The world has become increasingly aware during the last few years that SS personnel weren't the only individuals who implemented the Third Reich's genocidal policies. As a result of a number of highly publicized lawsuits against German companies (and some American companies that owned German subsidiaries in the 1930s and 40s), the American and German publics are at last learning a great many disturbing facts about the relationship between the Nazi regime and German big business. Presenting these facts and offering a forum for various perspectives is the goal of this issue of Dimensions.

Our authors discuss a number of issues raised by the participation of some of Germany's largest and most formidable corporations in the Holocaust. All too many corporate executives, it appears, had no qualms about putting their expertise at the service of the Nazi regime. And so, these executives acquired even more power and wealth for their companies by exploiting slave and forced laborers, by expropriating businesses and property owned by Jews, and by financing, constructing, or profiting from the concentration and death camps.

One of our articles discusses how greed drove the Flick conglomerate to cooperate with the Nazi state. These corporations were not anomalies in the Third Reich. While the story of Oskar Schindler reveals that it was possible for a businessman to resist, even thwart, Nazi policies, our issue makes it clear just how rare Schindler's behavior was among Germany's business elite in the 1930s and 40s.

The scholars in this issue explore the contemporary implications of the moral culpability of German business, as well as the legal and other issues raised by the former slave and forced laborers seeking compensation from the companies that once abused them.

Many German corporations are now, finally, opening their archives to scholars, and some current leaders of the German business community are recognizing that they have a moral obligation to acknowledge their companies' past and to offer restitution to the men and women who suffered because of the activities of those companies during the Nazi era. This state of affairs is welcome news, a positive turn toward honesty and openness.

Also in this issue of Dimensions is a memoir by the noted artist and Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak, a memoir of the three years of his life that he spent at the Landsberg Displaced Persons camp after the Second World War. This powerful and moving article is presented as an acknowledgment of the 2000 Conference on Displaced Persons Camps at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For me, this subject holds a special place in my heart and mind. I, too, am filled with lingering memories of an earlier time and place, of a Displaced Persons camp in Austria.

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