How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer

Hitler not only fattened his adoring "Volk" with jobs and low taxes, he also fed his war machine through robbery and murder, says a German historian in a stunning new book. Far from considering Nazism oppressive, most Germans thought of it as warm-hearted, asserts Goetz Aly. The book is generating significant buzz in Germany and it may mark the beginning of a new level of Holocaust discourse.

DER SPIEGEL Hitler took great care to pamper and coddle his people and they loved him -- and the Nazi regime -- for it. A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also -- in great contrast to World War I -- particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side.

Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says.

Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich."

Instead, Hitler continued on the easy path of self deception, spurring the war greedily forward. And the German people -- fat with bounty -- kept quiet about where all the wealth originated, he says. Was it a deplorable weakness of human nature or insatiable German avarice? It's hard to say, but imagine if today's beleaguered government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could offer jobs and higher benefits to the masses. "No one would ask where the money came from and they would directly win the next election," Aly says.

Stadtarchiv Oberhausen The Nazis helped themselves to Jewish wealth and used it to feed the war machine. Likewise, in the 1940s, soldiers on the front were instructed to ravage conquered lands for raw materials, industrial goods and food for Germans. Aly cites secret Nazi files showing that from 1941-1943 Germans robbed enough food and supplies from the Soviet Union to care for 21 million people. Meanwhile, he insists, Soviet war prisoners were systematically starved. German soldiers were also encouraged to send care packages home to their families to boost the morale of their wives and children. In the first three months of 1943, German soldiers on the Leningrad front sent more than 3 million packages stuffed with artifacts, art, valuables and food home, Aly says.

"About 95 percent of the German population benefited financially from the National Socialist system. The Nazis' unprecedented killing machine maintained its momentum by robbing from others. ... Millions of people were killed -- the Jews were gassed, 2 million Soviet war prisoners were starved to death ... so that the German people could maintain their good mood." By contrast, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill cajoled his people in 1940, just after France had fallen, to "brace ourselves to our duties" so that in a thousand years, "men will still say, this was their finest hour."

DPA The Nazi war plunder had a snowball effect. If Hitler stopped it, the Reich would have been bankrupt. Aly's theory is not only fascinating for its brazenness, but also for the ruckus it is causing in Germany, where lately the trend has been to accept that Germans, too, suffered under Hitler and under the Allied bombing raids at the war's end. Aly is now negating much of that suffering, insisting that every single German benefited from Hitler's culture of killing. The Feuilleton, or cultural pages, of German newspapers -- which only recently exploded with coverage of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz -- have teemed with articles about Aly since the book, "Hitler's People's State" came out on March 10. In the left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung, he has even engaged in an open fight with Cambridge economics historian Adam Tooze who has criticized the mathematical methods he used to substantiate his theory. Sales, too, are much better than he or his publisher imagined. "I didn't write the book for the lay person," he says. "It's crammed full of facts and dry historical and economic data and has close to 1,000 footnotes." But if people want to read it, he says he won't complain. It will come out in French this autumn and in English in 2006.

The timing for the book's German release, as his publishers well know, couldn't be better. Germany will spend the next six weeks hitting dozens of World War II anniversaries before arriving at memorial celebrations on May 8 and 9 marking 60 years since the war's end. It is also, says Aly, no coincidence that the work comes close to three generations after Hitler's suicide.

"The book could have been written 10 years ago, even 20 years ago," he says. All of the documents were there. We just weren't open to them. Personally, I didn't have the questions then."

The documents include reams of complex economic, bank and tax records as well as thousands of clippings from regional newspaper archives that Aly spent the past four years scouring. In the book, he uses them to support his theory that half the war was financed by government credit and that close to 70 percent of the rest came from plunder. "I am not trying to turn the history of National Socialism on its head," he insists. "But I think -- despite all the time that has passed -- it is still important to ask the most fundamental questions, namely how all this happened. What were the most important elements that allowed this criminal regime to thrive? So much came out of the German middle class. That is the most troubling aspect of the history."

