Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (47 page)
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Authors: Götz Aly
BOOK: Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State
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In March 1942, Hitler drew attention to “our enormous arms buildup,” which had “consumed sums that thus far have not been covered.” He saw two diametrically opposed possibilities for reducing debt. “Either the tax burden will have to be gradually transferred to our ethnic comrades in the Reich or it will be defrayed by potential profits from the occupied eastern territories.”
53
In August 1942, “directly” after visiting Hitler, the Reich commissioner and gauleiter for Ukraine, Erich Koch, issued the following instructions to his subordinates: “If the Ukrainian people work ten hours a day, eight of those hours should be for us. All sentimental concerns are to be put aside.”
54
With political cover provided by higher authorities, civil servants in the Finance Ministry—who had at an earlier stage conceived of an imperialist form of debt reduction that would benefit ordinary Germans—now spoke of “the Führer’s long-term financial-political goals” and proposed that Ukraine become “an object of exploitation for this purpose.”
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53
In August 1942, “directly” after visiting Hitler, the Reich commissioner and gauleiter for Ukraine, Erich Koch, issued the following instructions to his subordinates: “If the Ukrainian people work ten hours a day, eight of those hours should be for us. All sentimental concerns are to be put aside.”
54
With political cover provided by higher authorities, civil servants in the Finance Ministry—who had at an earlier stage conceived of an imperialist form of debt reduction that would benefit ordinary Germans—now spoke of “the Führer’s long-term financial-political goals” and proposed that Ukraine become “an object of exploitation for this purpose.”
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One theme appears repeatedly in the statements of leading Nazi academics and politicians: that the exceptionally cruel regimes installed by Germany in occupied parts of the Soviet Union were justified by a concern for the future standard of living of ordinary Germans, even if it meant starvation, poverty, forced labor, and death for the local populace. In long-term practice, this strategy proved unworkable. Proceeds from the occupied territories failed to live up to expectations, and resistance among the besieged people grew from day to day, becoming impossible to suppress. Much to his consternation, Goebbels discovered in January 1943 that “furtive German slogans about the inferiority of the Slavic people and the need to eliminate them have come to the attention of the broad Russian public.” That strengthened Stalin’s hand when he urged: “It’s better to die on our feet than survive on our knees!”
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German plans for ruthless, unrestrained exploitation of Eastern Europe foundered on the resistance of Soviet soldiers and partisans. The medium-range German strategy was to use foreign resources to refinance war debts and raise the general German standard of living in one stroke.In the short term, the Reich sought to cover German food needs as fully as possible. Germany was able to realize only the latter goal, and even then its success was only partial. But the conclusion to be drawn from the historical evidence is inescapable: concern for the welfare of Germans was the decisive motivation behind policies of terrorizing, enslaving, and exterminating enemy groups.
CHAPTER 13
Nazi Socialism
Expertise and Policy
Long before September 1, 1939, the Reich had reshaped public finances so that state debts would be covered by resources from a war of imperialistic plunder. A significant number of German financial experts, Reichsbank managers, and civil servants in government ministries supported this policy. As early as 1935, the country’s aristocratic finance minister, Schwerin von Krosigk—a traditional German conservative—described himself as someone who worked “with courage and faith” and who would not let his “vision for the enormous greatness of the time” be clouded by the minor difficulties of everyday money matters.
1
Von Krosigk’s devotion to duty illustrates the remarkable convergence of interests between the Nazi true believers and “apolitical” civil servants, a convergence that influenced every aspect of their cooperation during the war. The historical distinction between “party ideologues,” who rabidly persecuted Jews, and officials such as von Krosigk and his staff, who have too often been credited with offering some form of “resistance,” is outmoded and should be discarded once and for all.
2
1
Von Krosigk’s devotion to duty illustrates the remarkable convergence of interests between the Nazi true believers and “apolitical” civil servants, a convergence that influenced every aspect of their cooperation during the war. The historical distinction between “party ideologues,” who rabidly persecuted Jews, and officials such as von Krosigk and his staff, who have too often been credited with offering some form of “resistance,” is outmoded and should be discarded once and for all.
2
The preceding chapters have sketched out some of the practices by which Germany dispossessed those deemed to be enemies of the state. The overall picture, though it may be incomplete, suffices to give an idea of the techniques used in what amounted to a state-sponsored campaign of grand larceny. This campaign would not have succeeded without the active cooperation of career bureaucrats, many of whom did not share the anti-Semitic hatred of Nazi ideologues. The Reich Finance Ministry maintained numerous accounts between which money could be pushed back and forth and mixed so as to conceal where it came from. At the very least, von Krosigk and his chief civil servants can be accused of having repeatedly procured and laundered money, using methods prohibited under international law, in support of a criminal regime. The same accusation can be leveled at the leadership and the financial experts at the Reichsbank, the Reich Credit Banks, and the Wehrmacht directorates.
