institutions, he fails to note that the BIS became an essential financial institution to the Nazis, who used it to clear plundered gold in exchange for unblocked currency that was used to purchase and manufacture war materials.[7]

From the corporate side, Hogan mainly focuses on the interdepartmental communications and deliberations between national actors. We are offered only a modicum of substantive analysis of the functional, private enterprise actors in the equation. While Hogan brings to the table a comprehensive list of committees and organizations set up by U.S. officials, he consistently neglects to elaborate to any great degree on the businesses and investment houses that actually contributed to the Marshall Plan. Even when discussing influential business figures at length, such as W. Averell Harriman, Hogan also provides scant detail of how these individuals or their firms benefited from such deals. Although it is important to note that this is a common problem within the realm of literature that employs the corporatist framework for U.S. foreign policy, without a complete picture of the corporations that were involved in particular policy initiatives, including their strategies and past activity, we miss a fundamental component of Hogan’s thesis. There is little mention of JP Morgan, Chase Bank, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, ITT, or IBM, all of which were dominant businesses in Europe at the end of World War II.[8] Considering the wealth and influence of such organizations, the text leaves one to wonder if the U.S. legislators and the committees they set up retained the dominant position in policy making decisions in the face of these powerful interests when formulating the Marshall Plan.

The gap in addressing the outcomes of corporatist strategies in detail where they were deployed, such as Latin America, has been seized upon by other writers. Ironically, one such historian shares the namesake with the author above, Michael Hogan. Not to be confused with Michael J. Hogan, this unrelated author has produced a revisionist-inspired text called Savage Capitalism, which attempts to give an eyewitness analysis of U.S. corporatist policy. The text consists of a compiled series of essays written during the past decade that recount Hogan’s research and experience as an educator in Latin America. He specifically focuses on the neoliberal policies of the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. corporations, as well as the intertwining legacy of American military interventions in the various regions.

While claiming objectivity, Hogan states that “One cannot live in Latin America for any length of time, and still retain one’s soul, without failing to be impressed by the damage” of such policies. (p. 3) Hogan has an exceedingly dim view on the corporatist brand of U.S. policy, particularly its emphasis on free trade. In the author’s words, free trade is “a misnomer…there is nothing free about it. It merely means that the dominant economic power in the relationship requires the poorer trading partner to sell its raw product at the cheapest possible price to him, so that he can refine and package it and sell it back to the poorer partner and to the rest of the world at the highest profit to himself.” (p. 12) Hogan further reiterates the Wallersteinian periphery-core analysis by asserting that U.S. corporations drive policy to “use all the political, economic and (if necessary) military force” to keep markets open and maintain a free trade environment. (p. 12)

While Hogan claims to draw upon a large reservoir of experience on the ground in Latin American countries, there is more criticism than historical analysis in his broad based critique of U.S. policy in the various regions. Throughout the first three chapters, Hogan makes reference to various free trade policies, such as NAFTA and GATT, commodity prices, and poverty indices without producing any footnotes as to where an interested researcher may follow up upon. The issue of missing citations is partially addressed by several short sections in the central portion of the book, in which he cites a range of poverty, education, immigration, and trade statistics; on the other hand, these references are insubstantial compared to more traditional academic analyses like The Marshall Plan.

Savage Capitalism is at its best when Hogan retells his personal experience, as he does in the later chapters retelling his visits to Nicaragua and Guatemala. Problematically, his analysis still lacks citation when he is attempting to connect his experience to the problems of poverty, illiteracy, corruption, and the corporate exploitation he is describing. This issue becomes far more acute for the text overall, as it does not contain a bibliography. Other striking personal accounts of his interactions with Guatemalan gang members and participating in anti-free trade protests inside the U.S. provide the text with a significant degree of depth; nevertheless, Hogan fundamentally fails to provide the objectivity he claims to be seeking in his introduction. In every one of the fourteen chapters in the book, the author strays from historical analysis into the role of armchair policy maker. While it is clearly apparent that he has witnessed gross injustice and exploitation during his travels, Hogan has misplaced his intention to provide a neutral account. The work illustrates a wide divide between the detached, relativistic approach of U.S. foreign policy academics, and the emotionally invested, on-the-ground, journalistic accounts like Savage Capitalism. The most unfortunate aspects of this work and similar accounts are twofold: works of such a polemical nature with few citations often have a difficult time being accepted by the academic community, even if they contain viewpoints worth exploring. Secondly, the wider audience that is sympathetic to the book’s premise are receiving unsatisfactory example of scholarship, which can actually hurt the causes the author is passionate about. Hence, the problem is methodological rather than ideological. This issue could be at least partially addressed with the presence of more rigorous citations and a clearer delineation between personal conclusions and historical context.

From an ideological perspective, America’s Half Century by Thomas McCormick has a similar critical orientation as Savage Capitalism. Utilizing both the Wallersteinian world systems framework and the corporatist model, McCormick examines the linkage between American domestic and foreign policy over the latter half of the 20^th century. This analysis revolves around a description of how the world capitalist system facilitated American hegemony. Conscious of differentiating his work from orthodox appraisals of U.S. strategy, McCormick emphasizes that it was neither necessary nor unavoidable. He notes, “hegemony does not simply happen, individuals and groups of people make it happen” (p. 7)

These non-state actors, including academics, businessmen and lawyers, were focused on utilizing an Open Door policy to incorporate nations into industrialized blocs. McCormick explains that the main intention was “the integration of the Third World periphery and semiperiphery into the industrial cores, and the integration of all” (p. 106) Essentially, the author describes the viewpoint of U.S. leaders and their corporate allies as occupying an aggressive position which required the monopolization of foreign markets as the principle method of achieving piece and tranquility; consequently, they saw the Soviet Union, as well as revolutionary nationalism, as a direct threat to such goals. McCormick credits William Appleman Williams with constructing this Open Door thesis, conceding it to be “imperative of American access to an open, unitary free world economy.” (p. 248) McCormick demonstrates that unprecedented amounts of investment capital, bank loans, engineering, and manufactured goods flowed from the United States into the peripheral zones of the Third World. The author contends that utilizing this policy of market penetration, America modeled itself after the eighteenth and nineteenth century imperial Britain of Adam Smith. McCormick states that the imperial-styled market penetration were, “the envisioned goals…material rewards and physical security for both the United States and the world as a whole.” (p. 48)

The author pinpoints the late 1950’s as the highpoint of American hegemony, but by the 1970s was in decline due to a “national moral ‘malaise’ and decreased efficacy of the nation as global policeman.” (p. 239) In this environment, McCormick explains that American corporations, particularly financial institutions, could still push foreign policy by denying long term lending to nations that were unfriendly to the U.S., as was the case in Chile from 1970-73. McCormick argues that in its competition with the Soviet Union, the U.S. assumed “détente would mean Russian acceptance of the status quo in the periphery” of “sub-Imperialism,” or economic hegemony in their respective spheres of influence. (p. 185-6) Continuing his description of U.S. decline into the 1980s and 1990s, McCormick contends the geopolitical environment was still an attractive setting for the U.S projection of corporate power. Despite its loss of dominance in heavy industry, the mainstay of American supremacy in the first half of the 20^th century, McCormick argues that U.S. “goods, services, and dollars proved to be the tugboat that pulled core and semiperipheral economies along its wake” in later decades. (p. 193)

As with Savage Capitalism, America’s Half Century lacks footnotes, although it does contain a lengthy bibliographic essay. This is an issue, as with the aforementioned work, contains broad generalizations in several sections. Methodologically, the McCormick’s work is more similar to The Marshall Plan, being firmly anchored in U.S diplomatic history. More of a synthetic narrative than a polemic, McCormick’s revisionist perspective is a decent counterpoint to the more orthodox work of Michael J. Hogan.

