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Visions of Utopia: Social Emancipation, Technological Progress, and Anticapitalism in Nazi Inventor Policy, 1933–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Kees Gispen
Kees Gispen
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
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Extract

In this paper I would like to relate some of the results of my specialized research on Nazi inventor policy to themes and interpretations with which many students of the Third Reich already are familiar. One of those themes is the relationship between big business and the Nazi state. An influential hypothesis in this area centers on the notion of a “power cartel,” based on the insight that Nazi Germany was not a dictatorship in which all sectors of society were suppressed with equal force. According to the “power-cartel” interpretation, which incorporates elements of the Marxist perspective on the relationship between capitalism and National Socialism, the Third Reich was governed by an informal coalition of the Nazis, the military, and big business. This fundamental idea is then qualified by two additional observations. First, the Nazi movement is broken down into factions comprising the party, Labor Front, and SA on the one hand, and the Gestapo and SS on the other hand. The former are seen to lose power as time went by while that latter gained it, which helps explain the regime's increasing brutality and its accelerating descent into barbarism. Second, the idea of a changing balance of power is also applied to the power cartel as a whole. The point here is to account for the gradual loss of power by the military and big business. Their relatively advantageous positions in the regime’s early years steadily eroded, producing a very different weighting among the cartel’s members by the time World War II ended, without, however, ever completely destroying it.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 35 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1999

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References

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