Increasingly, historians have been turning their attention to the effects of Nazi racism. In recent years major studies have appeared on forced sterilization, euthanasia, theft of “racially valuable” children, and “antinatalism,” as well as the destruction of “racially undesirable” groups: the handicapped, certain foreign laborers, and homosexuals.

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.

One of the difficulties in thinking about postwar German history comes in trying to explain the apparent absence of a paramilitary effervescence accompanying the collapse of the Third Reich. Independent military formations—Freikorps—had played a role during the 1806–1813 period, and such units had appeared again during the stormy years from 1918 to 1923, so the seeming absence of such formations in 1944/45 is quite noticeable. Charles Maier called it one of the major surprises of postwar European politics. To some extent, this perception is illusory; in truth, there were a number of Freikorps launched in 1944/45, although they failed to make a military or political impact and were therefore quickly forgotten. Considering the integral connection between previous Freikorps and the development of modern German nationalism, their relative absence in 1944/45 warrants the historian’s attention.