:The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank.

This thoroughly researched, closely annotated book is one of several made possible recently by the opening of the voluminous records of Germany's biggest bank to unfettered historical research. It is an augmented version of Harold James's portion of an earlier work commissioned by the bank, which was written by an international team of historians and published in both English and German: Lothar Gall et al., eds., The Deutsche Bank 1870–1995 (1995). As was the case with that work, the bank records used in the current book are open to all other scholars. In a new overall assessment of the bank's history during the Third Reich, James notes that German bankers faced the daunting problem of operating under a dictatorial regime unfettered by law that espoused principles “aimed fundamentally at the destruction of the economic system in which and for which they functioned” (p. 19). At the core of Nazi ideology lay a hostility toward finance capitalism encapsulated in the party program's commitment to “breaking the serfdom of interest.” As James observes, the party associated bankers “with the allegedly defunct economy of ‘liberal individualism’ and found them to be at odds with its notions of state‐led economic activity” (p. 19). The Nazis therefore periodically subjected banks and bankers to propagandistic attacks throughout the Third Reich. Their hostility was directed with particular vehemence at the handful of nation‐wide “Great Banks” with headquarters in Berlin, among which the Deutsche Bank was the largest. James sees the responses of the latter's directors to this adverse political environment as characterized by a clash of two strategies of adaptation: “on the one hand, self‐defense against the intrusions of party and state; but accommodation and compromise on the other” (p. 19). As his study makes clear, the latter strategy increasingly prevailed.