In the study of the role of non-state actors, particularly businesses on U.S. foreign policy, not all works revolve around the Cold War. Linda B. Hall’s Oil, Banks and Politics is also a respectable example of the highly varied field of corporatism. Examining the role of American financial institutions, oil companies, and legislators in policy toward Mexico in the 1920s, Hall demonstrates that there were conflicting interests among these various groups which did not lead to a unified strategy. The banks, for their part, were interested in debt repayments, which could be facilitated by revenue from Mexico’s vast oil reserves. This ran counter to the priorities of the American oil companies, who wanted to maximize profit for themselves by monopolizing Mexico’s oil industry. This left government actors to produce incoherent policy at times, whose primary outcome threatened the institutionalization of the fledgling post-revolutionary Mexican government.

Taking a revisionist position, Hall’s work is a critique on U.S. corporate influenced foreign policy, which she describes as an inherently exploitative relationship that left the Mexican people with bitterness and a sense of heightened protectiveness for its natural resources. Hall argues, “Had the demands of the United States in regard to Mexican recognition and Mexican oil . . . been less coercive and more flexible, it is possible that the outcome might have been considerably different. As it happened, oil became the emblem of Mexican economic nationalism, and it remains so to this day.” (p. 180) Hall enriches the corporatist perspective to borrow from the framework of Theda Skocpol, arguing that the Mexican sense of sovereignty and resistance to U.S. business was a direct result of its revolution. Hall contends that, “Mexican political actors repeatedly framed their responses to U.S. pressures in terms of the preservation of Mexican sovereignty. (p. 7)

Ultimately, the text fits well into the model of the other books discussed in this essay, illustrating the essential connections between state actors and non-state associations and institutions in formulating policy. Hall’s work is similar to the approach of Andrew P.N. Erdmann, who has also focused on the interwar years as a framework for a non-Cold War corporatist analysis.[9] While Hall’s work is more descriptive and less methodological, the depth of archival research in American, Mexican, and British sources helps Oil, Banks and Politics retain its value as an adequate explanation of the interaction between elites and government officials within the corporatist framework.

As many of the approaches detailed here are “outside-in” descriptions of corporatist U.S. policy, it is also helpful to look at the “inside-out” appraisals of this methodology, which lends itself naturally to literature that looks in detail at corporate policy. Sanford Jacoby has produced a work worthy of this type of framework called Modern Manors, which looks specifically at corporate-styled welfare capitalism as a historically and geographically specific phenomenon. Reading from more of the positivist (although not necessarily orthodox) school of thought, Jacoby sees corporate projections of power to be “an impressive if imperfect system, one whose notions of order, community, and paternal responsibility recalled the preindustrial household economy. The firms pursuing welfare capitalism were, in effect, industrial manors.” (p. 4)

Jacoby utilizes three separate case studies of corporate firms to illustrate a wider picture of the evolution of industrial and governmental relations throughout the 20^th century. Jacoby concedes that this type of corporate domination of the American workforce is not entirely rosy, stating “As in the 1920s, the workforce increasingly is split between the ‘have-nots’ and the ‘haves,’ who will spend most of their careers working in modern manors like S.C. Johnson or Microsoft.”(p. 9) The primary thrust of the text is a description of how major industries united to exert the greatest possible influence on policy in the 1920s and 1930s. Under the Special Conference Committee (SCC), executives from ten of America’s leading companies formed a committee to coordinate labor relations and responses to changes in legislation. The set of principles at the heart of such efforts were summed up by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: “the only solidarity natural in industry is the solidarity which unites all those in the same business establishment,” referring to the continual growth and maintenance of profit. (p. 21)

As the “keystone of economic security in American society,” Jacoby asserts that the welfare capitalism of large corporate firms has triumphed largely on the world stage. (p. 266) Despite the challenges of the Great Depression, World War II, and the rapid technological change of the last four decades, the preeminence of corporate power has eclipsed the strength of both unions, as well, as Jacoby muses, government legislators. Arguably, a close analysis of Modern Manors demonstrates that corporations wielded enormous influence on governmental actors throughout the 20^th century as various administrations consistently turned to the business community for assistance for both major domestic and foreign problems. Jacoby contends that corporate power expanded with the growth of consulting firms and partnerships with academia and the military. These combined to create what Jacoby describes as “a nexus of ties among government, corporations, and behavioral scientists” that pushed policy, particularly during and after the Cold War. (p. 226)

The main strength of Jacoby’s work is its heavy reliance on primary sources derived from the internal policy formulations of major corporations. While only a small portion of the text is actually focused on the link between corporate activity and foreign policy, it provides a highly informed window inside the workings of actors that were deeply engaged in such policy. That said, a deeper analysis of the implications of such a wide penetration of non-state actors into the legislative process that Modern Manors demonstrates would have been welcome. It causes Jacoby’s conclusion of the ceding of authority from legislators to corporations as less than a positive development to be oddly out of sync with what is essentially a highly technical account.

The divergence of Jacoby’s work to all of the others featured here exhibit the rich variety available in the field. As historian Philipe C. Schmitter posited, there are a growing number of versions of corporatism, each illustrating a different aspect depending on foreign and domestic variables.[10] Many other texts from disparate vantage points would be worthy of an appraisal within the corporatist framework. This methodology, for example, applies to the work of Ellis W. Hawley, who defines corporatism more in terms of bureaucracy and associationalism within U.S. presidential administrations, which is significantly divergent compared to the position of David Painter, who sees corporatism as the playing out of a delicate balance of both and public and private interests, that is influenced more strongly by non-state actors.[11] Both of these works are far different from that of Edwin Black, who is more focused on the ideological rather than the political implications of the effect of businesses and business associations on U.S. foreign policy.[12]

Michael J. Hogan sees this variety as a strength in countering the critique of historical “fuzziness,” by John Lewis Gaddis.[13] Nevertheless, Gaddis has a valid point in his contention that the corporatist approach possesses a loose enough framework as to leave space for an enormous array of varying viewpoints. This essay attempts to isolate at least four major categories: The traditionalist approach of The Marshall Plan, a more personal, journalistic account of Savage Capitalism, the revisionist-inspired works of McCormick and Hall, and the technical, internal view of corporate governance presented by Jacoby. Each has positive and negative attributes, but taken together, they deserve the appraisal put forth by Michael J. Hogan of “restore[ing] the connection between more traditional diplomatic historians and their colleagues in other fields…to rejoin the larger community of scholars who are unraveling the history of modern America.”[14]

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[1] Charles Maier, The Cold War in Europe (Princeton: Markus Weiner, 1991), p.21.

[2] Michael J. Hogan, “Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal,” Diplomatic History 10, (October 1986): p. 363-72.

[3] John Lewis Gaddis, “The Corporatist Synthesis: A Skeptical View” Diplomatic History 10, (October 1986): p. 357-62.

[4] Thomas J. McCormick, “Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): p. 318-30.

[5] Charles Maier, “American Visions and British Interests: Hogan’s Marshall Plan,” Reviews in American History 18 (March 1990): p. 102. Michael Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Toronto: Berghan, 1994), p.220.

[6] Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952,” SHAFR Newsletter 15 (September 1984): p. 1-21; and Charles Maier, “The Politics of Productivity,” p. 630.

[7] Independent Commission of Experts, Switzerland, Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War (Zürich: Pendo Verlag GmbH, 2002), p. 181-83, 239, 424, 520.

