Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (4 page)

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 h Gl 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.

THE COOPERATION between professional experts, political leaders, and the majority of the populace was facilitated by Hitler’s willingness to carry through overdue reforms, many of which had been derailed during the Weimar Republic by special-interest squabbling. In its hunger for action, the National Socialist bureaucracy simply jettisoned a lot of what it considered useless, outmoded ballast. In 1941, a directive prohibited the use of traditional German
Fraktur
(broken-script typeface) in favor of Latin lettering—a reform originally called for by Jacob Grimm in 1854.
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Article 155 of the Weimar constitution had done away with entailments, a medieval form of communal property inheritance common in northeastern Germany and considered antithetical to modern capitalism. But whereas the Weimar Republic had been unable to enforce the ban, which had been on the political agenda since 1849, entailments were simply eradicated by a Reich law dated July 6,1938, and signed “Adolf Hitler, Berchtesgaden.”

The Nazi leadership made automobiles affordable to everyday Germans. 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.”
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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 eyed comrades.”
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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-à-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.
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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.
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The German trade journal for court officers, the
Deutsche Gerichtsvollzieher-Zeitungy
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.”
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Göring 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.”
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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.”
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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 Gerichtsvollzieher-Zeitung
stated, “contributes in a fundamental way to the victory of our people, who are engaged in a fierce struggle for their survival.”
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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.
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Laws such as these made the “national socialism” of the Third Reich immensely popular among many Germans.

CULTURAL AND even state institutions retained a remarkable degree of internal diversity. To many people—from intellectuals to civil servants and engineers—it seemed as if institutional paralysis had been overcome and that a seismic shift in society, an explosion of technical expertise unfettered by party politics and class restraints, was at hand. In this moment of tension between change and continuity, specialists of all sorts, drawing on their expertise to take advantage of the new opportunities for career advancement, voluntarily turned themselves into instruments of Nazi rule. Whatever their role in the new system, public employees were never compelled to betray their personal convictions. Unlike Communism, National Socialism did not demand absolute devotion. Instead it called for closeness to the common man—an antielitist stance that held considerable appeal for twentieth-century European intellectuals.

The cooptation of civil servants allowed for the peculiar combination of populist opportunism, selective government manipulation, and premeditated genocide that characterized the Third Reich. This constellation, rather than any particular German fondness for bureaucracy or Prussian subservience, helps explain the success of the Nazi movement. Despite the regime’s self-image as a state with an omnipotent central Führer, National Socialism deemphasized vertical chains of command in favor of more modern, horizontal decision-making processes. In this sense the Nazi bureaucracy was more advanced than its democratic precursor in the Weimar Republic. The regime unleashed the force of individual initiative in both long-standing and newly created government agencies. It broke through the rigidity of established hierarchies. The drudgery of merely following procedure was replaced by meaningful work, in which people were encouraged to think for themselves—and to plan for the future.

This was the spirit in which the Nazis’ finance minister, Schwerin von Krosigk, organized a brainstorming session for his staff in the summer of 1935. The goal was to maximize the amount of money squeezed out of Jews by the tax system. The participants were instructed to rate various proposals as “recommended,” “possible but not recommended,” and “definitely not recommended.” Acting on their own, without pressure from above, they suggested eradicating dozens of tax credits provided that they also benefited Jews. Mindful of the various ordinances in place, they argued that, where Jews were concerned, “an expedient that contravenes the law is already an option toda#8221;
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In April 1938, the finance minister held a second meeting on the subject, forwarding the ideas suggested to Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick. Tax officials debated the merits of denying Jews—either all Jews or only minor dependents—the allowable exemptions from the wealth tax. They questioned whether guide dogs for Jews who had been blinded fighting in World War I should continue to be exempt from the tax on dogs. One participant drafted legislation imposing a special premium on income and assets taxes for Jews alone. The proposal stipulated that the amount of the premium was “to be flexible so that it can be increased in special cases such as malicious behavior by individual Jews toward the people as a whole.”
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These initiatives required original thought and belied the cliché that Germans were reflexively obedient to arcane bureaucratic procedure.

Hitler’s inner circle quickly warmed to representatives of the old elite, such as Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who took a constructive attitude toward Nazi anti-Semitism. At the beginning of each new phase of radicalization, Goebbels noted in his diary, von Krosigk may have been “somewhat shaky,” but in the end he always proved reliable. In terms of personality, Goebbels added, von Krosigk was “the sort of civil servant we definitely need in our state.”
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In 1937, Hitler awarded him the golden insignia of honorary Nazi Party membership. Thereafter, von Krosigk used the official Nazi form of address “Esteemed Party Comrade” when the occasion called for it and didn’t object when he, too, was addressed in that way instead of by his aristocratic title. In 1939, the honorary Nazi earmarked 450,000 reichsmarks (the equivalent today of $5 million) in the national budget for a ministerial apartment befitting his social status.
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Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk was born in Anhalt in 1887 and was later adopted by an aristocratic Prussian family. He studied at Lausanne and Oxford and received his law degree in Halle, where he passed the German equivalent of the bar exam. Highly decorated in World War I, he retired as a lieutenant colonel. In 1919, von Krosigk joined the reconstituted Finance Ministry and rose rapidly through the ranks. Ten years later he was put in charge of its budget division. Although he wasn’t affiliated with any political party, Chancellor Franz von Papen appointed him finance minister in 1932, and Papen’s successors, Kurt von Schleicher and Adolf Hitler, honored his financial expertise by retaining him in that post. Von Krosigk stayed loyal to the inner circle of the Nazi regime even through the final days of World War II. On May 2, 1945, Hitler’s successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, named him director of the short-lived government that negotiated Germany’s surrender. After the war he was given a sentence of ten years in prison, which was commuted in 1951. He died in 1977.
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An undisputed master of state finances, von Krosigk was known for the ease with which he countered critics, in freely dictated, multiple-page letters explaining the intricacies of the Third Reich’s wartime budget.

Von Krosigk’s deputy, Fritz Reinhardt, came from an altogether different background. The son of a Thuringian bookbinder, Reinhardt was born in 1895 in far more humble circumstances. He attended trade school in the town of Ilmenau and became a salesman. After the outbreak of World War I, Reinhardt was arrested in Riga as an enemy alien by the Russian army and deported to Siberia. Fred after the war, he founded a school for export trade in 1924 in the Bavarian town of Herrsching am Ammersee. The school received little support from the Weimar Republic’s educational bureaucracy, and two years later a disillusioned Reinhardt joined the Nazi Party and started a booking agency for party speakers. An expert in budgetary politics, Reinhardt was later appointed the party’s financial spokesman. He was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi deputy in 1930.