Nothing suggests that the leaders of German big business were filled with ideological ardour for National Socialism, before or after February 1933. Nor did Hitler ask Krupp & Co. to sign up to an agenda of violent anti-Semitism or a war of conquest. The speech he gave to the businessmen in Goering’s villa was not the speech he had given to the generals a few weeks earlier, in which he had spoken openly about rearmament and the need for territorial expansion. But what Hitler and his government did promise was an end to parliamentary democracy and the destruction of the German left and for this
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