"Business complications do strange things to our patriotism and to our ethics," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1945. It has taken half a century, but historians are responding to her indirect appeal to confront US corporations that supported Nazi Germany.

In the past decade, particularly in Germany, a number of historians such as Ulrich Herbert and Karl Heinz Roth have turned away from cold war academic debates and traditional approaches to pursue research from the bottom up, studying regions and cities where Nazi crimes occurred, recording oral histories and writing about forgotten victims. Such studies have led to the corporate institutions that benefited from human suffering.

Corporate policies and practices during World War II, often extreme but not isolated, point to related activities of multinationals today. The ways used by big business "to pursue profits and interests abroad by the means they see fit, regardless of the costs to foreign peoples, have not been reformed," writes Nicholas Levis, co-author of Working for the Enemy.

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