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Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Natural Law Does Not Lead to the Unbound Executive
In 2016, I was studying the rise of the National Socialist movement. My project was to investigate the philosophical origins of the National Socialist German Worker's Party—that is, the Nazi Party. That story is a complicated one, since National Socialism was not a cohesive philosophical movement in itself. It was constituted by a variety of different threads: the master morality of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosophy of Otto Weininger, Darwinian population medicine, and a number of other influences. It was during this work that I encountered the work of Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, famous for his legal justification of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Back in 2016, Schmitt's work was coming again into the public eye, thanks in large part to the influential Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule. Schmitt's sharp critiques of liberalism and his theories of law and politics, Vermeule argued, could be separated from his Nazism, and that to ignore these insights on account of Schmitt's politics was mere 'puritanism.' More recently, Vermeule has made waves with his idea of 'common good constitutionalism,' a new theory of legal interpretation arguing the executive branch can read into the law its own determinations about what serves the common good. (This is in contrast to the traditional notion that the courts make final determinations on constitutional questions.) In making this case, Vermeule makes liberal use of classical philosophical terms like 'common good' and 'natural law.' Vermeule's theories, however, should not be taken as representative of the tradition whose language he borrows. Rather, his project is fundamentally Schmittian and should be distinguished from wider theories about natural law and the common good. The significant and serious risks in Vermeule's project are not inherent in either natural law or common good political thought themselves. It would be a shame to throw out a tradition of thought, the tradition of natural law, that has so much to offer our public life because of a certain odorous bathwater. For the past several decades, Adrian Vermeule has been making an extended case for a more powerful executive branch of government. In the wake of the Iraq War, he co-authored The Executive Unbound, which made the case that legal constraints on the executive are really a fiction, and that American legal thinkers have overblown the need for separation of powers and the rule of law. In the modern era, given how quickly technology, markets, and foreign policy dynamics shift and how complex governance is, the legislature and courts are increasingly irrelevant. The executive is, or at least ought to be, 'legally unconstrained,' he wrote. Vermeule draws this line of thinking from Schmitt, a legal academic in early 20th century Germany and the 'crown jurist' of the Nazi Party. Schmitt played an important role in the early days of the Reich as chief legal counsel in party meetings. He wrote legal opinions for the party, drawing on his theories about the executive and the state of emergency, in order to justify Hitler's rise to dictatorial power and the extra-legal murders during the Night of the Long Knives. As the executive, sole power for determination with regard to the state of emergency—when to declare it, what it meant, and how long it would last—rested with the fuhrer. In this historical case, one element of the emergency was the existence of enemies of the party in important public positions. The fuhrer was, therefore, according to Schmitt, well within his proper role in ordering their killing or removal. Just as Vermeule claims that the executive's power rests not on what is granted to him by law but on the support of the people, so Schmitt claimed that Hitler's acts were justified because he had a special 'affinity' with what was popular among the German citizenry. Vermeule and his coauthor, Eric Posner, argue in The Executive Unbound that it is unreasonable to be afraid of tyranny on the part of an executive who is legally unconstrained, because public opinion itself will limit the administration's power (they have to worry about being ousted or about a lack of political will among the people). This, however, is precisely why Schmitt thought Hitler was justified in his policies: namely, because the German people wanted them. In the ensuing years, Vermeule has applied a Schmittian analysis to the administrative state—that is, to federal agencies acting under the executive. In articles like 'Our Schmittian Administrative Law,' and books like Law's Abnegation, he has argued that, inevitably, legislatures leave gray areas and gaps in the law, within which agency officials would have an unlimited breadth of action and judgment. The rise of the administrative state has long been a concern for originalists, who bemoaned the legal doctrine known as Chevron deference (overturned last year by the Supreme Court) which held that courts should defer to agency judgments in matters of the agency's own expertise. Many originalists regarded the legal doctrine as a problematic violation of the separation of powers since it gave unelected members of the executive wide latitude to exercise lawmaking power via regulations, unchecked by the courts or by Congress. Such a vast expansion of executive power opens the door to abuses of power, they maintained. But for Vermeule, this is a feature of the administrative state, rather than a bug. It is precisely with the executive, unfettered by law, that this kind of power should rest. 