ABSTRACT
Any assessment of National Socialism's relationship with the control and organisation of industry and business, must be set against the background of a relatively highly organised pattern of economic life well before 1933. And aside from the creation of such bodies as the Four-Year-Plan organisation, the Nazi accession mostly witnessed a consolidation of this pattern. Membership of the former widely representative trade associations became compulsory, for instance, and the Fuhrerprinzip was established within them. The largest of these was that for industry and this remained so from 1933. The Reichsgruppe for Industry had seven functional sub-divisions and each subdivision was further subdivided. The general label the Nazis used to describe this form of organisation was 'self-administration', but the only real sense in which this applied was in terms of personnel. Industrial administration was carried out by industrialists, not civil servants, but nevertheless under direct state supervision.
