The Historiography of the Holocaust

Big Business and the Third Reich 157
in 1937. 57 The coalescing of government and business interests played a significant
role in the development of state enterprises. 58 By the end of the war,
short-sighted military considerations, not economic rationality, dominated
business decision-making. Economically viable programmes were sometimes
sacrificed for prestigious government contracts. 59
Second, and somewhat paradoxically in light of the first point, even with the
establishment of the Second Four-Year Plan, the organization of German
industry cannot be described as a planned economy. Petzina in the West and
East German historians like Dietrich Eichholtz almost simultaneously reached
the conclusion that Germany in the late 1930s was far from being a command
economy. 60 Government officials were no way near having effective control of
all economic planning until well into the war, as the failure to defeat Britain and
the Soviet Union rapidly convinced all but the most rabid fanatics that, at the
very best, victory was a distant hope. Until 1942, Germany lacked many elements
of a planned economy. 61 Although industry was forced to follow the Will of the
Dictator after 1936, even Klaus Hildebrand, one of the first to document the
loss of industrial self-determination, denied that this development established
a form of state capitalism. Many studies have focused on the complex economic
structures created by the FYP and the complex interaction of business and
party organs, once Germany was put on a war footing. 62
According to Ian Kershaw, neither the primacy of economics nor politics can
explain the Nazi system. The system was too complex, and both extreme explanations
too simplistic. The NS leadership did not have a sole aim, but many, and
these were sometimes contradictory. Sufficient chaos among the various power
groups within the system allowed for conflicts among proponents of various
government policies. Moreover, industry, too, was not homogeneous; it
encompassed a large variety of interest constellations that were integrated into
the planning process.
One of the main aims of the Four-Year Plan was to address raw material and
food shortages. 63 While IG Farben took over the planning and personal management
of the FYP, the replacement of assets and decisions on new investments
were organized by business sectors – for example, minerals, light metals and
chemicals – not by companies, which tended to make individual enterprises
secondary to the planning process, even though some of the FYP staff came
from industry. 64 Many business people were recruited to help in the planning
process, holding positions best characterized as functions between the private
and public sectors. 65
One of the clearest and saddest areas for illustrating the change in relationship
between the state and industry were labour practices, especially the use of
forced labour (Jews forced out of their normal employment, foreign workers
recruited under duress and prisoners of war) and slave labour (concentration
camp inmates) by companies during the war. Many aspects of the phenomenon