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with the community represented on the directorate. Thyssen, steelmagnate and ultra-conservative, says of this:The result is that a kind of sparring match takes place between theprivate economic interests on the one hand and the communal interests ofthe cities and villages on the other. The object is precisely this: to ensurethat the private economic interests must not injure the commonweal. Thefinal supervision is, of course, the business of the government. 5One argument in later years for this system was that this gavethe state all the advantages of ownership without the dangers ofmanagement of many industries which would result in the creationof a vast state bureaucracy. The Hitler regime was especially attractedby this scheme and it became an integral part of its wholeeconomic policy. Like everything else it did, however, the wholesystem and all its techniques were forged for it by that strangecollaboration of conservatives and radicals, which must ever remainone of the most singular phenomena of these times.The experiments in state ownership, state control, state partnershipswere numerous. One example was the coal industry. A ReichCoal Council was organized, which applied the principle of planningto the coal industry. The same thing was done for the potash industry.This was done in 1919 but continued to flourish all throughthe ¯Weimar regime. 6The Weimar republic invaded the banking field. It organized theKeichskreditgesellschaft, It operated on the same model as the privatebanks and quickly rose to the rank of the Big Four and finallygave the state dominant position in the banking field. The governmentowned, as a legacy of the war, enterprises of various kinds.These were transferred to government-owned corporations in whichthe government held stock through a great government-owned holdingcompany known as Viag (Vereinigte Industrie AktiengeselUschaft) with which was combined the Keichskreditgesellschaft tofinance them. By 1926 it is estimated there were 1,200 cartels operatingin the Reich. The government was struggling to create abalance between industrial and farm prices—parity—and to thisH Paid Hitler, by Fritz Thyssen, Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1941.*German Economy, by Gustav Stolper, Reynal & Hitchcock, Nev York, 1940."5