Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State

In this provocative and groundbreaking book, distinguished historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history’s greatest conundrums: How did Adolf Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans for his program of mass murder and military conquest? The answer Aly provides is as shocking as it is persuasive. By engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale, and by channeling the proceeds into a succession of generous social programs, Hitler literally bought the consent of the German people.

Drawing on secret Nazi files and unexamined financial records, Aly shows that while Jews and citizens of occupied lands suffered crippling taxation, mass looting, enslavement, and destruction, most Germans enjoyed a marked improvement in their standard of living. He documents the many millions of packages soldiers sent from the front stuffed with valuables and provisions; the systematic plunder of conquered territory for raw materials, industrial goods, and food supplies; and the disappearance of Jewish property and fortunes into German homes and pockets across the Reich. Whatever moral qualms Germans may have felt toward Nazi policies were swept away by waves of government handouts, tax breaks, and preferential legislation.

Aly depicts a Nazi leadership addicted to the spoils of invasion, annexation, and dispossession. He shows that the pace and timing of Nazi conquests—from the
Anschluss
of Austria to the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland—were dictated by the rapidly escalating financial needs of the German war machine. Time and again, warnings of an imminent financial collapse spurred the Third Reich to ever more desperate and brazen acts of thievery and destruction.

A gripping work of scrupulous erudition and great historical importance,
Hitler’s Beneficiaries
explains the inexplicable, making a radically new contribution to our understanding of Nazi aggression, the Holocaust, and the complicity of a people.

“Thoroughly researched and fluently written, this book offers a new, brilliant, gripping, and convincing dimension to the understanding of one of the most puzzling questions in the history of our times: Why did so many Germans, both Nazis and ‘ordinary people’ support the persecution of the Jews? We’ve heard much about ideology, sociology, and psychology: it’s time to pay attention to profit.”

—Tom Segev, author of
The Seventh Million.-Israel Confronts the Holocaust

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Copyright © 2005 by S. Fischer Verlage GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

Translation copyright © 2006 by Metropolitan Books

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Originally published in Germany in 2005 under the title

by S. Fischer Verlage, Frankfurt.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aly, Götz, 1947–

[Hitlers Volksstaat. English]

Hitler’s beneficiaries: plunder, racial war, and the Nazi welfare state / Götz Aly; translated by Jefferson Chase.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7926-5

ISBN-10: 0-8050-7926-2

1. Germany—Economic policy—1933–1945. 2. Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945. 3. National socialism—Philosophy. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Destruction and pillage—Europe. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Economic aspects—Switzerland. 6. Jewish property—Europe—History—20th century. 7. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Economic aspects. I. Title.

HC286.4.A613 2007

330.943′086—dc22

2006046672

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First U.S. Edition 2007

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgments and Translator’s Note

Preface

Part I

1. The Dream of a “People’s Empire”

2. The Accommodating Dictatorship

Part II

3. With Unwavering Efficiency

4. Profits for the People

5. The Mainstay: Western Europe

6. Room for Expansion: Eastern Europe

Part III

7. Larceny as a State Principle

8. Laundering Money for the Wehrmacht

9. Subsidies to and from Germany’s Allies

10. The Trail of Gold

Part IV

11. The Fruits of Evil

12. Speculative Politics

13. Nazi Socialism

A Note on Calculations

Currency Exchange Rates

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

The J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Foundation Award of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum allowed me to work in archives and libraries in and around Washington, D.C. This book was also written with the help of grants from the Köhler Foundation—part of the Association of German Research Foundations—and the S. Fischer Foundation. The assistance of all of the above was a mark of their support for the basic idea of this book, and for that I thank them. I am also grateful to the many individuals who offered constructive criticism and encouragement, helped to clear up specific questions, and intervened to prevent mistakes.t="0em" wieight="1em">

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

In the interests of rendering an extraordinarily complex historical investigation more comprehensible to an American audience, this book occasionally deviates from the text of Götz Aly’s German original. All changes have been made in consultation with the author.

