The Arms Of Krupp by William Manchester contains the little gem of information that the German arms company Krupp billed the British government after the Great War for using their patented rifle sight to kill German soldiers. They calculated how much the Brits owed them based on how many Germans were shot with them.
A lot of western industrialists were appeasers because they had businesses inside Germany. Those same industrialists were buying politicians, of course. So how many of the political leaders who were appeasers of the 1930s were motivated by their own corruption and blinded because they thought Hitler would never actually upset the apple cart?
Munich makes perfect sense if you are beholden to the giant industrialists and don't give a damn about Czechoslovakians.
I'm sure there are others who can chime in on this with deeper references than I can, but very broadly speaking, there was a coincidence of interests between industry and anti-communism. And, for lack of a better (stronger) anti-communist candidate, conservatives and industry leaders almost Europe-wide supported Hitler to an extent. That does not make them Nazis directly, as many switched off that particular weakness the moment war became inevitable. However, this was not always directly personal economic interest, at least not in the sense that their own moneys were necessarily directly involved, but rather one of ideological blindness (i.e. "Communism is a bad disease, if it catches on in Germany, it wont't stop there, and later harm me, so as long as Germany doesn't switch to communism I'm fine with a dictatorship there.").
As for your example for British companies paying their patent dues even if these were for weapons during the last war: this was more common than you think. The German Mannesmann company for instance held the world patent for producing seamless steel tubes, which basically meant that for each cannon built by the British in World War I the Mannesmann way, patent license fees were due -- and they were paid after the "Great War", too. The reason here, however, is not necessarily one of direct personal or political convictions or financial involvement with the Nazi ideals.
Rather, it is the mutual acceptance of patents: If your country does not duly pay its license fees for my patents, why should companies in my country be liable to pay for yours? Europe's industry as a whole was loathe to have the rather practical financial system of patents removed, and to keep it , the books had to be in order. So the due payments were paid as per international legal agreements all through the 1920s.
Of course this does not relieve hard core anti communist industrial leaders and pundits from their responsibility for defending the Nazis as "harmless" in their early years. In many ways, British press magnate Viscount Rothermere was among the worst here, as he personally wrote apologetic commentaries about the Nazis in his own newspaper (the Daily Mail, which British leftists, not without reason, often called the "Daily Heil", a nickname that hasn't quite gone away today for other reasons). Rothermere went so far as to defend Hitler's actions beyond Kristallnacht (!) into 1939, until Hitler illegally annexed Prague and it became clear even to the most witless that war was becoming inevitable. (BTW, for a good overview of Rothermere and this situation one should take a look at The Great Outsiders -- Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail, by S.J. Taylor, 1996. Rothermere changed course only right before the war, and died only shortly after in Bermuda in 1940.) However, even Rothermere did not have personal financial interests in Germany at stake.