From 1933 onward, Nazi Germany undertook massive and unprecedented industrial integration, submitting an entire economic sector to direct state oversight. This innovative study explores how German ...professionals navigated this complex landscape through the divergent careers of business managers in two of the era's most important trade organizations. While Jakob Reichert of the iron and steel industry unexpectedly resisted state control and was eventually driven to suicide, Karl Lange of the machine builders' association achieved security for himself and his industry by submitting to the Nazi regime. Both men's stories illuminate the options available to industrialists under the Third Reich, as well as the real priorities set by the industries they served.
Impotence Bera, Matt
Lobbying Hitler,
01/2016
Book Chapter
What might have happened to Reichert and the Wirtschaft sgruppe Eisenschaff ende Industrie, had the war not intervened? He might have been more or less honourably shuffled out and into another ...occupation just as his old colleague Max Schlenker had been in 1933. He might even have been tolerated as a cantankerous anachronism in one of the many superfluous organizations in the Third Reich for some time to come, and perhaps even recouped some of his old influence later. The war might also have offered Reichert a chance of redemption in the eyes of the state. He had always been
Neither Jakob Reichert nor Karl Lange supported the Nazi Party before 1933 or took any active steps to promote or aid it. They bear none of the direct responsibility for the financing or support of ...the NSDAP that Turner quantified in German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler.¹ Their beliefs, hopes and ideals are a more complicated matter. Reichert in particular shared a number of key ideas with the Party. He distrusted or opposed democracy, aligned himself with the far right in major political debates, mercilessly attacked social democracy and the left in general, and espoused a vision of
INTRODUCTION Bera, Matt
Lobbying Hitler,
01/2016
Book Chapter
The German merchant firm Wilhelm Grillo found itself in a dilemma in the early days of the tumultuous year 1940. Another firm, Lampe Delta, a Belgian company that produced pocket flashlights, was ...having difficulty finding a secure supplier of zinc casings for the three-volt batteries its products used and hoped Grillo could put them in touch with a German machine builder that would provide the equipment required to make them in-house.¹ As a merchant, Grillo wondered whether it would be better to find Lampe Delta a producer that would sell them such a machine, or to locate a battery manufacturer
Indispensability Bera, Matt
Lobbying Hitler,
01/2016
Book Chapter
Whereas Reichert and the iron and steel industry appeared to have a considerable advantage over Karl Lange and the machine builders in 1933, the situation had been more or less reversed by the ...outbreak of hostilities in 1939. Lange’s efforts over the preceding years provided the Wirtschaft sgruppe Maschinenbau with a solid basis to build on during the war that would at once satisfy the regime’s expectations and meet the needs of member firms. Lange himself was central to this process, and he and his Wigru stepped smoothly into the war effort as it was imagined by the Nazi regime.
After the Machtergreifung in January 1933, German industry and its organizations were faced with a new government that threatened the economic order industrialists had come to know. Capitalism, the ...market and the freedom of the entrepreneur were all openly questioned. From the perspective of industrialists and their organizations, the new state was unpredictable, appeared unstable and was more interested in political and social issues than real business policy. At best, it was unconcerned with the aspirations of industrialists in a capitalist economy. At worst, it might prove to be a species of Marxism, and the party’s putative emphasis on the
The National Socialist government’s basic assumptions about race, power and violence led to dramatic changes in the German economy between 1936 and the outbreak of war in 1939. How powerful was the ...Nazi state, and what were its aims? The degree of authoritarian autarky achieved (or even pursued) by the National Socialist regime prior to the outbreak of war remains in dispute. Avraham Barkai in particular makes a convincing argument that despite its lack of intellectual or conceptual rigour, the NSDAP adopted a ‘strain of antiliberalist nationalist etatism’ prior to gaining power that it then attempted to implement to the
