Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State by Götz Aly Read Free Book Online

opponents was over, only 4,761 people—some of whom were chronic alcoholics and career criminals—were incarcerated in the country’s concentration camps.
     
    Although the financial basis for Germany’s economic upswing was precarious, Hitler’s popularity grew with each seemingly effortless triumph, soon spreading beyond the party rank and file and further undermining the opposition. By 1938, what Mussolini aptly called
democrazia totalitaria
had been established. After many years of civil strife, class hatred, and political obstructionism, Germans were united in their yearning for popular community.
     
    In his memoirs, my grandfather Wolfgang Aly described his experience of World War I at great length. The recipient of a doctorate in Germanic linguistics (his father had overruled his wish to become a mathematician), he had served in the war as an artillery commander. In 1917, a particularly capable staff sergeant caught his attention. “He was entirely without fear,” my grandfather wrote. “I wanted to promote him to senior officer and ordered him to report to me. When he learned of my plan, he answered: ‘My father is a tailor. I’d rather stay a junior officer. I don’t fit in with that sort of company.’ Nonetheless,” the account concluded, “he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.” 40 This social dynamic, set in motion during World War I, was taken up and exploited by National Socialism. The party appealed to thousands of men who had left their class identification behind them in the grime of trench warfare. It drew in left-leaning blue-collar workers, artisans, and office workers who hoped their children would enjoy upward social mobility. They were joined by those who had already profited from the educational reforms of the Weimar Republic and wanted to continue their rise in status. These groups sought not a new class dictatorship but rather the sort of meritocracy we take for granted today: a society in which the circumstances of one’s birth have relatively little influence on one’s eventual career and social standing.
     
    THE NAZIS’ racist teachings have been read solely as encouragement for hatred, violence, and murder, but for millions of Germans their appeal lay in the promise of real equality within the ethnic community. Externally, Nazi ideology emphasized differences; internally, it smoothed them over. Hitler demanded “the highest degree of social solidarity and maximum educational opportunities for every member of the German race; toward others, however, [we assume] the standpoint of the absolute master.” 41 For all those who legally belonged to the German racial community—about 95 percent of the population—social divides became ever smaller. For many people, the regime’s aim of leveling out class distinctions was realized in the Hitler Youth, the National Labor Service, the major party organizations, and ultimately even in the Wehrmacht. The Nazis’ fondness for uniforms is today seen as a manifestation of its militarism. But uniforms, whether worn by schoolchildren or Boy Scouts or sports teams, are also a way of obscuring differences between the well-off and their less fortunate peers.
     
    The goal of reducing class differences also motivated the Nazis to launch, between 1939 and 1942, a series of increasingly ambious plans to settle Germans in Eastern Europe. Designed to give Germans more living space, greater access to natural resources, and better opportunities for self-advancement, the most extreme proposal envisioned forcibly relocating 50 million Slavs to Siberia. (For years, the German Research Foundation also supported the development of technocratic plans for the slaughter of millions of people. Funds for research in this area were still allocated in the Nazis’ final budget for the fiscal year 1945-46.) In domestic terms, the General Eastern Settlement Plan was promoted as a driving force behind an assurgent lower-class movement in Germany. Party