![Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State by [Jefferson Chase, Gitz Aly]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/519RfFsb-nL._SY346_.jpg)
In his books Hitlers Volksstaat (English version Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State) German historian Götz Aly attracts attention of the reader to the frequently overlooked fact that the Holocaust for Nazi regime rather had not demographical or political goals, but fiscal ones. Jews were not simply relocated to ghettoes, sent to concentration camps, or killed. First and foremost of all, their property was confiscated, and Nazi Regime used the property and proceedings of selling it to finance its social programs and war efforts.
Real estate and liquid wealth of Jews (buildings, businesses, stocks, deposits, precious gems and metals, jewelry, garments, luxury items) was nationalized and legally treated as a credit to government trust funds which were put in charge of handling those assets. Involuntary “creditors” were separated from the control over their former funds and were given per diem allowance for everyday needs of about $1500 per week. Over time, when Jews disappeared in camps, their property was classified as “abandoned” and either was used as a guaranty of government bonds, or sold for quite low prices. Those who invested in buying this property effectively received indirect subsidies from the government. However poorer Germans received their benefits, too. Despite the low selling prices for the Jewish property, its sheer amount made the government to collect huge sums on the property liquidation sales. These funds were used for the social programs for all Germans and for building the Werhmacht’s war machine, which was used to get more and more European Jews and their wealth into reach of Nazi regime. These policies resulted into unprecedented support of the regime from all Germans.
As a result, 4 billion Reichsmark (or about $60 billion in the current equivalent) were confiscated from Jews from 1939 to the end of WWII. Considering that before the WWII a bit more than 200 thousand Jews were living in Germany, on an average $1.2 million were expropriated form every abstract Jewish family of 4 (2 adults and 2 children – from a simple reproduction estimate).
To take away Jewish property in the occupied and allied European countries Nazi regime had to jump through additional hoops. According to the Hague Convention, which Nazi Germany tried to comply formally, an occupying power could not have seized and sold property of the civilian population. However, these regulations did not extend over the local authorities of being occupied countries, and this loophole was used for confiscating property of the European Jews. Thus, because of these requisitions, in 1940 budget revenues of France has increased by 211%, Belgium - 200%, Holland – 180%, and Norway – 242%. In 1941 this revenue boom continued, and reached 125% in Belgium, 131% in Netherlands, and 100% in Serbia.
Of course lion share of this spoil was extracted from these countries by Germans, but ordinary people of the occupied and allied countries also directly and indirectly benefited from this big grab of Jewish property. Overall, during war years 20 billion Reichsmark (or about today’s $300 billion) worth property was extracted from the European Jews. Especially these money were needed to finance needs of the Eastern Front. Thus, campaign of 1942 which allowed Germans to reach Caucasus and Volga, as well as campaign of 1943 which ended in the giant battle of the armored armadas near Kursk, were indeed funded by “Jewish money”. However, in reality, contrary to conspirological theorists, “financiers” were doing that involuntarily, and in most cases posthumously (obliteration of the Jews – 4 million – peaked in 1941-42).
So, it was not the 6 million (or 9 million pre-WWII European Jews) which was the target number of Nazi policies. That number was only a means to reach the real target number of 24 billion confiscated Reichsmark ($360 billion in current equivalent), which is about one and a half times more than GDP of the state of Israel with its 8 million population, contemporary technology and work productivity, and a more than a half-century direct and indirect financial infusions from USA. Or, again, calculated per an abstract 4 member family, that target number was about $160 thousand confiscated from each European Jewish family.
The Kindle title is not currently available for purchase
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
See Clubs
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State First Edition, Kindle Edition
| Price | New from | Used from |
A stunning account of the economic workings of the Third Reich—and the reasons ordinary Germans supported the Nazi state
In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history's greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale—and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs—Hitler literally "bought" his people's consent.
Drawing on secret files and financial records, Aly shows that while Jews and citizens of occupied lands suffered crippling taxation, mass looting, enslavement, and destruction, most Germans enjoyed an improved standard of living. Buoyed by millions of packages soldiers sent from the front, Germans also benefited from the systematic plunder of conquered territory and the transfer of Jewish possessions into their homes and pockets. Any qualms were swept away by waves of government handouts, tax breaks, and preferential legislation.
