Some of the bereaved want the London building to be kept as a memorial to the tragedy.

Photographs by Chris Hoare

Several stories below the British Library’s Magna Carta room, alongside a rumbling line of the London Underground, is a brightly lit labyrinth of rare and historic items. Past a series of antique rifles chained to a wall, past an intricate system of conveyor belts whisking books to the surface, the library stores an enormous collection of plays, manuscripts, and letters. Last spring, I checked my belongings at security and descended to sift through this archive—a record of correspondence between the producers and directors of British theater and a small team of censors who once worked for the Crown.

For centuries, these strict, dyspeptic, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious bureaucrats read and passed judgment on every public theatrical production in Britain, striking out references to sex, God, and politics, and forcing playwrights to, as one put it, cook their “conceptions to the taste of authority.” They reported to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which in 1737 became responsible for granting licenses to theaters and approving the texts of plays. “Examiners” made sure that no productions would offend the sovereign, blaspheme the Church, or stir audiences to political radicalism. An 1843 act expanded the department’s powers, calling upon it to block any play that threatened not just the “Public Peace” but “Decorum” and “good Manners.”

Hardly chosen for their artistic sensibilities or knowledge of theatrical history, the men hired by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office were mostly retired military officers from the upper-middle class. From the Victorian era on, they scrutinized plays for references to racial equality and sexuality—particularly homosexuality—vulgar language, and “offensive personalities,” as one guideline put it.

Twentieth-century English theater was, as a result of all this vigilance, “subject to more censorship than in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I,” wrote the playwright and former theater critic Nicholas de Jongh in his 2000 survey of censorship, Politics, Prudery and Perversions. The censors suppressed or bowdlerized countless works of genius. As I thumbed through every play I could think of from the 1820s to the 1960s (earlier manuscripts, sold as part of an examiner’s private archive, can be seen in the Huntington Library in California), it became clear that the censors only got stricter—and more prudish—over time.

[Read: When the culture wars came for the theater]

“Do not come to me with Ibsen,” warned the examiner E. F. Smyth Pigott, nicely demonstrating the censors’ habitual tone. He had “studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully,” and determined that the characters were, to a man, “morally deranged.”

In cardboard boxes stacked on endless rows of metal shelving, string-tie binders hold the original versions of thousands of plays. The text of each is accompanied by a typewritten “Readers’ Report,” most of them several pages long, summarizing the plot and cataloging the work’s flaws as well as any redeeming qualities. That is followed, when available, by typed and handwritten correspondence between the censors and the applicants (usually the play’s hopeful and ingratiating producers).

These reports can at times be as entertaining as the plays themselves. On Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one examiner wrote: “Omit the business and speeches about flybuttons”; on Sartre’s Huis Clos: “The play illustrates very well the difference between the French and English tastes. I don’t suppose that anyone would bat an eyelid over in Paris, but here we bar Lesbians on the stage”; on Camus’ Caligula: “This is the sort of play for which I have no liking at all”; on Tennessee Williams: “Neuroses grin through everything he writes”; and on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: “A good play about negroes in a Chicago slum, written with dignity, power and complete freedom from whimsy. The title is taken from a worthless piece of occasional verse about dreams deferred drying up like a raisin in the sun—or festering and exploding.”

[Ethan Zuckerman: America is no longer the home of the free internet]

These bureaucrats were eager, as one of them wrote, to “lop off a few excrescent boughs” to save the tree. They were anti-Semitic (one successful compromise involved replacing a script’s use of “Fuck the Pope” with “The Pope’s a Jew”) and virulently homophobic. In response to Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, in 1958, one Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Troubridge noted: “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism at the end of this play, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indications that the dead man was a homosexual.”

But the censors could also, occasionally, aspire to the level of pointed and biting literary criticism. “This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett,” the report for a 1960 production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker begins, “though it has not that author’s vein of nihilistic pessimism, and each individual sentence is comprehensible if irrelevant.” One gets the impression that, like the characters from a Bolaño novel, at least some of these men were themselves failed artists and intellectuals, drawn to such authoritarian work from a place of bruised and envious ego.

