> Every time *this* comes up, I register disagreement by bringing up Hjalmar
> Schacht, Hitler's Reichsbank chairman in the relevant period and one of the
> few people to have been acquitted at Nuremberg. The only relevant Nazi
> econonomic policy in the 1930s was aggressive monetary expansion, financed
> by default on overseas debt. Hence, (possibly) M. Sawicky's analogy with
> the current USA?
Evidently no one pays attention, then. The last time I saw someone post such an absurdity, I urged that all parties to the debate consult (German left communist) Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Economics and Class Structure of Nazi Germany. In that book Sohn-Rethel demonstrated that the most productive modern industries (such as Siemens) were incapable of recovery under ordinary capitalist remedies, while the most backward and traditional ones (Krupp, Thyssen, I.G. Farben) recovered only by plundering the state treasury with war production. The Nazi regime "solved" this economic dilemma by shifting from the production of relative surplus value to the production of absolute surplus value, by shifting from a liberal bourgeois system of "free" labor to the Nazi system of slave labor. Hence Doug Henwood is correct, and the snipers have not grazed his point with any of these potshots.
Davies is wrong about Hjalmar Schacht too. Anyone who regards Schacht's monetary tricks as crucial must regard Alan Greenspan as the U.S. sovereign today. That inverts the relation between the ruling class and its central banker. On December 1, 1923, Schacht had introduced the Retenmark to end the Great Inflation, restoring an uneasy confidence in the new currency. But that worked only because Germany had first deliberately bankrupted the speculators in Versailles reparation debt, flooding the Cologne exchange with worthless old marks during the last week or so of November. Those moves lifted a burden from the German economy, but by no means restored its health and productivity. The economic crisis persisted, which is why politics polarized, leading to Hitler's ascent to power a decade later. Schacht then continued to perform currency manipulations for the Nazi regime similar to those he had performed for Weimar -- and was able to defend himself accordingly at Nuremberg (where he was indeed convicted of organizing Germany for war, but that was not regarded as a war crime, despite Soviet objections). In fact, Schacht was a war criminal regardless, having personally designed the "Schacht Plan" to confiscate Jewish assets, for example. What saved him was that Hitler had (falsely) suspected Schacht of involvement in the July 1944 assassination plot, and had him arrested and thrown into a concentration camp (first Ravensbrueck, then Flossenbuerg). Schacht's subsequent 8-year sentence from the de-Nazification court was overturned on appeal at the outset of the Cold War.
The U.S. economy is not today a Nazi economy; Alan Greenspan is not Hjalmar Schacht; and central bankers do not constitute the ruling class.
Ken Lawrence