October 27, 2005
Hayes to deliver lecture on business and the Third Reich at Clark on Nov. 10
WORCESTER, Mass. - Peter Hayes, Ph.D., Theodore Z. Weiss Professor of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University will deliver
“From Aryanization to Auschwitz: Degussa in the Third Reich” at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 10, in Clark University’s Tilton Hall, Higgins University Center, 950 Main Street.
From 1933 to 1945, virtually all of Germany’s leading corporations cooperated with, then became complicit in the Nazi assault on the Jews. Hayes’most recent book “From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press 2004),” details the incremental moral corruption of otherwise honorable executives who expropriated Jewish property, employed forced and slave labor, refined stolen gold and silver, and supplied, through a subsidiary firm, the gas used to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Nazi death camps.
Hayes will discuss to what extent corporate leaders at the German Gold and Silver Separation Institute (Degussa) adjusted their principles to accommodate the Third Reich.
Hayes is the author of “Industry and Ideology,” a now classic study of the huge conglomerate IG Farben during the Nazi Era. The study was awarded the 1988 Biennial Book Prize of the Conference Group for Central European History, a section of the American Historical Association. He is currently working on two other books, “Profits and Persecution: German Big Business and the Holocaust” and “The Failure of a Generation: German Elites and National Socialism.”
Hayes earned his A.B. magna cum laude from Bowdoin College. He has a B.A. and M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.
He has been at Northwestern University since 1980, and currently teaches history and German. He also directs the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern, serves on the Academic Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the German Society for Business History. He is the recipient of Northwestern's Distinguished Teaching Award and the Alumni Association's Excellence in Teaching Award.
This event is sponsored by the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. It is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception. For more information, call 508-793-8897.
The mission of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies is to educate undergraduate and graduate students about genocide and the Holocaust; to host a lecture series, free of charge and open to the public; to use scholarship to address current problems stemming from the murderous past; and to participate in the public discussion about a host of issues ranging from the significance of state-sponsored denial of the Armenian genocide and well-funded denial of the Holocaust to intervention in and prevention of genocidal situations today.
Clark University is a private, co-educational liberal-arts research university with 2,000 undergraduate and 600 graduate students. Since its founding in 1887 as the first all-graduate school in New England, Clark has challenged convention with innovative programs such as the International Studies Stream, the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the five-year BA/MA programs with the fifth year tuition-free for eligible students.
Angela M. Bazydlo
Associate Director of Media Relations
Clark University
Worcester, Mass.
phone: 508-793-7635
www.clarku.edu
|
