BIG BUSINESS IN THE THIRD REICH

It is Professor Schweitzer's thesis that an understanding of the economic systems of fascist regimes can ""furnish us with some significant lessons for coping with one-party dictatorships in the future"". With this end in mind, he has studied, literally, of documents, some of them hitherto inaccessible, concerned with business, banking, and industry in Nazi Germany. One of his findings was that there were two prevalent economic policies involved, one before and one after 1936. Since this present volume consists of 640 close pages and yet treats only the first of these policies, it is a highly specialized book. But within its rigorous limitations, which include an almost slavish dedication to Max Weber's four-fold theories of capitalism, its accomplishments are many and far-reaching. It constitutes a convincing refutation of Shirer's opinion that ""the Nazi revolution was political, not economic,"" and demonstrates how it was a oalition of two classes, the military and big business, which produced and controlled the first phases of that revolution. It also provides an often frightening picture of capitalism not only divorced from, but inimical to, democracy.