Postwar decartelization of German heavy industry was steered to avoid socialization.

Evidence

Mannesmann was not just any company. It had been a founding member of the Anti-Bolshevik League and had financed the Nazi Party. During the Second World War it had taken over factories in occupied countries. After 1945 it was one of the industrial conglomerates which were decartelized. The decartelization of German heavy industry, whose concentration in a few hands the Allies saw as being a decisive precondition for Germany’s vast potential for waging war, was one of the most important provisions of the Potsdam Protocol. The American military government, however, had ensured from the start that decartelization offered an alternative to socialization. Under pressure from the USA, the British Labour government, which had nationalized its own coal and steel industry, banned the parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia from carrying out socialization measures demanded not only by the SPD and KPD but also by the workers’ wing of the CDU. Wherever the works council laws passed by individual states gave works councils a say in business matters, the military governments suspended either the laws as a whole or the relevant sections of them. In addition, representatives of the former companies were entrusted with carrying out the decartelization, since this meant that the normal course of business would be disturbed as little as possible. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2054

Categorization

• CANDY: A startling fact: the company that financed the Nazi Party was later entrusted with carrying out its own decartelization to avoid disturbing business.
• XREF: connects to: Weimar-era cartelization forced the state to pick between crushing or strengthening monopolies — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 509; The post-war German government refused even symbolic concessions toward socialization. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 31; The German bureaucracy sabotaged the 1919 Socialization Commission’s work

Broader Connections

• The post-war German government refused even symbolic concessions toward socialization. #corroborates (0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 31
• Weimar-era cartelization forced the state to pick between crushing or strengthening monopolies #responds-to (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 509