actually wiki has a good summary
The Great Depression had spurred increased state ownership in most Western capitalist countries. This also took place in Germany during the last years of the Weimar Republic.
[39] But after the Nazis took power, industries were privatized en masse. Several banks, shipyards, railway lines, shipping lines, welfare organizations, and more were privatized.
[40] The Nazi government took the stance that enterprises should be in private hands wherever possible.
[41] State ownership was to be avoided unless it was absolutely necessary for rearmament or the war effort, and even in those cases “the Reich often insisted on the inclusion in the contract of an option clause according to which the private firm operating the plant was entitled to purchase it.”
[42] However, the privatization was "applied within a framework of increasing control of the state over the whole economy through regulation and political interference,"
[43] as laid out in the 1933 Act for the Formation of Compulsory Cartels, which gave the government a role in regulating and controlling the cartels that had been earlier formed in the Weimar Republic under the Cartel Act of 1923.
[44] These had mostly regulated themselves from 1923 to 1933.
[45]
Companies privatized by the Nazis included the four major commercial banks in Germany, which had all come under public ownership during the prior years:
Commerz– und Privatbank ,
Deutsche Bank und Disconto-Gesellschaft ,
Golddiskontbank and
Dresdner Bank .
[46][47] Also privatized were the
Deutsche Reichsbahn (German Railways), at the time the largest single public enterprise in the world, the
Vereinigte Stahlwerke A.G. (United Steelworks), the second largest joint-stock company in Germany (the largest was
IG Farben) and
Vereinigte Oberschlesische Hüttenwerke AG , a company controlling all of the metal production in the Upper Silesian coal and steel industry. The government also sold a number of shipbuilding companies, and enhanced private utilities at the expense of municipally owned utilities companies.
[48] Additionally, the Nazis privatized some public services which had been previously provided by the government, especially social and labor-related services, and these were mainly taken over by organizations affiliated with the Nazi Party that could be trusted to apply Nazi racial policies.
[49]
One of the reasons for the Nazi privatization policy was to cement the partnership between the government and business interests.
[50] Another reason was financial. As the Nazi government faced budget deficits due to its military spending, privatization was one of the methods it used to raise more funds.
[51] Between the fiscal years 1934-35 and 1937–38, privatization represented 1.4 percent of the German government's revenues.
[52] There was also an ideological motivation. Nazi ideology held
entrepreneurship in high regard, and “private property was considered a precondition to developing the creativity of members of the German race in the best interest of the people.
[53] The Nazi leadership believed that “private property itself provided important incentives to achieve greater cost consciousness, efficiency gains, and technical progress.”
[54] Adolf Hitler used
Social Darwinist arguments to support this stance, cautioning against “bureaucratic managing of the economy” that would preserve the weak and “represent a burden to the higher ability, industry and value.”
[55]
