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It does not require great powers of observation to note the pervasiveness of Nazi Germany in contemporary U.S. cultural and political discourse. For better or worse, the discursive landscape is saturated with depictions of and references to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Gestapo—an obsession visible everywhere, from the progressive left to the far right, from TV shows to Twitter feeds to video games. The allure of using the Third Reich as a rhetorical weapon may seem obvious enough in a hyperpartisan political climate, but the resonance of that historical period clearly extends well beyond politics. Indeed, National Socialism now functions as an all-purpose conceptual barometer that can be applied to conversations about all sorts of subjects. Over the past few years, scholars have sought to shape such discussions with an unusually heavy outpouring of projects that explore correlations between Nazi Germany and the United States. What they rarely address, however, is why Americans are so prone to invoking the Third Reich as a framework for thinking about life in their own country to begin with. No less important to consider are the implications of how that trend has taken on such a wide-ranging salience and sense of urgency lately. With these questions in mind, Bradley Nichols (History, University of Missouri) convened an interdisciplinary roundtable, composed not only of historians, but also scholars of U.S. politics and culture. He invited Jens-Uwe Guettel (History, Penn State University), Sabine Hake (Germanic Studies, University of Texas), Emanuela Kucik (English and Africana Studies, Muhlenberg College), Alexandra Minna Stern (English, University of California, Los Angeles), and S. Jonathan Wiesen (History, University of Alabama at Birmingham) to share their insights and reflect on the issues at stake. 1. The recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the relationship between Nazi Germany and the United States has mirrored a heightened level of popular curiosity in the topic. How do we explain the timing of this conjuncture? What, if anything, sets it apart from the long-standing current of fascination with parallels linking the two countries? Is there something unique going on here that transcends other overlaps in focus between academia and the public (past or present)?

In the 1960s and 1970s two controversies forced Rotary clubs to address the issue of complicity during the Holocaust. One emerged from a West German Rotarian’s attempts to publish an honest account of his organization’s concessions to National Socialism in the 1930s. The second ensued upon the nomination of an Austrian former Nazi to the Rotary International presidency. Both events unleashed intense discussions in the United States and elsewhere, pitting those who felt that the Holocaust must never be forgotten against those who saw camaraderie and forgiveness as more important than historical memory. These debates revealed “transnational” memory at work. Rotarians’ and the wider public’s response to these controversies transcended geographical boundaried, bringing Americans, Europeans, and others together to contemplate the moral legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.

This article explores the self-understanding of West German business leaders in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It argues that business leaders were never silent about the ...

This article situates industrialists in an ongoing discussion about the ‘Americanization’ of West Germany by focusing on business leaders' interest in public relations and human relations during the l950s. It portrays industrialists' adoption of putatively ‘American’ techniques of publicity and factory relations as an attempt to make peace with workers, while simultaneously overcoming a legitimacy crisis born of their complicity in nazi crimes. Despite their interest in American PR, many industrialists could not hide their fears of American popular culture. Industrialists therefore crafted an image of America as economically modern but intellectually bankrupt. They juxtaposed this ambivalent view of America with indigenous discourses about ‘the factory community’ and company paternalism that had been present during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Ultimately, against the backdrop of the Cold War, industrialists were able to adapt to liberal democracy and ‘protect’ their workers from communism by amalgamating American and German models of labour relations.

In 1973 Yad Vashem, the international organization commemorating Holocaust martyrs and heroes, extended its highest honors to one of Germany's most influential business leaders. Berthold Beitz, head of the Krupp Foundation in Essen, was declared one of “the righteous among the nations” and was inducted into a very small group of individuals who had risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Third Reich. As a young manager in German-occupied Galicia, Beitz had been considered a rising star in the firm of Karpaten Öl. A trustee acting on behalf of the board of directors, Beitz was in a key position to witness the brutality of the SS in occupied Poland. In 1943, as he began to suspect his government's murderous intentions, Beits grew determined to risk his career, and possibly his life, to protect Jews from a tragic fate. Through various means of trickery and bargaining with the SS, Beitz took under his wing both young and old, skilled and unskilled, and employed them in scattered oil installations in eastern Galicia, ultimately protecting many of them from deportation and probable death in Belzec.