[8] Reinhold Billstein, et. al.,Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors and Forced Labor in Germany During the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2000). The argument of this text revolves around the premise that Ford and GM controlled a majority of Third Reich War industries through their subsidiaries, Ford-Werke & Opel, and maintained in contact and control with them throughout the war via managers loyal to the company. Both companies regained ownership at the end of the war. See also Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishing, 2001) Edwin Black argues in his exhaustively sourced monograph that International Business Machines’ (IBM) largest client was Germany throughout the 1930s and 40s and played a crucial role in Nazi war production by organizing inventories, production schedules, combat records, and census data – specifically for concentration camp slave labor and genocide. Additionally, Charles Higham contends that International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) also monopolized Germany’s information technology business, supplying them the majority of their phones, radios, and telegraph technology, in Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. (New York: Delacorte Press 1983, 2007). Finally, for a description of U.S. financial institutional penetration into European markets during the interwar and World War II period, see Jason Weixelbaum, “Following the Money: An Exploration of the Relationship between American Finance and Nazi Germany.” jasonweixelbaum.wordpress.com.

[9] Andrew P.N. Erdmann, “Mining for the Corporatist Synthesis: Gold in American Foreign Economic Policy, 1931-36,” Diplomatic History 17 (Spring 1993): p. 171-200

[10] Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” Review of Politics 36 (January 1974): p.85-131.

[11] For Hawley’s opinion of corporatism, see Martin L. Fausold  and George T. Mazuzan, eds., The Hoover Presidency (New York: State of New York University Press, 1974), p. 101-119. See also David Painter, “Oil and the Marshall Plan,” The Business History Review 58 (Autumn 1984): p. 359-83.

[12] See Edwin Black, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust (New York: Dialog Press, 2009)

[13] Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds. Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), p. 147.

[14] Ibid. p. 148.

A brief historiography of imperial overstretch and its relationship to American hegemony

Imperial Overstretch: American hegemony and the historiography of empires in decline

The idea of imperial overstretch is not new to modern history. Perhaps the most famous of all texts in this vein is Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which attributes the collapse of Rome to the outsource of its security forces and the accompanying decline of cohesive civic virtue among its citizenry.

Indeed, the fascination of with the decline of major empires, according to British historian Joel Mokyr, is a “slightly sadistic intellectual schadenfreude.”[1]

Aside from the sheer complexity of explaining the constant flux of global power dynamics, any discussion of this subject is made more challenging due to the problematic nature of what empire actually means. Historian Charles Maier struggled with the definition even as he attempted to explain their relative rise or decline in his work, Among Empires. Maier argued that the term was so polarizing, it led to an oversimplification of the varied experiences great powers could have on the world stage.[2]

The other major issue in any exploration of the historiography of imperial overstretch is the methodology various authors have employed to describe it. For many historians, a broad narrative incorporating many countries was appropriate. The problem with this approach is that these histories are open to criticism that they are too vague, and are subject to a kind of historical shorthand that misses the nuances of large dynamic shifts. This is not a new challenge to the study of international history, which naturally includes the interstate interactions inherent to the examination of all empires. The other approach is less comparative; this leads to a concentration on a particular country’s imperial experience, which then can run the risk of becoming myopic. Both methods can be useful, as this essay will demonstrate, in explaining the reasons behind imperial decline.

Imperial overstretch was more recently popularized in part by Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which signified a successful attempt to explain the imperial experience of western powers since 1500. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, who Kennedy could claim as a predecessor, he saw an emergent bipolar world, dominated by Russia and the United States.[3] Both Kennedy and Tocqueville explain that this paradigm had its seeds in the 19^th century, in the form of laying claim to vast continental territory with the potential for massive industrial capacity.

Kennedy, for his part, was astutely aware that the bipolar world of the post war era could only last so long. His analysis of earlier imperial experiences in the previous four centuries led him to conclude that “unusually rapid shifts in the centers of world production during the past two or three decades cannot avoid having repercussions upon the grand-strategical future of today’s leading Powers…” [4] The encapsulation of this argument is that economic hegemony, which precedes military and political dominance, can change quickly and unpredictably leading to shifts in the global balance of power.

As an aside from Kennedy’s detailed analysis of how international affairs led to the bipolar geopolitical situation of the mid 1980s when The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was published, Kennedy’s predictions of the inevitable decline of large political/territorial blocs, particularly the Soviet and American empire, due to ever increasing military expenditure, would become the legacy of his work.

Kennedy saw an increasingly fractured world, in which smaller political units would emerge within the vacuum of such a decline. This analysis rests on Kennedy’s observation of what he perceives as the seeds of a multi-polar global environment, which began with leaders such as Tito, Nasser, and Nehru, who symbolized the refusal to align themselves with either the U.S. or U.S.S.R. This, along with the Sino-Soviet split, demonstrated that the monolithic power arrangements that had been solidified in the years following World War II up into the 1980s would not remained fixed.

This assertion rests on Kennedy’s thesis that no state has ever had a long term monopoly on power, be it the Habsburg’s “bid for mastery” in the 17^th century, the equilibrium of imperial powers after Napoleon in the 18^th century, nor Victorian England in the 19^th century. Essentially, his only consolation for the American audience of his work, being the inheritors of global hegemony, is that the Soviet Union appeared to be in much worse shape – which was validated by its collapse only two years after Rise and Fall’s publication.

A major opponent of this view was Walt Whitman Rostow, who argued against the inevitability of this change in power dynamics. Rostow, responding to Kennedy’s work at the time of its publication, (which was still before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and long before the U.S. military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan) argued for a steadiness and continuity of American policy, rather than the classic expansiveness normally associated with empire that Kennedy alludes to. Paradoxically, Rostow wanted to avoid an American geopolitical retraction, which he warned would mirror Britain’s alleged failure to maintain its own hegemony after World War II. This, of course, could translate as the continuance of exactly the type of imperial dominance that Kennedy is warning about. Rostow embeds this type of policy in the language of partnership (particularly with Europe) and balance of power rather than hegemony, avoiding the subtext of American dominance in such a relationship. [5]

This problem of maintaining a balance of power from an imperial perspective is elucidated well by Michael Doyle’s Empires, which defines this concept as a battle of relative weight. Essentially, Doyle defines an empire’s failure to grow as evidence of its decline.[6] He asserts that changes in the relative balance of power between large nations can be indicative of future geopolitical developments.

Doyle, like Maier, also found the definition of empire challenging, and produced his own explanation to describe it. He states that empire is “…a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another.”[7] Employing a comparative method of incorporating many different empires into his narrative, as Kennedy does, Doyle describes the relative dominance of the various hegemonic powers as dependent on the characteristics of the peripheral territory they are trying to control. Essentially, his explanation is that the relative strength of these territories determines the depth of multi-polar competition for these areas, as well as whether or not they would be subject to direct rule by an imperial power.[8]

Vaclav Smil has also elaborated on the unpredictability of international power dynamics, demonstrating the stark differences between the geoeconomic experiences of Russia and China in the last four decades. Smil points out that perceptions in the West as well as within Russia and China themselves, ran counter to projections of how economies would develop in the Communist world. In this case, Smil states that the rapid ascendancy of China was a surprise to policymakers.

Smil predicts that even though the U.S. may be aware of growing trends of imperial overstretch and changing geopolitical and macroeconomic dynamics, they may be powerless to shape these movements to their advantage. Smil states, “In the West, our wealth, the extent of our scientific knowledge, and major areas of our lives where we have successfully asserted our control over the environment mislead us into believing that we are (or ought to be) more in charge of history than we can ever be.”[9]

David Kaiser’s alludes to imperial overstretch in American Tragedy, which chronicles American involvement in the Vietnam War. Kaiser’s main point is that the decision to escalate in Vietnam was based on the conviction that the U.S. could support further projections of its hegemony abroad based on its past experience. Kaiser states, “The Vietnam War was the logical, but not essential consequence of the previous thirty years of American History.”[10] Kaiser appears to be in line with Kennedy in suggesting that America’s faith in its hegemony blinded it from the obvious risks of overstretching its power in an unwinnable war.

Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 by Patrick Karl O’Brien & Armand Clesse argue with Kennedy’s main assumption about the British Empire, stating that it was overstretched after World War I as opposed to before it. The main point of the O’Brien and Clesse text, however, is not to lament the waning of British hegemonic power, but to celebrate the ascendance of the United States. The text contains many comparisons of Britain at its heights to the U.S.; however, the authors argue that the U.S. is a far more dominant hegemony than Britain ever was.[11]

The obvious title worth mentioning in this discussion is Imperial Overstretch by Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell. This text matches Kennedy’s postulation that as an empire grows, its natural inclination is to expand its economic base to fund the military administration of the territory under its influence.[12] Burbach and Tarbell argue that decline begins when its economy can no longer meet the needs of its administrative costs. The authors’ criticism of the use of imperial power is particularly withering in the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which they contend are unsustainable and evidence the inevitable decline of American hegemony.

Hannes Adomeit has also written about this concept, as is apparent in his similarly titled work, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev. Adomeit’s principal thrust is that Soviet Russia became overstretched when it chose to occupy Eastern Germany, which he characterizes as unplanned, but followed the imperial logic of a need for peripheral territory as a buffer against rivals. Nevertheless, this resulted in grave political liabilities that eventually contributed to the collapse of the Soviet system.[13] Adomeit’s most forceful analysis comes toward the end of his text, where he demonstrates that the U.S.S.R. under Gorbachev was unable to divorce itself from its responsibilities as a hegemonic power despite the understanding of a need for comprehensive reform.

Contrary to Kennedy, Niall Ferguson argues in The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000, that both Britain of the 19^th century and the United States in the present time are experiencing imperial “understretch” as a result of their own uneven and discriminating style of engagement with the rest of the world.[14] Ferguson contends that this problem is derived from a lack of understanding in the U.S. that economic progress does not always lead to democratic reform. The author laments that the U.S. lacks the political will to see beyond its own democratic orthodoxy and use its economic power to generally improve the world financial system. Ferguson’s opinion is that the under-regulation of world financial markets acts as a hazard to international growth because of their contagion effect in financial panics, which has obvious echoes to the current global financial crisis.

Addressing Ferguson’s desire for the U.S. to take control of its destiny, the book Empires, Systems and States by Michael Cox, Tim Dunne and Ken Booth demonstrate that Western nations have little choice in altering the current geopolitical and macroeconomic policies at the current time. As Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver point out in the text, “The fall is likely because the leading states of the West are prisoners of the developmental paths that have made their fortunes, both political and economic. The paths are yielding decreasing returns…but they cannot be abandoned in favour of the more dynamic path without causing social strains so unbearable that they would result in chaos rather than ‘competitiveness.’”[15] The authors note that although the hegemony of the U.S. is of a magnitude never before seen in world history, the maintenance of such power has actually been undermined by the removal of the bipolar paradigm in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Arrighi and Silver note that the conclusion of U.S. and Russian rivalries of the post war era has actually created a less stable geopolitical system, which is now more turbulent and uncertain.[16]

Other assessments of the potential U.S. imperial role during the last several decades are more critical. Historian Odd Arne Westad noted that the Cold War experience of the Third World, which contain some of the emergent economies of today, witnessed “…results of America’s interventions [which] are truly dismal. Instead of being a force for good-which they were no doubt intended to be-these incursions have devastated many societies and left them more vulnerable to further disasters of their own making.”[17] Westad goes on to argue that the U.S. was at least partially responsible for isolating non-aligned Third World countries, and attempting to suppress their political and social development.[18]

Other works also occupy the space of American hegemony within the historiography of the Cold War. The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present by Christopher Layne also deals with the U.S. hegemony, arguing that current U.S. foreign policy must be understood within its Wilsonian, liberal “open door” roots. Layne argues that this policy included not only suppressing the influence of the Soviet Union where it could, but also ensuring the preponderance of American influence. Because of this policy, Layne contends that the U.S. now faces the problem of political, economic, and military overstretch due to its history of restraining Third World powers that could have helped with regional stability in areas the U.S. must now expend resources to maintain.[19]

The current major issue in a discussion of American hegemony is the ongoing global economic crisis. Both the twin fiscal and account deficits of the United States as well as the costs of its open ended military commitments abroad, have resemblances to other overstretched empires of the past. Nouriel Roubini, a well known economist and academic, recently commented that because over half of all US Treasury bonds were owned by non residents, America faced the real possibility of losing its hegemonic dominance to its competitors, who would use this situation to their advantage.[20]

The parallels between America and other collapsed empires have also been explored by political scientist Jack Snyder, who noted similarities between the recent U.S. preemptive military actions and those of the British, Japanese, and German empires of the past. Snyder notes, “…imperial rulers feared that unchecked defiance on the periphery might cascade toward the imperial core. Repeatedly they tried the strategy of preventive attack to nip challenges in the bud and prevent their spread.”[21]

It is now clear that the resultant U.S. triumphalist view in the wake of Soviet collapse drowned out voices like Kennedy’s, who argued that neither empire could shoulder the military and economic costs of maintaining their sphere of influence indefinitely. Thus, a new historiography will likely come into view that reflects the current shift in global power, in which the U.S. is just one of many actors in an emergent multi-polar world.

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[1] Joel Mokyr, “Review: On the (Alleged) Failures of Victorian Britain,”  The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 89-95. In this article, Mokyr argues that it was the challenge of  implementing technological innovation on a national scale, akin to Joseph Schumpter’s Creative Destruction that caused British decline during the Victorian era.

[2] Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 3, 106, 115.

[3] Alexis de Tocquville, Democracy in America (First published in 1835 – New York: Random House, 2004)  “Of Discipline in Democratic Armies,” Vol. 2, Book 3, Chp. XXV, pp. 820.

[4] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 437.

[5] Walt Whitman Rostow, “Book Review Essay: Beware of Historians Bearing False Analogies,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 66 (Spring, 1988), pp. 863-68.

[6] Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 27.

[7] Ibid., pp. 45.

[8] Ibid., pp. 130. Doyle’s description of the nature of imperial domination of peripheral states is situated within a larger discussion of three conditions the author states are necessary for the maintenance of empire. They are: A highly integrated central metropole, a periphery that is fractured enough not to provide any reasonable competition, and a common interest (religious, military, political) that can integrate the periphery with the metropole.

[9] Vaclav Smil, “The Next 50 Years: Unfolding Trends,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 605-643.

[10] David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Boston: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 9. See also Kaiser’s blog, “History Unfolding” for further discussions on American empire. http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2008/04/britain-united-states-and-middle-east.html (accessed December 13, 2009)

[11] Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 (Surrey: Ashgate & Aldershot, 2002). See also Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 15, 138, 242.

[12] Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell, Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire (Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2004).

[13] Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev An Analysis Based on New Archival Evidence, Memoirs, and Interviews (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998).

[14] Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

[15] Michael Cox, Tim Dunne and Ken Booth, Empires, Systems and States: Great Transformations in International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 278.

[16] Ibid.,  pp. 240, 293.

[17] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 404.

[18] Ibid., pp. 394. Westad argues that this is particularly true within the context of U.S. interactions with Africa.

[19] Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

[20] Noriel Roubini, “The Decline of the American Empire,” Roubini Global Economics, August 13, 2008.  http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/253323/the_decline_of_the_american_empire (accessed December 13, 2009). See also Macro Market Musings, “The End of American Hegemony?” August 17, 2008. http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-american-hegemony.html (accessed December 13, 2009).

[21] Jack Snyder, “Imperial Temptations,” The National Interest, (Spring, 2003), pp. 29-30.

Alchemy in Early Modern Europe

Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire by Tara E. Nummedal. Chicago University Press, 2007. 256 pages.

Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution by Bruce T. Moran. Cambridge University Press, 2005. 199 pages.

There is an embarrassment of riches within the treasury of the historiography of alchemy. Situated inside the broader context of early modern scientific development, the history of alchemy has experienced considerable growth in recent years, as judged by the substantial number of texts on the subject published within the last decade. Two significant recent works, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire by Tara Nummedal and Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution by Bruce Moran provide an up close look at the lives of alchemists within the larger story of scientific progress in early modern Europe.

Alchemy itself is an interesting field due to the massive degree of overlap it has with other disciplines. As much as it contained the budding seeds of modern scientific development, with its inherent penchant for experimentation and observation, there was also the incorporation of the supernatural, which provided its critics ample ammunition to discredit the field. Alchemists are probably most well known for outlandish claims of turning lead into gold; however, they also engaged in medicinal and mechanical pursuits. Both Moran and Nummedal demonstrate that particular kernels of chemical knowledge, such as the concepts of distillation and transmutation, provide a bridge between the world of the alchemist and modern science.

Nummedal, for her part, focuses on a theme significant to early modern scientific development, that of authority. Alchemists in early modern Europe wished to establish legitimacy for their profession in the face of scorn from many writers such as Thomas Erastus, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Francesco Petrarch, who labeled them as charlatans and frauds. However, Nummedal demonstrates that many royal patrons of the alchemists were more influenced by the writings of this collection of individuals themselves, whose claims of transmuting cheap metals into gold and increasing mining production tantalized them.

Thus, the tension between alchemists’ ability to deliver on their promises and their patrons’ images led to a “high-risk, high-reward game,” that could either promise quick riches, or more often, a brutal untimely end. (4) Nummedal’s sources come primarily from court proceedings against the alchemists in the latter category, demonstrating the common fate of these enterprising folk. However, the danger of such documentation, as Nummedal points out, is that the ideological battle over the authority of opinion causes the reliability of such sources to be problematic. To create a nuanced view into the lives of alchemists, Nummedal has also collected an array of contracts and supply orders, to demonstrate how they actually built their workshops and practiced their art.

The alchemist brought a variety of skills which were in demand in early modern Europe. Their skills in mining, metallurgy, and medicine derived prodigious support in some royal circles, provided they could deliver on their promises. Though times were never easy, Nummedal explains that the 16^th century was a difficult time for the alchemists, as their art differed from the practitioners of other early modern scientific disciplines; there where no guilds or supporting institutions, only their own entrepreneurial spirit.

The other side of Nummedal’s story involves the critics of the alchemists, such as those like Leonhard Thurneisser who were also trying to establish their own authoritative voice by railing against both real and perceived falsehoods of the alchemists. (68) Unfortunately for the alchemists, there was credence given to the writings of skeptics like Thurneisser as Nummedal points out in the case of Hans Nüschler, who appears to have genuinely wanted to experiment in order to achieve the famed alchemical chrysopoia, or transmutation, but turned to fraud when the desired results were not achieved. (158)

Nummedal stresses that despite the bad press, many alchemists were genuinely interested in experimentation rather than defrauding their clients. Her observations of attempts to legitimize the work of proto-scientific alchemical practitioners, “begins to disappear when one’s focus shifts from texts to practices.” (86) Essentially, this manifested itself in the demands of their royal patrons, who desired the same concrete results from their resident alchemists as they did from their miners, metallurgists, apothecaries, etc.

The rub for the alchemists were the written contracts that came into use with their royal employers. Because they were specific about what the alchemist was to produce, the contracts made their existence far more tenuous, not only because these documents gave fuel to those that wished to discredit them, but also created a situation where the alchemist was doomed to fail. Nummedal uncovers scenarios in which alchemists were faced with the unhappy situation of discovering that their beliefs did not match naturally occurring processes, and paid with their lives for it. As a result, scientific authority resided indirectly with the patrons of alchemy, who evaluated the utility of practical knowledge produced. Thus, the intersection of early modern scientific progress and the alchemists were the courts where an alchemist could live or die by the results of their experimentations.

Problematically, there was no central definition as to what an alchemist actually was. Nummedal notes that a cynical observer “…will find the [the alchemist’s] primary transmutation to be of himself: a goldsmith becomes a goldmaker, an apothecary a chemical physician, a barber a Paracelsian, on who wastes his own patrimony turns into one who spends the gold and goods of others.” (18) As CalTech historian Nicholas Popper noted on Nummedal’s work, “each alchemist constituted their authority and identity by adopting and synthesizing attributes of the scholar, the artisan and the prophet.” [1] Highly publicized fraud cases against alchemists prompted other alchemical practitioners such as Count Michael Maier to argue that alchemy should be a private art outside of the public sphere. However, these contentions themselves play into the struggle over who could claim ownership over various techniques. Thus, accusations of who was a Betrüger, or fraudster, could come from within the ranks of the alchemists themselves. (172)

Nummedal’s primary study is on metallurgical practices, rather than medicinal or mechanical, narrowing the scope of different alchemical practices she explores. However, the effectiveness of Nummedal’s central argument of demonstrating the rise of the authoritative voice as a legitimizing (or de-legitimizing) force is undiminished by her focus. Through the sensationalized and often gruesome trials of early modern alchemists who failed to fulfill their contractual obligations, Nummedal provides a glimpse into the interplay between alchemists, their critics, and royalty, all attempting to assert their authority over how the world should be perceived.

The theme of the struggle for a particular version of scientific reality continues in Bruce Moran’s Distilling Knowledge. Moran’s work occupies a different space than Nummedal’s, in that he eschews the failures of alchemical prospects in favor of instances of successful contribution to the scientific revolution. He argues, “chemistry itself did not so much replace alchemy as subsume it.” (184) To display this evolution, Moran utilizes a large amount of written material from early modern scientific practitioners themselves – bringing together a diversity of work from the 16^th century metallurgical writing of Georgius Agricola to the 17^th century medical observations of Thomas Willis.

Moran advises that the historiography of alchemy has faced a bit of historical transmutation itself. Moran evokes the treatment of Roger Bacon, an early modern physical scientist, whose internalized alchemical concepts evident in his work are downplayed by his admirers in favor of “striking proof of his scientific discernment.” (23) To help legitimize the early modern scientific process, which now appears somewhat convoluted when infused with alchemical mysticism, 16^th century scientist Andreas Libavius, stripped the growing field of early modern chemistry of its alchemical vocabulary. Moran chronicles this development, along with an infusion of Aristotelian rationality, which forced the recognition of underlying alchemical concepts of transmutation within the halls of academia.  Ironically, the influence of alchemy on Libavius’ chemical work was significant and admits, “If chemistry was about the mixtures of the material world, then what is appropriate about chemistry and what should count as chemical knowledge had to be found entirely in the physical stuff of the earth.” (105) Moran contends that by the time of the revered scientist Robert Boyle in the mid 17th century, “chemistry was no longer an intruder at the table of philosophic discussion, but an invited guest.” (144)

Another early modern natural philosopher, Paracelsus, looms large in Moran’s study, embodying an intermediary between the world of the alchemist and scientist. Paracelsus is known for emphasizing observation in natural processes, particularly those having to do with the human body. His springboard for this idea came from earlier concepts of transmutation, which caused controversy 16^th century France when scholars Johannes Guinther of Andernach and Peter Severinus of the University of Paris, wrote about the practical application of Parcelsus’ observations. (84) Parcelsus’ work on medical remedies was disseminated widely by Oswald Croll, whose book Royal Chemistry, Moran demonstrates, directly influenced the development of distillation laboratories in the court of the Spanish king, Phillip II. (103)

