David Enrich – Dark Towers: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
• Author: David Enrich
• Genre: History & Politics, Business & Economics
• Pages: 416
• Published Year: 2020
• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Language: English
• Awards: Finalist for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award; Winner of the 2021 Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book

Audio Summary

Synopsis

Dark Towers traces Deutsche Bank’s 150-year history of taking risks other banks wouldn’t touch—from financing the Nazi regime to bankrolling Donald Trump when no one else would. New York Times journalist David Enrich exposes how the bank’s addiction to high-risk deals transformed it from a conservative German institution into a reckless global player. When American traders brought Wall Street’s cowboy culture to Frankfurt in the 1980s, winning became everything, and any means justified profitable ends. The story culminates with executive Bill Broeksmit’s 2014 suicide, symbolizing the human cost of institutional greed. This meticulously researched narrative reveals the dangerous intersection of finance, politics, and power.

Key Takeaways

• Deutsche Bank built its success on taking risks other financial institutions avoided, establishing a dangerous pattern of dealing with unscrupulous characters from its founding in 1870
• The bank’s transformation in the 1980s from conservative German institution to aggressive Wall Street player fundamentally changed its culture, prioritizing winning and profits over ethics and responsibility
• Deutsche’s willingness to work with Donald Trump when other banks refused demonstrates how institutional desperation can override sound judgment and risk management
• The tragic suicide of executive Bill Broeksmit in 2014 symbolizes the devastating human cost of unchecked corporate greed and the psychological toll of participating in destructive financial practices
• Regulatory oversight often lags behind financial innovation, allowing banks to exploit loopholes and engage in risky behavior until catastrophic consequences force intervention

My Summary

A Bank Built on Dangerous Risks

I’ll be honest—when I picked up David Enrich’s Dark Towers, I expected another dry financial exposé that would put me to sleep by chapter three. Instead, I found myself reading late into the night, genuinely shocked by how one institution could consistently make such spectacularly bad decisions for over a century and still survive.

Enrich, a financial editor at The New York Times, has crafted something rare: a banking book that reads like a thriller. But what makes this work truly unsettling is that every outrageous detail is meticulously documented and true. From financing Hitler’s concentration camps to becoming Donald Trump’s lender of last resort, Deutsche Bank’s story is a masterclass in how institutional culture can normalize the unthinkable.

The book opens with a scene from 1883 that sets the tone for everything that follows. Georg von Siemens, representing the young Deutsche Bank, watches railroad tycoon Henry Villard hammer in the ceremonial last spike of a transcontinental railroad that Deutsche had financed. Within weeks, Villard’s company defaulted, and Deutsche lost its investment. Villard himself refused to accept any blame, despite having used borrowed money to build himself a Manhattan mansion.

Here’s the kicker: instead of cutting ties with this obvious charlatan, Siemens became his close friend and sent him back to America three years later to find more investment opportunities for Deutsche. Predictably, Villard’s next venture also went bankrupt. This pattern—of choosing profit potential over character assessment, of prioritizing relationships over accountability—would repeat itself throughout the bank’s history.

From Nazi Gold to Wall Street Cowboys

The darkest chapter in Deutsche’s history came during the Nazi regime. Enrich doesn’t shy away from the horrifying details: Deutsche Bank converted gold stolen from Holocaust victims into cash, including dental fillings extracted from murdered prisoners. The bank financed the construction of Auschwitz and the factory that produced Zyklon B, the poison gas used in death chambers.

What struck me most wasn’t just the moral bankruptcy of these actions—it was what happened afterward. Hermann Abbs, the bank’s wartime director, was convicted of war crimes but received only a light sentence because Britain needed a strong German bank to help pay World War I reparations. By 1956, Abbs was running Deutsche again. This impunity set another dangerous precedent: consequences were negotiable if you were important enough to the economic system.

The bank’s transformation into a global risk-taking machine accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. When Alfred Herrhausen took over in 1987, he looked enviously at the booming economies in the UK and US, driven by financial innovation and aggressive investment banking. In 1989, Deutsche acquired British investment bank Morgan Grenfell for $1.5 billion—then the largest acquisition of an investment bank ever.

But the real culture shock came when Deutsche hired American traders Edson Mitchell and Bill Broeksmit to lead its derivatives trading operation. These weren’t your stereotypical buttoned-up German bankers. Mitchell had started his career doing accounts for an egg farm in Maine and embodied the “work hard, play hard” ethos of Wall Street. He and Broeksmit were experts in derivatives—financial products whose value derives from other products.

When Betting Became Banking

Derivatives were initially marketed as helpful innovations, like ATMs or 30-year mortgages. And in some applications, they genuinely were useful tools for managing risk. But Wall Street had discovered they could also be used for pure speculation—essentially sophisticated gambling. It was hugely profitable, and suddenly Mitchell and Broeksmit were the most popular guys in finance.

Mitchell convinced Deutsche to give him $2 billion to build a London-based trading operation. He doubled his workforce in 18 months, poaching talent from Wall Street with massive salaries. Broeksmit joined with a compensation package in the high seven figures. These Americans brought more than financial expertise—they imported an entirely different philosophy of banking.