Indeed, one examiner, Geoffrey Dearmer, considered among the more flexible, had written poetry during the Great War. He reported to the Lord Chamberlain alongside the tyrannical Charles Heriot, who had studied theater at university and worked on a production of Macbeth before moving, still as a young man, into advertising, journalism, and book publishing. He was known, de Jongh wrote, for being “gratuitously abusive.” (Heriot on Edward Bond’s 1965 Saved: “A revolting amateur play … about a bunch of brainless, ape-like yobs,” including a “brainless slut of twenty-three living with her sluttish parents.”) Another examiner, George Alexander Redford, was a bank manager chosen primarily because he was friends with the man he succeeded. When asked about the criteria he used in his decision making, Redford answered, “I have no critical view on plays.” He was “simply bringing to bear an official point of view and keeping up a standard. … There are no principles that can be defined. I follow precedent.”

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The director Peter Hall, writing in The Guardian in 2002 about his experiences with the censors, said that the office “was largely staffed by retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They were so alert to filth that they often found it when none was intended.” Once, he called to ask why some lines had been cut from a play he was directing:

“We all know what’s going on here, Hall, don’t we?” said the retired naval officer angrily. “It’s up periscopes.” “Up periscopes?” I queried. “Buggery, Hall, buggery!” Actually, it wasn’t.

As comic as these men seem now, they wielded enormous, unexamined power. The correspondence filed alongside the manuscripts reveals the extent to which the pressures of censorship warped manuscripts long before they even arrived on the censors’ desks. Managers and production companies checked scripts and suggested changes in anticipation of scrutiny. In a 1967 letter, a representative of a dramatic society eager to stage Waiting for Godot writes, “On page 81 Estragon says ‘Who farted?’ The director and myself are concerned as to whether, during a public presentation, this might offend the laws of censorship. Awaiting your advice.” Presumably, the answer was affirmative.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s report on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Playwrights also performed their own “pre-pre-censorship”—limiting the scope of their subject matter before and during the writing process. According to the 2004 book The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … A History of British Theatre Censorship, as far back as 1866, the comptroller of the LCO, Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, “explicitly commended examiners for operating this ‘indirect system of censorship’ because it enabled the Office to keep the number of prohibited plays to a minimum and forestall concerns about repression.”

Some plays made it past the censors only as a result of human error. When I met Kate Dossett, a professor at the University of Leeds who specializes in Black-theater history, she told me that the case of the playwright Una Marson is an example of what “gets hidden in this collection.” Marson’s 1932 play, At What a Price, depicts a young Black woman from the Jamaican countryside who moves to Kingston and takes a job as a stenographer. Her white employer seduces—or, in today’s understanding, sexually harasses—and impregnates her. The drama is a subtle exploration of miscegenation, one of the core taboos that the LCO often clamped down on. But the play was approved because the examiner—confused by the protagonist’s class markers and education—didn’t realize that she was Black.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticThe script of Una Marson’s At What a Price

“This play is to be produced by the League of Coloured Peoples but it seems to have no particular relation to the objects of that institution except that the scene is in Jamaica and some of the minor characters are coloured and speak a more or less diverting dialect,” the report states. “The main story is presumably about English people and is an old-fashioned artless affair.”

From the beginning, some prominent figures fought against the system of censorship. Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa bears the distinction of having been the first British play banned under the Licensing Act of 1737. The work, ostensibly about the Swedish liberator Gustav I, was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Responding to the ban in a satirical defense of the censors, Samuel Johnson wrote that the government should go further, and make it a “felony to teach to read without a license from the lord chamberlain.” Only then would citizens be able to rest, in “ignorance and peace,” and the government be safe from “the insults of the poets.”

Universal History Archive / GettyA cartoon from 1874 satirized the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to clean up the stage.

Henry James, in his day, spoke out in defense of the English playwright, who “has less dignity—thanks to the censor’s arbitrary rights upon his work—than that of any other man of letters in Europe.” So, too, did George Bernard Shaw. “It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets and authors of modern Europe, men like Ibsen,” Shaw wrote, “delivered helplessly into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this despised and incapable old official.”

