Introduction: The room for manoeuvre for firms in the Third Reich

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, questions about the role of private enterprises played during the ‘Third Reich’, including why – and the extent to which – they supported armament, exploitation, and crimes by the Nazis through 1945, have formed a central focus of German economic and business historiography. Numerous case studies of the most important German enterprises (including Krupp, BASF, Flick, and Degussa) have demonstrated that, despite the increasing impact of political and ideological factors, private firms never stopped pursuing their economic self-interest. Even under the extreme ideological circumstances of the ‘Third Reich’, their strategic decisions remained underpinned by economic criteria. In the meantime, a broad consensus has emerged that the state control of firms took place more by virtue of changes in framework conditions affecting the business environment than through direct coercion. Actually, the regime was especially able to control the economy successfully in those cases where it operated with economic incentives and left companies room for manoeuvre, even if the latter became increasingly smaller towards the end of the war due to increasing state intervention and government control. This scope may explain the considerable differences in the behaviour of firms, especially with respect to their involvement in the Nazi crimes, although it was often economic self-interest more than moral shortcomings on the part of managers and entrepreneurs that led the firms to cooperate with the regime. Despite this consensus, however, the question of how much room for manoeuvre firms actually had remains highly contested. A good example of this is the controversy between Peter Hayes and Christoph Buchheim. Buchheim argued that firms enjoyed a high degree of autonomy during the National Socialist period, while Hayes stressed the significance of state intervention in the economy, which firms could not afford to ignore without suffering considerable economic disadvantages. This special issue takes this controversy as a starting point, addressing the still open question of how much freedom of action firms actually had. The basic assumption is that this question can only be reasonably answered on the basis of numerous empirical case studies. For this reason, a general overview on the current state of discussion is presented in the following introduction of the special issue.