'As for the structure and distribution of authority within government,' Vermeule writes, 'common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law's inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule.' Finally, in Common Good Constitutionalism, his most recent book, Vermeule argues that it is within the executive's prerogative to read into the text of the law its own judgments on what serves the common good. This prerogative, further, ought not be limited by ideas about the original public meaning of the Constitution or later statutes. Originalists have long argued for their position on the basis that straying from the original public meaning of the text in favor of 'reading into' the text the policy priorities of a given judge effectively untethers judicial and executive action from the law altogether. It provides no principled limit to a judge's ability to disregard the actual meaning of a law in favor of his or her preferred policy objectives. Here again, this kind of wiggle room is what Vermeule likes, and he likes it not just for judges but for administration officials. In Common Good Constitutionalism, as legal scholars William Baude and Stephen Sachs note, Vermeule's motivation for attacking originalism seems to be that it has failed to achieve his preferred policy ends (among these are a stricter public health regime, the curbing of elite liberal wealth, and forming 'better beliefs' among the public). For Vermeule, the limitations of original public meaning are too constraining. Despite the introduction of natural law and common good language in his most recent book (following on Vermeule's recent conversion, in 2016, to Catholicism), that work's project is the same Schmittian one that Vermeule has been on for decades. Additionally, the elements of Schmitt's thinking that Vermeule affirms were not incidental to Schmitt's support for Hitler, but constitutive of it. It was on the basis of the very theories that Vermeule affirms that Schmitt gave to the Nazi party the justifications it needed for dictatorship and political murder. I do not think this is the outcome Vermeule wants. But it is a grave misjudgment to think there's a nugget of gold hiding within the mottled stone of Nazi jurisprudence. Again, Vermuele's latest work has a distinct flavor from his earlier writing, in that it makes liberal use of 'the common good' and 'natural law' and of quotations from Thomas Aquinas. The term 'natural law' refers chiefly to a tradition of ethical, not legal, thought. It is a tradition as broad as it is deep, and includes ancients like Aristotle and the stoics, medievals like Aquinas and Ibn Sina, and moderns like Hugo Grotius and Jean-Jaques Burlamaqui. On the other side of the world, it includes also the epochal philosophers Mengzi and Zhu Xi. These thinkers are united by the idea that ethical truths can be drawn from facts about human nature. Within the natural law legal tradition in America today, Vermeule is decidedly on the outskirts. The leading thinkers in this world are people like Jeff Pojanowski, Kevin Walsh, and Robert P. George, none of whom would agree with Vermeule's particular application of classical or natural law terms and traditions. Where Vermeule sees the meaning of law as open to the unconstrained interpretation of the executive, Pojanowski and Walsh ably argue that the classical tradition has more to say in favor of faithfulness to the original public meaning of duly promulgated law. The differences between these thinkers is enough to show that Vermeule's line of thought should not be taken as representative of the natural law legal theorists at large. The strength of natural law theory is that it holds that ethical and political debates may be grounded in facts about human nature that are accessible to all. This does not mean that the answers to moral and political questions are obvious or easy. It simply means that it is possible for us to argue, disagree, deliberate, and reason together constructively, because we all have access to some degree of common ground upon which to argue. To understand natural law in the American tradition, you might turn to Hugo Grotius, the Dutch natural law legal theorist of the Early Modern era and an influential figure in the legal landscape that shaped America. Working mostly in the early 17th century, Grotius was facing a newly diverse, pluralistic, and interconnected world, one in which the dictates of particular religious traditions would not have universal sway. Was it ever possible to come to any kind of agreement about moral life and the law? Grotius thought so, because essential facts about our human nature, like the fact that we are rational and social animals, are universal, and can ground our deliberation about what constitutes the human good. In his great work, De Jure Belli, Grotius argued that natural law is 'a dictate of right reason' based upon human nature, one which could ground the laws of engagement between diverse nations. We still find ourselves in the same situation: a pluralistic