The Historiography of the Holocaust

Big Business and the Third Reich 153
manager during the war or accept the consequences, which meant at the very
least dismissal. The evidence that their behaviour was managed from Detroit is
shaky at best. Their very survival during the war and after seems to imply
a conspiracy among GM’s German managers, the head office and the Nazi
authorities.
As companies important for the war effort, they, like fully German firms, had
been mobilized for the war effort and were subject to the same controls and
pressures as German companies. It is unclear what the authors expected.
Should GM not have sought business in Germany or adapted to the political,
social norms of Nazi Germany? Just when should they have stopped doing
business with Nazi Germany? No government required this of them. If they
had closed the German company, or if Opel had been expropriated, would this
have been moral and would they have been violating their fiduciary responsibilities?
Of more surprise and interest were the apparent benefits received by
these American companies due to their involvement with the Nazis and their
lack of effort to make restitution to Jews and other victims. A sense of the political
risk involved and the degree of difficulty (cost) of extricating foreign companies
from their German investments in light of management’s assessment of an
uncertain future is missing from this and many other books about foreign
investment. 46
Neil Forbes’ Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial
Relations with Germany, 1931–1939 stands out among works dealing with
foreign investment in Germany during the period. Whereas Forbes makes no
bones about how English credits and raw materials furthered Nazi rearmament,
he puts these activities in their appropriate historical context. He gives a great
deal of weight to the personal relationships of leading figures, particularly
Hjalmar Schacht and Montagu Norman, head of the German Central Bank and
the Bank of England respectively, as well as the important role played by the
political sympathies of some English businessmen, who were even willing to
help finance Hitler in the hope that he would prove an effective barrier to the
spread of communism, as factors contributing to economic and political
appeasement. Unlike Trading with the Enemy, for example, Forbes acknowledges
the dilemmas and uncertainties of business and political leaders who had to
deal with the Nazi regime. Until 1939, Britain was Germany’s most important
trading partner. Britain was a major trader with and lender to Germany long
before Hitler came to power, business connections that were critical to British
workers during the depression years. While those making decisions in Britain
about what kind of business to do with Nazi Germany looked to their own
economic and political interests first, they did so with the hope that trade and
lending would help reduce the worldwide effects of the depression, which were
particularly severe in Germany, and assist the more reasonable elements of the
party, like Schacht, control the more thuggish. When the Nazis took over the