By the time the Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the censorship of plays, social attitudes were changing. The influx of workers from Jamaica and other countries in the Commonwealth in the 1950s challenged the stability of racial dynamics; sex between men was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967; divorce became more common; and the rock-and-roll era destigmatized drugs. For years, theaters had been taking advantage of a loophole: Because the LCO’s jurisdiction applied only to public performances, theaters could charge patrons a nominal membership fee, thereby transforming themselves into private subscription clubs out of the censors’ reach.

It must have gotten lonely, trying to stand so long against the changing times. “I don’t understand this,” Heriot wrote, plaintively, about Hair. The American musical was banned three times for extolling “dirt, anti-establishment views, homosexuality and free love,” but in the end, one gets the impression that the censors just gave up. Alexander Lock, a curator at the library, pointed me to Heriot’s report on the final version of the musical. The pain of defeat in his voice is almost palpable: “A curiously half-hearted attempt to vet the script” had been made, he wrote, but many offenses were left intact.

Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968. That month, by royal assent, no new plays required approval from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which was left to devote its attention to the planning of royal weddings, funerals, and garden parties.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the censors’ legacy as limited to, as a 1967 article in The Times of London had it, “the trivia of indecency.” But the damage was far deeper. The censors, de Jongh wrote, stunted English theater, kept it frivolous and parochial, and prevented it from dealing with “the greatest issues and anguishes of this violent century.” No playwrights addressed “the fascist regimes of the 1930s, the process that led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ghastliness perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin, or the tyrannies experienced in China and under other totalitarian leaderships. No wonder. Their plays would have been disallowed. In the 1930s you could not win licences for plays that might offend Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin.” Shakespeare never “had to put up with” censorship so “rigorous and narrow-minded,” Peter Hall wrote. His “richest plays and his finest lines, packed with erotic double meanings, would have been smartly excised by the Lord Chamberlain’s watchdogs.”

[From the January 1930 issue: Edward Weeks on the practice of censorship]

These practices may strike us today as outlandish and anachronistic. Many of us take for granted creative license and the freedom of expression that undergirds it. But the foundation upon which these rights—as we think of them—are situated is far less immutable than we would like to imagine. As recent trends in the United States and elsewhere have shown, advances toward greater tolerance are reversible.

Indeed, many Americans on both the right and the left correctly sense this, even if they do not always understand what genuine censorship looks like. Activists on college campuses have confused the ability to occupy and disrupt physical space for the right to dissent verbally. Meanwhile, Elon Musk warns that “wokeness” will stifle free speech even as he uses the social-media site he owns to manipulate public debate.

Perusing the plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s archive is, among other things, a reminder of what censorship really is: government power applied to speech to either limit or compel it. And it is also a reminder that in the long term, many such attempts backfire. They reveal, as Sir Roly Keating, who was chief executive of the library from 2012 until the beginning of this year, told me, more about the censors’ own “fears, paranoias, obsessions” than they ever succeed in concealing.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticInside the archive 

There is also the sheer fact of what Keating called “this extraordinary imposition of bureaucracy.” Just as the Stasi archive provides unparalleled insight into the interplay of art and politics in postwar East German society, and the Hoover-era FBI’s copious files on Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and other Black American luminaries amount to a valuable cultural repository, the Lord Chamberlain’s archive can now be seen as one of the preeminent collections of Black and queer theater in the English-speaking world. It includes not just the plays that were staged, but also those that were rejected, and in some cases multiple drafts of them. These are precisely the kinds of works that, without the backing of institutions that have the resources to protect their own archive, might have been lost to history.

“Theater’s an ephemeral medium,” Keating told me. “Early drafts of plays change all the time; many don’t get published at all.” Among the many ramifications of censorship, I had not adequately considered this one: the degree to which methodical suppression can create the most meticulous collection. It is a deeply satisfying justice—even a form of revenge—that the hapless bureaucrats who endeavored so relentlessly to squelch and block independent thought have instead so painstakingly preserved it for future generations.

Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “All the King’s Censors.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.”

Savannah Marshall says she is no longer fighting on the undercard of Natasha Jonas v Lauren Price on 7 March in London.