As part of a judicial settlement “in re Austrian and German Bank Holocaust Litigation,” Bank Austria Creditanstalt (today UniCredit Bank Austria) agreed in the year 2000 to set up an Independent Historical Commission charged with “among other things, investigating the activities of Austrian banks during the National Socialist era, publishing the results, and attempting to identify by name those who were harmed” (1). The findings of this group of historians, consisting of Gerald D. Feldman, Oliver Rathkolb, Theodor Venus, and Ulrike Zimmerl, were published in German in 2006 under the title Österreichische Banken und Sparkassen im Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkriegszeit (2 vols., Munich: C. H. Beck). Feldman's chapters about the activities of two Austrian banks in the period of Nazi occupation of Austria, Österreichische Creditanstalt – Wiener Bankverein and Länderbank Wien, AG, were published in 2015. This is the last book of the renowned historian, who died in 2007.

The first part of book deals with the Creditanstalt-Bankverein (CA-BV), covering the following topics: ownership, organization, and personnel, 1938–45; CA-BV's Jewish customers and Aryanization; the growth of CA-BV in an expanding German Empire; and services of the bank for the regime in peace and war. Feldman starts with a short summary of the history of the bank, which was founded in 1855 on the initiative of the then minister of finance to provide funds for the construction of railroads and for industrial ventures. The bank failed in 1931 caused, inter alia, by the insistence of the bank management to continue its business operations in the Danube basin as far as possible even after the breakup of the Habsburg monarchy after the Great War. The insolvency of the bank was prevented by emergency credits of the Austrian central bank and by capital injections of the Austrian government and the central bank. In 1938 the majority of the shares of the CA-BV were controlled by the state. The struggle between various German institutions—the Deutsche Bank, the Vereinigte Industrie Aktiengesellschaft (VIAG), the Reichswerke Herman Göring, the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft, and private corporations—and their respective supporters in the higher echelons of the bureaucracy in Berlin and in the Nazi Party in Berlin and Vienna for the whole or parts of the bank's industrial and financial holdings gives a well-documented example of the polymorphous power system of Nazi Germany. In the end, in 1942, the CA-BV became part of the Deutsche Bank and tried to regain its prominent position in banking in the former parts of the monarchy that were now dominated by the Third Reich.

The elimination of Jewish personnel from the bank, the “de-Jewification,” started immediately after the occupation of Austria and was completed by the end of 1938. Simultaneously, the bank was active in the process of Aryanization and in the dispossession of Jews of their enterprises and financial assets. As far as German investors were interested in companies of the CA-BV concern belonging to Jewish customers, the Aryanization was at the same time a “Germanization” that was, from time to time, opposed by high-ranking Nazi leaders of the “Ostmark.” Feldman describes in detail the struggle for the spoils of the occupation of Austria using documents of a vast number of archives. Feldman's monumental work was supported by a long list of colleagues, archivists, and assistants in Austria and other European countries.

The second part of the book deals with “The Länderbank Wien in the National Socialist Period.” The Länderbank, the second-largest bank of Austria, was taken over by the Dresdner Bank, “relatively uncontested,” as Feldman notes (395), because Germanization and Aryanization efforts had begun well before the Anschluss. The Länderbank Wien was primarily the product of the merger of the Viennese branch and the Austrian holdings of the Banque des Pays de l'Europe Centrale (Zentraleuropäische Länderbank), the Austrian branch of the Prague Živnostenská Bank and the Mercurbank. Since 1932, 95 percent of the share capital of this bank was in the hands of the Dresdner Bank, which maintained close contacts with the SS, the paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. The Länderbank followed a similar business strategy as the CA-BV—Aryanization and expansion in Central, East, and Southeast Europe—but its efforts to achieve a similar financial standing as the CA-BV came to nothing. The balance sheet of the CA-BV rose in the years 1940 and 1941 by about 50 percent, but only by 16 percent in the two following years. Total assets of the Länderbank nearly tripled from 1939 to 1944, but more than 60 percent of them were claims against the Third Reich, which were without any value at the end of the war. Both banks were insolvent in 1945 and had for this and other reasons to be nationalized in 1946. At this time, Josef Joham, as Feldman puts it, “the best Austrian banker around” (391), was public administrator of the CA-BV. Joham had joined the management board in 1932, became general director in 1936, remained member of the board during the Nazi period, and became general director in 1948 again. His postwar career likely benefitted from his spying activities since 1943 for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner organization of the CIA. Joham never spoke about these actions that make them, as Feldman writes, “all the more mysterious” (390). According to Feldman, “[I]t is fair to say that his career, with all its ambiguities, embodied the interwar and postwar history of the CA and, indeed, of Austria” (391).

Feldman's analysis of the history of the two largest Austrian banks in the period of National Socialism centers, as defined in the task of the Historical Commission, on the services that the banks fulfilled for the regime, namely the Aryanization and the expansion into East and Southeast Europe. The book is not easy reading. Nevertheless, it stands as a testament to the unrivaled professionality of the late Professor Feldman.