Enterprise in the Period of Fascism in Europe

by James,Harold

• ISBN13: 9780754600770
• ISBN10: 0754600777
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-05-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The essays in this volume consider the involvement of business corporations and of individual businessmen in the politics of the 1930s and 1940s: in the move away from the market and also from democracy, towards state control and authoritarianism, including the massive intervention of the state in property rights. How far did businesses attempt to guide this intervention for their own purposes, and to what extent did they succeed? This debate deals, centrally, with the role of German business, of banks, of industrial corporations, and of small tradesmen in the Nazi regime. An older discussion of how they may have facilitated the Nazi takeover has been supplemented here by an investigation into how they made the regime's policies possible, and the extent to which the profit motive drove them to participate - with sometimes more, sometimes less enthusiasm - in the politics of inhumanity.Such discussion has been given further impetus by legal action, initially in the United States, in the form of class action suits on behalf of the victims of Nazism. What do such legal and political debates mean for business history? What are the current responsibilities of business facing the consequences of historical action? And what lessons should be learned concerning the ethics of business behaviour?The contributions to this volume were originally presented as papers at a conference organised by the Society for European Business History in Paris in November 1998.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
List of Tables	viii
Notes on Contributors	ix
Preface	xiii
Part I
The Economic Origins and Dimensions of European Fascism	3	(11)
Gerald D. Feldman
Banks and the Era of Totalitarianism: Banking in Nazi Germany	14	(12)
Harold James
Industry under the Swastika	26	(12)
Peter Hayes
Comment	38	(5)
Christopher Kopper
Part II
Spanish Entrepreneurs in the Era of Fascism: From the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship to the Franco Dictatorship, 1923-1945	43	(19)
Mercedes Cabrera
Fernando del Rey
The Fascist Regime and Big Business: The Fiat and Montecatini Cases	62	(16)
Franco Amatori
Entrepreneurs and the Fascist Regime in Italy: From the Honeymoon to the Divorce	78	(16)
Luciano Segreto
Comment	94	(11)
Pablo Martin Acena
Part III
Enterprises in Switzerland during the Second World War	105	(10)
Jean-Francois Bergier
Business as Usual? The Danish Economy and Business during the German Occupation	115	(29)
Per H. Hansen
Comment	144	(7)
Jakob Tanner
Part IV
Business in the Grossraumwirtschaft: Eastern Europe, 1938-1945	151	(27)
Richard J. Overy
Polish and Jewish Entrepreneurs during the German Occupation in Poland, 1939-1945	178	(11)
Zbigniew Landau
Comment	189	(6)
Boris Barth
Part V
The Belgian Business Elite, Economic Exploitation and National Socialist Corporatism	195	(24)
Dirk Luyten
The Dutch Economy during the German Occupation, 1940-1945	219	(40)
Hein A.M. Klemann
French Enterprises under German Occupation, 1940-1944	259	(12)
Patrick Fridenson
Index	271