Interpretation of the relationship between German business and the National Socialist regime is in flux. There have always been profound disagreements between those who see the relationship in terms of a political device to allow a crisis-ridden German capitalism to survive the world slump and control its working class, and those who argue that National Socialism imposed a populist totalitarian economics on a powerless business community. There is now a third area of interpretation that sees the German economy in the 1930s in relative terms, with clear areas of continuity with pre-1933 policies, and evident convergence with economic policy pursued elsewhere. On this account, the long-term development of the German business community and of German economic policy is of more significance than the short-term disruption of the dictatorship.

The first of these interpretations is the oldest, derived from Marxist analysis of the nature of fascism in the 1920s. The National Socialist regime was widely regarded as the direct offspring of the deep crisis affecting German capitalism. Marxists saw the slump of 1929–32 as evidence that the liberal-bourgeois economic order was in terminal decay. At the 17th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Stalin told delegates that they were witnessing ‘the general crisis of capitalism’, a ‘depression of a special kind’. Its political consequences were looked upon as self-evident: ‘the ruling classes in the capitalist countries are zealously destroying or nullifying the last vestiges of parliamentarianism and bourgeois democracy … they are resorting to open terroristic methods to maintain their dictatorship’.