Big industry and the rise of the NSDAP

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The question of the share of large-scale industry in the rise of the NSDAP is a central subject in historical studies in the political and scientific discussion of National Socialism and the final phase of the Weimar Republic . The main controversial issue is whether and to what extent large-scale industry supported the NSDAP in the decisive years after the Reichstag elections from 1930 to the beginning of National Socialist rule in 1933.

Mostly Marxist historians claimed that it was essentially the owners and representatives of large corporations who brought Adolf Hitler to power. The American historian Henry Ashby Turner contradicted this in various publications since the 1970s. The results of his research sparked a heated controversy. Turner's positions were mainly confirmed. Today, the thesis that financial support is provided by Industrial is a contributing factor to the rise of the Nazi party to power was, from the doctrine rejected in History.

Berlin / Sportpalast, 1932, NS factory cell meeting: “ Chase the bigwigs out of their chairs! “The Weimar Republic was ridiculed by the Nazi regime as a bonzocracy (“ corruption state ”). After the alignment in 1933, however, the use of this term decreased.

Assessment by contemporaries

As early as the 1920s and 1930s, many contemporaries were convinced that National Socialism was being financed by big industry. Carl von Ossietzky, for example, believed that he did not have to deal with National Socialism on the left-wing democratic world stage , because they saw it as externally controlled by industry:

“ Hugenberg will not let his Golem Hitler become too independent; if he no longer needs it, he will simply block his income, and the National Socialist movement will disappear as mysteriously as it has mysteriously grown in these last two years. "

The conviction that the Nazi movement was only an instrument of the capitalists who financed it found its graphic expression in John Heartfield's photomontage , which appeared on the cover of the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung in October 1932 . Under the headline: "The meaning of the Hitler salute" you can see Hitler with an arm bent backwards in greeting; Standing behind him, an oversized figure in a suit puts several thousand-mark bills in his hand; the text “Millions stand behind me” satirizes Hitler's language with a joke .

The thesis expressed in Heartfield's montage resembles the formulation of the Marxist-Leninist theory of fascism by the 13th plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) in December 1933, which Georgi Dimitrov adopted at the 7th World Congress of the Communist International in August 1935:

"Fascism in power, comrades, is, as the 13th plenum of the ECCI has rightly characterized it," the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary , most chauvinist , most imperialist elements of finance capital . "

If the National Socialists were the agents of the monopoly capitalists, then it was obvious that they had paid them too. This belief became an integral part of the Soviet communist ideology as an agent theory .

In the 1920s it was rumored that the American industrialist Henry Ford , who had contributed greatly to the publicity of the anti-Semitic inflammatory pamphlet Protocols of the Elders of Zion , would be supporting the NSDAP financially. This was denied by Hitler in 1928 with reference to Ford's membership in the Democratic Party ; an honorable mention from Ford was deleted from the new edition of Mein Kampf in 1931 .

Fritz Thyssen (1928)

Many conservative contemporaries also believed in large-scale industrial support for the NSDAP. For the former Chancellor Heinrich Brüning , financing from large-scale industry was the cause of Hitler's rise. From his exile on August 28, 1937, he wrote in a private letter to Winston Churchill :

“Hitler's real rise did not begin until 1929, when major German industrialists and others refused to continue to distribute funds to a host of patriotic organizations that had been doing all the work for the German ' Risorgimento ' up to then . In her opinion, these organizations were too progressive in their social thinking. They were glad that Hitler wanted to radically disenfranchise the workers. The donations that they withheld from other organizations went to Hitler's organization. That is of course the usual beginning of fascism everywhere. "

Individual industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf made no secret of their support for Hitler's young party. The National Socialists themselves occasionally also freely admitted that they accepted donations from industry. This is how Heinrich Brüning describes his outrage in his memoirs when he learned "from Nazi circles" that the United Steelworks donated half a million RM to Hitler in the 1932 presidential election campaign, while Hindenburg , who he supported , received only 5000 RM. The Reich Chancellery then started an investigation which, on the basis of estimates and press speculation, came to the conclusion that from April 1931 to April 1932 40 to 45 million Reichsmarks were paid to the NSDAP by foreign industrialists. Domestic entrepreneurs only paid five million, which corresponds to a share of seven to eight percent of the annual party income. The investigation named Thyssen, the Jewish department store owner Oscar Tietz , the French heavy industry association Comité des Forges , the Greek arms dealer Basil Zaharoff , the British arms company Vickers , Henri Deterding and Ivar Kreuger as current or former donors . Investigations by the Prussian police, which in the summer of 1930 had obtained the internal accounts of the mining association and the association of German iron and steel industrialists using intelligence methods , found no evidence of support for the NSDAP.

The efforts of Hitler and his party to make this source of money gush even more abundantly, such as his speech to the Düsseldorf Industry Club on January 26, 1932, were heavily scandalized by the communist press, which also contributed to the fact that large circles of contemporaries believed that they have been quite successful.

