Chapter 7 traces Commerzbank’s trajectory of financialisation to highlight how its extroverted strategies differed from those of Deutsche Bank. Commerzbank is a less-likely actor of financialisation as it is a smaller bank and has historically focused on the European SME sector. Commerzbank attempted a transformation without major relocation, and redirected fewer resources to its strategies of liability management (LM). While it established the first German foreign branch in the US in 1971, it never bought a major US or British institution. Commerzbank’s more hesitant approach meant that the bank failed to uphold itself in US money markets several times. The chapter shows that Commerzbank’s significant US immersion only happened during the GFC when it bought the larger Dresdner Bank during the 2008 financial crisis but could not manage Dresdner’s heavy exposure to US RMBS, eventually resulting in a public bailout. Commerzbank’s alternative story demonstrates that the rise of US finance made LM a transformative but differentiated concern for non-US banks.

This chapter details the increasingly indispensable part German big business played in expelling German Jews from economic life and dispossessing them, including in the annexed regions of Austria and the Czech lands. Avarice and self-defense were the principal motivators, with the latter becoming increasingly important as time passed.

The argument here is that German industry and finance were preprogrammed to participate in the murder of the Jews by decisions made before the war that could not be reversed. Big business thus collaborated fully in the process, becoming “bagmen” and “fences” for stolen Jewish property and providers of goods and services to death camps.