The traditional Deutsche culture valued conservative, consensus-based decision-making. The Americans replaced it with risk-taking machismo and cowboy individualism. They literally had to be trained to pronounce “Deutsche” correctly because they’d been telling people they worked at “Douche Bank.” (I laughed out loud at this detail, even as I recognized it as a metaphor for the deeper cultural clash.)

This transformation reflects a broader shift in global finance that I’ve witnessed in my years covering business books. The 1980s and 1990s saw the financialization of everything—the idea that moving money around could be more profitable than making actual products or providing real services. Deutsche’s pivot wasn’t unique, but its willingness to take risks others wouldn’t made it an extreme example of this trend.

The Trump Connection

By the time Donald Trump needed financing for his real estate projects in the late 1990s and 2000s, most American banks had learned their lesson about lending to him. He had a history of defaults, bankruptcies, and litigious behavior that made him radioactive in traditional banking circles. But Deutsche Bank, desperate to prove itself as a major player in American markets, saw an opportunity where others saw a liability.

Enrich traces the bank’s relationship with Trump in meticulous detail, showing how institutional desperation can override individual judgment. Even within Deutsche, different divisions had conflicting experiences with Trump—one part of the bank would lose money on a Trump deal while another division would immediately turn around and lend him more. The right hand literally didn’t know what the left hand was doing, or perhaps didn’t want to know.

This resonates with something I’ve noticed in researching corporate decision-making: large institutions can maintain contradictory positions because no single person has to take full responsibility. When things go wrong, everyone can point to someone else. It’s a diffusion of accountability that enables behavior no individual would defend if they had to own it completely.

The Human Cost of Institutional Greed

The most tragic figure in Enrich’s narrative is Bill Broeksmit, the executive who helped build Deutsche’s derivatives empire. In January 2014, Broeksmit hanged himself in his London home. He left behind a wife, children, and questions about what drove a successful, wealthy banker to such despair.

Enrich suggests that Broeksmit had become increasingly troubled by the ethical implications of his work and the bank’s direction. As regulatory pressure mounted and Deutsche’s excesses became harder to ignore, Broeksmit found himself caught between loyalty to the institution that had made him rich and recognition of the damage it had caused.

This is where Dark Towers transcends typical financial journalism. Broeksmit’s story humanizes the abstract concept of “institutional greed.” It’s easy to be outraged by a corporation’s bad behavior, but harder to grapple with the reality that corporations are made up of individual people—many of them intelligent, well-meaning, and ultimately complicit in systems they may have come to question.

Reading about Broeksmit’s suicide, I thought about other books I’ve covered that explore moral injury—the psychological damage that occurs when you participate in actions that violate your core values. It happens to soldiers in war, but it can also happen to bankers in suits. The pressure to keep winning, to keep generating profits, to maintain the lifestyle and status that success has brought—these forces can trap people in situations they know are wrong.

Why This Matters Now

Some readers might wonder why they should care about the internal workings of a German bank. The answer is that Deutsche Bank’s story is really a story about how modern financial systems work—or don’t work. The bank’s behavior wasn’t aberrant; it was an extreme version of patterns that exist throughout the industry.

The 2008 financial crisis revealed how interconnected global banking had become and how the failure of one institution could threaten the entire system. Deutsche Bank survived that crisis, but barely. Enrich shows how the same cultural factors that led to the 2008 meltdown—excessive risk-taking, inadequate oversight, prioritizing short-term profits over long-term stability—continued at Deutsche even after the crisis should have taught everyone a lesson.

In our current moment, with ongoing debates about financial regulation, corporate accountability, and the relationship between business and government, Dark Towers provides essential context. It demonstrates that without robust oversight and enforcement, financial institutions will push boundaries until they break. The “invisible hand” of the market doesn’t naturally lead to ethical behavior; it leads to whatever generates the highest returns, ethics be damned.

Applying These Lessons to Everyday Life

You might be thinking, “I’m not a banker or a regulator—what does this have to do with me?” Fair question. But I think there are several practical takeaways that apply beyond Wall Street:

Institutional culture matters more than individual ethics. Deutsche Bank surely employed many people who, as individuals, would never dream of financing concentration camps or enabling fraud. But institutional culture can normalize behaviors that individuals would reject in isolation. This applies to any organization you’re part of—from your workplace to your community groups. Pay attention to what behaviors are rewarded and what gets rationalized away.

Past behavior predicts future behavior, especially for institutions. Deutsche’s pattern of taking risks others wouldn’t, of dealing with unscrupulous characters, of prioritizing profit over principle—this pattern was established in 1870 and continued for 150 years. When evaluating organizations (including potential employers, business partners, or investment opportunities), look at their track record over time, not just their current marketing message.

Complexity can hide accountability. One reason Deutsche could maintain its relationship with Trump even after losing money on him repeatedly was that the bank was so large and complex that no single person had to take full responsibility. In your own life, be wary of situations where responsibility is so diffused that nobody is really accountable. Whether it’s a group project at work or a community initiative, clear accountability leads to better outcomes.

