Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (46 page)

In March 1944, Economics Minister Funk was forced to reassure low-and moderate-income savers by publicly declaring that the Reich “would never call upon the contents of savings accounts to pay off wartime debts.”
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Despite the incipient nervousness, and allowing for variations between types of banks and between regions, the level of savings remained impressively constant in the first half of 1944. But “toward the end of the year, the growth rate in savings slowed significantly.” From August 1944 onward, average wage earners in Germany hoarded their money in cash form. The affluent had been somewhat quicker to react: the number of new life insurance policies was already declining dramatically by March 1944.

On September 15, the Reichsbank complained about “the withdrawal of large amounts of cash by the public.”
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Otto Ohlendorf, state secretary at the Economics Ministry, remarked in January 1945 that the “amount of cash held by people” had “hugely increased” and that the Reich “would have no choice but to print more money.” The amount of money in circulation had increased from 38.5 to 48.5 billion reichsmarks between September and December 1944 alone—an increase more than three times greater than the average in the preceding twelve months.
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One financial expert remarked dryly that a “general need for liquidity” had arisen “as the political and military situation came to a head.”
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The behavior of consumers had a direct influence on the policies of German banks. The finance minister complained: “Contrary to expectations, credit institutions are less and less willing to take on long-term government promissory notes.” Beginning in August, Reichsbank resources had to be increasingly shifted and “significant contributions made to prop up the value of Reich bonds.”
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On August 3, 1944, for instance, the previously obedient Savings Bank of Salzburg had decided “in the interest of greater liquidity” to refrain temporarily “from buying Reich bonds.”
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That decision, as the Reichsbank immediately noted, reflected a general wariness of treasury bonds from the German state.
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Banks were reacting to their customers, who were by then—belatedly—making a clear statement against the war and withdrawing credit from their political leadership.

In August 1944—after the Allies had landed in Normandy, the Red Army had defeated the Army Group Center on the Eastern Front, and the Stauffenberg coup d’état had come to naught—confidence in both the Reich leadership and the reichsmark collapsed completely. It had been gradually declining, judging by savings figures, since the spring of 1943. The affluent were quicker to lose faith than the less well situated. Against this backdrop of growing skepticism toward the Nazi political leadership, the attempted coup d’état, which is often depicted as a lost cause, might have had a chance of popular success.

This sort of skepticism, however, arose only toward the end of the war. Public support for the Nazi state may have been based on mutual illusions, but for most of the duration of the Third Reich its politicians consistently succeeded in renewing trust in their leadership capabilities. In a historically unprecedented fashion, they created the preconditions for the modern social welfare state. Punitive violence, which made an example of rebellious individuals within the
Volk
, cannot be ignored. But neither should its importance be overestimated. State violence became a major means of control only during the second half of the war. Out of the 16,000 death sentences against German civilians, 15,000 were handed down after the crisis of winter 1941-42. Much the same was true in the military. The 253rd Infantry Division is a case in point: eighteen of its soldiers were executed during the war. Between 1939 and 1942, none were put to death; there were eight executions in 1943, six in 1944, and four in 1945. In total, in the course of the war, some 20,000 death sentences were carried out on German soldiers.
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The combination of the state’s general concern for the welfare of the masses and its exemplary punishment of those defamed as
“Volk
parasites” did not convert the majority of Germans into rabid Nazis. It made them conformists, eager to enjoy the daily advantages the state offered them. The passive loyalty created among the populace was sufficient to guarantee that the state could do pretty much as it wanted until the summer of 1944.

Germany’s purely speculative techniques for financing the war meant that the only option for the Third Reich was total victory. Hitler’s government could not afford any sort of compromise or partial defeat. From the very first day of the conflict, the government banked on “the enormous additional capacities that Germany could exploit in the territories it occupied—without having to use the German people’s own assets.” In the immediate wake of victory over France, Germany was brimming with confidence. As the author of a 1941 dissertation on wartime finances proclaimed, “within the sphere of influence from uppermost Norway to the Bay of Biscay,” heavily indebted Germany now had “the riches of almost all of Europe at its disposal.”
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Germans were kept passive and generally content by a lavish social welfare system that was paid for by these riches. The improvement in the public mood that came with increases in people’s material welfare explains such policies as the tax benefits aimed at German workers in the fall of 1940, the hike in pensions of 1941, and the government’s refusal to impose any broad, direct wartime levies in the years that followed. Once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the public was only confirmed in its belief that Germany’s rearmament and war debts existed merely on paper. In 1942, Fritz Reinhardt published a pamphlet, intended to reassure public opinion, entitled
What Is Happening with Our Money?
In it, he drew attention to the “reordering of things in the East” and promised Germans that they would reap the fruits of victory. German war debts, he tried to lull his readers into thinking, were “actively counterbalanced by access to resources and sources of wealth that amount to many times more than the debt run up by the Reich.”
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