New York Times report of February 1, 1933 on a boom on the German stock exchange after Hitler was appointed Chancellor

According to Turner, the Berlin stock exchange reacts cautiously and unsteadily to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. After three weeks, share prices would have been roughly the same as at the end of January. Share price statistics published by the American political scientist Thomas Ferguson and the Swiss economist Hans-Joachim Voth show a positive stock market trend since November 1932, which lasted until May 1933. You quote the New York Times of February 1, 1933, which wrote of a real boom with price increases of 3 to 5 percent.

Problems of sources and terms

The problem area “Industry and National Socialism before 1933” was, according to Eberhard Kolb's assessment , initially neglected by non-Marxist research. Only with the growing interest in interpretations of fascism theory at the end of the 1960s did the relationship between fascism and capitalism come to the fore. The source situation caused problems. The documents on the finances of the NSDAP were destroyed by the Munich party chancellery in the last days of the Second World War on Hitler's instructions . Furthermore, there are large numbers of sources from entrepreneurs in the company archives, but this gives rise to the problem of the sheer abundance of sources on the one hand, and the question of whether the archives might not have been cleared of incriminating documents after the end of the war on the other. This applies in particular to the estate of the influential CEO of Gutehoffnungshütte Paul Reusch .

The dispute over the contribution of big industry to the rise of the NSDAP went on for decades without clarifying who was meant by “big industry”. One made do with general terms such as “the” economy or “ capital ” or gave exemplary names. It was not until 1985 that Henry Turner proposed that large-scale industry designate private companies in the fields of trade, finance, industry, and insurance with a nominal capital of at least twenty million Reichsmarks.

Marxist assessments since the post-war period

In the GDR, a whole series of papers were produced which attempted to prove that the NSDAP acted in the interests of large-scale industry and was brought to power by it for this purpose. The historians Jürgen Kuczynski , Kurt Gossweiler , Eberhard Czichon and Wolfgang Ruge differentiated the agent theory of the Comintern through the monopoly group theory developed by Kuczynski : According to this, in state monopoly capitalism political and economic rule are fused with one another, but there are individual factions within the capitalist class Monopoly groups that have different interests and different styles of rule. They differentiated the older, conservative, authoritarian, heavy industrial monopoly group from a younger, more modern and reformist group in the chemical and electrical industry, to which finance capital had been added as the third monopoly group since Gossweiler's habilitation thesis .

Kurt von Schröders' villa in Cologne, where Papen and Hitler agreed to form a government on January 4, 1933

The exact assignment of the various actors to the three monopoly groups changes among the historians mentioned, but there is definitely agreement between them that Hitler was a "painstakingly hyped and dearly paid political candidate" of a "Nazi group" within German industry.

As evidence for the direct responsibility of the German “monopoly rulers” for the rule of National Socialism, Marxist research used, in addition to convergence of interests between the two, a. a. biographical sources, namely the Thyssen memoirs, the fact that the decisive negotiations between Hitler and Hindenburg's camarilla took place in January 1933 in the house of the Cologne banker Kurt von Schröder (see meeting Papen with Hitler in the house of the banker Schröder ), as well as the above called industrial input . This is a letter from 20 industrialists, merchants and agricultural representatives from November 1932, in which Hindenburg was asked to appoint Hitler as Reich Chancellor. The signatures of the most powerful Ruhr industrialists Paul Reusch ( Gutehoffnungshütte ), Albert Vögler ( Vereinigte Stahlwerke ) and Fritz Springorum ( Hoesch AG ) were missing , but they indirectly declared their consent. Research in the GDR always interpreted the behavior of the business people involved as representative of their respective monopoly group and thus concluded that they were responsible.

The political scientist Reinhard Kühnl criticized Kurt Gossweiler's earlier works to the effect that here the “indeed existing causal relationship between capitalism and fascism [...] is interpreted too directly and in a personalist-voluntarist way, so that the proximity to conspiracy theories cannot be overlooked. In fact, this relationship must be seen more as a mediated and structural one: it was not the direct support of big business that brought about the rise of fascism, but the economic crisis rooted in the capitalist system drove the frightened masses, above all the proletarianized middle classes or those threatened by proletarianization, to fascism, who promised them social security and national prestige. It was only when fascism had formed a mass movement that the support of big business began on a larger scale, which then of course further increased the propaganda possibilities of fascism and accelerated its rise ”.

