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

by Gotz Aly (Author) "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..." (more)
Key Phrases: lion reichsmarks, ethnic comrades, chief intendant, Finance Ministry, Soviet Union, Third Reich (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The publication of this book in Germany inspired a huge controversy. In an important, original contribution, Aly, the author of a number of major works on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, argues that the Nazi regime plundered the rest of Europe during WWII to the great material benefit of the German population. Germans lived quite nicely from the sausages, furniture, shoes and even Christmas geese that millions of German soldiers and SS men sent back home from all over Europe. Plunder by official state agencies also financed the war. These points hardly seem revelatory or controversial, but Aly, as is his style, pushes the argument to the nth degree, supporting it with a wealth of documentary detail. The crimes against humanity committed by the regime were not, he argues, the work of a few individuals or an evil external to the population and the course of German history in the 20th century. Rather, the Nazis met the population's overwhelming desire for material security and an improved standard of living. The Nazis redistributed wealth in favor of the lower classes and opened up avenues of social mobility for them. The Holocaust, then, was not just a result of the ideology of anti-Semitism but also of the policies of plunder that won the regime the support of the vast majority of the German people. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
Historian Aly grapples with a problem that continues to bedevil and divide historians: why ordinary Germans supported the rise and maintenance of Nazi power and even, on a massive scale, took personal part in the atrocities inflicted on the Jews and conquered populations. Aly's answer is novel, provocative, but highly debatable. He utilizes reams of statistics to illustrate how the widespread Nazi program of expropriation of Jewish property and plunder of the resources of occupied nations was vital in lifting the standard of living of ordinary Germans. This, Aly asserts, provides the "missing link" between the "obviously deceitful, megalomaniacal criminal" regime and the popular support it enjoyed. Ordinary Germans supported the horrors of the Third Reich because they directly benefited from them. Despite flaws in his conclusions, Aly's work is a useful contribution to an ongoing historical debate. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books (January 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805079262
• ISBN-13: 978-0805079265
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #650,907 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Nazi Robbers, March 15, 2007

By	Werner Cohn (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Nobody will be surprised to learn that the Nazis robbed the Jews and other nations in Europe. But some of the detail will be new even to those who are well read in the voluminous literature on the Nazi period, and for that we must be grateful to the author. But it must also be said that he relied on the published work of others for some of the most interesting detail even in this narrow area.

Where the author is original is in his reading of the data of Nazi robbery. He argues that the German people benefited from the Nazi thievery, and, he says, for that reason (among others) they gave their enthusiastic support to the regime. He is careful not to dismiss other factors altogether, such as anti-Semitism, but he stresses the importance of the economic benefit to the population.

There are a number of problems with this thesis.

First, the evidence for happiness with economic conditions during the Hitler regime is totally anecdotal. The author has talked with members of his own family and other acquaintances, but there is no assurance that such haphazard interviewing has resulted in a representative picture. The same goes for his unsystematic reading of published memoirs by famous writers.

Is it simply common sense to assume that people are happy when they reap economic benefits? Not in the absence of other considerations. The German people, after all, underwent great hardship under the Nazi regime, especially in wartime. Aly does not mention that, from the point of view of material comfort, they had as many reasons to be unhappy with the Nazis as to be happy. Their taxes were low during the war, says Aly, because the Nazis robbed the Jews and the occupied countries to pay for the war. And low taxes make people happy. Even if your cities get bombed and your sons and husbands die on the battlefield? If, as Aly suggests, it is material benefits that motivate people above all else, the Germans might have been expected to oppose Hitler.

In my view, writers who have assigned greater weight to non-material motivating factors, such as the Nazi theology of anti-Semitism, have given more satisfactory answers to the puzzle of the Germans' wartime approbation of Hitler.

The Germans' happiness with the Nazis, moreover, began long before Jewish properties were expropriated. Why were the Nazis so popular in 1933, 1934, 1935 - before the program of looting was put into effect? On this point, Aly is totally ahistorical. His thesis is one of cause and effect - Nazi robberies having the effect of Nazi popularity. But what if the effect began before the putative cause?

To this reader at least, Aly's thesis lacks logic.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hitler's Satisfied Thieves: Actually, the Case for Nazi German Larceny-and-Genocide Policies can be Made Stronger, August 19, 2007

By	Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

German author Gotz (Goetz) Aly describes National Socialism as a form of populist wealth-redistribution welfare-state socialism. One-third of German taxpayers paid more than two-thirds of the tax burdens of war (p. 293), and businesses were heavily taxed (pp. 60-68). Hitler favored social equality for all Germans (p. 300), and worked to correct social inequities, notably in education (p. 322).