Many important works in the field of consumer studies focus on the United States and post-World War II Western Europe, with the former often cast as the paradigmatic example of consumer society. Notwithstanding the disruptions of the Great Depression and less-severe business cycles, these societies offer plentiful images of bustling stores, widening economic opportunities, and the emergence of politicized citizen-consumers. The unique violence of the movements – whether manifested in the militant machismo of Benito Mussolini or the genocidal thrust of National Socialism – sets fascism apart from other twentieth-century developments. This article addresses some of the questions that emerge from a consideration of fascism and consumption, focusing in particular on National Socialist Germany, where consumption served a uniquely harsh end. It explores how Nazism envisioned the function of buying, selling, and consuming; the extent to which consumption was shaped by the state's ideological priorities; Nazi visions of consumption; realities of consumption and marketing in the Third Reich; and the debate on consumption and consent.

It is tempting to associate consumption exclusively with democracy. Many important works in the field of consumer studies focus on the United States and post-World War II Western Europe, and the former is often cast as the paradigmatic example of consumer society.1 We tend to assume that economic opportunity and wide access to goods and services depend on a basic level of political openness and plurality.2 Consumption, however, is not limited to democratic settings. It has also existed under fascist dictatorships, which have used shopping and leisure opportunities to bind their populations to their political visions and to inspire them toward hard work and sacrifice.3 Historians have found the relationship between National Socialism and consumption particularly intriguing, for in his quest to build a racially pure “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft.), Adolf Hitler appeared to be moving in the opposite direction from the United States.4 The Nazi leadership welcomed certain features of consumer society—like modern manufacturing, advertising, and retailing technologies—but rejected the social and political expressions that came to be associated with mass consumption: cultural hybridity, the commercialization of public life, and opportunities for activism among self-conscious consumers.5

How did people enjoy themselves during the Third Reich? In light of the Nazis’ barbarism, the question seems potentially crass. Yet, recent scholarship has revealed multiple forms of entertainment under a dictatorship and the ability of popular amusement to bolster a brutal regime. Whether on cruise ship tours sponsored by the Nazis’ Strength through Joy organization or in drinking Coca-Cola at the 1936 Olympics, Germans who were deemed racially acceptable found multiple opportunities for pleasure, which in turn helped Hitler promote his vision of a volkisch economic and spiritual recovery.1 The year 1933 did not represent a break of such proportions that modern forms of enjoyment — film, music, radio — were altered beyond recognition. The Nazis employed these media both to propagate their ideological vision and to give the public familiar forms of visual and aural satisfaction.2

