Accountability for death(s): Reconceptualising corporate responsibility through thanatoaccountability

This article challenges the narrow confines of traditional accountability by introducing thanatoaccountability as a theoretical framework. Through an analysis of the German company Degussa during the Holocaust, we uncover how accounting metrics and accountability mechanisms actively obscured and normalised corporate participation in genocide. Drawing on archival analysis, we show how accounting and accountability mechanisms were repurposed to identify, exclude and ultimately erase Jewish life – first from markets, then from the political sphere and finally from existence itself. Degussa's progression from initial resistance to active complicity reveals how routine business practices, cloaked in bureaucratic neutrality, normalised genocide, even when financial gains were minimal. Thanatoaccountability not only exposes the inadequacy of conventional legal and financial accountability in capturing these processes but also offers crucial analytical tools for understanding how modern corporations normalise systematic death, highlighting how accounting practices can be weaponised to facilitate death while simultaneously shielding corporations from accountability for those death(s).