and diverse society. Natural law allows us to govern together based on certain fundamental facts about human nature. We will all bring our own biases and interests to the table, but—unlike the executive branch Vermeule would make all powerful—the legislature is specifically designed for bargaining, reasoning, deliberating, and accommodating in order to achieve stable, moderate, and reformable governance through law. Natural law theory supports the idea that this kind of deliberation is possible, and that politics can be something more than raw expression of preference and power. In a legislative body, members will bring many resources to bear in making judgments about what is and is not good law. For deliberation to be possible, however, there must be some common ground, some public set of reasons accessible to all. Otherwise the parties are at an impasse. Natural law holds that this realm of public reason really is accessible to us through observation of human nature. In the rationality and freedom of the human person, for instance, we might be able to ground arguments about rights; in the sociality and fellow-feeling of human nature, we might be able to ground arguments about duties. This does not mean everyone will come to the same easy conclusions, it just means that there is a common, non-sectarian discourse within which reasons can be exchanged. Natural law holds that there really are objective claims we can make about what is good and bad for the human person. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, makes his famous 'function argument' to express how this works. In looking at any natural thing, we determine what is good or bad for it based on its characteristic functions. Thus, we know that it is better for a dog to be able to run and play and be with other dogs than to be legless, caged up, and alone. This is because we can observe the nature of the dog is to run, to play, to be social. So it is with human beings. Our characteristic functions include our health, security, but they also include distinctly human things, like our freedom, sociality, and rationality. Early Americans thought that the law should protect certain liberties, like freedom of speech, worship, and expression, because these were conducive to the characteristic functions of free and rational creatures. But this exchange of reasons, this deliberative practice where, as a group, we try to come to practical arrangements in accordance with human flourishing and the common good, does not satisfy Vermeule. He would like government to instantiate his own conception of the common good without compromise and deliberation. In his picture, the executive will be in the best position to decide difficult questions of politics and morality. But how can we be sure the executive will use this awesome power well? On the one hand, in The Executive Unbound, he says that public opinion will constrain the executive, but in Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule claims that the executive will do what's best for the people whether they like it or not. How we guarantee that the executive will be so wise, restraining itself from using its unchecked power tyrannically, remains a mystery. Vermeulism also should not be taken as 'the Catholic position.' Although Vermeule quotes St. Thomas Aquinas—a towering figure in the natural law tradition—in support of his legal theory, whether Vermeule's view represents Aquinas's, let alone the actual teaching of the Catholic Church, is debatable. Pope John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus, affirmed that there should be a balance of power between executive, legislative, and judicial, with the law reigning over all. 'This is the principle of the 'rule of law',' John Paul II wrote, 'in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals. … Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law.' What is more, Vermeule bases his thinking on the political theology of Carl Schmitt. But no less an authority than Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in 1970 that it was 'impossible' for a Catholic to adhere, as Vermeule seems to, to Schmitt's 'political theology.' Our constitutional system, inspired by the writing of Aristotle among others, is designed with human weakness in mind. An unbound executive was precisely what it meant to avoid because the Founding Fathers recognized, as Aristotle did, that an executive unconstrained by law is a tyranny, and that those in whom such power was concentrated were likely to be corrupted by power. Aristotle thought that it would be lovely to have a perfectly wise and just monarch, but recognized that, human nature being what it is, a tyrant was much more likely. The solution of our founders was the elaborate system of separation of powers and of checks and balances. And even further, the founders, as expressed in The Federalist and elsewhere, did not believe that their system was self-enforcing or self-constraining. They understood that it could devolve into tyranny in various ways. As John Adams said, our Constitution is only fit for a moral and religious people, and any other would 'go through it like a whale goes through a net.' The founders also believed that, fallen as human nature is, it could still rise to virtue under the right cultural influences and within a well-designed constitutional system. The Constitution is designed for people who have the virtue to adhere to, rather than violate, its limits. As administrative law scholar Adam White argued in his review of Law's Abnegation, the rise of a more imperial presidency is not a historical inevitability, but a consequence of a lack of public virtue. The loss of the rule of law is, in some respects, a matter of choice. Today, perhaps, we face a choice. Do we still believe in the Constitution handed down to us, or do we want to slide toward Schmitt's authoritarian vision? It is a vision that could be embodied on the right or the left theory and that of the founders both made use of the idea of natural law. If we accept Vermeulism, let us at least not say that natural law made us do it.
