This week, CIA personnel came to a “fork in the road.” That’s the official euphemism for a buyout that the Trump administration has offered federal government employees, among them the more than 20,000 who work for the intelligence agency. But many longtime officers and new recruits really do feel like they are at a crossroads as they ask themselves whether they still want their jobs, or will be able to keep them.

The buyout, part of a legally dubious proposal called “deferred resignation,” is ostensibly an attempt to cut government spending by reducing the number of employees. But another objective is plainly visible: The president suspects that the CIA harbors people who oppose his policies and might try to undermine them. The buyout is one way to weed these people out. But it’s a strategy that reflects a misunderstanding of how the CIA actually works—and a drawdown that could leave the country exposed at a time of heightened global risk. The measures the administration is taking to thin the ranks further risk doing the very thing that Donald Trump claims he wants to stop: politicizing the intelligence community.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

The CIA wasn’t initially among the government agencies offered the buyout, which excluded “positions related to … national security.” But John Ratcliffe, the new CIA director, asked the White House to make the offer available, “believing it would pave the way for a more aggressive spy agency,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported about it.

Ratcliffe has said many times that CIA employees aren’t “aggressive” enough. What exactly he means by this can be hard to pin down, but generally Ratcliffe—who was the director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration—seems to think that the CIA has “subordinated the truth,” as he once wrote, to the political biases and preferences of unaccountable analysts, most consequentially those studying China. He has said that he personally saw officers pulling punches or altering analysis to comport with “the company line” that the country did not pose as significant a threat to the United States as Trump claimed during his first term. He has also said that the agency is too hidebound and bureaucratic, an assessment that surely some, and perhaps many, CIA officers would agree with.

In his first written message to the entire workforce as CIA director, Ratcliffe said the agency needed to rededicate itself to its core mission of international espionage, people who read his note told me. He largely repeated remarks from his Senate confirmation hearing last month, when he promised that the CIA “will collect intelligence—especially human intelligence—in every corner of the globe, no matter how dark or difficult.”

This was an odd thing to emphasize, given that the CIA literally does this every day, and has since its inception more than 75 years ago. But Ratcliffe argues that the agency has lost its focus and is drifting away from its apolitical ethos. He promised “a strict adherence to the CIA’s mission … never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgement [sic] or infect our products.” Addressing personnel, Ratcliffe said, “If all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work. ”

Here was another curious exhortation, because risky and dangerous spying in the service of presidents, regardless of party, is exactly what people who work for the CIA signed up for. Presumably many of them also thought they were making a difference. When Ratcliffe talks about stamping out bias, many will presume he’s talking to people who wish Trump weren’t the president. And surely there are many. But CIA officers are trained to subordinate their own political views and do their job regardless of who sits in the White House. Ratcliffe appears to think that for a lot of intelligence officers, that’s just lip service, and his broader critique of political bias aligns neatly with Trump’s own long-held suspicions.  

So now those who don’t want to buckle up are being invited to get out. Ratcliffe addressed the buyout yesterday when he held his first “all-hands,” a town-hall meeting in an auditorium at headquarters known as the “Bubble.” The gathering was uncontentious, people who heard his remarks told me. Ratcliffe said he wanted CIA officers to have the same opportunity as other federal employees to leave if they decided that they could not work for the Trump administration. Those who were on board with the administration’s vision—which he described as countering China and protecting the United States from terrorists—were welcome to stay.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil service reform]

In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson described the buyout offer as “part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission.” But the agency exists to support the president’s policies—any president’s policies—and moves with the political tides. Presidents come and go. CIA officers salute (metaphorically) and carry out their orders. At the town-hall meeting, Ratcliffe “highlighted his determination to rebuild the Agency’s trust with the President,” a CIA official said. Trump’s feelings are no secret, but to hear the new director articulate them to the nation’s most important intelligence agency was still remarkable: The president doesn’t really trust you.

Trump’s attacks on the CIA are not new, and most officers sweated them out through the president’s first four years in office. But some are wondering if they can do it again—not because of their political beliefs, but because of what they see transpiring at other agencies in the first few weeks of the new administration. Some have told me that they’re watching events at the FBI—where Trump is rooting out agents who worked on criminal investigations of his conduct—and the wholesale demonization of USAID, and they wonder if this is a preview of things to come at Langley.