Non-communist research since the late 1960s

Industry and National Socialism before 1930

Ernst von Borsig, portrait from 1930

It is relatively undisputed that the National Socialists solicited funds from all kinds of patrons and especially from industrialists from the start. Looking back at the time of the German Workers' Party , the immediate predecessor organization of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler spoke of the fact that "a few poor devils" had hoped for money people. In the first few years before the coup in 1923 , funds actually flowed from the Bavarian Federation of Industrialists and from some medium-sized entrepreneurs. The NSDAP also benefited indirectly from a donation by Fritz Thyssen worth 100,000 gold marks to the German Combat League, an association of paramilitary organizations in Bavaria. Ernst von Borsig and Albert Vögler continued to be among the early sponsors .

After the failure of the coup, almost all external donors turned away from the National Socialists. In the mid-1920s, the party was almost entirely dependent on contributions, proceeds from propaganda material, or entrance fees. Only individual medium-sized entrepreneurs such as the piano maker Edwin Bechstein or the publisher Hugo Bruckmann helped Hitler to rebuild his party. At the end of 1926, the National Socialists tried to open up new sources of money through intensive advertising with large-scale industry. For example, Hitler tried to get in touch with large-scale industry through Emil Kirdorf and wrote the book Der Weg zum Wiederaufstieg , which was only widespread in industrial circles , in which he tried to bring his ideology closer to industrialists. In October 1927 there was a meeting with leading entrepreneurs from the Ruhr area, which, however, remained financially inconclusive for the NSDAP. Hitler also spoke four times in Essen between 1926 and 1927 to several hundred industrialists each time. In a circular to a number of large industrialists from May 1927, the NSDAP openly solicited money, the letter stated:

“The National Socialist Workers' Party has also written the protection of lawfully acquired property on its program. Thanks to the enthusiasm of its supporters and its tight organization, it is alone in a position to effectively counter the terror from the left. Unfortunately, this cannot be done without significant funding. We therefore have no choice but to turn to the German and German-Völkisch-minded circles from industry and trade with a request for support [...] The honesty of our movement offers you a full guarantee that the money will be used well. "

As a splinter party, however, it remained largely uninteresting for industry until the surprising election success of 1930 . Only then did the relations between party and industry begin to grow closer. The key research question was what quality these relationships assumed.

Turner's research

Non-Marxist research initially had little to oppose the differentiated work from the GDR in this regard. The German political scientist Eike Hennig accused her as early as 1970 of simplifying the complex process of transferring power to National Socialism into a “completely monocausal purchase act”, but in the absence of her own source-based studies of the behavior of large-scale industry at the end of the Weimar Republic, she was able to cannot be falsified . That changed at the beginning of the seventies with the source-critical studies of the American historian Henry A. Turner. He succeeded in clearly refuting various unsubstantiated claims.

It is indisputable that in the early 1930s industrial support money flowed to the NSDAP. In addition to the self-confessed National Socialist Thyssen, donations came from Fritz Springorum , Paul Silverberg , Kurt Schmitt and Friedrich Flick . Collectively, money came from the so-called Ruhrlade , the association for mining interests , the employers' association for the district of the Northwestern Group of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists, and the IG-Farben concern . Thyssen alone donated around 400,000 Reichsmarks to the NSDAP between 1930 and 1933. He was also involved in the acquisition and renovation of the Palais Barlow ( Brown House ) in Munich. However, like the other industrialists, Thyssen supported such National Socialists as Hermann Göring or Walther Funk , whom they considered moderate.

The lignite industrialist Paul Silverberg, photo from 1930

The significance of these donations from industry and other sources for the overall financing of the party before 1933 is difficult to assess at the Reich level because of the poor tradition. Together with Horst Matzerath , however, Turner showed, on the basis of existing data for the districts in the Rhineland, a strong self-financing rate through membership fees. The significance of donations, which mostly also came from members, and the income from events were significantly less important. The party in the Cologne-Aachen Gau took a total of RM 62,310 between June and August 1931. Of this, 47,015 (75%) came from contributions, 8,705 RM from donations and 6,400 RM from event revenues. In addition, 190 RM other income came. Overall, the NSDAP was similar to the SPD and unlike the bourgeois parties, a self-financing party.

Big industry, which felt deterred by the party's ongoing “socialist” rhetoric, played less of a role in their donation income. In the state parliaments, the NSDAP repeatedly voted together with the left-wing parties. B. 1927 against the introduction of the allegedly insufficiently worker-friendly unemployment insurance and the increase in indirect taxes . Small and medium-sized industrialists like Bechstein were more important. In addition to NSDAP member Thyssen, there were also some large entrepreneurs who transferred large amounts of donation, but Turner was able to prove that they also supported other parties at the same time, and mostly to an even greater extent. The purpose of these donations was not to bring the NSDAP to power, but to ensure its benevolence in the event of a seizure of power - as in the case of Friedrich Flick , who was vulnerable because of the Gelsenberg affair - or to dissuade it from its supposedly socialist course.

