The key role coal industrialists played in supporting and financing the eventual Nazi triumph
Ever since the publication of Henry Turner’s German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, most historians in both Germany and the United States have dismissed the idea that support from German major industry played a key role in bringing Hitler to power. But the consensus is wrong, as I have shown in a series of works that began with my doctoral dissertation at the Free University of Berlin and now extends to more than ten different works, including two books. These works rely extensively on archival resources that were either inaccessible or only selectively open to earlier researchers.
This very comprehensive research cannot, of course, be exhaustively presented in a single essay. Instead, this INET Working Paper deals in detail with one of the most crucial episodes in Hitler’s rise to power – one that previous historians, particularly Turner, have profoundly misjudged thanks, in part at least, to shortcomings in the documentary sources available to them. This is the history of the political relations between Hitler and the NSDAP leadership and the German “coal industrialists” in the period from 1926 to 1933 – based on a profound analysis of first-class source materials from several German economic archives. Or, in plain English, the part that the German coal industry played in the rise of Hitler at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s.
The essay begins by clarifying who the German coal industrialists actually were and the place they occupied in large-scale German industry. The political and economic situation in Germany at the time is examined to show why the coal industrialists supported Hitler and ultimately saw him as the solution to their political problems. The essay traces the growth of relations between Hitler and the leading German coal industrialists over time. The final part of the essay studies the effects of the political alliance between Hitler and the coal industrialists and documents the industrialists’ extensive financial support for the NSDAP, its press, its leading figures, and its election funding.
