The history of the political relations between Hitler and the NSDAP leadership and the German “coal industrialists” from 1926 to 1933
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. This 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 paper analyzes in detail 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 the shortcomings in the documentary sources available to them. This is the history of the political relations between Hitler, the NSDAP leadership, and the German “coal industrialists” in the period from 1926 to 1933 and the key role these firms played in supporting and financing the eventual Nazi triumph.
