Profits & Persecution: German Big Business and Nazi Crimes

Featuring Peter Hayes, PhD, who will share an analysis of why and how Germany’s largest corporations became deeply enmeshed in Nazi crimes. From a legal perspective, Dr. Hayes will specifically highlight the issue of justice and punishment, as only a handful of the industrialists involved in Nazi crimes ever suffered any penalty.

Peter Hayes (Ph.D., Yale, 1982) specializes in the histories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and, in particular, in the conduct of the nation’s largest corporations during the Third Reich. He taught at Northwestern for thirty-six years from 1980 to 2016, served on the academic boards of multiple professional societies and Holocaust memorial sites, featured in many documentary films, and published and edited thirteen books and more than ninety articles on the Holocaust.