Why Holocaust Stories Still Have Meaning and Relevance

It’s been 64 years since the end of World War II but Holocaust stories in popular culture continue to cascade. Kate Winslet won an Oscar this year for her portrayal of a concentration camp guard in The Reader. John Demjanjuk, who served as a guard at three different death camps, was deported from the United States to Germany in May; now 89, he was implicated in the execution of 29,000 Jews. Two plays currently running in London deal with the collaboration of two German composers, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Richard Strauss, with the Nazis. And this year has seen the publication of The Third Reich at War, the third and final volume in Richard J. Evans’s gripping account of how Germany lost the war.

There are many people who surely throwing up their hands, saying: “Enough already. Why do we have to put up with this endless recitation of atrocities?” The best answer is probably Evans’s remarks at the end of his new book:

Most of us who lived through the Third Reich and fought in its wars are no longer with us. Within a few decades there will be no one left who remembers it at first hand. And yet its legacy is still alive in myriad ways.…The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted.

Evans’s history begins, “On September 1, 1939 the first of a grand total of sixty divisions of German troops crossed the Third Reich’s border with Poland.” I was 12 years old on that day and I remember looking at the headlines and recognizing that this was not good news for Jews. My father, his brother and his sister had made their way out of Eastern Europe to the United States in 1920. The rest of the family remained in a village that was alternately Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Soviet, and is now Ukrainian. Very few Jews live there anymore. I have photographs of my grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt and two cousins – people I have never met. I don’t know whether they were exterminated at Auschwitz or shot on the spot.

The point Evans makes about the moral dilemmas faced by people confronted with evil actions has direct relevance to social responsibility initiatives in the business world. How does a company respond to sweat shops in China, genocide in Darfur, sexual and racial discrimination in America? European companies that kowtowed to Hitler and were complicit in his demonic programs faced a backlash after the end of the war. Companies like Bayer and Daimler-Benz were asked to compensate their slave laborers. The giant insurance companies, Generali in Italy and Allianz in Germany, and the Swiss bankers were hit by a bevy of lawsuits over assets appropriated from Jewish clients. When families filed claims to get the proceeds from life insurance policies, companies demanded proof of death. Is it possible that executives of these companies didn’t know that death certificates were not issued at Auschwitz?

The Final Solution was so large and brutal that even when the slaughter was revealed, it was discounted as being “beyond belief.” And while Jews were the primary victims, others were also persecuted: gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, Poles, Russians, Italians. The Russians fared worst; 3.3 million Red Army POWs died in German captivity.

As the war wound down, the Germans accelerated their killing machine. Up to half of the 700,000 inmates of concentration camps at the start of 1945 were dead four months later. One was the young Dutch diarist Anne Frank, who died of typhus. Another was Lou Ernst, the first wife of the surrealist painter Max Ernst, who was shipped to Auschwitz on the next to last train. And perhaps my grandparents and their children were caught in those final days of the war since the Hungarian Jews were the last to be rounded up for extinction.

Bear Stearns Remembered

New Book Captures the Culture of a Wall Street High-Flier

by Milt Moskowitz

My stepson worked for 17 years at Bear Stearns before it disappeared last year into the bowels of JPMorgan Chase in the shotgun marriage arranged by the U.S. government. He is doing very well today, taking time off to consider his options.

He misses the excitement of deal making. His major deals involved structured financial products collateralized by mortgage-backed securities, the root cause of the current upheaval in the economy.  AIG was his top client.

Bear Stearns was not a company that made it into the portfolios of social investment companies, despite having one of the most innovative philanthropic programs in the business world. Every senior manager at Bear was required to prove, every year, that she or he had donated at least 4% of their income to charities of their choosing. Charities such as the United Way and United Jewish Appeal are said to be devastated by Bear’s collapse.

The culture of Bear always fascinated me, and it is artfully delineated in William Cohan’s book, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. Cohan traces the last days of the firm in rich detail, distilled from interviews he conducted with 16 former employees, and many who chose anonymity. He tells it so well that even though you know how it turns out, you are swept along with the suspense as all-night deliberations rattle on.

It’s not clear that Bear Stearns had to die. The firm fought to the end to maintain its franchise. But when you are leveraged 30 to 1 and rumors start to circulate that other banks do not want to lend to you, it doesn’t take long for the curtain to fall. In fact, it took only two days in the second week of March 2008 for Bear Stearns to see that, after 85 years, it had no future.

Some of the adjectives often used to describe Bear Stearns were: scrappy, aggressive, quirky, independent, cut-throat, street brawler. Went their own way. Didn’t pay a lot of attention to the niceties. The top echelon was studded with champion bridge players.

