The aryanization of private banks in the Third Reich

the long version

"This study uses the example of the private banking sector to examine the process of Aryanization - the sale, usually under duress, of Jewish-owned businesses to non-Jews, typically at reduced prices - in all its complexity"-- "Approaches to the History of Aryanization In the 1990s, the entanglement of German companies in National Socialism moved increasingly into the focus of public interest. The driving force behind this were the class-action lawsuits by thousands of forced laborers and victims of persecution in American courts, and new information about the participation of German and Swiss commercial banks in the ruthless dealings with despoliated Nazi gold. Late, but then with vigor, historical research addressed the role of companies from a different perspective. For a long time, the attention had been on the "systemic" integration of the economy into the Nazi dictatorship. At the center tended to be more the theoretical link between Fascism and capitalism, or the role of big industry in the establishment of the criminal system and the structures of the war economy. What moved to the fore now much more concretely was the profiteering of businesses from the inhuman exploitation of forced laborers and the despoliation of the wealth of the persecuted in the so-called German "Altreich" (Germany within the borders of 1937) and in the occupied territories"--