Pointedly, National Socialism massively transferred wealth from non-Germans to Germans: "In terms of wartime revenues, internal and external, low- and middle-income Germans, who together with their families numbered some 60 million, accounted for no more than 10 percent of the total sum. More affluent Germans bore 20 percent of the burden, while foreigners, forced laborers, and Jews were compelled to cover 70 percent of the funds consumed every day by Germany during the war." (p. 292). Consequently: "On average, the vast and not particularly affluent majority of Germans enjoyed more disposable income during the war that they had before it." (p. 293). Nazism also appealed to those opposed to traditional moral conventions, and to those inclined towards anticlericalism and anti-elitism (p. 319).

Not surprisingly, once voted into power by the German people, Hitler never needed draconian methods to maintain power until the end. Nearly 90% of the German dissenters executed lost their lives after 1941 (pp. 303-304). Unlike Communism, Nazism never demanded absolute devotion (pp. 23-24). In 1937, merely 7,000 Gestapo employees sufficed to handle 60 million Germans, while, in later East Germany, 190,000 surveillance experts controlled 17 million people (p. 29).

Jews weren't the only victims of larcenous Nazi policies--far from it: "This land of milk and honey in Eastern Europe was to be conquered not for the benefit of landed Prussian Junkers and powerful industrialists but to provide ordinary people with a real-world utopia." (p. 31).

Aly breaks new ground by showing that virtually ALL sectors of German society were involved in the expropriation of conquered peoples' wealth. German soldiers not only sent a considerable amount of looted goods back home (p. 178), but were encouraged to do so (p. 311). Later-writer Heinrich Boll (Boell) wrote much about this (p. 110, etc.). Not mentioned is the fact that, in German-occupied Poland, any German could enter a Polish or Jewish shop at any time and take anything at will without paying.

Poles targeted by the Germans for deportation, imprisonment, or execution immediately lost all their properties to the Reich (p. 197, 236). The 8-12 million forced laborers in the Reich, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, toiled under inhumane conditions. They were paid a wage in order to forestall resistance back home, but then the earnings were recouped by the Germans in various creative ways (pp. 156-157).

German-occupied Poland actually had to pay Germany for being occupied (pp. 76-77) "...with the result that the local population endured acute shortages of grain, potatoes, meat, and other necessities." (p. 77), leading to famine (p. 170). (This enables the reader understand why some Poles didn't aid fugitive Jews and why Poles sometimes betrayed or killed Jews known or suspected of stealing from them). Polish guerilla resistance eventually forced the Germans to slightly reduce the harshness of their exploitation of Poland (p. 160).

The Wehrmacht invaded Russia under orders to live off the land, placing 21.2 million Soviet citizens in starvation mode (p. 178). Additionally, millions of Soviet POWs were starved to death by the Germans (p. 175). Aly touches on the eventual Nazi extermination plans against Slavs: "...the most extreme proposal envisioned forcibly relocating 50 million Slavs to Siberia. (For years, the German Research Foundation also supported the development of technocratic plans for the slaughter of millions of people. Funds for research in this area were still allocated in the Nazis' final budget for the fiscal year 1945-46)." (p. 30). Yet the term "relocation" had itself already become a euphemism for extermination.

One Holocaust myth would have us believe that the destruction of Jews had been so uniquely irrational that the Germans would rather sacrifice themselves than leave Jews alive. In actuality, the deportation of the Jews from the island of Rhodes never did challenge the Wehrmacht's transport needs (p. 268), and there wasn't even talk of German retreat at the time of the Rhodes Jews' deportation (pp. 269-270). Once it did occur, the Rhodes Jews' deportation was itself governed by economic considerations (p. 273).

The case for Aly's premise that the Holocaust can't be properly understood without the larceny behind it (p. 285) can be strengthened (see: INTO THAT DARKNESS). Treblinka Kommandant Franz Stangl rejected the presumed Nazi obsession with killing all Jews, citing the creation of "honorary Aryans". Stangl asserted that the Holocaust was actually motivated by financial gain. When confronted with the obvious fact that most Jews weren't wealthy, Stangl retorted with the comment that almost every Jew had some worthy possession that could be confiscated--and that the booty added up.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Organized Theft from Occupied Lands and the Jews, March 28, 2007

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mr. Aly presents new and somewhat surprising view of the Nazi years and the effort that Hitler et al went through to keep the home crowds happy. His thesis is that Hitler provided 'guns and butter' through the systematic looting of the property of others including the jews and subsequently the occupied lands. He describes and documents that such looting was not just the looting of fine art from museums and factory equipment to the huge German companies but mundane, everyday items like hams and chairs. As Goring said in a speech on October 4, 1942, 'if someone has to go hungry, let it be someone other than a German.'

The book does not explain Hitler's support before 1933, and the book does not spend much time on happenings after February 2, 1943 (Stalingrad) and April 8, 1943 (Tunesia), nor of course on the last year of the war when the British and American bomber forces were finally getting it together.