Atlantic
06-02-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
Hitler's Oligarchs
He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: 'One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.' In my recent book, Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power, I chronicled the fraught relationship between the tyrant and the titan, but my story ended in January 1933, so I did not detail the subsequent impact on Hugenberg's fortunes, let alone the catastrophic consequences that lay ahead for other corporate leaders, their companies, and their country. In the '20s and early '30s, the Hitler 'brand' was anathema to capitalists and corporate elites. His National Socialist German Worker's Party was belligerently nationalistisch but also unapologetically sozialistisch —a true Arbeiter Partei, or 'working man's party.' Its 25-point political platform explicitly targeted bankers and financiers, calling for 'breaking the bondage of interest,' as well as industrialists who profited from wartime production. Profits were to be confiscated by the state without compensation, and corporate executives charged with treason. Platform Point 13 was explicit: 'We demand the nationalization of all existing corporate entities.' Through the 1920s, businessmen preferred to place their political bets with conservative, centrist, business-friendly politicians, such as those in the Center Party or the Bavarian People's Party or the right-wing but decidedly pro-business German Nationalists. Out of necessity, then, the National Socialists had to derive most of its financing via storm troopers standing on street corners begging for contributions and from admission fees to Hitler rallies. Among the exceptions to this were socialites—Viktoria von Dirksen, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann—who were smitten with Hitler. But the most significant exception was Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen, heir to one of Germany's leading industrial fortunes, had been an early financier of the Nazi movement. He first met Hitler in the autumn of 1923 after attending a beer-hall rally. 'It was then that I realised his oratorical gifts and his ability to lead the masses,' Thyssen recalled in his 1941 memoir, I Paid Hitler. 'What impressed me most, however, was the order that reigned in his meetings, the almost military discipline of his followers.' Thyssen provided the party, by his own estimate, approximately 1 million reichsmarks—more than $5 million today—and also helped finance the acquisition and refurbishment of a Munich palace as the Nazi Party headquarters. Most important, Thyssen arranged for Hitler to speak to his fellow industrialists in Düsseldorf on January 27, 1932. Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days 'The speech made a deep impression on the assembled industrialists,' Thyssen said, 'and in consequence of this a number of large contributions flowed from the resources of heavy industry into the treasuries of the National Socialist party.' This financing, estimated at a still-cautious 2 million marks annually, was channeled through a trusted intermediary: Alfred Hugenberg. Hugenberg had served as a director of Krupp A.G., the large steelmaker and arms manufacturer, during the Great War, and had subsequently founded the Telegraph Union, a conglomerate of 1,400 associated newspapers intended to provide a conservative bulwark against the liberal, pro-democracy press. Hugenberg also bought controlling shares in the country's largest movie studio, enabling him to have film and the press work together to advance his right-wing, antidemocratic agenda. A reporter for Vossische Zeitung, a leading centrist daily newspaper, observed that Hugenberg was 'the great disseminator of National Socialist ideas to an entire nation through newspapers, books, magazines and films.' To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, 'the politics of catastrophe,' by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen— entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. As a right-wing delegate to the Reichstag, Hugenberg proposed a 'freedom law' that called for the liberation of the German people from the shackles of democracy and from the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The law called for the treaty signatories to be tried and hanged for treason, along with government officials involved with implementing the treaty provisions. The French ambassador in Berlin called Hugenberg 'one of the most evil geniuses of Germany.' Though both Hitler and Hugenberg were fiercely anti-Communist, antidemocratic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic, their