Many held out hope that the Bibas family might have still been alive.

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been busy. Over the past few weeks, he’s been rooting out programs and language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The U.S. military is dutifully following his lead: West Point no longer supports those ostensibly suspicious organizations such as the Native American Heritage Forum and the Latin Cultural Club, and the Army Recruiting Command has ended its long partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards.

The new Pentagon boss also zeroed in on the pressing task of renaming Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, though it’s not exactly a reversal; Hegseth ordered that the base now honor a World War II hero named Roland Bragg (a private first class who won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge) instead of the odious Confederate General Braxton Bragg, for whom it was named in 1918. This change is little more than a clumsy stunt, one that manages to insult a loyal PFC while resurrecting the traitorous general—almost certainly after searching for a hero named Bragg, just so people could use the old name with a wink and a chuckle.

Americans might wonder what all of this performative inanity has to do with arming, training, feeding, and housing the most powerful military in the world, or how any of this showmanship makes the United States safer and more capable of deterring its enemies and fighting for its interests. But Hegseth, like most of Donald Trump’s other nominees, knows that his job is not to administer a department but to carry out Trump’s cultural and political vendettas.

[Elliot Ackerman: Bring back the War Department]

When a government department gets an appointee like Hegseth, it must still find a way to function every day, and those many tasks then fall to the deputies and undersecretaries. Sometimes, the effect is almost imperceptible. Ben Carson, for example, was tapped in Trump’s first term to lead Housing and Urban Development; he was out of his depth and it showed, but HUD slogged on despite Carson’s inexperience. The Defense Department, however, cannot run on autopilot. Mistakes made at the Pentagon can get people killed and endanger the safety of the nation. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, Trump’s current nominees to other top-tier Pentagon positions aren’t much more qualified than Hegseth. As with Trump’s nominations in other departments, the key factors appear to be loyalty, wealth, and ideological fervor, not competence.

Day-to-day operations at the Pentagon and other agencies are usually run by a deputy secretary. The previous deputy under Lloyd Austin, Kath Hicks, has a Ph.D. from MIT and years of experience in national defense, including at the Pentagon. Trump’s nominee to succeed her is the billionaire Steve Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus Capital. He has no military or Pentagon experience. (Likewise, Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, is a wealthy businessman and art collector who has never served in the military or any government position.)

Below the secretary, several undersecretaries serve as the senior managers of the institution, and the news here is also worrisome. In 2020, Trump tried to nominate Bradley Hansell, a special assistant to Trump in his first term, as the deputy undersecretary for intelligence (in order to replace someone whose loyalty came into question among Trump’s advisers), a nomination that was returned to Trump without action from the Senate. This time, Trump has nominated Hansell (whose background is in venture capital) for the more senior job of undersecretary, despite his lack of qualifications. Trump has also tapped Emil Michael, a tech investor and executive at Uber and Klout, as undersecretary for research and engineering. Michael is a lawyer; his predecessor in the research and engineering post in the Biden administration, Heidi Shyu, was an actual engineer, with long experience in defense production and acquisition issues.

One relatively conventional choice among the undersecretary nominees is Elbridge Colby, a well-known defense intellectual who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in Trump’s first term. (He’s the type of Washington fixture whom Trump’s people usually distrust, but Colby was careful never to get on the wrong side of the MAGA world.) His views, especially regarding nuclear weapons, are alarming: He once wrote that America should consider nuclear responses to a cyberattack. But Colby is a serious choice compared with his future colleagues.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The U.S. needs soldiers, not warriors]

After Hegseth, Trump’s most disturbing DOD nomination—at least so far—is Anthony Tata, the retired one-star general whom Trump has put forward as undersecretary for personnel and readiness. Tata’s views are extreme: He once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist,” claimed that former CIA Director John Brennan was trying to kill Trump, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered several of their political opponents. Trump had to pull Tata’s nomination in 2020 as undersecretary for policy (the position Colby is now slated to get) just 90 minutes before his Senate hearing, after being told that the votes to confirm him were not there. The president is now going to send Tata back and humiliate the Republicans into voting for yet another unacceptable nominee.