Gripping and important, Hitler's Beneficiaries makes a radically new contribution to our understanding of Nazi aggression, the Holocaust, and the complicity of a people.
- ISBN-13978-0805087260
- EditionFirst
- PublisherMetropolitan Books
- Publication dateJanuary 8, 2008
- LanguageEnglish
- File size2106 KB
Kindle e-Readers
Fire Tablets
Fire Phones
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"This remarkable book tackles in an entirely original manner one of the greatest paradoxes of the Nazi state: why did the German people increasingly support Hitler's rule even after it unleashed a world war that ultimately led to its own destruction? The answer, based on massive evidence and convincingly argued, is that the Nazi regime won the support of middle and working class Germans by creating greater social and economic equality at home and ensuring that its own "racial comrades" would be well fed and clothed, all with the proceeds of mass murder and unprecedented continent-wide robbery. This rewriting of history, which dismantles the conventional distinction between fanatical Nazis and sober civil servants, will irreversibly transform our understanding of the Third Reich, revealing it as a consensual dictatorship whose popularity was rooted in grand larceny and the profits of crimes against humanity on an unimaginable scale."
--Omer Bartov, author of Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories
"A pathbreaking work."
--Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany
"In this book Aly once again brings to bear his formidable research skills, his knack for pursuing original lines of inquiry, and his incredible capacity to uncover neglected and seemingly innocuous documents. While I do not share Aly's views about the underlying economic causes of the Holocaust, I nonetheless consider this a fascinating and important book about the Nazi economic policies that facilitated the regime's capacity to implement the Final Solution."
--Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
"Thoroughly researched and fluently written, this book offers a new, brilliant, gripping and convincing dimension to the understanding of one of the most puzzling questions in t...
--Omer Bartov, author of Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories
"A pathbreaking work."
--Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany
"In this book Aly once again brings to bear his formidable research skills, his knack for pursuing original lines of inquiry, and his incredible capacity to uncover neglected and seemingly innocuous documents. While I do not share Aly's views about the underlying economic causes of the Holocaust, I nonetheless consider this a fascinating and important book about the Nazi economic policies that facilitated the regime's capacity to implement the Final Solution."
--Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
"Thoroughly researched and fluently written, this book offers a new, brilliant, gripping and convincing dimension to the understanding of one of the most puzzling questions in t...
From the Back Cover
Advance Praise for Hitler's Beneficiaries
"This remarkable book tackles in an entirely original manner one of the greatest paradoxes of the Nazi state: Why did the German people increasingly support Hitler's rule even after it unleashed a world war that ultimately led to its own destruction? The answer, based on massive evidence and convincingly argued, is that the Nazi regime won the support of middle- and working-class Germans by creating greater social and economic equality at home and ensuring that its own `racial comrades' would be well fed and clothed, all with the proceeds of mass murder and unprecedented continent-wide robbery. This rewriting of history, which dismantles the conventional distinction between fanatical Nazis and sober civil servants, will irreversibly transform our understanding of the Third Reich, revealing it as a consensual dictatorship whose popularity was rooted in grand larceny and the profits of crimes against humanity on an unimaginable scale."
--Omer Bartov, author of Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories
"A pathbreaking work."
--Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany
"In this book Aly once again brings to bear his formidable research skills, his knack for pursuing original lines of inquiry, and his incredible capacity to uncover neglected and seemingly innocuous documents. While I do not share Aly's views about the underlying economic causes of the Holocaust, I nonetheless consider this a fascinating and important book about the Nazi economic policies that facilitated the regime's capacity to implement the Final Solution."
--Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
"Hitler's Beneficiaries recalls the nightmare of older classical liberals like Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber, who feared that with the coming of mass society people would forsake liberty to enjoy materialism and its `petty pleasures.' Götz Aly has written a brilliant yet disturbing book that shatters our complacencies."