Holly Berkley Fletcher, who worked as a senior Africa analyst, resigned in December, having decided before the election to bring her 19-year career to a close. “Watching all of this feels like a massive betrayal,” she told me. CIA officers “give up elements of their privacy and personal freedom, curtail their political activities, and constrain their speech in the workplace in order to function as a team, with mission always at the center of what they do. Diversity of all kinds, including political diversity, has always been CIA’s strength in accomplishing that.”

Trump is not likely to simply shut down the CIA. But he could gut it. And buyouts aren’t the only means to that end. Two officers told me they are considering early retirement, an option that could be attractive for people who are financially prepared to leave the government after decades of service and would collect a pension. And the Trump administration has taken other steps that might push out people who joined very recently.

The White House demanded the names of all officers under probationary status, meaning that they have worked for the CIA for two years or less, people familiar with this process told me. Those new employees don’t yet have full civil-service protections, which could make them easier to fire than those who do. The agency plans to review their qualifications to ensure that they are aligned with the mission. Presumably they will be; the CIA hired them for a reason. But the obvious and troubling implication is that people who joined while Joe Biden was president are at greater risk of losing their job.

Demanding a list of names in this way (as first reported by The New York Times) is unconventional and risky. Foreign governments labor diligently to learn the identities of anyone working at the CIA. To protect the information while complying with the White House’s directive, the probationary officers were identified by only their first name and the first initial of their last name. Those names were delivered to the Office of Personnel Management, which has been effectively taken over by Elon Musk and his staff.

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Reducing the number of CIA employees at a moment when the United States faces such formidable challengers as Russia, Iran, China, and international drug cartels “is potentially a big mistake,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former operations officer who worked in the Middle East and on Russia, told me. “This may have a significant impact on CIA’s core mission of recruiting and handling agents. Replacing case officers with years of street experience, tradecraft training, and hard-target language skills is exceedingly difficult if many indeed walk out the door.”

To train officers to work in the field takes years. Polymeropoulos worries that getting rid of the newest officers, who are the next generation in the pipeline, could set back the work of espionage. “This is not reform, which is for sure needed,” he said. “This is more of a sledgehammer.”

And surely U.S. adversaries are taking notes, Fletcher, the Africa analyst, told me—just as the CIA would be if an adversary’s intelligence service were in such disarray.

“Our adversaries could not have scripted things better, and they are no doubt celebrating the chaos, fear, and division permeating the agency right now,” Fletcher told me. “As a former CIA officer, I am heartbroken. As an American citizen, I am terrified.”

Project 2025, the conservative governing playbook produced by veterans of the first Trump administration, has an entire chapter on how to overhaul USAID. Its authors urged the next president to “scale back USAID’s global footprint,” “deradicalize” its programs, and throttle its funding.

Before the election, Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 because it veered so far to the right. But now he’s making the plan look downright timid. Project 2025 did not call for freezing all foreign aid or locking USAID employees out of their headquarters. Nor did the treatise suggest shutting down the $40 billion agency and subsuming it into the State Department—all without a single vote in Congress.

As the chair of Trump’s quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has razed USAID with shocking speed. He’s called it “evil,” “a radical-left political psy op,” and “a criminal organization.” The rampage seemed to come out of nowhere, but the 64-year-old agency has long been one of the government’s most vulnerable conservative targets.

[Read: Why Trump can’t banish the weirdos]

Although foreign aid accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget, right-wing politicians began attacking it well before Trump. In the 1990s, the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina likened the disbursement of American money abroad to shoving taxpayer dollars “down a rathole.” Conservatives have even tried to abolish USAID—most notably Helms in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But the scope of those attempts pales in comparison to what Trump and Musk are doing now, George Ingram, a former USAID official in the Clinton administration, told me. “This,” he said, “is fundamentally different.”

At Musk’s urging, the Trump administration has placed nearly all USAID employees on administrative leave and recalled thousands from overseas postings with virtually no notice. (At the same time, the president declared that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip—a mission that would presumably require a sizable American deployment.) Trump designated Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s acting administrator. In one of his first moves, Rubio wrote to senior members of Congress—not to ask for their help in reforming the agency but merely to notify them that the government might reorganize it.

