Austrian Banks in the Period of National Socialism is Gerald Feldman's last book, a translation and posthumous publication of two chapters he contributed to a larger research effort by a group of international scholars that examined the history of Bank Austria Creditanstalt during the Third Reich. This volume is an exemplary work of scholarship—meticulous, engaging, and comprehensive—and, as such, is a worthy capstone to the career of a scholar who profoundly shaped the study of modern German history over the past half century.

The book is divided into two parts, each exploring the history of one of the two most important Austrian banks in the Third Reich: the Creditanstalt-Wiener Bankverein (CA) and the Länderbank Wien AG. Feldman's treatment of the first is by far the lengthier of the two, totaling almost four hundred double-columned pages. The author begins his analysis by answering three central questions: Who owned the bank in the period 1938–45? How was the institution organized? Who made up its personnel? In answering all three questions, Feldman makes it clear that the Anschluss represented a loss of autonomy for the bank that was accompanied by significant economic injury; at the same time, however, the bank's new status as an enterprise in the German Reich created a number of economic opportunities. Feldman shows convincingly that in these matters as well as in many others, the bank both reacted to and was driven by important political and economic considerations. Taking the case of the “subordination” of the bank by the much larger Deutsche Bank, Feldman illustrates the incredible complexity surrounding the integration of the Austrian bank into the German economic universe, foregrounding the difficulties created by the fact that the future of the bank was being decided by German Nazis and Austrian patriots as well as by rival German and Austrian bankers—all of whom often pursued conflicting agendas. He argues persuasively that, in the end, coming under the control of the Deutsche Bank in Adolf Hitler's Germany clearly harmed the bank: it lost its independence as well as some of its industrial holdings. But there were, at the same time, a large number of immediate and future financial benefits, such as access to new markets. Similarly, Feldman's discussion of the purge of the bank's personnel, especially its Jewish employees, highlights powerfully the potent mix of economic and political issues that, in this case, resulted in ruined careers and hardship for some—but promotion and greater wealth for others. On this point as well as on many others, Feldman calls attention to the discrepancy between the historical record established in this study and the postwar claims made by the bank and its representatives regarding the bank's alleged status as a victim of Nazi duress and “plunder.” As Feldman writes, the bank's “story under [the Nazi] regime must and will inevitably turn from the CA as ‘victim’ to the CA as participant and perpetrator in the National Socialist economy” (85).

Such dynamics—the economic and political considerations often in opposition to one another, the mixed balance sheet of loss and gain, the clear evidence of both active participation in and occasional victimization by Nazi policies—can be found in the final three sections of the first part of Feldman's analysis. These deal with the bank's role in the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses and customers in Austria and elsewhere beginning in 1938. They offer a detailed discussion of the bank's expansion in Europe as part of the Nazi empire and provide a wide-ranging assessment of the various ways the bank served the Nazi state before and during World War II. Particularly rich is Feldman's voluminous study of the many ways the bank expanded its role financially and economically in Nazi-dominated Europe—into the Sudentenland, for example, as well as into the Czech “Protectorate,” Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and southeastern Europe. The author devotes a considerable amount of space to a large number of case studies of companies (controlled at least partially by the bank) that furthered the Nazi economic program in various parts of Europe, from “Aryanizing” local businesses to reorienting production in support of the war effort.

In the book's second part, Feldman addresses, if in slightly less detail, the very same issues experienced by the second largest bank in Austria at the time, the Länderbank Wien AG. He covers thoroughly and deftly the hard-nosed wrangling among the various state, party, and private business entities behind the creation and running of the bank—for example, the successful purge of the bank's personnel and customer base of political and racial enemies, as well as the bank's important role in financing the German war effort by means of issuing credit to businesses making products for the German military. Here, too, Feldman argues persuasively that postwar claims that bank actions had been the result of German coercion explain, at best, only a very small part of the bank's history, obscuring the many instances in which the bank actively furthered the Nazi regime's interests primarily because it profited economically from doing so. “There is no evidence whatsoever that any significant figure in the Länderbank,” writes Feldman, “had hesitations or reservations about the policies toward the Jews, financing the war effort, or any of the other practices and policies of the regime. On the contrary, the Länderbank … had no compunction about opening accounts for [Adolf] Eichmann, and cheerfully financed ruthless Austrian industrialists like [Georg] Meindl” (546). This second part of the volume is no mere repetition of the first, however: Feldman also highlights the salient differences between the two banks and their experiences. For example, the early history of the Länderbank in the Third Reich was, he shows, different from that of the CA for two reasons: the Austrian institutions involved put up less resistance, and the Germanization and “Aryanization” efforts had begun well before the Anschluss.

With this work, Gerald Feldman has written the definitive history of Austria's two largest banks in the Third Reich. While such a book is of particular use to specialists and to advanced graduate students, it is conceivable that individual subsections—especially those involving the various case studies explored here—could be of real benefit to undergraduate students.