The level of involvement of the German industry in the Nazis' rise to and consolidation of power was controversially debated amongst scholars for many years.

While some historians argued in favour of systemic collusion between the Nazis and German industrialists to enable Hitler's rise to power, this thesis was disputed by the publications of American historian Henry Turner in the 1970s.

Current teachings align with most of Turner's positions and criticise the previous doctrine's oversimplification and generalisation of the Nazis' rise to power.

Before we take an actual look at the issue, I'd like to address some problems that historians face when examining "big industry and the Nazis".

First of all, there is unfortunately not an abundance of reliable sources. Most of the financial documents of the NSDAP were destroyed in the last days of the war, and many of the contemporary German business papers are sometimes contradicting. Henry Turner also alleged that some businesses might have cleared the archives of incriminating evidence.

Secondly, the term "big industry" in the context of 1920s-1930s Germany wasn't adequately defined for many years and was just used as a general denotation, which made it of course susceptible to generalisations.

It wasn't until the 1980s that a consensus could be reached on what "big industry" was actually describing (a private corporation with a registered capital of at least 20 million Mark).

Now that we have that clear, let's take a closer look at the issue itself: the relationship between the Nazis and German industrialists was often ambivalent and the development of it was rarely linear. However, we can still make a rather clear distinction between two time periods of industrial involvement with the Nazis - before 1933, and after.

Especially in the earlier years of the NSDAP, the party sometimes propagated strong anti-capitalist rhetoric and condemned 'big business' as an agent of Jewish infiltration. Still, the party actively campaigned for political donations, and they did indeed receive several donations from the Bavarian Industrial Association in the early 1920s.

After the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and Hitler's conviction, the party was abandoned by its industrial supporters and had to almost exclusively rely on membership fees. In an effort of rapprochement, Hitler published the manifesto "The way to resurgence" in 1927, in which he tried to square his racial fanatism with the industrialists' economic interests.

He even met with several leading industrialists to secure funding for his party, but results were mixed. The NSDAP simply wasn't a big enough player yet in German politics to attract large sums of donations.

That changed, however, with the 1930 general election, amidst the turmoil of the Great Depression the NSDAP saw its share of votes surge from 2.6% in the previous election to 18.5% - finishing second behind the centre-left SPD.

Those results changed the power dynamic, and the Nazis saw a significant increase in political donations from 'big business' industrialists, who had already been donating to other far-right and ultraconservative organisations for some time. Among the first of these big-money donors was Fritz Thyssen, chairman of the United Steel Mills Inc. - the single-largest steel producer in Germany - who donated 400,000 Mark to causes of the NSDAP between 1930 and 1933. He was soon joined by other industry grandees, such as Fritz Springorum, Paul Silverberg, Kurt Schmitt and Friedrich Flick, some of the richest men in 1930s Germany.

Now, the question is, of course, what drove these obscenely rich men to support a party of radical fanatics?

Some, like Fritz Thyssen, were ardent supporters of German nationalism and genuinely aligned with some of the Nazis' policies. Others were more sceptical towards the Nazis but viewed them as a necessary evil to help contain and eventually squash the threat of socialism.