“It’s ridiculous,” Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator, told me. He ran the organization for the first five years of the George W. Bush administration and describes himself as “the most conservative administrator in the history of the agency.” Natsios has his share of problems with USAID, including his sense that its staff is often unresponsive to political leadership, a critique that Project 2025 echoes. But Natsios, who’s now a professor at Texas A&M University, is aghast at the Trump administration’s purge of USAID. (He began our conversation by comparing it to the Russian Revolution.) For days, he’s been fielding calls from panicked contacts at the agency. “They are not reviewing each project,” he said. “They’re eliminating entire bureaus, whole programs, simply deleting them without even looking at what they’re doing.”

USAID was created in 1961 to consolidate programs that had grown out of the Marshall Plan, said Ingram, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Congress considered putting USAID in the State Department but kept it separate so that it could operate more nimbly—like a business, Ingram told me, rather than a bureaucracy.

Presidents of both parties have supported foreign aid, including Ronald Reagan and the second Bush, who weren’t enthusiastic about it as candidates. “Once they got into office, they saw that it was a very important tool of U.S. foreign policy,” Ingram said. Even one of the Project 2025 authors acknowledged that foreign aid has helped America check global adversaries; a former USAID deputy administrator, Max Primorac, credited the agency with countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Indeed, authoritarian regimes have long denounced American aid, and now some of them are praising Musk’s efforts. Musk himself promoted a laudatory post on X from a top aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. With that adulation in mind, Natsios questioned whether Musk’s campaign against USAID might be “motivated by his desire to please the Kremlin.”

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Sending taxpayer funds abroad has never been particularly popular, a reality that Trump seized on during his first term by attacking foreign aid as part of his “America First” agenda. In 2017, administration officials reportedly drafted proposals to merge USAID with the State Department, but they never went anywhere. Polling has found that Americans dramatically overestimate the amount of money the government spends on foreign aid, and in a survey released this week, most respondents backed cuts to foreign aid. Natsios faulted the Biden administration for making USAID an even more inviting target for Trump 2.0 by trying to export progressive values such as LGBTQ and abortion rights, especially to countries where they are unpopular. “They brought part of this on,” he said.

By and large, Republican lawmakers have simply watched as Musk and his allies shut down an agency that, according to a paper published on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, cannot be abolished, moved, or consolidated without authorization from Congress. A few have issued mild protests. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana criticized the pause on distributing HIV/AIDS drugs through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a George W. Bush–era program that enjoys wide bipartisan support domestically and internationally. “It is a Republican initiative, it is pro-life, pro-America and the most popular U.S. program in Africa,” Cassidy wrote on X. “This must be reversed immediately!!”

Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who until last month served as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Trump administration was “right to scrutinize and revamp” USAID, but he strongly defended its purpose and urged the president to eventually resume sending aid abroad. “U.S. foreign-assistance programs not only feed starving women and children in some of the most destitute parts of the world, but they also promote democracy, help stabilize fragile nations on the brink of collapse, and counter our adversaries’ attempts to shift the global balance of power,” McCaul told me.

By contrast, McCaul’s successor atop the committee, Representative Brian Mast of Florida, cheered the administration unreservedly and released a four-minute video “exposing radical, far-left grants” supposedly issued during the Biden administration. His list included $15 million for “condoms for the Taliban,” money to expand “atheism in Nepal,” and various line items promoting LGBTQ rights. (The contraceptives were for Afghan citizens, not members of the Taliban; the Nepal grant promoted religious freedom.)

When I asked Natsios, a lifelong Republican, what he made of the response from GOP lawmakers, he scoffed: “The Republican Party in Congress is a disgrace.”

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Advocates for USAID now have little choice but to place their hopes in Rubio, who as a senator defended foreign assistance as “critical to our national security.” In his new role, however, he has characterized USAID as a rogue agency whose leaders misspent taxpayer money and refused to cooperate with Trump’s directives during his first few days in office. “There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue,” Rubio told reporters in El Salvador on Monday. “But it has to be aligned with American foreign policy.”

Natsios used to enthusiastically support Rubio. He told me that he once saw Rubio give “the strongest speech for foreign aid” he had ever heard. He contributed to Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016—when Rubio was a GOP rival to Trump—and said the then-senator had told him that, had he won, he would have brought him into the White House. Now, Natsios told me, Rubio has a choice to make: “He is going to accept the ideology” of Trump and Musk, “or he is going to get fired.”

While Rubio and other Republicans decide whether, and how much, to fight for U.S. foreign aid, the ripple effects of the firings and funding freeze at USAID are quickly growing. Many policy decisions in Washington take weeks or even months to be felt overseas. Not this one, Ingram said. The moves threaten the jobs of thousands of people connected to the aid industry inside the U.S., and they jeopardize the livelihood of potentially hundreds of thousands of people—or more—in the developing world, who rely on USAID for health care, food, fertilizer, and other crucial supplies. Ingram was stunned: “I have never seen a government action have such an immediate impact.”

He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”

In my recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, I chronicled the fraught relationship between the tyrant and the titan, but my story ended in January 1933, so I did not detail the subsequent impact on Hugenberg’s fortunes, let alone the catastrophic consequences that lay ahead for other corporate leaders, their companies, and their country.

In the ’20s and early ’30s, the Hitler “brand” was anathema to capitalists and corporate elites. His National Socialist German Worker’s Party was belligerently nationalistisch but also unapologetically sozialistisch—a true Arbeiter Partei, or “working man’s party.” Its 25-point political platform explicitly targeted bankers and financiers, calling for “breaking the bondage of interest,” as well as industrialists who profited from wartime production. Profits were to be confiscated by the state without compensation, and corporate executives charged with treason. Platform Point 13 was explicit: “We demand the nationalization of all existing corporate entities.”

Through the 1920s, businessmen preferred to place their political bets with conservative, centrist, business-friendly politicians, such as those in the Center Party or the Bavarian People’s Party or the right-wing but decidedly pro-business German Nationalists. Out of necessity, then, the National Socialists had to derive most of its financing via storm troopers standing on street corners begging for contributions and from admission fees to Hitler rallies. Among the exceptions to this were socialites—Viktoria von Dirksen, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann—who were smitten with Hitler. But the most significant exception was Fritz Thyssen.

Thyssen, heir to one of Germany’s leading industrial fortunes, had been an early financier of the Nazi movement. He first met Hitler in the autumn of 1923 after attending a beer-hall rally. “It was then that I realised his oratorical gifts and his ability to lead the masses,” Thyssen recalled in his 1941 memoir, I Paid Hitler. “What impressed me most, however, was the order that reigned in his meetings, the almost military discipline of his followers.” Thyssen provided the party, by his own estimate, approximately 1 million reichsmarks—more than $5 million today—and also helped finance the acquisition and refurbishment of a Munich palace as the Nazi Party headquarters. Most important, Thyssen arranged for Hitler to speak to his fellow industrialists in Düsseldorf on January 27, 1932.

Hitler sits next to Hermann Göring at the Düsseldorf Industrieclub, while Fritz Thyssen, a wealthy industrialist who was one of Hitler’s early financial backers, speaks at the microphone, January 27, 1932. (Ullstein bild / Getty)

[Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

“The speech made a deep impression on the assembled industrialists,” Thyssen said, “and in consequence of this a number of large contributions flowed from the resources of heavy industry into the treasuries of the National Socialist party.” This financing, estimated at a still-cautious 2 million marks annually, was channeled through a trusted intermediary: Alfred Hugenberg.

Hugenberg had served as a director of Krupp A.G., the large steelmaker and arms manufacturer, during the Great War, and had subsequently founded the Telegraph Union, a conglomerate of 1,400 associated newspapers intended to provide a conservative bulwark against the liberal, pro-democracy press. Hugenberg also bought controlling shares in the country’s largest movie studio, enabling him to have film and the press work together to advance his right-wing, antidemocratic agenda. A reporter for Vossische Zeitung, a leading centrist daily newspaper, observed that Hugenberg was “the great disseminator of National Socialist ideas to an entire nation through newspapers, books, magazines and films.”

To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. As a right-wing delegate to the Reichstag, Hugenberg proposed a “freedom law” that called for the liberation of the German people from the shackles of democracy and from the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The law called for the treaty signatories to be tried and hanged for treason, along with government officials involved with implementing the treaty provisions. The French ambassador in Berlin called Hugenberg “one of the most evil geniuses of Germany.”