Moran concludes that early modern chemists were conscious of the portrayal of their work and sought authoritative legitimacy during this crucial transition from alchemy to chemistry. Moran contends, “…the utility that came as a result of collecting chemical procedures and knew that the processes of separation and combination disclosed the letters out of which compounds, or words, of nature were formed.” (188)

As stated earlier, the common theme, not only between Distilling Knowledge and Alchemy and Authority, but also within the historiography of early modern scientific development, is the notion of authoritative voice. Alchemy has been recognized as occupying a central role in this epoch; its contribution to the creation of knowledge networks was essential. The central concept of trust (or distrust) of an individual attempting to propagate a scientific fact is evident in many histories of the Scientific Revolution. One text that relates fairly closely to this concept is A Social History of Truth by Steven Shapin. He argues that despite demonstrable results, the acceptance of scientific discovery in the early modern era was invariably political and dependent on individual trust. This, of course, is why the assertion of authority was indispensable to alchemical practitioners. Shapin states, “…science is a system of knowledge by virtue of it being a system of trusting persons. I have sought to show the ineradicable role of trust in the constitution of empirical forms of scientific knowledge, where resort to trust has seemed most unlikely.” (417)

As with Shapin, Moran described the role of gentlemanly trust networks and forming a consensus (or authority) within the context of early modern historical development. For Moran, the struggle for authoritative voice among alchemists that Nummedal describes is also crucial in the development of epistemology itself. [2]

Moran echoes Shapin in Distilling Knowledge stating, “Objective certainty…follows a willingness to believe in something. The same rule applies regardless of whether one’s willingness to embrace doctrines of religion, the principles of alchemy, or the precepts of the scientific method.” (4) Moran extrapolates Shapin’s argument even further, contending that those who study the history of science are willing to believe in the authority of the triumph of human reason over mysticism. Thus, Moran would have us believe that the historiography of science itself is influenced by a network of trust in academic authority.

Other historians, such as Jole Shackleford also wrote about the more acrimonious side of this exchange by dealing with the common sub-theme of attacks on the adopters of Paracelsus’ work.[3] The relationship that emerges, such as in the case of theologian Thomas Erastus’ critiques of the chemical philosopher Severinus, is a dialog that is religious in nature and Manichean at its core; however, the struggle for authority remains the key theme.  Consequently, the polemics against alchemical experimentation coming from the church had a genuine effect. A common idea in Nummedal’s work is that this tension influenced and motivated those involved in the Parcelsian movement. As is demonstrated in Urszula Szulakowska’s  The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation, this dynamic led alchemists-turned medical-practitioners to internalize alchemical traditions and mix medical, alchemical and Christian images.[4] Lawrence Principe, has also joined the cause of describing the tension between various scientific authorities. Principe contends that despite Boyle’s public skepticism of some alchemical practices, his acceptance of the concepts of distillation and transmutation makes him an excellent example of the continuity from alchemy to chemistry during the early modern period of scientific development.

Inevitably, the question of where the study of alchemy in history is heading looms large over a discussion Nummedal and Moran. These authors appear to be going to an appropriate place that many different types of historiography have been leading for the last several decades – toward a socially oriented study of the field. Principe has contributed to this subject by fleshing out the lives of some individual alchemists in Chymists and Chymistry, Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Chemistry. Other episodes have yet to be explored. For instance, what was the reception and circumstances surrounding the premier of The Alchemist play by Ben Johnson in 1610, which joined the critics of the alchemists in lampooning them? There is also little mention of women in the male dominated field of alchemists. Nummedal has chosen to address this problem in her forthcoming book, The Lion’s Blood: Alchemy, Apocalypse, and Gender in Reformation Europe, in which she explores the life of Anna Zieglerin, one of the few female alchemists that have been documented thus far.[5] Approaching the lives of individual alchemists is a decisive step forward in understanding the roots of the scientific revolution. In these interesting figures we can witness firsthand the vestiges of mysticism falling away to reveal the rationality of the scientific method that is now familiar to us. Despite the terrible end that some alchemists faced when their faith in the supernatural failed to produce results, the stories of failure are just as essential as the stories of success.

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[1] Nicholas Popper, Reviewed work(s): Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire by Tara Nummedal. Social History of Medicine, April, 2009: 288-89.

[2] Moran, Reading the Book of Nature, 79.

[3] Jole Shackleford, “Seeds with a Mechanical Purpose,” also in Debus and Walton’s Reading the Book of Nature, 21.

[4] This is Nummedal’s observation in her review of Szulakowska’s The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3, Fall 2007: 998-1000

[5] Nummedal has already written extensively on Zieglerin in the past on a project in 2001-02 called “Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: A Female Alchemist’s Career in Reformation Europe,” funded by the Edelstein Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel)

An Unyielding Account of One of the Most Contentious Issues in Jewish History

The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. Edwin Black. Dialog Press. 1983, 1999, 2001, 2009. 430 pages.

Twenty six years ago, author Edwin Black asked a question at the end of a long and difficult journey: Was it madness or genius?  This journey would begin further back in time, at a bleak moment in world history when a madman named Adolf Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor of Germany. Although this could be the start of any number of narratives regarding the Third Reich, The Transfer Agreement involves a particular esoteric agreement between Jewish Zionists and Nazis.

The Zionists wanted to assist (and direct, if necessary) their German Jewish brethren to emigrate and reestablish themselves in the land promised long ago by God and more recently by the British: Palestine.

The Nazis, for their part, not only shared the goal of wanting the Jews out of Germany, but also wanted to quickly end the rapid, worldwide boycott that was organized against them by other Jewish and non-Jewish groups in 1933. Thus begins a complex web of reactions, rationalizations, back-stabbing, misrepresentation, and ultimately, hard-nosed negotiations on the part of each side.

Despite the odiousness of dealing with the Nazis, the Zionists that took part in the agreement held their national aspirations above all else and offered to break the boycott in exchange for Jewish refugees and their capital in the hopes that these could be used to establish a new Jewish state. This arrangement would come not only in form of political support to stymie the boycott, but also in the deliberate promotion of German goods to Jewish Palestine. Other historians have supported the book’s premise that the influx of foreign capital, resulting from both Jewish emigration and sale of German goods abroad, was an irresistible incentive to the Nazis, as this currency was in dangerously short supply for a Germany wracked by the Great Depression.

While the end result is a dramatically ironic pact between the most unlikely of participants, the book’s main focus is the path that led to such an arrangement. This comes in the form of behind-the-scenes intrigue among Jewish groups, both Zionist and otherwise. On display are their reactions to the situation, which vary widely – from unwavering, angry defiance, to guilt and self-blame.

The text raises the uncomfortable question that links these two disparate groups: do extreme nationalist tendencies mirror each other more than we like to believe? In the end, this account, which both sides labeled as ‘the deal with the devil’ arouses an array of powerful emotional responses.

This intensity comes from the immediacy of its narrative style that would become a trademark of Edwin Black’s later books, such as IBM and the Holocaust and War Against the Weak. This book makes you want to believe in the anti-Nazi boycott. Page by page, the only solace to the unending reminders of Jewish suffering throughout the book comes in the form of newsflash style reporting of widespread fiscal damage to the new Nazi state resulting from the rapid, negative world reaction. Black offers the reader repose in periodic and dramatic descriptions of Nazis fretting over the economic precariousness of their situation.

This apparent moment of vulnerability for the Nazis makes the collaboration with Jews to break the boycott all the more shocking. With the awareness of the horror of the Final Solution that was to come after this era, The Transfer Agreement adds an unmistakable emotional resonance.

The center of Edwin Black’s argument is nothing less than the extremely controversial subject of the foundation of the state of Israel itself. He contends that this particular transfer of people, money, and goods to the burgeoning Jewish nation was a catalyzing moment for its founding. The Transfer Agreement also supports the idea that this group of Jewish settlers and goods that arrived in Palestine as the result of such a pact would serve as a critical foothold for Jews seeking asylum who would survive the Holocaust. While the objective merit of any historical argument can be debated, the author’s personal views are apparent throughout the text.