attempts at political partnership failed spectacularly and repeatedly. The problem lay not in ideological differences but in the similarity of their temperaments and their competing political aspirations. Like Hitler, Hugenberg was inflexible, stubborn, and self-righteous. When challenged, he doubled down. Hugenberg had spoken of a 'third Reich' as early as 1919, well before Hitler was a force on the political scene, and he envisioned himself as the future Reichsverweser, or 'regent of the Reich.' His followers greeted him with 'Heil Hugenberg!' Joseph Goebbels noted that Hitler invariably emerged from his meetings with Hugenberg red-faced and 'mad as shit.' But by late January 1933, the two men's fates were inextricably entangled. Hugenberg, who had leveraged his wealth into political power, had become the leader of the German National People's Party, which had the votes in the Reichstag that Hitler needed to be appointed chancellor. Hitler had the potential to elevate Hugenberg to political power. As one Hitler associate explained the Hitler-Hugenberg dynamic: 'Hugenberg had everything but the masses; Hitler had everything but the money.' After cantankerous negotiation, a deal was reached: Hugenberg would deliver Hitler the chancellorship, in exchange for Hugenberg being given a cabinet post as head of a Superministerium that subsumed the ministries of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn't hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinhold Quaatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg's calculus as follows: 'Hitler will sit in the saddle but Hugenberg holds the whip.' The New York Times expressed astonishment that Hugenberg, an 'arch-capitalist' who stood 'in strongest discord with economic doctrines of the Nazi movement,' was suddenly in charge of the country's finances. Hitler's 'socialist mask' had fallen, the Communist daily Red Banner proclaimed, arguing that 'Hugenberg is in charge, not Hitler!' The weekly journal Die Weltbühne dubbed the new government 'Hitler, Hugenberg & Co.' As self-proclaimed 'economic dictator,' Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers' rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 percent. 'The real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability in economic life,' one of Hugenberg's newspapers editorialized, arguing that the goal of economic policy should be to rescue 'the professions, and those most negatively affected: the merchant middle class.' Hugenberg declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures, canceled debts, and placed tariffs on several widely produced agricultural goods, violating trade agreements and inflating the cost of living. 'It just won't do,' Hitler objected in one cabinet meeting, 'that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest.' Let them suffer awhile, Hugenberg argued. 'Then it will be possible to even out the hardships.' The economy fell into chaos. The press dubbed Hugenberg the Konfusionsrat —the 'consultant of confusion.' Hugenberg didn't care about bad press. He was accustomed to being one of the most unpopular personalities in the country. Vorwärts, the socialist newspaper, depicted him as a puffed-up frog with spectacles. Hitler called him a Wauwau, or 'woof woof.' Even his close associates referred to him as 'the Hamster.' But Hugenberg lived by the golden rule: He who had the gold ruled. Earlier, when disagreements had arisen over the rightward turn of the German National Party, Hugenberg simply expelled the dissenters and financed the party's entire budget from his own resources. Hitler could aspire to be dictator of the Third Reich, but Hugenberg was already dictator of the economy. In late June 1933, while Hitler was trying to assuage international concerns about the long-term intentions of his government, Hugenberg appeared in London at an international conference on economic development. To the surprise of everyone, including the other German-delegation members present, Hugenberg laid out an ambitious plan for economic growth through territorial expansion. 'The first step would consist of Germany reclaiming its colonies in Africa,' Hugenberg explained. 'The second would be that the 'people without space''— Volk ohne Raum —'would open areas in which our productive race would create living space.' The announcement made headlines around the world. 'Reich Asks for Return of African Lands at London Parley,' read one New York Times headline. Below that, a subhead continued: 'Also seeks other territory, presumably in Europe.' From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler's foreign minister, tried to walk back the Hugenberg statement, asserting that Hugenberg had expressed only a personal opinion, not government policy. Hugenberg dug in his heels, retorting that, as economic minister, when he said something, he was speaking for the entire government. Foreign policy was just an extension of economic policy. Confusion and embarrassment followed. Back in Berlin, Neurath insisted in a cabinet meeting that 'a single member cannot simply overlook the objections of the others' and that Hugenberg 'either did not understand these objections, which were naturally clothed in polite form, or he did not want to understand them.' Hitler sought to mediate, saying that 'what had already happened was no longer of any interest.' But Hugenberg wouldn't back down: He wanted the issue resolved and on his terms. 