The Historiography of the Holocaust

146 Christopher Kobrak and Andrea H. Schneider
attention to the National Socialists’ economic ideology and financial support.
Until Avraham Barkai published his study of Nazi economics (original German
edition 1977), most historians believed that the Nazis had no theoretical or
practical economic programme and that whatever success they had in mitigating
the economic misery of the depression in Germany was attributable to pragmatic
improvisation or war preparations (a ‘war economy in peacetime’). 23 Barkai
reminded his readers of how consistently and thoroughly the Nazis had railed
against big business before they came to power, and how they applied their
theories about the proper role of business in society once they attained power.
Although National Socialists used some traditional business institutions early
on, their overall aim was to restructure companies and commercial attitudes to
turn businesses away from the pursuit of individual profit and towards the
good of the whole (the state and Volk) as defined by the party. German business,
for its part, was not nearly as opposed to extensive government intervention to
achieve certain social goods as their counterparts in other countries, which
may help explain why German industrial leaders so quickly became ‘sleeping
partners’ (to use Barkai’s words) of the new Nazi state. Nevertheless, industrialists
were apprehensive about the extent to which the ‘Movement’ was willing
to trample on traditional distinctions between public and private. Taking as his
starting point Mason’s observation that the defining characteristic of the Nazi
regime was the ‘primacy of politics’, Barkai argued that, by the time business
began participating in the preparations for war, big business had lost all
influence. Where he differed from Mason is the latter’s view that decisions
emanated from Hitler alone. According to Barkai, Nazi ideology consistently
placed the needs of the whole over that of individual profit, which demanded
political guidance ostensibly for economic decisions. He concluded that, whereas
business shared in the profits of the recovery and the plunder of Jewish and
foreign property, the business community ‘had no real say with regard to farreaching
objectives of economic policy; at best they had partial and limited
influence on the manner in which this policy was implemented’. 24
Henry Ashby Turner Jr challenged the popular faith that business had actively
aided Hitler’s coming to power. After dissecting in detail the evidence for the
arguments that the Nazi Party had received substantial help from big business
before 1933, he concluded that big business’s role in undermining the Weimar
Republic and the early gains of National Socialism had been greatly exaggerated
by historians. Although still not without controversy, Turner’s views are now
widely accepted, most importantly by historians active in research about the
period. Despite some important and well-known early supporters, the vast
majority of active leaders of big business – in contrast to the owners of small
and medium-sized businesses, who tended to be Nazi sympathizers – were at
worst only nervous about the prospects of a National Socialist government and
most probably actively pushing for other solutions to Germany’s social and