ABSTRACT
Among the most alarming features of Nazi rule was its success in rigging market mechanisms and perverting moral values without dispensing with either. Between Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 and his unleashing of the Second World War in 1939, his regime constructed an elaborate system of controls and incentives that bridled and spurred corporate competition within Germany and lent credibility to his Party’s claim to have found a powerful and productive “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. Simultaneously, the self-styled Third Reich fostered what the theologian Paul Tillich termed a “transmoral conscience.” It elevated deeds formerly regarded as evil or criminal into expressions of a new and higher ethical code and thus channeled the fervor of a generation into the service of persecution and exploitation. This chapter examines the corrupting effects of both transformations on a single German chemical enterprise, known during the Nazi era as the German Gold and Silver Separation Institute, formerly Roessler, of Frankfurt am Main, but nowadays as Degussa, an acronym of its original German name.