Regulatory oversight requires constant vigilance. Enrich shows how regulations often lag behind financial innovation, allowing banks to exploit loopholes until disaster strikes. This pattern applies to many areas of modern life—from social media platforms to gig economy companies. As citizens, we need to support robust regulatory frameworks and enforcement, even when they seem burdensome, because the alternative is often catastrophic failure.

Moral injury is real. If you find yourself in a situation where your work requires you to violate your core values, that’s not just an abstract ethical problem—it’s a threat to your psychological wellbeing. Broeksmit’s tragedy is an extreme example, but the underlying dynamic exists in many workplaces. It’s worth considering whether any amount of money is worth that kind of internal conflict.

What Enrich Gets Right (and Wrong)

Enrich’s greatest strength is his reporting. This book is based on hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of documents, and years of investigative work. The level of detail is impressive—you really feel like you’re inside Deutsche Bank’s offices, witnessing the decisions as they happen. His prose is clear and engaging, avoiding the jargon that makes many financial books impenetrable to general readers.

The structure is also smart. By focusing on key figures like Mitchell and Broeksmit, Enrich gives readers emotional entry points into what could otherwise be an abstract story about institutional failure. We care about what happens because we’ve come to know these people as characters, not just as names in a financial scandal.

However, some critics (and some readers on Goodreads) have noted that Enrich occasionally lets his personal opinions and experiences intrude on the narrative. As someone who writes in a personal voice myself, I’m sympathetic to this approach—but I can see how readers looking for pure objective reporting might find it distracting. There’s a balance between providing context and interpretation versus editorializing, and Enrich doesn’t always stay on the right side of that line.

Another limitation is that while Enrich thoroughly documents what happened, he’s less successful at explaining why the broader financial system continues to enable institutions like Deutsche Bank. The book ends with Deutsche still operating, still taking risks, still facing regulatory scrutiny but never quite facing existential consequences. Some readers wanted more analysis of potential solutions or reforms, though to be fair, that might have been a different book entirely.

Comparing Dark Towers to Other Financial Exposés

If you’re interested in understanding how we got to our current financial system, Dark Towers fits into a broader genre of financial journalism that includes books like Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s All the Devils Are Here, and Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia.

What distinguishes Enrich’s work is the long historical perspective. While Lewis focuses on the 2008 crisis and the traders who saw it coming, Enrich traces patterns back to the 19th century. This longer view reveals that the 2008 crisis wasn’t an aberration—it was the predictable result of cultural and institutional factors that had been building for decades.

Enrich’s book is also more international in scope than many American financial books. By focusing on a German institution operating globally, he shows how financial contagion crosses borders and how regulatory arbitrage—playing different countries’ rules against each other—enables risky behavior.

If I had to recommend a reading order, I’d suggest starting with Lewis’s The Big Short for an accessible, entertaining introduction to financial crisis, then moving to Enrich’s Dark Towers for deeper historical context, and finally tackling McLean and Nocera’s All the Devils Are Here for comprehensive analysis of the 2008 crisis specifically.

Questions Worth Pondering

After finishing Dark Towers, I found myself wrestling with questions that don’t have easy answers. If an institution is “too big to fail”—meaning its collapse would threaten the entire economic system—does that give it implicit permission to take excessive risks, knowing it will be bailed out? How do we create accountability for corporate decisions when responsibility is so diffused that no individual feels personally culpable?

I’m also curious about the cultural dimensions. The clash between traditional German banking conservatism and aggressive American risk-taking is a fascinating subplot in Enrich’s narrative. Did Deutsche’s downfall require both elements—the German unwillingness to admit mistakes combined with American cowboy recklessness? Would a purely German or purely American institution have made different choices?

Most fundamentally: can we design financial systems that serve the real economy—helping businesses grow, enabling people to buy homes, facilitating productive investment—without creating the conditions for catastrophic failure? Or is boom-and-bust crisis just the price we pay for dynamic capitalism?

Final Thoughts from Books4Soul

I came away from Dark Towers both enlightened and disturbed. Enlightened because Enrich has provided a comprehensive, accessible explanation of how modern banking actually works beneath the respectable surface. Disturbed because the patterns he documents—institutional recklessness, regulatory capture, diffused accountability—show no signs of changing.

This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the financial forces shaping our world. It’s particularly valuable for younger readers who might have been too young to fully grasp the 2008 crisis but are now entering a financial system that hasn’t fundamentally reformed itself. The same dynamics that led to that crisis, and to Deutsche Bank’s ongoing problems, are still operating today.

If you’ve read Dark Towers, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Did it change how you think about banking and finance? Did you find Enrich’s Trump coverage compelling or distracting from the broader institutional story? And what do you think it would take to actually reform these systems?

For those who haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend picking up a copy. Yes, it’s a hefty 416 pages, and yes, it covers some dark material (the title is apt). But Enrich’s narrative skills make it surprisingly readable, and the insights are worth the investment of time. Understanding how we got here is the first step toward imagining how we might do better.

As always, thanks for being part of the Books4Soul community. These conversations matter, and I’m grateful to share this reading journey with you all.