Part.1 (What the German AG's were) AG is short for Aktiengesellschaft in German, which means a corporation limited by share ownership, not unlike your typical incorporated company, but more specifically a conglomerate of some sort. There were many dozens of AG's in the Reich, some of which you will be aware of or have heard before. Krupp, Vereinigte Stahlwerke, Daimler Benz, and Siemens to name a few. What these were and operated as under the NS system were effectively state-backed, NOT owned, public companies that had private holders and boards. There were many that felt the likes of Strasser and his followers were too far left and were seeking to take a distinctly un-German and anti-folkish approach to the economy by making most of the economy state owned akin to how the soviet union did. I won't be getting into the granular details for the sake of space, but more or less the way it worked was the German government would select key industries needed for national and state security (cannons and tanks with Krupp, IG Farben with fuel, Siemens with electronics and radar, and so on) and then allocate funding to them for major projects like major production orders, infrastructure developments, new and/or updated facilities, better tooling and PPE, etc. Now obviously these private companies had to largely go with the whims and needs of the NSDAP because they were so very backed by them AND because of many of their heads seeing a patriotic, if not ideological, duty to serve the German Reich. If the RLM (Reich Luftfahrt Ministerium) needed a batch of 800 new BF109s they would contact Messerschmitt for the order, whom in turn would contact all their subcontractors for the parts, raw materials, and subcomponents they need to make the planes. But if the government needed the same AG to scale up production by 300% and from a factory site of their choosing, the working relationship between the two meant the AG would have to comply with the directives of the gov. This was a mutual partnership between private business and the public serving element of government, there was no need to micro-manage every single facet of the various German companies on the part of the NSDAP and while some purely state-owned things like the Reichwerke HG existed, they were fairly uncommon. I think the truly represented the best balance of both innovative, pro-hard work, diligent, Aryan work ethic while also maintaining it for the collective security of the folk and not letting the god of those at the top be to make profit at the folks expense.
One must remember that in 1933 the German population of roughly 65 mil, was about half that of the US alone that same year, to say nothing of the USSR, UK, France, and others combined, and all in a country about the size of Texas. So for them to be able to properly mobilize their workforce, have a large military industrial capacity, ensure capital is being generated and flown into the economy and by extension the people, and maintain their peer-2-peer status as a nation and not fall to a second rate power; The NSDAP had to levy the business acumen of their best and brightest minds and company heads, while maintaining workers right, representation, and unified vision for what the folk must accomplish, profit be damned. It speaks very highly of such an economic system that it was able to produce so much in such dire circumstances, both before and during the war, to the point of needing multiple world spanning empires to defeat them, and even so with very lop-sided casualties.
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