--John Patrick Diggins, author of Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy
"Shifting the focus from racist fanaticism as the key factor in the success of Nazism to the economic gains from looting and genocide, Aly provides fresh insights into the kleptocratic calculations behind Hitler's great popularity. A bestseller in Germany, this important new book will stimulate renewed debate on why millions of ordinary Germans were lured into cheering for Hitler in peacetime and total war, and how we might come to grips with the enormous and still puzzling dynamism of one of the most exploitative and murderous movements of the 20th century."
--Volker R. Berghahn, author of Europe in the Era of Two World Wars
"Thoroughly researched and fluently written, this book offers a new, brilliant, gripping, and convincing dimension to the understanding of one of the most puzzling questions in the history of our times: Why did so many Germans, both Nazis and `ordinary people' support the persecution of the Jews? We've heard much about ideology, sociology and psychology: it's time to pay attention to profit."
--Tom Segev, author of The Seventh Million: Israel Confronts the Holocaust
About the Author
One of the most respected historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Götz Aly is the author of Architects of Annihilation, among other books. Winner of Germany's prestigious history award, the Heinrich Mann Prize, Aly has been a visiting fellow at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C., and currently teaches at the University of Frankfurt. He lives in Berlin. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The Dream of a "People's Empire"
Heady Days
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."1
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 Göring, 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."2
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."3
In a diary entry from 1939, a thirty-three-year-old described his decision to apply for a position helping resettle ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe in the expanding German empire: "I didn't need to think about it for a second. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I hope they'll be able to use me and will accept my application. It would get me out of the confines of my office, which has grown very stale." Two weeks later he noted: "I'm awed by the size of the task. I've never been given such great responsibility before."4 Female university students spent semester breaks in occupied Poland, staffing the provisional day care centers that freed German settlers to bring in the harvest. One student later wrote enthusiastically: "It made no difference which school we were from. We were united in one great mission: to apply ourselves during our break in Poland with all our strength and whatever knowledge we had. It was truly an honor to be among the first students allowed to do such pioneering work."5
In 1942, twenty-seven-year-old Hanns Martin Schleyer--later a leading industrialist and president of the Employers' Association in the Federal Republic of Germany--was working in the Nazi administration of occupied Prague. There he complained about older bureaucrats dragging their feet and contrasted their hesitancy with the gung-ho attitude of his own generation: "We learned at a young age during the movement's days of struggle to seek out challenges, instead of waiting for them to come to us--this and our constant efforts for the party, even after it took power, made us ready to take on responsibility much earlier than usual."6 In May 1941, Hans Schuster, who would go on to become a senior editor of the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung after the war, was made economic attaché to the German mission in Zagreb. Although only twenty-six, he was charged with helping to establish Croatia as a Nazi satellite state. Earlier, having written his Ph.D. dissertation on "The Jewish Question in Romania," he had worked for the German embassy in Bucharest, where he was involved in various conspiratorial endeavors. In a letter from January 1942 to his friend Hellmut Becker, another influential figure in postwar Germany, Schuster wrote with the breathless enthusiasm of a true believer:
I would really like to move on soon. The past year here has been too good to me. Things have gone almost too smoothly, though conditions have been very tense and, for weeks on end, quite dangerous. [We had] the coup d'état in Belgrade, followed by the war and our coup here in Agram [Zagreb]. I've had the good fortune to be assigned to help with the difficult task of building up this country. For a full six months, I've been working under the excellent command of envoy Kasche [an SA squadron leader] and have been given a lot of responsibility. The circumstances are especially fortuitous thanks to our good relations with the present government before it came to power.
Schuster was granted his request for a transfer, and later, as a soldier, he expressed his gratitude that "the variety of this life, the constant excitement, the challenge of making independent, if minor, decisions that require a modicum of imagination and initiative" had protected him against "the side of war that dulls the senses."7
These young 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.
