This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conclusion of the most famous of the Nuremberg trials, the International Military Tribunal, which began in November 1945. While the tribunal—which sentenced Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and other prominent Nazi military and political figures—has dominated our memory of the Nuremberg trials, it was only the first of a series of criminal proceedings against doctors, administrators, jurists, and others—including private businessmen, whose prosecution was seen by many at the time as essential to both reaping justice and establishing a lasting peace.
The Trials of the Industrialists have become, in the words of historian S. Jonathan Wiesen, “undoubtedly one of the most overlooked aspects of postwar German business history.” When the prosecutors presented these cases before the judges, they were asking them to consider, implicitly and explicitly, the connection between capitalism and warfare, and where—or even whether—it was possible to draw a line between legitimate pursuit of profit and immoral greed. The conclusions these judges arrived at would shape not only the future of international law but the arc of Western Europe’s postwar reconstruction as a whole.
Links between the world of big business and the Nazis were extensive: over 50 percent of companies listed on Berlin’s stock exchange in 1932 had significant ties to the Nazi Party, and they experienced a boom in stock value after Hitler seized power the following year. It did not take corporate leaders long to realize the profits their businesses could reap from German aggression. In 1933 Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, whose metalworks would churn out everything from Panzers to anti-aircraft cannons during the war, submitted to Hitler a plan for the complete reorganization of Germany’s industry “guided by the idea of bringing [it] into agreement with the political aims of the Reich Government.” Steel giant Hermann Röchling encouraged Hitler to invade the Balkans and leveraged his ties with the regime to cherry-pick which factories and mines his firm would take over in occupied territory; these same production sites were then policed by SS officers and staffed with forced laborers over whose heads hung the constant threat of imprisonment in a company-run labor camp at Etzenhofen. The understanding that economic imperialism had played a major role in Germany’s aggression was therefore widely held, not just among Soviet thinkers but among the Western Allies as well.