Enterprise in the Period of Fascism in Europe

Harold James, Jakob Tanner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351939850
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The essays in this volume consider the involvement of business corporations and of individual businessmen in the politics of the 1930s and 1940s: in the move away from the market and also from democracy, towards state control and authoritarianism, including the massive intervention of the state in property rights. How far did businesses attempt to guide this intervention for their own purposes, and to what extent did they succeed? This debate deals, centrally, with the role of German business, of banks, of industrial corporations, and of small tradesmen in the Nazi regime. An older discussion of how they may have facilitated the Nazi takeover has been supplemented here by an investigation into how they made the regime's policies possible, and the extent to which the profit motive drove them to participate - with sometimes more, sometimes less enthusiasm - in the politics of inhumanity. Such discussion has been given further impetus by legal action, initially in the United States, in the form of class action suits on behalf of the victims of Nazism. What do such legal and political debates mean for business history? What are the current responsibilities of business facing the consequences of historical action? And what lessons should be learned concerning the ethics of business behaviour? The contributions to this volume were originally presented as papers at a conference organised by the Society for European Business History in Paris in November 1998.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

The Economic Origins and Dimensions of European Fascism

Gerald D. Feldman

Speaking on this subject in a conference with the title ‘Enterprises in the Period of Fascism in Europe’ fills me with a certain nostalgia. It reminds me of the good old days in the 1960s and early 1970s when students flooded into the classrooms of professors like myself teaching twentieth-century history of Germany or Europe to gather ammunition for their discussions of Fascism theory. It was a time when the analysis of state monopoly capitalism, organized capitalism, late capitalism, and the works of the Frankfurt School, Ralph Miliband, and Nicos Poulantzas, and compilations of essays on theories of Fascism were the rage. Where have all the usual suspects gone? While some of the historians in this room are older than others, the constellation of participants in this meeting come by and large from the field of business and economic history rather than those who devoted their work to the study of Fascist regimes. Even more extraordinary, this is a meeting sponsored by enterprises and foundations supported by enterprises, and most remarkably, we have leading businesspeople sitting in the audience and participating in our concluding panel. As a friend from Berkeley who just attended a conference in honour of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Herbert Marcuse – where perhaps some of the usual suspects were present – reported to me: ‘I think the Revolution is not much closer to being realized.’ Nevertheless, there is something revolutionary about this gathering, at least in an intellectual sense, and it owes much to the great storms of the late 1960s and early 1970s that paved the way for our present engagement with this subject by opening up important problems and testing theories and ideas in ways that are very helpful to us today.

It is essential to remember that the most telling and, in my own view, fatal assault on the traditional Marxist approach to National Socialism came from a Marxist, the late Tim Mason, who argued that it was the primacy of politics rather than that of economics which characterized National Socialism in its most potent and destructive phase. His justly famous essay on the primacy of politics suggested that the barbarism of the regime had to be explained by the manner in which it tore asunder all connection between its goals and anything resembling economic rationality and the norms of civil society.¹ So, too, was it Tim Mason who provided us with one of the best analyses of the decline and fall of fascism theory in another important essay of 1988 bearing the title ‘Whatever happened to “fascism”?’² He attributed the theory’s demise primarily ‘to the slow decline and fragmentation of the movements of 1968’, whose interest in the fascism of the past was driven by the anticipation that fascism had a future in the present. The failure of this expectation, the growing significance of feminism, which turned interest away from the Fascist paradigm, and the increasing consciousness that the Holocaust was a qualitatively different historical experience that could not be explained by the paradigm – all these elements made the old discussion increasingly irrelevant to scholars working on this era and to the interested public. Nevertheless, Mason also argued that fascism remained a useful and important concept, at a minimum in a heuristic sense, because there were important similarities between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The trajectories of the two movements and regimes took place in reference to one another, and one can learn a good deal about the two regimes by comparing and contrasting them with one another in a host of areas. Furthermore, the Fascist model, however interpreted and understood by contemporary observers, exerted great influence throughout Europe after 1922 and of course dominated Europe between 1938/1939 and 1945.

As we have become acutely aware during the past few years, the decline of Marxist fascism theory has by no means led to a loss of interest in the relationship between capitalist enterprises and Fascist and National Socialist regimes, let alone to an exoneration of those enterprises from their collaboration with the Fascist war effort and involvement in the crimes of National Socialism. The days when enterprises can claim they were victims of Socialism and the economic irrationalities of National Socialism, and were even resisters, as many enterprises did, are over, although the records of some are clearly better than those of others. Furthermore, we are now becoming more and more aware of how Fascism and National Socialism tainted and corrupted not only everything they touched but also undermined the morality and ethics of those outside their direct control. It is significant, therefore, that our meeting includes the discussion of enterprises in neutral countries as well as of those allied to and occupied by the Axis powers. In any case, I believe that we are doing something very new and important here today, and I want to attempt to set the stage for our conference by trying to establish some links between what we know already about this subject and what we are trying to find out.

