Peter Hayes

Peter Hayes holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale and was from 1980 to 2016 Professor of History and German and from 2000 to 2016 Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University. His publications have won several prizes and been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, and Spanish. His acclaimed study of IG Farben, Industry and Ideology, received the Biennial Book Prize from the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association. In his monumental history of the Nazi economy entitled The Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze called Industry and Ideology "the best book on IG, indeed the best book on business in the Third Reich." Hayes has long supported the work of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, notably in preparing How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he formerly chaired the Academic Committee. Also an award-winning teacher, he lectures widely on German and Holocaust history in the United States and abroad.