Among those who took power in 1933 were many recent university graduates and students. Their ranks included the rebellious sons of old elite families and the increasingly self-assertive lower classes, who had profited from the Social Democrats' reforms in the Weimar Republic. They overcame differences in background through their collective struggle for a National Socialist utopia, a utopia at once romantic and technologically modern. Viewing themselves and their peers as the avant-garde of the "young Volk," they disdained their more experienced, skeptical elders as "cemetery vegetables." To members of the new generation, veteran civil servants, with their devotion to rules and principles, were "ossified old geezers."8 The movement's activists and the far greater number of cautious but curious sympathizers looked beyond the constraints of the present toward the dawning of a new, völkisch age. The burden of what would soon become enormous daily challenges was easy to bear when one's gaze was fixed so firmly on the future. Goebbels considered calling his 1941 book of war speeches "Between Yesterday and Tomorrow." (The actual title of the volume, when published, was An Unprecedented Age.)9 For all these reasons, National Socialism can be seen as a dictatorship of youth. Within only a few years, it developed into the most destructive generational project of the twentieth century.
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."10 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.'"11 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.12
Germany's rapid military defeat of France in 1940 was accomplished by violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality--a transgression against international law that Hitler dismissed as "meaningless." The Führer impressed upon his supporters, and gradually upon the German people as well, a maxim that was soon to justify any and all sorts of crimes: "No one will ask questions, once we've achieved victory."13
That year, while temporarily confined to a sickbed, Reich Deputy Finance Minister Fritz Reinhardt wrote to his boss, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk: "I'm looking forward to the great tasks that will have to be accomplished soon. . . . We can be enormously glad to live and work in these heady days. Paris in German hands, France on the verge of capitulation! In such a short span of time! It's hard to believe!"14
It is pointless to ask whether any of the Nazis' grandiose plans for the future were anything more than propaganda. The extraordinarily feverish tempo, the youthful élan with which Germans jettisoned their moral scruples are what make the twelve short years of Nazi rule so difficult for us to comprehend. Nazi society drew its extreme intensity from the regime's ability to merge opposites: rational and emotional political goals, old and new elites, the interests of the people, the party, and the government bureaucracy. Huge bursts of energy were released wherever the Nazi Party apparatus conjoined contradictory elements: the preservation of putative traditions with the desire for technological achievement; antiauthoritarian glee at the toppling of the old order with the authoritarian devotion to a new utopia in which Germany would finally assume its place in the sun. Hitler combined the prospect of national revival with the risk of absolute collapse, the ideal of communal class harmony with minutely organized genocidal violence.
The Seismic Shift
The Nazi leadership had little patience with lawyers, judges, career diplomats, general staff officers, and other stolid members of the old order. But it was to the party's advantage to give such people time to conform to the new order. Equally useful to the party were civil servants within the Reichsbank and the Ministries of Finance and Economics, shrewd men who had gathered their first political and professional experience in Wilhelmine Germany and the early years of the Weimar Republic. Many had fought in World War I, and they came from all walks of life, as did the members of most university institutes, private and semiprivate economic think tanks, academic societies, newspaper editorial staffs, and economics divisions of large commercial banks.
Their expertise was crucial to the success of the Nazi leadership's criminal undertakings. Between 1939 and 1945, under the leadership of Ministerial Director Gustav Schlotterer, civil servants within Division III of the Ministry of Economics plundered much of Europe with a thoroughness that is difficult to imagine today. Division III was founded in 1920 to fulfill Germany's obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. Helpless to resist French, Belgian, and British demands for reparations, this generation of civil servants received an introductory lesson in the art of subjugation, looting, and blackmail. Later, they would turn this involuntarily acquired know-how back on their teachers, bolstering it with a German talent for bureaucratic organization. In their minds, the myriad techniques they applied to exploit their fellow Europeans were just compensation for previous humiliations.
Civil servants were also instrumental in advancing the Führer's anti-Semitic agenda. The Nuremberg Laws, which were broadly and somewhat hastily proclaimed by Hitler at the annual Nazi Party conference in September 1935, mandated the preservation of "German blood" against threats from Jews. But they did not even define who was to be considered Jewish. It was up to legal experts to transform Hitler's vague ideas of protecting German blood and of "breeding out" the characteristics of "inferior" races into practicable regulations that bureaucrats could implement. Only once this had been done could the government issue the first ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Law (Reichsbürgergesetz), which defined who was to be considered Jewish and how to classify people in cases of mixed parenthood and marriage. In formulating that legislation, the party's legal experts ignored the fine racial distinctions worked out by German geneticists and simply decreed that the religious affiliation of an individual's grandparents, which could be easily ascertained from registration documents, would be the legal basis for deciding hundreds of thousands of cases of disputed ethnicity. This created an automatic procedure for social exclusion.