The biggest risk is not that these nominees will do poorly in their jobs. They will have assistants—the same bureaucrats and experienced civil servants whom Trump and Hegseth are trying to drive from the Pentagon—who will make sure that things get done as much as possible in the midst of the chaos. The real danger will come during a crisis, when Trump needs the defense secretary and his senior staff to rise to the occasion and provide advice and options under difficult and perhaps even terrifying conditions. Although these nominees will likely serve up plenty of uninformed or irresponsibly sycophantic views at such a moment, few of them have the depth of knowledge or experience to offer steadier guidance—let alone to push back against the president when needed.

Maybe none of that matters: Trump’s first term showed that he is practically unbriefable and rarely listens to advice. Hegseth and his subordinates seem likely to spend much of their time conducting ideological warfare against their own department, with occasional breaks for tasteless public trolling. But sooner or later, Trump could face a foreign-policy crisis, and he will need better counsel than he can get from billionaire defense dilettantes and a MAGA television personality. At such a moment, Americans can only hope that someone with sober judgment and a healthy sense of patriotism—and who knows what they’re doing—emerges to do the job that Hegseth and others have left aside.

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Throughout everything that happened during Donald Trump’s first term in office—the abuses of executive power, the impeachments, the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—the administration never outright defied an order of the court. Now, less than a month into Trump’s second term, the president and those around him seem to be talking themselves into crossing that line.

The crisis began—where else?—on X, where the administration’s unelected chancellor Elon Musk began spitefully posting about a court order limiting the ability of his aides to rampage through sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department. Within the locked, echoing room of the X algorithm, Musk’s outrage bounced among far-right influencers and sympathetic members of the legal academy until it found the ear of Vice President J. D. Vance, who posted on Sunday: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Vance’s post is somewhat tricky. The vice president didn’t say outright that the administration would defy a court order, but he hinted at it by implicitly raising the question of just who determines what constitutes a legitimate use of executive authority. Is it the executive branch itself, or the courts? Since the Supreme Court handed down Marbury vs. Madison in 1803, the answer has emphatically been the latter. But if the Trump administration decides that the president himself—or Elon Musk—gets to choose whether or not to obey the courts, then the country may cross into dangerous and unknown territory. Legal scholars can’t agree on just what defines a constitutional crisis, but pretty much everyone would recognize intentional executive defiance of a court order as one.

[Read: Trump signals he might ignore the courts]

The good news, such as it is, is that the administration doesn’t yet seem to have taken the plunge. The bad news is that this seems like a live possibility, and nobody really knows what will happen if it does. To some extent, there is a road map—but beyond that, not so much.

Already, the cascade of litigation against Trump’s executive actions has resulted in several instances in which courts have scolded the administration for noncompliance. Most notably, almost two weeks after Judge John McConnell ordered the administration to halt its broad freeze of trillions of dollars in federal funds, 22 Democratic attorneys general filed a motion to enforce compliance with the order, alerting the court that funding for many state programs remained halted. The Justice Department responded that it had abided by its own, narrower reading of the temporary restraining order. Judge McConnell swiftly issued another order declaring the federal government to have violated the terms of his initial ruling, demanding that it comply with the more expansive reading of his order going forward—and hinting at the possibility of legal penalties if the administration defied him.

I will admit to watching these proceedings unfold with a pit in my stomach, waiting for Musk, Vance, and Trump to spin themselves up into outright disobedience. So far, though, that hasn’t happened. Instead, the Justice Department appealed Judge McConnell’s order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit—which, despite some procedural oddities, is the normal rule-of-law process for when the government doesn’t like a court order and wants to change it. (The First Circuit denied the appeal.) An ongoing scuffle over whether a certain stream of FEMA funding could be turned off under Judge McConnell’s order has not so far resulted in J. D. Vance tweeting “Come and take it!” Rather, the Justice Department filed requests for clarification from the court about the scope of the order, which the judge provided. Likewise, rather than just disobeying the temporary restraining order that bothered Musk so greatly concerning access to Treasury systems, the Justice Department requested and received a limited carve-out from the court.

None of this is good, but it’s not outright defiance. As the legal journalist Chris Geidner has written, “DOJ lawyers do appear to be seeking a way to advance Trump’s claims in courts while trying to then implement courts’ orders if and when those claims fail.” It’s important that these cases are being litigated by Justice Department attorneys who don’t want to get in trouble with the courts or legal bar authorities for lying or disobeying an order, and have strong incentives to play by the rules. Elon Musk may not care, but lawyers need to worry about their ability to practice law—under future administrations as well.

But what happens if the Trump team decides to push things further? Take the funding-freeze case again—if the standoff continued, the judge might convene a hearing, or plaintiffs could push for one, to determine why the court shouldn’t hold the government in contempt. What then?

