Just as national socialism gradually evolved through good intentions and the nurturing of a socialist constituency, so our own brand of U.S. federal socialism grows. Obama and the leftists in congress track closely with the German national socialists of the 1930s. Every one of these movements in history came to a very bad end. What hubris to think our governments and courts could take over industry and banking, rewrite finance and contract law, redistribute wealth between the top half and the bottom half of the population, and ration medicine, while creating no negative consequences. We cannot know the future, but on this well-traveled road, we know, for many, it will be deadly and horrible.
Excerpts from “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: plunder, racial war, and the Nazi welfare state” by Gotz Aly, 2005.
ANY INVESTIGATION into Hitler’s ascent must thus examine the give-and-take relationship between the populace and the Nazi leadership. It is a matter of historical record that the party hierarchy was, from its earliest days, extremely unstable. The mystery is how it managed to stabilize itself, if only temporarily, so that the regime could survive for twelve spectacularly destructive years. Solving this mystery requires a more precise rephrasing of the general question “How could Nazi Germany have happened?” Namely, how did National Socialism, an obviously deceitful, megalomaniacal, and criminal undertaking, succeed in persuading the great majority of the German people that it was working in their interest?
One answer is that as harshly as the Nazi leadership applied its racist ideology to Jews, the handicapped, and other “undesirables” their domestic policies were remarkably friendly toward the German lower classes, soaking the wealthy and redistributing the burdens of wartime to the benefit of the underprivileged. Moreover, once the Nazi state undertook what became the most expensive war in world history, the majority of Germans bore virtually none of the costs. Hitler shielded the average Aryan from that burden at the cost of depriving others of their basic subsistence.
The German war chest was also filled with billions of reichsmarks garnered from the dispossession of European Jewish property stolen in Germany, in allied states, and in countries occupied by the Wehrmacht. By exploiting material wealth confiscated and plundered in a racial war, Hitler’s National Socialism achieved an unprecedented level of economic equality and created vast new opportunities for upward mobility for the German people. That made the regime both popular and criminal. The cascade of riches and personal advantages—all derived from crimes against humanity, for which ordinary Germans were not directly responsible but from which they gladly profited—led the majority of the populace to feel that the regime had their best interests at heart.
Conversely, the Nazis’ genocidal policy gained momentum from the fact that it also improved the material welfare of the German people. The lack of significant internal opposition to Hitler as well as ordinary Germans’ later refusal to acknowledge any personal culpability for the crimes of the Third Reich arise from one and the same historical constellation.
So complex an answer to the question of how Nazism could have happened does not lend itself to mere antifascist sloganeering or the didacticism of museum exhibits. It is necessary to focus on the socialist aspect of National Socialism, if only as a way of advancing beyond the usual projections of blame onto specific individuals and groups—most often the delusional, possibly insane Fuhrer but also the cabal of racist ideologues or the members of a particular class, like bankers and business tycoons, or certain Wehrmacht generals or the elite killing units. The chief problem with such approaches is they all suggest that a special group of evil “others” bears culpability for Nazi crimes. At the very least the present volume attempts to break through this comforting proposition by showing how everyday people, acting on ordinary calculations of self-interest, could become complicit in a government-driven program of larcenous genocide.
The Dream of a “People’s Empire”
The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded on a doctrine of inequality between races, but it also promised Germans greater equality among themselves than they had enjoyed during either the Wilhelmine empire or the Weimar Republic. In practice, this goal was achieved at the expense of other groups, by means of a racist war of conquest. Nazi ideology conceived of racial conflict as an antidote to class conflict. By framing its program in this way, the party was propagating two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was the key to the Nazis’ popularity, from which they derived the power they needed to pursue their criminal aims. The ideal of the Volksstaat—a state of and for the people-was what we would now call a welfare state for Germans with the proper racial pedigree. In one of his central pronouncements, Hitler promised “the creation of a socially just state,’ a model society that would “continue to eradicate all [social] barriers.”
Like all other revolutionaries, the predominantly youthful members of the Nazi movement had an urgent, now-or-never aura about them. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Joseph Goebbels was thirty-five years old. Reinhard Heydrich was twenty-eight; Albert Speer, twenty-seven; Adolf Eichmann, twenty-six; Josef Mengele, twenty-one; and Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank, both thirty-two. Hermann Goring, one of the eldest among the party leadership, had just celebrated his fortieth birthday. And a decade later, in the midst of World War II, Goebbels could still conclude from a statistical survey: “According to the data, the average age of midlevel party leaders is 34, and within the government, it’s 44. One can indeed say that Germany today is being led by its youth.’ At the same time, Goebbels nonetheless called for a continuing “freshening of the ranks .”
For most young Germans, National Socialism did not mean dictatorship, censorship, and repression; it meant freedom and adventure. They saw Nazism as a natural extension of the youth movement, as an antiaging regimen for body and mind. By 1935, the twenty- to thirty-year-olds who set the tone for the party rank and file viewed with open contempt those who advocated caution. They considered themselves modern men of action with no time for petty, individual concerns. “The philistines may fret,” they mocked, “but tomorrow belongs to us.” In January 1940, one ambitious young Nazi wrote of Germany’s standing on the threshold of “a great battle” and declared confidently that, “no matter who should fall, our country is heading toward a great and glorious future.” Even as late as March 1944, despite the terrible costs Germany had incurred, the faithful were still cheerfully gearing up for “the final sprint to the finish in this war.”
…[Y]oung men and women were living out the perennial dream of people in their twenties: independence, opportunity, and jobs that demanded pioneer spirit, satisfying their need for improvisation and constant physical and mental challenges. Disdaining the small-minded culture of everyday office work, they wanted to test their limits, enjoy themselves, and experience the thrill of the unknown and the intoxication of taking part in a fast-paced, modern war. Elated by feelings of unlimited possibility, they embarked on a search for an identity all their own.
Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. In his memoirs, Adolf Eichmann repeatedly asserted: “My political sentiments inclined toward the left and emphasized socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.” In the days when the movement was still doing battle in the streets, Eichmann added, he and his comrades had viewed Nazism and Communism as “quasi-siblings.”
Also typical of his generation was Wolfgang Hillers, a leftist writer and art critic, who declared: “The `I’ has to be subjugated to a `we,’ and new German art can only be nourished from the wellsprings of this `we. ‘” Before Hitler’s rise to power, Hillers had collaborated with socialist authors Bertolt Brecht and Johannes R. Becher on The Great Plan, a choral work celebrating the achievements of the industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin. After 1933, Hillers needed only to substitute the word “German” for “proletariat” to conform to the new political spirit. He’d already made the journey from “I” to “we,” and his recognition “that the new spirit of collectivism could best be expressed in choral form” was easily transferable. The new Germany envisioned by the Nazis gave their former opponents in the demonstrations, debates, and public battles of the Weimar Republic ample opportunity to make their own personal peace with the Third Reich.”
The Nazi leadership gave Germans their first taste of what it might be like to own an automobile. It introduced the previously almost unknown idea of vacations. It doubled the number of days off for workers and began to develop large-scale tourism in Germany. The Berlin regional warden of the German Labor Front was particularly energetic in his promotion of such benefits: “In 1938 we want to devote ourselves more and more to reaching all those comrades who still think that vacation travel isn’t something for blue-collar workers. This persistent misconception must finally be overcome.” At the time, a fourteen-day trip through Germany cost between 40 and 80 reichsmarks, roughly equivalent to between 480 and 960 dollars in today’s terms.
From its earliest days in power, the Hitler regime privileged families over single people and childless couples, and it insured farmers against the vagaries of the weather and the world market. Nazi-era policies paved the way for many postwar reforms, everything from European Union agricultural policy, joint tax returns for couples, and compulsory liability insurance for drivers to state child-support allowances, graduated income tax, and the beginnings of environmental conservation. Nazi civil servants drafted the outline for a pension system that anticipated the one adopted in 1957 by the Federal Republic of Germany. The 1939 system tried to end the poverty faced by retirees and decreed that “the living standards of veterans of the workforce should not deviate dramatically from that of currently employed comrades.”
A number of Nazi leaders came from humble origins and had direct personal experience with court officers arriving at the front door to repossess their family belongings. Not surprisingly, some of the first measures enacted after the Nazis came to power were aimed at alleviating the threat, felt by the majority of Germans in the wake of the Depression, of eviction and repossession. Several early Nazi laws restricted the rights of creditors vis-a-vis debtors so as to prevent “the impoverishment of the [German] people.” The 1938 Old Debt Eradication Law invalidated hundreds of thousands of titles to collectible debts. The Law for the Prevention of Misuse of Repossession, passed in late 1934, was directed against what was seen as the “nearly unlimited freedom enjoyed by creditors” in the past. As was typical for the Nazi style of rule, the law granted officers of the court broad powers of discretion in carrying out individual court orders.
The German trade journal for court officers, the Deutsche Gerichtsvollzieher-Zeitung, set the tone for how this new freedom should be interpreted: “A court officer with a social conscience will not have the heart to subject his comrades to absolute destitution, to rob them of their last possessions, their trust in the protecting state, and their love of their fatherland. [Germans] are entitled to believe that they will be allowed to live with a modicum of comfort.” In a Volksstaat, the officer of the court was to develop “a sense of true social solidarity” and at all costs “avoid becoming hardened” to his ethnic comrades’ plight. He had to “spare no effort and accept possible personal disadvantage in order to live up to social ideals.” Finally, he was told to remain ever conscious of his ethnic duty “in light of the close connection between the social and the national concept.”
Another issue of the same journal cited an early maxim of “the people’s chancellor,” Adolf Hitler: “Germany will be at its greatest when its poorest citizens are also its most loyal.” Goring seconded this sentiment: “The property owner who displays a pitiless lack of scruples and turns his poorer ethnic comrades out on the street over insignificant [debts] has forfeited his right to protection by the state.” That dictum applied even when the property owner had “the appearance of legality” on his side, if he violated “the basic laws of ethnic solidarity.” Meanwhile, court officers were also called upon, as a matter of course, “to take the harshest steps” against “malicious debtors,” whom the author referred to as “parasites on the German people.”
With the start of World War II on September 1, 1939, a Nazi directive prevented creditors from repossessing the belongings of draftees and their families. An announcement in the court officers’ journal read: “All procedures requiring the auctioning off of nonliquid personal assets are suspended or postponed by law, regardless of whether the compulsory auction was ordered before or after [this] directive came into force.” The Nazi regime also strengthened rent-control and tenants’-rights laws to benefit soldiers and their families. Although the government later took a harder line toward debtors, protection of their rights remained one of the courts’ central responsibilities. This policy, the Deutsche GerichtsvollzieherZeitung stated, “contributes in a fundamental way to the victory of our people, who are engaged in a fierce struggle for their survival.”
On October 30, 1940, the regime issued a similar directive, giving indebted Germans increased protection against having their wages seized. All wages earned from working overtime—as well as vacation pay, Christmas bonuses, state child-rearing allowances, and retirement pensions for those injured on the job—were declared off-limits to creditors. The regime also exempted most wages from being garnished by using net rather than gross income to calculate what debtors could afford to repay and by creating exemptions they could claim for family members. To increase equality among the German populace, this directive also annulled the special protection from creditors enjoyed by civil servants and clergymen, a privilege dating back to the early days of German capitalism. Laws such as these made the “national socialism” of the Third Reich immensely popular among many Germans.