Irrespective of an awful overall performance, an important characteristic of the economy of the Third Reich, and a big difference from a centrally planned one, was the rôle [that] private ownership of firms was playing — in practice as well as in theory. The ideal [Fascist] economy would liberate the creativeness of a multitude of private entrepreneurs in a predominantly competitive framework gently directed by the state to achieve the highest welfare of the Germanic people.
— Christoph Buchheim & Jonas Scherner
Germany was not the Soviet Union, centrally planned and centrally commanded. [The Chancellery’s] orders, though they shaped national policy, were refracted and distorted by a system that was poorly coordinated, factious, and obstructive. There was no straight line of command between Führer and factory.
In between lay a web of ministries, plenipotentiaries and Party commissars, each with their own apparatus, interests and rubber stamps, producing more than the usual weight of bureaucratic inertia. At the end of the line was a business community most of whom remained wedded to entrepreneurial independence, and resented the jumbled administration, the corrupt [N.S.D.A.P.] hacks, the endless form‐filling, which stifled what voluntary efforts [that] they might have made to transform the war economy.
This monopolistic structure is not maintained solely by the general managers (Generaldirektoren), but just as much by capitalists. Otto Wolff, Friedrich Flick, and Günther Quandt are not managers, but powerful capitalists. They are not rentiers who at the end of the year cut the dividend coupons of their stock certificates and cash their dividends.
Nor are the managers themselves simply managers, that is, salaried employees. They have long ago assumed the role of capitalists proper, investing their savings in shares and often speculating with the funds of their own corporations, thereby strengthening their personal financial power within them. Moreover, the managerial positions are often as hereditary as those of the capitalists proper.
[I]t is not astonishing that Otto Ohlendorf, an enthusiastic [anticommunist] and high‐ranking SS officer, who since November 1943 held a top position in the Reich Economics Ministry, did not like Speer’s system of industrial production at all. He strongly criticized the cartel‐like organization of the war economy where groups of interested private parties exercised state power to the detriment of the small and medium entrepreneur.
For the postwar period he therefore advocated a clear separation of the state from private enterprises with the former establishing a general framework for the activity of the latter. In his opinion it was the constant aim of [Fascist] economic policy, “to restrict as little as possible the creative activities of the individual. […] Private property is the natural precondition to the development of personality. Only private property is able to further the continuous attachment to a certain work.”
— Christoph Buchheim & Jonas Scherner
Trade and commercial power cannot be understood by only examining state‐to‐state interactions or the intentions of political leaders. At its core, trade is about private transactions, about buyers finding sellers. This remained the case, albeit with limitations, throughout the 1930s. Although the [bourgeois] state intervened in ever more extensive swaths of the economy after 1929, both in Germany and in Southeastern Europe, the basic building blocks of trade remained private actors.
By the 1930s the [bourgeois] state may have dictated the broader goals of the economy and even set some prices, but firms and other private institutions gathered the information, evaluated the price signals, and made decisions that in the aggregate affected the shape and substance of foreign trade.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
Further reading: The room for manoeuvre for firms in the Third Reich.