Let me begin with the problem of the economic origins of Fascism and National Socialism. Neither of these movements can be accused of having contributed anything to economic thought or to have had any original vision of a new economic order replacing capitalism. In this they of course contrasted sharply to Marxist Socialism and Communism, which were grounded in a historical theory based on the evolution and control of the forces of production, which anticipated the overthrow of the capitalist order and its replacement by a new Socialist and Communist order, and which entertained a utopian vision of a world without states. Both the theory and the practice of Marxism proved useful in mobilizing and developing backward economies at a certain stage of development but then proved utterly disastrous at more advanced stages of development which require the existence of sophisticated market signals, functional systems of distribution, and the personal liberties required to take advantage of the information revolution upon which the economies of so-called post-industrial societies rest. In economic terms, Fascism and National Socialism were advantaged by their theoretical opportunism and purely instrumental and decisionist approaches to economic problems. They were anti-capitalist enough to be threatening to private enterprise and property but flexible enough to take advantage of the efficiencies of capitalist enterprises in the mobilization of societies. In the short run they presented no real threat and even some real advantages to the capitalist system, while in the long run, their dynamism and imperialism certainly threatened the autonomy and indeed the existence of capitalist enterprise through a transcendent decisionism that ultimately was tantamount to national suicide. The rules and norms of the capitalist economic system became increasingly irrelevant in the course of Fascism’s march into catastrophe.³

Whatever their pre-war intellectual antecedents, Fascism and National Socialism, as living movements and systems, were products of the First World War and its aftermath. They were movements spawned by dissatisfaction with the outcome of the First World War, fuelled by an exclusionary integral nationalism, driven by demagogic and charismatic leaders whose most important following came from the brutalized veterans of the war, and favoured by the economic crises and social discontents that undermined the Liberal-Democratic regimes of the post-war period as well as by the fear in bourgeois circles of radical Socialist and Communist alternatives. The economic conditions were a necessary but not sufficient condition for Fascist seizures of power since other countries in and outside Europe underwent economic crises without ending up with Fascist governments. This said, however, one can certainly specify the kinds of economic conditions that led to such seizures of power and discuss the role which enterprises played in them.

One way of doing so is to compare Germany and Italy between 1919 and 1923 and ask why Italy went Fascist while Germany was saved from Fascism for a decade despite the fact that it had plenty of Fascists or Fascist-like organizations with which to contend; experienced major putsches and assassinations; was in a steady state of political uproar, and ended up in a hyperinflation that totally destroyed its currency. One might add that in 1923 Hitler was seen by many as the German Mussolini and that leading German industrialists were calling for a more authoritarian regime, rule by some kind of directory, and even a kind of ‘Mussolinism’ in their effort to eliminate the eight-hour day and undermine collective bargaining. The answer as to why Weimar survived, lay in the use made of inflation to maintain employment levels during the post-revolutionary period, recapture something of Germany’s position on world markets, and reconstruct the domestic economy more fully than might otherwise have been the case. Weimar Germany benefited from the abundance of a crucial natural resource, coal, and from a speculative engagement in the mark by foreigners, who believed, at least until the summer of 1922, that the Germans would put their own house in order and get back to work. Once the Germans managed to end the hyperinflation in late 1923, Germany was spared an extreme deflation and severe depression because Great Britain and, above all the United States, were willing to come to the rescue in 1923–1924. The Republic also benefited from leadership of exceptional quality in the persons of Chancellor and then Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and, as strange as it sounds in view of his later career, Currency Commissar and Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who sought a resolution of the crisis that maintained parliamentary democracy and regained international confidence. Stabilization, greased by American money, could thus proceed under relatively favourable conditions. Furthermore, unlike Austria, which was rescued from its inflation by a League of Nations loan and a foreign supervisor over its budgetary practices, external restraints on Germany were minimal as it still enjoyed respect because of its great power status.⁴