Other historians have argued that this agreement ultimately facilitated the emigration of only a small handful of mostly wealthy Jews, a situation which did not fulfill the requirements of either party in the Transfer Agreement. Actually, some 60,000 Jews transferred in Palestine under the agreement. Not only was Nazi Germany losing tax revenue instead of gaining badly needed foreign currency, it was also failing to hasten the removal of all Jews quickly from the Reich. Additionally, this result did not appear to help the Zionist cause either, hardly resembling the widespread exodus to Palestine they had envisioned. Thus, the benefits of the Transfer Agreement can still be debated today – which adds continued relevance to this book.

In hindsight, we now know that both a Nazi economic recovery and a state of Israel would eventually result, but one of the most important aspects of this text goes beyond its argument to what it represents: Although some information regarding the Transfer Agreement had been available in select Hebrew-language and German-language academic circles before this book was first published, it has brought this subject to an infinitely wider audience. [1] The importance of public accessibility to extremely controversial issues like this one cannot be understated. They enrich us and teach us the painful lessons of the past, which give rise to the hope that we are not doomed to repeat them. With this newest 2009 edition, the lessons to be learned from The Transfer Agreement are likely to reverberate throughout continuing generations of people.

Uncompromising and intense, Black’s work takes the reader to a place where they will never return the same.

The Transfer Agreement turns out to mirror any number of significant human endeavors: They are both madness AND genius.

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[1] David Yisraeli, “The Third Reich and The Transfer Agreement.” Journal of Contemporary History 6, no. 2 (1971) 129-148.

Comparative Book Review of “IBM and the Holocaust” by Edwin Black and “Trading with the Enemy” by Charles Higham

Author’s note: These are two sources I have used for my thesis, “Facilitating the Nazis.” This piece compares the structure, sources, and impact of the two books. All comments are welcome. Thank you.

Americans are unceasingly reminded of the shared memories of the self-titled “Greatest Generation” that beat back the Nazis and saved the world from fascism. Is there a nether side to this heroic narrative? Although historians generally commend the United States as an instrumental force behind the undoing of Hitler’s Nazi regime, many prominent American companies and citizens knowingly aided the inception and military efforts of Nazi Germany.

Two texts, Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation and Charles Higham’s Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, give this subject a significant degree of depth. Both works are groundbreaking in the information they present. Both have spurred new public dialog and research among historians. Although they involve similar types of activity, the two books have markedly different approaches and methodology. These differences present a challenge to researchers and the public in gaining insight into the big picture of this sordid past. To that end, exploring each book within the context of the other is essential.

IBM and the Holocaust is a thoroughly detailed book about the history of International Business Machines’ (IBM) dealings with Nazi Germany. As densely packed with information as this text is, its thesis is simple: Directed from its worldwide headquarters in New York, IBM was a willing and decisive organizational force behind Nazi rearmament and genocide plans. The documentation supplied to support this thesis is both massive and well organized. The text is presented in a loose chronological arrangement which employs the activities of IBM managers, especially those of CEO Thomas J. Watson, as a common thread for its narrative. Edwin Black has also written other books on the subject which lay equally grave criticisms at the feet of those Americans who were involved with the Nazis. Ultimately, these arguments have been the basis for several lawsuits brought against companies that engaged in Holocaust era profiteering and exploitation.

The text is divided into three sections. It begins with the history of information technology and how this industry was developed in both the United States and Germany. The narrative then follows the rise of IBM and its dominant position in both countries. This section eventually plays itself out as a power struggle between IBM and its subsidiary, Dehomag, as Nazi authorities were reviewing a possible contract between themselves and the corporation. With IBM victorious, the following two sections deal with the most chilling aspect of the book: how IBM facilitated the organization of census data for the Nazis to perpetrate wholesale mass theft and murder of Germany’s Jewish population, and IBM’s role in organizing the logistics of Hitler’s military buildup.

The author presents a massive amount of technical data on precisely how IBM’s “solutions” oriented business made these two goals possible. He traces CEO Thomas J. Watson’s struggle to maintain control over its subsidiary to guarantee the immense profits to be gained from such a lucrative and extensive contract. As more pressure was brought to bear on both sides of the Atlantic to cover up the connection between IBM and Dehomag, Black details the arrangement of trusted Nazi officials to protect IBM’s profits and provide stewardship of the subsidiary and its property. After hostilities commenced, the text details not only the day to day struggles Watson engaged in to maintain control of IBM’s European operations, but also how IBM expanded and supplied Hitler’s forces to continue their agenda as they conquered the European continent.

The last third of IBM and the Holocaust details how IBM became essential to the war aims of both the Axis and the Allies as World War II unfolded. At this point there is an obvious dichotomy. Black weaves between the war activities of each side. The focus on the rapidly culminating “Final Solution” becomes the centerpiece of the book as it reaches its conclusion. The detailed treatment of organizational details behind Hitler’s genocidal aims as they were reaching full fruition provides an emotional locus for the entire text. The final section of the book closes on IBM’s aggressive moves to secure all profits and property after Germany was defeated, underscoring the answer to the question raised by Black’s thesis: Why would any individual or corporation become a willing participant in such horrifying endeavor? Black’s answer: The singular focus of IBM’s profit motive reigned supreme over all else.

Throughout the book, Edwin Black diverges from the organizational narrative to the activities and communications of the players involved, providing a human dimension to the discussion. The struggles between Watson and Dehomag’s original manager, Willy Heidegger, are particularly dramatic. Later, Black details the circumstances surrounding Watson’s receivership of a Nazi medal and direct communications with Hitler himself. The amicable nature of these interactions are both captivating and chilling. Speaking to the pragmatic approach that IBM had with its German business, the communications detailed between IBM representative Harold Chauncey and Nazi leader Karl Hummel are almost banal, considering the circumstances. This aspect of the book allows for some respite to the unrelenting details leading to what is inevitably a story about the mass execution of whole populations. In this way, Black portrays IBM as a company whose direction was both deliberate, and tightly controlled from the top down.

Due to the contentious nature of the subject, Edwin Black brings with him a mountain of data to back up his argument. The rational administration of IBM allowed for an extensively detailed account of IBM’s moves. To handle such a project, Black assembled a team of over one hundred researchers to wade through the copious amounts of available data existing in multiple countries and in multiple languages. The primary sources and endnotes are not only arranged in a simple and organized format, but the major repositories of information are also detailed, such as the location of various archives and other repositories of information situated throughout the world. What is perhaps most interesting, is Black’s detailing of requests for information from IBM itself. According to IBM and the Holocaust, the corporation made extensive efforts to block, hinder, and confuse investigation. When IBM realized the project already had extensive data to make its case, it attempted to whitewash its role issuing several public denials of its involvement.

IBM and the Holocaust made a considerable impact on both the reading public as well as historians when it came out in 2001. When it was released, the book ignited a flurry of media attention and became an immediate best seller. Simultaneously, a lawsuit was brought by scholars, Holocaust survivors and their families against IBM for the allegations presented in the text. As noted earlier, IBM repeatedly stated a simplistic argument that it lost control of its subsidiary and had no involvement with the Third Reich’s plans. What is problematic for IBM and its defenders is that no substantive rebuttals have yet to be made to any of the claims presented in the book. Although there are an overwhelming amount of details presented by IBM and the Holocaust, none have been actively contested. The larger stories that captured the imagination of the public, such as the communications between Hitler and Watson and receiving a Nazi Medal overwhelmed the tepid denials IBM and its historians made. Although the lawsuit brought against IBM was ended by the intervention of the US State Department in 2003, a concession was provided to have the corporation’s archives opened for further study. The US State Department has not yet released a date when this would occur. That same year, the research presented in Edwin Black’s book surfaced again in the widely acclaimed film, The Corporation, showing that public interest in corporate complicity with Nazi aims continues to grow.