AP Jewish slave workers toil at the Dachau concentration camp to benefit the Reich. Such ground has been broken before. In his 1996 bestseller, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," controversial Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen -- an American Jew -- dared to point his finger at average Germans and insist they not only knew about the Third Reich atrocities, but in their rabid anti-Semitism were eager co-conspirators. And for decades, historians have spoken of Hitler's popular appeal, his ability to head off unemployment and shore up the nation's shoddy infrastructure. In fact, Germany's famous "Autobahn" (highway) is sometimes called the "Hitler Bahn" because it was built by the Nazis. His Napola and Adolf Hitler schools famously cut through social classes, admitting rich and poor to Nazi indoctrination. Still, until now, economists have struggled to prove that the plunder from abroad really drove the war machine.

Perhaps, says Aly, that is partly because German historians weren't ready to look at what he calls "secondary" questions about the structural and financial underpinnings of the Nazi war machine. "Writing about them would have reduced the human scale of the tragedy," he says. Plus, he insists, it is always "much easier to say it was the fault of a small group of elites, the power-crazed SS commanders, or even big businesses" than to point to your own greed. German society has spent decades digesting and "perhaps now we have reached a new level," he says.

REUTERS German President Horst Koehler bows in memory at Auschwitz. Do Germans belong at Holocaust memorial ceremonies? Current politics seems to mirror this sentiment. These days, making use of an agile word and mind flip, Germans have begun to insist that they -- like the rest of Europe -- were also liberated on May 8, 1945. They say it marks the day they and their children were freed from Nazi oppression. Still, in 1945, says Aly, Germans didn't think they were being liberated. "They had to be liberated from themselves," he says. "That's the problem."

In truth, Germans have made great strides in accepting their guilt and have even "liberated themselves," enough that it is now politically acceptable for German politicians to participate in World War II anniversaries in other countries. In May, Gerhard Schroeder became the first German chancellor to participate in a D-Day celebration. In January, German President Horst Koehler bowed his head at Auschwitz in memory of the 1.5 million people killed before the Red Army liberated the camp. Another trip is planned to Moscow for May celebrations.

Scholarship and even more delicately, German Holocaust sensitivities, too have progressed in recent years. In January, the first post-war German-Jewish comedy, "Alles Auf Zucker" (Bet it all on Zucker) was released and became an immediate box office hit. Before its release, film and television executives had long held that any productions involving Jews and Germans meant poison at the box office. Germans are also starting to talk about their own suffering during the war, particularly during the relentless Allied bombing of German cities such as Dresden. Aly accepts such suffering as truthful, saying talking about it shows that Germans have made advances from the shame-faced decades just after the war when no German academic could look at the war objectively. The question, he says is, "how do you relegate that suffering? We were also victims of our own aggression."

The important thing, he says is that German perspectives continue to evolve. He sees his book as an important part of that process. "I think in 10 years, because of this book, our understanding will be very different than it was less say a year ago," he says. "That's because my book contains a large number of short descriptions and sketches, and I am quite certain that the questions I ask will be investigated by my colleagues. That will definitely give us a lot more information. I notice it already in the echo from the book. I am getting letters from families who corroborate what I write. I'm sure more of that will come."

What is the Right?

That is the fundamental question. Was a 1930s German Conservative the same as a 1930s or 2000 American Conservative? I would say they aren't even close to being the same animal.

Conservative in Europe in the 1930s meant conserving their historical position in society -- the old titled and landed aristocracy -- the High churches, and the industrial Moguls --- all were targets for the "Communists" who's platform was to completely gut the existing society and rebuild a new society that would have totally excluded the old order. The only thing conservative about those people was the desire to 'conserve' their own positions in society --- and possibly their lives at the hands of the "Bolsheviks".

Unlike the American Conservative of the 1930s or today, the European Conservative had no particular ideology on the size and scope of government or the concept of Natural Law that defined the limits of government authority. If anything, they were likely to favor larger government intervention in the economy and social organization since they were paternalistic in nature. Hitler gave them the best of both worlds -- a "socialist" economy that preserved their position far more securely than possible under Capitalism and a paternalist society where they were the "uber" parents.