Though both Hitler and Hugenberg were fiercely anti-Communist, antidemocratic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic, their attempts at political partnership failed spectacularly and repeatedly. The problem lay not in ideological differences but in the similarity of their temperaments and their competing political aspirations. Like Hitler, Hugenberg was inflexible, stubborn, and self-righteous. When challenged, he doubled down. Hugenberg had spoken of a “third Reich” as early as 1919, well before Hitler was a force on the political scene, and he envisioned himself as the future Reichsverweser, or “regent of the Reich.” His followers greeted him with “Heil Hugenberg!” Joseph Goebbels noted that Hitler invariably emerged from his meetings with Hugenberg red-faced and “mad as shit.”

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

But by late January 1933, the two men’s fates were inextricably entangled. Hugenberg, who had leveraged his wealth into political power, had become the leader of the German National People’s Party, which had the votes in the Reichstag that Hitler needed to be appointed chancellor. Hitler had the potential to elevate Hugenberg to political power. As one Hitler associate explained the Hitler-Hugenberg dynamic: “Hugenberg had everything but the masses; Hitler had everything but the money.”

After cantankerous negotiation, a deal was reached: Hugenberg would deliver Hitler the chancellorship, in exchange for Hugenberg being given a cabinet post as head of a Superministerium that subsumed the ministries of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn’t hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinhold Quaatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg’s calculus as follows: “Hitler will sit in the saddle but Hugenberg holds the whip.”

The New York Times expressed astonishment that Hugenberg, an “arch-capitalist” who stood “in strongest discord with economic doctrines of the Nazi movement,” was suddenly in charge of the country’s finances. Hitler’s “socialist mask” had fallen, the Communist daily Red Banner proclaimed, arguing that “Hugenberg is in charge, not Hitler!” The weekly journal Die Weltbühne dubbed the new government “Hitler, Hugenberg & Co.”

As self-proclaimed “economic dictator,” Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers’ rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 percent. “The real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability in economic life,” one of Hugenberg’s newspapers editorialized, arguing that the goal of economic policy should be to rescue “the professions, and those most negatively affected: the merchant middle class.” Hugenberg declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures, canceled debts, and placed tariffs on several widely produced agricultural goods, violating trade agreements and inflating the cost of living. “It just won’t do,” Hitler objected in one cabinet meeting, “that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest.” Let them suffer awhile, Hugenberg argued. “Then it will be possible to even out the hardships.” The economy fell into chaos. The press dubbed Hugenberg the Konfusionsrat —the “consultant of confusion.”

Hugenberg didn’t care about bad press. He was accustomed to being one of the most unpopular personalities in the country. Vorwärts, the socialist newspaper, depicted him as a puffed-up frog with spectacles. Hitler called him a Wauwau, or “woof woof.” Even his close associates referred to him as “the Hamster.” But Hugenberg lived by the golden rule: He who had the gold ruled. Earlier, when disagreements had arisen over the rightward turn of the German National Party, Hugenberg simply expelled the dissenters and financed the party’s entire budget from his own resources. Hitler could aspire to be dictator of the Third Reich, but Hugenberg was already dictator of the economy.

In late June 1933, while Hitler was trying to assuage international concerns about the long-term intentions of his government, Hugenberg appeared in London at an international conference on economic development. To the surprise of everyone, including the other German-delegation members present, Hugenberg laid out an ambitious plan for economic growth through territorial expansion. “The first step would consist of Germany reclaiming its colonies in Africa,” Hugenberg explained. “The second would be that the ‘people without space’”—Volk ohne Raum—“would open areas in which our productive race would create living space.” The announcement made headlines around the world. “Reich Asks for Return of African Lands at London Parley,” read one New York Times headline. Below that, a subhead continued: “Also seeks other territory, presumably in Europe.”

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s foreign minister, tried to walk back the Hugenberg statement, asserting that Hugenberg had expressed only a personal opinion, not government policy. Hugenberg dug in his heels, retorting that, as economic minister, when he said something, he was speaking for the entire government. Foreign policy was just an extension of economic policy. Confusion and embarrassment followed.

