An e-mail from Reason’s Michael Moynihan, posted with permission:
Wow, that was some thin gruel from Paxton. And he misses the point about Henry Ashby Turner’s book (which I am rereading now for a piece on Oliver Stone) by a country mile. Obviously German big business, for the most part, fell in line with National Socialism post machtergreifung, as did the tepid conservative parties, but the argument from Marxist historians has always been that corporations desired a Nazi state and were instrumental in the rise of German fascism. Nonsense, as Turner demonstrates. When I reviewed Gotz Aly’s book I highlighted just how wonderfully the business climate was in Germany from 1933-39:
To “achieve a truly socialist division of personal assets,” he writes, Hitler implemented a variety of interventionist economic policies, including price and rent controls, exorbitant corporate taxes, frequent “polemics against landlords,” subsidies to German farmers as protection “against the vagaries of weather and the world market,” and harsh taxes on capital gains, which Hitler himself had denounced as “effortless income.”
Aly demonstrates convincingly that Nazi “domestic policies were remarkably friendly toward the German lower classes, soaking the wealthy and redistributing the burdens of wartime.” And with fresh memories of Weimer inflation, “transferring the tax burden to corporations earned the leadership in Berlin considerable political capital, as the government keenly registered.”
Anyway, will read your response now. But if this is the best the scholars of fascism can do (and where is A. James Gregor, who knows more about Italian fascism than anyone else in American academia?), you needn’t lose any sleep over it.
Hope you are well.