The Historiography of the Holocaust

Big Business and the Third Reich 147
economic problems. While no enthusiastic democrats, business leaders feared
the rabble-rousing, anti-business rhetoric of the NSDAP and even its harsh
forms of antisemitism. Although some business and individual contributions were
made to the Nazi Party before 1933, the vast majority of big business’s political
contributions went to parties of the centre-right. Nevertheless, as Turner has
pointed out, when economic and especially political circumstances worsened
and the Hindenburg-appointed governments paid as little heed to business
interests as the parties of the left, business leaders were increasingly willing to
support other anti-democratic parties of the right such as Hugenberg’s. By the
late autumn of 1932 and early winter of 1932–33, a good many were abandoning
their strong opposition to a Nazi-led government. Some were vainly trying to
cultivate relationships with seemingly more reasonable Nazis like Gregor Strasser.
Most business leaders were passive, ill-informed bystanders to the final negotiations
that brought Hitler to power in January 1933, but after the Machtergreifung
they adapted quickly enough. Big business began to view the Nazis more
opportunistically as a possible means of ridding Germany of vestiges of the
near-universally hated Versailles Treaty, reducing international financial and
competitive pressures and quelling labour unrest:
The leaders of German big business were, for all their pretensions, such
absorbed and confined men, preoccupied with the management of large,
complex organizations. They sustained fashion to that sphere of activity, so
that they remained part-time amateurs, operating only sporadically, and
usually ineffectually, on the periphery of politics. As such, they were sorely
ill-suited to deal with a phenomenon like Nazism. 25
On the heels of Turner’s landmark study, his student, Peter Hayes, established
what has become the paradigm for all other company studies by comparing
the evolution of the changes in company attitudes and behaviour as National
Socialism tightened its grip on German society. Freed of the extreme suppositions
that businessmen were either manipulating the Nazi thugs or were themselves
innocent victims, Hayes’ greatest contribution to the study of business lies in
the area of process, how the management of IG Farben was transformed from
industrial to ideological agents. He was the first scholar to show in detail how the
managers of an international firm, devoted to technical innovation and steeped
in traditions of managerial independence, could end up convicted of crimes
against humanity, leaders of a firm that had lost, as it were, even its legal right
to exist. Although Hayes begins his story with a short history of IG Farben’s
member firms and the first seven years of the resulting merged company, his
focus is the incremental steps that took Farben from being a despised – even to
party zealots a ‘Jewish firm’, in which party members were not particularly
welcome and were certainly outnumbered in management during the early 1930s