One insider interviewed by Cohan contrasted Bear Stearns with Goldman Sachs. At Bear, if they just did a deal with a customer, a trader might say: “I just ripped that f—er’s head off.” At Goldman, they would say about the same deal: “That was a very attractive and commercial price [we] purchased those securities at and I think we will have a very interesting economic opportunity in the near future.”

Cohan’s book is full of interesting tidbits like that. Jimmy Cayne stepped down as CEO in January 2008 but stayed on as chairman. In March, Cayne decided not to wait for the formal sale to JPMorgan and opted to sell his 5.6 million shares for $61 million. Although he had worked at Bear for 39 years, Cayne, at that point, was no longer technically an employee. Ace Greenberg, who had hired him and was Bear’s CEO for 15 years before Cayne deposed him in 1993, was still working for the firm – and he charged Cayne the non-employee commission of $77,000 for that sale; an employee would have to pay only $2,500. And so it goes.

Was Bear’s free-wheeling culture the reason for the firm’s demise? That’s hard to say. Every other investment banking firm was behaving in the same manner. The final verdict in Cohan’s book goes to Alan Schwartz, the last CEO of Bear. He said:

“I’m sure we will figure out how to prevent something like this from happening in the future. Wall Street is always good at fighting the last war. But these things happen and they’re big, and when they happen everybody tries to look at what happened in the previous six months to find someone or something to blame it on. But, in truth, it was a team effort. We all f—ed up. Government. Rating agencies, Wall Street. Commercial banks. Regulators. Investors. Everybody.” (Of course it’s somewhat self-serving to blame others when the finger is pointing at you.)

My stepson puts it more succinctly: “Wall Street is all about greed. It was that way in the past. It still is.  And it probably will be in the future.”

It Seems to Me

In Memoriam: Anita Roddick, Frizzy-Haired Lady Who Pioneered Social Responsibility in Business

Anita Roddick, fiery founder of the Body Shop cosmetic stores, died last September 11. She was only 64. No one who ever met Anita is likely to forget the passion, energy and dedication that she brought to building the Body Shop into an exemplar of corporate social responsibility. I remember her poking fun at big corporate titans with kindred soul Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s. They were both more interested in the social missions of their companies than the business mission. They both loved poking fun at big corporate titans.

At her death the Body Shop had 2,000 branches in 53 countries, but it was no longer an independent company. Anita sold the Body Shop to the French cosmetics giant, L’Oreal, for $1.3 billion in 2006. Some immediately accused her of selling out. That’s about the last thing Anita Roddick would do. She became a consultant to L’Oreal and fashioned herself a “Trojan Horse” who would move the French company in the right direction.
Dame Anita Roddick (as of 2003) made a number of pithy observations about the business world. Most of the following are from her 1991 book, Body & Soul:

I have no doubt that wealth is corrosive. No matter how sensible I try to be, I think I am corroded by my own wealth.

I hate the beauty business. It is a monster industry selling unattainable dreams. It lies. It cheats. It exploits women. Its major product lines are packaging and garbage.

The trouble is that the business world is too conservative and fearful of change. All this talk about free enterprise, innovation, entrepreneurship, individuality — it’s nothing but hot air.

I believe that if companies are in business solely to make money, you can’t really trust whatever they do or say.

I am still looking for the modern-day equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently, worked hard, spent honestly, saved honestly, gave honest value for money, put back more than they took out and told no lies. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

Large corporations are trying, bless them. Are they trying hard enough? No, but none of us is because the financial institutions are like fascists and just want a return.

After some people criticized her for selling Body Shop to L’Oreal, Anita argued on her website that it would probably have been more valid to accuse her of selling out when she and her husband, Gordon Roddick, took the company public in 1984. Anita explained:

We then became ‘owned’ by people who were happy to downgrade our stock at the merest whiff of community trade, who believed that pioneering an end to animal testing in cosmetics was a threat to our share price….That was, I now realize, selling out. To people for whom a brave, idiosyncratic, maverick, fighting for human rights or social justice in business was a threat to everything they stood for.

Anita Roddick was, in effect, the anti-corporate business leader. She recognized that a lot of people saw the Body Shop “as a flaky organization led by a madwoman with frizzy hair.” She did go her own way. She hated meeting with security analysts. She once spoke at a meeting organized by the ad agency J. Walter Thompson – her theme was “Why I would never use an advertising agency.” When the Body Shop invaded the U.S. in 1988, the Wall Street Journal quoted a Harvard Business School professor who said the company would need, “at minimum,” a major launch advertising campaign. Anita’s response was: “I’ll never hire anybody from Harvard Business School.” And she didn’t. And the Body Shop never advertised.