We often celebrate business leaders who do well by doing good. Yet, history’s more sobering lessons may come from those who did well by doing evil. After all, the Holocaust, the greatest moral catastrophe of the modern age, was enabled not only by ideologues and executioners but also by executives, board members, and businessmen pursuing what they believed to be rational goals, and some of their descendants count among the wealthiest people on the planet because of it. This reminder is again becoming urgent. At least in theory and rhetoric, the pendulum of capitalism swung from shareholders to stakeholders in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis. For a time, the language of ethics, purpose, and sustainability took hold in boardrooms and business schools. Yet that pendulum now appears to be swinging back—and swinging back hard. Technological disruption, social fragmentation, and rising authoritarianism have yet again destabilized shared assumptions about the role of business in society. No durable consensus exists—and perhaps never will—about how to balance private gain with public good, and the social embeddedness of business remains one of the most enduring and unresolved questions of political economy.

In such moments, history offers the closest thing to a natural laboratory: a way to examine how others responded to crises and pressures that, while different in kind, are familiar in structure. Few historical mirrors are as harrowing as the Holocaust, and Peter Haye’s Profits & Persecution holds that mirror up to the reader with searing precision. It is a magisterial effort intended “as neither an indictment nor an exculpation” of the business leaders of the age, “but as a warning” (p. 4). One of our most eminent historians of Nazi Germany, Hayes is renowned for foundational works such as Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, UK, 1987) and From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK, 2004) as well as for his civic commitment as long-time member and then Chair of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. His recent Why? Explaining the Holocaust (New York, 2017) set a new standard for the rigorous yet readable synthesis of Holocaust studies for larger audiences, and one might see Profits & Persecution as playing a similar role for his own specialties of business and economic history. Drawing on his own archival work as well as the recent wave of secondary literature on the subject, this is the culmination of a lifetime of study by a historian operating at the height of his powers.

The book is divided into four parts (“Prologue, 1918–1933”; “Autarky and Armament, 1933–1939/41”; “Total War, 1939/41–1945”; and “Aftermath, 1945–2024”), each subdivided into short chapters moving, inexorably, from Path Dependence through Ambivalence and Compliance toward Mobilization, Exploitation, Annihilation, Outcomes, and, finally, the deadening Summary. Hayes writes calmly and methodically about matters that naturally invite exasperation, and the result is a short and rigorous overview of the role of big business in the rise and fall of the Nazi economy and the horrors of the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler’s economic plan was essentially to fight unemployment through the massive rearmament necessary to conquer the lands and resources Germany was lacking in the contemporary crucible of international competition (p. 46), which always had been imagined becoming a “war of the continents” (p. 52), and Hayes masterfully shows the means and methods by which Germany’s largest companies first gradually and then precipitously became embroiled in his project.

Some optimistic executives sought to collaborate with the Nazis in an attempt to “direct” the movement into “normal channels” (pp. 13, 43), and it is not without irony how many hitched their hopes on Hitler to achieve a “state-free economy” (p. 6) in opposition to the perceived “socialism” of the Weimar era. Needless to say, they got more politics than they had bargained for. And while a few made the conscious decision to “howl with the wolves” (p. 41) from the start, Hayes shows that most business leaders were neither “antisemites” nor pronounced “anti-antisemites,” and so, stuck between the “carrots and sticks” of the regime on the one hand (p. 155) and the fear of losing ground to competitors on the other, ambivalence “under the guise of prudence” (p. 20), not to mention “reflexive conformity, compliance, and consent” (p. 117), relentlessly led the elites of the German business community toward acquiescence, complicity, and, finally, participation in crimes against humanity.

Partly, this was because the leaders of Germany’s largest businesses by and large underestimated who they were dealing with. “Because they were generally unable to take racism seriously as a remedy for complicated problems,” Hayes observes, “many executives were inclined to believe that the Nazis were not serious about it” (pp. 24–25). Yet, it turned out that Hitler and his followers walked their talk, and, soon enough, the momentum was such that, as one executive justified the dejewification of his firm in 1937, “it is pointless to swim against the stream” (p. 69). Yet precisely by being fundamentally defensive and focused on their “business rationality” in the face of uncertainty, they found themselves actively enabling Nazism; “that they thus made themselves into agents of persecution fell outside their field of responsibility or even vision” (p. 77).

