The first years of Hitler’s regime saw the imposition of a series of controls on German business that were unprecedented in peacetime history. In large part these stemmed from the difficulty of managing the German balance of payments and in that sense they clearly had their origin in the great financial crisis of the summer and autumn of 1931. However, with the complete disintegration of the gold standard following the dollar devaluation, Germany’s creeping default on its long-term debt, including hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks owed by German corporates, and the imposition of the New
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