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Big Business and the Third Reich: An Appraisal of the Historical Arguments

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The Historiography of the Holocaust

Abstract

The reappraisal, concentrated over the past twenty years, of big business’s relationship to the Holocaust — or more generally business’s responsibility for the consequences of National Socialism — is one of the most vibrant and controversial areas of modern historiography. The reassessment itself, as well as some of the preconditions that spawned it, have profound implications for our attitudes about business, the Third Reich and, for that matter, our general views about modern history. Discussions of business’s relationship to or responsibility for genocide go well beyond questions about the profits that were earned from slave labourers and the extermination of millions of Jews and other ‘unwanted’ groups. They also involve the larger question of how sober and austere leaders of a civilized community like pre-Nazi Germany could accept — some would argue were seduced by — and work with representatives of a movement that not only thrived on the basest of human inclinations, but also very often espoused views, as Hitler did, that were antithetical to modern capitalist institutions and the material interests of big business. A proper study of business and the Third Reich should begin with the structure of German business, the attitudes of businessmen prior to Hitler’s coming to power and their relationship to the Weimar government, and end with business’s post-war reaction to the Nazi experience.

A grave economic system of decay was the slow disappearance of the right of private property, and the gradual transference of the entire economy to the ownership of stock companies … labour had sunk to the level of an object of speculation for unscrupulous Jewish businessmen.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kainpf

In economic terms, Fascism and National Socialism were advantaged by their theoretical opportunism and purely instrumental and decisionist approaches to economic problems. They were anti-capitalist enough to be threatening to private enterprise and property but flexible enough to take advantage of the efficiencies of capitalist enterprises in the mobilization of societies.

Gerald Feldman, ‘The Economic Origins of European Fascism’

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Notes

  1. See H. James and J. Tanner, eds., Enterprise in the Period of Fascism in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) for a comprehensive collection of articles on business in occupied and fascist countries. Several studies have laid to rest the notion that Austrians in business and other spheres of activity were Hitler’s first victims. See, for example, D. Stiefel, ed., Die politische Okonomie des Holocaust: Zur Wirtschaftlichen Logik von Verfolgung und ‘Wiedergutmachung’ (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2001).

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Kobrak, C., Schneider, A.H. (2004). Big Business and the Third Reich: An Appraisal of the Historical Arguments. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_8

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