Before the takeover of power, German industry did not make a significant financial contribution to the support of National Socialism. Turner also described the financial aid from foreign entrepreneurs as mere rumors that had their roots in the advertising campaigns that B. the radical anti-communist Dutch oil industrialist Henri Deterding had switched to the Völkischer Beobachter for his Shell concern. Deterding, who only openly committed to National Socialism when he moved to Germany in 1936, had always denied having actively promoted the rise of the National Socialists, and no such promotion was mentioned in the laudatory obituaries published by German newspapers after his death in 1939 .

According to Turner's account, Hitler's speech to the Düsseldorf Industrial Club on January 26, 1932, by no means had the enormous advertising success that Marxist historiography attributed to it. Hitler had made every effort not to unsettle the industrialists with the anti-Semitic or credit reformist tones that were common in the NSDAP. Rather, he confessed to private property , declared that the world economic crisis could only be resolved with political means, but withheld which means, and called for the fight against democracy and Bolshevism . In the audience there were a noticeably large number of smaller hardware manufacturers, while prominent members of the industrial club such as Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach , Reusch, Paul Silverberg and Carl Duisberg were absent. They applauded politely, in Fritz Thyssen's enthusiastic shout: “Heil, Herr Hitler!” But only about a third of the participants could agree. The speech certainly did not bring about the “breakthrough” among the West German industrial captains, of which the National Socialist press later wrote. No financial commitments were made. The same goes for a meeting a day later. Hjalmar Schacht then complained in a letter to Hitler that "heavy industry (...) takes its name from heavy industry from its clumsiness."

Hjalmar Schacht as Minister of Economics in conversation with Hitler, photo from 1936
Albert Vögler , the general manager of the United Steelworks , supported the Papen government in 1932

The industrielleneingabe appear at Turner in a different light than in Marxist research. He argues that, according to the National Socialist assessment, it was a failure, firstly because Hindenburg did not appoint Hitler, but Kurt von Schleicher as the successor to the recently resigned Franz von Papen , and secondly, almost all heavy industrialists refused to sign. Against the assumption that they would have sympathized with her, Turner makes another petition from November 1932: In addition to 337 other personalities, Springorum and Vögler also signed for the Papen government, for the DNVP and thus clearly against the NSDAP, so it is unlikely that they would have shown solidarity with the industrialists' input and its diametrically different thrust.

According to Turner's research, the overwhelming majority of German industrialists did not support Hitler and the NSDAP in the final phase of the Weimar Republic, but Papen and the DNVP. The vast majority of political donations went to them. In order to keep Papen in power, some industrialists, in the sense of a taming concept, advocated winning the NSDAP as a junior partner and “drawing it to the state”. The historian Reinhard Neebe comes to a very similar conclusion in his 1981 dissertation on the Reich Association of German Industry . At the end of the Weimar Republic, the powerful employers' association got into a stalemate situation due to internal conflicts of interests vis-à-vis the increasingly autonomous state. The fact that in this conflict the pro-National Socialist “Thyssen Group” prevailed over the course of the leadership of Duisberg and Krupp, which was directed against the NSDAP, was “not the prerequisite and cause of the seizure of power, but ... on the contrary, its consequence”.

Only after the takeover of power can one speak of massive financial support for the NSDAP from big industry. At the secret meeting of February 20, 1933 , Hitler and Göring received more than two dozen industrialists, including Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach , the chairman of the Reich Association of German Industry , who had always kept a distance from the NSDAP. After a speech by Hitler, in which he campaigned for private property and against economic experiments, the employers of the NSDAP promised a sum of three million Reichsmarks for the upcoming election campaign. In June 1933, this entrepreneurial support for the NSDAP was institutionalized as an Adolf Hitler donation to the German economy : From then on, German industry made a massive and steady contribution to the financing of the NSDAP. The meeting of February 20, 1933 was, in Turner's opinion, "a milestone: the first significant material contribution made by large-scale industrial organizations to the National Socialist cause." Even Adam Tooze sees the donation in February and March 1933 "a really significant contribution" as the party "before the last election in its history was."

Turner-Stegmann controversy

Turner's theses were violently contradicted as early as 1973 by Dirk Stegmann , who, with a slight modification, represented the opinion of GDR historians, according to which the support of the "Hitler wing" within large-scale industry was a decisive factor in the preparation of Hitler's chancellorship. The subsequent, z. The controversy, which was sometimes bitter, was only partially fruitful, as the opponents did not describe their questions and research goals clearly enough. While Turner was primarily concerned with the falsification of the thesis that large-scale industry had financed the rise of National Socialism, Stegmann was interested in a comprehensive analysis of large-scale industrial interest politics and their contribution to the destruction of the Weimar Republic.