Charles Higham’s book, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, has also cast a long shadow on the study of World War II era US corporate activity in Nazi Germany. Published nearly two decades before IBM and the Holocaust in 1983, the information presented in the text also has a continuing impact on the study of its subject matter. Like IBM and the Holocaust, Higham’s text also lays out an extensive array of details for the reader to digest. Higham’s thesis is also just as blunt: Many US financial and industrial figures knowingly aided Nazi war efforts. Higham supplies a selective bibliography to support his claims and provides copies of a few key primary sources at the end of the book. Trading with the Enemy is organized by business, exploring the activities of individuals and their related enterprises in each section chronologically. Higham closes the text by detailing how many of the accused Nazi collaborators covered up their activities at the war’s end. As an author who focuses mainly on the lives of famous personalities, such as Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hughes, it is unusual for such a detailed treatment of this topic to emerge from this catalogue. Higham states that he became interested in the subject of American collaboration with Nazis while researching Errol Flynn, who he also accuses of Nazi connections. Regardless of how it was formulated, the information presented in Trading with the Enemy has been the subject of historical discussion, and at least one lawsuit employed to bring more details to light.

As stated earlier, Higham details each business individually in his text. Trading with the Enemy begins with the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Higham weaves a narrative of how the bank became controlled by confidants of Hitler and that its original purpose of disbursing reparations from Germany following World War I was subverted into a mechanism for funneling money into Nazi Germany, with the help of willing American counterparts. He continues this theme by exploring the financial connections between New York’s Chase bank and Nazis in Paris. Higham’s argument here is that Chase set up branches in Vichy France with the specific purpose of doing business with the Third Reich. It is important to note that as in the first section, Trading with the Enemy gives credit to American officials who became aware of such dealings and tried to stop them through their various offices, such as Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau. However, each section invariably ends with the perpetrators escaping justice.

In the next several chapters, Trading with the Enemy tackles the involvement of heavy industry starting with Standard Oil of New Jersey and ending up with iconic American giants, General Motors (GM) and Ford Motor Company. Interspersed in this section, Higham also levels accusations against International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) for its alleged dealings with the Nazis. Essentially, Trading with the Enemy accuses Standard Oil of New Jersey for supplying fuel to The Third Reich while Ford and GM were building military vehicles to advance the Nazi agenda of conquest. Higham blames ITT for supplying communication equipment, fuses for munitions, and involvement in research and development of rocket technology.

Contained in this central section of the book, Higham spends a great deal of time describing the interactions between the various CEOs of these corporations and their Nazi counterparts. The author takes special note to show that some US government officials were aware of their activities, but their investigations were inevitably eclipsed by the wealth and influence these would be collaborators had. This ultimately leads to Higham’s final third of the book, were he details the fate of the personalities involved and how they were able to obscure their activities and avoid prosecution.

Trading with the Enemy utilizes a selective bibliography and a few primary source documents at the end of the text to back up its claims. The book does not contain citations, though it does reference some of the bibliographic material within the narrative. The primary source documents have the common characteristic of generally implicating the corporations mentioned earlier. Many of them are memorandum from US Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau, who as noted earlier, was a key figure in investigating American Nazi collaboration.

When it was released, Trading with the Enemy received little fanfare. In the intervening years since then, however, much more attention has been paid to the allegations presented in the text. In 1999, Michael Ravnitzky, an American lawyer that specializes in Freedom of Information Act cases, requested the source documents used for Higham’s book at the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group. This action brought more attention to the text, which had been out of print. A new version has since been republished in 2007.

IBM and the Holocaust and Trading with Enemy diverge far more than they converge. However, it is important to note the similarities between each text. The most significant aspect each book shares with the other is tone. Though Trading with the Enemy takes far more liberties in narrative style, both authors give the reader the unmistakable impression that they are unsympathetic witnesses to such nefarious activity. Neither book gives a cold clinical impression; both remain firmly judgmental. Both texts are far more akin to appealing to the reader’s ire. Both works internalize the dominant historical narrative. The underlying theme of both Higham and Black’s work reference the polemical nature of the US vs. Nazi as Good vs. Evil and turn it on its head.

The differences between IBM and the Holocaust and Trading with the Enemy are stark. Edwin Black’s work reads as a well sourced piece of historical literature while Higham’s appeals to the tabloid style that is much more popular among conspiracy theory magazines and websites. To be fair to Higham, his work may have been meant for a different audience than Black’s. However, is it safe to assume that such a subject should be addressed without a foundation in rigorous scholarship? On the other side, Black’s work has been criticized for being too dense. This comparison draws out the problem inherent in much political literature: That consideration for an audience can come into direct conflict with the need for academic legitimacy.

Trading with the Enemy has a problematic relationship with its sources. Given its loose narrative style, it is sorely in need of endnotes, footnotes, or other reference to its supporting information. Additionally, the book only contains a selective bibliography, leaving the reader to wonder what was not included. As stated earlier, some copies of primary source documents are included at the end of the book, but they are far too general to constitute the forceful accusations in the text. Any serious researcher willing to verify or disprove Higham’s points faces the frustrating prospect of redoing his research in order to expose the facts.

In contrast, IBM and the Holocaust contains an overwhelming amount of source material. Even without much assistance from IBM, Black was able to put together an entire operational dossier of its European activities during the war years. Although his endnotes help in locating particular source documents, there is still a great deal of information to get through to verify each point. Whether or not this matters to the audience of this text is debatable. There is such a great deal of cross referencing in IBM and the Holocaust in respect to its sources that there is a diminished need to reestablish individual points, unless they are source of particular contention. This reality does not betray the weight Black’s thesis significantly.

Higham’s work is far more troubling, not just because of the difficulty in verifying the information in this work, but for the study of the subject as a whole. As stated earlier, American assistance to Nazi Germany is a contentious issue because it runs counter to the generally accepted story of World War II. Therefore, it remains important for all stories stemming from this countervailing historical narrative be as clear and well sourced as possible. Unfortunately, Higham’s work is not easy to classify here. Many of his points such as those on GM and Ford have been verified by newer and more academic texts, such as Working with the Enemy by Billstein, et. al. Additionally, his work has been cited in other academic journals on this subject. The only solutions to the problem presented by Trading with the Enemy appear to be clarifying each individual point, a haltingly cumbersome task, or requesting the author provide foot or endnotes. Neither of these options are palatable.

IBM and the Holocaust and Trading with the Enemy remain important books for several reasons. First, they are two of the most well known texts on the subject of American assistance to the Third Reich. As the study of this subject expands, these books loom large as a reference point for further research. In the case of IBM and the Holocaust, Black has provided an exemplary text for rebutting a well known historic myth: That US corporations have only American interests solely in mind. Trading with the Enemy, on the other hand, is one of the few books that engages the entire landscape of American interaction with the Nazis. This is a meaningful development. The entire field is in need of reappraisal to understand the intertwined nature of global business interactions, especially as they relate to large historical currents.

The numerous documentaries, cable channels, books, and magazines are a testament to the growing public interest in World War II. As more information becomes available on American involvement with the Nazis, it is imperative that it be done with clarity and academic rigor. Much of the popular media available in the US today still conveniently omits the stories explored here. Regardless, World War II remains a pivotal event that diminished some powers and elevated others, creating a new world order. We live in its remnants today. In order to understand our relationship to these events, they must be faced with the utmost clarity, even if these realities are heartbreaking, horrific, and contradictory.