Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (49 page)

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Authors: Götz Aly

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Race Conscious and Class Conscious
 
Along with the radical revisions to the Treaty of Versailles, discussed early on in this book, a major key to the National Socialist German Workers Party’s success was its spontaneous, almost adolescent acceleration of the pace of political decisions and action. The war intensified the emphasis on rapidity and radicalism. Military force wiped out borders, and territories that Germany had been obliged to cede after World War I were reacquired, seemingly for all eternity. In 1941, German historians were already pondering the possibilities of “winning back the free county of Burgundy [Franche-Comté]” and the “Low Countries,” which had “slipped out of the Reich federation” during the Middle Ages. In two years of blitzkrieg warfare, the tempo increased with every large-scale military action. Attacks on the Norwegian city of Narvik and on Rotterdam followed the one on Warsaw. Campaigns in Crete, the Caucasus, and northern Africa came hot on the heels of victory over France.
 
The third fundamental pillar of Hitler’s popular support was his promise of equality for all members of the racially defined Volk. In the policies of wartime socialism that came into effect as of September 1, 1939, many Germans saw a credible vision of a more just social order. The war accelerated the obliteration of class barriers. The Nazi leadership was at pains to ensure that “in these times of shortages every individual Volk comrade will be provided for equally with the necessities of life, regardless of his social position and income.” The only privileges were for people who did particularly strenuous physical labor or had special needs. In early 1940, an observer from the Social Democratic Party reported from Berlin: “The working classes thoroughly welcome the fact that ‘the better off’ have, in practical terms, ceased to be that.”
18
Egalitarian rationing policies increased the popularity of the regime.
19
 
Hitler claimed to be a man of the people who had risen to the top of society thanks to talent and hard work. He promulgated the idea that his government would guarantee gifted individuals the opportunity to better their lot, no matter how poor and uneducated they had grown up. One of his credos was that “the constricting of upward mobility must be opposed.” He promoted Nazi-founded secondary schools, so-called national-political educational establishments, and Adolf-Hitler-Schulen as institutions that would correct social inequities in both a material and a pedagogical sense, “so that even the poorest youth can rise to any position, as long as he has what it takes.”
20
A number of leading figures in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany were graduates of such institutions, which did not charge tuition, as most schools did. In 1938, Hitler proclaimed: “With the type of help our institutions offer, it should now be possible for any child of a worker or a farmer, if blessed by God with talent, to rise to the highest echelons of our new Germany.”
21
In October 1942, as mass German casualties on the Eastern Front forced the Wehrmacht to open its officer ranks to those without higher education, Germans reacted “with enthusiasm,” seeing the development as the “realization of a main goal of the party program.”
22
As of 1933, the same program had forbidden Aryans from carrying on romantic liaisons with Jews. Now, for the first time in German history, an officer was allowed to marry a working-class woman, provided the two could prove their ethnic hygiene and get a marriage license.
 
On January 16, 1945, as the Third Reich was being overwhelmed by the Allied armies and reduced to ruins, Fritz Reinhardt offered a final vision of what had become a lost cause. In a statement to a newspaper, he declared that the government was spending more than a billion reichsmarks a year on children and education—an extraordinarily large sum for the time. “Soon after the conclusion of the war,” he added, “the next step toward redistribution of family burdens will be the eradication of school fees, tuitions, and costs of educational materials for all children and all types of schools, including trade schools and universities.” With this step, a “strong, economically and financially healthy Germany” would become “the first [truly] social state on earth.”
23
 
Upward mobility for the common people—in various forms and not infrequently at the cost of others—was one of the fundamental political innovations of the twentieth century. The Nazi brand of socialism was part of this tradition. Though based on an odious and thoroughly discredited vision of racial superiority, the Nazi devaluation of individual freedom and indifference toward personal autonomy did not radically deviate from many other forms of egalitarianism. The Nazi movement represented the drive to couple social equality with national homogeneity, a concept that was popular not only in Germany. From this powerful formulation, Hitler’s welfare state derived its criminal energies.
 
In the fall of 1939, most Germans had little desire to go to war again purely to serve the cause of patriotism. It was a political necessity for the Nazi leadership to cut them in, as quickly as possible, on a significant portion of the spoils. Social policy and racial appeals were conjoined for the first time, and the resulting appeasement renewed the public’s trust in the state. For this reason, the German public clung to the obviously Utopian promises of National Socialism, even after its contradictions and moral dishonesty became evident to all. It is also why those active within the system were so willing to destroy the livelihoods and lives of tens of millions of people.
 
N
OTHING LESS
than massive popular greed made it possible for the regime to tame the majority of Germans with a combination of low taxes, ample supplies of consumer goods, and targeted acts of terror against social outsiders. The best strategy in the eyes of the public-opinion-conscious Nazi leadership was to keep all Germans happy. Goebbels was fond of saying that public optimism was “a weapon crucial to the war effort.”
24
 
The Nazi leadership did not transform the majority of Germans into ideological fanatics who were convinced they were part of the master race. Instead it succeeded in making them well-fed parasites. Vast numbers of Germans fell prey to the euphoria of a gold rush, certain that the future would be a time of unbridled prosperity. As the state was transformed into a gigantic apparatus for plundering others, average Germans became unscrupulous profiteers and passive recipients of bribes. Soldiers became armed couriers of butter.
25
 