One of the inspirations for this book was the series of negotiations carried out by Stuart E. Eizenstat to recover damages from the Swiss and German governments on behalf of victims of persecution during World War II. Eizenstat was, of course, entirely right to demand compensation for the stolen gold and confiscated bank accounts of those murdered in the Holocaust, as well as for the slave labor performed by survivors. Nonetheless, his highly public negotiations gave rise to a distorted picture of history. The fact that the names of large Swiss and German banks—together with those of world-famous companies like Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, Allianz Insurance, Krupp, the Bertelsmann publishing group, and BMW—were constantly in the news gave the impression that prominent German capitalists, occasionally in alliance with major Swiss banks, were the main culprits behind the terrible crimes of Nazi Germany.

There is no question that many leading German industrialists and financiers were complicit in Hitler’s regime. But it would be wrong to conclude that primary responsibility for the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes lay with the elite of the German bourgeoisie. Eizenstat’s efforts, as well as those of the Jewish Claims Conference, indirectly, if unintentionally, encouraged such a conclusion. And indeed many Germans had a stake in seeing the public’s attention focused on the captains of industry and finance, since it shifted the burden of blame for Nazi barbarism to a handful of individuals.

This book was conceived as an attempt at redressing the balance, at redirecting public attention toward the potential advantages everyday Germans derived from the Nazi regime. In so doing, it uncovered a “missing link” that was better able than previous historical arguments to explain the widespread, if always temporary, satisfaction most Germans felt with their government during the Third Reich. Precisely because so many Germans did in fact benefit from Nazi Germany’s campaigns of plunder, only marginal resistance arose. Content as most Germans were, there was little chance for a domestic movement that would have halted Nazi crimes. This new perspective on the Nazi regime as a kind of racist-totalitarian welfare state allows us to understand the connection between the Nazi policies of racial genocide and the countless, seemingly benign family anecdotes about how a generation of German citizens “got through” World War II.

I myself heard many such anecdotes. I was born in 1947 and still have vivid memories of the first two decades of postwar Germany. People often talked about how they had suffered from food shortages in 1946–47. “We were well off during the war,” they complained. “Food deliveries always went smoothly.” It was the “organizational incompetence of the Allies” after the war that “made us go hungry.” My mother told me that my portly grandfather suddenly became thin in 1946 and regained his weight only in 1950. Recounting their experiences in the Wehrmacht, my teachers—some of whom we missing an arm or a leg—never spoke of suffering. Rather, their stories made the war sound like the ordinary man’s travelogue, full of adventure and funny incidents. They recalled Italy, France, and Poland. They reminisced about the things they enjoyed in those countries, things they had never known before—foods, goods, amenities. In contrast, the American care packages that helped Germans survive the early years after the war were dismissed as little more than chicken feed. (German housewives back then were no great fans of corn.)

It was only when I began work on this book that the truth behind these stories became clear to me. The women of the Third Reich were accustomed to far better than chicken feed. The packages their husbands had constantly sent back from the German-occupied countries between 1941 and 1944 contained staple and gourmet items that supplied well beyond the minimum calories necessary for human survival. This discovery prompted me to ask my relatives some pointed questions. One aunt cheerfully recalled: “I had a real shoe fetish. My fiancé, Fritz, sent me sixty pairs of shoes from the African front.” She was still wearing some of those shoes during the 1950s. An older cousin remembered her godfather sending her a gold-embroidered down quilt from Paris. My mother received nothing—my father was sent to the Eastern Front in early 1943 and was wounded after only a few weeks. But she, too, remembered that her older sister Dora “got a package every few days from her husband in Romania, which contained everything she could possibly want. He also sent ham and honey from Russia. But she never shared anything.” I once asked my mother whether she could recall Hermann Göring’s speech on October 4,1942. Without hesitation, she shot back: “He said we’d be getting more to eat and other extra rations for Christmas. And we got them!” In fact what Göring had said was: “If someone has to go hungry, let it be someone other than a German.”