When big business rolled over for fascism — and cashed in: A lesson, or a warning?

At the beginning of 1933, the National Socialist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazis, found themselves on the brink of financial ruin. To feed its propaganda apparatus and pay for the "brownshirts," Nazi militias who stalked Germany's streets "discouraging" opposition, the party needed money it didn't have. Hitler's avowed opposition to left-wing politics would later endear him to Germany's capitalists, though that moment had to wait for many years after he explained his beliefs in "Mein Kampf." That, of course, was not universally true; Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, a heavy industry magnate whose famous firm produced the bulk of German war materiél during World War I, was an enthusiastic Hitler backer well before the 1933 breakthrough, making large financial contributions to the party and distributing copies of "Mein Kampf" among his workers. Hitler argued that the economic interests of capitalism were best served by the destruction of Germany's parliamentary system: "Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy."