Hitler and the German Coal Industrialists: Passing the Keys to A Kingdom

Karsten Heinz Schönbach
Additional contact information
Karsten Heinz Schönbach: Free University of Berlin

No inetwp230, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: Ever since the publication of Henry Turner's German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, most histo-rians 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 ar-chival 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 pre-vious historians, particularly Turner, have profoundly misjudged thanks in part at least to the short-comings in the documentary sources available to them. This is the history of the political relations be-tween 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.

Keywords: German Coal Industry; Great Depression, Rise of Nazis, Germany Economic History (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J52 N14 N34 N54 N64 P12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2024-10-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp230 First version, 2024 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:inetwp230

DOI: 10.36687/inetwp230

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pia Malaney ().