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

officials were well aware of the plan’s advantages on the home front. Himmler spoke of a “socialism of good blood.” Hitler declared enthusiastically: “We can take our poor workers’ families from Thuringia and the coal mining mountains and give them vast stretches of land.” The German Labor Front hoped that in this way “at least 700,000 economically unviable, small agrarian enterprises can be gotten rid of.” 42 Academic studies were commissioned to look into “settler reserves” within the German population, and all made reference to Marx’s term for excess labor, “the industrial reserve army.” These were precisely the sorts of people who in an earlier period would have emigrated to the United States, driven by poverty.
     
    By 1942 German children were staging imaginary gunfights on the “black soil” of central Russia, while hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ wives dreamed of owning country estates in Ukraine. Even Heinrich Böll, who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 and who was certainly not one of Hitler’s willing executioners, wrote to his parents on December 31,1943, from a frontline hospital: “I long to return to the Rhine and to Germany, yet I often also think of the possibility of a colonial existence here in Eastern Europe once the war has been won.” 43 Children’s writers Thea Haupt and Use Mau conceived of a primer “for beginning readers” that would “acquaint small children with the ideas behind the settlement plan and transfer the cowboys-and-Indians romanticism [of the American West] to Eastern Europe.” They concocted the following flights of fancy: “Let us now borrow Tom Thumb’s magic boots and take a walk through a foreign land. We’ll need them if we hope to get there. . . . Here we are in the fruitful terrain of black soil. . . . The corn rustles alongside the wheat and rye.” 44
     
    This land of milk and honey in Eastern Europe was to be conquered not for the benefit of landed Prussian Junkers and powerful industrialists but to provide ordinary people with a real-world utopia.
     
    The Trauma of 1918
     
    Utopian dreams represented a pointed contrast to Germans’ experience of World War I. Three memories were particularly traumatic: the food shortages caused by the British naval blockade, the devaluation of the currency, and the civil unrest that followed defeat. More than 400,000 people starved to death during the war—a number that does not include those who died prematurely of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases made worse by malnutrition. 45 Currency devaluation made runaway inflation a part of daily life. On average, the cost of food doubled in Germany during the war, and in isolated parts of the country, the rise was even more dramatic. 46 In the absence of effective government priccontrol mechanisms, inflation placed most of the economic burden on ordinary people, few of whom possessed savings or material assets. Price rises continued to torment Germany after the war. The hyperinflation of 1923 led to the de facto impoverishment of the nationalistically inclined middle classes.
     
    In many Germans’ memories of the two final years of World War I, the humiliation of defeat was combined with a hatred of those perceived to have profited from the people’s desperation. The popular view held that traitors to the nation had stirred up discontent and defeatism among an otherwise patriotic public. What else could explain Germany’s failure to achieve victory on the Western Front, after it had defeated Russia and its other enemies in the East? Only after internal unity had collapsed, many believed, was the fatherland finally subdued on the battlefield, a calamity that led to the trauma of the communist uprising of November 1918. Hitler deftly exploited this widespread sentiment. Point 12 of the National Socialist Party platform read: “With respect to the enormous sacrifice of life and property that every war demands of