Actually, the German conservative and the Marxist both shared an intellectual root in Hegel and the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel viewed the state as the highest human aspiration.

You are quite right in that the European conservative was oriented to preservation of the status quo, not any "free market" ideology.

What "Churches" survived the Nazi regime "intact"? Not the Catholic Church. Thousands of priests were murdered and sent to camps, nuns raped, churches burned or confiscated (several turned into Nazi museums). Hitler hated Christianity.

The Germans were not Catholics...they were Lutherans...Hitler did have his problems with the churches...but he by no means destroyed them...I don't think Hitler "hated" Christianity...he just didn't have any use for it...he disliked the politics of religion...'tis why he was in to the occult and paganism...in which Europeans still celebrate paganistic rites to this day....

Tens of thousands of Catholic priests were murdered in concentration camps.

...

Just in Poland alone:

Similarly, in the German Extraordinary Pacification Campaign of 1940, some 15,000 Polish priests, teachers and political leaders were transported to Dachau , or shot in the Palmiry Forest.

http://www.asthma-drsprecace.com/paper.html

There have been several Saints made of priests who died in the concentration camps while bravely doing good deeds.

The claims you present here are greatly exagerated. I did a search on "Extraordinary Pacification". From what I read it looks that Germans vigorously persecuted Catholic clergy in the annexed territories.

From http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/poles/poles.php?menu=/export/home/www/doc_root/education/foreducators/include/menu.txt&bgcolor=CD9544

The Roman Catholic Church was suppressed throughout Poland because historically it had led Polish nationalist forces fighting for Poland's independence from outside domination. The Germans treated the Church most harshly in the annexed regions, as they systematically closed churches there; most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. The Germans also closed seminaries and convents, persecuting monks and nuns. Between 1939 and 1945 an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were killed; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps, 787 of them at Dachau.

3,000 sounds right, tens of thousands - bullsh*t.

Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, ...... and other major industries.

Oh, sorta like "no child left behind", prescription drugs, and faith based pork?

Because those things were passed under a Republican Administration and Congress doesnt mean they become conservative philosophies. It just means that the Republicans are passing a liberal agenda. The nationalization of education and health care is still a liberal agenda, regardless of who is passing it.

People who try to connect fascism and socialism are failing miserably to understand that statism is simply the political culture of Europe, right and left.

Authoritarian statists of both left & right are connected by their common devotion to the State as the source of all law. Individuals are granted 'rights' by the State, in their view.

There is no such thing as a non-statist European right. There are no European "libertarians".

They may not be organized in parties, but they do exist:

European Libertarians
Address:http://libertarians.cjb.net/

It just means that the Republicans are passing a liberal agenda.

You are what, comforted? Who then are you looking to for a conservative, limited government agenda?

I believe the word/concept you should be focusing on is totalitarian. Try to shake off the simplistic two-tone Limbaugh point of view.

Liberal philosophy/ideas do not necessarily lead to totalitarianism. The paths to totalitarianism are several and beguiling.

Not all Germans were Lutherans. The Catholic Church had numerous bishops, priests and nuns in Germany when the Nazis came to power. Many met a grim fate. Catholics in other countries that Germany conquered during World War II - like France and Poland - were also viciously persecuted.

How do you explain the fact that the cross was featured in all German Army insignia? I am not talking about swastika.

What about military chaplains of different Christian denominations (including Catholic) in German Wehrmacht?

I think this whole idea of Hitler being anti-Christian is preposterous. The only thing he requested was that there had to be a prayer for him and Germany in all military religious ceremonies.

Side item - Germans had "Gott mit uns" (God with us) on all soldier belt buckles. So much for atheists!

3,000 for Poland, then add the USSR, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, France, Norway, Holland, etc.

You forgot Croatia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania - the first thing those local fascist did - they killed their priests.

And Bulgaria has the largest population of Catholic priests. Not many Catholics to speak of, but tons of Catholic priests, monks and nuns.

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