This book has had a long gestation. I began thinking about the theme in the late 1980s, when the Deutsche Bank invited me to write one chapter in a history to be published on its one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary, in 1995. The aim at that time was – from the point of view of the bank – a very courageous one, in that it was prepared to allow an outside team of scholars to write an uncontrolled, uncensored, and unexpurgated history of the bank. In the course of the later 1990s, after the book was published, a great deal of public interest and attention focused on the role and behavior of corporations in the Nazi period in the wake of class actions in U.S. courts. Much new material became available at the same time: in central Europe and Russia, as a consequence of the end of the Cold War; in the United States, as records relevant to the Second World War and its aftermath were declassified; and in Germany, as (at least some) corporations tried to assemble all the documentation relevant to their history.

In 1998, the Deutsche Bank invited five historians (the other four were Avraham Barkai, Lothar Gall, Gerald D. Feldman, and Jonathan Steinberg) to form a commission to examine the history of the bank in the Nazi era and to assess the new documentation that was becoming available. Jonathan Steinberg prepared an initial report, on gold transactions during the Second World War.