W
ITHIN
G
ERMANY
, the government pursued policies to redistribute wealth, including strict price controls. The public widely considered these policies fair. Outside Germany, Wehrmacht soldiers were encouraged to enrich themselves. From the perspective of the finance minister, the best thing for the German economy was to convert excess consumer spending power at home into foreign currency to be spent on goods abroad. “Send me whatever money you have,” Heinrich Böll wrote to his parents at the start of the war, and the message was unmistakable. In this way, family purchasing power that could not be converted into goods within the German welfare state could be siphoned off. Politicians responsible for wartime finances exploited foreign supplies of consumer goods to render harmless “the few potentially malignant billions” in excess consumer capital, which might have led to shortages, inflation, and popular dissatisfaction.
3
The Nazi regime profited from the basic satisfaction of ordinary Germans, regardless of whether they felt a sense of attachment to or—in the case of Böll and Wolf Goette—distance from the party ideology.
ITHIN
G
ERMANY
, the government pursued policies to redistribute wealth, including strict price controls. The public widely considered these policies fair. Outside Germany, Wehrmacht soldiers were encouraged to enrich themselves. From the perspective of the finance minister, the best thing for the German economy was to convert excess consumer spending power at home into foreign currency to be spent on goods abroad. “Send me whatever money you have,” Heinrich Böll wrote to his parents at the start of the war, and the message was unmistakable. In this way, family purchasing power that could not be converted into goods within the German welfare state could be siphoned off. Politicians responsible for wartime finances exploited foreign supplies of consumer goods to render harmless “the few potentially malignant billions” in excess consumer capital, which might have led to shortages, inflation, and popular dissatisfaction.
3
The Nazi regime profited from the basic satisfaction of ordinary Germans, regardless of whether they felt a sense of attachment to or—in the case of Böll and Wolf Goette—distance from the party ideology.
The practical details of how Germany financed World War II vividly illustrate the relationship between financial experts and the political leadership. This relationship required that the sometimes arcane, specialist considerations of career bureaucrats be balanced against political limitations. Often, the two sides worked together to achieve a common goal, such as the dispossession of Jews in Salonika, Belgium, and France. Wehrmacht intendants and civil servants within the Finance Ministry were delighted at the additional revenues flowing their way—either directly, as in Belgium, or via budgets for occupation costs, such as those levied on France. Together with the directors of the Reichsbank, they hoped the additional resources would combat the short-term inflation caused by the Reich’s own presence in occupied countries and thus, in the longer term, stabilize the reichsmark.
There was clear consensus, too, between experts and the political leadership that subjugated peoples should be forced to cover a significant proportion of the day-to-day costs of war. They agreed that the vanquished would pay off the supplementary loans taken out to finance German military campaigns. To quote the discreet language used by the guardians of the reichsmark: “To protect the integrity of the German currency, the Reichsbank stands by the basic principle of satisfying, wherever possible, the monetary needs of German offices in occupied territories by availing itself of payment from the countries concerned.”
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4
From the fall of 1941 onward, the political leadership blocked all proposals by finance experts to levy supplementary wartime taxes on the wages and everyday consumer spending of average Germans. They had no such scruples about taxing the upper classes. In the case of the real estate inflation tax, the Reich commissioner for price controls worked together with the German Labor Front, Hitler’s Party Chancellery, and the conservative-led Prussian Finance Ministry to see that the originally steep tax rates were doubled. Nazi functionaries supported the hike in the interest of securing the loyalty of the masses. The financial experts involved advocated it as a politically viable way of slowing the increase in wartime debt.
In other situations, the experts clearly took the initiative. Their actions caused the delicate psychological balance between the aims of Nazi politicians and the policies considered desirable by specialists to be constantly recalibrated. The system of RKK certificates, for example, was the independent invention of civil servants at the Finance Ministry and the Reichsbank. As if to prove the truth of Brecht’s famous dictum “It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk,” the Reich Credit Banks became the backbone of the remarkably effective—and even elegant—procedures by which Germany plundered much of Europe. The civil servants at the credit banks, recruited almost exclusively from the Reichsbank itself, conducted lucrative business dealings with non-German money—and the heist was pulled off in the name of currency policy. (The occupied parts of the Soviet Union represent an exception. There, money played a significant role, but it was secondary to various methods of terrorizing and subjugating the populace.)
