Recently there has been a remarkable increase in interest in the business history of Germany in the Nazi era, and especially in the economic history of the Holocaust – the analysis of the economics behind discriminatory measures that prepared the way for the mass murder of Jews and other racially or biologically defined groups who lived in Germany or in the areas conquered by German soldiers. For a long time, there was relatively scant academic interest in the story of the expropriation of German Jews and its function in German economic life.

There is certainly an extensive literature on the relationship of big business and National Socialism; consequently, the revival of interest in this theme in the 1990s may appear quite puzzling. Much of the older literature, from the 1930s on, concentrated on the extent to which the support – especially the financial support – of business facilitated Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The analysis that emphasized the antidemocratic consequences of large concentrations of economic power underlay Allied wartime and postwar plans for the restructuring and democratization of Germany. For the United States, the problem lay in cartels, trusts, and big banks, and the occupation authorities consequently embarked on decartellization, detrustification, and a regionalization of banking along U.S. lines (where banks were restricted to one state). This view was reflected in the reports compiled for the Office of the Military Government of the United States (OMGUS).