The World At War Germany: the division of the spoils by Götz Aly Le Monde diplomatique May 2005
I WANT to ask a simple question that has never really been answered: how could it have happened? How could the Germans have allowed and committed unprecedented mass crimes, particularly the genocide of Europe's Jews? While the hatred the state whipped up against all "inferior" peoples - "Polacks", "Bolsheviks" and "Jews" - no doubt prepared the ground, it is not an adequate answer.
In the years before Hitler came to power, the Germans harboured no greater feeling of resentment than did other Europeans; German nationalism was no more racist than that of other nations. There was no Sonderweg (special German path to modernity) that would lead logically to Auschwitz. There is no empirical basis for the idea that a specific form of xenophobia, a deadly anti-semitism, had developed early in Germany. It is wrong to assume that there must have been specific and long-standing causes for a mistake with such fatal consequences. A range of factors led to the National German Socialist Workers' party (NSDAP) gaining and consolidating power, but the most important arose only after 1914.
At the heart of this study is the relationship between people and political elite under national socialism. We know that the edifice of Hitler's power was fragile from the start. So how was it stabilised in a way that allowed it to last for 12 destructive years? We must clarify the general question: how could an enterprise which, in retrospect, appears as overtly deceitful, megalomaniac and criminal as Nazism have achieved political consensus on a scale we find it hard to explain today?
I consider the Nazi regime as a dictatorship in the service of the people. The war period, which brings out clearly the other features of Nazism, provides the best answer to the question. Hitler, the NSDAP Gauleiter (regional leaders), many of the ministers, state secretaries and advisers acted the part of traditional demagogues, constantly asking themselves how best to secure and consolidate general satisfaction and daily buying public approval or at least indifference. Giving and receiving was the basis on which they founded a consensual dictatorship consistently endorsed by the majority; an analysis of the internal collapse at the end of the first world war had revealed the pitfalls that their policy of popular beneficence would need to avoid.
During the second world war, the Nazi leadership tried to distribute food supplies in such a way that they were seen to be fairly allocated, particularly by poorer people. They did all they could to maintain the apparent stability of the Reichsmark (RM) to prevent any worrying reminder of the inflation of the 1914-18 war or the collapse of the German currency in 1923. And they saw to it - this had not happened during the first world war - that families of the military received enough money, nearly 85% of mobilised soldiers' former net pay, compared with less than half for British and American families in the same position. It was not unusual for the wives and families of German soldiers to have more money than before the war; they also benefited from the presents brought back by soldiers on leave and parcels sent from occupied countries by military post.
To reinforce the illusion of benefits that were guaranteed and likely to increase, Hitler saw to it that the farming community, manual workers, white-collar workers and lower- or middle-rank civil servants were not significantly burdened by war taxes; the situation in Britain and the United States was crucially different. Exempting most German taxpayers meant considerably increasing the tax burden for those sections of society with large incomes. The exceptional tax of RM8bn that property owners were required to pay at the end of 1942 is a striking example of the policy of social justice ostensibly practised by the Third Reich. The same is true of the tax exemption for bonuses for working nights, Sundays and public holidays accorded after the defeat of France (and, until recently, considered by Germans as a social benefit).
While the Nazi regime was ruthless in its dealings with Jews and peoples it considered racially inferior or alien (fremdvölkisch), its class awareness led it to tax in a way that benefited the weakest Germans. Taxing the moneyed classes (only 4% of German taxpayers were earning more than RM6,000 a year) could not provide the funds necessary to finance the second world war. So how was it possible to finance the most costly war in history with minimal impact on the majority of the population? Hitler spared middle-class Aryans at the expense of other population groups.
To curry favour with its own people, the government of the Third Reich ruined the currencies of Europe by exacting ever-higher occupation taxes. To secure the standard of living of its own people, it stole millions of tonnes of food to feed its soldiers, and had the rest sent back to Germany. German armies were supposed to feed themselves at the expense of the occupied countries and to settle their running costs in those countries' currencies: they mostly succeeded. German soldiers deployed abroad, which was almost all of them; supplies provided to the Wehrmacht in occupied countries; the raw materials, industrial products and foodstuffs purchased on site for the Wehrmacht or to be sent back to Germany; all these were paid for in currencies other than the Reichsmark. The leadership applied simple principles: if someone has to die of hunger, it should not be a German; if wartime inflation is inevitable, it should affect any country except Germany.
