Wanna Take a Guess Who Trump-Backing Businessmen Sound Like?

It was business leaders who negotiated the deal that brought Hitler to power in 1933. The banker Kurt von Schröder arranged crucial negotiations between Hitler and Franz von Papen, the former chancellor who would become vice-chancellor in Hitler’s Cabinet. In the final arrangement, Hugenberg took over no fewer than five different Cabinet positions.

After the war, Schröder explained his motivation. The economic situation in 1932 was catastrophic, he said, and all attempts to stimulate the economy had failed. “I am firmly convinced, even today,” he told prosecutors at Nuremberg, “that if stable conditions hadn’t come, we would have sunk into Bolshevism.” The 30 parties in Germany’s Parliament couldn’t bring stability; only one party, he implied—and only one-party rule—could do that.

In the short term this deal worked out well for business. Business profits rose modestly in the 1930s as Germany recovered from the Depression. Wages stagnated (though employment rose). But it did not take long for business leaders to realize that the economic efficiency and rationality they sought were at odds with Hitler’s real goals. Those goals—the largest possible war machine to conquer the largest possible empire—required trade-offs industrialists would never voluntarily make (not exporting any steel and relying on inferior domestic ores, for instance). Hitler fired Hugenberg and then Schacht from his Cabinet. These men learned too late that an authoritarian state could come for them too.