Federal courts have broad powers to hold those who defy their orders in contempt. This can take the form of financial penalties or even incarceration, either to strong-arm the contemner into compliance or to punish them for noncompliance after the fact. Those financial penalties can be steep. In one extreme 2014 case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court hinted at its willingness to impose fines of $250,000 on Yahoo for noncompliance with a government surveillance program—an amount that would have doubled every week, quickly bankrupting the company. (Yahoo complied.)

[Peter M. Shane: Presidents may not unilaterally dismantle government agencies]

Yet a broad survey of litigation by Nicholas R. Parrillo, a law professor at Yale, reveals that federal courts have in many cases been reluctant to turn the screws when the federal government itself is the party that might be held in contempt. Instead, Parrillo writes, courts have tended to wield the threat of contempt—relying on the norm that executive officials generally don’t want to be found in violation of a court order. But that norm is exactly what Trump and those around him are now toying with trying to erode.

If a court did try to levy sanctions against a defiant official or agency, that would also bring up the question of who would enforce them. The agency responsible for judicial enforcement is the U.S. Marshals, which is under the control of the Justice Department. By statute, marshals are required to carry out court orders. But while we’re spinning out hypotheticals, what would happen if Attorney General Pam Bondi, or Trump himself, ordered them not to comply?

The answer to that question lies outside the courtroom. It is located instead in the halls of Congress, the pages of newspapers, the boardrooms of businesses and civil-society organizations, and finally the streets. It’s not a struggle that can be resolved by law itself, but rather by whether Americans care enough to demonstrate as a polity that the rule of law matters to them and that they will defend it.

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A baffling problem in the Trump era is separating its sinister aspects from its pathetic self-embarrassments. On Tuesday, the White House turned away an Associated Press reporter from an Oval Office event. The reporter had done nothing wrong. The refusal was intended to punish the AP collectively for disobeying President Donald Trump’s edict to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”

The decree and its enforcement were indeed sinister—an effort to bend reality to one man’s whim. But they were also pathetic, a revelation of inner weakness, not national strength.

Consider how the Gulf of Mexico got its name in the first place. It was not from the Mexicans themselves. The ancient Aztecs knew the oceans to their west and east as “Sky Water.” They did not invent geographically specific names for the seas around them, because they did not need them.

The Gulf of Mexico instead got its name from 16th-century Spanish mapmakers. In the age of discovery and conquest, European mariners often named bodies of water after the destination territory on the other side of that water. The Gulf of Mexico is so called because when a Spaniard sailed toward Mexico, the Gulf was the sea that the Spaniard crossed.

Once you understand this practice, you see it everywhere. The Bight of Benin was not called that by the people of the Benin kingdom. It was named by the Europeans who sailed across the bight (an old word for bay) toward Benin.

The Indian Ocean. The Java Sea. These were not labels chosen by the Indians or Javanese, but by European seafarers en route to India and Java.

Even European home waters were named by sailors after their destination. The Irish Sea was the route from England to Ireland; the Gulf of Finland was the way taken by non-Finns on the south shore traveling to trade with the Finnish people on the north shore.

An apparent exception, the English Channel, is no exception at all.

The Romans bestowed the name “Britannic Ocean” upon the water between their continental empire and their British colony. The medieval English knew the sea by the ancient Latin name. They sometimes more loosely referred to the waters around them as “the German Ocean”—because they offered the way to the rich markets of the Rhine Valley and the German coast. But in the 1600s, the supreme naval power of northwestern Europe was the Dutch Netherlands. For the Dutch, the significance of the channel was that it guided them to England and then onward into the Atlantic. It was the Dutch who spread the term English Channel. Because the English relied on superior Dutch charts for a long time, the Dutch name stuck—despite the efforts of some English geographers to replace the name with the more romantic and less objectifying “Narrow Seas.”

Bodies of water are typically named by dominant nations not after themselves, but after the subordinate nations on the other side. To rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” is to reconceptualize the United States not as a sending point, but as a receiving point; no longer a country that stamps itself upon history, but a country upon which history is stamped.

Maybe, in that very specific sense, the attempted renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is a fitting memorial to the Trump era. Trump’s act of imperial boastfulness unwittingly reveals a disquieting self-awareness of imperial decline. As so often, Trump claims to be a winner while acting like a loser.

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.”