Readers should know from the outset that this book came into being under unusual circumstances and auspices for a scholarly work. During the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and the completion of German unification removed political impediments to an examination of several issues related to Nazi-era war crimes that had remained incompletely or unsatisfactorily resolved since 1945. As a result, the name of the Degussa corporation of Frankfurt began to appear frequently in news publications worldwide. It surfaced first in connection with revelations concerning the plundered gold, some of it processed by this firm, that the Nazi state had used to pay for vital wartime imports, primarily via Switzerland, and that had remained, for the most part, in that nation's bank vaults ever since. Later, Degussa's American subsidiaries became the object of widely discussed class action suits filed in United States courts. These proceedings sought restitution or compensation payments to the surviving victims of not only the spoliation of precious metals, but also the parent firm's roles in the manufacture of Zyklon B, the infamous pesticide used to massacre hundreds of thousands of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, and in the exploitation of forced laborers, many of them drawn from ghettoes and concentration camps.

Stung by widespread public criticism and eager to demonstrate good faith in establishing a reliable record of Degussa's conduct, the corporation's board of directors resolved in 1997 to follow the example of several other large German enterprises and to charge a recognized scholar in the fields of German, Holocaust, and business history with the task of preparing a detailed study of their firm in the Nazi era.