Bouřlivá léta: Baťovské podnikatelské aktivity v širší střední Evropě za druhé světové války

This study focuses on the dealings of concerns during the Second World War. Based on the example of Baťa, the author describes the development and transformation of the concern’s business activities on the eve of the war and during the war itself within the wider territory of Central Europe, which is for the purposes of this study limited to the lands of Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. In the treatment of this subject there was a deliberate preference for a problem-based orientation, because it also enables the revelation of some more general questions connected with the phenomenon of Baťa’s business activities. There is space dedicated to the practical steps taken as well as to the preservation of the concern’s property in markets where they had already operated in the past, and also to evaluation of the methods that were to have provided for expansion into territories that had not yet been occupied. In this context, a reconstruction is provided for institutional and personal ties in particular between the controlling company in Zlín, the affiliated financial centers with headquarters in Switzerland and the United States, and finally with the individual subsidiary companies in the countries that were analyzed.