Until recently the history of enterprises during the Nazi regime was analyzed primarily in ideological terms. Were members of the managing board also members of the Nazi Party? Did “big business” and the Nazis have common political objectives, or did they at least have the same political enemies? Did big business finance Hitler?

Even today many political historians have difficulties accepting that the Nazi economic policy and the business strategies of individual firms sometimes followed fundamentally different objectives. In contrast, economic and business historians who analyze the Third Reich are now used to thinking primarily in economic rather than political terms. The question is no longer whether a CEO shared the Nazi ideology but to what extent the top management adapted the company strategy to the new institutional setting, and how much it was able to influence this environment. It is not that moral questions are no longer of interest. Rather, they are set into relationship with economic motives. And, the decisive point, they are embedded in a kind of explicit or implicit cost-benefit analysis: What where the opportunity costs of resisting the demands of the Nazis?

Fortunately, this discussion is no longer confined to Germany. In many countries that were occupied or indirectly controlled by Germany during World War II there is new interest in how native firms dealt with the German occupants. This interest has its origin in two interrelated causes. One is the general question of who collaborated with the Nazis, and why. As in Germany, this discussion seems to have started only when the generation of the protagonists faded away. The other cause is legal action. German firms were not alone in being subjected to class action lawsuits in the 1990s. Swiss banks and, subsequently, companies in other countries also faced legal action. It is not an exaggeration to say that litigation that originated in the United States led to a large job creation program for many European (and a few U.S.) historians. In this context the Society for European Business History organized a conference in 1998 on enterprise in the period of fascism in Europe. Thirteen papers discuss the experience of companies vis-a-vis the Nazis or other fascist dictatorships in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the German-occupied part of the Soviet Union. Most are discussed in four shorter comments.

In contrast to what the title may suggest, this is not a collection of company case studies. Most papers focus on a country's entrepreneurs as a whole or those of a certain industry or sector. Economic historians will like the contributions of Per Hansen on Denmark and Hein Klemann on the Netherlands who support their arguments with ample macro- and microeconomic data. If there is something like a common theme in these quite disparate contributions it is the questions of how firms reacted to the opportunities offered and constraints imposed by the Nazis or other fascist regimes like in Italy and Spain and how far they were able to benefit from that environment. With respect to carrots and sticks, the latter dominated in Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. All major companies were taken over by the Germans and given either to state holdings such as the notorious Reichswerke Hermann Göring or to private German firms. How far privately run firms were pulled or pushed remains controversial. Peter Hayes and Richard Overy find good arguments to tend to the latter. They corroborate once more Tim Mason's primacy-of-politics hypothesis, which is hardly challenged nowadays. But a wording like “the larger directions of policy … proved to be processes to which firms could either adapt or see themselves superseded” (Hayes, p. 33) underestimates the active role of many firms when it came to participate in plunder, spoliation, and the deployment of forced labor.

In this context, widening the perspective to the European experience is illuminating. In general, firms in Western Europe and Denmark were quite reluctant to cooperate openly with the Nazis. In contrast to German entrepreneurs, their West and North European peers were quite confident that the German occupation would somehow be superseded by at least a status of restricted autonomy under German hegemony or, after Germany's defeat at the African and Russian war theatres, to full independence. Thus the trade-off between short-term profits due to collaboration with the Nazis and long-term considerations had totally different parameters than for German firms who expected to remain under Nazi rule. This may explain why it was the construction industry—reported for the Danish case by Hansen but very probably observable in the Western European countries as well—that showed a relatively high propensity to cooperate with the Germans, who urgently needed defence fortifications for their “Fortress Europe” and were willing to pay for it.

In conclusion, one might infer from this valuable volume that entrepreneurial behavior—either in states under fascist regimes or in occupied countries—was much less dominated by political preferences than was thought before. It was, rather, sheer economic opportunism that prevailed in entrepreneurial decision making. One might speculate that entrepreneurs are more apt to adapt to changing political regimes because their assets are to a larger fraction fixed and thus “sunk” than those of other professions (e.g., professionals). When fascist regimes established foreign exchange controls (all did), entrepreneurs were no longer able to liquidate their assets and emigrate with their wealth. They were locked in and should not be blamed for trying to save their assets under fascist rule. Many should, however, be blamed for realizing opportunities that could only be offered by dictatorial and predatory regimes even though they had viable alternatives.