'It was a matter between Hitler and me as to who was going to seize the initiative,' Hugenberg later admitted. Hitler prevailed. On June 29, 1933, Hugenberg resigned his minister post. By then Hitler no longer needed either Hugenberg's corporate contacts or his Reichstag delegates. The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists. Six months earlier, three weeks before Hitler's appointment as chancellor, the banker Kurt Baron von Schröder had met with Hitler at Schröder's villa in a fashionable quarter of Cologne. The arrangements were cloak-and-dagger: Hitler made an unscheduled, early-morning exit from a train in Bonn, entered a hotel, ate a quick breakfast, then departed in a waiting car with curtained rear windows to be driven to the Schröder villa while a decoy vehicle drove in the opposite direction. Hitler walked out of the meeting with a 30 million reichsmark credit line that saved his political movement from bankruptcy. Once Hitler was in power, there was no longer need for secrecy or subterfuge. On Monday, February 20, 1933, Hermann Göring, one of two Nazis ministers in the Hitler cabinet and the president of the Reichstag, hosted a fundraiser at his official residence for the Nazi Party in advance of upcoming elections. The event was presided over by Hjalmar Schacht, a respected banker and co-founder of a centrist political party who saw Hitler as the best bet against left-wing political forces and had lobbied President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. Among the two dozen industrialists, bankers, and businessmen in attendance, the most prominent was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, known as 'the cannon king' for his armament production. 'I was astonished,' Schacht recalled, 'because I knew that this same Krupp von Bohlen had refused an invitation from Fritz Thyssen to attend an event with the Rhine-Westfalen industrialists four weeks earlier.' Perhaps equally surprising was the presence at this fundraiser of four directors from the board of the giant chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate I.G. Farben, which had to that point been staunchly pro-democracy, pro–Weimar Republic, and anti–National Socialist. (The Nazis derided the company, which employed many Jewish scientists, as 'an international capitalist Jewish company.') Hitler himself stunned party attendees by showing up as the unannounced guest of honor. Clad in a suit and tie rather than a brown storm trooper's uniform, Hitler addressed the assembled corporate elite, warning of the dangers of communism and trumpeting his appointment as chancellor as a 'great victory' that he saw as a mandate for radical change. He outlined his plans to restore the power of the military, assert totalitarian control over the country, destroy the parliamentary system, and crush all political opponents by force. 'Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,' Hitler told them. Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: 'I need the kind of generals that Hitler had' After Hitler departed, Schacht spoke of the need for additional campaign financing in advance of the upcoming elections. Hermann Göring added that the election, scheduled for March 5, 'will surely be the last one for the next 10 years, probably even for the next 100 years.' By day's end, the fundraiser had generated 3 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of $15 million today. The following three weeks delivered a series of blows to the Weimar Republic that resulted in its demise: the arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, which saw the very symbol of parliamentarian democracy consumed in flame; the March 5 elections from which the Nazis emerged with a mandate for Hitler's reforms; and the passing of an 'enabling law,' on March 23, that established Hitler as unchallenged dictator. In a letter to Hitler, Gustav Krupp wrote, 'The turn of political events is in line with the wishes which I myself and the board of directors have cherished for a long time.' German corporations, large and small, helped retool the Weimar Republic as the Third Reich. Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen, a 'car for the people.' Mercedes-Benz provided Hitler and his chief lieutenants with bulletproof sedans. Hugo Boss designed the black uniforms for the SS. Krupp supplied armaments. Miele produced munitions. Allianz provided insurance for concentration camps. J.A. Topf & Sons manufactured crematoria ovens. A dismayed executive at Deutsche Bank, which was involved in the expropriation of Jewish businesses, sent a letter to the chairman of his supervisory board: 'I fear we are embarking on an explicit, well- planned path toward the annihilation of all Jews in Germany.' For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was 'a staunch advocate of democracy' who 'detested the Nazi dictatorship,' he was also 'responsible for ensuring the company's well-being and continued existence.') By October 1942, I.G. Farben and its subsidiaries were using slave laborers in 23 locations. The life expectancy of inmates at an I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz was less than four months; more than 25,000 people lost their lives on the construction site alone. As corporate practices adapted to evolving political realities, the company aligned its wide technological and human resources with government priorities. Jews were purged from the corporate ranks. The I.G. Farben pharmaceutical division, Bayer, supported Nazi medical experiments. A postwar affidavit alleges that Bayer paid 170 reichsmarks for 150 female Auschwitz prisoners. 