Bertelsmann SE & Co.

The Bertelsmann Group was established in 1835 as a Protestant publishing house in the village of Gtersloh in Westphalia in Central Germany. It was a kind of Protestant revivalist publishing house that distributed theological booklets, treatises, and literature for young people, less via bookshops than through schools, associations, and door-to-door sales. The neoliberal influence that the Bertelsmann Foundation exerts on politics, education, health, and public administration in Germany and in the EU is so great that German critics of corporations have now coined the term Bertelsmannisierung. The particular political sensitivities in the United States caused the Bertelsmann Group to come to grips with its Nazi past. When, in 1998, Bertelsmann acquired Random House, a former Jewish group of publishers, thus becoming the world's largest book publisher, the group placated the American public, who were astonished by the acquisition, by saying that during the Nazi era Bertelsmann published books that were ostensibly subversive.