As Hayes shows, executives may have been blinkered by self-interest, but they were not blind to the directives of the Third Reich nor, for that matter, to the direction the war soon took. Eventually, most business leaders found themselves “fighting on two fronts, not only against the prospect of defeat by the Allies but also against the possibility of defeat at home if firms were found wanting,” and by the summer of 1943, the SS Security Service could report that “among senior industrial leaders…there was no longer anyone who believed in the possibility of a German victory” (pp. 96–97). Nonetheless, “dedication to corporate self-interest” soon had some of the country’s most important conglomerates engaged in “one of the most extensive programs of conscripted labor in world history” (pp. 103–104). And as the war turned against Germany, “mounting desperation opened the way to further barbarism” (p. 105). The process of increasing acculturation to the excesses of the regime eventually reached its fatal culmination in the decision of the private company Degesch to supply Zyklon to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. This helped bring the cost of each murder down to “two German pennies (Pfenning) or one US cent per corpse at the time” (p. 128), but, as Hayes shows, it was the Nth step in the German business community’s long march toward the moral abyss. As it turns out, the road to the wrong side of history was paved with prudent concern for shareholder value.

Hayes is an able guide through these nightmarish lands, and one of the most effective aspects of his book is the degree to which he consciously moves beyond the dichotomies that long have dominated the business history of the Nazi period. The leaders of Germany’s largest companies were not, as many insisted after the war, “twice victimized heroes” (p. 142) unenviably stuck between a rock and a hard place, but neither were most of them evil in the more obvious sense of better-known Nazi perpetrators. As Hayes shows, big German businesses were rather opportunistically than ideologically complicit in the formalization of Nazi authoritarianism, persecutions, wars, and finally the annihilation of the Holocaust. And, “though shocking, the behavior of Germany’s corporate elite during the Nazi years does not seem genuinely surprising in retrospect” (p. 157). As he rightly notes, “that Flick or Quandt or Rosterg or Röchling—workaholic empire builders all—would have put the purpose and habits of a lifetime aside for the sake of defending human rights appears rather fanciful” (p. 158).

“At every stop on this slide into depravity,” Hayes notes, “corporate executives participated out of a combination of self-interest (Eigennutz) and the force of circumstance (Sachzwang)” (pp. 110–111). But beyond offering a survey of the state of the field and a convincing model for explaining how sterling captains of industry could become cheerleaders of the apocalypse, Hayes also dismisses some popular myths about the war, from the centrality of IBM to the Holocaust (p. 130) to the role of “greed” as such as a motivating force, because, as he damningly notes, “the returns on complicity were generally small” (p. 131). Faced with a state of “permanent blackmail” by the government (p. 58), in which “market competition had become political competition” for the regime’s favor (p. 60), leaders turned out to be all to too willing to sacrifice empathy and ultimately their humanity for the sake of profit and perseverance. A select few, such as the manager of a drilling firm named Berthold Beitz, who ultimately had to give up his struggle against the SS and warn his Jewish workforce to go into hiding in 1943, emerged “heroic” from this gauntlet (p. 109), but far more followed in the footsteps of Ferdinand Porsche and eventually embraced Nazism wholeheartedly (p. 99). That the former disappeared from the historical record and the latter helped give rise to one of the world’s wealthiest dynasties and most iconic automobile companies is worthy of pause.

The 1920s and 1930s were neither the first, nor the last time that “normality” began to “crumble” (p. 56), and today’s business leaders, too, will inevitably find themselves faced with unenviable yet unavoidable choices between justice and expedience, money and morality. From this perspective, the life and times of IG Farben executive Walter Dürrfeld, for whom “the fates of thousands counted for nothing compared to his job security and advancement” (p. 115), ought forever stand as a cautionary tale about where a singular “focus on oneself and one’s own blinkered priorities” can lead (p. 132). Heroism may be too lofty an ask of business leaders, but something along the lines of Edwin F. Gay’s vision, at the founding of Harvard Business School, to teach leaders how to “make a decent profit, decently,” might yet go a long way. Hayes has penned a masterful historical synthesis and a poignant meditation on the failures of business leadership which remains distressingly pertinent in the present. Beyond its historical merits, it ought to be required reading in all business schools.