In those days of the distant past the National Socialists presented themselves to the public as the champions of virtue and disinterestedness. As soo… - Fritz Thyssen

For my financial interest in the greatest metallurgical concern in Germany, the United Steel Works, instead of being transferred to the Reich, has been seized by Prussia. Goering may have certain ideas in this connection. Indeed, a large share ownership in these steel works might save the Hermann Goering Works from bankruptcy.

The persecution of the Jews reached its height in the autumn of 1938 and aroused universal protest. Up to 1933 I had not attached much importance to the anti-Semitic brawls of the National Socialist party. The inhabitants of the Catholic provinces of the Rhine are not anti-Semitic. There may be regions in Germany where the slow-wittedness of the population has enabled the Jews to play an exaggerated role. This has never been the case in the Rhineland. We have always considered the Jew Heinrich Heine as one of our national poets. The Nazis may destroy Heine’s statue in his native city of Düsseldorf, but they will never be able to prevent people from singing ‘Die Lorelei’ on the boats that sail down the Rhine.

At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century the generally dominant idea, derived from Ricardo and Adam Smith, was that commerce must be entirely unfettered, and that free trade was fundamentally linked with economic life. But the Liberals have ‘emptied the baby with the bath,’ with the result that the state, in opposition to them, has assumed more and more control over the economic process and has even gone into business on its own account. In my opinion the results achieved by the state as business manager have, on the whole, been bad… The function of the state, however, is to administer; and administration is something wholly different from enterprise under business management.