On the afternoon of February 20, 1933, Adolf Hitler met with Germany’s business leaders. Among the two dozen executives present was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, head of the legendary eponymous maker of steel and armaments. There was car manufacturer Fritz von Opel, and Georg von Schnitzler from the chemical concern I.G. Farben, which in a few years would become notorious for supplying Auschwitz with the poison gas Zyklon B. Presiding over the event was Hjalmar Schacht, who would soon return to his old job as head of Germany’s central bank, the Reichsbank.
An election campaign was underway, with the vote coming in three weeks. Hitler needed money.
“Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” Hitler told the assembled bosses. Germany faced a stark choice between “Marxism, or the other side.” This election campaign would, Hitler insisted, be the last one: “Regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat.” Schacht concluded the meeting by bringing things right to the point: “To the cash boxes, gentlemen!”
The gentlemen contributed altogether a little over 2 million Reichsmarks, around $12.5 million in present U.S. dollars. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was jubilant. “Great stuff!” he wrote in his diary. “I alert the whole propaganda department right away.… Now we’re going to make an election campaign.”
The aura of evil around the Nazis can make everything associated with them seem exotic and remote. It may be hard for us to imagine how respectable business leaders could enthusiastically support Hitler’s election campaign. But their motives were mundane and familiar: pragmatism with a dash of ideological conviction.
Exactly the same mixture of motives drives many business leaders to give large sums to Donald Trump in 2024, with a potentially similar outcome.
The Weimar Republic (1919–1933) significantly changed conditions for German business. The new state obliged companies to recognize labor unions, instituted an eight-hour day, and required companies with more than 50 employees to form “works councils” with labor representation to make key decisions. There was also a nationally mandated wage arbitration system, which tended to push wage settlements to levels companies viewed as unsustainable.
Business had to operate within a complicated set of financial arrangements, a legacy of defeat in World War I. The Treaty of Versailles obliged Germany to pay reparations to the victors. The allies took control of the Reichsbank and forced Germany to return its currency to the gold standard. One Reichsbank president called these arrangements “an invisible occupation,” and he wasn’t wrong. They were meant to limit Germany’s sovereignty. Most German businesspeople and financiers—like Hjalmar Schacht—found them intolerable.
Business leaders could accept a stringent regulatory environment and greater union power such as Weimar’s so long as these impositions seemed to stave off a violent revolution on the model of the Russian Bolsheviks’. Such a revolution was what Germany’s business leaders had feared at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. But 10 years later, they came to believe that the Weimar regulatory state had made capitalism unworkable. The Communist Party, or KPD, was getting more votes with every election, while the business-oriented parties were shrinking into irrelevance. Democracy wasn’t working out for business.
The most prominent business leader in politics was Alfred Hugenberg. Hugenberg had been an executive at Krupps, and then had broken out on his own to become the Rupert Murdoch of Weimar Germany, a media baron who owned a chain of newspapers and magazines as well as the renowned UFA film studio. In 1928 he rose to lead the German National People’s Party, the party of the establishment right.
Hugenberg wanted to put an end to Weimar’s labor-friendly regulations and treaty commitments. Only an authoritarian state could do this. His party became uncompromising in its hostility to democracy, even though that position cost it half of its electoral following.
As Hugenberg gained control of the German Nationals, the Great Depression was transforming the electoral appeal of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists. Hugenberg persistently sought an alliance with Hitler. They campaigned together against a renegotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, and they joined in a political alliance known as the Harzburg Front.
Both sides of this alliance were ambivalent. The establishment didn’t like Hitler. He was crude; he had trouble speaking grammatically; sometimes his party sounded worryingly anti-elitist or even anti-capitalist. Hitler generally despised the conservative politicians he knew he had to use to get power. But the two factions agreed on anti-Communism and hostility to the peace settlement. And Hitler got votes: He could provide a mass basis for their capitalism.
Hitler admired business leaders and their companies. When Otto Strasser, one of the more anti-capitalist Nazis, asked Hitler in astonishment if he would leave Krupps alone when he got power, Hitler responded: “Of course I would leave it alone! Do you think me so crazy as to want to ruin Germany’s great industry?”
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.
Nearly a century later, many of our business leaders are blithely repeating the experiences of their German predecessors. They are doing so with the same mixture of motives—mostly pragmatic, with a touch of ideology. They back Trump although they often do not think highly of him. And they show the same indifference, or downright hostility, to democracy.
The lowest common denominator among Trump’s business backers is the desire for deregulation. This is no doubt Elon Musk’s motivation, as it is for the cryptocurrency bros who flock to his banner. Fear of regulatory retaliation against Amazon is probably behind Jeff Bezos’s decision to nix The Washington Post’s already written endorsement of Kamala Harris.
It isn’t that these people think well of Trump. Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz is typical. At a fundraiser for Trump earlier this year, when President Joe Biden was still in the race, Peltz is reported to have said, “I don’t like Donald Trump,” whom he called a “terrible human being.” But the country is “in a bad place and we can’t afford Joe Biden.” Schröder could not have said it better.
If Trump wins, these backers are likely to be as disappointed as German business leaders became. A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review finds that populist leaders of the right and left have an increasingly negative effect on economic growth the longer they are in office. The reasons include the temptation to keep fueling growth through ever more desperate measures—along with corruption and the suppression of accurate economic data.
Certainly not every captain of industry is on board with Trump. Many who would have backed a conventional Republican are not backing Trump, from Bill Gates to Charles Koch.
Those who are with Trump often reveal a harder ideological edge. Sometimes this is about the belief that Trump will be more resolute in supporting Israel. Sometimes it is openly anti-democratic. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” says Peter Thiel, patron of JD Vance as well as Trump.
We can only wonder if Thiel knows he is channeling Adolf Hitler on that February afternoon in 1933.