GDP per capita is a good measure of output, but not of living standards.
But in any event, I don't have to believe anyone, because the numbers are a matter of public record.
Though weekly earnings rose by a quarter between 1932 and 1938, hourly rates were marginally down over the same period (Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, 98) - so any increase in income was more than paid for by longer hours. Still, more cash wages did not translate into more consumer goods, because they were not available as industry was being switched over to munitions. Between 1938 and 1944 the output of Germany's consumer goods industry fell from 31 per cent of all output to just 22 per cent (Abelshauser, in Harrison, The Economics of World War Two, 153). Living costs were pushed up by a law allowing cartels to fix prices in 1935 (Schoenbaum, 126). By 1941 household spending was down by a fifth from its already low point in 1938 (Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 353). Food and clothing was rationed in Germany in the first two weeks of the war (Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 356). A cut in rations in 1942 was found by scientists to lead to a loss of body fat in factory workers (Tooze, 361, 541).
"As for increased labor discipline, people were mainly happy to get back to work at all."
And yet they had to be coerced. In 1938 Goering's decree for Securing Labour for Tasks of Special State Importance effectively conscripted labour. Within a year 1.9 million workers had been subject to compulsory work orders (Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 261). By 1944 some 87 000 Germans had been jailed for breaking workplace rules, and in 1943 5,336 of them were put to death (Kolko, A Century of War, 1994, 242). Defence workers were put on a seventy-hour week (ICC, Vol. III, No 1, January 1937: 22), and a ceiling was put on wages in 1938 (Schoenbaum, 97)
"The regime _stayed_popular through 1944. Basically it was only when the Allies started knocking the door that the popularity went down among ordinary Germans."
The late Tim Mason, who was well informed on these questions, suggests that the regime was unpopular in 1938, launching on its military expansionism mostly to avoid domestic problems, but gained in popularity _because_ the Allies were knocking down rather more than just the door.
Is it not possible that your picture of happy workers rallying to the Nazis is something of a prejudice against the German people?