Hitler's internal party opponent Gregor Strasser, photo from 1928

In the attempt to take stock of the controversy, which was published in 1981, the archivist Thomas Trumpp, based on some new archive material, basically followed Turner's theses. Accordingly, the portion of the money flowing to the NSDAP made up the smaller part of the donations from industry. In some cases, the industrialists also relied on the wrong forces: After the NSDAP's electoral success on July 31, 1932 , Silverberg supported Hitler's internal party opponent Gregor Strasser , who was considered moderate, but was soon disempowered. For most of the entrepreneurs who donated to the NSDAP, this was a kind of reinsurance. Most of the industrial payments went to the established right-wing parties, namely the DNVP.

State of the discussion

The question of the absolute and relative share of large-scale industry in the financing of the NSDAP is currently valid, subject to new sources, to the effect that "large-scale industry did not ultimately make a decisive material contribution to the rise of National Socialism and to the National Socialist electoral successes".

The situation is different with the role that big industrialists played in the final phase of the Weimar Republic. Not only did they do nothing to protect the increasingly threatened democracy, they even actively contributed to its dismantling. In the spring of 1930 they worked towards a break in the grand coalition under the social democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller , the last parliamentary government of the Weimar Republic. The RDI chairman Carl Duisberg openly stated that his association was aiming for “a completely different direction in the capitalist sense, not in the socialist sense”. To this end, the association developed a lively journalistic activity, which culminated in December 1929 in the memorandum Aufstieg oder Niedergang . Here the industrialists announced an open fight against the social policy of the Weimar Republic, which one would no longer be able to afford under the Young Plan that had just been decided . Instead, they called for the Reich budget to be balanced through tough austerity measures, while at the same time reducing taxes for entrepreneurs, an end to compulsory arbitration and a reduction in unemployment insurance benefits. It was intended that these demands could not be enforced with, but only against, the Social Democrats. The installation of the Brüning government, which marks the beginning of the presidential cabinets and just launched the policy of budget equalization and social cuts that had been demanded by the industrialists, was expressly welcomed by the RDI. In the summer of 1930, Springorum and other industrialists urged that Article 48 should finally be applied, which allowed legislation by emergency ordinance without the consent of parliament.

Paul Reusch, undated portrait

But soon the industrialists were disappointed by Brüning, who let the SPD tolerate his minority government . After the banking crisis , the heavy industrialist Reusch demanded:

“Since he [Brüning] does not have the courage to part with the Social Democrats, he must be fiercely fought by the economy and the Reichsverband [...]. Furthermore, I am of the opinion that we must finally change our tactics towards the unions . So far, industry has been too cowardly to take up the fight with the trade unions with all sharpness.

This course of confrontation could not be implemented because other large industrialists such as RDI Managing Director Ludwig Kastl stuck to Brüning. The entrepreneurs only came to an agreement again in the spring of 1932, when the right-wing conservative Franz von Papen became chancellor after Brüning's fall. They enthusiastically welcomed his declared goal of an authoritarian "New State" in which the Reich government was no longer dependent on the confidence of the Reichstag, but only on the goodwill of the Reich President. The donations flowed in abundance to the Papen-friendly parties, and the large entrepreneurs openly supported the Papen government in public. Henry A. Turner therefore puts the corresponding chapter in his book under the heading: "The capitalists find their chancellor."

The Bielefeld social historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler sums up the debate about the role of industrialists at the end of the Weimar Republic:

“The old wives' tale that they bought Hitler and his henchmen has definitely been refuted. But one can by no means absolve them of the serious accusation that they have contributed everything possible to the destruction of the republic. "

Hans-Ulrich Thamer has a similarly clear view :

“In no case can the dynamic of the National Socialist faith and protest movement be explained with material support from big industry. The massive propaganda campaigns of the NSDAP were financed primarily by the members and their contributions as well as by entrance fees, then by the help of sympathizers, especially with small and medium-sized companies. There is no evidence of continuous financial support for the NSDAP by big industry. In addition, the behavior of big industry towards the NSDAP and Hitler's participation in government in 1932/33 was very inconsistent; only a small faction supported Hitler. More important was the role of big business and other traditional power elites in the destruction of parliamentary democracy in favor of an authoritarian form of government, which in the end could not assert itself before the onslaught of the NSDAP. "

According to Eberhard Kolb, research shows that heavy industry did not act uniformly and was also not involved in mediating a conversation between Hitler and Papen. Nevertheless, big industry prepared the ground for the rejection of democracy and parliamentarism. Kolb sums up: “Industry was not the originator of the Hitler government, and the vast majority of large industrialists did not seek the establishment of National Socialist rule until January 1933. But by rejecting parliamentary democracy and leaning towards an authoritarian system, the employers' camp pushed for the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and prepared the way for the dictatorship. Therefore, industry in general and large-scale industry in particular bears a high degree of joint responsibility for making Hitler and the Nazi rule possible. "

According to Adam Tooze , Hitler was not at all dependent on any support from the industrialists:

“After the First World War , the business lobby was strong enough to contain the revolutionary impulses of 1918 and 1919. Now, in the deepest crisis of capitalism, German entrepreneurs simply lacked the power to defend themselves against state interventionism, which this time threatened not from the left but from the right. "

In 1998 Manfred Weißbecker and Kurt Pätzold , who had held professorships for historical studies in the GDR, presented a revision of their comprehensive account of the history of the NSDAP, first published in 1981, in which they also emphasized the entrepreneurial interests in its rise. They analyzed the Adolf Hitler donation institutionalized by the German economy after the seizure of power as an attempt by the entrepreneurs to further consolidate their ties to the NSDAP leadership through a centralized transfer of money to the party leadership and, in particular, to the "continued financial begging of subordinate agencies and organizations of the NSDAP to escape."

