Join celebrated Holocaust scholar Peter Hayes for the AHEC’s annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture. Hosted in partnership with the UAB Department of History, this lecture will provide an exclusive preview of Hayes’ upcoming book, Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust.

Were German businesses Nazi collaborators, or were they just doing business with the Nazis? Hayes will explore how German businesses during the Nazi regime became involved with and vital to the Nazi persecution, exploitation, and murder of the Jewish people. He will reveal how the Nazi regime used a corrupting combination of intimidation and temptation to win the support of the German corporate world and earn their participation in what he terms “the normalization of barbarism.” Shockingly, few of these businessmen were ever brought to justice for their actions, and Hayes will unravel the mystery of why and how these individuals escaped prosecution.

The event will be held at UAB’s Hulsey Auditorium on November 7th with a reception at 5:30pm. The lecture will then promptly begin at 6:00pm. Join us to learn more about how ordinary German businesses became Nazi collaborators and enjoy a sneak peek of Hayes’ new book! 

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Meet Our Speaker:

Professor Peter Hayes holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale University. He was a professor in History and German at Northwestern University from 1980 to 2016, as well as the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor from 2000 to 2016.

His works on the Holocaust include Why? Explaining the Holocaust (2017), How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010) that he edited with John K. Roth; and German Railroads, Jewish Souls (2020), a study of deportation trains that he and Christopher Browning assembled. He has just completed a book entitled Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust, which will appear in both English and German in 2025.  His publications have won several prizes and been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, and Spanish.

From 2014 to 2019, Hayes chaired the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on which he served for a total of twenty years.  An award-winning teacher, he lectures widely on German and Holocaust history in the United States and abroad.

Buy His New Book

Thank You to Our Partner:

The Alabama Holocaust Education Center would like to thank our partner, the UAB Department of History, for supporting our 2024 Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture.