The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi economic war against the Jews: the expropriation of Jewish-owned property, by Harold James [review]

James’ book is the second study produced in the context of a special commission of historians, invited by the Deutsche Bank in 1998 to examine the history of the Bank between 1933 and 1945. The first study by Jonathan Steinberg dealt with the Bank’s gold transactions in the Second World War. The English title of James’ study differs significantly from the parallel German publication by Beck, which bears the less contentious title Die Deutsche Bank und die “Arisierung” but it reflects more accurately the underlying assumptions in the work of a polarity between German state policy - the ‘Nazi’ economic war against the Jews - and the strategy of an important but subordinate private company. Make no mistake, James identifies considerable evidence of complicity by the Bank in acts of theft and dehumanisation in relation to the Jewish population of both Germany and the wartime occupied territories. He quotes examples of transactions, where the Bank scrupulously applied the increasingly strict rules of state ‘dejudification policy’, lending them the respectability that attached to Germany’s biggest private bank.