In his dissertation published in 2015, the historian Karsten Heinz Schönbach contradicts the view that the support of the NSDAP by big industry was rather marginal before 1933. According to Schönbach, the sources showed that the NSDAP had received considerable support from major industrialists from 1927/28 onwards. However, one could only speak of a predominantly Nazi-friendly attitude on the part of big industry after the election defeat of the conservative right on November 6, 1932. After the seizure of power in February 1933, as Turner also emphasized, “a clear majority among German industrialists stood behind a 'Hitler solution'”.

literature

  • Eberhard Czichon: Who helped Hitler to power? On the share of German industry in the destruction of the Weimar Republic . Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1967.
  • Kurt Gossweiler: Capital, Reichswehr and NSDAP. Early history - 1919 to 1924 . PapyRossa Verlag, Cologne 2011.
  • Reinhard Neebe: Big Industry, State and NSDAP 1930–1933. Paul Silverberg and the Reich Association of German Industry in the Crisis of the Weimar Republic (= critical studies on historical science. Volume 45). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35703-6 ( online , PDF; 6.9 MB).
  • Reinhard Neebe: Industry and January 30, 1933 . In: Karl Dietrich Bracher , Manfred Funke , Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945. A balance sheet . Federal Agency for Civic Education , Bonn 1986, ISBN 3-921352-95-9 , pp. 155–176.
  • Karsten Heinz Schönbach: The German Corporations and National Socialism 1926-1943 . Trafo, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86464-080-3 (see dissertation, FU Berlin, 2012).
  • Dirk Stegmann: On the relationship between large-scale industry and National Socialism 1930–1933. A contribution to the history of the so-called seizure of power . In: Archive for Social History , Volume 13, 1973, pp. 399–482 ( PDF ; 21.4 MB).
  • Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-88680-143-8 .
  • Thomas Trumpp: On the financing of the NSDAP by large German industry. Attempt to take stock . In: Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945. A balance sheet . Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 1986, ISBN 3-921352-95-9 , pp. 132–154.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism , de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1998, ISBN 3-11-013379-2 , p. 126.
  2. ^ Carl von Ossietzky: Is there still an opposition? , in: Die Weltbühne from January 7, 1930; similar to Quietus, Hitler's finances, in: “Die Weltbühne” from February 19, 1932; see. Philipp Heyde: Die Weltbühne: A small, radical Zorn and Lustbrevier , in: then 5 (1993), p. 67 f.
  3. ↑ The AIZ cover picture in the LeMO ; Carsten Jakobi: The small victory over anti-Semitism. Representation and interpretation of the National Socialist persecution of Jews in the German-speaking period of exile 1933–1945. Walter de Gruyter Berlin / New York 2005, p. 34 ff.
  4. ^ Georgi Dimitroff: The offensive of fascism and the tasks of the Communist International in the struggle for the unity of the working class against fascism , in: Wilhelm Pieck , Georgi Dimitroff, Palmiro Togliatti (ed.): The offensive of fascism and the tasks of the communists in Struggle for the Popular Front against War and Fascism - Lectures at the VII Congress of the Communist International (1935) . Berlin (East) 1957, pp. 85-178.
  5. ^ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : The NSDAP. A party and its members. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2017, p. 193 f .; Christian Hartmann , Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger, Roman Töppel (eds.): Hitler, Mein Kampf. A critical edition . Institute for Contemporary History Munich - Berlin, Munich 2016, vol. 2, p. 1619.
  6. ↑ See e.g. B. Otto Meissner : State Secretary under Ebert - Hindenburg - Hitler . Hamburg 1950, p. 276.
  7. ^ Claire Nix (ed.), Heinrich Brüning Letters and Conversations 1934 - 1945, Stuttgart 1974, p. 149.
  8. ^ Heinrich Brüning: Memoirs 1918–1934 . DVA, Stuttgart 1970, p. 531.
  9. ^ Gerhard Schulz, Rise of National Socialism. Crisis and Revolution in Germany , Propylaen Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 635. There are no other sources for the fact that the large portion of the NSDAP's annual budget came from foreign donors.
  10. ^ Memorandum from Hermann Pünder from April 16, 1932; Federal Archives, files of the Reich Chancellery, Pünder estate, No. 154, pages 48–49; on-line
  11. ^ Sven Felix Kellerhoff: The NSDAP. A party and its members. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2017, p. 193.
  12. ^ Gustav Luntowski: Hitler and the gentlemen on the Ruhr. Economic power and state power in the Third Reich . Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 43.
  13. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, p. 390 f.
  14. ↑ Thomas Ferguson, Hans-JoachimVoth: Betting on Hitler — the value of political connections in Nazi Germany . In: The Quarterly Journal of Economics . 2008, No. 1, pp. 1–29, here: pp. 6 f. On-line
