Among the groups widely regarded as winners in the economic upheavals of the early 1920s were the big industrialists and financiers, a fact that caused widespread resentment against ‘capitalists’ and ‘profiteers’ in many quarters of German society. But German businessmen were not so sure they had gained so much. Many of them looked back to the Wilhelmine Reich with nostalgia, a time when the state, the police and the courts had kept the labour movement at bay and business itself had bent the ear of government in key matters of economic and social policy.