Civil servants played an equally key role in the "atonement payment" (Judenbusse) of one billion reichsmarks that Hermann Göring, in a fit of anti-Semitic fervor, ordered Jews to pay in 1938. The Finance Ministry translated this demand into a 20 percent levy on personal assets, to be paid in four installments over the course of a year. In the end, the money raised significantly exceeded Göring's original figure.
These so-called special measures, now regarded as the first steps toward the Holocaust, could only be put into practice with the help of precise work by bureaucrats and civil servants. After Nazi Germany's conquest of Central and Eastern Europe, for example, the Reich General Auditor's Office monitored the confiscation of Jewish property in Belgrade, the management of the deportation centers for Dutch Jews, and the operations of the German administration of the Lodz ghetto in Poland.15 Economic logic was a motor that drove the Holocaust. The Ministry of Economics charged the National Board for Economy and Efficiency with producing a cost-benefit analysis of the Warsaw ghetto. The board issued a number of reports that cautioned against maintaining such prisonlike but economically unviable "Jewish areas of residence."16
These examples illustrate how the impulsive, populist, and often improvised actions of the Nazi movement were supported by an experienced bureaucracy. As willing as civil servants were to serve the national cause, however, they were never keen to relinquish control over their traditional instruments of power. The General Auditor's Office and the civil court system, for instance, continued to operate much as they had before 1933; the leadership of both institutions retained considerable autonomy, and the multitiered bureaucracy worked with notable efficiency. The Nazi gauleiters (district leaders), whose ideal form of rule was a nonbureaucratic dictatorship directly translating popular will into action, were constantly frustrated by civil servants who insisted that fiscal questions be decided in strict accordance with national budgetary guidelines. Friction, irritation, and conflict were unavoidable, especially when government bureaucrats sought to impose financial limits on political or military maneuvers. Yet the polycratic organizational structure of the Nazi state did not, as is often claimed, lead to chaos. The strength, however precarious, of the regime was its capacity for resolving conflicts of interest and deciding on an appropriate course of action. This capacity allowed the state to avoid administrative gridlock while it developed and implemented ever more radical policies. Such was the genesis of Nazi Germany's ultimately homicidal mixture of political volunteerism and functional rationality.
Copyright © 2005 by S. Fischer Verlage GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. Translation copyright © 2006 by Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The Dream of a "People's Empire"
Heady Days
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."1
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 Göring, 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."2
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."3
In a diary entry from 1939, a thirty-three-year-old described his decision to apply for a position helping resettle ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe in the expanding German empire: "I didn't need to think about it for a second. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I hope they'll be able to use me and will accept my application. It would get me out of the confines of my office, which has grown very stale." Two weeks later he noted: "I'm awed by the size of the task. I've never been given such great responsibility before."4 Female university students spent semester breaks in occupied Poland, staffing the provisional day care centers that freed German settlers to bring in the harvest. One student later wrote enthusiastically: "It made no difference which school we were from. We were united in one great mission: to apply ourselves during our break in Poland with all our strength and whatever knowledge we had. It was truly an honor to be among the first students allowed to do such pioneering work."5
In 1942, twenty-seven-year-old Hanns Martin Schleyer--later a leading industrialist and president of the Employers' Association in the Federal Republic of Germany--was working in the Nazi administration of occupied Prague. There he complained about older bureaucrats dragging their feet and contrasted their hesitancy with the gung-ho attitude of his own generation: "We learned at a young age during the movement's days of struggle to seek out challenges, instead of waiting for them to come to us--this and our constant efforts for the party, even after it took power, made us ready to take on responsibility much earlier than usual."6 In May 1941, Hans Schuster, who would go on to become a senior editor of the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung after the war, was made economic attaché to the German mission in Zagreb. Although only twenty-six, he was charged with helping to establish Croatia as a Nazi satellite state. Earlier, having written his Ph.D. dissertation on "The Jewish Question in Romania," he had worked for the German embassy in Bucharest, where he was involved in various conspiratorial endeavors. In a letter from January 1942 to his friend Hellmut Becker, another influential figure in postwar Germany, Schuster wrote with the breathless enthusiasm of a true believer:
I would really like to move on soon. The past year here has been too good to me. Things have gone almost too smoothly, though conditions have been very tense and, for weeks on end, quite dangerous. [We had] the coup d'état in Belgrade, followed by the war and our coup here in Agram [Zagreb]. I've had the good fortune to be assigned to help with the difficult task of building up this country. For a full six months, I've been working under the excellent command of envoy Kasche [an SA squadron leader] and have been given a lot of responsibility. The circumstances are especially fortuitous thanks to our good relations with the present government before it came to power.