  15. ↑ Eberhard Kolb, Dirk Schumann: The Weimar Republic (= Oldenbourg floor plan of history 16). 8th edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 273.
  16. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Thamer: Seduction and violence. Germany 1933–1945 . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1994, p. 207.
  17. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, pp. 8-11.
  18. ^ Karsten Heinz Schönbach: Ruhr coal for Hitler. The financing of the NSDAP by large-scale industry 1928–1933 . In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement . 1 (2015), p. 100.
  19. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, p. 11 f.
  20. ^ Kurt Gossweiler: Big banks industrial monopoly state; Economy and Politics of State Monopoly Capitalism in Germany 1914-1932 . Berlin 1971.
  21. ↑ So the formulation by Eberhard Czichon: Who helped Hitler to power? , Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1967, p. 32.
  22. ^ Fritz Thyssen: I Paid Hitler , London 1941.
  23. ^ Albert Schreiner: The submission of German financial magnates, monopolists and junkers to Hindenburg for Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor (November 1932) . In: ZfG , Vol. 4 (1956), pp. 366-369.
  24. ↑ A critical summary of the monopoly group theory can be found in Reinhard Neebe: Großindustrie, Staat und NSDAP 1930–1933. Paul Silverberg and the Reich Association of German Industry in the Crisis of the Weimar Republic (= critical studies on historical science. Volume 45). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35703-6 ( online , PDF; 6.9 MB), p. 11 ff.
  25. ↑ Reinhard Kühnl: Theories of fascism. A guide . updated new edition, Distel Verlag, Heilbronn 1990, p. 249 f.
  26. ^ Thomas Trumpp: To the financing of the NSDAP by the German big industry. Attempt to take stock . In: Karl Dietrich Bracher / Manfred Funke / Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): National Socialist Dictatorship 1933–1945. A balance sheet . Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), Bonn 1986, p. 135.
  27. ↑ Albrecht Tyrell (ed.): Führer befiehl ... self-testimonies from the 'fighting time' of the NSDAP . Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1969, p. 181.
  28. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, p. 106 ff.
  29. ↑ Klaus Scheel: War over ether waves , Berlin 1970, p. 256.
  30. ^ Thomas Trumpp: To the financing of the NSDAP by the German big industry. Attempt to take stock . In: Karl Dietrich Bracher / Manfred Funke / Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945. A balance sheet . Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), Bonn 1986, pp. 135–139.
  31. ↑ Eike Hennig: Industry and Fascism: Notes on the Soviet Marxist Interpretation . Neue Politische Literatur, 15, Heft 3 (1970), p. 439.
  32. ^ A collection of early essays: Henry A. Turner, Fascism and Capitalism in Germany. Studies on the relationship between National Socialism and the economy , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1972.
  33. ^ Thomas Trumpp: To the financing of the NSDAP by the German big industry. Attempt to take stock . In: Karl Dietrich Bracher / Manfred Funke / Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945. A balance sheet . Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), Bonn 1986, pp. 140–148.
  34. ^ Horst Matzerath / Henry A. Turner: The self-financing of the NSDAP 1930-1932 . In: History and Society, issue 1/1977, p. 70 f.
  35. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, p. 85 ff.
  36. ↑ Horst Matzerath and Henry A. Turner: The self-financing of the NSDAP 1930-32 . In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft Vol. 3 (1977), pp. 59-92.
  37. ↑ The appearance of the Shell advertisements had led to furious protests from the readership, which publisher Max Amann replied on February 11, 1932 with the explanation: "We take up the Shell advertisements because we National Socialists cannot drive with water either", Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag Berlin 1985, p. 327 f.
  38. ↑ Some of the specialist literature does not give the date consistently. With the pressure of the speech, January 27 was also circulated.
  39. ↑ On the industry club speech, see also Gustav Luntowski: Hitler und die Herren an der Ruhr. Economic power and state power in the Third Reich . Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 43–47.
  40. ↑ cit. According to Thomas Trumpp: On the financing of the NSDAP by large German industry. Attempt to take stock . In: Karl Dietrich Bracher / Manfred Funke / Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945. A balance sheet . Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), Bonn 1986, p. 145.
  41. ^ According to Paul Reusch in a conversation with Papen on January 7, 1933, cited above. after Dirk Stegmann: Capitalism and Fascism in Germany 1929–1934. Theses and materials on the restitution of the primacy of large-scale industry between the global economic crisis and the start of the arms boom . in society. Contributions to Marx's theory, vol. 6, Frankfurt am Main 1976, p. 89 f.
