The Nazi Way

While Washington officials last week were struggling with the problem of Little Business (see above) a significant letter from a little businessman in Wehrmacht uniform addressed to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reached the outside world. It said:

"With open eyes we followed and understood the meaning of all the economic laws of the past few years. Whether they dealt with the closing of factories, the naming of new administrators, expanding the authority of Government agencies, they always, without exception, have been measures whose ultimate results were directed against the little businessman. Or did anybody ever perchance hear of just one case wherein a profitable, large industry closed and its capital, labor and contracts were handed over to the small entrepreneur? Or that any Government administrator ever assigned interesting, lucrative contracts to small firms and less profitable contracts to big ones?"

The history of small business under Hitler:

P:From 1933 to war's outbreak, the number of joint stock companies (a kind of partnership) in Germany dropped from 9,100 to 5,300, while their average capital doubled to four million Reichsmarks. Limited companies were reduced from 35,000 to 22,000.

P:In 1940, 364 stock companies and 1,900 corporations were liquidated. In the occupied countries little businesses were either killed or incorporated into monster Reich state concerns, such as Goering's Gustloff Works.

P:In 1941, 22 stock companies and 1,400 corporations went under. But now the little man was being told that the rich occupied regions of Russia would yield enough loot to satisfy big & little men.

But by autumn of 1942, this last dream was dead. Goering, Krupp and other mammoths were taller and fatter, little businesses were withering away. In December the official Reich Office of Statistics announced that by September 1942, state insurance paid to firms closed by war had reached 44 million Reichsmarks--more than double the amount paid out in 1941. A recent issue of the Essener National Zeitung (Goering's paper) announced, as evidence of the success of Industrial Dictator Albert Speer's rationalization program, that in the past six months the number of firms producing special artillery shells was reduced from 54 to 4; those manufacturing certain war-vehicle parts from 402 to 173; those making rifle bullets cut 50%.

All this is dully ironic in view of the fact that little business in Germany feels that it played a major role in bringing Hitler to power. But Hitler was not alone responsible for the betrayal of Germany's small businessman. For the fact is that war, which demands the utmost in efficiency and the elimination of many a consumer product, always plays into hands of bigness.

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