1946 Pollux Infographic Table of the Corporate 'Trusts' of the Third Reich

A scarce and damning infographic, this c. 1946 chart traces the companies and trusts of the Nazi-era German economy and their interconnections with the Nazi regime. It appeared in the booklet Criminels de guerre! Derrière les coulisses. 50 potentats gouvernaient l'Allemagne, aimed at French trade unionists.

A Closer Look

The chart seen here is a forensic map of the webs of finance and political control that comprised the Nazi corporatist economy. The ultimate power was, without question, the Nazi Party itself. However, the party was neither willing nor able to oversee all aspects of production and economic exchange. Instead, it enlisted or coopted a range of industrial firms and financial institutions, in addition to the levers of the state, such as the Reichsbank and the office of Walther Funk, Reich Minister for Economic Affairs during the war years. (Funk was convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, but released in 1957 and died 3 years later.) Many recognizable names appear, such as Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Thyssen, Krupp, and Skoda, demonstrating the postwar viability of firms that collaborated with the Nazis.

No case is more damning or illustrative than that of I.G. Farben, a chemicals manufacturer that employed slave labor at a factory near Auschwitz, conducted bizarre medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, and produced the gas Zyklon B, used to exterminate over 1 million European Jews and others in gas chambers. At the end of the war, the company's leadership were tried as war criminals, with roughly half its executives convicted and sentenced to prison terms of various lengths. However, as was common for those convicted at Nuremberg but not executed, these executives were all released early and returned to corporate leadership.

A surprising feature of this chart, and one the booklet with which it was published emphasizes, is the role of international capital and capitalists, whether Swiss and American banks, financiers in London and New York, foreign arms manufacturers, or French, British, and American industrial firms. No doubt, most of these international connections were truncated during the war, but the booklet is focused on building a postwar system in France and Germany that would avoid the re-emergence of such a conglomeration of unscrupulous financiers and war profiteers.

Corporatism and the Third Reich

Despite calling themselves 'national socialists,' the Nazis were not particularly socialist in their economic policies. Instead, they practiced a fairly standard form of corporatism, albeit one overlaid with racist, hyper-nationalist ideology. Under the Nazi's corporatism model, major industrial firms maintained their independent identity. They operated on a for-profit basis as before but were guided by the state towards certain ends, above all towards militarization. Emphasis was placed on cooperation and common national aims rather than competition and profit maximization. Labor was suppressed, and workers were forced to join Nazi-aligned 'unions' (the German Labor Front) that negotiated with the firms' bosses, overseen by the guiding hand of the party-state. Companies that were politically aligned with the Nazis benefitted during their rise to power, but in the process came more firmly under Nazi control. As the example of I.G. Farben above illustrates, these firms were implicated in the worst crimes of the Nazi regime and were penalized to an extent at the end of the war, but many continued to exist and even thrive in the postwar period.

Publication History and Census

This work was prepared for the booklet Criminels de guerre! Derrière les coulisses.50 potentats gouvernaient l'Allemagne, published c. 1946 by the French publisher Pollux. This is the French edition of a work originally published in Zurich, Switzerland the previous year by Verein für wirtschaftliche Studien - Imprimerie Coopérative (as Qui gouvernait l’Allemagne? Les véritables criminels de guerre: 50 potentats derrière les coulisses). This French edition was published by Pollux for the French trade union magazine La Vie Ouvrière (the book's preface was written by André Tollet, a leader in the French Resistance and the Secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail). The infographic presented here is not independently cataloged among the holdings of any institution. The entire work (either the Swiss or French editions, OCLC 713928227, 427921251, and 915199024) is only held by six institutions in Europe.