With the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 began a government – sponsored drive to exclude Jews from German economic life. As a result of a series of pressures – from local party officials, from public authorities who played a prominent role as customers, from party members in the enterprise and in the reconstituted works councils, from ambitious managers who wanted rapid promotion – Jews were removed from the managing boards and supervisory boards of major corporations.

Deutsche Bank was no exception in this general story. Believed by National Socialist ideologues to be all-powerful, represented on many supervisory boards, often holding the chairmanship, Deutsche Bank was inevitably involved in what amounted in practice to a large-scale purge of German economic life.

This purge is and was sometimes termed “aryanization.” This is a loose or elastic concept that encompasses both the economic effects of racial discrimination by customers and suppliers (“ordinary Germans”) and restrictive administrative practices (in giving permits to trade, in allocating foreign exchange) and finally concrete legal measures in 1938 that completed the exclusion of Jews from German business life.

Some writers consider that the first kind of “aryanization,” which came to be a major feature of the early years of the dictatorship, was in fact already under way well before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.