Men from the simplest walks of life suddenly owned things they hadn’t known existed a few years previously. On its own, that was hardly sufficient motivation. But the war itself gave those who fought it a taste of luxuries to come: as German soldiers conquered today, so would all Germans live tomorrow. Underlying this heady sensation, however, was the nagging pull of bad conscience, an uneasy feeling that one was damned to either total victory or total destruction. In late 1943, the Security Service summarized the views of Germans who, like millions of other people, regularly deposited their money in savings accounts: “If we win the war, the money will stand us in good stead. If we lose the war, then it doesn’t matter whether we have saved money or spent it on things and property. Everything will be lost.”
26
 
I
N
A
PRIL
1945, a German-born British officer named Julius Posener returned to his former homeland, traveling from the lower Rhine region to the bombed-out city of Cologne. He had previously fought on the Italian front, “where in the hard winter of 1944–45 Neapolitans had starved to death on the streets by the hundreds” and where the people, “even from the upper echelons of society, were broken, pale, and hopeless.” The war had been relatively benign in France, Posener wrote, “but that was nothing compared with the rows of lovely girls dressed in white” in Germany, “taking an evening stroll past the ruins of the city.”
 
Although the extent of damage exceeded his expectations, Posener, who was a construction engineer in civilian life, had been prepared for the destruction of cities. What surprised him was the way the people looked: “The people did not fit the destruction. They looked good. They were rosy cheeked, happy, well groomed, and very well dressed. An economic system that had been propped up by millions of foreign hands and the total plunder of an entire part of the world was here displaying what it had achieved.”
27
 
A Note on Calculations
 
The publication of this book in Germany in 2005 prompted a number of questions from two British historians, Richard Overy and Adam Tooze, pertaining to the calculations I used to establish the financial burden borne by Germans during the war. In The Wdamagf Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, which appeared as this English edition was going to press, Tooze, on a number of occasions, praises and draws on my work, both my previous books on National Socialism and the present volume. But in a note he writes of “serious misreadings that undermine [my] central thesis,”
*
namely, that the regime went easy on German taxpayers in order to secure their loyalty.
 
At issue are the statistics concerning Germany’s revenues and wartime debt. I argue that the percentage of Germany’s wartime revenues derived from external sources—that is, revenues extracted from occupied countries, forced labor, and persecuted Jews—is about 70 percent.
†
Tooze objects that it amounted to around 25 percent of the actual costs of war. Most of the discrepancy can be easily explained. My focus is on revenues received during the actual period of the war; my critic is talking about total, comprehensive war expenditures, including those financed on credit—debts that came due after Germany’s defeat.
 
The Third Reich spent around 620 billion reichsmarks during World War II. We can subtract approximately 20 billion reichsmarks annually—or a total of 110 billion reichsmarks—as money that would also have been spent in peacetime for the basic needs of the Third Reich. That leaves around 510 billion reichsmarks used by Germany for the purpose of waging war. Approximately one-half of these expenditures were covered by ongoing revenues—an extraordinarily high proportion when we look at other historical examples. The remaining funds needed were obtained, to some extent, by printing more money. But the lion’s share was financed on credit, from medium- and especially short-term bonds issued by the Reich on the German financial market. There is presumably no disagreement between Tooze and me about these facts, although I question Overy’s assertion (which Tooze accepts) that foreign sources—that is, revenues extracted from occupied countries—accounted for a mere 12 percent of the revenues in Germany’s total wartime budget.
*
(Purposely or not, that assertion served postwar Germany’s own interests.)
 
Our major area of disagreement is rather over the question of how much of the cost of the war was borne by Germans during the war itself. Tooze’s calculations would put the percentage of budget costs shouldered by Germany considerably higher than my own. This dispute is rooted in the issue of where one starts one’s calculations. When attempting to explain Hitler’s popular success, in contrast to merely tallying up pluses and minuses in the ledger sheets, it is wrong to include German debts for which repayment began after the end of the war. Tooze and others add up their figures on the German war economy in reverse, starting from the point of Germany’s defeat. Thus, while the figures they arrive at may be mathematically correct, the results are historically irrelevant since they don’t adequately reflect the political context in which those debts were incurred.
 
In contrast, the starting point for my investigation is the question of how Hitler, together with his ministers, gauleiters, and advisers, managed to maintain domestic stability within the Reich between 1940 and 1943. As is also the case in today’s Germany, average citizens were only marginally interested in the level of state indebtedness. The loans taken out during the war placed no burden on the populace during the Nazi regime, and indeed Germans as a whole were indifferent to them. They were more likely to protest if the government raised their taxes or cut back on beefits and entitlements. Conversely, state generosity, especially in hard times, created public goodwill. That is my main thesis. This book is concerned with the interaction between a people and its leadership and with what gave Nazi Germany internal stability, not with the burdens Germans faced after 1945.
 
In arguing against Tooze, one could well cite historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Wehler writes, correctly, that post-1939 Nazi financial policy “was completely dominated by and irresponsibly fixated on the idea of passing on its own burdens to the states it had conquered.”
*
I do not, as Tooze claims, ignore the domestic debt the Nazi regime took on in the name of all Germans. On the contrary, I discuss this topic in depth in the section of
chapter 12
titled “Virtual War Debts.” These wartime debts were, of course, passed on to the taxpaying German populace, but again, only with the Third Reich’s defeat in World War II. During the war, ever mindful of popular opinion, Hitler never confronted his subjects with the real level of state debt he was accruing. In fact, a lot of effort went toward assuaging popular fears about debt-driven inflation. In 1942, the Reich Finance Ministry told the public that wartime debts were actively counterbalanced by access to resources and other sources of income worth several times more than the Reich’s elevated debt. The plan, at the end of the war, was to eradicate this debt with the help of “the significant amount of real value” assets that had been won by the German sword—or, to use the more polite language of financial experts back then, by “utilizing foreign economies.”

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