Last week came word of perhaps the biggest suspect to date. Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest financial institution, was forced to admit it financed the death camp at Auschwitz and even lent money to the company which produced Zyklon B - the gas which poisoned the Jews of Europe. The firm wants to take over the US-based Bankers' Trust, and this embarrassing bit of history threatens to break the deal. It's that serious. Suddenly we are seeing that individuals and nations are not the only morally responsible agents.
Corporations are moral entities, too.
The Holocaust was not the sole creation of Adolf Eichmann or even the German people. Deutsche would like to believe there is not, that they had no say over the decisions of a half-century ago. The plaintiffs see it differently, arguing that Deutsche's executives are rich today only because their predecessors grew fat on Jewish suffering. But the rest of the world's corporations cannot dodge the point so easily. It goes beyond the current fashion for branding companies as 'families' or the slogans which insist 'we care'.