Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (48 page)

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Authors: Götz Aly

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Civil servants in the Food Ministry stopped supplies of milk to Jewish children and introduced special, vastly inferior Jewish food rations, while ensuring that Germans with the right racial pedigree were kept as well fed as possible. These bureaucrats foresaw the mass murder of Jews as a way of increasing food supplies that could be extracted from Poland. In 1942, citing the needs of the German populace and their attitude toward the war, Minister Herbert Backe refused to deliver supplemental food rations to German troops fighting in Russia. In the competition over food reserves between the Eastern Front and the home front, he put the well-being of German civilians first. To ensure there would be enough food in Germany, Göring stressed the following point to agricultural commissioners working in occupied Soviet territories: “The war must sustain the war! That is now to be completely emphasized.”
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Backe and his subordinates acted without scruple, propagating mass murder both through verbal commands and in writing. Schwerin von Krosigk’s degree of culpability is open to debate. Thus far, no documents have been uncovered to link him to any of the specific decisions described here. In a modern state apparatus organized according to principles of division of labor, a prized specialist would not necessarily have been concerned with such issues. But it is beyond question that the finance minister personally, and with a great degree of thoroughness, made sure that everything taken from those who were murdered—including the gold from their teeth and the shirts off their backs—was handed over to the state. He then sold off whatever was received, from precious metals and jewels to garments fit only for rag collectors. Finally, he recorded the proceeds under general administrative revenues in the Reich’s annual budget in an effort to obscure their origins.
 
Whatever Schwerin von Krosigk may have personally thought about Jews in general, he assumed that they would disappear, never to be seen again. Long before the decision was taken to proceed with the Holocaust, Krosigk, Reinhardt, and other leading civil servants at the Finance Ministry were busy inventing new ways of gradually impoverishing Jews so that in the end they would become “burdens on the state.” Financial specialist in the Finance and Economics Ministries were the ones who, with their ever more stringent regulations on currency export and ever more draconian techniques of expropriation, made it impossible for many Jews to flee Nazi Germany. Overriding the will of the SS, they also prohibited Jews deported to the General Government of Poland from taking any significant cash reserves with them—money with which the deportees might have been at least minimally able to support themselves.
 
The financial experts represented a counterweight to the Nazi regime, which, owing to its tendency toward heedless action and, of course, to the character of the Führer himself, was often unstable. The collaboration between the two was makeshift and improvised, but it was efficient enough to support nearly twelve years of rearmament, violence, and annihilation. Even when the experts opposed the politically expedient course of action—as on the issue of what German soldiers could bring back home while on leave—their activities helped maintain the precarious equilibrium between the people and the political leadership. National Socialism did not derive its strength exclusively or even primarily from ideological indoctrination.
 
Our picture of the Third Reich as an authoritarian Führerstaat is misleading. Notwithstanding the state terror inflicted on its putative enemies, the system tolerated remarkably lively differences in opinions and policy between political leaders and professional specialists. The result was creative tension. Without the corrective influence of experts, the political functionaries would have been swamped by a financial crisis caused by currency devaluation and mounting debts. If the politicians had not restrained the experts and allowed political viability to trump financial wisdom on individual issues, the regime would have lost the loyalty of the masses.
 
Only the uneasy cooperation of both of these policy-making camps ensured that equilibrium would be maintained. Realism and apolitical expertise merged with a racist ideology bent on creating a welfare state for the benefit of ethnically “pure” Germans. It was in the interaction of these two elements—neither of which would have functioned on its own—that National Socialism developed its destructive potential.
 
Just Like in the Movies
 
The Nazi government bought the domestic loyalty of the German people through initially irresponsible, then outright criminal financial practices. In 1935, Hitler prohibited the Reich budget from being published. (He had good reason, since the following year his policies would come to depend more and more on mortgaging future assets.) The necessary result was an internal impetus toward war and conquest. The constant Nazi talk of needing more space and colonies, of Germany’s place on the world stage and eastward expansion, as well as of the imperative of “de-Jewification,” was aimed at hastening a rise in the German standard of living, which the domestic economy alone could never have supported.
 
In their propaganda, the Nazi leadership boasted of laying the cornerstone of a thousand-year Reich. But on the level of routine decision making, they didn’t know how they were going to pay their bills from one day to the next. In January 1938, after reading a memorandum from the Finance Ministry, Goebbels wrote with a hint of bravado: “The situation is worse than I imagined. But no people have ever perished of debt—far more have died from a lack of weapons.”
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Two months later, he noted, after reviewing the draft Reich budget: “We may have a huge defiit, but we’ve got Austria.” In December 1939, an eyewitness described the thrust of Hitler’s strategy: “The Führer realizes that we can’t hold out in a drawn-out war. . . . All bets have to be placed on a single card.”
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Nonetheless, after every military victory, no matter how quick and relatively painless for German forces, the same problems with finances and food supplies kept cropping up. However vast the amounts of loot and the size of territories annexed, the revenues derived fell short of expectations. The Nazi state could never develop and cultivate what it had conquered.
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The political consequences of issuing bad checks (in the form of short-term Reich promissory notes and “floating debts”) meant that the Nazi leaders had to push ahead with further military expansionism. Any hesitancy would have led to the end of the regime. They couldn’t afford to content themselves with preserving a status quo, even after the victorious military campaigns against France and other rivals in 1939–40 had united Europe’s “German soil” (Volksboden)—including all disputed regions, vast resources of coal, and the “bread basket” of Poland—within the Reich.
 
