On August 25th I was advised that I would have to go to Berlin for a meeting of the Reichstag. The suddenness of such convocations is symptomatic of … - Friedrich Thyssen

What interested me primarily was the way in which economic life should be organised in the National Socialist state or—as I advocated—under a collaboration of the National Socialists and the German Nationalists. Here was a problem of great importance. For the question to be decided was whether industry and economic activity in general should be taken over by the state; or if not, what was to be the role of the state in relation to economic life.

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.

After the declaration of war several people, who took no trouble to conceal their lack of enthusiasm for the regime, came to see me in Switzerland. They said, ‘how that war is declared, everyone must rally behind Hitler, for he represents Germany.’ To all such attempts to make me reverse my decision I replied, ‘No; for this man will plunge the German people into disaster.’