The fruits of fascism : political regimes and the origins of modern prosperity in the British and German automobile industries / by Simon Francis Reich.

This dissertation attempts to address the question of the effect of specific forms of political regimes on the distribution of profits among automobile producers. The study concentrates on the contrasting effects of fascist and liberal regimes on the relative success of producers in the automobile industries of Germany and Britain. The study focuses on the historical period between the late 1920s and the late 1950s. The dissertation concludes that the market structures of the automobile industries in Britain and Germany were converging in the late 1920s but diverged between 1933 and 1945--due to the fascist regime's discriminatory policies against those producers in the German market who either refused to be integrated into the state apparatus or who were ostracized as a result of their foreign ownership. In contrast the liberal British regime's equalitarian ideology and limited capacity for intervention often served to favor those very foreign producers who were discriminated against in Germany. In the immediate postwar period those very firms who had been favored by the Nazi government had their advantages reinforced by Allied policies. American multinationals in Britain were often the greatest beneficiaries of the government's equalitarian ideology. This dissertation relies on the comparative case study technique, focusing on four companies. Primary data provided the basis for each case study. The data was drawn from a variety of archives in the United States, Britain and Germany including the Edison Institute and Ford Industrial Archives in Detroit, the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte in Munich, the Public Records Office and Imperial War Museum in London and the Modern Records Center located at Warwick University. Primary materials were also drawn from private collections belonging to two researchers, Professor Mira Wilkins and Dr. Ian Turner, and two private archives--the study group examining the history of Volkswagen headed by Professor Hans Mommsen at Bochum and the archives of the Institute for Social History headed by Dr. Karl-Heinz Roth located in Hamburg.