At first the profits were used to undo the damage done by the Depression. Then from the late 1930s onwards, they financed an extraordinary investment boom such as had never before been seen in German industrial history.59 What Hitler’s regime positively enabled German business to do was to recover from the disastrous recession, to accumulate capital and to engage in high-pressure development of certain key technologies: the technologies necessary to achieve the regime’s twin objectives of increased self-sufficiency (autarchy) and rearmament.
