Examining the role of the Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest commercial bank, in the Nazi dictatorship, Harold James asks how the bank accommodated itself to a transition from democracy and a market economy to dictatorship and a planned economy. How did the new Zeitgeist influence the bank? What opportunities for profit did it see in the National Socialist route out of the Great Depression? What role did anti-Semitism play in the bank's business relations and its dealing with employees? How was the bank connected to Auschwitz?

This history of three powerful family firms located in different European countries takes place over a period of more than two hundred years. The interplay and the changing social and legal arrangements of the families shaped the development of a European capitalism quite different from the Anglo-American variety.

Qualifying claims by Alfred Chandler and David Landes that family firms tend to be dysfunctional, Harold James shows how and why these steel and engineering firms were successful over long periods of time. Indeed, he sees the family enterprise as particularly conducive to...