Dark Towers

In January 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. As he delivered his fiery Inaugural address, a grey-haired woman named Rosemary Vrablic sat in the VIP section of the audience. Vrablic was an executive at Deutsche Bank, and without her, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t have been moving into the White House.

This is the never-before-told story of how a 150-year-old German bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality, a history that traces back to its role helping the Nazis build Auschwitz. In the 1990s, a succession of hard-charging executives made the fateful decision to chase Wall Street riches—and set Deutsche Bank on an epic path of devastation. Its sins included manipulating markets, violating international sanctions, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs.