"Industry was regarded entirely instrumentally by party, state and military, in terms of its ability to provide the sinews of war… The business community was characterized by a defensive opportunism in the face of state power."

“here could be no guarantee in a free market that the interests of race or state as Hitler defined them would take priority over the interests of businessmen or consumers. After 1933 the role of the state in regulating and directing economic life increased sharply, first in order to encourage economic revival, then to divert economic resources to the growth of German military power… led, in an unplanned, incremental way, to the establishment of a kind of command economy.”

“The outcome was a command economy, governed by military priorities, but run by a coalition of state officials, soldiers, party hacks and industrial technocrats.”

“Nazi political hegemony in the end prevented German capitalists form acting as capitalists.”

“In a remark made in 1932 to Otto Wagener, one of the party’s economic experts, Hitler observed that the business bourgeoisie “know nothing except their profit. ‘Fatherland’ is only a word for them.”

“Göring industrial empire represented, in this sense, one of the major steps towards restricting private industrial capitalism and substituting a ‘völkisch’, state-run industrial economy.”

“The regime was also able to use the state-owned multi-nationals as a ‘battering ram’ for entering economies that were not occupied territory.”