Schuster was granted his request for a transfer, and later, as a soldier, he expressed his gratitude that "the variety of this life, the constant excitement, the challenge of making independent, if minor, decisions that require a modicum of imagination and initiative" had protected him against "the side of war that dulls the senses."7
These young 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.
Among those who took power in 1933 were many recent university graduates and students. Their ranks included the rebellious sons of old elite families and the increasingly self-assertive lower classes, who had profited from the Social Democrats' reforms in the Weimar Republic. They overcame differences in background through their collective struggle for a National Socialist utopia, a utopia at once romantic and technologically modern. Viewing themselves and their peers as the avant-garde of the "young Volk," they disdained their more experienced, skeptical elders as "cemetery vegetables." To members of the new generation, veteran civil servants, with their devotion to rules and principles, were "ossified old geezers."8 The movement's activists and the far greater number of cautious but curious sympathizers looked beyond the constraints of the present toward the dawning of a new, völkisch age. The burden of what would soon become enormous daily challenges was easy to bear when one's gaze was fixed so firmly on the future. Goebbels considered calling his 1941 book of war speeches "Between Yesterday and Tomorrow." (The actual title of the volume, when published, was An Unprecedented Age.)9 For all these reasons, National Socialism can be seen as a dictatorship of youth. Within only a few years, it developed into the most destructive generational project of the twentieth century.
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."10 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.'"11 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.12
Germany's rapid military defeat of France in 1940 was accomplished by violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality--a transgression against international law that Hitler dismissed as "meaningless." The Führer impressed upon his supporters, and gradually upon the German people as well, a maxim that was soon to justify any and all sorts of crimes: "No one will ask questions, once we've achieved victory."13
That year, while temporarily confined to a sickbed, Reich Deputy Finance Minister Fritz Reinhardt wrote to his boss, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk: "I'm looking forward to the great tasks that will have to be accomplished soon. . . . We can be enormously glad to live and work in these heady days. Paris in German hands, France on the verge of capitulation! In such a short span of time! It's hard to believe!"14
It is pointless to ask whether any of the Nazis' grandiose plans for the future were anything more than propaganda. The extraordinarily feverish tempo, the youthful élan with which Germans jettisoned their moral scruples are what make the twelve short years of Nazi rule so difficult for us to comprehend. Nazi society drew its extreme intensity from the regime's ability to merge opposites: rational and emotional political goals, old and new elites, the interests of the people, the party, and the government bureaucracy. Huge bursts of energy were released wherever the Nazi Party apparatus conjoined contradictory elements: the preservation of putative traditions with the desire for technological achievement; antiauthoritarian glee at the toppling of the old order with the authoritarian devotion to a new utopia in which Germany would finally assume its place in the sun. Hitler combined the prospect of national revival with the risk of absolute collapse, the ideal of communal class harmony with minutely organized genocidal violence.