'The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition,' the affidavit reads. 'However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments,' and 'we would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.' Although recent investigations have questioned the veracity of this particular affidavit, Bayer's involvement in medical experimentation on Auschwitz inmates is undisputed. The I.G. Farben company Degussa owned a chemical subsidiary that produced a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B, used primarily for fumigating ships, warehouses, and trains—and, after 1942, as a homicidal agent at Nazi extermination facilities. Company logs confirm the delivery of an estimated 56 tons of Zyklon B from 1942 to 1944; more than 23.8 tons were sent to Auschwitz, where it served as the primary instrument of death for the more than 1 million Jewish people murdered there. In August 1947, 24 senior I.G. Farben managers were placed on trial for their role in Nazi aggression and atrocity. In his opening statement before the court, the prosecutor Telford Taylor said of these executives, 'They were the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true. They were the guardians of the military and state secrets.' The 15,638 pages of courtroom testimony, along with the 6,384 documents submitted as evidence—purchase orders, internal memos, board minutes—indicated that these Farben executives knew the exact number of airplane and truck ties, the running feet of tank tread, the amount of explosives, as well as the precise number of canisters of Zyklon B gas delivered to Auschwitz. The defense attorney for the chairman of I.G. Farben's supervisory board argued that his client was 'no robber, no plunderer, no slave dealer,' but rather just a 60-year-old senior executive doing what senior executives were paid to do—run the company with an eye to the bottom line. If he collaborated with the government, it was out of 'a feeling of personal responsibility to the company.' Twenty-three I.G. Farben directors were eventually charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; 13 of them were convicted and sentenced to prison. From the February 1937 Issue: Hitler looks eastward At the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Gustav Krupp was indicted as a major war criminal alongside the likes of Göring and Hans Frank, but he was too ill to stand trial. Instead, his son was tried in 1947, in The United States of America v. Alfried Krupp, et al. The indictment charged the younger Krupp, alongside 11 Krupp corporate directors, with crimes against humanity and war crimes, for participating in 'the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians.' Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, 'We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.' As for Alfred Hugenberg? Unlike other early private-sector Hitler enablers such as Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht—both of whom ended up in concentration camps after crossing Hitler—Hugenberg got off lightly. Hugenberg withdrew to his sprawling estate, Rohbraken, in the former feudal province of Lippe, where he lived as the local regent while his business empire was gradually whittled away. The German Nationalist Party was disbanded as soon as Hugenberg stepped down from his cabinet post in June 1933. In December of that year, the Telegraph Union was taken over by the ministry of propaganda and absorbed into a newly created entity, the German News Office. In 1943, Hugenberg's publishing house, Scherl Verlag, was acquired by the Nazi publisher, Eher Verlag. By war's end, the defrocked cabinet minister and disenfranchised media mogul was diminished and dissipated but still defiant. On September 28, 1946, Hugenberg was arrested by the British military police. He was detained for five months, and his assets were frozen. After a formal hearing, Hugenberg was deemed to be a 'lesser evildoer'—officially, a ' Mitläufer,' the lowest order of complicity in the Nazi regime—on the grounds that he had left his cabinet post in the first months of the Hitler regime and had never been a member of the Nazi Party. With undiminished temerity, Hugenberg balked at even that lesser charge. Having been stripped of most of his business empire, Hugenberg saw himself as a victim of, not a participant in, the Nazi regime. He appealed the hearing's determination and won. He was declared 'untainted,' which allowed him to lay claim to his frozen assets. Unrepentant to his dying day, Hugenberg refused to publicly countenance any suggestion of guilt or responsibility for Hitler's excesses. On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, 1933, less than 24 hours after enabling Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Hugenberg reportedly spoke with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a fellow conservative and the mayor of Leipzig. 'I've just committed the greatest stupidity of my life,' Hugenberg allegedly told Goerdeler. 'I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in the history of the world.'
