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While German business's complicity in Nazi-era crimes from "Aryanization" to forced labor and mass murder has been well documented by historical research, corporate expansion into occupied Europe has received much less attention. Beyond plundering and labor recruitment we still know little about what German companies actually did abroad and whether it mattered to the actual war effort. The present article follows several electrical and construction companies, among them Siemens, AEG, and Philipp Holzmann, to wartime Ukraine, the most important arena of German economic exploitation in Eastern Europe. It traces their role within the occupation regime, their crucial contribution to the war, and their own goals in the process. Through a detailed examination of the giant, world-renowned hydroelectric power plant DniproGES (Dneprostoi), we argue that private business both literally and metaphorically powered German conquest, occupation, and the continuing war effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the attempts to reinforce capitalism within Germany during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials between 1945 and 1949. The author explains that the United Nations Organization was attempting to secure peace through stabilizing economic conditions and had set up an Economics and Social Committee. She discusses the relationship between National Socialism and capitalism, explores how the Nuremberg Trials addressed both political and corporate ideals, and examines the connection between Germany's Third Reich war crimes and its economics.