The Seismic Shift
The Nazi leadership had little patience with lawyers, judges, career diplomats, general staff officers, and other stolid members of the old order. But it was to the party's advantage to give such people time to conform to the new order. Equally useful to the party were civil servants within the Reichsbank and the Ministries of Finance and Economics, shrewd men who had gathered their first political and professional experience in Wilhelmine Germany and the early years of the Weimar Republic. Many had fought in World War I, and they came from all walks of life, as did the members of most university institutes, private and semiprivate economic think tanks, academic societies, newspaper editorial staffs, and economics divisions of large commercial banks.
Their expertise was crucial to the success of the Nazi leadership's criminal undertakings. Between 1939 and 1945, under the leadership of Ministerial Director Gustav Schlotterer, civil servants within Division III of the Ministry of Economics plundered much of Europe with a thoroughness that is difficult to imagine today. Division III was founded in 1920 to fulfill Germany's obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. Helpless to resist French, Belgian, and British demands for reparations, this generation of civil servants received an introductory lesson in the art of subjugation, looting, and blackmail. Later, they would turn this involuntarily acquired know-how back on their teachers, bolstering it with a German talent for bureaucratic organization. In their minds, the myriad techniques they applied to exploit their fellow Europeans were just compensation for previous humiliations.
Civil servants were also instrumental in advancing the Führer's anti-Semitic agenda. The Nuremberg Laws, which were broadly and somewhat hastily proclaimed by Hitler at the annual Nazi Party conference in September 1935, mandated the preservation of "German blood" against threats from Jews. But they did not even define who was to be considered Jewish. It was up to legal experts to transform Hitler's vague ideas of protecting German blood and of "breeding out" the characteristics of "inferior" races into practicable regulations that bureaucrats could implement. Only once this had been done could the government issue the first ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Law (Reichsbürgergesetz), which defined who was to be considered Jewish and how to classify people in cases of mixed parenthood and marriage. In formulating that legislation, the party's legal experts ignored the fine racial distinctions worked out by German geneticists and simply decreed that the religious affiliation of an individual's grandparents, which could be easily ascertained from registration documents, would be the legal basis for deciding hundreds of thousands of cases of disputed ethnicity. This created an automatic procedure for social exclusion.
Civil servants played an equally key role in the "atonement payment" (Judenbusse) of one billion reichsmarks that Hermann Göring, in a fit of anti-Semitic fervor, ordered Jews to pay in 1938. The Finance Ministry translated this demand into a 20 percent levy on personal assets, to be paid in four installments over the course of a year. In the end, the money raised significantly exceeded Göring's original figure.
These so-called special measures, now regarded as the first steps toward the Holocaust, could only be put into practice with the help of precise work by bureaucrats and civil servants. After Nazi Germany's conquest of Central and Eastern Europe, for example, the Reich General Auditor's Office monitored the confiscation of Jewish property in Belgrade, the management of the deportation centers for Dutch Jews, and the operations of the German administration of the Lodz ghetto in Poland.15 Economic logic was a motor that drove the Holocaust. The Ministry of Economics charged the National Board for Economy and Efficiency with producing a cost-benefit analysis of the Warsaw ghetto. The board issued a number of reports that cautioned against maintaining such prisonlike but economically unviable "Jewish areas of residence."16
These examples illustrate how the impulsive, populist, and often improvised actions of the Nazi movement were supported by an experienced bureaucracy. As willing as civil servants were to serve the national cause, however, they were never keen to relinquish control over their traditional instruments of power. The General Auditor's Office and the civil court system, for instance, continued to operate much as they had before 1933; the leadership of both institutions retained considerable autonomy, and the multitiered bureaucracy worked with notable efficiency. The Nazi gauleiters (district leaders), whose ideal form of rule was a nonbureaucratic dictatorship directly translating popular will into action, were constantly frustrated by civil servants who insisted that fiscal questions be decided in strict accordance with national budgetary guidelines. Friction, irritation, and conflict were unavoidable, especially when government bureaucrats sought to impose financial limits on political or military maneuvers. Yet the polycratic organizational structure of the Nazi state did not, as is often claimed, lead to chaos. The strength, however precarious, of the regime was its capacity for resolving conflicts of interest and deciding on an appropriate course of action. This capacity allowed the state to avoid administrative gridlock while it developed and implemented ever more radical policies. Such was the genesis of Nazi Germany's ultimately homicidal mixture of political volunteerism and functional rationality.