As we saw in the two preceding chapters, Nazi economic policy was not only centered on putting people back to work and preparing the country for war. It was also about engineering a proper racial and commercial sensibility. In the Nazi marketplace, the state and private companies communicated with Germans in their capacities as consumers, who held symbolic and actual power. Consumers had the ability to withhold support from the regime if the economy remained weak and to undermine a company by not buying its goods. Marketers and the Nazi Advertising Council therefore relied upon a number of tools to both appease and educate consumers. In the Third Reich companies found multiple opportunities for business, but the disparate aims of private industry and the regime created an uneasy tension. Schooling consumers in patience, frugality, and racial difference could be at odds with the desire to move products. Business leaders, who were encouraged to maintain a semblance of normality, were confused about how to implement a National Socialist agenda while protecting their own interests. Who exactly were these business leaders? How did they understand the new ideological terrain on which they operated? This chapter takes a closer look at these individuals – managers, company owners, and economists – and their participation in German Rotary Clubs during the Third Reich in order to understand the milieu in which Nazi ideas about commerce and consumption circulated. In a sense, this chapter uses the example of one civic association to understand the broader social and intellectual context of the Nazis’ market vision. As we will see, business in the Third Reich was not only about maintaining profits and healthy markets. The ascent of National Socialism also gave economic leaders an opportunity to explore their self-understanding as elites and to ask how their unfolding relationship with the consuming masses might be transformed after the tumultuous Weimar years. Nazism challenged them to forge an understanding of modern consumer society that would serve both their business interests and the Volksgemeinschaft. In their weekly conversations and debates, these bourgeois gentlemen breathed life into the ideas about achievement, trust, and virtuous economic behavior that were the hallmarks of the Nazi marketplace.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they promised to build a vibrant consumer society. But they faced a dilemma. They recognized that consolidating support for the regime required providing Germans with the products they desired. At the same time, the Nazis worried about the degrading cultural effects of mass consumption and its association with 'Jewish' interests. This book examines how both the state and private companies sought to overcome this predicament. Drawing on a wide range of sources - advertisements, exhibition programs, films, consumer research and marketing publications - the book traces the ways National Socialists attempted to create their own distinctive world of buying and selling. At the same time, it shows how corporate leaders and everyday Germans navigated what S. Jonathan Wiesen calls 'the Nazi marketplace'. A groundbreaking work that combines cultural, intellectual and business history, Creating the Nazi Marketplace offers an innovative interpretation of commerce and ideology in the Third Reich.

The sheer intensity and violence of Germany’s twentieth century—through the end of an empire, two world wars, two democracies, and two dictatorships—provide a unique opportunity to assess the power and endurance of commercial imagery in the most extreme circumstances. Selling Modernity places advertising and advertisements in this tumultuous historical setting, exploring such themes as the relationship between advertising and propaganda in Nazi Germany, the influence of the United States on German advertising, the use of advertising to promote mass consumption in West Germany, and the ideological uses and eventual prohibition of advertising in East Germany. While the essays are informed by the burgeoning literature on consumer society, Selling Modernity focuses on the actors who had the greatest stake in successful merchandising: company managers, advertising executives, copywriters, graphic artists, market researchers, and salespeople, all of whom helped shape the depiction of a company’s products, reputation, and visions of modern life. The contributors consider topics ranging from critiques of capitalism triggered by the growth of advertising in the 1890s to the racial politics of Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies during the Nazi era, and from the post-1945 career of an erotica entrepreneur to a federal anti-drug campaign in West Germany. Whether analyzing the growing fascination with racialized discourse reflected in early-twentieth-century professional advertising journals or the postwar efforts of Lufthansa to lure holiday and business travelers back to a country associated with mass murder, the contributors reveal advertising’s central role in debates about German culture, business, politics, and society. Contributors . Shelley Baranowski, Greg Castillo, Victoria de Grazia, Guillaume de Syon, Holm Friebe, Rainer Gries, Elizabeth Heineman, Michael Imort, Anne Kaminsky, Kevin Repp , Corey Ross, Jeff Schutts, Robert P. Stephens, Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, Jonathan R. Zatlin

For historians of postwar Germany and America, writing about “business relations” poses a formidable challenge. Although such a study might begin with a focus on finance and trade, one quickly discovers that “business” always transcends the realm of the economy proper. After 1945, transatlantic business relations were not only about trade or corporate partnerships, they were also about the transmission of mentalities and ideas. Postwar business relations entailed a collection of “sociopolitical,” “socioeconomic,” and “sociocultural interlacings.” Whether over a glass of wine or at a seminar on management strategies, whether in New York or in Frankfurt, American and West German businessmen met regularly to forge a vibrant transatlantic relationship. Corporate executives, company managers, economic publicists, and entrepreneurs came together to discuss not only business ventures and export statistics but also the political developments in both countries, the spiritual condition of “the West,” and the nature of democracy and totalitarianism. If we could eavesdrop on these private dialogues from 1945 to 1968, we would discover that West German and American businessmen were not immune to the broader preoccupations of the postwar period.