Albert Vögler

As a business man, Vögler feared the rise of communism in Germany. Records of donations from Vögler to the Nazi Party from as early as 1931 exist. Vögler met Adolf Hitler on 11 September 1931. From 1932, Vögler openly funded the Nazi Party. He was a member of the Freundeskreis Himmler.

Hitler became German Chancellor on 30 January 1933. He held a meeting with Hermann Göring and German industrialists on 20 February 1933. Vögler was present at this meeting. Hitler presented the Nazi Party's political plans, and received a total of three million marks in donations. During the latter part of the 1930s, Vögler was described by the Jewish businessman Max von der Porten as one of the industrialists who focused primarily on business, hardly spoke of politics and did not want to know anything about it.

In November 1933, Vögler was again elected from Westphalia South as one of the few "guest" members of the Nazi-dominated Reichstag and he retained that seat until the fall of the Nazi regime. In the 1938 Reichstag handbook, he is identified as a Nazi Party deputy.

From 1940, Vögler was involved in the manufacture of munitions. He acted as the unofficial scientific advisor to Reichsmarshall Göring. In mid-1942, he persuaded the Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer to transfer the Reichsforschungsrat (Reich Research Council), which oversaw the Nazi German nuclear programme, from Bernhard Rust's Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture to Göring as the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (supreme commander of the Luftwaffe). He served in increasingly important positions under Speer in the Ruhr industrial heartland from 1942 until 1944. He helped rationalize armament production and increase output at a time when Germany was clearly losing the war, following the defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of El Alamein and the Battle of Kursk. The armaments industry used much forced labour, as well as slave labour, so costs of manufacture were minimal. He was president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (later Max Planck Society) from 1941 until his death in 1945.

On 14 April 1945, to avoid capture by the advancing US Army, Vögler committed suicide via a cyanide pill in Haus Ende, Herdecke. Despite his death, he was still identified as one of the defendants in the Nuremberg trials of prominent industrialists, which prosecuted the clique of businessmen who helped Hitler.