Copyright © 2005 by S. Fischer Verlage GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. Translation copyright © 2006 by Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product details
- ASIN : B0012DHDNG
- Publisher : Metropolitan Books; First edition (January 8, 2008)
- Publication date : January 8, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 2106 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 450 pages
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
107 global ratings
How customer reviews and ratings work
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 16, 2013
Report
21 people found this helpful
Helpful
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 16, 2007
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.
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.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 22, 2019
A thorough analysis of what motivated the German Nation in WWII - the common German and the High Command - to destroy tens of millions of lives. Aly goes into depth about the economics of Hitler's war machine, how Germans on every level did their best to keep the War going, the planning, the weighting of costs vs lives, the starvation of conquered Nations to feed and keep happy their own.
The common German did not starve during the War; after, some. But during, German soldiers happily looted Nations, sending home captured food stuffs, furniture, jewelry, anything they could pack.
Each conquered Nation was different in its compliance, and each delicately handled by subalterns for the German cause. After depriving Jews of their businesses, jobs and belongings, and moving them off into labor camps...the Reich soon realized it cost more to feed them, then what their labor was returning. The solution? Liquidation.
This is not an easy read, little of the war itself, but an overwhelming evidence of the complicity of Germans on every level to live and thrive off other Nations and races. This is the evil face of Socialism. Once Germany and Germans accepted that individuals were subordinate to the State, to be used as seen fit, then nothing stood in their way. This is the same evil America faces today: the encroaching State assuming powers never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers.
A shocking book, completely referenced.
The common German did not starve during the War; after, some. But during, German soldiers happily looted Nations, sending home captured food stuffs, furniture, jewelry, anything they could pack.
Each conquered Nation was different in its compliance, and each delicately handled by subalterns for the German cause. After depriving Jews of their businesses, jobs and belongings, and moving them off into labor camps...the Reich soon realized it cost more to feed them, then what their labor was returning. The solution? Liquidation.
This is not an easy read, little of the war itself, but an overwhelming evidence of the complicity of Germans on every level to live and thrive off other Nations and races. This is the evil face of Socialism. Once Germany and Germans accepted that individuals were subordinate to the State, to be used as seen fit, then nothing stood in their way. This is the same evil America faces today: the encroaching State assuming powers never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers.
A shocking book, completely referenced.
Top reviews from other countries
Darran
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 1, 2017
Fascinating. This book provides an account of the rise of the Nazis from the perspective of a German historian, and it challenges some of the conventional perceptions of how the Nazis held power, and to what extent the German people were active supporters.
One person found this helpful
Report
Robert
4.0 out of 5 stars
A solid purchase
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 26, 2020
The content was excellent; detailed and well researched. The book itself has a great appearance, even after enduring many moons in my bag and suitcase.
Maelen Moonsinger
5.0 out of 5 stars
People are easy to buy
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 6, 2022
The German people in World War Two led surprisingly comfortable lives, all things considered. Their government kept them quiet and content by murdering millions of people and using the proceeds to buy their silence. Need money for the war? Don't raise taxes; steal from an out-group. Bombed out? Here's a new apartment! Just don't ask who was living here before. It's the old imperialist ploy of milking the colonies to prop up the homeland, turned up to 11. People don't easily question the source of their convenience and comfort. This was a peculiarly lethal expression of that principle, but it remains true today in somewhat more diluted forms.
Luiz Antonio Vital Teixeira
5.0 out of 5 stars
Livro muio interessante.
Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on July 30, 2022
O autor tem uma argumentação muito inovadora, mas e bom cotejar suas ideias com outros livros sobre o nazismo. Recomendo especialmente ler o que Richard Evans disse sobre esse livro, em seu O Terceiro Reich na Historia e na Memoria.
Joseph Sao-Bras
5.0 out of 5 stars
I liked it.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 20, 2014
Very informative with back-up info. Some of it I already knew but most was new data. Deals with the corruption of a system know for its deceit and cruelty..