Consolidating what had been won in land and resources would have meant that the Reich would have had to take responsibility for the money it had borrowed to create jobs on the home front and rearm itself, to build architectural monuments, and to expand its territory. The dispossession of Jews, the sale of “enemy assets,” and ultimately the murder of hundreds of thousands of “useless mouths to feed” allowed the enlarged Reich to close some of its financial gaps. But these vast crimes would not have helped the Nazi regime pay off its massive debts. If the government had heeded Carl Friedrich Goerdeler’s prognosis in the summer of 1940, immediately after Germany’s triumph over France, the Reich would have yielded to the bitter necessity of consolidating its finances. But as Goerdeler himself recognized, that was not going to happen. Those in charge, led by a public-opinion-conscious Adolf Hitler, had decided “to take the easier path of self-deception.”
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Given the political circumstances in the summer of 1940, war was not only the easier of two paths but the only one still open to the German leadership. By the fall of that year, once Churchill had thwarted Germany’s colonial ambitions in Africa, the sole option was to invade the Soviet Union. A few days prior to the start of that campaign, Goebbels wrote of the common bond linking popular opinion, crimes against humanity, and the political leadership: “The Führer says that, right or wrong, we have to achieve victory. That is the only way. And it is just, moral, and necessary. Once we’ve achieved victory, no one will ask how we did it. We have so much on our conscience anyway that we have to be victorious. Otherwise our people and those of us in the leadership will be wiped out, along with everything that is precious to us. So let’s get to work!”
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By the winter of 1941–42, the political leadership had succeeded in convincing a majority of Germans that all bridges had been burned. While they may have supported individual Nazi measures, ordinary Germans also considered it increasingly difficult to change the direction that had been taken. This realization led many of them in the last years of the war to prefer sacrificing themselves for a hopeless cause rather than capitulating.
 
Undoubtedly there were skeptics in Germany during the war years. But their voices went largely unheard. Most of those who supported National Socialism did so because one or another of the Nazis’ vaguely formulated goals appealed to them. Some followed the party’s lead because its efforts were directed against Germany’s archenemy, France, others because the relatively youthful Nazi leadership broke traditional moral conventions. Catholic clergymen gave their blessing to weapons’ being used in the crusade against godless Bolshevism, even as they objected to the seizure of monasteries and the Nazi euthanasia campaigns. Volk comrades from a socialist background, on the other hand, enthusiastically supported the party’s anticlericism and antielitism. Later, when the fighting was over, the fateful collaboration of millions of Germans vanished, as if by magic, to be replaced by a wildly exaggerated—and historically insignificant—record of resistance to Hitler. Opposition to the Nazis, too, was based on shifting affiliations and allegiances.
 
The actor Wolf Goette, cited in the chapter on Hitler’s satisfied thieves, maintained the same distance from Nazi ideology as the writer Heinrich Böll. Nazi politics, wrote Goette, always made him “want to puke,” evoking a “feeling of terrible shame,” when he saw those “branded with yellow [stars].” In contrast to Böll, though, Goette saw the pro-euthanasia propaganda film Ich klage an (J’accuse) as representing a “pure and respectable outlook,” as a moving work of art whose “cinematic excellence” demonstrated the “necessity” of euthanasia “in certain cases of hopeless decrepitude.” On occasions he felt pangs of conscience as to what might happen if “this idea were propagated by a state ruled by arbitrariness.” Yet no matter how Goette stood on individual political issues, as a resident of the “fairy-tale city of Prague,” he relished the prospects for advancing his career and bettering his standard of living that Germany’s rule by force offered him. Preoccupied as he was with maximizing his own small, personal advantage, he was politically neutralized.
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Hitler moved quickly to stabilize an explosive compound of highly diverse interests and political attitudes. This was the political alchemy of his leadership. The sheer speed of decisions and events kept his regime from falling apart. He preserved the dynamic element of the Nazi Party as a movement. He was more supportive of erstwhile street fighters who had become gauleiters and other local Nazi leaders than he was of his governmental ministers. Hitler’s triumph in organizing his regime after 1933 was not to let the all-powerful party decay into an ancillary apparatus of the state. On the contrary, unlike the communists in the former East Germany, he was able to mobilize the apparatus of state extraordinarily successfully, using its creativity to support his own goals of a “national uprising” and to stretch the resources of the country to the point of collapse. The majority of Germans succumbed first to the giddiness, then to the full-blown intoxication of history’s being made at breakneck pace. Later, after the German defeat at Stalingrad, the relentless pounding of aerial bombardments, and the rise in punitive acts of state terrorism, those people fell into an equally benumbed state of shock. The air raids produced more indifference than fear, leading to fatalistic resignation. The mass deaths of German soldiers on the Eastern Front encouraged those at home to reduce their concerns to everyday needs—and to their hopes of getting at least one more letter from their sons, husbands, or lovers.
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Germans experienced the twelve short years between 1933 and 1945 as a perpetual state of emergency. Spinning on the carousel of events, they lost their sense of both balance and proportion. “Everything seems like a film to me,” remarked a business associate of Victor Klemperer’s during the Sudeten crisis of 1938.
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A year later, nine days before the German invasion of Poland, Göring assured the workers at the Rheinmetall-Borsig factory in Berlin that they could rely on a leadership that “is positively racing with energy.”
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Entries in Goebbels’s diary from February 1941 echoed that sentiment. “The whole day a marvelous tempo,” reads one. “Now the pace of life on the offensive is resuming.” And in a fit of glee at German military successes against Britain: “I spent the whole day in a feverish state of happiness.”
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Within his inner circle, Hitler often alluded to the possibility that he might die young as justification for the accelerated pace of his rule. Speed, he explained, was necessary if he was to achieve his political goals. Hitler was like an amateur tightrope walker who can maintain his balance only by taking ever faster steps—and who inevitably falls from the wire. Hitler’s political and military decisions are best interpreted in the light of his motivation at the moment, despite all his thundering rhetoric about the future.

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