  42. ↑ Reinhard Neebe: Big Industry, State and NSDAP 1930-1933. Paul Silverberg and the Reich Association of German Industry in the Crisis of the Weimar Republic (= critical studies on historical science. Volume 45). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35703-6 ( online , PDF; 6.9 MB), p. 202.
  43. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag Berlin 1985, pp. 393–396.
  44. ↑ Adam Tooze (2007): Economy of Destruction - The History of the Economy in National Socialism. Translated from the English by Yvonne Badal. Federal Agency for Civic Education , Series Volume 663, p. 129.
  45. ↑ On Stegmann's research and his objections to Turner see just Reinhard Neebe: Großindustrie, Staat und NSDAP 1930-1933. Paul Silverberg and the Reich Association of German Industry in the Crisis of the Weimar Republic (= critical studies on historical science. Volume 45). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35703-6 ( online , PDF; 6.9 MB), pp. 16-18.
  46. ↑ Dirk Stegmann: On the relationship between large-scale industry and National Socialism 1930–1933. A contribution to the history of the so-called seizure of power , Archive for Social History Vol. 13 (1973), pp. 399–482; Henry Ashby Turner: Big Entrepreneurship and National Socialism 1930-1933. Critical and supplementary information on two new research contributions . in: Historische Zeitschrift Vol. 221 (1975), pp. 18-68.
  47. ^ Thomas Trumpp: To the financing of the NSDAP by the German big industry. Attempt to take stock . In: Karl Dietrich Bracher / Manfred Funke / Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.): National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945. A balance sheet . Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), Bonn 1986, pp. 140–150. (First published in: History in Science and Education, Issue 3 1981)
  48. ↑ Eberhard Kolb, Dirk Schumann: The Weimar Republic (= Oldenbourg floor plan of history 16). 8th edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 275.
  49. ↑ Reinhard Neebe: Big Industry, State and NSDAP 1930-1933. Paul Silverberg and the Reich Association of German Industry in the Crisis of the Weimar Republic (= critical studies on historical science. Volume 45). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35703-6 ( online , PDF; 6.9 MB), p. 223.
  50. ↑ Michael Grübler: The umbrella organizations of the economy and the first Brüning cabinet. From the end of the grand coalition in 1929/30 to the eve of the banking crisis in 1931. A source study , Droste, Düsseldorf 1982, pp. 55–66; similar to Henry Ashby Turner: The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler . Siedler Verlag Berlin 1985, p. 405.
  51. ↑ Reinhard Neebe: Big Industry, State and NSDAP 1930-1933. Paul Silverberg and the Reich Association of German Industry in the Crisis of the Weimar Republic (= critical studies on historical science. Volume 45). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35703-6 ( online , PDF; 6.9 MB), p. 74.
  52. ↑ Reinhard Neebe: Big Industry, State and NSDAP 1930-1933. Paul Silverberg and the Reich Association of German Industry in the Crisis of the Weimar Republic (= critical studies on historical science. Volume 45). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35703-6 ( online , PDF; 6.9 MB), p. 99.
  53. ^ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: German history of society . Vol. 4: From the beginning of the First World War to the founding of the two German states 1914–1949 . CH Beck, Munich 2003, p. 293.
  54. ^ Hans-Ulrich Thamer: National Socialism . In Uwe Andersen; Woyke Wichard Ed .: "Concise dictionary of the political system of the Federal Republic". 7th, updated Ed., Springer VS, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 3-531-18488-1 . Online version on the website of the Federal Agency for Civic Education. Accessed August 5, 2016.
  55. ↑ Eberhard Kolb, Dirk Schumann: The Weimar Republic (= Oldenbourg floor plan of history 16). 8th edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 276.
  56. ↑ Adam Tooze (2007): Economy of Destruction - The History of the Economy in National Socialism. Translated from the English by Yvonne Badal. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Series Volume 663, p. 135.
  57. ^ Kurt Paetzold and Manfred Weissbecker: swastika and skull. The party of crime. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin (East) 1981. Reprinted under the title History of the NSDAP 1920-1945 . Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1998.
  58. ↑ Manfred Weißbecker and Kurt Pätzold: History of the NSDAP - 1920-1945 . Special edition 2002, Papyrossa, Cologne 2002, ISBN 978-3-89438-406-7 , p. 276.
  59. ^ Karsten Heinz Schönbach: The German Corporations and National Socialism 1926–1943. Trafo, Berlin 2015 (also dissertation, FU Berlin, 2012), pp. 199–208 u. Abstract pp. 603-614 (citation p. 613).