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

the populace, wartime profiteering must be considered a crime committed against the people. We therefore demand that all profits from war, without exception, be confiscated.”
     
    Popular anxieties about wartime profiteers and revolutionaries were easily projected onto a phantom propaganda enemy: the “Jewish plutocrat” whose greed played into the hands of the equally rapacious “Jewish Bolshevik.” While the former was accused of destroying the middle classes and enslaving agricultural and industrial workers in the service of big-money capitalism, the latter was blamed for “the complete dissolution of order” and the erosion of public respect for religion, morality, property, and the rule of law. 47
     
    Using this propagandistic foundation, the instigators of anti-Semitic state policies invariably justified their measures against “the Jews” as acts of self-preservation. The concluding chapter of
Mein Kampf
is entitled “The Right to Self-Defense.” A landmark piece of anti-Semitic legislation, the April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, was justified on the same grounds and initiated the gradual exclusion of Jews from public life. When the Finance Ministry drafted legislation paving the way for the partial dispossession of German Jews in the summer of 1937, the draft was titled the Law Concerning the Reparation of Damages Caused to the German Empire by Jews. 48 The longer the war went on, the more one-dimensional German propaganda depicted it as the struggle of “Aryan resistance” against the aggression of “global Jewry,” with its threefold aspirations to world dominance: “firstly as Jew, secondly as member of a plutocratic Jewish clan, and thirdly as Jewish Bolshevik.” 49
     
    The Nazi doctrine of Germans as a master race fit in seamlessly with these schematic divisions. Despite all the bluster about German superiority, the doctrine was grounded in the anxiety that humanity’s worthiest representatives—as defined by racialist pseudoscience—would inevitably come under attack by their inferiors and be forced to defend themselves. The socialist worldview contained a similar, if less paranoid, element in its doctrine, whereby the proletariat, the inevitable victors of history, were under siege by the bourgeoisie, an inferior class condemned to extinction. That affinity eased the transition of many Germans from one salvation doctrine (Communism) to the other, especially given that National Socialism presented itself as the more open and pragmatic ideology and was indeed capable of appealing to extremely diverse segments of German society. Civil strife and class antagonisms had spelled the end for the Weimar Republic. In its wake, the Nazi movement seduced its followers with the dream of a “third way.” Nazi politicians promised the populace that justice would be restored and that they would fight against all forms of social “disintegration,” whether liberal-capitalist or doctrinaire-Bolshevik in nature.
     
    IN CONTRAST to the Germany of 1939, that of 1914 could look back on three successful wars. Waged between 1864 and 1871, they coincided with Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s successful creation of an imperial German nation-state. Forty years of peace followed, bringing economic growth and bourgeois prosperity. At the beginning of World War I, German warehouses were full with stockpiled necessities valued at about 40 billion reichsmarks. In 1940, Germany possessed only 5 billion reichsmarks in available reserves in case of a blockade, and the purchasing power of the reichsmark was dramatically lower than in 1914. Furthermore, while on the eve of World War I the Reichsbank could draw on holdings of 1.4 billion marks to procure supplies from neutral countries and the value of its gold reserves was 2.5 billion marks, Germany’s public and clandestine gold reserves on September 1, 1939, amounted to only around 500 million reichsmarks. 50
     
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