Such happy solutions had not been available to Italy because, unlike Germany, it was a great power only in its own mind, was poor in natural resources, above all coal, and was not inviting to currency speculators. Furthermore, in trying to pursue a deflationary policy, it lacked the internal authority and stability enjoyed by the great victors of the First World War, the United States and Great Britain, and thus suffered doubly under the economic downturn of 1920–1921. Radicalized and frightened by the occupation of the factories in the bienno rosso of 1919–1920 and the land seizures in the Po valley and in central Italy, the alarmed bourgeoisie used the economic downturn to counterattack in 1921–1922 and were prepared to accept Fascist terror against the Left. As Adrian Lyttelton has argued, the Fascist triumph was a consequence of the crisis in rather than of bourgeois society in which the old and new middle classes revolted against the bureaucratic and political liberals. In general, the capitalists would have preferred a conservative government but were quite prepared to see Mussolini in it.⁵ The truth was that Mussolini was no threat to industry and banking and was not perceived as one; that no one exactly knew what Mussolinism was, including Mussolini himself, or what a Fascist state would look like, and that the capitalists were not prime movers in what turned out to be a protracted Fascist take-over. They did seek what Rolf Petri has called an ‘authoritarian overcoming of the institutional status quo’,⁶ and they were prime beneficiaries of the restoration of ‘order’ and the suppression of the trade unions through the authoritarian state corporatism of the so-called ‘totalitarian’ state after 1925. Thanks to its role in the overcoming of the crisis of 1919–1922, the regime enjoyed a high degree of loyalty and legitimacy among the employers.

As in Italy in 1920–1922, so in Germany in 1930–1933: the crisis of the State and the crisis in bourgeois society combined with the economic crisis to produce a Fascist outcome. This time, however, the economic crisis was far more severe and the context of the world economic crisis radically limited the assistance Germany could expect from the outside world. Indeed, the world-wide nature of the crisis promoted economic isolationism and gave autarky ideas a plausibility they would otherwise never have gained. To be sure, German businessmen did not buy into these ideas and remained committed to economic internationalism, but it is important to recognize that the authority of the German business community had been severely undermined by the Great Depression. German industry had claimed a great deal of authority for itself in the Weimar Republic, had played a major role in politics and the media, and had undertaken a substantial programme of concentration and rationalization. The economic collapse opened up the way to severe criticism of big industry and big banking, the former being charged with overrationalization and false policies, the latter being charged with misdirection of credits in favour of big business, and often big crooks, to the neglect of medium-sized and small business. Many of these charges came from the National Socialist camp, and it was thus understandable that many big businessmen viewed the Nazis as nothing more than brown-shirted Socialists and a revolt from the gutter. There were very few big businessmen who supported Hitler, and such support as he did receive was conditioned by the expectation that the National Socialists could be ‘educated’ to understand economics and would share power in a conservative government. The history of Italian Fascism provided reason for optimism. As one German business lobbyist argued: ‘Despite the radical National Socialist agitation proposals, a change is not to be ruled out. The Fascists in Italy made similar demands in the years 1922–1923, but they then threw them overboard when Mussolini came to power and had to take responsibility.’⁷ Much more important than such toying with Fascist possibilities, however, was the role played by big business in undermining democracy through its support of the authoritarian, anti-parliamentary approach to the management of the economic crisis reflected in the policies of Brüning, von Papen and Schleicher. The reduction of wages and salaries by decree, the use of compulsory arbitration to favour industry, the harsh deflationary measures and increasing government supervision of the economy following the July 1931 banking crisis all had the cumulative consequence of shifting the balance between business and state in favour of the latter. Businessmen liked some of these measures and did not like others, but the crucial thing was that they were increasingly dependent on the authority of the state and were thus being trained for National Socialism even before they were compelled to deal with it as the ruling force in Germany. After the banking crisis, more and more of them were willing to accept reflationary experimentation and work-creation measures provided they were implemented under authoritarian auspices and were free of trade union interference. This explains their willingness to go along with National Socialist work creation activities in 1934–1935 which, as Dan P. Silverman has demonstrated in his recent book on National Socialist work-creation programmes were not pure eyewash and entailed some fiscal risks as well as some uneconomic concessions on the part of businessmen.⁸ Even if they did not lead to the self-sustaining growth that was the goal of some of the more sober economic leaders – Kurt Schmitt, Hjalmar Schacht, and Schwerin von Krosigk – of the regime and ultimately gave way to rearmament under the Four Year Plan in 1936, the willingness of employers to go along with these measures and then with Goring’s rearmament programme demonstrated how decisively authority and power had shifted away from the business community. Not only did the business community not resist this shift in any serious sense, but it also demonstrated a deplorable willingness to go along, to demonstrate loyalty, and to fight for its interests by appropriating the language and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Index