Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
Keeping Germany Fat
By Gordon A. Craig
The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews
by Harold James
Cambridge University Press, 268 pp., $24.95
Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain's Economic and Financial Relations with Germany, 1931–1939
by Neil Forbes, with a foreword by Richard Overy
London: Frank Cass, 250 pp., $59.50; $26.50 (paper)
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation
by Edwin Black
Crown, 519 pp., $27.50
If it can be said that Germany was a world power before it began to act like one, this was largely because of its banks. In the remarkable extension of German interests around the globe in the nineteenth century the chief agents were the great banking institutions, particularly the so-called D-Banks, the Deutsche Bank, the Dresdner Bank, the Darmstädter-und-Nationalbank (Danatbank), and the Disconto Gesellschaft. These organizations, which controlled about 40 percent of Germany's commercial deposits, had been founded in part to promote industrial growth, but it was their purpose also, as stated by one of their publications, 'to foster commercial relations between Germany and other countries.' They did this by investing in foreign banks and sharing in their operations or by estab-lishing branches of their own and using their capital to support commercial operations. Their success in the 1890s was remarkable, as is illustrated by their creation of the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank in China and subsidiaries of the Dresdner and Deutsche banks throughout Latin America and by their capital investments and railway concessions in South Africa and the Ottoman Empire.
Review, 3298 words
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