The finance minister did not have to be ordered to stop transfers of forced laborers’ wages to their families abroad and to for pric them paid in local currencies instead. He was quite willing to do so unbidden. Nor did he have to be commanded to extend the same procedure—forcing payment in local currency—to monetary institutions and businesses that bought foreign goods or securities. The market prices paid in reichsmarks for those commodities disappeared into the Reich’s clearing account, and they were then added to the annual budget to the benefit of the general German population. The populations of the occupied countries were the ones who had to pay for the German state’s unscrupulous business deals. It is inconceivable that Hitler, a financial layman, could have issued orders detailed enough to set up such complex systems. He didn’t have to. Instead, he gave Germany’s financial experts free rein—with the mandate to do whatever was necessary to benefit the German people. It was hardly an accident that some of the Reichsbank’s stationery bore a stamp with a swastika and the honorary designation “Exemplary National Socialist Enterprise.”
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5
Differences of opinion arose chiefly around the questions of how quickly and by which means Europe could be robbed penniless. Financial experts tended to be concerned with maximizing medium-term profits. They stressed a certain degree of sustainability, preferring, as it were, to milk the cow for an extended time rather than leading it directly to the slaughter. Schwerin von Krosigk insisted on pursuing what he called “the military-economic optimum,” which involved “preventing countries whose potential we want to use from premature collapse.”
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6
Nazi ideology may have been guided by grandiose visions of the future, but the party’s leaders thought in terms of everyday political survival. They made their fiscal decisions, whatever the ultimate costs, in order to get through the next couple of weeks or, at most, months.
T
HE CHAPTERS
of this book about Hitler’s “satisfied thieves” and those dealing with the large-scale corruption among German civilians in Ukraine shed ample light on the contradictory priorities of the Third Reich’s financial experts and its political leadership. The permanent conflict over how much to tax the income of the German masses split along the same fault lines. In both cases, political opportunism overruled expert financial opinion.
HE CHAPTERS
of this book about Hitler’s “satisfied thieves” and those dealing with the large-scale corruption among German civilians in Ukraine shed ample light on the contradictory priorities of the Third Reich’s financial experts and its political leadership. The permanent conflict over how much to tax the income of the German masses split along the same fault lines. In both cases, political opportunism overruled expert financial opinion.
At the beginning of this book, the question was posed as to how the Nazi regime was able to achieve such a high level of domestic political stability. In practice, the uneasy marriage of sophisticated financial expertise and the politics of popular opinion oriented around the welfare of the masses proved remarkably fruitful. The Nazi leaders were constantly handing out benefits to ordinary Germans, keeping them remarkably well fed and well supplied. At the same time, those who possessed the financial know-how compensated as best they could for the state’s generosity. They kept increasing taxes on Germany’s wealthy, not because they thought that made the most sense but because it was the only option for raising taxes at all within the country. They forcibly introduced means of non-currency payment into occupied countries to restrict the amount of cash in circulation and whenever possible imposed new taxes on foreign citizens. Professional considerations prompted them to encourage the dispossession of Europe’s Jews in order to put the brakes on inflationary pressure.
A similar decision-making process governed policies on food rationing. With the war disrupting shipments from overseas, food suddenly became scarce in occupied countries such as Norway, Greece, #8221;Holland. Significantly more food is needed to keep a combat army active than is required for an equivalent number of civilians. Moreover, millions of forced laborers suddenly had to be provided for, while resources in broad stretches of Europe decreased due to the effects of war and, later on, inflation.
Experts were responsible for rationing food and determining which items would be subject to control in Germany. They also decided which groups should be allocated very few provisions—or none at all. Jews, Soviet POWs, and psychiatric patients were the first groups to suffer from rationing policies, followed by residents of certain besieged cities. The decisions were made on the basis of political and military expediency.
One example serves to illustrate the general mechanism behind the system, although its particular effects may appear marginal. In 1940, in the interest of stretching supplies of grain and meat, civil servants in the Reich Food Ministry proposed prohibiting people from keeping house pets that did not serve some practical purpose, such as cats on a farm. The food saved would have immediately allowed the Reich to feed additional hundreds of thousands of people. Hitler quashed the ban, fearing that Germans would find the emotional loss unacceptable. The prohibition was, however, put in place for Jews, who were barred from keeping birds, cats, and dogs.
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