Strategies were devised to achieve this. German coffers were filled with the billions acquired by despoiling Europe's Jews, first in Germany, then in allied countries and those under Wehrmacht occupation. Relying on large-scale predatory and racial war, national socialism was a source of real equality, largely based on a policy of social advancement on a scale unprecedented in Germany; that made it both popular and criminal. The material comforts, the benefits of mass criminality - indirect and with no sense of individual responsibility, but willingly accepted - left most Germans feeling that the regime was taking care of them. That drove the policy of extermination forward: the criterion was the people's wellbeing. The absence of anything that could be described as real internal opposition and the subsequent lack of any feeling of guilt are a product of this historic combination of factors. By answering the "how could this have happened?" question this way, we avoid resorting to anti-fascist formulas. This answer is hard to post up on walls and impossible to isolate from the national histories of postwar Germans in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or Austria. But it is essential to understand the Nazi regime as a form of national socialism so as to question the recurring tendency to blame individuals or clearly defined groups.
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Those who profited from the policy of Aryanisation are usually too quickly linked with big industrialists or bankers. The committees of inquiry into the Nazi period set up during the 1990s in many European states and big companies, made up of specialist historians, reinforced that impression, but it is misleading in the overall context. Historiographers are happy to add a number of middle- or high-ranking Nazis to the list of those who profited from Aryanisation. For some years the "man next door" has figured too: Germans, Poles, Czechs or Hungarians, whose questionable services to the occupying power were often rewarded with goods taken from Jews.
But any theory that focuses solely on individual beneficiaries fails to answer the question - what happened to the assets of Europe's expropriated and murdered Jews?
The method of financing the war adopted in Germany in 1938, requiring that private assets be converted into government bonds, has been passed over by those who have considered the policy of Aryanisation from a legal, ethical or historiographical perspective. That viewpoint reflected the desire of the German leadership to hush up the material benefits of the pillage. Reference to the forced conversion of Jewish assets into government bonds was taboo, the actual figure kept secret. The persecution of the Jews had to be presented by the Nazis as purely ideological, and the defenceless victims of mass murder seen as despicable enemies.
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There is no doubt that many Germans were sceptical of Nazism. But many of those who allowed themselves to be carried along by it latched on to vague elements in the programme. Some followed the NSDAP because of its attitude to France, the old enemy; others because the young German state was making a major break with traditional morality. Some Catholic clergy blessed the weapons used in the crusade against pagan Bolshevism and opposed the confiscation of church assets and euthanasia. The Volksgenossen (national comrades - that is, Aryan citizens) with a socialist bent were enthused by the anti-clerical and anti-elitist aspects of national socialism. The follow-my-leader attitude that millions of Germans adopted for individual reasons and with disastrous consequences could later easily be reformulated as historically ineffective "resistance" precisely because this range of partial affinities existed.
The actor Wolf Goette was as far removed from Nazi ideology as the writer Heinrich Böll. He always found German policy repugnant and felt "dreadfully ashamed" when he passed anyone wearing the "yellow insignia". But, unlike Böll, he initially considered the film Ich klage an (I Accuse), which sought to justify euthanasia, as taking a "proper and appropriate line". He thought it a moving work of art that showed "with remarkable cinematographic quality" the "need for euthanasia" in the "case of certain incurable diseases", although he later voiced discreet doubts "in the event that a despotic state were to proclaim that idea". But Goette appreciated his career possibilities and opportunities for fine living as a result of the German dictatorship in Prague, a city of plenty. He was preoccupied with his personal interests and politically neutralised.
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Most Germans were initially caught up in the process, intoxicated as the pace of history seemed to speed up. Later, as a result of Stalingrad, which had a major impact inside Germany because of related Allied carpet-bombing, people went into a state of shock that produced the same torpor. The bombing was a source of indifference rather than fear: people felt they couldn't give a damn. The deaths on the eastern front made people focus on daily concerns and wait for news of son, husband or fiancé.
Germans lived through the 12 years of Nazism as if in a permanent state of emergency. In the whirlwind of events, they lost all sense of balance and measure.
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