Back in Berlin, Neurath insisted in a cabinet meeting that “a single member cannot simply overlook the objections of the others” and that Hugenberg “either did not understand these objections, which were naturally clothed in polite form, or he did not want to understand them.” Hitler sought to mediate, saying that “what had already happened was no longer of any interest.” But Hugenberg wouldn’t back down: He wanted the issue resolved and on his terms. “It was a matter between Hitler and me as to who was going to seize the initiative,” Hugenberg later admitted. Hitler prevailed. On June 29, 1933, Hugenberg resigned his minister post.

By then Hitler no longer needed either Hugenberg’s corporate contacts or his Reichstag delegates. The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists. Six months earlier, three weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the banker Kurt Baron von Schröder had met with Hitler at Schröder’s villa in a fashionable quarter of Cologne. The arrangements were cloak-and-dagger: Hitler made an unscheduled, early-morning exit from a train in Bonn, entered a hotel, ate a quick breakfast, then departed in a waiting car with curtained rear windows to be driven to the Schröder villa while a decoy vehicle drove in the opposite direction. Hitler walked out of the meeting with a 30 million reichsmark credit line that saved his political movement from bankruptcy.

Once Hitler was in power, there was no longer need for secrecy or subterfuge. On Monday, February 20, 1933, Hermann Göring, one of two Nazis ministers in the Hitler cabinet and the president of the Reichstag, hosted a fundraiser at his official residence for the Nazi Party in advance of upcoming elections. The event was presided over by Hjalmar Schacht, a respected banker and co-founder of a centrist political party who saw Hitler as the best bet against left-wing political forces and had lobbied President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor.

Among the two dozen industrialists, bankers, and businessmen in attendance, the most prominent was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, known as “the cannon king” for his armament production. “I was astonished,” Schacht recalled, “because I knew that this same Krupp von Bohlen had refused an invitation from Fritz Thyssen to attend an event with the Rhine-Westfalen industrialists four weeks earlier.”

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen (at left) and Adolf Hitler during a visit to the Krupp Factory in Essen. Krupp, another wealthy Hitler backer, supplied armaments to the Third Reich. (DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy)

Perhaps equally surprising was the presence at this fundraiser of four directors from the board of the giant chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate I.G. Farben, which had to that point been staunchly pro-democracy, pro–Weimar Republic, and anti–National Socialist. (The Nazis derided the company, which employed many Jewish scientists, as “an international capitalist Jewish company.”)

Hitler himself stunned party attendees by showing up as the unannounced guest of honor. Clad in a suit and tie rather than a brown storm trooper’s uniform, Hitler addressed the assembled corporate elite, warning of the dangers of communism and trumpeting his appointment as chancellor as a “great victory” that he saw as a mandate for radical change. He outlined his plans to restore the power of the military, assert totalitarian control over the country, destroy the parliamentary system, and crush all political opponents by force. “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” Hitler told them.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

After Hitler departed, Schacht spoke of the need for additional campaign financing in advance of the upcoming elections. Hermann Göring added that the election, scheduled for March 5, “will surely be the last one for the next 10 years, probably even for the next 100 years.” By day’s end, the fundraiser had generated 3 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of $15 million today.

The following three weeks delivered a series of blows to the Weimar Republic that resulted in its demise: the arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, which saw the very symbol of parliamentarian democracy consumed in flame; the March 5 elections from which the Nazis emerged with a mandate for Hitler’s reforms; and the passing of an “enabling law,” on March 23, that established Hitler as unchallenged dictator. In a letter to Hitler, Gustav Krupp wrote, “The turn of political events is in line with the wishes which I myself and the board of directors have cherished for a long time.”

German corporations, large and small, helped retool the Weimar Republic as the Third Reich. Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen, a “car for the people.” Mercedes-Benz provided Hitler and his chief lieutenants with bulletproof sedans. Hugo Boss designed the black uniforms for the SS. Krupp supplied armaments. Miele produced munitions. Allianz provided insurance for concentration camps. J.A. Topf & Sons manufactured crematoria ovens. A dismayed executive at Deutsche Bank, which was involved in the expropriation of Jewish businesses, sent a letter to the chairman of his supervisory board: “I fear we are embarking on an explicit, well- planned path toward the annihilation of all Jews in Germany.”

