The Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE and the Institute for Banking and Financial History (IBF) organize and cordially invite you to attend an online lecture on:
Out of Hitlers Shadow: Debt, Guilt, and the German Economic Miracle
by Tobias Straumann (Zurich University)
to be held on 23 March 2026, 6:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. CET,
online via Zoom
Comments by Rui Esteves (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Moderation: Uwe Walz (Frankfurt University/SAFE)
The devastation left behind by Nazi Germany was immense. There were compelling reasons to require the defeated Germans to pay for Hitlers debts, as the New York Times described the vast scale of the destruction. Yet, while the Soviet Union imposed punitive measures on East Germany, the Western Allies
chose, at the London Debt Conference (1952), to waive all war-related debts. Why did the United States and its Western Allies adopt such a lenient approach in the aftermath of the most brutal war in history? In his recent book Out of Hitlers Shadow, Tobias Straumann seeks to answer this question and to examine its implications for contemporary Europe.
The Speakers
Tobias Straumann is a full professor of modern and economic history at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, a lecturer at the Department of Economics, the academic director of the Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in Applied History and a member of the UZH Center for Crisis Competence. His research focuses on financial and monetary history, the history of Swiss multinational companies and the political economy of Switzerland. More specifically, he is interested in the interplay between economic crises, institutions and politics. He also writes a monthly column for the business section of the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.
Comments by Rui Esteves, Professor of International Economics and International History at the Geneva Graduate Institute since 2018 and CEPR Economic History Program Director. He is a specialist in monetary and financial history with a particular interest in international finance, institutional economics and public finance. His research and teaching covers fields such as the history of the global financial system, financial crises, sovereign debt, payments and capital flows, financial markets micro-infrastructure and corruption in public office.
Moderation: Uwe Walz, who received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Tuebingen in 1991 and completed his habilitation at the University of Mannheim in 1995. Prior to joining the faculty of Goethe University in October 2002 he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Bochum (1995-1997) and at the University of Tuebingen (1997-2002). Furthermore, he was a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics and at the University of California, Berkeley. His current main research areas include private equity, start-up and growth finance, and innovation economics.