For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)

By October 1942, I.G. Farben and its subsidiaries were using slave laborers in 23 locations. The life expectancy of inmates at an I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz was less than four months; more than 25,000 people lost their lives on the construction site alone. As corporate practices adapted to evolving political realities, the company aligned its wide technological and human resources with government priorities. Jews were purged from the corporate ranks. The I.G. Farben pharmaceutical division, Bayer, supported Nazi medical experiments. A postwar affidavit alleges that Bayer paid 170 reichsmarks for 150 female Auschwitz prisoners. “The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition,” the affidavit reads. “However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments,” and “we would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.” Although recent investigations have questioned the veracity of this particular affidavit, Bayer’s involvement in medical experimentation on Auschwitz inmates is undisputed.

The I.G. Farben company Degussa owned a chemical subsidiary that produced a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B, used primarily for fumigating ships, warehouses, and trains—and, after 1942, as a homicidal agent at Nazi extermination facilities. Company logs confirm the delivery of an estimated 56 tons of Zyklon B from 1942 to 1944; more than 23.8 tons were sent to Auschwitz, where it served as the primary instrument of death for the more than 1 million Jewish people murdered there.

In August 1947, 24 senior I.G. Farben managers were placed on trial for their role in Nazi aggression and atrocity. In his opening statement before the court, the prosecutor Telford Taylor said of these executives, “They were the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true. They were the guardians of the military and state secrets.” The 15,638 pages of courtroom testimony, along with the 6,384 documents submitted as evidence—purchase orders, internal memos, board minutes—indicated that these Farben executives knew the exact number of airplane and truck ties, the running feet of tank tread, the amount of explosives, as well as the precise number of canisters of Zyklon B gas delivered to Auschwitz. The defense attorney for the chairman of I.G. Farben’s supervisory board argued that his client was “no robber, no plunderer, no slave dealer,” but rather just a 60-year-old senior executive doing what senior executives were paid to do—run the company with an eye to the bottom line. If he collaborated with the government, it was out of “a feeling of personal responsibility to the company.” Twenty-three I.G. Farben directors were eventually charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; 13 of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.

[From the February 1937 Issue: Hitler looks eastward]

At the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Gustav Krupp was indicted as a major war criminal alongside the likes of Göring and Hans Frank, but he was too ill to stand trial. Instead, his son was tried in 1947, in The United States of America v. Alfried Krupp, et al. The indictment charged the younger Krupp, alongside 11 Krupp corporate directors, with crimes against humanity and war crimes, for participating in “the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians.” Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, “We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”

As for Alfred Hugenberg? Unlike other early private-sector Hitler enablers such as Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht—both of whom ended up in concentration camps after crossing Hitler—Hugenberg got off lightly. Hugenberg withdrew to his sprawling estate, Rohbraken, in the former feudal province of Lippe, where he lived as the local regent while his business empire was gradually whittled away.

The German Nationalist Party was disbanded as soon as Hugenberg stepped down from his cabinet post in June 1933. In December of that year, the Telegraph Union was taken over by the ministry of propaganda and absorbed into a newly created entity, the German News Office. In 1943, Hugenberg’s publishing house, Scherl Verlag, was acquired by the Nazi publisher, Eher Verlag. By war’s end, the defrocked cabinet minister and disenfranchised media mogul was diminished and dissipated but still defiant.

On September 28, 1946, Hugenberg was arrested by the British military police. He was detained for five months, and his assets were frozen. After a formal hearing, Hugenberg was deemed to be a “lesser evildoer”—officially, a “Mitläufer,” the lowest order of complicity in the Nazi regime—on the grounds that he had left his cabinet post in the first months of the Hitler regime and had never been a member of the Nazi Party. With undiminished temerity, Hugenberg balked at even that lesser charge. Having been stripped of most of his business empire, Hugenberg saw himself as a victim of, not a participant in, the Nazi regime. He appealed the hearing’s determination and won. He was declared “untainted,” which allowed him to lay claim to his frozen assets. Unrepentant to his dying day, Hugenberg refused to publicly countenance any suggestion of guilt or responsibility for Hitler’s excesses.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, 1933, less than 24 hours after enabling Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Hugenberg reportedly spoke with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a fellow conservative and the mayor of Leipzig. “I’ve just committed the greatest stupidity of my life,” Hugenberg allegedly told Goerdeler. “I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in the history of the world.”